The impending bootlegging trial was a major cause for concern for Solomon’s gangland associates, including Buccola and Lombardo, as well as for Joseph P. Kennedy; all wondered whether the King would give up his partners in hope of striking a deal with the feds. On January 24, 1933, four Irish hoods followed Solomon from his table into the washroom at the Cotton Club and opened fire. Solomon was shot three times and stumbled out of the bathroom clutching his bleeding gut. He was rushed to City Hospital where, on his death bed, Solomon performed a final soliloquy straight out of a gangster movie. When questioned by detectives, the King wouldn’t give any up any names. Instead, with his final breaths, he damned “the dirty rats” who had shot him.
Those “rats” included James “Skeets” Coyne and John Burke, a couple of Irish “pug uglies” with no direct gang affiliation. Coyne was captured in Indiana one year later. He and his accomplices claimed they had targeted Solomon because he was known to carry a fat bank roll. “Skeets” Coyne was sent to prison for manslaughter, while the other gunmen were all acquitted on murder and robbery charges.
Virtually no one believed Coyne’s account of the shooting, and over the decades there has been widespread speculation about who directly ordered the hit on Solomon. Buccola and Lombardo are as likely as anyone to have orchestrated the murder. Both had much to lose and so much to gain with their Jewish rival out of the picture.
With Buccola’s status as Godfather of Boston, the Sicilian native gained the attention of the federal authorities despite his attempts to stay above the criminal fray. The boss was rarely seen in the North End, choosing instead to live in nearby Newton, a predominantly Jewish suburb that was a short distance but a world away from Hanover Street. Buccola lived in an apartment with his Irish wife, Rose Hogan, and their live-in maid. Joe Lombardo also chose to live outside of Boston’s gangster hemisphere. Although he spent much of his time at his North End importing company headquarters, Lombardo lived twenty miles away in the leafy town of Framingham, where he ran a horse stable and was considered a pillar of the community. He was known to dress in understated light gray suits, and his neighbors had little or no idea of the power Lombardo wielded in the back rooms, smoky bars, and dark alleys of Boston. The only hint of his membership in the mob was the pearl gray sapphire ring he flashed on his finger.
“Lombardo was the Mr. Big of the mob,”12 recalled criminal associate Vincent Teresa. “There was no doubt of what he was when you saw him with others. Everyone bowed down to him—treated him with respect. Whether you were a boss in Rhode Island or in Springfield or in a section of Boston, you went to Mr. Lombardo for a decision. If he said no, that was it—there were no further arguments.” In contemporary parlance, Lombardo was to Buccola what Dick Cheney was to George W. Bush. Lombardo was happy to stay in the background, where the heat brought by law enforcement was less intense. His official title was Consigliere, but it was Buccola who followed Lombardo’s orders, even when it meant taking control over the rackets in Providence where Frank “Butsey” Morelli had recently announced his “retirement.”
Buccola wasn’t cut out for the expanded role. Running gambling operations and resolving territory disputes in two states proved too much for the patrician from Palermo. With investigators from the Kefauver Committee hot on his trail, Buccola fled with his wife to his native Sicily, where he had built a six-room villa just after World War II. Buccola lived there in semiretirement, conferring every so often with Lucky Luciano about mob related matters back in the United States. For the most part, though, Buccola lived out his remaining years in complete content, working as a chicken farmer with birds he had imported from New Hampshire.
Buccola’s graceful exit was not seen as an affront to the Mafia, either in New England or in New York. Instead they welcomed it. New England’s Mafia was in dire need of strong leadership. Joe Lombardo’s strength had come in his ability to remain in the shadows. Thus there was no real structure to organized crime in New England. It was every gang or organization for itself, with the Italians exerting the most influence. What the mob needed was a hammer. That hammer would be swung when, in 1954, Lombardo and other high-ranking Mafia leaders chose Raymond L. S. Patriarca as Phil Buccola’s successor.
4
Wild Thing
Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in this town.
THIN LIZZY
On New Year’s Eve, 1949, Joe Barboza was arrested for the break-ins he had committed in New Bedford as leader of the Cream Pie Bandits. He was now seventeen and considered too old for the Lyman School, and too young for state prison, so the judge sentenced him to five years and one day at the Massachusetts Reformatory in Concord. Opened in 1884, the institution had been established as a school where males under the age of thirty could learn a trade that would be useful upon their re-entry into the community. The jail had seen its share of tough and crafty prisoners, including a red-haired African American drug dealer who would later change his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X. Barboza entered the prison on February 9, 1950, the same day that Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy made headlines around the world, in a speech given to a women’s club in West Virginia, by claiming that the U.S. State Department was infiltrated with communists.
At this stage in his life, Barboza was no doubt more comfortable under guard than he was on the streets. Prison was home to him. He understood the culture, and he understood what it took to survive. He was first put to work in the weaving mill but asked to be transferred to the cafeteria, where he wanted to learn to be a cook. Barboza’s new assignment did not last long. He quickly picked a fight with an older inmate, one with a fearsome reputation, and laid the guy out with a ferocious punch, breaking the man’s jaw in two places. Barboza was immediately tossed into solitary confinement for nine days. Once he was let out, the guards ordered him down to the boiler room, where he was assigned to shovel coal. The punishment was worth it. He had accomplished his first goal. Barboza was now the alpha dog. He knew that if he took down the toughest guy in jail, the others would fear him. He was right. Shoveling coal might have sounded like back-breaking work to some prisoners, but Barboza welcomed it. He treated the penalty like a reward, using the work to build up his muscular arms and thick, sturdy legs.
Eventually, his jailers believed that there was more than just a sliver of hope that the young tough from New Bedford could be rehabilitated. A year after his incarceration at Concord, he was shipped off to the Norfolk Prison Colony, considered at the time to be a “model prison community.” Once again, Barboza was following in the steps of the future Malcolm X, who had served as a member of the Norfolk Debating Society while incarcerated there. Joe, now eighteen, had no interest in joining the debate team, glee club, or any other jailhouse extracurricular activity. The prison did, however, have a boxing ring where he could continue his training. Joe wanted to best his father in every way—from the amount of money he earned to the number of wins in the ring. Joe’s hatred of his father continued to fuel his fire behind bars. He trained as a middleweight, routinely thumping fellow prisoners who were oftentimes older and heavier than he. Sparring sessions and ring work kept him in superior physical condition and kept his brain sharp. Yet once he stepped foot outside the gym, the monotony of prison life weighed heavily.
To escape boredom, Barboza spent his days looking for new ways to get high. Normally a buzz would mellow out a prisoner, which is why guards often turned a blind eye to the use of drugs. But chemicals had the opposite effect on Barboza. When he got high—he got even meaner. Not only did Barboza set out to dominate his fellow prisoners, he sought to dominate his jailers as well. One night after sniffing paint thinner, Joe led a prison revolt and challenged the guards to a brawl. Joe waited in his cell with pupils dilated, throwing lightning quick combinations and howling at the moon. He challenged the guards to come in after him. One, two, three at a time—Barboza called on all the guards as he spewed obscenity-laced insults about their mothers, wives, and girlfriends. The guards had seen
the kind of violence Barboza was capable of inside the ring, and no guard was crazy enough to go near him. Instead, the warden negotiated peace terms during a tense two-hour stalemate. Once his buzz wore off, Joe gave himself up without a struggle, smiling at his jailers as they handcuffed him and led him off to solitary. The stunt proved one thing to prison administrators—Joe Barboza was “beyond rehabilitation.” He was transferred back to Concord to serve out the remainder of his sentence.
Joe continued boxing upon his return to Concord Reformatory. He also began lifting weights and adding muscle to his stocky frame. His arms grew wider and his neck got thicker. Eventually he climbed weight classes from middleweight to light heavyweight. Barboza did not surrender any of this explosive power with the extra weight. He proved this by claiming the prison boxing championship with a win over a tough thug named Walter “Rocky” Stone. Unlike his constant taunting of guards at the Norfolk Prison Colony, Joe got along well with his jailers at Concord—so well that he convinced one guard to sneak in drugs, booze, food, and even knives that Joe would sell to his fellow inmates.
Still, Barboza was far from a model prisoner. He was all too happy to join in on a prison riot despite promises from the warden for preferential treatment if he wouldn’t act out. Once again Barboza was tossed into solitary confinement, this time for thirty days. He was given only bread and water, and Joe feared the dietary restriction would shrink his growing muscles. Once out of solitary, Barboza was sent to work on the prison farm, where he would be isolated from the rest of the prison population. For Joe, it was a vacation. He would peel off his prison clothes and swim naked in an adjacent water reservoir and would steal chickens from the henhouse to fry up in the prison kitchen. Like his counterpart at Norfolk, the Concord warden was constantly playing a game of “Let’s make a deal” with Joe. The warden promised that he would shave time off Barboza’s sentence if he would cause no further trouble. But Joe did not follow through. One night, while he and a few inmates were drinking smuggled booze in the boiler room, Barboza convinced some fellow prisoners to escape. They easily overpowered the guards, tied them up, and stole a car. A drunken Barboza howled and growled as the escapees laughingly made their getaway down Route 2 West, headed for Boston. The frivolity ended a short time later when the car they had stolen broke down. The prisoners abandoned the vehicle and stole another after Joe slugged its driver. The brazen jailbreak lasted only one day, and Barboza was picked up by police in Revere—the mob-controlled city where he would later earn his reputation as a stone-cold killer. While he was getting processed, Joe punched out a photographer who tried to take his picture. This would eventually become a normal occurrence; he routinely threatened to kill anyone who tried to snap a Polaroid of him, whether in court or on the street.
Barboza was brought back to Concord and placed into solitary confinement once more. A guard whom Joe had tied up during his escape paid him a visit in solitary. The guard, clearly embarrassed by the episode, cussed Barboza for making him look like a fool. It was a fool’s move. Barboza was unshackled. He grabbed the leg of a wooden table, lifted it high over his head, and brought it crashing down on the jailer’s skull. Barboza continued to beat him with the table until six guards rushed into the cell and hogtied the prisoner.
The warden now realized that his prison was too small and his men too inexperienced to control such a madman. Joe Barboza was sent immediately to the Charlestown State Prison just outside Boston and given a new sentence of ten to twelve years. Called the Old Gray Monster, the Charlestown State Prison was considered escape proof. Inmates ate their meals in damp, dark cells with no plumbing. Coal dust blowing in from a nearby railroad yard made breathing nearly impossible for prisoners and guards alike. Built in 1805 on the grounds that now house Bunker Hill Community College, the Charlestown State Prison was once called “a verminous pesthole unfit for human habitation” by Time magazine.
It was the worst possible place for Joe Barboza, yet it was the best possible place. Joe was no longer surrounded by petty criminals and hoods; Charlestown State Prison was the home away from home for many of the area’s most notorious mobsters. Throughout his young life, Barboza had idolized these gangsters much as a kid would look up to his favorite baseball player. Joe’s ultimate goal was to be the first Portuguese inducted in the Mafia.
And Barboza could be as cunning as he was vicious. According to a prison psychiatrist, he had a higher than average IQ and could persuade people to do just about anything. “His features make him look less bright than he actually is,” the psychiatrist wrote. “His IQ is of the order of 90–100 and he has the intellectual ability to do well in a moderately skilled profession.” The psychiatrist also wrote that Barboza had a “sociopathic personality disturbance and there is a great possibility for further antisocial behavior in the future.”
Barboza’s incarceration at Charlestown was short lived, however, thanks to an audacious prisoner revolt that would lead to an eighty-two-hour stand-off with authorities (the second-longest prison siege in U.S. history at the time). This time, Joe Barboza was merely a spectator. Just a few months after Barboza’s arrival, four armed prisoners held six fellow inmates and five guards hostage in the segregated section of the prison known as Cherry Hill (where the worst criminals were housed). Using smuggled hacksaw blades, the inmates sawed their way through the one-inch bars of their solitary cells and captured their guards. They then used blocks of wood, rope, and other items to construct a makeshift ladder that proved too short and too weak to support their weight. These were desperate men making a desperate attempt at freedom. All were serving life sentences, or close to it. There was a former paratrooper in the group, as well as a cop killer and a violent rapist. The would-be escapees began digging a tunnel through the prison’s concrete floor but were turned back when water came rushing through the hole. They quickly demanded a getaway car and delivered an ominous threat to the warden.
“One shot, one gas bomb, and all five of your screws [guards] die!” shouted hostage taker Teddy Green, who was serving a forty-five- to fifty-two-year sentence for bank robbery and was also considered a major suspect in the Great Brink’s Robbery.13
“If one of those guards dies, you’ll all die in the electric chair!” promised Massachusetts attorney general George Fingold over the prison’s public-address system.
The siege was eventually put down with the help of an army of state troopers and an armored tank. The stand-off dominated the news, and the publicity surrounding it led many critics to call for widespread reform. The old prison was finally shuttered, and all inmates were transported to the state’s newest prison, in the town of Walpole.
Once there Joe concentrated on winning his own freedom—the right way. During an inmate evaluation prior to Joe’s appearance before the parole board, a psychiatrist described Barboza this way: “He is a 26 year-old man serving a 10 to 12 year sentence for a series of offenses occurring on and after an escape from Concord in 1954. A review of his record reveals that he has had a difficulty with the law since the age of 10 and has been either at Lyman School or in correctional institutions since then. His behavior has been poor. He (Barboza) has a 6th grade education … however he has conformed better since 1956. During the present interview he is pleasant, answers questions relevantly and coherently, is in good contact and shows no evidence of mental disease. He states that he has learned a few things; that he is grown up and realizes that his previous behavior was childish.”
The days and hours ticked away, and Barboza was finally paroled from prison in June of 1958. He was met at the prison gates by his brother, Donald, who drove him back to their New Bedford home. But this time Joe would not be returning home alone. He had a girlfriend that he was intent on marrying. The woman’s name was Philomena “Fay” Termini, and she was sixteen years older than Joe. Barboza never explained how they had met, only that she had been writing him in prison. Termini, a divorcee with four children, owned property in East Boston, but, more important in Joe’s eye
s, she was Sicilian.
Barboza had done his research behind bars. He knew the Mafia inducted new members only if they were of Sicilian heritage and if they were willing to kill. Joe would have no problem accomplishing the latter, and he felt that he had found a loophole in the former requirement. If he married a Sicilian woman, Barboza believed the Mafia just might be willing to overlook the fact that he was not Italian himself.
Upon his release from prison, Joe worked briefly on the docks in New Bedford, where he unloaded fishing boats of their daily catch. The menial labor and the overpowering stench of the wharf quickly reminded him why he had sworn off such work. He immediately quit his job, packed his suitcase, and headed north to reunite with his soon-to-be bride Fay in East Boston. Barboza was hell-bent on making a go of it as a prize fighter. He had dominated his foes in prison, and he believed strongly that his jailhouse opponents were much tougher than anyone he would face on the outside. In August 1958, Joe walked into a sweaty gym on Hawthorne Street in Chelsea and urged boxing manager Johnny Dunn to take him on. The veteran manager sized up the young tough from New Bedford and decided to give him a shot. Barboza fought four times during the months of August and September 1958. He won three out of four fights, all by knockout. Barboza was paid $30 for each match but needed extra money to support his training, along with his new wife and her four kids. He couldn’t find a decent job, as no respectable businessman would take a shot on a former convict like him. Barboza voiced his frustration and his intentions to his older brother, Donald.
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