Animal (11 page)

The
FBI
quickly expanded its investigation of Patriarca to include other members of his inner circle, including his underboss Henry Tameleo, and the man who had bought his way into the Mafia—Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo.

Jerry Angiulo was born on March 20, 1919, on Prince Street in Boston’s North End, just three months after a freak disaster that nearly destroyed the entire neighborhood when a massive fifty-foot-tall tank, holding 2.5 million gallons of molasses (to be distilled into rum or industrial alcohol), exploded on nearby Commercial Street. Stunned witnesses were first alerted by the sound of steel bolts firing off the tank like machine gun bullets. Large sections of the tank’s thick metal siding came flying off next, the shrapnel raining down on a nearby elevated train track, buckling its steel supports just seconds after a car packed with passengers had passed by. A short time later, an enormous wall of molasses poured into the streets. Moving at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour and two stories high, the syrupy tsunami oozed its way through the neighborhood, devouring everything in its path. Twenty-one people were killed, including two children—a boy and a girl. The boy, ten-year-old Pasquale Iantosca, was swallowed up by the sticky flood while gathering firewood for his family around the base of the tank. Some 150 people were injured in the spill, which many believe was caused by a spike in temperature. Somehow, Caeser and Giovannina Angiulo and their three-year-old son, Nicolo, survived the disaster unscathed. A second son, Gennaro, would
be born as winter changed slowly to spring, with the nauseatingly sweet smell of molasses still overpowering the ravaged neighborhood.

Caeser and Giovannina “Jennie” Angiulo ran a grocery on Prince Street. The place was a neighborhood hotspot, serving up steamed hot dogs, candy, and soda to neighborhood kids and adults alike. But despite the grocery’s popularity, money was tight in the Angiulo household. Jerry’s mother padded the family finances with her amazing skills as a card player, gin rummy being her game of choice. Angry at first at his mother, young Jerry soon changed his view when it came to gambling. Like Jennie, Jerry Angiulo saw gambling, just short of robbery, as the easiest way to separate suckers from their cash. Jerry had an affinity for numbers, which gave him an inner strength and confidence that belied his short and scrawny appearance. He knew that he would not make a name for himself with his fists, like many of his rugged neighborhood pals. After all, a powerful left hook could take you only so far. Instead Angiulo exercised his mind, scoring high marks in grade school and then at Boston English High School. He also had a quick wit and would undress any potential tormenter with a few biting remarks. Angiulo was a natural born debater and always appeared eager to engage both students and teachers alike. When it came time to write his life’s ambition in his high school yearbook, Angiulo announced that he intended one day to become a criminal lawyer. He would eventually become well versed in criminal law, but not the way he had intended.

Following his high school graduation in 1936, Angiulo toiled around the North End, working in his family’s grocery store until the outbreak of World War II, when he and millions of America’s young men enlisted to fight for their country and take revenge on the Japanese following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Flat footed, Angiulo was originally rejected by the U.S. military, but the crafty son of the North End enlisted again using a different middle name. This minor switcheroo was enough to do the trick, and he was allowed to join the U.S. Navy, where he served four years, eventually achieving the rank of chief boatswain’s mate. Angiulo found himself in the heat of battle on several occasions as he steered landing craft packed with brave yet terrified troops during the bloody island-hopping campaign in the Pacific.

The horrors of war tested Angiulo’s mettle and no doubt gave him a
steely eyed reserve that would serve him later in life. Nothing he would ever see on the streets could compare to what he had witnessed in battle. After receiving an honorable discharge in 1946, Jerry Angiulo returned home to Boston, where he drove a fruit truck and spent late nights talking with his three brothers, Donato, Frank, and Michele, about ways to get their hands on some big money.

The rackets were the key. This Jerry knew all too well. He approached Nicola Giso, one of Joe Lombardo’s racket operators, and asked for a job. Giso cut the kid a break and gave him a job taking bets in Joe Lombardo’s “horse room.” Soon Angiulo was making big money and bigger plans. Eventually he approached Lombardo himself with an attractive proposition. Lombardo had been feeling the heat from Senator Estes Kefauver’s dogged federal investigators. The glare was so bright that Lombardo was forced to shutter all mob-controlled gambling operations in Boston. Angiulo convinced Lombardo to allow him to resurrect the gambling parlors while offering him a slice of the pie. It was a low-risk, high-reward proposition for the Boston boss. Angiulo would divert the attention of Kefauver’s federal investigation away from Lombardo, while still providing him a seat on the money train that continued to roll and rumble through virtually every street and back alley of the city.

Angiulo soon realized that despite Joe Lombardo’s business acumen, the boss had run what was really just a small-time numbers racket, one that his protege would soon expand to include dog and horse racing. Eventually, Jerry and his brothers would employee about fifty office workers to handle the exploding growth of their gambling enterprise.

Despite his new-found wealth, Jerry Angiulo still had one major problem. He was an independent operator—not a made member of the Mafia. Thus his gambling joints were often targeted for mob shakedowns. Mobsters would walk into Angiulo owned clubs like the Monte Cristo and demand that Jerry hand over a couple grand as a “tribute.” Angiulo would grudgingly pay, only to entice the gangsters to come back for more. When Angiulo drew a line in the sand and refused to pay more, he would get slapped around until he came up with the rest of the cash.

This was humiliating for the proud bookie, and it was also cutting into his hard-earned profits. The scrawny Angiulo knew that he was no physical match for the muscle-bound neighborhood mobsters, but what he
lacked in size he more than made up for in intellect. Jerry Angiulo was the ultimate criminal tactician. After getting fleeced once again by some North End toughs, Angiulo sat his brothers down at the Monte Cristo and came up with what he thought was a bullet-proof plan.

Armed only with an envelope stuffed with cash, Angiulo drove down to Providence in hopes of making New England’s Mafia Godfather an offer he couldn’t refuse. The crafty Boston bookmaker arrived at Raymond Patriarca’s headquarters unannounced and asked for a meeting with the Man. After presenting his bona fides and being subjected to a serious patdown, Angiulo was allowed an audience with the most powerful mobster in the region. The two men had never met before, and Angiulo made sure to keep his confidence and cockiness in check. At this point, he needed Raymond Patriarca much more than Patriarca needed him.

Anguilo spent several minutes explaining his situation—the shakedowns and the overall lack of respect he had been subjected to back in his hometown. Patriarca was better versed than Anguilo realized, as he himself was the one who most likely gave mob soldiers like Ilario “Larry Baione” Zannino carte blanche to bust up Jerry’s place.

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you fight them?” Patriarca asked Angiulo.
¹⁹

Angiulo placed the envelope, containing $50,000, in Patriarca’s hand. He then promised to pay the Mafia boss at least twice that amount each year. In return, Angiulo asked that he not only be allowed to operate his businesses in peace, but that he be granted the privilege of running the city of Boston on Patriarca’s behalf. The Man accepted Angiulo’s lucrative offer and ordered the shakedowns to stop. “Angiulo’s with me now,” Patriarca announced.

At this point Jerry Angiulo had become an anomaly in the annals of organized crime. Patriarca soon brought his junior partner to New York for a lunchtime meeting with national crime boss Vito Genovese, where he was inducted as a fully fledged member of
La Cosa Nostra
without ever having to fire a shot. Jerry Angiulo made his bones not with a gun, a knife, or a garrote; instead he was allowed entry into the Mafia’s dark world by simply preying on the insatiable greed of Raymond Patriarca.

With the easy payment of fifty grand and the promise of more, Jerry Angiulo’s life changed virtually overnight. No longer would tough guys
like Larry Zannino be muscling him for money. Now Zannino and his fellow Boston Mafiosi would be answering to Angiulo. The former bookmaker turned mob underboss was on top of the world—or so he thought.

In August 1962, Angiulo reached the
FBI’S
radar screen in a big way as a result of his newly minted association with Patriarca. The feds were looking for ways to tear down the barriers that Patriarca used to insulate and protect himself from prosecution. This meant going after the boss’s lieutenants and associates with both barrels.

Investigators had already discovered one chink in Angiulo’s armor. Eavesdropping agents had picked up chatter between the Boston underboss and Raymond Patriarca about the bribery of an Internal Revenue Service agent who had been paid $3,000 to straighten out a tax case involving Angiulo’s older brother, Nick. A few months later, in November 1962, J. Edgar Hoover authorized microphone surveillance on Angiulo, whom he called “the overall boss of rackets in the Boston area and chief lieutenant of Raymond L. S. Patriarca.” A bug was planted in the basement office of Jays Lounge, Angiulo’s club at 255 Tremont Street in Boston, and given the
FBI
reference code 856-
C
. This number-letter combination equaled dollar signs for agent, Dennis Condon, who ran the operation and was awarded $150 by the bureau for establishing what the
FBI
called “a highly confidential source of information.”

New England was the most dysfunctional and yet one of the most profitable Mafia territories in the United States. It should not have worked, but it did. Unlike other territories where power was concentrated in big cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, New England’s Mafia family took its orders not from Boston but Providence, an “afterthought city.” Boss Raymond Patriarca provided the fear and influence, while his Boston underboss, Jerry Angiulo, provided the financial smarts and influx of cash to keep the crime machine going strong. Both men had a small army of about three hundred soldiers and associates out on the streets every day, hustling or “outfiguring the straights.” Fencing stolen goods and operating gambling parlors and brothels had supplied the New England Mafia with traditional revenue streams, but gangsters were always encouraged to be creative—to think outside the box. Men like Patriarca and Angiulo did not care where the money came from as long as it came. The scores ranged from rudimentary and violent stickups
to sophisticated schemes pulled off with a high degree of ingenuity and smarts.

One particular scam involved a talented printer who could create duplicate checks of originals from insurance companies like John Hancock, and phony driver’s licenses. Mobsters would thumb through telephone books from regions across New England and select names of unsuspecting people whose identities they would then use on the checks and the licenses needed for identification to cash them. The names were always chosen from the areas the gangsters were looking to hit. Fate was always on their side, because not once did a bank teller recognize any of the names presented to them, and over time the mobsters walked away with thousands of dollars.

A percentage of the score was always kicked up to Jerry Angiulo and then kicked up further to Raymond Patriarca. Many times mobsters would ask the bosses to invest in a particular score before it went down. That was the case with the Great Plymouth Mail Truck Robbery of 1962. A local bank robber and mob associate, named Billy Aggie, approached Angiulo and asked him to finance an operation he was planning on the South Shore. Aggie told the underboss that he had been tracking a mail truck over the past two months as it collected money from small banks on Cape Cod and delivered it to the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston. Aggie wanted to rob the truck and asked for about $8,000 in up-front money to purchase shotguns, disguises, and other special equipment needed for the heist. If the job was successful, Aggie would hand over all the cash to Angiulo, who would pay him between 60 and 80 cents on the dollar. Anguilo would then clean the money through a multitude of businesses he owned. Angiulo gave the start-up money to Aggie, who then pulled in several other gangsters including John J. “Red” Kelley and Maurice “Pro” Lerner. A week before the heist Aggie suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized, forcing him to postpone. His partners agreed, but then decided to go ahead without him.

Just before dusk on August 14, 1962, two cars blocked the highway on Route 3 in Plymouth, forcing the mail truck to stop. A robber wearing a police uniform and brandishing a shotgun demanded that the driver and his partner open the back of the truck. The two men were tied up by other members of the gang and told to lie face-down in the back of the
truck. The robbers then grabbed parcels of cash and transferred them to a waiting car. The score netted the gang $1,551,277, which at that time was the biggest cash robbery in U.S. history. Angiulo paid Kelley 80 cents on the dollar for the loot. Hearing that the heist had taken place without him, Billy Aggie demanded his cut. Angiulo brokered a meeting, and a settlement was presumably reached to prevent the robbers from becoming embroiled in a bloodbath. Kelley and two others were eventually indicted for the heist. Both Kelley and codefendant Patricia Diaferio were acquitted, while the third suspect, Thomas Richards, vanished and was presumably murdered before the trial. His remains were never found, and the loot from the Great Plymouth Mail Truck Robbery was never recovered.

Mob associates often used the Mafia as a central bank where they could secure loans (most at high interest) and launder money that was too hot to circulate themselves. Those who went on ill-conceived spending sprees after a particular score did not last long on the street. But mobsters understood that they had to be really careless and really stupid to get unwanted attention from the cops. Many officers in Boston and Providence were on the mob’s payroll, while others in law enforcement looked the other way so as not to spoil a good thing for their comrades. Police always had the most leverage in their unwritten partnership with the Mafia. One high-ranking Boston cop was so bold as to return a Christmas envelope stuffed with $500 to an Angiulo soldier because it simply wasn’t enough.
²⁰
Angiulo griped privately but dug deeper in his pocket for an extra $1,000. The cops provided Angiulo and Patriarca with tipoffs and other services when needed. In fact, when Angiulo’s mother died, in 1975, a high-ranking Boston police superintendent directed traffic at her funeral, while four motorcycle cops escorted the hearse to the cemetery. It was a send-off fit for a popular mayor, certainly not the mother of a Mafia leader.