Animal (12 page)

In the New England mob respect was earned, and membership in the Mafia was a rare honor. Many Sicilian associates toiled along the periphery of true power for a decade or more before even being considered for initiation. One soldier explained his induction into the New England Mafia to the feds in 1971. Dennis “Fall River Danny” Raimondi had been carrying out various orders for Patriarca and underboss Henry Tameleo for fifteen years before being told in early 1970 that he would be “made”
if he continued to keep the respect of his masters. Raimondi did just that and was invited to participate in a Mafia induction ceremony inside a Boston-area home later that year. Raimondi stated that a Godfather had been selected among the high-ranking Mafiosi to sponsor him for the honor, which exposed him to a whole new world. The former mob gofer and bodyguard was now given control over certain areas of Patriarca’s criminal empire, while also receiving a greater share of the profits.

This organizational structure made the Mafia more powerful than other ethnic gangs, especially the Irish, who were clannish by nature and fought their battles neighborhood to neighborhood instead of quelching their hatred and bitter rivalries so as to organize themselves more effectively. The Irish gangs had long been the rabid dog tugging on the end of the Mafia’s leash. When the Italians needed to turn a threat into reality, they often called on their Hibernian associates to handle the dirty business. The Irish were also the most expendable. Unlike Jewish gangsters, who had won the respect of the Mafia for their business acumen and keen eye for diversification, the Irish were considered infantry—trench fighters with muddy knees and bloody elbows merely looking to fight another day. The Irish gangs did not possess the forethought and strategic planning needed to take on the Mafia. The battle would be left instead to their blood brothers on the opposite side of the law.

6

Skullduggery

You’re right as rain, but you’re all to blame

ALICE IN CHAINS

Named after his father, Boston Fire Department captain Dennis M. Condon, the younger Condon was born and raised in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on Bunker Hill Street in the shadow of the famous monument. Condon’s parents, most notably his mother, Nora, instilled a sense of duty and the need for education in her nine children from an early age. Condon was an exceptional student who attended Boston English High School a few years after Jerry Angiulo, and then went on to earn a degree in education from Boston College in 1947. As was the case with most young men at that time, Condon’s college years were interrupted by the war. He joined the U.S. Navy at the tail end of World War II but missed seeing any real action, as the escort carrier he was assigned to, the
USS
Siboney
, arrived at Pearl Harbor the day after hostilities with Japan had ceased. The closest Condon and his shipmates got to any real excitement occurred when the
Siboney
was involved in air search operations to locate Rear Admiral William D. Sample after his plane went missing near Wakayama, Japan. The forty-seven-year-old Sample had been the youngest rear admiral in the Pacific theater. Search crews found no sign of Sample, who was officially declared dead a year later. Following the war, Condon made his way back to Massachusetts, where he finished up his studies at BC and then received a graduate degree from Boston University before joining the
FBI
in January 1951, just one month before the arrival of his future partner, H. Paul Rico.

Condon and Rico were polar opposites in just about every way. While both were graduates of Boston College, Condon was a street kid with a patrician’s demeanor, while Rico, a product of an affluent Boston suburb, cultivated the image of the very gangsters he was looking to put behind bars. Harold Paul Rico was born in Belmont, Massachusetts, in 1926. He had an Irish mother but had inherited his dark, swarthy looks from his
Spanish father, who worked for New England Telephone. Rico graduated from Belmont High School in 1944 and went on to serve in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. Like Condon, after the war he enrolled at Boston College, where he received a degree in history in 1950. In Rico’s Boston College yearbook,
Sub Turri
(Latin for under the tower), both faculty and the graduating class stressed “a strength in ideals … a purpose in life.” No doubt that many of Rico’s classmates took this pledge to heart. But Rico himself had different plans. In his senior picture, H. Paul Rico wore a flashy tie to match his crooked grin. His sense of style would serve him well in his future career.

Rico joined the bureau on February 26, 1951, and was immediately dispatched to the
FBI’S
Chicago office, where he spent a year learning the ropes before getting summoned back to Boston when his father became gravely ill. Rico was reassigned to the Boston office, where he would stay for the rest of his
FBI
career. H. Paul Rico made his way onto J. Edgar Hoover’s radar screen early, first by working behind the scenes assisting fellow agent Jack Kehoe’s investigation of the infamous Brink’s Job. The case had remained unsolved for five years before Kehoe broke it wide open in 1955, when he convinced robber Joseph “Specs” O’Keefe to cooperate with authorities. Kehoe had learned that O’Keefe was outraged that thieves had snatched his cut of the stolen money. To add insult to injury, O’Keefe’s former Brink’s partner, Tony Pino, had hired a hitman to silence Specs once and for all. The gunman, Elmer “Trigger” Burke, drove up to Boston from New York City and found O’Keefe at a Dorchester housing project. After chasing him around the building for thirty minutes, Burke finally shot Specs in the leg. The wound required hospitalization. Kehoe paid Specs a bedside visit and used O’Keefe’s anger to his advantage. O’Keefe eventually cooperated with Kehoe, and soon all the Brink’s robbers (including Tony Pino) were behind bars.

Jack Kehoe became a legend within the ranks of the
FBI
, and H. Paul Rico nibbled around that fame until he landed a major collar himself just a year later in 1956. The feds were on the hunt for a twenty-five-year-old accused bank robber from South Boston named James “Whitey” Bulger. During the previous year, Bulger and his gang had knocked over two banks, one in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and another in Hammond, Indiana, for a combined take of $54,612.28. During the Indiana job, Bulger
served as a cover man, holding two pistols on customers and bank employees while another member of the gang cleaned out the tellers’ cages. The witnesses all got a good look at the robbers, as they were not wearing masks. Instead, Bulger and his bandits sported Elmer Fudd–like hunting caps with flaps covering their ears.

An arrest warrant was issued for Whitey Bulger on January 4, 1956. Bulger knew enough to steer clear of his old haunts, at least for a while. His one reported visit back to Boston occurred during the Christmas holiday. Whitey Bulger kept moving; he’d be in California one week, New Mexico the next. He traveled with a girlfriend under several aliases, including Leo McLaughlin, Martin Kelley, and Paul John Rose. Not only had Bulger changed his name, but he also changed his appearance. He dyed his soft blond hair jet black and began to sport horn-rimmed glasses. The
FBI
had also learned that Bulger (a nonsmoker) had taken to walking around with a cigar stuffed in his mouth in an attempt to distort his facial features.

H. Paul Rico had known Bulger for a couple of years. The two ran into each other often in Boston’s gay nightclub district, where Bulger worked as a hustler and where Rico cultivated informants. There has been much speculation over the years, however, that their interests in Boston’s homosexual scene had more to do with pleasure than it did with business. In March 1956, Rico and another fellow
FBI
agent, Herbert F. Briick, received a tip that Bulger had returned to Boston and was spending time at a nightclub in Revere, just a few miles north of the city. Rico and Briick staked out the place for a couple of nights until they spotted a disguised Bulger walking out of the joint with another local thug named John DeFeo. Rico and his men swooped in and captured the fugitive Bulger, who was unarmed. During his arraignment the next day, the prosecutor called Bulger “a vicious person, known to carry guns, and [who] by his own admittance has an intense dislike for police and law enforcement officers.”
²¹

A few months later, Bulger was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He was shipped off to federal lockups in Atlanta, Georgia, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and then the “Rock” itself—Alcatraz. Meanwhile, H. Paul Rico stayed in Boston and reaped the rewards connected with the high-profile capture. Rico’s boss in the Boston office sent a personal and confidential
memo to J. Edgar Hoover praising the young agent for taking Whitey Bulger off the street. The special agent in charge described the South Boston hoodlum as “extremely dangerous,” a person with remarkable agility and reckless daring in driving vehicles and overall unstable and vicious characteristics.

Upon receiving the memo, J. Edgar Hoover swiftly promoted Rico to special agent and wrote him a letter in which he stated, “It is a pleasure to approve this promotion in view of your superior accomplishments in connection with the Bank Robbery case involving James J. Bulger Jr. and others.” The
FBI
director went on to praise Rico for his ability to develop valuable and confidential sources of information. Rico’s new special agent status also came with a cash bonus and a trip to Washington, DC, for a celebratory photo with Hoover himself. Rico boasted to colleague and criminal alike that he had a close relationship with the nation’s top cop. Given the rumors about each man’s sexual orientation, Rico’s braggadocio no doubt triggered snickers behind his back.

The
FBI’S
use of electronic surveillance (
ELSUR
) had been paying dividends in the bureau’s fight against the mob, but Hoover continued to stress the need for his agents to cultivate informants in the hope of gathering solid human intelligence (
HUMINT
). One confidential source developed by the Boston office provided agents with significant information about disharmony at the highest levels in the New England Mafia. The story began to unfold when underboss Jerry Angiulo awoke to find his car riddled with bullets outside his apartment in Boston’s North End. Was it merely a warning? Or had the gunman believed Angiulo to be in the car at the time? The informant had no way of knowing. What he did tell the
FBI
was that a gangster named Salvatore Iacone had gone to Raymond Patriarca the day before the shooting to complain about Angiulo. Iacone and Angiulo had recently gone in on the Indian Meadow Country Club in Worcester, Massachusetts. The two men had been arguing about proprietorship of the club when the short-tempered Angiulo launched into an obscenity-laced tirade against his business partner. Iacone wanted to kill Angiulo on the spot, but chose not to act out of respect for Patriarca. When Iacone described the incident to the Man, Patriarca just scoffed.

“You shoulda killed him,” Patriarca told Iacone. He also gave Iacone the green light to whack Angiulo on the spot with no questions asked if
the underboss disrespected him in the future. As stated by the Boston office in a confidential memo to a top
FBI
official in Washington, “We have had recent indications of a growing coolness in attitude by Patriarca toward Angiulo.” These “indications” were exactly what the bureau had been waiting for. It suggested a soft spot in Patriarca’s impenetrable armor and gave agents hope that the growing divide between the boss and underboss would spread to the rest of the New England mob family.

In the early 1960s, the nation’s most infamous gangster was not Raymond Patriarca, Sam Giancana, or any of their counterparts. Instead, America’s most celebrated mobster was a low-level, square-headed drug smuggler named Joseph Valachi. Valachi had been in prison since his conviction on federal narcotics charges in 1959. Agents from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics (
FBN
) approached Valachi while he was behind bars at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. The drug smuggler had just killed a man in the prison yard he believed had been sent by New York Mafia boss Vito Genovese to assassinate him. Valachi crushed the man’s skull with a two-foot section of iron pipe. It had been the desperate act of a desperate man. Valachi had already survived three attempts on his life. He believed that he had been marked for death after another mobster began spreading erroneous rumors that Valachi had turned informer. Valachi told authorities that Genovese had planted his lips on Valachi’s cheeks, giving him the “kiss of death” while the two shared a cell shortly before the deadly jail-yard confrontation. By the time Valachi smashed the pipe against his victim’s head, he was weak and delusional, having been on a self-imposed hunger strike for several days out of fear that his prison food was poisoned. The sad truth was that Valachi’s “assassin” had not been trying to kill him at all. The victim, John Joseph Saupp, was serving time for mail robbery and forgery and had no mob ties. Valachi had mistaken Saupp for a dangerous mobster named Joseph “Joe Beck” DiPalermo.
FBN
agents informed the paranoid Valachi that he had in fact killed the wrong man and then threatened to return him to the prison’s general population unless he cooperated.