Animal (16 page)

“Because I don’t fuck with you and demand respect, you take that for weakness and mouth off to me,” Barboza shouted at the man with eyes bulging. “Well, I’m not threatening you; I’m promising you.”
³⁴

Exactly what Barboza had promised, he did not say. The druggist would learn his punishment soon enough, however. That evening, Joe and his crew smashed out all the windows of the store. The next morning, Barboza walked into the drugstore which now had plywood covering the windows.

“Can I use your bathroom?” he asked the druggist. This time, Barboza got the answer he was looking for and whistled his way toward the restroom as if nothing had happened.

The murders continued in the summer months and for crook and cop alike, it appeared that the blood would never stop flowing. In late July, the bullet-riddled bodies of two Providence mobsters, Paul Collicci and Vincent Bisesi, were pulled from the trunk of a car in the parking lot of a Quincy, Massachusetts, motel. This was a hit sanctioned by Raymond Patriarca himself. Collicci had recently done a stretch in jail for a crime that involved the Man. While behind bars, Collicci had sent Patriarca several letters promising trouble if the Mafia boss did not pull strings with the right politicians to win him parole. Patriarca did not respond immediately to the threats. Instead, the boss waited patiently for Collicci to be released from jail and then sent two assassins to Quincy, where Collicci and Vincent Bisesi were running a stolen television and air conditioner scam. Both men were shot inside their motel room and then stuffed in the trunk of their car. Their remains were discovered days later after a motel guest complained about a vile smell emanating from the trunk of the vehicle.

A month later, the bodies of two other men, Harold Hannon and Wilfred “Willy” Delaney, were fished out of Boston Harbor; their bodies had been trussed with baling wire. Hannon had been a marked man for some time. He had been on a lucrative run robbing Mafia protected bookies, and his last score had netted him $80,000. But what had really put a target on Hannon’s back was his long friendship with Punchy McLaughlin.
Hannon had long served as the tip to McLaughlin’s spear. It was Hannon who had exacted revenge upon a former light heavyweight boxer from South Boston named Tommy Sullivan after Sullivan nearly killed McLaughlin during a street fight.

The brawl began in a barroom when Punchy clubbed Sullivan over the head with an iron pipe. Sullivan collapsed on the floor but somehow managed to get back to his feet. Both men had spent years in the ring, and they went after each other with all the ferocity of a championship bout. Punches flew and the fight spilled out onto the street. Sullivan was a much better fighter than McLaughlin and had kept himself in excellent shape even after his professional career had ended. The same could not be said for Punchy, whose daily exercise consisted of twisting the cap off a bottle of booze. After taking several unanswered blows to the head and stomach, Punchy tried to escape by rolling under a nearby car. Most witnesses thought the fight was over until a crazed Sullivan lifted up the back end of the car and dropped it on the curb, giving him plenty of access to his enemy hiding underneath. When the brawl finally ended, Punchy McLaughlin limped home with bumps, bruises, and half of his ear torn off. For Punchy, the humiliation would not stand. Days later, he sent Harold Hannon into South Boston to deliver the message. It was Christmas Eve 1957, and Hannon spotted Sullivan outside the East 5th Street home he had shared with his mother. Hannon called Sullivan over to his car and the former prizefighter foolishly obliged. Hannon shot Sullivan five times—three bullets piercing the man’s skull. nearly tearing it off his shoulders.

Four years later, in 1961, Hannon would come of the defense of the McLaughlin brothers once again after Buddy McLean shot and killed Bernie McLaughlin. Georgie McLaughlin, who had instigated the Irish mob war that resulted in his brother’s murder, scoured the streets of Somerville looking for any sign of his brother’s killer. He drove around slowly with Harold Hannon hidden in the trunk of the car, the barrel of his rifle pointing through a makeshift peephole in the back of the vehicle. Hannon and the McLaughlin brothers would have no luck this time, but the attempt had put Harold Hannon directly in Buddy McLean’s crosshairs.

Three years passed before McLean would have the opportunity to execute his plan of vengeance. McLean got an attractive woman to lure
Hannon and his friend Willie Delaney to her South Boston apartment for sex. When the two men walked through the front door, the femme fatale was nowhere to be found. Instead, they were met by Buddy McLean and a menacing welcoming party that included Joe Barboza. The crew grabbed Hannon immediately, while Delaney made an attempt to flee. Delaney was rounded up quickly and both men were handcuffed. McLean then brought out a butane blow torch and sparked the flame, signaling to each man that his death would be slow and excruciatingly painful. Hannon struggled against his restraints and his captors as the flame inched closer to his body. McLean lowered the torch to Hannon’s crotch and asked the doomed man a series of questions, to which Hannon replied amid loud screams. Delaney watched in horror as the executioners roasted Hannon’s genitals. Harold Hannon was then garroted with wire and put out of his misery. The killers then set their eyes on Willie Delaney, who had been warned to steer clear of his friend Hannon. Buddy McLean did not have any personal animosity toward Delaney, so he showed the man a bit of mercy. Delaney was given a fifth of whiskey and ten Seconal capsules, which eventually caused him to pass out. Once Delaney was unconscious, McLean ordered Barboza and his crew to strangle him and bundle his body with Hannon’s. Their corpses were then driven to a pier along Boston Harbor and dumped into the cold water.

Although he considered himself an independent operator, Barboza had aligned himself with McLean’s Winter Hill Gang in the Boston mob war against the McLaughlin’s. Barboza and McLean were drawn together over a shared heritage. James “Buddy” McLean may have been Irish by birth, but he considered himself Portuguese at heart. As a young boy McLean was orphaned by his birth parents and was then adopted by a Portuguese immigrant couple. Buddy had been blessed with Angelic blue eyes and a welcoming smile. He was considered to be a fair young man by all he had met, but he could also hand out a vicious beating to those who crossed him. One companion summed up McLean this way: “He looks like a choir boy, but fights like the devil.” Those fights left McLean with visible scars running along his neck and permanent damage to his left eye. Still, he was considered movie star handsome, and when it was time to marry, McLean broke many hearts in Somerville by offering his hand to a Portuguese-American nurse. Barboza often kidded McLean that he would one day
steal her away from him. The two gangsters, who referred to each other by the code name Seagull, spent hours together discussing their mothers’ favorite Portuguese recipes while planning more nefarious activities. Barboza was a frequent visitor to McLean’s operational headquarters inside the Tap Royal Bar on Broadway in Somerville, where Buddy would whisper orders to his men while sitting on a stool against a back wall, so he could keep his good right eye on everyone who entered the bar.

The Irish mob war was not concentrated only in the cities of Somerville, Charlestown, and Boston. The blood also flowed as far south as the sleepy town of Pembroke some thirty miles away. Founded in 1712 and popular with cranberry farmers and horse breeders, Pembroke was virtually the last place one would think of as a burial ground for the mob—and that is what made it so attractive to the killers of Leo “Iggy” Lowry. Iggy Lowry was a bisexual, smalltime crook who had sold his body to the highest bidder while behind bars at the old Charlestown State Prison. Once he was released from jail, he floated back to the softer sex and became embroiled in a love triangle. Lowry was spotted in a local tavern making time with the wife of a known gangster. When confronted by the gangster’s brother, Lowry defended himself by claiming that all’s fair in love and war, as the gangster had seduced Lowry’s wife the night before. The brother stormed out of the bar but remained close by for the rest of the night. When he saw Lowry and the woman leaving the tavern hours later, the brother forced Lowry into his car and drove off. As Lowry tried to fight his way out of the automobile, the brother pulled out a four-shot Derringer and fired once into the back of Iggy’s head. The spray of blood along the interior of the car looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, with streaks of red splashed across the car seat and dashboard. To make matters even worse, the brother then pulled out a knife and tried to cut off Iggy’s head, causing more blood to flow. The brother then picked up his sibling and together they drove to the leafy town of Pembroke, where the body of Iggy Lowry was dumped in a quiet location.

Barboza was told the story of Iggy’s demise by Jimmy “the Bear” Flemmi, who provided great detail. A few weeks later Iggy Lowry’s killer was himself shot in the leg, not by a rival mobster but by the wife of the gangster Lowry had tried to make it with that night. Clearly, she did not agree with the way the love triangle was handled.

In September 1964, Bostonians had taken their minds off baseball after an injury had ended the season for Red Sox rookie phenom Tony Conigliaro, who had smashed twenty-one home runs before breaking both his arm and several toes in August. The Red Sox would finish with seventy-two wins, which was not enough to secure a playoff berth. Still, locals were provided with plenty of excitement in the “Irish sports pages.” Iggy Lowry’s murder was the eighth mob murder in only nine months, and there would be no letup in sight. Investigators and mob insiders had very little time to debate whether Lowry’s bloody murder would have any significance on the Northeast version of the Hatfield and McCoy feud. On September 4, 1964, the day after Lowry’s body was recovered from the Pembroke woods, another mobster better known among cops and crooks alike would meet his fate at the order of Buddy McLean, and this time McLean would have help from a most unlikely source—the
FBI
.

Ronald Dermody was a son of Cambridge and a former member of James “Whitey” Bulger’s bank robbing gang. Dermody was a hood to the core. In fact, it was in his
DNA
. His father, Joe, had been murdered in Charlestown State Prison in 1954. Ronnie’s brother, Joe Jr., was serving time at Norfolk Prison. Ronnie had just been released after serving a lengthy stretch for helping Bulger pull off a heist in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1955 that had netted the gang $42,000. Since Bulger was still imprisoned at Leavenworth at the time of Dermody’s release, the gangster fell in with the McLaughlin Gang for both money and love. Ronnie Dermody was a handsome, muscular guy who, like Iggy Lowry before him, had eyes for a rival gangster’s girl. In this case, the rival was a vicious triggerman named James “Spike” O’Toole, who was also a close associate of Buddy McLean. Dermody had fallen hard for O’Toole’s girlfriend, Dottie Barchard, the Virginia Hill of the Boston mob. Like Hill, who became famous dating gangsters such as Joe Adonis and most notably Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Barchard was a twenty-nine-year-old German-English beauty who was drawn to the excitement of dangerous men capable of deadly deeds.

When Barchard began her relationship with O’Toole, she was still married to an underworld thug named Richard Barchard. Despite the fact that O’Toole had fathered two of her children, Dottie Barchard had gone prospecting once again and had become captivated by the handsome,
muscular Dermody. The feeling was mutual. In fact, Ronnie Dermody would do anything—even kill—to have her all to himself. After he was sprung from jail, Dermody approached Georgie McLaughlin with a unique proposition. Somewhat reminiscent of the diabolical Crisscross method in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film
Strangers on a Train
, Dermody said he would kill the McLaughlin Gang’s main rival, Buddy McLean, if Georgie would whack Spike O’Toole. With O’Toole out of the way, Dermody would then be free to marry his mistress. The proposal was a curious one, and even a drunkard like McLaughlin must have had reservations. To show his good faith, Dermody promised Georgie that he would kill McLean first. The lovelorn gangster hit the streets to take care of his part of the bargain. A few days later, he opened fire on a man he believed was Buddy McLean. It wasn’t. A civilian got hit, and word quickly spread that the Winter Hill boss had been the actual target of Dermody’s botched assassination attempt. Panicked and now marked for death, Dermody hid out in Cambridge and contemplated his best chances for survival. He decided to reach out to
FBI
agent H. Paul Rico in an attempt to surrender for the shooting of the bystander.

It had been Rico who had arrested Dermody years before, after the bank heist with Whitey Bulger. What Dermody did not know was that Buddy McLean was now one of Rico’s prized informants. McLean was one of the most important mobsters in all of New England, and Rico had him in his back pocket. The information McLean could provide against the Mafia was invaluable to the
FBI
, and to Rico’s blossoming career. These things weighed on the special agent’s mind as he decided what to do. The answer was simple, and it signaled Rico’s crossover from cop to criminal. He told Ronnie Dermody to meet him on the border of Watertown and Belmont, close to the agent’s home. Rico then placed a call to McLean and provided him with the address of the rendezvous spot. Buddy was waiting for Dermody when he arrived and shot him three times in the head, leaving Dermody dead in his car. When Joe Jr., found out about his brother’s murder, he didn’t blame McLean but instead pointed the guilty finger at Barboza. Joe Jr. promised revenge once he got out of jail. The two had known each other since their days at the Concord Reformatory. Barboza never had anything personal against the Dermody brothers and did not take kindly to the threats. The Animal sent the grieving brother a message
through the grapevine. Through a prison intermediary, Barboza told Joe Dermody Jr. that he did not kill Ronnie, but also promised that he would be waiting for Joe Jr. on the streets to settle the dispute once and for all. Joe Jr. never got out of jail, however. He was later found stabbed to death in his prison cell.