Animal (9 page)

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 eyes, 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.

“No one’s gonna hire me because of my past,” Joe confided. “It means I gotta do the only thing I know how to do.”

Joe did not tell his brother what that was. He didn’t have to. In September 1958, just three months after getting paroled from prison, Barboza was arrested while trying to break into a house. Joe pleaded his innocence to the arresting cops, but the burglary tools in his possession told them all they needed to know. He was given a three-to five-year sentence and sent back to Walpole State Prison. Joe had recently applied for a boxing license through the Massachusetts State Boxing Commission but was shipped off to jail before he could obtain it.

Once back in prison, the Walpole warden again offered Barboza a deal of easy work outside the prison walls if he behaved himself. Joe accepted the offer but because of his violent nature could not deliver. A few weeks into his sentence he attacked a fellow inmate while both were working in the prison cafeteria. The prisoner, a guy named Eddie Kilrow, had made the grave mistake of giving Barboza lip. Joe returned Kilrow’s wise-ass comments with a knockout punch. Another inmate tried to revive Kilrow with a bucket of water poured over his face, but the man did not move.

“He looks dead,” the inmate whispered to Barboza.
¹⁴

Guards loaded the unconscious Kilrow onto a stretcher and brought him to a hospital where he was given a spinal tap. The man could not move his arms or legs. Kilrow remained paralyzed for two days before he snapped out of it. However, the effects of the severe concussion he was given at the hands of Joe Barboza would last much longer.

Barboza was never fingered for the beating, but everyone, inmates and jailers alike, knew exactly what he had done. Although the warden fully suspected that Barboza had turned his back on their deal, he still followed through on his side of the bargain and allowed Joe to work outside the prison walls. No doubt he felt that Barboza would do less damage if he were given some semblance of freedom. And freedom he got. While working outside the walls at Walpole, Joe would sneak into the woods and drive off for hours at a time with friends. They’d give Joe a sports coat to wear over his prison uniform and then whisk him away to local restaurants or to go fishing or swimming. The Animal was caged, but that cage had been left open by cooperative guards who were willing to look the other way if the price were right. Barboza always promised to come
back, and surprisingly he always did. He was paroled again in 1960. By that time he had built up a lucrative business inside prison walls through bookmaking and loansharking. He had also allied himself with another equally ferocious prisoner: a cherubic psychopath named Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi.

5

Top Echelon

Like a blind man’s first see,
This conspiracy cuts deep

SOULFLY

It had now been two full years since Bobby Kennedy was verbally skewered by Raymond Patriarca during the McClellan Hearings, but the newly appointed attorney general of the United States treated the insult like a festering wound and deemed that the only remedy was amputation. Kennedy had already issued a letter to Internal Revenue commissioner Mortimer M. Caplan targeting the New England Mafia boss for investigation and prosecution by adding his name to a list of thirty-nine top-echelon racketeers in the nation. Much had happened to Kennedy since he had first tangled with Patriarca in the winter of 1958. He was no longer the bootlegger’s son; now Kennedy was America’s top law enforcement official and brother to the sitting president of the United States.