by Dick Lehr
Perhaps because of all the adversity, the Mafia found a home. Small and lean, the group was able to prosper without the cyclical cataclysms of New York and Chicago and Detroit. In other waterfront cities, the Mafia families had larger numbers, control of pier pilferage, and far less competition from rivals. They were able to expand far more quickly from Prohibition gluttony and then frantic Depression-era gambling. Their staple became the false hope of the long-odds lottery. But the price of boundless expansion elsewhere was blood in the streets and major police investigations. Boston would have neither until the 1960s, a free ride of thirty years.
The frenetic Prohibition growth in other cities had a downside Boston was spared. In Chicago, Al Capone made $50 million a year until he was brought down by federal agents in 1934. In New York, the “Castellammarese War” left scores dead and two violent changes of leadership in one six-month period in 1931. In New Or-leans, the Sicilians controlled the docks before the turn of the century, but the early start there brought a probe by the city’s police chief—and lynchings of Sicilians when the chief was murdered for doing the job too well.
But all the early spadework was a prelude to the seminal event at the end of Prohibition that shook the Mafia to its core: the bloodletting in New York in 1930—31 that reverberated throughout the decades, with vendettas lasting to early graves. It was an upheaval that Boston was able to sit out, just watching to see which side won the vicious battle.
It began, as it always seemed to, when greed and vanity took hold of a dominant leader who decided to become the only leader. The don of Manhattan, a squat, insatiable man of legendary appetites named Joseph Masseria, became distrustful of the burgeoning and feisty Sicilian contingent in Brooklyn. He demanded a loyalty oath that was summarily rebuffed. Masseria had one of the Sicilians shot dead and held another for ransom. But it only hardened the resistance of the Sicilians led by Salvatore Maranzano, who, like many of the men in Brooklyn, were from the same small village in Sicily known as Castellammarese. The loyalty oath was all it took to set off months of mayhem, an ugly war of attrition that pitted a generation of leaders against each other. Masseria’s allies were Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, Carlo Gambino, Albert Anastasia, and Frank Costello. The Sicilians had Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, Thomas Lucchese, Joseph Magaliocco, and Stephano Magaddino of Buffalo. Off and on, the Mafia’s all-star line up would be at each others throats forever more.
The tide turned against Masseria in early 1931 after he had lost fifty men to the better organized and slightly more fanatical men of Sicily. Luciano, the shrewdest and most practical of them all, saw bootlegging profits decline during the prolonged feud and urged peace on the pigheaded Masseria, but Masseria had abandoned the balance sheet for the body count. Luciano struck a deal with the other side: amnesty for Masseria’s head.
The first phase of the war ended on April 19, 931, at Scarpato’s restaurant on Coney Island. Seconds after Luciano left the table to go to the men’s room, gunmen moved quickly into the dining room, showering the bloated Masseria with bullets, killing him instantly. After the funeral, Maranzano held a meeting with five hundred men at a Bronx hall, outlining a family structure of capo, sottocapo, capo regime, and soldier that exists to this day. But there was a fatal flaw in Maranzano’s new constitution: It provided for a dictator with the title of capo di tutti capo, the boss of all bosses. And he gave the job to himself.
Maranzano, who was spellbound by Caesar and had an apartment full of books about the Roman Empire, would be dead in six months, another murder traceable to the fine hand of Luciano. This time, though, Luciano used imported killers, Jewish gangsters who posed as New York detectives and swept right into Maranzano’s real-estate office, flashing phony badges at guards in the anteroom. They shot him four times and, for good measure, stabbed him six times in the stomach. Luciano took over, presiding at a more democratic commission set up to establish policy and arbitrate disputes. He brought a measure of evenhanded predictability to the Mafia, stressing cooperation among the families and getting loyalty in return.
While Boston was a sideshow to these seismic events, the reign of Luciano, with its emphasis on respect and negotiation, helped shape the two dominant leaders of a generation in New England, a forty-five-year-old fight promoter in Boston named Filippo Buccola and a young ex-convict in Providence named Raymond L. S. Patriarca. The marching orders shifted slightly from “do this or else” to “ignore these rules at your peril.” Buccola was more flexible than the obdurate Patriarca, who was a fair but ferocious man when crossed.
The Boston Mafia’s slow development was due in part to the city’s long tradition of hovels and hostility for whoever was last off the boat. From the mid-nineteenth century on, many of the new arrivals started out in the North End, which early in Boston history became an abandoned ghetto with no political power and little sanitation, an ostracized island of tenements for immigrants who had nowhere else to go. It was a ghastly place of disease and crime, a wretched slum where three out of every ten children died before the age of one, giving Boston the highest child death rate in the United States. Yet, in the 1840s, the North End was where most immigrants in Boston began a hard life in a new country.
The evolution of the North End is the story of lost grandeur. In the beginning, which in Boston means the seventeenth century, it was the first and most elegant neighborhood, home to Cotton Mather and wealthy merchants who built spacious manor houses. But the area raced downhill after the Revolutionary War, with business and the upper crust moving inland, leaving the waterfront to the riffraff and inexorable decay. It stayed an immigrant’s nadir for more than a century, a separate island of unremitting misery.
The dark narrow streets of the North End, long a protective cover for organized crime, lie on what was once sparsely settled marshland where deteriorating manors were converted into ramshackle apartments. At the turn of the eighteenth century the area was becoming a miasmic rooming house, a forbidding waterfront of warehouses, saloons, and brothels. Within a few decades, the potato crop failure in Ireland disgorged emaciated and unskilled farmers on its shore like so many bedraggled swimmers. By 1855, more than half of the North End’s population was Irish—14,000 of 26,000. The Irish began moving out after the Civil War, first to escape the wretched tenement life, and later the incessant conflicts with the newly arrived Italians, who began to come in numbers in the 1880s. By 1895, the Italian population of the North End tripled. There was a steady stream of Eastern European Jews as well, most of them from Russia, who settled in small blocks near where the Angiulos grew up. Gennaro always was able to do business more readily with Jewish bookies than Irish gangsters.
As the Irish withdrew from the North End, seeking the better housing and jobs of newer neighborhoods such as nearby South Boston, they turned their voluble social networks into potent ward politics. They left the North End on bad terms and kept it that way. It was in the North End where the Italians and Irish gangs of Boston first clashed. This was to be an enduring enmity, one that carried over to a young Gennaro Angiulo growing up there in the 1920s.
The tension between the two dominant ethnic blocks in Boston dates back a century and persists to this day. In the 1880s, they fought each other in the street over menial jobs and the last crammed apartment in a fetid tenement that housed up to fifty children. The Irish left the North End as a retreating army might, sniping as they pulled out, leaving nasty wounds that were remembered in the street again and again when Caesar and Giovannina Angiulo set up house on Prince Street in 1915.
The North End remained isolated and spurned while the rest of the city’s population exploded and assimilated, while other neighborhoods teemed with newcomers and new ventures. From 1850, when the immigration wave began in earnest, until the birth of the last Angiulo brother in 1927, when the influx into Boston crested, the city’s population had increased nearly 600 percent, peaking at close to 800,000. The growth took place all around the North End, which not onl
y lagged far behind, but actually receded as the city swelled. It may as well have been a village in Sicily, sealed off by jagged mountain passes.
Omen or coincidence, Angiulo’s birth in 1919 dovetailed with the real beginning of the Mafia in America: the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned alcoholic beverages. Although the law went on the books, it did not go into effect until a year later. Perversely, it became the lifeblood of a fledgling urban crime organization that had been getting by on extortion, theft, and neighborhood gambling.
Angiulo’s birth took place in the city’s most tumultuous year in the modern era. First, there was a bizarre tragedy only blocks from Angiulo’s house. When Giovannina Angiulo was six months’ pregnant with her third child, whom she would name Gennaro after her father, a huge storage tank with 2.2 million gallons of molasses burst on Commercial Street, which ran along the outer edge of the North End. A fifteen-foot tidal wave of goo swept aside everything in its path, drowning twenty-one persons, destroying a fire station, and pushing horse-drawn wagons into the harbor. Then, six months after Angiulo’s birth, militant Boston patrolmen went on strike after negotiations to form a union broke down. Within days, the festive mood of the populace turned ugly. Crap games on the Common escalated into rapes in Scollay Square alleys and hallways. Governor Calvin Coolidge sent in troops to restore order, broke the strike, and, with nearly unanimous public support, fired one thousand policemen who had let the city sink into chaos. The patrolmen’s action was denounced as a national crime by President Woodrow Wilson and condemned from pulpits around the city, but didn’t cause a ripple in the impervious North End, which remained a cloistered place, little different from an overcrowded village south of Rome. The dialect, dress, customs, manner, and cooking were no different from back home. Women wore black, men furtive looks. Unmarried women, no matter the age, were always under the surveillance of concerned parents and even cousins three streets over. North End residents looked inward or out to sea, and the secretive ambiance seeped into Angiulo’s character, becoming an indelible part of his makeup.
This mentality persists today, with many older Italians such as the Angiulos sticking to themselves, seldom venturing from their street or even their homes, some wearing a permanent pallor of the house-bound. Much of the second generation turned their backs on Boston’s Irish politics or Brahmin culture, preferring the familiarity and comfort of old-world ways. An entire neighborhood resisted assimilation throughout the twentieth century.
Before the Angiulo brothers went to jail, it’s likely that none of them ever walked the five blocks to the city’s spiffy showplace, the refurbished Faneuil Hall marketplace of smart shops and expensive restaurants and singles’ bars. As often as not, the brothers ate supper in their office on Prince Street, firing up four burners on a stove large enough to service a small restaurant.
Even in 1981, when the North End was partly gentrified into a high-rent district and Italians shared power at every stratum in the city, Angiulo still rubbed the Irish wound, lashing out at the dogged FBI team on his tail led by the son of a Boston cop, Ed Quinn of Dorchester. After Quinn popped up all over a grand jury case against the family, Angiulo saw him more as an Irish tormentor than an FBI agent. “Quinn, Quinn all over again,” he said to an underling in his office on Prince Street. “You know Quinn at all? ... Thin-looking motherfucker ... Did you ever see those guys from South Boston that wear the scully caps from the fucking docks? Thin, thin guys, black beardish. Always with a dark beard. Without the beard on and the fucking eyebrows, you know the Irish, the real Irish, that’s Quinn.”
Irishmen on the docks were bad enough. But put them in a police uniform and it defined Angiulo’s lifelong nemesis: a horde of Irish cops. His disdain was boundless. In his view, policemen were psychotics who took the job to act out their aggressions. “You have to be a special guy to be a cop to begin with,” he told an Italian court officer who passed along information to the family from Boston’s Suffolk County Courthouse. “He’s disturbed up here and once they get the feel of it ... That’s why all Irishmen are cops. They love it. Alone they’re a piece of shit. When they put on the uniform and they get a little power, they start destroying everything.”
The Boston Mafia took hold in such a milieu, though none of its leaders until Angiulo was born in the North End—or even lived there. They did business in the cafés during the day but slept elsewhere, much as generals stay in separate camps.
Just as their predecessors began by exploiting the peasants of Sicily in exchange for ephemeral protection against conquering armies, the Boston Mafia lived off the factory workers and street vendors of the North End, parasites operating just below the surface of daily commerce, holding out usurious loans and the false hope of the Italian lottery number. Boston’s Mafia stabilized at the entry level, not reaching the Roaring Twenties until the 1960s.
It never did cut into the Irish monopoly on waterfront pilferage and union jobs and it had to struggle during prohibition to keep pace with Jewish gangsters who set out to control the liquor for their speakeasies in downtown Boston and elsewhere. The bulk of it came overland from Canada, and the Irish controlled most of the liquor brought in along the waterfront. The North End Mafia had to make do with an occasional boatload of liquor smuggled in at night, dumped on North End docks along with the catch of the day, and loaded onto a ragtag convoy of trucks for distribution to the speakeasies of Tremont Street and beyond.
The better conditions for growth—and the man to manage it—lay to the south of Boston, in the far smaller but mostly Italian city of Providence, Rhode Island. The man for the times was Raymond Patriarca, who had put in a long, hard apprenticeship during Prohibition, running prostitutes and hijacking trucks, learning the ropes as an associate and then member of the New York Mafia, which he purportedly joined in 1929.
While Angiulo would make it as a born bookmaker, Patriarca would rise to the top by being, in the words of one Massachusetts state policemen “just the toughest guy you ever saw.” In Providence, he was able to take advantage of a large Italian population and ready access to politicians and police. In the late 1930s, he was able to bribe his way out of prison on armed robbery charges by paying for a pardon. Several decades later he received early parole from a Rhode Island state prison on a murder conspiracy charge after a letter was written on his behalf in 1973 by then Speaker of the House, Joseph A. Bevilacqua. The letter stated Patriarca was “a person of integrity and, in my opinion, good moral character.”
Over the years, Patriarca became the tail that wagged the dog, the driving force behind the New England Mafia, a brutal man who nevertheless had the leadership and management skills to oversee what would become a billion-dollar business. By the early 1950s, it was simply impossible to be a major figure in crime in New England and not have to deal with Patriarca. Big-time gamblers needed his race wire or layoff bank, and career armed robbers had to go through him to launder money or goods.
The man Patriarca replaced as New England don, Filippo “Phil” Buccola, was not as suited to make the leap from prohibition to big-time racketeering. He was a Sicilian who ran the North End with a firm, even hand and was tough enough to protect his turf. In fact, he was believed to have been forced to flee from vengeful rivals in Sicily after a murder in Palermo, arriving in Boston with impressive credentials and persuasive old-world ties. But he just didn’t have it in him to expand, to push for new business and territory, knowing that the one who reached too far for dominance in Boston was the one who got killed. Like Frankie Wallace.
When Buccola’s name appeared in the Boston newspapers—and it wasn’t often—he was referred to as a local sportsman, a boxing manager and promoter who also owned racehorses. He showed up on the back pages for contesting charges of tax fraud and nonpayment dating back to the 1920s. And, when it didn’t make any difference, he was named as the one-time head of the New England Mafia by Cosa Nostra turncoat, Joseph Valachi, who testified before Congress in 1963. The newspapers said Bu
ccola had retired to Italy. Close enough. He had been back in Sicily for a decade, running a chicken farm outside of Palermo with baby chicks imported from New Hampshire. The life suited him, and over the decades (until his death in 1987 at the age of 101) he kept his hand in Boston’s underworld, sponsoring a few of the Sicilians who came to the United States in the mid—1980s, a secret influx that replenished the Mafia’s decimated ranks with troops who avoided the flashy wiseguy life in favor of a work ethic and drug profits. In many ways, they became just like the dependable, loyal soldiers that arrived as immigrants when Buccola first started out in Boston at the dawn of Prohibition.
Born in Palermo, Buccola was an educated man and an adventurer who attended the Universita degli Studi in Palermo and another school in Switzerland and who traveled to Russia before the Revolution. After he came to the United States in 1920, he had a meteoric rise, something that was undoubtedly prearranged before he left Sicily.
His timing could not have been better. He was an experienced leader arriving at the age of thirty-four on the eve of Prohibition from a relatively well-off Sicilian family. He was head man within a few years and was formally sanctioned as head of the New England Mafia by the newly formed Luciano Commission in 1932, according to an FBI summary of a bugged conversation in Patriarca’s office. Most of the other Mafia leaders, in contrast, had immigrated as much younger men from impoverished families and came up through the ranks. It also seemed that the avuncular Buccola treated his power in the comfortable way of someone who was used to it, lacking the insecurity of most of his peers who had to fight or crawl for it.
