by Dick Lehr
Barboza sat behind bars, confused that neither Angiulo nor Patriarca had sent anyone down with money to spring him. In fact, he’d heard it was the Mafia that tipped off the cops that he was riding around the Zone armed and ready for business. Fortunately for Barboza, others had not forgotten him. One of the guys nabbed with him, Arthur C. “Tash” Bratsos, a thirty-six-year-old loan shark from Medford who’d made his far lower bail, began hitting up other wiseguys around town for Barboza’s. Helping was twenty-seven-year-old Thomas J. DePrisco, Jr., known as an enforcer, or “stalker.”
Then the Mafia sent Joe a message.
It came after he’d been in jail for more than five weeks. Bratsos and DePrisco, continuing to press people on behalf of Barboza, had raised $59,000. One November night, the pair visited the Nite Lite Café, a mafiosi hangout on Commercial Street in the North End. The bar was managed by Ralph “Ralphie Chong” Lamattina, a soldier in the Angiulo family who was assigned to Capo de Regime Larry Zannino. Lamattina, like Bratsos, lived in Medford; in fact, the two were neighbors—Ralphie lived in the house behind Tash’s.
But that meant nothing. Barboza’s two fundraisers had gone to the wrong place after midnight looking for financial aid. Bratsos was shot twice in the back of the head. DePrisco was shot four times. The Mafia, in an awkward attempt to have police think the murders were the work of Irish gangsters, dumped the corpses in the back seat of Bratsos’s black Cadillac and abandoned the car in South Boston. No one was fooled. The slayings were counted as the thirty-ninth and fortieth in the ongoing gangland violence, and police, acting on a tip, were able to search the Nite Lite while the corpses were still warm. Police found Ralph Lamattina in the café. Someone had tried using solvent to wash blood off the sidewalk out front. Inside, the walls were pocked with bullet holes and the carpet was wet with blood. A spent bullet and bullet casing, tested later, were shown to have been fired from the murder weapon.
Throughout that day and the next, police rounded up thirty wiseguys for questioning. News of the murders shook Barboza. Not only were his pals dead, but the $59,000 was missing. The afternoon the bodies were discovered, he was taken to Boston City Hospital for a toothache. He was under heavy police guard; his hands were manacled and his eyes hidden behind dark, wrap-around shades. As Barboza climbed out of the police vehicle, a photographer immediately snapped his picture. Barboza flipped out, screaming at the press and the police. He dove back into the car, demanding to be returned to the Charles Street Jail.
Monitoring all of this were the FBI’s Condon and Rico, for Barboza’s mounting troubles coincided with the bureau’s decision to actively cultivate informants. Barboza, in their mind, was a prime candidate. They began to visit the Animal in jail, telling him he’d become a sore spot to the organization; that he had no future with it; that he was a marked man; that his friends were marked men; and that, during the FBI’s secret bugging of Patriarca, the boss had several times mentioned Barboza in less than favorable terms.
But converting Barboza was not easy. The process took time, almost six months, during which Barboza vacillated wildly between promising to help and refusing to believe the Mafia had dumped him. From jail, he wrote Angiulo and Patriarca notes, with the initial ones demanding an explanation for the murders and the stolen bail money and the later ones containing explicit threats about whom he would bring down if he cooperated.
During those six months, both sides—the Mafia and the law—acted in ways that encouraged Barboza to roll over. Three weeks after the two fundraisers were knocked off, Barboza’s pal, Joe Amico, was gunned down in Revere. Amico was no fool; he’d gone into hiding immediately after the Bratsos and DePrisco hits. But the Mafia tracked down the twenty-four-year-old just before Christmas.
Condon and Rico talked to Barboza about his dead friend. The next month, in state court, Barboza was convicted on the weapons charges after a ten-day trial. In late January 1967, he was sentenced to a five-year term at Walpole. Condon and Rico went to Walpole to see him. In February Ralph Lamattina pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact in the murders of Bratsos and DePrisco. The prosecutors insisted Lamattina knew who did the actual killing, but “Ralphie Chong” wouldn’t talk. The Mafia soldier was sentenced to ten to fourteen years.
Eventually, Lamattina did “talk,” albeit years later in a conversation secretly recorded by the FBI. In April 1981, he commiserated with Zannino about the messy handling of the hits late one night at their North End club. “Remember when we did that work in, in, in the Nite Lite?” Lamattina asked Zannino and soldier John Cincotti. The trio tried to recall who worked that night. Cincotti had been behind the bar, but was sent home before the shooting started.
“Yeah, we made you go home,” Zannino told Cincotti.
“Made everyone go home,” Lamattina said.
“I threw everybody out of the joint,” Zannino said.
The gist of the discussion was that the murders could have been executed better—maybe they should have burned down the café afterward, or maybe the bodies should have been left inside and the police summoned immediately, instead of dumping the bodies in Southie and attempting to clean up. Zannino concluded that their major mistake was shooting Bratsos and DePrisco inside the café. Ralphie would never have gone to prison if the killing were done outside. “It shouldn’t have happened inside his joint,” Zannino said. “No reason for it.... Once they get on the sidewalk, crack them and fuck them and walk away”
But, following orders from Patriarca back in February 1967, Lamattina pled guilty and refused to aid curious federal agents trying to pry inside information from him. The feds, however, could turn elsewhere—Barboza was finally providing the FBI with solid intelligence about the Mafia. Over the next several months, he began telling them about the slayings of burglar Teddy Deegan in 1965, boxer Rocco DiSeglio in 1966, and a Providence bookie named Willie Marfeo. The feds convened a grand jury and newspaper stories began hinting that major organized crime cases were brewing.
In protective custody the volatile Barboza was not easy to babysit. To one state police investigator, Barboza was only the second criminal he’d ever dealt with who frightened him—not that Barboza threatened him, it was Barboza’s look. The first was the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo. The investigator had met Barboza in a motel on Route Iin Foxborough in order to question him. He found Barboza seated directly in front of the television watching Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” Barboza, unshaven, wore a T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled in one sleeve and a baseball cap on his head, backward.
The trooper stood there watching Barboza watch Carson. Carson’s guest was Truman Capote and the two talked about Capote’s book In Cold Blood. The author noted that one of the killers he’d written about had inscribed the words love and hate on his knuckles. Capote explained that, to him, the tattoos suggested a homosexual slant—a comment that prompted a sudden reaction from Barboza. He took the chair he’d been sitting on and swung it through the television screen. Then he turned to the trooper, who spotted immediately that the Animal had the words love and hate tattooed on his knuckles.
By June 1967, Barboza began dropping his bombs. The first came on June 20: Patriarca, Tameleo, and another mobster were indicted in federal court on charges of conspiring to kill Marfeo. The second fell August 9 when Angiulo was one of four mobsters accused in state court of organizing the DiSeglio killing. Had he been convicted on charges of conspiracy and accessory before the murder, Angiulo could have gotten the death sentence. The final assault was the Deegan murder and it involved the carpet bombing of innocent men—Tameleo, Limone, and two other falsely implicated fringe mobsters. The Deegan case would be quickly eclipsed by murder conspiracy charges with star witness Barboza trying to bring down the top two leaders in the New England Mafia—Angiulo and Patriarca. Barboza batted .500.
In court the day after his indictment, Angiulo, sporting heavy, dark-rimmed glasses, pleaded not guilty. He came prepared, carrying a black leather bag containing hi
s toothbrush, toothpaste, and shaving gear. The Mafia boss was held without bail until the trial—confinement that would last the next five months, the most time Angiulo had ever spent locked up. Taken to the Charles Street Jail, the cantankerous Angiulo complained immediately about the food, rejecting the first offering of fried bologna, stewed corn, and mashed potatoes. The finicky steak man tried to pay guards to fetch him a decent meal, and when he was rebuffed he referred angrily to Barboza, shouting that the stool pigeon got to eat whatever he wanted. The next month, Angiulo had to be moved from Charles Street to the Plymouth County House of Corrections after he was discovered making hand signals from the jail’s top-floor barber shop to girlfriend Barbara Lombard, who had stationed herself at a Beacon Hill intersection facing the jail.
Shortly after the Patriarca indictment, which drew front-page stories about a Mafia stool pigeon, an angry Barboza tried to explain why he’d rolled over. He wrote the Boston Herald Traveler; “All I want is to be left alone. Leave my family alone.” In mangled prose, he told how he’d been duped into thinking the office would take care of him, but instead he’d been used and spat out. He had a warning for other would-be wiseguys: “Younger inmates in Walpole and Concord would do anything to get in with these people, figuring that they would become big men. The office likes them to believe this because then they bleed every single favorable effort from these disillusioned kids and men—and then throw them a crust of bread... and it goes on and on in one complete cycle of evil and viciousness while the office sits back, laughs and reaps the harvest.”
The Mafia made a final, feeble attempt to win back Barboza. Not long after Patriarca was indicted, Henry Tameleo, knowing that he was going to be falsely implicated in the Deegan murder, met with Barboza’s attorney John Fitzgerald, in an effort to buy his way out of the trial. Other meetings followed. The Mafia was willing to pay Barboza $25,000 to quit talking—he’d caused too much trouble already for Patriarca and Angiulo. Fitzgerald reported the offer to both the FBI and Barboza. Barboza actually showed some interest in the deal. The lawyer met again with Tameleo’s associates, saying his client wanted $50,000. The Mafia agreed, but Barboza, after a huddle with his attorney and the FBI, held fast. The die was cast for a tainted trial—for both the FBI and Barboza.
FIRST UP to bat was the silver-haired Angiulo.
In the January 1968 trial, the state’s star witness, Barboza, testified for four days. During that time, the courthouse in Boston crawled with special armed guards and police dogs. To get through the testimony as quickly as possible, the judge scheduled long work days, including Saturdays. The only break came Sunday January 14, when the sequestered jury was permitted to watch the Super Bowl.
Barboza described an elaborate murder scheme engineered by the mob leader from the North End. The motive was revenge-Angiulo had learned that DiSeglio was part of a foursome who’d been robbing lucrative dice games he controlled in Newton and Lowell. So Angiulo, as Barboza told it, summoned one of the other robbers, Benny Zinno, and gave him a choice: Either kill DiSeglio or be killed. The next week, Zinno and the other two defendants set up the victim at a bar in East Boston, luring DiSeglio to ride off with them and then shooting him three times in the back of the head. One bullet tore off part of DiSeglio’s face, another went through his head and out an eye socket. The murderers drove to Topsfield and dumped the body
Barboza told the jury he knew this because the accused killers Zinno and Richard “Vinnie the Pig” DeVincent told him so after the slaying. DeVincent bragged all about it. Barboza even went to see Angiulo at his office: “I told him that Benny Zinna and Vinnie DeVincent told me that he gave the order to whack out Rocky DiSeglio or he would whack them out. The reason I wanted to know was because DiSeglio was a friend of mine and to find out if he had done anything wrong on his part to be killed. I told Angiulo they were running at the mouth. That they came down and told me everything. Angiulo said he would talk to Zinna and that he didn’t trust ‘the Pig.’”
The jury listened, watching the menacing Barboza spew his words as he stood in court, his hands tightly clasped together, with tiny rings looking almost dainty on his pinkies. The man’s head was huge and long, his jaw protruding. His shoulders were enormous, but his legs were undersized. His upper and lower halves didn’t fit. It made him all the more disconcerting.
The Barboza testimony was the state’s case. In less than two hours, the jury reached a verdict—not guilty Angiulo clutched the dock rail and his body shook, the only defendant to show any emotion. He bit his lower lip and swallowed continuously. “I don’t want to say anything right now,” he said afterward to reporters. “I want to see my mother. She’s seventy-three, and this thing has been bothering her.”
Despite efforts by reporters to coax jurors to explain their deliberations, none did. Twenty years later, however, jury foreman Kenneth Matthews said none of the sixteen jurors had found Barboza believable. “He didn’t help the state at all,” Matthews said. “He wasn’t reliable. He was nothing as a witness.... Once you get into his background, you see he was a strong-arm man for loansharks who killed for practically nothing. He was an animal himself. How can you accept whatever he says? ... Personally, I was glad when he was off the witness stand. When he was there I worried there would be trouble. In the courtroom somewhere. I’m not sure how. Just some kind of trouble. I was glad when that part was over.” The problem with the state’s case, Matthews recalled, was that it relied heavily on Barboza. “Everything was mostly his word,” he said. “Maybe if he was used to corroborate other evidence, but as the only witness, it was a poor way to go about it.”
Angiulo had beaten the rap. Barboza, singing solo, had not played well. But in the two sensational trials that remained, the results were far different. The government still showcased Barboza, but it buttressed his testimony with that of other witnesses and with physical evidence.
Two months after Angiulo’s acquittal, Patriarca was convicted of conspiring to kill Marfeo. “I’m an old man,” was the Mafia leader’s reaction, as he leaned against the courtroom railing and gripped it with such force that his knuckles turned white.
During the trial, Barboza had taunted the aging Patriarca, striding to the defense table, staring at each of the three mobsters on trial, smirking at them, and then walking away From the stand, he told how he had agreed to kill Marfeo for Patriarca for nothing, deciding it would be good business to ingratiate himself with the number one mafioso in New England. Marfeo was gunned down in Providence while making a call from a telephone booth.
The trials were coming down quickly—all three would be staged within six months—but that didn’t stop the Mafia from doing whatever it could to derail Barboza. Prior to the Patriarca trial, Barboza lawyer and adviser John Fitzgerald left his office in Everett after another day spent coping with his client’s massive legal entanglements. He’d been driving a 1966 Olds belonging to Barboza, which was littered with papers, including a copy of Capote’s In Cold Blood in the back seat. Fitzgerald opened the door, threw his briefcase inside, and stuck the key in the ignition. The explosion came the second he turned the key Two sticks of dynamite had been used, each fifteen inches long and weighing six pounds. The explosives had been inserted with a coil next to the fire wall behind the car’s engine—a thirty-second job. Fitzgerald survived, but his mangled right leg was amputated three inches below the knee. He was conscious after the 5:15 P.M. bombing, asking the local police at the scene to get him Paul Rico of the FBI. The lawyer later disclosed he’d received recent death threats because of his close relationship to Barboza and his self-annointed role as mediator between the Mafia and his client. In the aftermath of what newspaper editorials labeled the underworld’s “brazen, terroristic act ... a frontal assault on our system of justice,” an outraged legal community rallied behind the maimed Fitzgerald, raising money for his family.
Knowing the Mafia was on the prowl, Barboza, under heavy guard, was moved around frequently—from Thatcher Island off Rockport,
north of Boston, to Fort Devens, an army base west of the city. For a while, he was kept in protective custody in the junior officer’s quarters at Fort Knox in Kentucky where one of the young officers in the Army military police was a Kansan named John Morris. Within a few years, Morris would become an FBI agent bound for Boston. But, to the MP officer, the swarthy visitor meant little. Each owned a German shepherd and, on occasion, the two talked when they met walking their dogs. It was an eerie prelude to Morris’s own dire day of destiny with treacherous informants in the Boston underworld (In fact, Barboza’s reign of terror would be eclipsed by Morris’s own murderous informants who headed the Irish gang—James “White” Bulger and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi).
The Mafia maneuverings to stop Barboza also included an attempt to convince an imprisoned convict to take one of the raps for them. The convict, already serving a life term for murder, was advised that the “office” wanted him to go down for the Deegan slaying—the next murder for which the top Mafia leaders would be in the dock. In return, the convict was promised $50,000, his kids would be cared for, and the office would try to work the parole board in his behalf. The convict had been approached about the deal by two mafiosi, one of whom was Ralph Lamattina—in jail as an accessory to the Nite Lite Café murders. But the convict didn’t go for it. Instead he went to the FBI, which, once again, shored up its tainted case against Henry Tameleo and Peter Limone.
The Deegan trial was the longest of the three, beginning in late May 1968 and running for fifty days. The court record ran 7,555 pages and the cast of six defendants included Tameleo of Providence and Peter Limone, who was at that time one of Jerry Angiulo’s most trusted underlings.
Barboza falsely claimed that Limone hired him to kill Deegan after Deegan robbed some of Limone’s North End friends. Barboza testified Limone met him on Prince Street near Angiulo’s office and offered him a $7,500 contract to kill Deegan. Barboza then implicated Tameleo by claiming he met separately with him at the Ebb Tide in Revere to make certain the Deegan hit was authorized by Providence. The Ebb Tide had become Tameleo’s Boston “office,” after Patriarca had become a part owner. Barboza concocted an exchange between the two, with Tameleo purportedly saying, “No punk like Deegan is going to push the office around.”
