The Underboss

by Dick Lehr

  The two FBI agents left that meeting frustrated, knowing they’d been spinning their wheels, unable to come up with any fresh insights. But Morris began rethinking what the informant kept stressing—that Angiulo conducted his criminal affairs at his Prince Street office. Mulling this fact, Morris realized the informant was telling them something—oh, not directly, not even intentionally. The fact of Angiulo’s modus operandi was old hat. Everyone knew about the office and how secretive and careful Angiulo was. Still, the truth was there, as it had been for some time. To get Angiulo someone had to challenge the conventional wisdom about the Angiulo fortress and attempt to do the seemingly impossible.

  Turning to Vaules and stressing every word, Morris said, “We have to put a mike in that place.”

  5

  The Wave

  For the next two years, there wasn’t much John Morris could do about the extravagant idea to bug Jerry Angiulo’s headquarters. He was reassigned to a squad that was trying to solve a series of truck hijackings. But he had plenty of time to consider all the crosscurrents underlying that moment of illumination he and Vaules had shared when the prescription for nailing the Boston Mafia revealed itself in the simplest of terms: Get Jerry Angiulo to indict himself in his own words. If only the FBI could record those words.

  It had become painfully clear to Morris that the strategies to fight the local Mafia during the 1970s had had minor success at best. He and his colleagues had spent years tailing bookies and busting Angiulo’s agents, but the raids and gambling probes only disrupted business. They did not significantly alter it. In the end, taking down the agents on the street had amounted to a small bother to Angiulo. Working for the Mafia was still the big leagues for many Italian street kids who were just waiting for their chance—just as Angiulo had waited for his. So, there were always plenty of substitutes to fill in for those sent away to jail.

  Even when the FBI did succeed in making a major gambling case against an Angiulo associate, Morris watched in dismay as the courts imposed light sentences. Gambling simply was not the kind of crime that carried hard time. By late 1977, when Morris took over the organized crime squad, the Barboza era had also been closed out. It had been a year since the Animal was shot down in the streets of San Francisco. Barboza may have failed to wound Angiulo, but he delivered some major blows to Providence. He was one in a million. Morris could not count on finding another Joe.

  What all of this trial-and-error experience meant to Morris was that the bureau had to go after the Mafia as an organization, to show the public that it was a blood-thirsty outfit and not simply made up of gruff bookies who took bets on Celtics games. He wanted to take that organization to court to show that it savagely assassinated people in order to expand and control its rackets.

  The stratagem to get the entire enterprise brought him back full circle to Jerry Angiulo, for Morris long ago had come to realize that, in Boston, the Mafia enterprise and Jerry Angiulo were one and the same. Angiulo was the epicenter. You could not get at the enterprise without getting at Jerry and if you got to Jerry you hit the organization in the bull’s-eye.

  The reason for this was that Angiulo had spent years insulating himself not only from law enforcement, but also from his own. Morris had learned this firsthand from some of the better informants he’d had a chance to listen to over the years.

  In the many gambling cases, he’d found that even those few mafiosi whom the FBI had coaxed into talking knew little about the inner workings of the Angiulo enterprise. Such ignorance made them useless to an FBI struggling to develop a case or corroborate the crumbs of evidence they might have been able to gather elsewhere.

  The informants then told Morris repeatedly how Angiulo would explode into a rage at one of his brothers if the Mafia boss decided that too much about “the business” was being discussed in the presence of a non-family member, even if the person was a member of the Mafia. Angiulo never even liked to discuss the business in the presence of the city’s second most powerful mafioso, Larry Zannino.

  So Angiulo was wrapped within a couple of heavy layers of insulation—the Mafia’s and his own family’s. The reason for the second layer, Morris would eventually learn, was mainly greed. Working in obsessive secrecy, Angiulo managed to keep some of his enterprise outside the stream of Mafia commerce, so that it was all his own. There would be no 50-50 split on this money with Patriarca in Providence. But the reason for the furtiveness didn’t matter. The net effect was that a second layer served as further protection against the FBI agents assigned to stalk him. “If there is such a thing as an evil genius, Jerry was an evil genius,” a federal prosecutor who dogged Angiulo for years once said. “Jerry got to the top because of that ability.”

  The invulnerability of Gennaro Angiulo all came down to something Nick Angiulo once said of another grand jury probe of his reigning brother. “Jerry Angiulo for what? The guy don’t meet nobody. He don’t do nothin’ with nobody.” Which was why Morris knew he had to bug Angiulo at 98 Prince Street—the nerve center where Angiulo did talk incessantly to his brothers and the few others he trusted.

  Toward the end of his first year as chief of the organized crime squad, Morris raised these thoughts at a meeting with the agent in charge of the Boston office, Dick Bates. It was a meeting between an older, seasoned supervisor serving his final office before retirement and a young, aggressive squad chief trying to make a name for himself. Bates, with a gentle smile, was skeptical. Morris pressed his case, noting that thousands of man-hours had been spent on bookmaking cases and on developing informants who knew little or nothing firsthand about Angiulo’s criminal behavior.

  He played off frustration felt throughout the bureau regarding an investigation against Zannino. The strongarm man from the South End had begun to exploit a defense strategy that would keep him from facing new charges on bookmaking and loansharking for years to come. Zannino, by now in his late fifties, began convincing judges that his physical infirmities were severe enough to keep him from standing trial. It was a tactic that worked—trial delay upon trial delay was granted. And the legal maneuvering kept Zannino on the street, where, Morris knew all too well, he was apparently fit enough to meet regularly with Jerry Angiulo, or attend card games where he gambled and drank late into the night.

  Morris stressed the major factor working in their favor—Angiulo’s irrepressible ego. The ego was their money in the bank. It represented a virtual guarantee that if they could set up electronic surveillance it would capture the sort of incriminating braggadocio of which conspiracy cases are made. Morris explained that his squad fully expected to capture blunt talk of crime and punishment that Angiulo indulged in only when he was comfortably behind his office door—including vintage Angiulo proclamations that he was boss of Boston; that he was an intimate of Vito Genovese and Raymond Patriarca; and that whatever he did—be it bookmaking, taking layoff, loansharking, or ordering a hit—he did it the best. Every other word would be I. Angiulo would brag about his crimes and expound on his plans.

  Bates, without giving a flat-out commitment, permitted Morris to run with the idea. If Morris wanted to take that kind of chance, then he’d back him. This sent Morris to the offices of the New England Organized Crime Strike Force, about ten blocks away in the federal district courthouse building. The strike force consisted of the federal prosecutors who would have to take care of the FBI’s legal flank—first assembling the mounds of legal paperwork to seek a judge’s approval for the electronic surveillance and, once they got the Angiulos on tape, presenting the evidence at trial.

  Morris began by going over the inventory of organized crime cases—where they stood, what the problems were. Then he launched into how the FBI would like to do things differently. It was routine fare, until Morris explained to the strike force chief, Gerry McDowell, what differently meant: “Gerry, what we’re going to do is we’re going to put a microphone in Jerry Angiulo’s office.”

  Morris could tell that McDowell regarded the proposal as half-ba
ked, but he also knew that the strike force would sign on. Morris was no neophyte in bureaucratic circuitry. The high-risk proposal was no sweat off the strike force’s back. The FBI absorbed all the risk for installing a bug. It would be Morris’s neck on the line, not a prosecutor’s.

  So Morris was not at all surprised when the strike force offered its full endorsement for the bugging plan. He and McDowell jointly agreed it was an opportunity to “depict them as the organization that they are.” But for any federal prosecutor in late 1978, the idea of attacking the Mafia as an organization hit a relatively new set of legal chords. Morris’s plan to take on Angiulo as an organization meant drawing upon on a statute known as the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, called RICO for short.

  Even though RICO had been passed in 1970, the powerful crime-fighting weapon had mostly gathered dust. In part, this was due to the complexity of the statute. Mostly, it was due to prosecutorial shyness. The law had not really created any new crimes. What it did was combine existing criminal behavior into a new offense that carried far stiffer punishment. RICO covered eight state and twenty-four federal crimes. If a prosecutor could prove a mobster committed any two of the crimes, he’d succeed in showing a pattern of racketeering and the RICO sanctions kicked into action. Finally, federal agents frustrated by meager sentences resulting from gambling and loansharking convictions could combine the results and, bingo, nail a wiseguy for operating a racket and win some big jail time—at least twenty years.

  By the time Morris conferred with the head of the New England Strike Force in late 1977, RICO had only just begun to be used sparingly around the country. In New England, the feds had broken RICO ground only two years earlier, in Hartford, and the effort netted two minor crime figures. In Boston, RICO cases were launched against an Irish gang leader and another minor mobster, but any attempt to use RICO to go after the entire Angiulo crime family would be, by far, the most ambitious case in the country.

  McDowell told Morris the plan was terrific if the FBI could pull it off. Let me know when you’re getting close to the affidavit, he said, referring to the first round of legal papers Morris would need to convince a judge that Jerry Angiulo warranted the FBI’s secret surveillance.

  Easier said than done. Morris immediately began assembling a team of agents, but nearly two years later not a single one had set foot inside Jerry’s place. During that time the FBI suffered a series of agonizing setbacks that kept Morris jittery and the mission in jeopardy

  THE FIRST disappointment came six months later, in June of 1979. Agent Mike Buckley was working the graveyard shift monitoring a secret video camera hidden in the North End. The camera, mounted on a rooftop, was trained on a dark alleyway behind 98 Prince Street where Angiulo parked his cars.

  The FBI had had the video running for several weeks. The idea was to record the comings and goings of Jerry Angiulo and his associates from the Mafia office. It was all part of the methodical and laborious first step if the FBI wanted a judge’s permission to bug Jerry To win court approval, they first had to establish that the office was where Jerry Angiulo and other mafiosi hung out.

  So far, at least as far as Morris was concerned, things had gone pretty well, if slowly. He’d gotten most of the people he had wanted for the mission, particularly his first choice for case agent, Ed Quinn. Quinn was steady and even-keeled. He had the calm determination to keep a long-term operation on track. He was the perfect counterpoint to a sometimes frenetic and intense squad chief. Morris had happily handed Quinn the ticket on Operation Bostar.

  With Quinn, Morris had then spent the early months of 1978 choosing the other players. It was like naming a starting lineup for opening day He grabbed a bunch of veterans. Nick Gianturco was selected for his street smarts and undercover work, Jack Cloherty because he had prepared bugging affidavits before. Tom Donlan, Joe Kelly, and Pete Kennedy had worked organized crime for years. And finally John Connolly, like Quinn, was a Boston native, from Southie, who’d returned home in 1973 from New York, where he’d busted one of the guys wanted for blowing off the leg of Joe Barboza’s attorney John Fitzgerald. Connolly worked the streets too, an agent who stroked informants well, though he had his share of run-ins with the North End’s first family. He was a dapper dresser who wore a ring with a symbol of Galway Ireland, where his parents were born.

  Connolly and Angiulo had gone nose to nose in the middle of Prince Street one night in 1976 when Connolly and a couple of other agents arrived to search Jerry and his office as part of a gambling probe. Angiulo was livid, screaming about how he was going to sue Connolly and how Connolly would wish he’d never set eyes on Jerry Angiulo. The very next morning Connolly was back in the North End cruising down Prince Street. Jerry stood on the corner, spotted Connolly and pointed to him. Connolly stopped his car and threw it in reverse. Angiulo raced into the street to meet him for round two.

  “You got a lot of balls,” he yelled at the agent, “being down here by yourself after what you pulled last night.” Looking out of the car, Connolly calmly said, “Jerry, listen: Yes, I got balls, and are you trying to tell me there may be someone down here who might want to commit an assault on a federal officer, knowing that brings a mandatory prison sentence and a large fine? I mean are you tipping me off to that? You want to be in the witness protection program, or what? Because I can arrange that, you can be a witness.” Angiulo shook his head and left, smiling derisively. From then on, he often greeted the agent mockingly, wailing “Connnnnnly. We meet agaaaaain.” Angiulo loved verbal jousting, as long as it was on his turf.

  So Morris grabbed Connolly and the other veterans and added relative newcomers Bill Regii and Mike Buckley The starting nine had seven Irishmen and two Italians, shades of the ethnic breakdown of Boston a century before. Quinn began interviewing women agents for roles as decoys, and the team started trying to snap photos of Jerry at Prince Street. Right off, they discovered nothing would come easy.

  For the photos, Morris turned to Bill Schopperle, the cowboy of cameras. Known as Shaky, the mustachioed video expert with sharp Germanic features hardly looked the part of the typical buttoned-down federal agent. He once described himself as an eighteen-year-old trapped in a fifty-one-year-old body. The man kept odd hours, often going without sleep for days on end. He was the first to admit he was a bit hyper about his work. He preferred boots, flannel shirts, and blue jeans to suits and ties. His gut protruded and he kept his service revolver tucked into his belt. But Shaky Schopperle was as determined as he was eccentric. He almost always got his pictures—one way or another.

  The North End posed a special challenge. You couldn’t just go down there, set up a camera, and start firing away. Angiulo’s people would be all over you in a second. So Schopperle actually began by taking an elevator to the roof of the FBI building. Using a lens that was nearly six feet long, he tried to focus in on the corner of Prince and Thatcher streets where Angiulo and his brothers often lingered. It was only a dozen or so blocks away, but too many other buildings blocked the view. Moreover, the pictures he did take, once they were blown up, lost most of their resolution. So he tried riding by in a car, hoping for an opportunity to catch an Angiulo arriving or departing at 98 Prince Street. But that didn’t work either. Too hit or miss.

  Schopperle then grabbed a green truck and had another agent drive it down into the North End and onto sunless Prince Street, which snaked through the neighborhood. The agent pulled the truck up onto a sidewalk across the narrow street from the office, locked the vehicle, and left for a while. Schopperle hid inside, snapping photos. Within minutes a large garbage truck rumbled up behind him and couldn’t get by. The driver leaned on his horn, which drew dozens of onlookers onto the street, including the Angiulos. The truck driver actually began breaking into his truck when the second agent finally returned to get a sweating Schopperle the hell out of there.

  Schopperle concluded that a cameraman simply could not stake out the office. He would have to come up with a remote sys
tem. If only they had some petty cash to buy a place on Prince Street, he joked to Morris. Morris, of course, couldn’t swing that, but he did have Jack Cloherty study property and rental lists to see if the FBI might approach someone about using his or her apartment. He found no openings, no one they could trust enough so that word about the FBI movements would never get back to Angiulo.

  By May, Schopperle settled on the video camera installed behind the office, overlooking the darkly lit Lombard Place. He succeeded in hooking it up to an electrical line and aiming it on Jerry’s back side. For nearly a month, the FBI camera was rolling, until one night in June on Buckley’s shift.

  Buckley sitting alone in the FBI office, sat bolt upright when he saw Angiulo enter the moonlit picture. It was about 1:30 A.M. and the Mafia boss was calling it a night. Buckley flicked on the tape to capture the image of Angiulo as he stepped across the alley to his AMC Pacer.

  But then something Angiulo did made the young agent’s stomach turn. Jerry’s hand went up and he seemed to wave at the camera concealed in a container that Schopperle had built to look like a utility box. “Wait until the guys see this,” moaned Buckley

  The next morning, as they did every morning, agents assembled to review the tapes from the night before. But this time Buckley fast-forwarded the reel to the moment that quickly became known as The Wave. Schopperle’s first reaction was to deny to his crestfallen colleagues that his camera had been made. He studied The Wave and said, “Maybe we’re OK. Maybe he’s waving to someone in the window?”