by Dick Lehr
“At 1:30 A.M.?” someone else asked.
Another agent noted there was no apartment back there. Morris watched the replay of The Wave over and over, the way a football coach might dwell upon a key interception that cost his team the game. He felt sick as his mind reviewed the months of work it had taken merely to get a single video camera going.
Without having to be told, Schopperle went down to the North End, climbed the building to the rooftop, and ripped out the camera. It was a lot easier taking them out than putting them in, although you had to put up with strutting wiseguys eager to let you know they had won that hand.
During the next several days, while Quinn and Morris struggled to figure out how they’d lost the camera, the resilient Schopperle quickly installed a second one right on Prince Street itself. He put it inside an air conditioner, which was in the window of a utility company building less than a block from Angiulo’s office. Schopperle angled the camera so it focused on Jerry’s front door.
This one lasted only two days. The video showed Jerry Angiulo rounding the corner of Thatcher Street and pausing in front of his office. He turned to the camera, looked straight up into the lens, and slowly raised his left hand to his neck for what seemed like an eternity to the monitoring agents. There was no mistake about it: He was giving the FBI the choke sign.
Even before Schopperle could go down and haul this one back in, the FBI watched Frankie Angiulo point out the camera to a group of schoolgirls dressed in matching dark skirts and white blouses. Frankie had the girls wave. Then he had a young punk climb a ladder and poke around the air conditioner. This netted the FBI a vivid close-up of a hand and an eyeball.
Quinn and Morris never did figure out how the rear camera was discovered, but there was little mystery about the air conditioner camera: it was made by the vigilant neighborhood network. Their mistake had been to alter, ever so slightly, the exterior landscape that surrounded Jerry Angiulo’s domain. Stunned, Morris and his squad were frozen in their tracks.
Drop back and punt, thought the indomitable Schopperle, who set out to devise new camera techniques. But leaders Quinn and Morris and the other agents became increasingly wary about Angiulo’s ability to pick up every move they made. Sure, they had gotten a solid start in gathering the photos and intelligence to go to court for a bug, but the photographic surveillance simply could not end at this early stage. If they ever did succeed in setting up a secret microphone to record conversations, they would also have to have ongoing picture-taking so they could match voices with wiseguys. You could not have a blind microphone and get the kind of precise identification of speakers needed to stand up in court.
Maybe, some of the agents began wondering, you really couldn’t overcome the mythic moat that surrounded the 98 Prince Street address. Maybe the idea of bugging Jerry Angiulo was too tall an order?
Slowly, painfully Morris and Quinn began drawing strength from these early failures, regarding them ultimately as a challenge that grew into a fierce determination to crack the North End. For inspiration, all they had to do was conjure up the image of the defiant Angiulo rubbing his neck in the choke signal for the air conditioner camera. Or there was the unforgettable wave that Buckley first witnessed. All Morris had to picture was that “look on his face, you know, kind of arrogantly waving at us.”
To preserve morale and restore energy, Quinn had his agents back off for a while, not wanting the FBI to err too soon on the heels of the camera debacles. Angiulo obviously knew the FBI was up to something, and some breathing space—or lull—was in order. But a few months later, they resumed the often tedious process of gathering all the information they could about the North End, from the layouts of streets and utility lines to details about the people who lived there. If they were going to develop a bugging plan, they needed to know the North End completely—what the patterns and rhythms of everyday life were.
It was an intelligence-gathering process that moved inch by inch, and it wasn’t until a year later, the spring of 1980, that the squad thought it was ready to make another formal sortie into the North End. They were putting the finishing touches on a plan to bug the office, using a “hardwire”—a microphone hooked up to a telephone company line that provided a clean and continuous signal.
This meant the time had come to tap the strike force for some legal prep work. McDowell was gone, replaced by an ambitious and prickly prosecutor named Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan. He assigned the newly hired, first female attorney in the Boston office of the strike force to perform the legal grunt work on the so-called T-3 application for a court-approved bug.
For the next two years, Wendy Collins would spend more time with FBI agents than she would with fellow prosecutors. She actually ended up preferring it that way, finding the teamwork among agents who are likely to spend their entire careers with the FBI more real than the jockeying among federal prosecutors looking to hit and run the government—grab some experience fast and then cash it in for some high-paying position with a highbrow law firm.
But Collins had no idea that this would be the case when she reported to work for the first time on March II, 1980. She left her parents’ house in Fitchburg, telling her mother she expected to spend the day filing forms and that she would probably be home early. She was dead wrong. She was immediately briefed on the heady plan to bug the headquarters of the Boston Mafia and told she would serve as the legal link between the strike force and the FBI.
She began researching both the RICO statute and the legal requirements for showing probable cause for a bug. Shortly after she started, an FBI agent took her to the North End to show her the lay of the land. They parked a bureau car on North Washington Street, one of the streets that define the neighborhood’s boundaries. In the back seat was her briefcase jammed with legal research and articles about electronic surveillance law that had taken her hours to assemble in a law library When they returned from their tour they found the car had been broken into. The briefcase was gone. The car radio was still there, but also stolen was a box of bullets agents are required to carry in their glove compartments. And this was the outskirts of Angiulo territory
Luckily, there was nothing in the briefcase that revealed anything about the plan to bug the Angiulos, but Collins was forced to retrace her steps in the law library Then she was introduced to Ed Quinn and the other agents, prompting a brief reevaluation of what she was undertaking and why. Here she was, a graduate of Clark University—not the most right-wing school around—who wrote her thesis on the FBI’s harassment of the radical Berrigan brothers. She was fresh from a job with a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that was probing the FBI’s undistinguished role in investigating the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. And here was case agent Ed Quinn, who while in New York had been part of a team assigned to stake out a church to arrest Daniel Berrigan. Quinn was the company man in a company that Collins had strong misgivings about.
But two things happened quickly to put to rest any of her opening suspicions. Quinn impressed Collins quickly with his integrity, his even temper, and his low-key style. He never let up and he rarely lost his cool. Then Collins realized there was a common ground for them in the bugging project. This wasn’t the Vietnam War or political activism. This was the Mafia. Collins had no problem seeing eye to eye with Quinn on the evils of the mob.
Quinn began shoveling raw information about Jerry Angiulo and his outfit to Collins so that she could sort through it and fashion the T-3 affidavit. The law, drafted to prevent the FBI’s abuses in the 1960when the bureau had initiated countless illegal bugging operations to gather intelligence rather than evidence, required strict court supervision. She studied other T-3 packages the Justice Department had assembled in other cases and watched her own grow in thickness, from twenty to thirty to forty pages.
But it was all for naught. The hardwire plan died on the vine, stymied again by Angiulo’s security network. While Collins was working up the legal documents, Morris and Quinn had been ironing out th
e remaining wrinkles in the bugging plan. They needed the telephone company’s cooperation in order to pull off a hardwire, and Morris had been having trouble securing a lease, or open, line that the FBI could tap into. There just weren’t any telephone lines left in the thickly populated neighborhood, and the Angiulos would surely ask plenty of questions if they saw work crews stringing up new ones.
Still, it was a snafu Morris was determined to work out, except that solving the problem became moot one day in the late spring of 1980 after a meeting with an informant. “Jerry knows,” the informant told the FBI. “He knows all about it.”
“About what? Whaddya talking about? He knows what?”
The informant explained that Jerry was heard telling an associate he had learned the FBI was going to try to put a bug in.
Morris was stunned, dejected, outraged. The hardwire plan collapsed instantly and Collins’s forty-page application for a secret bug was never forwarded to Washington. Once again, Jerry’s stature grew. He had his own network of informants everywhere.
In two years, the FBI had been knocked out of the box twice. Two stunning setbacks that affected the two principal pieces of any secret surveillance—first the video camera and then the listening device. But Quinn and Morris realized each carried a lesson for them, and in both instances the lesson was the same. To power their cameras and their mikes they could not rely on any sources but their own. No cameras from a rooftop someone else owned, hooked up to power lines someone else controlled; no cameras inside air conditioners jutting from a building belonging to outsiders ; no microphones tied into telephone lines that the FBI did not control absolutely. Just as Jerry Angiulo eschewed outsiders for his protection, so too would the FBI. Self-reliance became a word to live by on both sides of the fence.
They began working from the premise that everything would stay within the bureau. Their first major break came from Shaky Schopperle. In the late summer, he came up with a way to supply continuous photographic surveillance on the entrance to Boston’s underworld. He wanted to plant a camera in the front grille of a car, powered by batteries that he would hide under the back seat and in the trunk. He’d been tinkering around and figured he’d need ten car batteries strung together to keep the camera going all day and into the night, until that car could be replaced with a second equipped with a camera and a fresh string of batteries. He studied Prince Street and saw that a car parked at the corner of Prince and Thatcher could maintain a constant eye on Jerry’s door.
Quinn and Morris liked the idea. They also realized that Schopperle would have to come up with an elaborate plan to first secure the parking spot and then choreograph the nightly switches of a dying camera car with a charged one. They knew they could not just plunk one car down on Prince Street for several months. Sooner or later such a car would stick out. The Angiulos would wonder why the same car was always in the same place. Wiseguys would begin poking around. The tires would get slashed. The video car would get made. No, an elaborate procedure had to be developed to rotate the cars, so that their car looked just like any other that came and went in the North End. Eventually Shaky found he needed a tag team of six agents to maintain the fleet of video cars, recharging batteries and driving the vehicles in and out of the two parking spaces—one on the corner and one two spaces back—that he ended up securing exclusively for the FBI.
It took him three months that fall to round up the cars. The first—a 1974 maroon Nova—he got from the bureau’s own lot. It had been used in an earlier undercover operation. The rest he bought. He got the cash from Quinn and began checking out the classified ads. He’d meet people trying to unload an old used car and confuse them with his reaction. No this won’t do, he’d say unable to explain to the puzzled seller that he had certain space requirements and it wasn’t enough that the car ran. He couldn’t use a car with a V-8 engine—not enough room up front for the clam-era. It turned out that the junkier the car, the more adaptable it was to carve out the space for all the batteries.
His hunt took him to Beverly and countless other suburban towns. He bought one car on the South Shore from a plant worker during the guy’s lunch break—met the guy in the parking lot and paid cash right then and there. He even paid the asking price, though it seemed that the $400 price tag was negotiable. The worker probably raced back to his buddies and bragged how he snookered some idiot. In addition to the Nova, Schopperle picked up a 1965 gray Rambler, a 1970 gray Impala, and a rust-colored 1972 Dodge van.
Schopperle registered all of the cars to fictitious people—names he made up off the top of his head so a license-plate check by the Angiulos would never be traceable to the bureau. He picked one name and said the guy lived on Lowell Avenue in Peabody north of Boston. He picked another and gave a Lawrence address in a housing project. He picked a Framingham condo complex. The last one was registered to a Jamaica Plain address in Boston, at an apartment house with a lot of turnover. He purposely chose large housing sites so a mobster trying to trace a car would not get suspicious if neighbors had no idea who the person was.
With Schopperle making significant headway Morris, Quinn, and the others spent weeks brainstorming and consulting with technical people about various bugging options. The watchword was still self-reliance—there would be no more leaks because they would do everything themselves. They would use FBI bugging equipment powered not by any telephone or utility line, but by their own batteries. The techies warned that the best they could give them was a month’s worth of power from the log-size battery packs. This meant that if Quinn and Morris wanted the bug to last more than four weeks they would have to replace the drained power packs with new ones.
But Quinn and Morris went for it. Even if they had to break back into 98 Prince Street following an initial installation, they preferred to hold the fate of the mission in their own hands rather than risk exposure by tapping into any outside power sources. They’d had too much trouble already. They had also realized that summer was the worst time to break in, even if their hardwire idea had not died. Too many people stayed on the streets late into the night to have a team of agents skulk around and slip into 98 Prince Street undetected.
They began aiming for a wintertime entry—smack in the midst of a cold snap, hopefully, that would keep anyone in their right mind indoors. For months, Morris had been putting up with the inevitable office jabs about whether his crew was planning on pulling anything off this century. It had been more than two years. But the squad leader finally began to feel a little momentum building in their favor, and, in his view, the mistakes had been necessary in order to fine tune a plan with a prayer of working.
Starting in early autumn, Morris dispatched teams of agents to comb the North End. The movements of the Angiulos and associates like Richie Gambale and James “Fat Peter” Limone, who hung out near Salem Street, were recorded. The Salem Street corner was a favorite with the many Angiulo disciples trying to impress the Mafia boss by keeping an eye out for intruders. When the “law” did cruise by in an unmarked car, as it regularly did, the vehicle was quickly identified by its license number. The Angiulos were notified. Prince Street was theirs.
Morris’s men kept tabs on this corner and monitored the pulse of the entire North End—who lived where, when Prince Street was busy, at what hour it got quiet. They noticed that when the neighborhood did shut down, it shut down abruptly. One moment people were walking around, the next the street was deserted. Agents talked about being able to feel it happening, this sudden closure, almost like a curtain being drawn quickly. “We’re going in,” Morris promised at one of the many squad meetings, to ensure morale wouldn’t sag.
They’d decided to try a second bug as well, in the North Margin Street hangout of Angiulo’s number two man, Larry Zannino. Zannino conducted a late-night card game at the club, after which he often lingered and drank with the soldiers who worked in his regime. Morris viewed the two bugs as offering the best possible coverage of the Angiulo enterprise, for there was a symbiotic connection betw
een the two sites, located a mere two blocks apart.
The FBI knew that 98 Prince Street was a place where Jerry often issued orders to Larry Zannino, and that Zannino, on at least two nights a week, then returned to his North Margin Street gambling hall to discuss how to execute his boss’s commands. Morris assigned agent Shaun Rafferty to run the North Margin Street angle. Operation Bostar was expanding in both manpower and ambitiousness.
The entire pace of the mission picked up. On the legal front, Collins’s workload doubled. She single-handedly drafted two court applications for electronic surveillance—for Angiulo and Zannino. She’d basically had to start from scratch after the hardwire failure, because the informant and other information she put together earlier in the year had grown stale by the fall. The courts required fresh inside intelligence. The trick was drafting the applications so that any one reading it, including Jerry Angiulo some day, could never decipher the identities of the various informants the FBI relied upon. The possibility of burning an informant gave her nightmares. She began working late into the night and throughout the weekend. At some point in the late fall, she realized, all she cared about was the mission, and all she wanted for Christmas was for the FBI to install their microphones with no one getting hurt.
In the courts, there’d been an appellate decision that worried the strike force attorneys, but it was not enough to throw the operation off track or even into a slow-down. It was just something that had to be watched carefully.
The case involved RICO and the conviction of a two-bit thug named Novia Turkette, Jr., who had been convicted in federal court in Massachusetts under RICO for operating a drug ring and other illegal enterprises. He’d gotten twenty years in prison, but then appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston by attacking the legality of RICO.
The issue was whether the term enterprise in the RICO statute was intended to encompass both legitimate and illegitimate activities. Turkette argued the law was meant solely to protect legitimate business enterprises from infiltration by racketeers. He claimed that the law did not apply to an outfit that performed only illegal acts, like his drug trafficking business. So he couldn’t be convicted for merely participating in a criminal racket, especially since he’d not tried to take over any legitimate businesses. In other words, RICO didn’t apply to the mob or any racket until the outfit tried to muscle in on bona fide business.
