by Dick Lehr
The appellate court adopted Turkette’s line of reasoning. It overturned his RICO conviction. The government immediately appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the high court agreed to hear the case that winter. The local circuit’s point of view was at odds with circuit court rulings around the country, which had rejected similar attempts to limit the scope of RICO. Nevertheless, the Turkette decision, at least for the time being, offered mobsters everywhere a ray of hope. For Quinn and Morris, it meant that if the decision stood, they might never be able to go after Angiulo for operating a Mafia enterprise that engaged in ongoing criminal activities. But they could still go after the Mafia family for any specific crimes of conspiracy, gambling, loansharking, and accessory to murder they might uncover through their secret bugs.
So the two FBI leaders chose to let the attorneys worry about the intricacies of pending RICO litigation. They kept their attention on cracking the North End. Lengthy “work-ups” were prepared on each of the Angiulo brothers, chronicling their daily patterns and habits. Mike Buckley and Bill Regii took turns walking the streets during the day, up Thatcher Street, past Pizzeria Regina, right onto Prince Street, and up to Salem Street. Jack Cloherty and John Connolly did the same, hanging out, soaking up the atmosphere, noting a car registration or any other tidbit into the tiny tape recorders most of them carried. It got to the point where they could pick a time during the day and accurately guess where each of the Angiulos would be. Where was Mikey Angiulo? Usually standing outside on the corner, greeting women as they strolled by. Up on another corner, at Salem, outside a bakery, another lookout was always leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigar.
Certain faces began to emerge from the crowds on the busy side streets—faces belonging to the foot soldiers of Jerry Angiulo. To avoid detection, the agents varied their own appearances. Regii, who probably did the most footwork, grew a beard. One day he’d carry a tool box, the next a gym bag. He’d wear a vest, then an army jacket, then maybe an overcoat. The FBI had never known where Frankie Angiulo lived, but this daylong surveillance seemed to yield an answer. Each morning at about nine, Frankie would emerge from 95 Prince Street—the building that housed the old office—and walk across the street to open up 98 Prince Street.
Late in the fall, Jack Cloherty and Mike Buckley spent their nights in a van, to count heads after a third agent drove the van in, parked it, and walked away from an ostensibly empty vehicle. The pair then tracked each of the Angiulos leaving the office for the night. Their first stab at the surveillance was a bust. They’d been parked only a few minutes when a curious teenager began eyeing the van. The two agents, hiding inside, could only watch helplessly, using the rearview mirrors. “This kid is going to steal the van,” Buckley whispered to Cloherty. Then they saw the kid reach into his pocket, which got the agents guessing. What’s this, a gun, a knife? Out came a switchblade. The kid knelt and stabbed one tire, then moved and stabbed a second. They radioed for help, which came instantly. The van was towed away.
By December, Collins was completing the thick mound of paperwork for the two bugs. The surveillance teams had confirmed that the quietest time was Sunday night, so Quinn and Morris, who’d been fine-tuning a plan in a conference room at FBI headquarters, designated Sunday nights for primary entry. From the daily FBI surveillance they’d also come to realize that the last Angiulo to leave the office each night always seemed to pull down the front shade, so a drawn shade came to mean the shop was closed. The pieces were falling into place.
Most of them, at least. Nobody at the bureau knew whether anyone stayed over to guard the office. The information was obviously critical, but informants were never at Prince Street that late. Not surprisingly, this gap in the intelligence worried Quinn the most. He was the one leading two teams of agents into the Mafia’s office. All their legwork certainly supported the premise that Angiulo left the office empty overnight. That would have to do, because Quinn knew they were getting close. Nearing Christmas, Quinn reassigned Regii to a four-to-midnight run, to see that no one, at least on a regular basis, came by to check in. No one did.
But in trying to check and recheck their intelligence the squad hit another last-minute snag that once again upset the sense of surefootedness that had taken three months to regain. It was an afterthought almost, because by this time Quinn’s confidence had peaked. Maybe it was instinct, he’d never know. But Quinn corralled two female agents in the office and asked them to do him a favor. “I want you to pose as nurses,” he told them, “and drive a car up to 98 Prince Street tomorrow at dawn and knock on the door. If any one answers, your story is this: You’re looking for Mary Romano, another nurse, and you’re on your way to work at Mass General. I’m 99 percent certain nobody is going to answer.”
But somebody did.
Later, Quinn could not tell who was more shocked, the female agents or himself. “What the hell are you trying to do to us?” they yelled when they got back. The nurses had barely got the first knock off when some guy swung open Jerry Angiulo’s door. The worst part for Quinn was that the agents, not experienced in Mafia matters, could not tell him who the doorman was. He had them look at the photograph book, but they just couldn’t make a positive ID. They’d been too shocked. Maybe it was someone from one of the apartments upstairs in the four-story building the Angiulos owned? Quinn asked. No way, one of the women said. “I knocked once and the door opened immediately. The guy had been right there.”
The man had to have been in the Mafia office. Quinn, perplexed, considered the possibilities. He was unwilling to accept that all along, throughout their months of surveillance, someone stayed inside. Maybe it was someone who came back after Quinn’s agents had counted everyone out. Possibly he had stayed over just for that night. Maybe others were there, and an early meeting was already under way. It had to be an aberration. If only Quinn knew who it was—then he could have the guy tailed to see if being at the office at that hour was routine.
Quinn concluded that somehow the man had slipped through a seam in the FBI’s surveillance. He sent in more agents. He stepped up the nighttime lookout. On New Year’s Day, he called Regii and told him to switch to a midnight-to-eight shift. Everyone was now working seven days a week. Quinn had the office covered twenty-four hours a day. The mysterious appearance became a nagging worry, but the FBI never figured it out.
Then, on January 9, Morris called him to tell him the bugging operation had been approved by U.S. District Judge W Arthur Garrity. There was no more time to plan. No more time to worry. Not about his nurses, not about this unidentified guy, not about what they might find inside. Quinn put his team on alert. The roller coaster was under way, and it was too late to get off.
6
Failure
John Morris motioned the driver, agent Pete Kennedy, to pull over to the snow-crusted curb of Hull Street, running along the dark backside of a sprawling parking garage. It was a familiar spot by now, one they had used two nights ago, and two nights before that.
Since Judge Garrity had secretly authorized the FBI’s bugging plan a week earlier, Morris’s crew had tried twice to break into Jerry Angiulo’s office, and twice they’d failed. The court order gave them thirty days to install their bugs; they’d now used up seven.
“The clock is ticking,” the agents had bantered in a light vein the Sunday night they had first assembled to take the opening stab at getting inside the 98 Prince Street office. But now the ticking clock was nothing to take lightly.
With the car engine still running, Morris received word from the lookouts stationed at key points throughout the North End that Prince Street was empty; that there was no activity on the surrounding streets; and that Ed Quinn, agent Debbie Richard, and their locksmith could now make their way toward the Angiulos’. Morris leaned over the back seat and signaled to Quinn and the others to make their move.
The squad leader, staring at the backs of the trio of agents as they climbed the icy hill, sensed his own mounting anxiety. Kennedy pulled
the car away from the drop-off site and the two agents began the first of their many slow circles around the North End—Kennedy keeping his eye on the road and Morris working the radio to juggle all the different pieces that had to be synchronized if they were ever going to pull this off.
The effort to infiltrate Angiulo’s office had overtaken every one of their lives, leaving little time for the Christmas holidays and New Year’s celebrations. But the agents also knew these kinds of distractions worked in their favor. A Jerry Angiulo planning his annual New Year’s Eve bash at Tony C’s nightclub in Nahant was a Mafia boss less likely to be looking over his shoulder.
One of the most seasoned members of Operation Bostar, Kennedy was an agent who appreciated the slightest advantage. As a member of the organized crime squad, he had tracked Angiulo for nearly nine years—but with little success.
In 1974, he participated in a gambling probe intended to plug the steady stream of bettors’ dollars flowing from throughout the region into Angiulo’s hands. Investigators traced phone calls from one betting office to the satellite offices in the North End, studied telephone company records, and then got warrants to search the addresses the phones were listed to. But, as Kennedy would never forget, when they raided eight of the North End addresses, they only made the grade at two. The other places were empty: no gambling slips, no adding machines, no money, no soldiers, nothing. It wasn’t that the Mafia had been tipped off. Rather, the apartments and rooms they searched were not being used as gambling offices.
The mobsters had taken the telephone line that was billed to each location and “backstrapped,” or run, the line out of that location—going underground, along a rooftop, through walls, whatever route worked—to a second and secret location. It turned the North End into a maze. And it was exactly that sort of moment—standing in an empty room in a North End walk-up with a meaningless warrant—when the impenetrability of the North End really hit home.
So Kennedy was among those who had reacted with some skepticism to Morris’s plan. He and some of the others had shaken their heads and tried to explain to the eager Morris that they didn’t think you could bug Jerry Angiulo in his office. But nothing else had worked, and Kennedy began to respect Morris’s willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom that you could never take down Angiulo in the North End. In Morris he came to see a single-minded motivator who kicked the squad in the butt and got the high-risk venture rolling.
But contrary to appearances, Morris, who had picked Kennedy as his partner because of his experience investigating illegal gambling, was harboring his own doubts. He didn’t have much to say to Kennedy as they rode away from the drop-off site for the third time that week. He didn’t reveal any of his feelings either. That was not the FBI way. Yet, inside, he was consumed by the intricacies of the entry plan he, Quinn, and the other agents had fashioned. Oh, in recent weeks, he had taken superficial notice of what the rest of the world was talking about: Young kids had been getting murdered in Atlanta with frightening regularity for the past eighteen months; John Lennon, gunned down in New York City in early December, was still being mourned; the newly elected president, Ronald Reagan, was almost finished choosing his Cabinet. But Morris was too preoccupied to really take any of this in; his only concern about the Reagan presidency was practical: Would someone in the new Justice Department be ready to authorize the FBI’s secret bugs when the time came?
What increasingly worried Morris was time—from the running court order to each passing minute since Quinn and the other two agents had left his car. Morris heard from Quinn just as the agents reached the intersection of Hull and Snow Hill streets, a crest from which you could scan the North End rooftops or look north across the harbor to the rising slope of Charlestown, where other agents were stationed inside an apartment wired to monitor the bugged conversations. Receiving his approval, the agents began their descent down Snow Hill onto Prince and the final 40 yards to the Angiulo headquarters.
This blueprint they were following to break into the Angiulos’ had been worked and reworked, with agents having had opportunities to practice their parts during months of surveillance work in the North End. Now that they had received court approval to break into the Mafia headquarters, it was finally time to put the pieces together. But their first attempts had collapsed, resulting in an agonizing week of trial-and-error.
THE AGENTS’ first break-in attempt, on Sunday, had been quickly aborted. The trio had not even made it down Snow Hill Street when they were startled by three men walking ahead of them. They were young guys and they all wore leather jackets—the styled, waist-length jacket popular among the strutting young mafiosi.
If it had been early in the afternoon instead of early in the morning, Quinn would have expected to see these men on the corner of Prince and Salem, a hot spot for wiseguys dressed in dark slacks, dark shoes, and open shirts—even in January. Going around with open shirts in winter was all part of their machismo image. The same dress code called for the light leather jackets after sunset—a look that put Quinn on alert. The guys walked ahead of them down Snow Hill, staying fifteen to twenty yards in front.
The agents hoped they would keep on walking—onto Prince, past the Angiulo office, and out of sight into the night. But they had stopped smack at the corner of Prince, where they stood talking, rocking from one foot to another. Quinn couldn’t hear them; he could only see the vapor their breath made in the frigid night air. This had forced Quinn, Richard, and the locksmith to stop. “What are they doing in this cold?” Quinn complained, knowing the guys near Prince Street could ask the same question of them. Quinn radioed Morris about the stumbling block, and the squad leader instructed the trio to hold tight for awhile.
The game had begun, with each group sizing up the other.
To send a signal that they were just midnight ramblers, Debbie Richard snuggled into Quinn, giggled, and joked with the locksmith. She rolled back her head, her curly blond hair dancing from underneath her hat, and led the others off Snow Hill onto a narrow side street, Cleveland Place. The trio huddled against the cold.
Of the three, Debbie Richard was the youngest, thirty-one, but she was also the most experienced at undercover work, having worked the beat for ten years. She’d been one of the first women hired by the police department in Huntington Beach, California. Good female cops were hard to find, and, always the tomboy as a kid, Richard had had the drive and self-assurance to mix it up with the men and win their acceptance. In her role-playing, she’d done the prostitute bit, the girlfriend, the secretary, and the career woman, and had learned very early on that you had to be fast on your feet to survive the unexpected. Her uninhibited personality would become a matter of lore in the bureau. At one seminar on undercover work and ethics, the question posed to a large group of mostly male agents had been what to do when solicited for sex. After a long pause, Richard brought the house down with a crack from the back of the room. Leaving the possibility of an active sex life open, she demurred: “I’d say you never take a hit for the company.”
One time in California, she had posed as a model trying to get hired at a sleazy joint where models doubled as whores. She wore a hidden microphone to the interview. The old guy sizing her up suddenly grabbed her for a hug and inadvertently hit the secret recorder. What gives? he challenged her. What the hell is that? Richard quickly concocted a story that she wore a pacemaker, that she had heart problems even at her age. The guy bought it. Richard had not only kept up her cover, but, more important, got out of there without getting hurt.
So she knew they had to do something when they spotted the three guys at the foot of the hill, something that would keep the agents in character and make it seem they belonged there in the middle of the night. She tugged at Quinn and began playing up her role as girlfriend out on the town. Quinn immediately played off of her lead, and laughed as if reacting to a private joke.
She’d liked Quinn right from the start, ever since he and another agent had picked her up at Logan Airpor
t after she was summoned to Boston two years before. Morris had just begun assembling his team for Operation Bostar. He’d had Quinn and some others studying the files of the female agents around the country to see who had the experience required for the role they had in mind in the Angiulo break-in. The bureau hadn’t had many women to choose from, although by 1979 Richard had already logged five years as an FBI agent, mostly in Las Vegas. Only since J. Edgar Hoover’s death, in 1972, had the bureau begun hiring women as agents.
It seemed like Richard was always being sized up. The Boston crew wanted to know if she’d be interested in the grueling investigation, but mainly they wanted to scrutinize her in person and gauge whether she could handle the assignment. When Quinn and the second agent, Jack Cloherty, described what the office was planning to do, Richard was immediately drawn to the high-stakes venture. But she never forgot how secretive the two agents were. They never even took her to the FBI office. “We gotta keep you under wraps,” explained Cloherty in his hyperactive patter. “No one knows you’re here.”
The concern, as always, was the Angiulo family; it knew most of the FBI agents working in the city. Morris didn’t want them to get to know Debbie Richard. And he didn’t want to have to cope with the following scenario, no matter how small the possibility: One of the Angiulo brothers is seated in a coffee shop and one of his agents, whom the Angiulos know, is also there; Debbie Richard happens to walk in and the agent inadvertently greets her. This would be guilt by association; Richard would be made, and Morris would have to hunt up another woman decoy.
