by Dick Lehr
In the first days of the bugging, however, the Angiulos’ network did not pick up any federal cars around Prince Street. Agents like John Connolly, who for years had openly hung out in the North End, were now tied up at the monitoring site. This, Quinn quickly realized, was a terrible mistake. It was the kind of alteration in the daily rituals of the North End that Angiulo would soon detect. He’d get suspicious and start asking, Where’s Connolly? He’d start wondering whether the FBI was up to something. That was the last thing Quinn wanted. Nothing should appear different. He yanked the earphones off Connolly and had him resume his North End routine. It was a move Connolly didn’t mind—he much preferred the streets to a tape recorder.
But most of the agents had never had any direct dealings with Angiulo. For months, they’d secretly stalked the North End, trying to piece together the lives of the Mafia’s men from the outside. They’d done workups on all the brothers, again, from the outside working in.
Now, from Charlestown, they were picking up life inside. Over the years, the sixty-two-year-old Jerry had been the family spokesman in public. During a gambling raid, or at a courthouse, Jerry was the chatterbox. Now, from Charlestown, the FBI heard them all—Nicolo, Frankie, Mike, and Danny Angiulo, as well as the eminently quotable Larry Zannino.
Within a few weeks, the agents came to know the Boston Mafia’s daily routines. A typical day began almost exactly at 9 A.M., when, like clockwork, Frankie emerged from his apartment across the street and opened up. Agents heard the sixty-year-old Angiulo brother, a heavy smoker, cough, spit in the sink, and put on the coffee.
Later, James “Jimmy Jones” Angiulo, a nephew who ran a bookmaking office a few doors down at 126 Prince Street, showed up, followed by Mike. The youngest brother at fifty-three, Mike was not a made member of the Mafia; he was the cook and errand runner, the one sent to bring the car around or fetch another bottle from the wine cellar. But he was also the handyman who could rewire, or backstrap, telephone lines in and out of different apartments and across rooftops to confuse investigators.
When he was feeling well enough, the eldest brother, Nicolo, who was sixty-four, would join them to read the newspaper. As consigliere, his job was to arbitrate disputes among mafiosi. Zannino, needing counsel, once said to him, “You’re my attorney Nicky, let me ask you a question here.”
The fourth brother, Danny, did not frequent 98 Prince Street. Danny, fifty-seven, conducted his loansharking and other businesses from the back of the Café Pompeii. He was a capo regime, a lieutenant, who chafed under the control of his older brother. Putting Jerry and Danny together was like striking two stones to get sparks, especially when the talk turned to money.
During daylight, Frankie Angiulo was the boss. His time was spent settling up with the bookmakers and loan-shark customers. The problem for the FBI was that during the often routine gambling transactions few inminating words were spoken. Collecting as much as $45,000 gross a day from the family’s illegal ventures, Frank might grunt a greeting or exchange a few words in the code of the trade, but often that was it.
What the hidden microphones did pick up was the steady shuffle of cash being counted. Eventually, the FBI conducted a lightning-quick gambling raid on Prince Street to kick the hornet’s nest, but in the first few weeks of bugging, the only time Frankie’s vocal cords got a workout was when the gambling figures were off or loan payments were late.
“When are you gonna start giving me the $1,545 you owe Peter, never mind the thousand you owe me?” he demanded one day of a delinquent customer. “What are you doing here?”
“I, I, I ... ”
“You owe me a thousand right here. I lent you.”
“Right.”
“And you owe Peter $1,545. When are you gonna start paying this?”
“I’m starting right now, I’m getting ...”
“You ain’t starting nothing. You been telling me this for a month. What are you doing?”
“I’m just starting to get on my feet.”
“You been telling me this for a month.”
“I, I’m, I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t make nothing on horses. I’m just starting to make something on, ahh, on dogs, and I’m, ahh, working hard.”
“Get some money”
“And I’m not drinking. I’m not drinking.”
“You better not.”
“I don’t smoke. I don’t go out. I do nothing but trying to get even and make some money for myself.”
“That’s what got you in debt to start with.”
“The drinking did. I, I, I did it. I’m not blaming anybody else. Give me a little opportunity, pal, and you’ll be paid completely and we’ll be friends for life.”
Frankie cuffed the customer, intimidating him further, and then let him scram with another extension.
What the FBI couldn’t figure out about the family accountant was why he chose to live across the street at 95 Prince Street. The third-floor apartment was shabby and barely furnished. At the end of the day, Jerry Angiulo drove twenty miles north to his oceanside mansion in Nahant, Nick returned to Revere, and Mike and Danny headed to Medford, but Frankie, not needing a coat even in the dead of winter, hustled across the street to his hole in the wall. He never seemed to go anywhere except back and forth between 95 and 98. He never even ventured the few blocks to the bustling Faneuil Hall market. His world began and ended in the old neighborhood. He was an easy tail for the FBI.
Each day the beat changed around 4:00 P.M., the time Jerry Angiulo pulled up in his red and silver AMC Pacer (he usually left his baby blue Cadillac at home). With his entrance, the tenor of the office went from casual to deferential. He asked the questions and set the agenda as he sat in the big chair at the front of the office.
He talked about food and business and money and murder until 7:30 P.M., when the “Wild, Wild World of Animals” came on on Channel 2. Then he demanded quiet as he watched intensely, commenting on the strength or cunning of the animals featured on the show.
Sometimes the group watched the Celtics. Because most of Boston’s fans bet on the hometown club, a Celtics win meant more bets to pay, and a smaller profit margin for the bookies. Self-interest dictated that the Angiulos root against Larry Bird and his team-mates, so they did.
Often, Mikey Angiulo cooked dinner—lamb or veal, maybe linguine with clam sauce, or they would adjourn to Francesca’s restaurant, where several nights a week they ate at a table in back. Larry Zannino was often around, as was Jerry’s longtime favorite, Skinny Kazonis.
There was much business to discuss, such as fixing gambling cases pending in Roxbury District Court against one soldier who managed a family’s numbers office. “I straightened out that pinch,” Frankie bragged to Jerry one night in March. “That pinch is all over with. Sixty-one hundred dollars, the whole fucking shooting match.”
“What happened the last time when you went for close to $100,000?” Jerry shot back, never forgetting figures and rarely, if ever, complimenting someone on his work.
Or they would trade stories about collecting debts. “How much trouble did I have with this mother?” a boastful Zannino asked Jerry rhetorically another night while explaining how he’d received most of a $59,000 gambling debt. “I threatened his fucking father, his fucking brothers. You fucking cocksucker, you’ll pay this fucking ...”
The outcome of Zannino’s scare tactics? “They’re down to $15,000,” Zannino disclosed proudly.
“And our fuckin‘—wait, wait a minute,” Angiulo pontificated on yet another occasion, interrupting others, as he usually did, in order to stroke his own ego. “And our fuckin’ claim to fame is accounting.”
On this score he was spewing truths that had long been self-evident, for Angiulo rose to the top on his knack with numbers and operating illegal lotteries that for more than a decade were considered the biggest and most profitable Mafia games in the country. “You take Jerry Angiulo,” mobster Vinnie Teresa told congressional investigators in 1971. “You couldn’t co
unt his money if it took you three days, with a whole firm full of accountants.” More than a decade later, authorities estimated Angiulo’s ill-gotten wealth at up to $10 million.
Angiulo was so powerful financially that he was every bookmaker’s backup—the guy who would take their layoff when too much of the betting money was wagered on one number. For handsome fees, Angiulo would assume some of the bookies’ risk. It was a form of insurance, and it made Angiulo’s outfit the Lloyd’s of London in the gambling circuit. These fees, of course, were in addition to the share of the profits that bookies regularly paid Angiulo just to do business.
The mob boss kept dozens of accounts in a handful of Boston banks, and for years he had had a special arrangement with the Bank of Boston that helped him launder his money and circumvent federal banking laws. Beginning in 1970, under the Bank Secrecy Act, banks were required to notify the Internal Revenue Service about any cash transactions with customers involving more than $10,000. The law was seen as one way to get a handle on all the illicit cash that mobsters and drug dealers dumped into the banking system to launder. The feds might at least hope to get a tax fraud case out of it.
But within a few years, Jerry Angiulo, always the manipulator, managed to place his two real-estate companies on an exemption list kept by the Bank of Boston’s branch office a few blocks from his 98 Prince Street headquarters. It was a move guaranteeing that all the hard cash he and his associates brought in shopping bags to the tellers was never reported to the government. The setup worked smoothly until 1983, when a government probe of the bank’s general reporting failings stumbled upon Angiulo’s involvement.
For the FBI, it was yet another example of Angiulo’s business acumen. The self-educated financier made his money where he could, with vast sums pouring in from his own bookmaking operation that employed two hundred in offices scattered throughout greater Boston. He also siphoned proceeds from lucrative Las Vegas nights (jazzed-up versions of Bingo nights, featuring roulette wheels that were staged allegedly in the name of charity). There were at least five gambling businesses, including poker, craps, and the Greek dice game called barbooth. Some of the games floated, meaning players met in an alley near Cross and Salem streets in the North End to be escorted either by foot or in a car to the secret location of that night’s gathering. The barbooth games were in the North End or Lowell, a city north of Boston. The loansharking was managed out of 98 Prince Street.
From the day the bug went in, January 19, 1981, Angiulo had been preoccupied with the federal RICO statute and a test case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. He read newspaper articles about the case out loud to Frankie and Jason. “Now the most important part is the last part of the whole fuckin’ law,” he told them in late January. Scanning the newspaper, he read: “The pattern of racketeering activity is defined elsewhere in the act as the commission of any two of thirty-two specific state and federal crimes within a ten-year period.” Angiulo stopped reading and turned to the others. “Now we’re fuckin’ idiots we never looked up the thirty-two specific crimes.” Seconds later, he added, “In other words, if you break one of those crimes this year and within the next ten years you break the other one too, they will take your fuckin’ head off.”
On several other occasions, he and Zannino debated whether a Mafia soldier by the name of J. R. Russo would be able to return safely to Boston after five years of hiding. Russo was a leading suspect in the murder of Joe “The Animal” Barboza in San Francisco in 1976, but had never been indicted as far as they could tell. The five-year statute of limitations on a possible federal civil rights charge had expired, meaning a favored soldier of Zannino’s might now be home free.
“There’s always that 10 percent chance they might have that indictment,” a worried Angiulo cautioned Zannino.
“Secret indictment,” added Zannino.
Angiulo then framed the issue. “Do we tell this man to come back? Do we leave him where he is because we have no facilities, right now, for finding out whether the indictment exists or not, and we do not feel that from the questions we have asked various people that the facilities will be made available in time? Do we call him and tell him, ‘If you feel like it, come back, because all we can find out is the statute’s run out?’” In the end, they agreed to consult Patriarca.
Throughout the bugging, Angiulo was concerned with the turf lines of the illegal marketplace and was particularly concerned about his image—among other mafiosi and even law enforcement officials.
He was quick to defend Joseph Palladino of Saugus, who was a partner in several Worcester porn shops, when two wiseguys opened up a competing shop in that city with the blessing of New York’s Gambino crime family. Angiulo, livid at the intrusion into his turf, told Palladino that he would immediately intervene on his behalf.
Angiulo’s main point to Palladino, however, involved an issue that was probably way over the porn shop-owner’s head. Angiulo launched into a discourse on image, namely the tough image he sought to preserve with the various law enforcement agencies that tracked his activities. Image, to him, was another line of defense—the more menacing it was, the more likely the authorities would move with caution. Any sign of weakness and the authorities might pounce.
“You know the most important part of this conversation?” he asked Palladino. “The law over there knows exactly what we are. If we would allow a different group to come in and they run roughshod over everybody, the law would lose respect for us. You don’t mind losing the respect of that section, but then you lose it in every other section. What am I supposed to do? The law in that section tells the other law, say, ‘Hey, these fuckin’ motherfuckers got no balls here. They backed away from ...’”
But the very same Palladino suddenly became just another expendable associate in a matter closer to Angiulo’s heart—money. Palladino had borrowed $200,000, with interest running at $2,000 a week. In his imperious manner, Angiulo warned that although he didn’t need the two grand a week for any special reason, the porn shop owner had better pay up, on time.
“You ain’t never gonna cry baby, and you’re never gonna miss a week. I’m gonna tell you the kinda fucking people we are.”
The flip side to this cavalier attitude about money he showed to the likes of Palladino was the downright cheapness he revealed in the presence of family only. Trying to work out a strategy to hide his property, he dismissed his son’s proposal to transfer ownership of their yachts to a straw. How would that work? he demanded of Jason. The straw would get a loan, Jason explained, and it would appear as if the straw was the owner of record while Jerry Angiulo would remain the owner in reality. Forget it, Angiulo responded. To win the straw’s participation in the scam, Angiulo would at least have to pay the interest on the straw’s loan. “Cost me 18 percent a year,” he said, citing prevailing interest rates for loans obtainable through legal channels. “To you, 18 percent is shit. To me, it’s a lot of fuckin’ money”
But then, Angiulo was rarely impressed with anything his son suggested. By 1981, Jason was managing several of the illegal businesses, including the heartless Las Vegas night scams the family pulled on different charity groups. The elder Angiulo made a habit of using his son as a whipping boy.
In March, the two were reviewing a Las Vegas night Jason had managed at the Studio Four in Lynn, Massachusetts, allegedly to raise funds for the North Shore Association for Retarded Citizens, but in fact to fatten their pockets. When told old dice were used in the crap game, Angiulo exploded.
“How much do you really think you know about dice that are used in a crap game?” he demanded. “Now watch how you answer me.”
But Jason didn’t want to answer. Trying to bob away from his father, he mentioned a crisis at the blackjack table that he did handle—how he came down hard on a dealer named Vardie who was permitting bets above the house limit.
The old man persisted. “Tell me why that table in that fucking Studio Four had old dice.”
Jason tried to weave. “I was g
onna fucking choke him,” he said about the dealer. “He’s letting people bet $300 on my fucking table with a $25 limit.”
“Hey keep quiet. We’re talking craps now.”
“We’re talking about Mister Vardie—”
“We’re talking about craps.”
“Mister Vardie is my—”
“Fucking, motherfucking, big mouth cocksucker. Shut up.”
One last time, Jason tried. “You gonna listen to me?”
“No, you motherfucker. Now shut up. Let me tell you something. I’ve been in the crap business when you were—weren’t—born, you cocksucker that you are. Don’t you ever, ever have a pair of dice go more than one and a half or two hours without replacing it with a brand-new set, and that set goes in your fucking pocket and they’re thrown down the fucking sewer. Do you understand that? That’s a fucking order because you’re a fucking idiot. Now just shut up.”
“Yeah, let me tell you.”
“You talk and I’ll hit you with a fucking bottle. You go to a Vegas night, you figure to last six hours, you have three sets of dice, and no set of dice will ever stay on that table more than two hours. Why, you cocksucker, I got a thousand sets of dice for a Sunday game. Thousand dice by the set. Not one you got ‘em, you cocksucker, fucking what the motherfuckin’ cunt.... How about playing cards? How many new decks you got every time you use them? You use used cards, you dirty mother. You hear this motherfucker?”
Jason tried to say something.
“Shut up,” Angiulo interrupted. “Just shut up. You ever put a deck of used cards in the blackjack game in any fucking Vegas night or anywhere else again, I’ll kick you the fuck out of here. That’s an order, too. Why you fucking idiot you. If I was at your Vegas night the week before, I’d know every fucking card in that fucking deck, you motherfucker.”
