The Underboss

by Dick Lehr

  “There was only five decks of cards cause we ran out of fucking cards cause some asshole spilled fucking shit on the bar. Then we dropped them on the fucking floor ...”

  “Who?”

  “Some idiot playing at the fucking table.”

  For a moment, Jason had distracted his father. Angiulo wondered if ruining the cards was deliberate. “Think about it. Did you think about it?” But within minutes, Angiulo became bored by the idea that a cheater had preyed upon the game.

  Winding up the tirade, Angiulo first threatened to replace his son as manager of the Vegas nights with another soldier, but then concluded with a warning: “Remember what I told you. You ever let a crap table go more than two hours with the same set of dice, and they ain’t brand-new every fucking time, you better run out of here.”

  But there were calmer moments as well, usually later in the evening, after the meal and a few bottles of wine. Often Larry Zannino was present, the true mafioso who revered the rules of the secret fraternity that newer members increasingly winked at. Zannino relished going over past crimes, expressing nostalgia for the gangland killing era. Over the years, Zannino had done it all and, with all due respect to Jerry Angiulo, he, too, was something of an expert on the more brutal aspects of the underworld.

  On the very first day of the FBI’s secret bugging, agents listened to the city’s leading capo advise Angiulo on the art of killing. “If you’re clipping people, I always say, make sure if you clip people, you clip the people around him first. But get them together, cause everybody’s got a friend, Jerry. He could be the dirtiest motherfucker in the world, but someone, someone likes that guy, that’s the guy that sneaks you, you don’t even know it.”

  They heard the consummate Mafia martinet harshly instruct his soldiers on the ways of Mafia life. “Who the fuck are you to make a decision?” Zannino once accused a soldier in a diatribe on the privileges of rank. “You’ll make no fuckin’ decisions. You know when you make a decision? When they put fucking stripes on you.”

  Other times, Zannino would simply profess his love for mob life, outlining its differences from normal life. “That’s the one thing we got going for us. No one can hide. But we can. In other words, no one can hide from us, but we can hide from everybody. You understand?”

  He gave the FBI an earful. “This Thing comes first,” he once reminded another soldier, John Cincotti. “Johnny, This Thing we got here is beautiful. You understand? This Thing is so beautiful that if someone slapped Debbie in the mouth tonight, your girl, we would kill.... Don’t underrate it.”

  FOR THE FBI, Zannino’s sentimental line about Debbie was good enough to become the “Quote of the Day.” Soon after the bugging started, agents began posting the best quote to come from a mafioso mouth. It was a daily contest that helped overcome the monitoring grind.

  The agents called the tiny Charlestown apartment where the monitoring equipment was set up “the plant.” They worked in shifts, with one agent logging the content of the conversations and another, seated in the jump seat, simply listening in. They were required by law to shut off the tape recorder when the talk was not criminal, forcing agents to dance among the dials because of Angiulo’s sudden shifts from talking about the weather to ordering a slaying.

  Some nights it was dead. The mobsters assembled around the television set and watched movies such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, with Clint Eastwood. Nothing happened. Sheer ennui. Other days agents scrambled to keep up with all the criminal dialogue. Mondays were crazy because that was the day many bookies came in to square their accounts with Frankie Angiulo.

  Quinn served as a kind of director, keeping track of the different plot lines that were developing and advising the new shift on what to listen for. It was the worst pressure in his career, staying on top of the recordings, working every day, reviewing the tapes from the day before. In the beginning, it was so hard to make out the voices the tapes had to be played back at the FBI office a dozen times.

  Quinn put on weight, and he wasn’t the only one. The agents sat with the earphones on and nothing was happening, so they ate. Donuts. Steak and cheese subs. You couldn’t wait for lunch, so lunch came at 10:00 A.M. Then you ate again at 2:00. The agents working in Charlestown were like school kids who couldn’t wait for recess to get the hell out of there.

  But they kept at it—all twenty-five of them, maintaining the video cars, secretly tailing people out of the office to identify voices on the tape. Guys like Joe Kelly, a gruff veteran on the squad, set the tone. He had to have surgery to relieve a painful elbow, so he had the operation after the end of one shift, then showed up the next day with a couple of pillows to prop up the wounded arm. He never missed a shift, never took any medication that might affect his concentration. He had to listen.

  The quality of the tapes kept driving Morris whacky, but as squad leader he never had to do any actual monitoring. The others kept reassuring him that you just had to get used to the voices. Besides, the techies thought they had found ways to enhance the conversations to improve their clarity.

  There were countless housekeeping chores to attend to—most important maintaining the mikes and the video cars, their ears and eyes on Prince Street. The battery-powered microphones lasted thirty days, meaning that in the almost four months of secret surveillance Quinn’s team reentered the office three times.

  For the most part, the reentries went off smoothly. The FBI even had a key to Angiulo’s office; the locksmith made one up after the first break-in. With the bugs in place, they also eliminated what had been the major fear during the first break-in—that any of the Angiulos or some other wiseguys were inside. With agents listening to their bugs, Quinn was assured the place was empty each time he led the others down Snow Hill and across Prince Street to the office.

  In no reentry did Quinn harbor doubts about getting in and out cleanly. The agents were practiced at the plan and, basically, they followed the same format each time. Why fuss with what worked? They got it so they were done and out of there within sixty minutes. For the last reentry, Quinn didn’t even go in himself but sent a single team of technical agents to replace the batteries.

  There were times when agents in lookout vans had their tires slashed, or watched as punks hacked at the tires of some fancy car parked nearby, but nothing ever happened to threaten their mission seriously. The Mafia stayed asleep.

  The only scare came not from the Mob but from the Boston police. During the first reentry, in February, John Connolly was in the back of a van that another agent had driven into the North End and parked behind Prince Street. From his position, Connolly was to watch the back side of the office and the streets that led to Francesca’s restaurant, where the Angiulos often ate.

  The problem was that with the snow piled up on the street, and with so many other cars jammed together, the FBI driver parked the van awkwardly. The driver, who then took off, left the vehicle jutting out into the street so that it actually blocked traffic. Connolly, inside and moving from window to peephole, wasn’t aware of this at the time. But it wasn’t long before he spotted a police cruiser and then heard the crackle of a police radio.

  Someone had called the police to complain about the blocked street. The next thing Connolly knew was that his van was shaking. Keeping low, but using a side mirror, he watched two cops trying to get the door open. Connolly cursed under his breath, and his mind raced. If the Angiulos ever found out that Connolly was inside, dressed in black, at two o’clock in the morning, alarm bells would sound all over the North End.

  If they get the door open, Connolly figured, he would blow past the cops and take off into the night. He’d gone to high school in the North End and knew all the alleyways. He didn’t doubt he could shake them. And the van was registered to a bogus company, so no trace to the FBI was possible. He only hoped that in the confusion the cops wouldn’t open fire.

  Connolly couldn’t even use his radio to notify Morris, for fear the cops outside would overhear him. In his ea
rphone, he could hear Morris trying to reach him as part of the final round of checks before sending Quinn in. But there was no way he could respond.

  Morris began asking other lookouts about him—What’s with Connolly? Then Connolly heard another agent tell Morris, “He’s got a black and white on him, hold on.”

  This had always been one of Morris’s many worries—that other cops would stumble upon them and, not having a clue it was the FBI, start shooting at his people. Morris didn’t want to tell the Boston police, or send agents to intervene with the cops at the van, because there was always the chance that Connolly’s presence there would get back to the Angiulos through their police sources.

  Connolly’s other hope was that the cops would call a tow truck. Then he’d jump out once the van had been towed out of the neighborhood. He’d be able to radio the others and have them ready to pick him up after he fled.

  But as suddenly as the cops came, they simply left. Connolly radioed Morris and briefed him, and the squad leader quickly gave Quinn the go-ahead. Connolly and the others kept watch for the cops or a tow truck, but Quinn was finished, probably in record time, before either showed up. The van’s driver returned, and on their way out Connolly gave him a lecture on parking.

  And that was it, the only tense moment during the three reentries of February, March, and April.

  After the successful bugging of the office, keeping the secret cameras operating so the FBI could match faces with voices on the tape was the trickiest job during all of Operation Bostar. It belonged to Shaky Schopperle, whose day began at midnight when he went to the garage he’d rented in Woburn to store his fleet of four video cars. Schopperle began by charging the ten batteries needed to run the cameras. Eventually he favored two cars, the 1974 Nova and the 1970 Impala, so that he was usually replacing one with the other. Then, about 3:00 A.M., came the nightly car shuffle. Schopperle, or one of his assistants, strolled down Prince Street and climbed into the battered car parked at Thatcher and Prince, just down from Jerry Angiulo’s entranceway He sat and waited for the arrival of the replacement car.

  Schopperle had kept a log on what was going on at 3:00 A.M., so after a while he knew what to expect on the street at that hour. There was always a light on in a third-floor apartment in a building overlooking the corner, but he soon discovered it was somebody getting up to go to work at a nearby laundry. There were two older guys, in their fifties maybe, who often walked down Prince Street, also on their way to work. Two other people waited at another corner to get picked up. He even noticed a little cat outside 30 Prince Street sleeping in a box or eating from a bowl.

  Using the rearview mirror, Schopperle watched the stretch of street behind him, waiting for a car with a broken front parking light. That was the telltale signal. Schopperle then started the engine of his car and pulled out just in time to let the second car, with ten fresh batteries hooked up to the camera hidden behind the front grille, take the precious parking space with a view of 98 Prince Street.

  The driver of the second car ran a check on the camera to make sure it was working properly. The camera was equipped with a light-intensifying system designed for nighttime photographing. With it, streetlights provided enough illumination to get video pictures. The driver then locked the car and left the North End.

  Morning after cold morning, Schopperle directed his team of six, with only a couple of near disasters. A fistfight almost broke out one morning when an FBI driver pulled out too soon, having thought he’d spotted the car with the broken parking light approaching. But it wasn’t an FBI replacement car, just some guy looking to dump his car and call it a night. The parking light wasn’t even broken. The agent hit the brakes and wouldn’t budge. The other driver beeped. Schopperle, who that night had been driving the replacement car, was stuck behind the unknown driver. He beeped. There was some shouting, but finally the man sped off angrily. Schopperle quickly slipped into the spot.

  The FBI almost lost Schopperle when a car battery actually exploded in his hands. But he bandaged his damaged hands and stayed on the job, although he finally heeded John Morris’s nagging about wearing safety glasses.

  There were distractions, like the night the tires were slashed, which delayed the rotation until Schopperle commandeered a tow truck, or the days neighborhood kids sat on the front fenders or trunks of the video cars, causing the camera to bounce up and down. Sometimes during the day the sunlight hit the camera almost directly, creating a blind spot that was frustrating. This problem cleared up, however, as the winter wore on and the sun’s angle changed.

  The Angiulos and their associates, who prided themselves on noticing any change in their neighborhood, apparently found nothing suspicious about the “new” cars on the street—most often the 1974 Nova and 1970 Impala, but sometimes the 1972 Dodge or the 1965 Rambler. Instead, the cameras rolled almost twenty-four hours a day for nearly four months, providing pictures to go with Jerry Angiulo’s free-flowing monologues. The camera showed Jerry coming, Jerry going. It showed Zannino, all the brothers, countless bookies, wiseguys, and hit men. Not once did it show Jerry waving, or giving the camera the choke sign—images from the video-camera failures of 1979 that still haunted Morris and Quinn.

  The only time that Quinn actually worried the video cars might have been made came when an Angiulo lookout peered directly into the grille, producing a close-up picture of an eyeball. Quinn anxiously waited for more trouble, but it never came.

  9

  An Attempted Murder

  Within days of the successful entry into the Boston Mafia’s inner sanctum, the FBI, having survived parachuting behind enemy lines and literally working its way into the woodwork of 98 Prince Street, found itself with the general on a holiday.

  Without warning, Jerry Angiulo had gone to Florida in February of 1981 to bomb around the Ft. Lauderdale coast in his new toy, the yacht named St. Gennaro, putting his brother Frank in charge of running the office. Every day, nine to five, eavesdropping agents were recording the profane, peculiar argot of the numbers racket while they listened to the staccato slashing sound of money being counted and stashed. But was it enough? Was this banal business going to be all there was to such a daring and successful sortie?

  No. It would not do. Gennaro Angiulo was what they were after, the vain and bombastic prime mover who had run the mob with monomaniacal drive for close to three decades. They needed Angiulo back from Florida to get the type of case they wanted, one that could bring down the whole hierarchy. Only Angiulo set major plans in action or approved them, and only Angiulo conjured the conspiracies that are the cornerstone of a racketeering case, the kind that allow confiscation of property and produce prison sentences in the decades.

  What to do?

  One possibility emerged as the FBI’s Ed Quinn and novice prosecutor Wendy Collins reviewed the first few frantic weeks of gathering evidence. Besides the humdrum of numbers betting, one of the first things through the door was the case of two loan-shark customers from Boston’s adult entertainment center, the Combat Zone. Louis Venios was a rotund man who wore wide-brimmed soft hats and ran a strip joint, the Mouse Trap. Walter LaFreniere, a dark-haired man in his thirties, was Venios’s son-in-law and bartender. He was also in debt to Angiulo.

  The FBI and prosecutors decided to dangle the pair as bait to lure Angiulo back from Florida. Authorities promptly called Venios and LaFreniere before a grand jury—the sole spontaneous tactic in four years of meticulous planning, which also created a perilous house of cards that could collapse at any second and leave them with a bloody murder on their hands.

  In all the endless talk of gambling at 98 Prince Street, the grand jury subpoenas became the highest stake game of all. After word of the debtors’s upcoming court appearances filtered back to the Angiulos, Jerry raced back to town. In a stunning display of selfimmolation, he demanded to know everything that had happened with the debtors—which amounted to a group confession of extortion from his brothers, a recitation carried on secret microphone
s to the FBI’s spinning tape five miles away. The compulsive Angiulo had to constantly talk out his countermoves as well, which handed the FBI vivid accounts of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.

  He wound up giving the feds what he had devoted his criminal career to avoiding: His direct participation in a crime. No witnesses were necessary, just his own raspy, cocksure voice.

  THE FIRST CRACK in the once impregnable Angiulo empire began innocuously one night in the winter of 1980 when Venios brought LaFreniere to Jason Angiulo’s North End dice game known as barbooth.

  LaFreniere, a denizen of the Zone as a Mouse Trap bartender, had credentials to be at the game: He took money on the shark from Danny Angiulo and hung out with some minor-league wiseguys. That night, his troubles began when he thought they were over. The dice table had gone cold for him and he had to go to the house for credit to continue playing. The worst thing that ever happened to him was that he got it. In a transaction that would later drive Jerry Angiulo to distraction, Venios, who went back decades with the Angiulos, spoke directly to Jason Angiulo and got LaFreniere a fast $2,000 right there at the table. The mob leader’s son handled the deal himself. None of the expendable buffers were used as intermediaries.

  It became a sore Angiulo loved to rub, this unpardonable breach of security. In just one of the rebukes of his son, Angiulo told him: “Frank and I made you the boss, but you were the only boss with insulation. Skinny, Johnny O, and Candy. How did you allow yourself to sit at the table with Louis Venios’s son-in-law that he could ask you right at the table for the fucking two thousand?” The three underlings were sentries walking the camp’s periphery for the generals and they weren’t used. Shame.

  But what was merely a long-running tirade directed at Jason became a lethal matter for the blase LaFreniere, who, without even knowing it, had been sucked into the violent vortex on Prince Street. Within weeks of the game, LaFreniere was a hapless pawn in the deadly game of chance between the FBI and the head of the Boston underworld.