by Dick Lehr
In March 1981 his future was as precarious as a death-row prisoner’s in Florida. Walter had emerged as bait on the very first night the secret microphones were in place in January when Angiulo welcomed FBI interlopers with a classic harangue. Venios was late with the two grand a week he owed in loan-shark interest payments, known as “vig,” for operating his strip joint and porno store on Mafia turf. No matter that Venios had just been released from Beth Israel hospital, a seriously ill man who would be dead in a year. He was two weeks late and no one keeps Jerry Angiulo away from his money that long. “Get me my fucking money” were about the first words investigators heard out of Angiulo’s mouth.
As the first of 540 FBI tapes rolled five miles away on the top floor of a row house in Charlestown, Angiulo reiterated his views on laggards to henchmen in a mafioso’s Magna Carta. “Louie didn’t bring the fuckin’ money. You understand? When Louie comes out, if he ain’t got two thousand, you go get the fucking’ money. ‘I gave it to you.’ Just like that. Got that, friend.... I don’t know nothing about Louie. Okay pal. Bring me my money. That’s it. All of it.”
It was vintage Angiulo: merciless about money while putting someone else up to the nasty job of getting it from a moribund debtor. Cold heart, clean hands. Only later, when the operation was clearly in trouble, did he modulate his “past due” speech, realizing anew that extortion came down to “the same old story. It’s how you ask for your money.” You should be tough, but don’t threaten. But on January 19, 1981, after decades of beating the feds at their own game and an invincible neighborhood “watch” in place, who was worried about Louie Venios?
As the slashing soliloquy continued, Angiulo unwittingly set the LaFreniere trap in motion. He had been over some figures and didn’t like what he saw coming out of his son’s twice-weekly dice game: There were some new players and they’d better not be more deadbeats who had a way of showing up every eight or nine months. Who needs deadbeats? “You’re all fuckin’ idiots in my opinion,” he told those running the game. “Remember what I tell ya,” he said to sentry Johnny Orlandella. “A man takes money on a Tuesday, he don’t bring it on a Friday. Stop right then and there. Cashin’ him. ‘C’mere, don’t tell me a fuckin’ story. Go get my fuckin’ money.... I’m not interested.’ Got that straight?”
Getting that debt straight with Walter LaFreniere would put them all in jail, but only after a dizzying series of moves in a Machiavellian game within a game.
On one track, the FBI would put Venios, LaFreniere, and even Jason Angiulo before the grand jury. On the other, Jerry would debrief the witnesses, brainstorm with his lawyer, and badger and belittle his brothers in his office, plotting obstruction of justice, suborning perjury, and detailing extortion as the FBI listened in. When the day’s hearing ended, Angiulo’s lawyer, William Cintolo of Revere, would rush down to the North End to recapitulate the questions the prosecutors had asked so that Angiulo could get a fix on where the feds were heading. At the same time, Wendy Collins, the prosecutor running the grand jury, would go about the same distance from the courthouse to FBI headquarters, somewhat dazzled by the strange, titillating knowledge she had about the other side’s intentions. She listened to key portions of tapes, just as obsessed in her own way by the case as Angiulo. A member of the Organized Crime Strike Force less than a year, she was now working a hundred hours a week and loving it and hating it, entranced and repelled by the vain, vile little man who called her a dirty mother and a cunt and rued “che la puttana l’ha nato [that the whore was born].”
After Angiulo’s marching orders to get the Venios payment and screen barbooth players, his brothers went into action, chasing down both Venios and LaFreniere. After a fatuous series of telephone calls, they finally pinned down LaFreniere, who agreed to bring the money to Prince Street—and then failed to show up.
Venios had already been visited and chastised in the hospital by Mike Angiulo, the youngest brother, and still nothing happened. Not that Mike didn’t do his best. He found Venios in intensive care. “He looked up at me,” Mike told his brothers. “‘You fuckin’ guys come right in the hospital, huh?”’ “Louie,” Mike said, “my brother wants to know, are you alive?”
Finally, LaFreniere agreed to come the next day to square the Venios debt with Frank, the operation’s accountant and the closest thing Jerry had to a confidant.
Frank counted out loud the $2,607 that was handed over to him by LaFreniere and then issued a harsh demand note for two more weeks. “You tell me you’re going to be here, be here. Don’t let me come up the joint looking for you. Okay. What’s the matter with you ... you just don’t give a fuck. By the way, you owe a thousand at the game, don’t you? ... and tell the other guy I’m lookin’ for him. What’s his name, Walter?”
“I’m Walter,” LaFreniere said.
Frank finally got it straight and adjusted his books. “Yours ain’t a G-note,” he told LaFreniere. “Yours is more than that.” The loan was put at $2,000.
The who’s-on-first colloquy was a key tape for the FBI as it sorted through the evidence to get Jerry Angiulo back from Florida. Louie Venios and Walter LaFreniere and extortion? Why not stir the pot with those ingredients and see what happened?
Venios went before the grand jury in February, about a month and a half after he got out of the hospital, taking the Fifth to all questions. LaFreniere did the same about two weeks later, in mid-March.
Jerry Angiulo scrambled home to Boston the day Walter LaFreniere got his summons on March 9 and never regained his footing on turf that had been his for a generation. He knew Venios was an old pro who would walk the plank, but this kid Walter LaFreniere, could he trust him to stand up?
Angiulo went into geostationary orbit over the family’s foolhardy direct contact with a dicey stranger—and stayed there for a full week, pacing and fuming about how to foil the feds. He gyrated daily between smug fatalism and panicky pessimism. One minute it was the cocksure Jerry who had seen it all before and beat the feds at every turn, including acquittals on murder and money-laundering charges. The kid’s okay, he said of LaFreniere, “he knows the score and he’ll keep his mouth shut.” Almost in the same breath, he turned murderously morose. No, the kid’s a rat who’s gonna sink us all—he has to go.
By March 12, about two months after the secret FBI entry and the day LaFreniere took the Fifth before the grand jury, the Angiulo brothers were struggling to figure out what the story was with this nobody bartender. How much did he know and what was he saying to a federal grand jury?
Later that night, Jerry learned that the grand jury was asking LaFreniere about all the Angiulos and loan-sharking. “Oh, my fuckin’ life,” he moaned. “Now you got me a problem.... Fuck what Louie thinks. I knew all of sudden, this was something very fuckin’ new”
Angiulo was apoplectic that a fringe crap player had direct dealings with two of his brothers and his son. His worst-case scenario: LaFreniere testifies that Jason gave him a usurious loan of $2,000 in a barbooth game controlled by Gennaro Angiulo himself, all of which violated federal extortion and gambling laws. Together, it could add up to a racketeering conspiracy charge, a family affair covered by the dreaded RICO law. In a stunning set piece, Angiulo outlined the case against himself with all the crisp flair of a prosecuting attorney, pulling all the elements of the crimes together, handing investigators a road map to his own demise.
He summed up the case for his brother Danny: “Remember, they’re not saying this or that. They’re saying Angiulo. Angiulo—It could be me, you, him, him, and him too. Nobody knows. Under RICO, no matter who the fuck we are, if we’re together, they’ll get every fuckin’ one of us.... We’ve been sleepin’. I’ve been jerkin’ off in Florida for three weeks.... Why, I don’t even know where the fuck we’re at now.”
Jerry was especially fearful of the confiscatory leverage of a RICO conviction because not only do the feds put you in jail, they take what you’ve made in ill-gotten gains—or the bulk of Angiulo’s estate. “They take e
very fuckin’ motherfuckin’ cocksucker thing every fuckin’ one of us owns, including your fuckin’ eyeballs.”
His fears, however, were not fully shared by the most steady hand in the house, that of the oldest brother, Nicolo, the consigliere for the Boston Mafia family. An experienced if crude arbiter, he had settled some disputes without violence and had occasionally worked out jurisdictional disputes with Providence. On the LaFreniere grand jury matter, Nick thought Jerry was overreacting. How could Jerry be in jeopardy given his fanatical insularity. “Jerry Angiulo for what?” he asked rhetorically. “Their ass. The guy don’t meet nobody.”
Nick just didn’t see the situation as that big a deal. He figured Venios and LaFreniere would be asked if they had dealings with the Angiulos and they’d say no—whether they did or not. Case dismissed. If things had been as they appeared, Nick would have been right. But the omniscient bugs overhead and the spinning tape changed everything. Without the recordings, nothing would have come of the LaFreniere caper. But, as the grand jury pressure grew, Angiulo looked for a new scapegoat every day. On an afternoon in mid-March, he turned on his brother Danny, who was also known by the misnomer Smiley. Danny was an infrequent visitor to 98 Prince Street, preferring to do business from the back of Café Pompeii. He was a capo de regime, a lieutenant, who chafed under the control of his egocentric older brother. He was also the most independent and vicious of the brothers, the one said to have “earned his bones,” killed men to become a made member of the Mafia.
There was a history of bad blood between Danny and Jerry Angiulo, with shrill shouting matches over money and property and even over who was loved more by their domineering mother. Jerry thought Danny was stupid and Danny thought Jerry lacked guts.
On this day in March, Jerry Angiulo’s badgering had a point to it beyond bad blood. He wanted a culprit in the screw-up, forgetting the brothers were just doing what he had told them to do. “Who called LaFreniere first?” Jerry asked Dannγ. “Did you ever have a conversation? ... You’re all mixed up again ... a dummy anyway. Why’d you call for him in the first place? ... Hey, Smiley, this kid’s a rat. Let’s get it straight.” Recriminations over, at least for the moment, the brothers speculated that Venios had waddled into their lives because the feds had someone undercover at the Mouse Trap and had been following its managers around, including their visits to the North End on payment deliveries.
As usual, Jerry saw the problem most clearly of the brothers. The vig payments only mattered if someone said they happened. Louie wouldn’t squeal, no matter what. Walter probably wouldn’t but there was a chance with him. Plus, Walter wasn’t so smart and didn’t know the ropes of grand juries and testimony. Angiulo fretted that the feds would get LaFreniere for perjury if he denied all, producing some witness that LaFreniere talked to about paying the Angiulos. That would mean LaFreniere would face three years in jail for borrowing $2,000 from a family that had done nothing but abuse him.
Angiulo didn’t like it, not a bit. He began to lean toward the simple and sinister, talking for the first time, at least out loud, about eliminating what he had been told was a pill-popping, dope-smoking wild card. He said he would tell Venios, “Get rid of that fuckin’ kid. It’s your son-in-law Get rid of that fuckin’ motherfucker. That cocksucker will put us all in jail one of these days. All junkies do.” Angiulo had always avoided the drug end of the business, not because of any moral reservations, but because he saw it as the rat’s nest of the underworld, suffused with informants who all held something back to trade up when they were in a jam. No stand-up guys there.
Normally a clearheaded thinker, Angiulo had become convinced LaFreniere came to 98 Prince Street as part of a setup, forgetting that LaFreniere was only summoned there after Angiulo himself lambasted his brothers for laxity. They had simply followed his instructions to chase Venios wherever it led to get the money. It had led to LaFreniere and now it was all their fault.
Angiulo’s growing paranoia was fueled by a tip the family received from Station One of the Boston police department, which Angiulo had cultivated going back to at least the early 1960s. He was told the feds were following his son Jason around. The proposition, he said, was getting down to basic arithmetic, which Angiulo reduced to yet another Mafia malapropism. Figuring out Walter LaFreniere was now as simple as adding three plus three. LaFreniere, he concluded, had been followed by the feds.
“Put three and three in your fuckin’ mind,” he told his attorney, William Cintolo, during a review of the case. “He’s at the fuckin’ games.... Ce la cornata pui’ cornutu di christo [It’s Christ’s worst kind of fucking]. Do you understand it now? ... I hit it right on the head. Mannaggia la cornata [damn the fucking].”
Cintolo then unwittingly delivered what amounted to Walter LaFreniere’s death sentence when he told Angiulo that prosecutors were going to seek immunity for LaFreniere, meaning he couldn’t take the Fifth any more and would likely face a year and a half in jail for contempt if he refused to answer the government’s questions. To Angiulo, that simply meant eighteen months for LaFreniere to change his mind and cut a deal to get out of jail.
Cintolo told Angiulo: “They ask him ... ‘you know Danny?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘You ever take any money from Danny or ever been down to 95 Prince Street?’ ‘Ever give Mike Angiulo something?’ He takes the Fifth to every one of them. She [Wendy Collins] asked him to leave the room.... Five minutes later, she comes back out and she says ‘The grand jury doesn’t accept your answer. We will be in touch with you, ah, in order to make you answer the questions the grand jury wants to know ... Get yourself a ... ”’
Angiulo interrupted. “Get yourself a lawyer. Just like that. Okay. Well, he can’t have a better lawyer than you. Do you want to represent him?”
“Hey, we don’t mind,” was the fast, fateful decision of the lawyer who would face charges of obstruction of justice himself. By the end of the legal postmortem, Angiulo was harboring thoughts that presaged murder. “I got a decision to make,” he said ominously.
Three more days of brooding ended abruptly at 8:04 on the night of March 19, 1981. Jerry succumbed to his darkest impulse, the one that puts two bullets behind the ear of a man in a stolen car. He had talked it out for days and it was time to stop the dancing in the dark with Walter LaFreniere. “Get me Richie,” he snapped at Mike Angiulo, “I want to see him.” Richie Gambale and another enforcer, James “Fat Peter” Limone, arrived at Prince Street at 9:29 P.M.
At that very minute, in Charlestown, FBI agents had just put on a fresh tape, not knowing it would be the most important one of the case. The FBI listened as Angiulo greeted the two wiseguys at the door and pulled them aside immediately, huddling with them at the front of the L-shaped room by the blaring television. Jerry then did something that immediately caught the attention of the monitoring FBI agent: He lowered his voice.
Quinn had repeatedly warned the agents to be vigilant about danger to the vulnerable LaFreniere. Sinister whispering with a thug named Richie was enough to produce a fire station scramble at the FBI monitoring site. Fighting the media din of Angiulo’s omce—a television blared most of the night along with the radio—the supervising agent of the four-to-midnight shift handed a headset to one of the bureau’s veteran Mafia hands. Nick Gianturco took the “jump seat.” He picked up the conversation when it was half over, listening intently to the hushed voices speaking just below a microphone planted in a ceiling seam. The voices sounded like ship-to-shore conversations heard over a fuzzy shortwave radio. It was not exactly easy listening, but it would prove lethal in court nonetheless.
Getting down to basics, Angiulo assaulted Gambale with bad news. “Did I tell you that a certain guy might get called back to the grand jury?”
“Yeah.”
“Did I tell you what could happen if he got called back?”
“Yeah.”
“What is your opinion,” Angiulo said, keeping up the pressure. “I want to hear it ... will he or won’t he stand up?”
; “I got to see him tonight.”
“You gotta see him tonight?”
“Yeah, I told ya that.”
Even as the conversation neared its climax, Angiulo was instantly diverted by the testy tone of Gambale’s “told ya” response. “Sh, sh, sh, sh. Never say a word. You don’t have to make the decisions. That’s why I’m the boss ...”
Then Angiulo got back on track: “Let me put it to you this way. If you had this kid in the Mouse Trap and you are takin’ three or four thousand a week... then if he goes to the grand jury, you’re gonna get indicted ... if you don’t worry about it, why should I worry the fuck about it? What the fuck, I don’t even know him, except through you. Motherfucker. Motherfucker.”
Gambale risked an opinion. “I think he’ll stand up.”
This was not the answer Angiulo was looking for. He found himself in a debate with the thirty-nine-year-old Gambale, a reluctant killer who was missing the point. “Your answer is no ... strangle him. And get rid of him. Hit him in the fucking head.... Let me tell you why, okay? Make you feel better.”
By now, agent Gianturco was on line and Quinn had been called at his South Shore home.
Angiulo’s rationale continued. “In the last six weeks the feds have had Jason Brian Angiulo and Skinny Kazonis. Mean anything to you? Has to be a spy in the game. Who do you think’s been in the game, owes two thousand. Huh? ... You see what we’re doing here? Huh?”
Gambale continued to resist the execution order, citing the lack of a stolen car as one reason why LaFreniere could not be killed that quickly.
“You ain’t got a hot car,” lamented Angiulo. “You ain’t got nothin’. You think I need tough guys. I need intelligent tough guys. Huh? You’re not gonna get him? You’re gonna hafta.... I feel that my son might be in jeopardy I feel that Skinny might be in jeopardy.... Well, what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say to you do it right or don’t do it? ... Richie, you want to be careful because you can be killed. Because the only guy he’s gonna bury is you and ... ”
