by Dick Lehr
The stacked-deck fate of the thirty-eight-year-old Patrizzi is what the Mafia is all about. It’s not aging old-world dons who won’t sell drugs and only resort to violence to protect their turf. It’s nine men dragging one man away from a private club near Suffolk Downs Raceway in Revere, hog-tying his legs to his neck, putting him in a sleeping bag in the trunk of a stolen car, and letting him slowly strangle himself to death at the back of a Lynn motel parking lot. Patrizzi’s body was finally found in June because of the smell.
Most of the time, that would have been all there was to it; another gangland slaying. But this one was different. Instead of solving a nettlesome problem for Gennaro Angiulo and part of his mob operation, the 1981 murder became a crucial part of the biggest crisis in Boston Mafia history, a legal quagmire that put all its leaders in a courtroom for two years. For, this time, the FBI was eavesdropping, listening to the secret bugs in two North End sites while the murder was being planned and after the deed was done. And while the FBI may not have tried hard enough to stop the murder, the taped conversations about Patrizzi’s fate were coupde-grace evidence in the eventual federal and state trials.
It took nearly seven years, but Angelo Patrizzi finally did get his revenge. Jerry Angiulo was given a life sentence in 1987 after being convicted of accessory before the fact of Patrizzi’s death.
THE CASE began with the bogus white flag that greeted Patrizzi when he was released from Bridgewater State Prison on January 26, 1981. Freddie Simone, a longtime Mafia soldier in the Revere regime of Capo Sammy Granito, befriended him. Both men knew the other would kill him in a second, but also that this was the best way to keep an eye on each other. Simone got Patrizzi a job at Surf Auto Body in Revere and attempted to gain his confidence to better arrange his demise. Patrizzi played along, needing to be within striking distance of both Simone and Connie Frizzi, an East Boston soldier Patrizzi also suspected of murdering his brother.
In the winter of 1981, plans by Granito’s soldiers to kill Patrizzi went awry twice when Patrizzi was wary enough not to go off alone with Simone. On the last attempt, Simone scared him off by foolishly showing up at the Revere garage at 9:00 A.M.—much too early for the thirty-one-year-old soldier, who, like most peers, worked late and slept late. It was a perquisite of rank. “Why so early?” a suspicious Patrizzi had asked.
Angelo knew something was up, so rather than go for coffee with Simone, he said he was waiting for a call about a truck hijacking; he was going to ride shotgun in the holdup. Simone’s plan had been to take him to a nearby men’s club, where an assassination team waited to overwhelm Patrizzi and stab him to death.
After the klutsy minuet with Simone at the garage, Patrizzi disappeared for good. That put Simone on his third strike and he knew it. Instead of being dead, Angelo Patrizzi was missing and still a threat to the likes of Larry Zannino. Simone’s boss, the aging Capo Sammy Granito, brought him to the ultimate wood-shed: 98 Prince Street.
Granito, whose police mug shot shows a fearsome face with the blunt, brutish features of a death mask, got right to the point on the evening of March II, telling Angiulo that Patrizzi “has screwed and ran away.” He rued the missed opportunity of five days earlier, when they had Patrizzi set up and in their sights at the garage. “We had him ready last Friday. Oh, we had him Friday, ‘cause Freddie said, ‘C‘mon we’ll go for coffee.’ We had a place. We’re gonna take him in a house and strangle him.” But from there, the story rolled downhill to a bad ending. Granito turned it over to Simone. “You explain, huh,” Granito said, “to him just what happened... he wants to know why the kid got away from you.”
Things had been going real well, Simone told Angiulo. “I had him with me a couple of times driving around you know, an hour at a time; I got him a suit, I got him a jacket, top coat. Suddenly, he don’t want to come around no more.”
Angiulo interrupted: “What do you mean all of a sudden?”
Simone explained that he showed up early at the garage and a startled Patrizzi wanted to know, “What are you doing here?”
An exasperated Angiulo interrupted again: “Nobody thinks. Nobody thinks ...”
While the mob knew that Patrizzi was calling people in Revere who were more than willing to set him up, Granito had strong reservations about doing business with a double agent who was not “a friend of ours,” a Mafia member. “We got him in a trap,” Granito said of Patrizzi. “See, we figure he’s gonna call Pryce and if he gets hold of Pryce, Pryce will set him up. Now he’s been calling the other kid Donny.... Now if he calls Donny and makes a meet with Donny, we don’t know what to do.”
Angiulo asked, “You were going to trust Donny?”
Granito quickly reassured him. “No, no, that’s what I was just going to tell you. I don’t like that. Because we have to kill him.... I don’t like leavin’ myself open for no son of a bitch sitting around fifty years. And then the son of a bitch could finger me.”
Angiulo seconded the motion. “No sir.”
“So anyway,” Granito continued, “ah, as far as Pryce. Okay. He calls Pryce. He wants to meet with Pryce.”
“Beautiful,” concluded Angiulo.
To make sure that Angiulo took some action and that his men were not in prolonged jeopardy, Granito deftly dropped a surefire incentive. “Now let me give you this. I, I feel that we have no worry about him whacking Larry’s kid.”
Angiulo’s response was: Get this matter into my hands as fast as you can. After he ascertained there was a telephone number available for Patrizzi that could be used to trace him in South Boston, Angiulo turned tough with Simone. It reflected Angiulo’s ancient antipathy for autonomous Revere mobsters who only came to him when they needed a favor.
“Well,” Angiulo said of the telephone number, “you make it somebody’s business to bring it here ... you’ll find out that’s why we sit here.” Patrizzi’s fate all but sealed, Angiulo moved on to small talk with Granito, who was heading off to Florida. “What else is going on Sammy ...”
On the next day, March 12, marching orders were given at a meeting that included the paramilitary presence of Larry Zannino. He and Jerry Angiulo agreed that the death of Angelo Patrizzi had now become a matter of duty and honor, a message to those who would threaten the top. It put a noble veneer on crass self-interest.
Angiulo opened the conversation with Zannino by saying “Hey it’s you and I ... you and I are going to solve a problem here. Not because we want to do it, because it’s our fuckin’ duty to, okay, tonight?” Zannino, who already knew about the problem from other sources, couldn’t agree more: “We gotta kill this guy, you know.”
In the strategy session, Angiulo followed a familiar pattern of self-interest in which the top mob leaders would work on underlings with a kill-or-be-killed message. Zannino told Revere mobsters that they better get Patrizzi before he gets them. “Freddie, this kid’s gonna kill you,” he told Simone about the hapless half-wit in hiding. To another hoodlum, Zannino said of Patrizzi, “Don’t think he ran away. He didn’t run away. He’s layin’ and he’s waitin’ and he’ll crack one of you.”
The dialogue between Angiulo and Zannino about how best to handle Patrizzi was also a character study in the difference between the two top men. For Zannino, the hardened killer, it was an exciting challenge in pragmatics: Where is this bum now and who can kill him the soonest? Since he acknowledged playing a role in Joe Patrizzi’s death, Zannino had a special interest in putting any threat from Joe’s brother to rest, especially if it could save his own son’s life. Because Angelo Patrizzi was hiding out in South Boston, Zannino’s first instinct was to bring in two hit men from Southie and go along himself.
In contrast, Angiulo was cautious. His first instinct was to insulate himself and get some malleable “suckers” to do the dirty work. Why be indebted to South Boston killers when he had a ton of players dying to prove themselves? For one thing, the Irish hoodlums, led by Whitey Bulger and Steve Flemmi, owed him $245,000, and he wanted to keeo the upper hand
in all dealings with them. To use them now would change the relationship ever so slightly. He would owe them a favor, something anathema to him. The chits belonged in his vest pocket, not someone else’s. Finally, he was dead set against having Connie Frizzi, a hotheaded made soldier directly under him, participating in the hit in “mixed” company. Rather, Angiulo wanted it done by a group that could not point the finger at anyone in the leadership. Angiulo was always on alert about potential witnesses. “Connie is a Friend of Ours. Therefore, we can never put him with these other people and say ‘just tell Connie who he is,’ cause I know what he’ll do. He’ll say ‘that’s him’ and stand back, bam! And now we got a fuckin’ problem. What do we need it for?”
The discussion ended with the ball passed to the eager Zannino, who agreed to oversee an orchestrated hit by Revere mobsters who did not deal directly with Angiulo. “Once you give me the number, I know what to do,” Zannino told his boss. But, by the end of the macho murder talk, the eavesdropping FBI did not even know who the target was—neither crime boss had mentioned Patrizzi’s last name. It was as ticklish as any dilemma law enforcement faced in the investigation: There would be no more incriminating conversation to be had in four months of listening, but what could they do about warning the target? Who was he? Where was he? Could they save him without tipping their hand and exposing the bugging operation?
They had two leads from the rambling conversations. A first name, Angelo, was mentioned, and there was a reference to the target’s brother, Joe Porter, a Revere loan shark. Luckily, one of the agents remembered the name Joe Porter from another case and was able to come up with Patrizzi as the last name for the brothers. The book on Angelo Patrizzi was that he was minor league but dangerous and not very bright. Investigators also knew that Simone was banking on that, telling Jerry Angiulo, “He’s real dumb ... dumb, dumb.”
Those who knew Angelo Patrizzi, however, said that, in his own unglamorous way, he made an almost heroic stand against the Revere mob, a steadfast resistance going back deep into his adolescence. Three years younger than his brother Joseph, he took a distinctly different view of the Mafia.
Joe Porter, nicknamed after his stepfather, had been very much the hip wiseguy who liked traveling in a flashy crowd and driving a Gran Prix; Angelo was an unpredictable loner who never had a steady job or any money. Even as kids, say friends of the family, the mob had a dramatically opposite effect on the brothers. Joseph was drawn to it instantly, falling in with the local mobsters at age fourteen. Angelo was put off by what he saw as swaggering bullies who tried to tell him what to do. He always stood his ground. “Angelo was never a joiner. He was a very independent person,” recalled one family friend. Yet each would be murdered for Mafia code violations in his thirty-eighth year: one for taking money from the top and the other for threatening the top.
The Patrizzi brothers had shared a hard upbringing in Revere, where the family had moved from Lynn in 1947. There were frequent clashes with the stepfather, and the family never had much money. Angelo’s first brush with the law showed his pigheaded determination to do it his way. He was thirteen and got caught selling pornographic pictures at the local junior high school. The principal told him he had to either reveal the names of the other students involved or go to reform school. Off he went without a word. He did a year and came back more stubborn than before. “There was no turning back for Angelo then,” said a friend. “The die was cast. He went on to lead a really pathetic life. He never had a job because he had no training and was usually in jail. He lived on the street when he was out, drifting from girlfriend to girlfriend.”
When he was twenty-eight, after leaving a nephew’s christening, he and a girlfriend stopped by a Charlestown bar. One of the customers shot up the place, hitting three persons, including Patrizzi. Angelo wound up with a bullet fragment at the base of his brain. It was inoperable and Patrizzi’s dependence on alcohol and drugs accelerated with the chronic pain. Four years later, he got his first hard-time sentence in 1975, for attempted murder, and was still serving when his brother Joseph was murdered by Revere mobsters for skimming on some loan-shark collections in 1978.
Patrizzi cried vengeance immediately, naming names with abandon. “Angelo hated the Mafia, always did,” said the family friend. “He never liked the big shots who swaggered around. He couldn’t stand the thought of anyone having jurisdiction over him. He didn’t admire many people. He had his pride and was in fear of no man. There was at least that much.”
After the FBI and Organized Crime Strike Force attorneys reviewed the taped conversations about killing Patrizzi, it was decided that the murder plot should be turned over to the state police. While it was a sensible decision, Angelo Patrizzi would always be an unnerving episode for some of those involved. He was the one who got away, the one who was killed even though the FBI knew he was slated for death.
Patrizzi posed special problems: He was in hiding and the Mafia had a good line on where he was staying. But while the mob went into high gear it appeared that law enforcement simply went through the motions. In the aftermath, some investigators have asked: If Angiulo got a phone number that yielded an address, why didn’t we? If Zannino could leave Prince Street saying he knew what to do, why was it so hard for us to figure it out?
Patrizzi dropped out of sight on March 3 and was last seen alive at the St. Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston on March 15, wearing a shamrock pinned to the left collar of his blue barracuda-style jacket. When his body was found June 11 in the parking lot of a Lynn motel, he was still wearing the shamrock. The 1978 LeSabre had been stolen off a used-car lot in Medford, the license plate stolen from East Boston.
Patrizzi was found in a white sleeping bag with a red lining where he had been trussed and left to strangle himself when he moved. Gradually, the weight of his legs pulled the rope tight around his neck. The body was so blackened by decomposition that it was not possible to determine the victim’s race. The bullet fragments from the 1975 shooting incident were used for identification. Patrizzi had 84 cents in his dungarees pockets.
For some involved in the case, the putrefied body in the LeSabre reflected a troubling penchant among some in law enforcement to shrug when it learned of murder plots on secret microphones, to let someone get murdered simply because he was a dirt bag on the other side. The Patrizzi matter still gnaws at these agents. Looking back, they said it would have been an easy thing to have gone to Patrizzi’s prerelease center in the South End to check for leads to a South Boston address or the name of a girlfriend he was staying with. “More should have been done,” said one official. “It would not have been hard or taken much time.”
As things turned out, the only positive result of the Patrizzi dilemma was that it resurrected a simmering debate over whether to resume the bugging of Larry Zannino’s North End card games. The debate had had an edge to it, the sole discordant note in a harmonious team effort that demanded long hours in close quarters for nearly four years.
Zannino’s game, where the poker pots were as high as $35,000 and one loan-shark customer got on the hook for $140,000 in losses, had been bugged for the second half of February. This meant that for two days a week, the FBI had to man two electronic surveillance operations on adjacent streets in the North End. All the troops felt it had become a needless risk that had reached the point of diminishing returns. But squad leader John Morris was unshakeable in his insistence that the dual bugging was worth the trouble. He was determined to bag the top two Mafia figures in Boston by catching them hatching conspiracies at Angiulo’s office and then carrying them out at Zannino’s game.
When the Zannino bug was abandoned at the end of February with only a couple of nights of mildly incriminating conversations to show for it, Morris begrudgingly acquiesced—and waited for the right moment to revive it. Morale and team effort came first with him. But Morris quickly grabbed the Mafia plan to kill Patrizzi to press his argument that the bug had to be revived. It was the only way to track Zannino’s pro
mise of “knowing what to do” when he got the South Boston telephone number.
Even with that new motivation, the North Margin Street bug was star-crossed. Done on the fly, the cumbersome T-3 application to the courts, needed to make the new bugging operation legal and the transcripts admissible as evidence, hit a fatal bureaucratic snafu when it got to Washington on March 14, 1981, two days after Angiulo and Zannino had agreed on a general plan. The Justice Department was in transition from the Carter to the Reagan administration. For close to two weeks, no one could be found to sign the required affidavit to get the ball rolling in Boston.
Strike-force lawyer Wendy Collins, who prepared all the T—3S, even thought fleetingly about putting the bug in anyway to find out when the Mafia was going after Patrizzi so that the FBI could rescue the guy. After all, she figured, wasn’t a life more important than bureaucratic red tape? She regained her equilibrium, realizing that nothing good came from illegal acts by law enforcement, aberrations the idealistic woman had always abhorred as an undergrad and law student.
It was one of many unexpected moments of truth that Collins confronted in the grueling march to a major case against the Mafia. The issues had become so much more complicated than they were in law school. The question—Do you do something illegal to save a life?—had never come up before. The best answer she could divine was, Probably not. Suddenly, everything in her life seemed to be in gray tones and she became nostalgic for the simplicity of her earlier life—just a year before.
While she fretted and Morris pushed and chief prosecutor Jeremiah O’Sullivan hollered on the phone with the Justice Department to break the log jam, time was running out for Patrizzi. The strike force finally got the newly sworn attorney general, William French Smith, to sign the affidavit on March 26. It took twice as long as usual.
Yet even after the long-delayed authorization for the Zannino bug came through, there was still more red tape to slash. Morris found that although he had a court approval in hand there was no equipment on the shelf. When the microphones were removed from Zannino’s poker hall, they were immediately taken by another field office. Morris had to wait until two microphones became available after an undercover operation in Los Angeles shut down. Both borrowed microphones were installed on April I in the back conference room at North Margin Street—the place where Zannino and his closest henchmen played big-money poker. It proved to be a bonanza. “Bing,” said Morris. “That first conversation and they started talking about murders. I can remember the chill.”
