Legends of Winter Hill: Cops, Con Men, and Joe McCain, the Last Real Detective

by Jay Atkinson

  There was just enough doubt nagging at McCain about the Veranis killing that he decided to check out Dennett's story. Working with Billy's scenario and poking around on his days off, McCain began spending time at Castle Island, talking to the dog walkers and other habitués. One afternoon he found a young woman, a nurse from Mass General, who remembered seeing a brand-new Thunderbird parked in the lot. She said there were two men in the car, and when Joe showed her a picture of Tony Veranis, she recognized him. Back at the D.A.'s office, McCain asked the young nurse to look through a collection of photographs that included Billy Dennett and William Geraway.

  Without hesitation, she drew one out of the pile and said, “That's him— that's the one I saw on Castle Island.” It was Geraway.

  Still in handcuffs, Billy Dennett testified in front of the grand jury that William Geraway had murdered Tony Veranis. Bolstered by the nurse's testimony, the D.A. won a conviction and Geraway received a life sentence in Walpole State Prison. But the case would have another surprising twist. A few years into his sentence, Geraway told authorities that a convict who was in an adjacent cell for a few months in 1970 before being released admitted that he'd killed a man named Wilson in California. This jailhouse confession was noteworthy because Geraway's neighbor had been in the federal witness protection program when he'd committed the murder. In a successful attempt to reduce his own sentence to time served, Geraway testified against his fellow jailbird, which resulted in the man's return to Folsom Prison in California. Geraway's neighbor in Walpole was Joe Barboza.

  Avoiding the murder charge, Billy Dennett did time in Walpole for passing checks. As soon as he got out, he reunited with Black Jimmy in Boston. There was too much heat on slow walking, and the art of shortchanging, which might bring in a couple of hundred bucks in an afternoon, seemed too much like work. In the nick of time Jimmy and Billy learned that a wiseguy had slipped Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Wilt Chamberlain some bad crabmeat at the Sheraton the night before L.A. was supposed to play against the Celtics. Chamberlain was weakened by ptomaine poisoning but hardly anyone knew about it, and Jimmy and Billy pooled the last of their cash and called a bookie they knew in Chelsea to place a thousand-dollar bet on the Celts. Since they'd never bet more than a hundred dollars at a time, the bookie made them come in and pay the grand in advance, which they did.

  An hour later, Billy and Jimmy were just settling into their seats at the Boston Garden when they noticed the bookmaker sitting right behind the Lakers bench. Then the teams came out for the warm-up, and Wilt the Stilt was not among them.

  “Billy, Chamberlain ain't playing,” Black Jimmy said. “We got a fuckin' lock here.”

  Just then the bookie turned around and glared at Jimmy. “You dirty motherfucker,” he said.

  At halftime Jimmy ran into the bookmaker under the stands. “Why the fuck didn't you tell me Chamberlain was out?” he said.

  “How the fuck did I know?” asked Jimmy.

  The bookie walked away, fuming. The Celtics won, and the next day Black Jimmy phoned in to collect on the bet and was told to drop by at 6:30 P.M. “But you close at six,” said Jimmy.

  “Yeah, well, come at six-thirty,” the bookmaker said.

  Black Jimmy called Dennett and relayed the bookie's instructions. “Bring your gun,” he said. “Something's wrong.”

  On the drive over, Jimmy said to Billy, “Stand against the door. If the shooting starts, it's better we're split up.” Black Jimmy had a .357 in his coat pocket. “I don't know what they're comin' out with, but I ain't goin' down without a fight.”

  Jimmy and Billy arrived at the bookie's storefront office right at 6:30. When they walked in, John “the Basin Street Butcher” Martorano was sitting in the corner. (A notorious mob enforcer, Martorano later admitted to more than twenty murders and cut a deal that amounted to eight years in prison.)

  “Why didn't you tell me Chamberlain was gonna be out?” asked the bookmaker.

  “Look, if I knew Chamberlain was out, I woulda come to you and said, ‘Bet a hundred thousand— Chamberlain ain't playin'. But I want in for ten thousand,' and you woulda went for it in a minute,” Jimmy said. “We bet a lousy five hundred apiece, and you're gonna hassle us for that?”

  Martorano nodded to the bookie and said, “Pay 'em.”

  Within a few days, the Basin Street Butcher had conducted a little criminal investigation of his own, and the three wiseguys who had fixed the Celtics game turned up in Boston Harbor with the backs of their heads blown off. Happy to be alive, Billy and Jimmy went off looking for an easier way to make their living.

  When times were bad, the two con men usually sought out White Jimmy. Unlike some of his companions, James O'Grady had once worked a straight job, pounding the asphalt as a mailman for a couple of years. During that time O'Grady made the acquaintance of the North End P.O. manager, Pasquale Luzzo, who for several years was running a sweet little game nobody else had tried. Luzzo and a group of confederates were responsible for collecting the enormous volume of mail that was dumped into relay boxes around the city. If anything looked interesting, they'd cull it out of the pile and forward it to Luzzo, who would steam open the envelopes and peek inside. One day Luzzo found a sheaf of certificates that turned out to contain $300 million in bearer bonds from the state of Maine. The difficulty lay in trying to cash or fence the bonds, and seeking help, Luzzo reached out to James O'Grady. In turn, O'Grady consulted with Black Jimmy and Billy Dennett.

  The trio was sitting on a gold mine. Clearing just 10 percent on the face value of the certificates meant they would be set for life, and one afternoon in Billy Settipane's bar, they racked their brains on how to proceed. Black Jimmy said he knew a banker in Denver named Myron Levertov who had enough capital to offer thirty or forty points on the bonds. His partners decided it was worth a shot.

  Carrying half the bonds in a valise and leaving half behind for safekeeping, Jimmy flew into Stapleton airport late one night and grabbed a room in the best hotel on Colfax Ave. His accommodations were pricey, but soon he'd be off the carousel of petty cons and living the high life. Arriving in his suite, he admired the gilt-edged curtains and drapery, and with its tight, expensive linens, the bed was like a vellum envelope.

  The next morning he arranged to meet Levertov in his office at the bank, his heart racing at the possibility of such a big score. But Levertov took one look at the certificates, pronounced them too hot to handle, and Black Jimmy returned to his hotel room with $150 million and no way to spend it.

  Jimmy called O'Grady back in Boston. “Fuckin' guy wouldn't touch 'em with a ten-foot pole,” he said.

  The two grifters mulled over their options. The longer they held on to the bonds, the greater the chance they'd be pinched for the theft. And $300 million was hard to keep secret; pretty soon every wiseguy from Braintree to Lynn was going to be looking for a piece of the action.

  “Let's give 'em back,” said Black Jimmy.

  “To who?” asked O'Grady. “Maine?”

  “No, asshole. To Luzzo. And then we'll throw it to McCain. I owe him one, anyway.”

  After more discussion, White Jimmy agreed that turning the case over to Joe McCain was their best bet. Maybe there was a reward for the bonds, or Joe might convince the D.A. to pay them a fee if they helped set up Luzzo. In any event, they wouldn't be going to prison again.

  “Sayonara, three hundred million,” said O'Grady as he signed off.

  At 73 Tremont Street the next day, Joe McCain cataloged 164 Maine municipal bonds in the E, F, G, and H series, instructing James O'Grady to return them to Pasquale Luzzo. In the meantime, White Jimmy had learned that the slippery postal clerk had also stolen twenty-five Avco commercial notes worth a total of $6 million and a number of securities marked “African Gold Mining.” Luzzo stored all these notes and securities in a Filene's gift box, which he kept hidden behind the sofa in his home on Newman Street in Revere.

  While McCain's partner Jack Crowley and another detective tailed Luzzo
, McCain accompanied Joe Doyle to the home of Chelsea Court Clerk Fred Gillis in Winthrop, where the curly-haired assistant D.A. produced the documentation necessary for Gillis to issue a search warrant for Luzzo's home.

  Shortly thereafter, Crowley radioed McCain to tell him that Luzzo was at his residence, with his wife and two young children. Spreading a cordon of plainclothes Mets and postal inspectors around the home, a two-story wooden Colonial with a red brick front, Joe McCain walked up to the front stoop and knocked. He heard someone descend the interior staircase, and then Luzzo's wife, Delores, opened the door.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I need to speak to your husband,” McCain said.

  A man's voice called from upstairs. “Who is it?” he asked.

  “You better come down here,” said his wife.

  McCain passed over the threshold, and Luzzo met him in the foyer. “What's the problem?” he asked.

  “Step out here for a minute,” said McCain. They went onto the stoop, and McCain handed over a copy of the search warrant. “I'm a Metropolitan police officer,” he said. “I got an army of people here, and we're going to search your entire house.”

  Luzzo glanced at his wife, and she shook her head. On the way back inside, Pasquale read the warrant, and upon reaching the kitchen, he dropped the paper on the floor and began massaging his forehead.

  “Have your wife take the kids next door— less embarrassing that way,” said McCain. “We're looking for some papers. If you want to give this stuff up, we'll sit down right here, we'll talk, and everything will be okay.”

  Luzzo nodded. “I'll give you what you're looking for,” he said.

  They went into the living room, and Luzzo moved the sofa away from the wall to retrieve the Filene's box. “A guy dropped this off and asked me to hold on to it,” he said. “I don't know what's in it.”

  McCain opened the box and found the $6 million in Avco commercial notes and the mining certificates but not the bearer bonds. “Is that it?” he asked.

  “That's all I got,” Luzzo said.

  For the next two hours McCain and his team searched every room and the attic and basement without finding a thing. The Luzzo home was decorated in heavy, dark furniture, mirrored walls, and shag carpeting, the living room hung with paintings of sad-faced clowns and the ruins of the Colosseum. After they were ready to concede that the bonds were someplace else, big Joe was standing in front of a brick fireplace that occupied half the room. Though it was late spring and the nights had been warm, a pile of birch logs was stacked across the andirons.

  Bending down for a closer inspection, McCain noticed a paper bag hidden beneath the logs. He pulled it out and looked inside: all 164 Maine municipal bonds, ready for burning if Luzzo had been given the chance. Instead, he was arrested and held on $50,000 bail.

  For their trouble, Black Jimmy and James O'Grady earned a couple hundred dollars from the district attorney's office and a ton of Joe McCain's goodwill. And when they made Joe happy, he'd ignore most of their shenanigans— as long as they kept providing him with information. Working with the two Jimmies, McCain and Jack Crowley also broke the Veterans' Services case, in which a group of crooks, including the veterans' investigators Eddie and Robert Reardon, enlisted scores of men to falsify military records, file them with the veterans' services offices in their respective towns, and receive monthly checks. Typically, the phony veterans would cash the checks and turn over half the money to the Reardons and their partners.

  The scam had been going on for years, involving hundreds of nonveterans in Massachusetts and beyond, and defrauding the U.S. government out of millions of dollars. Late one night McCain and Crowley posted guards all around Boston City Hall, and went into the veterans' services office and examined the rolls. Within minutes they discovered the files of several known criminals from Charlestown and Somerville who had never served in the military and yet had DD-214 discharge papers and other bogus records. Firemen and police officers and city workers and teamsters from all over the city were involved, and before long a virtual army of lawyers and their clients were parading into the district attorney's office looking to plead out. The commissioner of veterans' services for the city of Boston, a fellow named Mullen, went to state prison along with the Reardons and several other plotters; their homes in Falmouth and boats and fancy cars were seized, and the entire system of veterans' payments was thrown into an uproar.

  The case generated mountains of paperwork, and one day Joe McCain was in his office on Tremont Street, his desk and the floor surrounding it buried in manila folders. Black Jimmy and Billy Dennett arrived intending to have lunch at the Fatted Calf and were surprised to find McCain, after his latest triumph, wearing such a glum look.

  “What's the matter, Joe?” asked Black Jimmy.

  McCain tossed a folder onto the pile. “I'm gonna be doing fucking reports on this for the rest of my life,” he said.

  Nearby, Billy Dennett was perusing the files and he reached down and held one aloft. “This is Ronnie Zagini's,” he said. “Shit, Joe, you're not gonna press charges against Ronnie, are you?”

  “Yeah, Ronnie Zagini's a great guy,” said Jimmy. “Don't do it, Joe.”

  McCain stood up, knee deep in file folders. “He's a fuckin' thief,” he said.

  Black Jimmy and Billy Dennett looked at each other like So what? Putting on his sport coat, McCain asked, “You're saying he's a good guy?”

  “The best, Joe,” said Dennett. “Ronnie's aces.”

  McCain took Zagini's file and opened it and looked inside. “Ehh,” he said, pitching it into the wastebasket. “One less fuckin' headache.”

  * * *

  BILLY DENNETT LOVED THE RACETRACK and the whores, but it was the booze that finally caught up with him. In Florida he fell ill but, wary of a shortchanging beef in Tampa, was reluctant to check himself into the hospital. Nor did he have the money to pay for his care until Black Jimmy, busy handicapping the dogs over in Sarasota, gave Billy five hundred dollars and convinced him to enter a Bradenton hospital under his brother's name and social security number.

  At least he had a clean, quiet place to rest, because not long after occupying the room Billy lapsed into a diabetic coma. Listed on his record as next of kin, Black Jimmy got the call after a losing day at the track that his friend's luck was running out.

  Jimmy opened the door to Billy's room and padded in, clutching the racing form and some trinkets from the gift shop. A nurse in orthopedic stockings was looking at Billy's chart, and glancing up, she smiled for a moment but shook her head. Billy was lying in a heap with an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, breathing in a shallow rhythm. Taking a chair beside him, Jimmy put the newspaper and plastic hula girl aside and sat gazing at the wallpaper.

  “Talk to him,” the nurse said.

  “Can he hear me?”

  “I don't know,” said the nurse. “I think so.”

  After she went out, Black Jimmy spoke in a confidential tone for quite a while, telling Billy about which dogs were going well at Sarasota and rhapsodizing over all the lovely young girls working the concession stands. If anyone had passed by the room just then, he or she would've thought that its occupant was a psych case, in there whispering to himself, his soliloquy punctuated now and then by a low, raspy chuckle.

  Billy Dennett made no response. After falling silent for a minute or so, Black Jimmy glanced around the room and heaved his shoulders. Then he got to his feet, looking past his old friend and out the window at the deepening twilight.

  “I'm wasting my fucking breath,” he said, heading for the door. “I'm talking to a dead man here.”

  NINETEEN

  Appointment with Dr. Sommerov

  I'M WORKING WITH KEVIN MCKENNA TODAY, and I've heard he likes to break balls. We've never met, but over the telephone he gives me an address down in Burlington and a description of the subject in a workmen's compensation case, a dark-haired, middle-aged man named Christmas Langlois who has been collectin
g eight hundred dollars a week in disability payments. Suffering from a back injury, Langlois has been out a year and is not able to drive a car or walk without a cane. Despite these infirmities, his employer, a large commercial transportation company, has heard rumors that Langlois is cruising around in his new Ford Explorer and doing work as a landscaper. The subject and his family live at 26 Temple Street in Burlington, which is a left off of Plummer Avenue.

  “He's one of the reasons our insurance premiums are so high,” McKenna says. He's coming up from the South Shore, and I tell him what I'm driving and the color shirt I'm wearing and ask how I'll be able to spot him. “That's your fucking problem,” says McKenna, and he hangs up.

  A forty-five-year-old Boston Housing cop, Kevin McKenna has a wife and three kids and has been moonlighting as a P.I. for several years, working for the McCains as well as SOS, which stands for “Surveillance Our Specialty,” an adroit little firm out of Kingston, Mass. He's made over four thousand arrests as a police officer in the housing developments scattered throughout the city, part of a thirty-five-man force charged with serving sixty thousand residents in an environment where organized crime, drug trafficking, and gangs are rampant. As a result, McKenna is said to be crazier than a shithouse rat but a great detective, with the mind of a logician and the nose of a bloodhound.

  It's a little after 7:00 A.M. on Sunday when I exit off Route 93 and go rolling into Burlington, a quiet residential town twenty miles north of Boston. Early in March the snow is gone, and a hint of spring is wafting in beneath the chill. I don't have a map book and go creeping down Main Street, peering up at the street signs. Less than a mile from the highway I get lucky when Plummer Ave. pops up on my right. Temple Street appears on my left a few seconds later, and I drive along past immaculate, low-slung homes equipped with two- or three-stall garages and fronted by expanses of manicured lawn.