by Jay Atkinson
On a bright August afternoon in 1972, Stew Henry drove to New York's Central Park to meet Topping, who carried with him a thousand dollars meant as payment toward Joey DeVito's “expenses.” At that time the Secret Service used two different signals to arrest a suspect while working undercover. If the agent was wearing a wire, he used the word “Acapulco” in conversation and the other agents moved in. This was standard practice for years. It became so common that one time, when Stew Henry and a colleague were working a guy on a separate case, the other agent mentioned that he was going on vacation soon.
“You better not be goin' to that fuckin' Acapulco,” said the suspect, while Henry and his colleague tried not to laugh. “The fuckin' police all go to Acapulco.”
The other signal was visual: the undercover agent would open the trunk of his car. That day in Central Park, Stew Henry took the envelope filled with cash from Andrew Topping and opened his trunk to stow it away and the other agents rushed in to arrest Nixon's would-be assassin. They threw Topping against the car and told him to spread his arms and legs. But the roof of the car was sizzling hot and Topping kept picking up his hands.
“They thought he was trying to resist, so they tuned him up pretty good,” said Henry, with a laugh.
Stew Henry's talent for playing OC— organized crime— figures landed him in Boston, where the wiseguy network was so tight-knit that local cops had a great deal of trouble going undercover to penetrate it. Henry met Joe McCain, Sr., at the height of his reputation, when the two men attended a law enforcement Christmas party in 1980.
“Joe always had the rep that he was a guy you could trust, that you could talk to, and that you could work with,” said Henry. “Joe McCain knew everybody, and everybody knew him.”
Beginning in the early eighties, Stew Henry and Joe McCain worked several cases in a row, none more involved, more dangerous, or more amusing than the “Eddie Miami” case. Eddie's real name was Edward M. Maiani; a “little greaseball from Revere,” said Henry. One of the former owners of the Ebb Tide Lounge on Revere Beach Boulevard, where Joe McCain had rumbled with mob hit man Joe “the Animal” Barboza in the sixties, Eddie Miami was a hard little nut that law enforcement had been trying to crack for years. At one point in the late seventies, the FBI stuck a phony bomb under Eddie's car and blamed it on his associates in an effort to get him to roll over on them.
“He never did,” said Henry.
As a private investigator and while he was a cop, Joe McCain was known for handling several cases at once with the dexterity of a symphony conductor. He was particularly adept with informants, who acted as his eyes and ears on the street. By cultivating a throng of “rats” over a long period of years, McCain learned exactly when to reward, admonish, ignore, punish, or coddle them. He also learned, through steady practice, how to discern the useful bits from the nonstop gab coming in from sketchy individuals who had apparently been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. Over a forty-year period Joe McCain put a lot of bad guys in jail because he knew how to listen.
But the key to his success in managing this link to the world of drug lords, hit men, and gangsters sprang from a large and well-used region of Joe McCain's character. At the very core of his existence was a love of people, and a love for rubbing elbows with them, high- or lowborn it didn't matter, from professors at Tufts University to the most rock-bottom junkie in Wilson Square. Among the many hours of taped conversations between McCain and his various informants, there's only one instance of somebody trying to get tough with him. During the Eddie Miami case, an angry middle-aged snitch named Bobby persisted in his complaints that he was being underpaid for his services. McCain was patient for a while, and then Bobby received some valuable insight into the sort of life he had chosen to immerse himself.
Bobby (talking rapidly): Look, I just had a long talk with Eddie. I told him to put his fucking cards on the table. What's the story with us, Joe, moneywise?
Joe McCain: You got three hundred dollars Friday. What have you done since then?
Bobby (his voice rising): I told you I was going to Florida.
McCain (calmly): I know what you told me. I'm not dumb. I'm not by any means dumb, Bobby.
Bobby: Look at the pressures I got on me, Joe. It's not fucking easy out here.
McCain: Just because you say “gimme” doesn't mean they're gonna give it to me. You can put all the pressure on me. I got broad shoulders. But I gotta go back to them.
Bobby: You've got everything you've asked for, Joe.
McCain: Me, personally? I'm not pleased with it.
A convicted bank robber and professional informant, Bobby eventually told Joe McCain that Eddie Miami was dealing large amounts of cocaine. McCain had recently been assigned to the Special Investigations Unit at the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office, a dream team of detectives from various law enforcement agencies. Their immediate supervisor was MDC Sergeant Mark Cronin, who had served as a courier for Army Intelligence out of Long Binh during the Vietnam War, and who would later work with McCain on the Melvin Lee case.
“I was a pretty good cop because I was trained to be a cop,” said Cronin, who retired from the Massachusetts State Police as a major. “Joe McCain was born to be one.”
The Special Investigations Unit, which focused on drugs and organized crime, was a new and rather expensive idea in 1980, a six- or seven-man team composed of local law enforcement, the DEA, and temporary assignees like the Secret Service agent Stew Henry. Under Captain of Detectives Tommy Keough and Sergeant Mark Cronin, the unit needed some publicity and saw Eddie Miami as their big ticket. “Joe was a good reactive detective, but he was a great proactive detective,” said Cronin. “He could make cases.”
Joe McCain and Stew Henry decided to set Henry up as a New York wiseguy. Posing as “Joey DeVito from the Bronx,” the way he had with Andrew Topping, Henry was to start buying cocaine from Eddie Miami and see if they could follow him up the food chain. A crucial element was the relationship between the informant and the drug dealer. If the criminal didn't trust the informant, it wouldn't work, according to Henry. “But if you had a good informant, you could show up in a police uniform and the dealer would just figure you were a bad cop,” he said.
As an informant Bobby was a wheeler-dealer. “He would give you information that suited him,” said Henry. “So you couldn't really trust him.” A bald, forty-year-old man with a round, reddish face, Bobby had a refined sense of taste: nothing too fancy in cars or clothes, but everything just so.
In those days Eddie Miami hung out at a steak tips joint in Chelsea called the Clubhouse Café, and Bobby took Henry in there one night. Eddie was in his mid-fifties and right out of central casting: about five-six with a bulldog face and jet-black hair. He dressed in loud clothes, drank vodka, and enjoyed a Revere guy's version of the high life. When he was introduced to this connected guy from the Bronx, Eddie misheard the name, and from that moment on Stew Henry was “Vito.”
First deals are always nerve-racking, that awkward, feeling-out period when each party is trying to see through the other. But the main thing you want to avoid in undercover work, according to Stew Henry, is going to the bad guy's house. He has total control of that environment, which is a huge advantage.
“I always used to say, ‘public places for private things,' which doesn't really make sense,” said Henry. That night, he and Bobby left the Clubhouse Café and drove to an agreed upon spot in East Boston, where “Vito” bought an ounce of coke from Eddie Miami.
Henry noted that lots of cops want to jump the deal too quickly and thus scare the mark away. “My philosophy was, negotiate, just like you would if you were a real dealer,” he said.
Eddie Miami and Vito hit it off from the start, and for about six months the two were frequent companions. In a way, Henry liked Eddie. One night they entered a classy nightclub on Route 1 in Saugus, and the girl at the door said there was a ten-dollar cover charge. Eddie flung his arm toward the empty ballroom and said, “What are
you, fucking crazy? I ain't paying ten bucks. There's nobody in there.”
The manager appeared and restated that there was a cover charge. “Yeah, yeah, well there's nobody in the fucking place,” said Eddie. The guy let them in for free.
“He was a little shit, but he had balls,” said Henry.
Another time, Eddie had difficulty starting his car outside a nightclub on Revere Beach Boulevard, and he went back in and brought out another wiseguy, a bookie. Eddie misapplied the jumper cables to the bookie's brand-new car and blew its electrical system. Ignoring the guy, Eddie managed to start his own car after several tries but broke down again just a short ways along the boulevard. Traffic began piling up behind him. Immediately Eddie started waving again, trying to attract another Samaritan. He stopped the next car, which happened to contain Metropolitan police officer Chris Brighton, who was on the case and working undercover. Brighton helped Eddie Miami get his car going again and the gangster drove off, oblivious to the fact that he'd just met one of the detectives working his case.
Gradually Stew Henry worked his way into a partnership with Eddie Miami. To build credibility, Henry arranged for the Secret Service to purchase two hundred pairs of designer blue jeans, explaining to Eddie that they had been lifted from a shipment in New York. Schooled in cocaine trafficking, where the sale of a football-sized package meant a huge score, Eddie grew frustrated with the pile of jeans, which he had to sell one pair at a time. “This is pick and shovel work,” he said. “We gotta sell 'em in bulk.”
At one point, needing a break, Vito told Eddie that his sister had been in a car accident and he had to go to New York to visit her. Upon his return a week later, Eddie asked, “How's your sister?” and then “Sell any jeans?”
In July, Stew Henry attended a Saturday cookout at Eddie's house on Lincoln Street in Revere. It was a hot day and several detectives, including Chris Brighton, were assigned to the surveillance on adjacent streets while Henry lounged by Eddie's pool with the other gangsters and his date, an undercover cop named Linda. During the course of the afternoon, Eddie asked Henry to take him to a nearby garage, where he was going to pick up his car.
On the way they drove past Brighton in the parking lot of a nursing home. Wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, Brighton was sprawled on a chaise lounge, drinking beers from a cooler and watching the Red Sox on a battery-operated TV. “I had too much stuff out there to be a cop,” Brighton would say later.
Soon enough, McCain's patience and Brighton's unorthodox surveillance methods began to pay dividends. While Eddie and Vito were selling coke to other hustlers in Boston and down on the South Shore, McCain was taping their conversations, building a list of coconspirators, and trailing them in an unmarked van. Eddie was quite a bit older than Vito and fancied himself a mentor to the young wiseguy. “These cops, they follow you,” he said. He advised his protégé to keep an eye on his rearview mirror at all times.
“But he never did,” said Henry. “You could have attached the cop car to his rear bumper.”
One day Eddie Miami passed word to Vito that a guy he knew wanted to start swapping large amounts of cocaine for methamphetamine. Driving along the Southeast Expressway on the way to the meeting, Eddie had trouble pronouncing “Scituate,” confusing Henry, who was at the wheel, and McCain, following in the surveillance van. They were approaching the split, where Routes 3 and 93 diverge.
“Up here you want to turn at Sip-switch,” said Eddie.
“What?” asked Henry, who was unfamiliar with the area.
“Sip-switch. Turn there.”
They were in the far right lane, approaching the place where the highway divides. “Turn left. Sip-switch. Sip-switch,” said Eddie.
The car veered across all six lanes, passing beneath the sign for Scituate. A short way behind, the van nearly capsized when Joe McCain went off the road and down into a ditch. Luckily, he came bouncing onto the highway again and made the turn. A half hour later, Stew Henry and Eddie Miami arrived at a used car lot where they met a dark-haired, mustachioed fellow named Joe. During the exchange, Joe produced the meth and called a husky kid named Bruce off the lot and had him sample it.
Bruce obliged and then lost speech and motor control almost instantly: his limbs began to shake and his head lolled and he made a series of grunting sounds. “He was out in never-never land,” said Henry. “That was some nasty shit.”
Later, when the Special Investigations Unit ran a background check on the meth dealer, they learned that thirty-five-year-old Joseph P. Civita of Scituate was a former policeman. Nothing sets a real cop's teeth on edge like a dirty cop.
Just a week after discovering the identity of Joe Civita, Stew Henry learned that Eddie was going to meet a new source for cocaine at the Clubhouse Café. Surveillance was arranged inside and outside the bar, and Henry watched from across the room as Eddie talked with a large, round-shouldered man with an oversized head. The new source, Ernie, didn't say much and avoided contact with Vito altogether— the hallmark of a smooth operator. If a criminal is well-organized and intelligent, there's never any reason for him to do business with someone new. “Why would Ernie want to meet me when he could sell the coke to Eddie and have him deal with me?” asked Henry.
But Eddie was excited about the connection. “Ernie's the guy,” he said. “We can do a lot of business with him.”
Eventually the unit learned that “Ernie” was Ernest K. Field. Joe McCain was acquainted with the fifty-four-year-old Field, a shambling wreck of a man with a diverse résumé as a professional crook. Four years earlier, McCain and his old buddy, DEA agent Billy Simpkins, had tracked a loan shark, narcotics dealer, and fence known as Ernest E. O'Connell, which they knew was an alias. A team of detectives kept tabs on O'Connell for thirteen months. There were indicators of organized crime activity but little hard evidence at first. O'Connell lived in an ordinary looking Colonial on Burnside Street in Medford, Mass., and drove an eight-year-old car. Unlike most wiseguys, he didn't drink or gamble and preferred to spend his evenings at home. Investigators tried to pick up O'Connell's fingerprints from objects that he had touched in order to learn his identity but never succeeded in obtaining more than a partial print.
Day after day McCain and his associates followed O'Connell as he collected loan shark payments and met with prospective customers. At the same time they heard rumors that he was about to become the fence for $10 million in stolen bearer bonds and was involved in a drug trafficking operation that stretched from Latin America to Canada. McCain also learned that O'Connell had done time at Walpole State Prison, but corrections officers there didn't recognize him when shown a recent photograph.
After a year of surveillance McCain finally caught a break when O'Connell visited the Norwood home of Ernest and Grace Field, who turned out to be his parents. Investigators learned that Ernest K. Field, aka Ernest E. O'Connell, was born in Norwood, had a tenth-grade education and a lengthy arrest record for assault, car theft, breaking and entering in the nighttime, and armed robbery. This information, coupled with the lengthy surveillance orchestrated by Joe McCain and Billy Simpkins, led to Field's arrest and the warrants to search his home. Even they were surprised by what they found.
Squirreled away in Field's residence was $180,000 worth of stolen American Express money orders; loot from a two-year-old $300,000 burglary at a private home in Beverly, Mass.; and seventy-two men's suits, jackets, and coats, as well as several industrial sewing machines stolen from the Boston docks. The raid also netted a dozen guns, a hand grenade, fireworks, rolls of detonator cord, hundreds of stolen credit cards, eight diamonds, and a special type of camera and accompanying stamp used by the Registry of Motor Vehicles to create driver's licenses. Miscellaneous items included a large bag of marijuana, loan shark slips in the amount of $50,000, a significant number of burglars' tools, furs, skis, typewriters, cameras, handcuffs, tumblers from various-sized safes, blank gun permits, and twenty-two watches. Ernest K. Field was a one-man wrecking crew.
Field was convicted and served thirty-three months of a ten-year sentence for operating a loan shark ring before he was paroled. When Stew Henry, posing as Vito, met him in the Clubhouse Café and reported the news to Joe McCain, the detectives concluded that Field had not been reformed during his most recent stay at Walpole. And he was just as closemouthed as he always had been. But the fact remained that Eddie had introduced Vito to Ernest K. Field, and that development ratcheted up the investigation. The boys were on to something big.
In determining whether to continue an investigation as complex and demanding as the Eddie Miami case, there are always two considerations: penetration of the criminal organization and budgetary constraints. As long as you're getting to new people and new criminal activity, you keep going— if the money holds out. At a certain point, you take down the suspects and tally up the results. As Vito, Henry played Eddie Miami like a fish, maneuvering to get him, Joe Civita, Bruce Ziskind, and Ernie Field all within reach of the net. Then, on a bright August morning in 1982, four takedown teams composed of Met detectives, Secret Service agents, and Boston police arranged surveillance on each of the suspects and waited for Joe McCain's call.
Chris Brighton was assigned to Bruce Ziskind. The muscular twenty-four-year old had served less than twelve months of an eighteen-year sentence for robbing a jewelry store and shooting at two police officers and was living at a prerelease center in Mattapan. That morning Brighton was parked in the driveway of the center and three other members of the team were spread around the building. Apparently none of his counselors or his probation officer had questioned the fact that Ziskind, who worked at a menial job in Cambridge, was driving a brand-new silver-and-black Thunderbird.
At quarter to eight, Ziskind walked out of the center and climbed into his T-bird, and started to pull out. Squealing his tires, Brighton jerked forward and cut him off.
At the same time, a Secret Service agent named John Orrizzi ran out from the side of the building and closed on the drug dealer. Realizing that he was being pinched, Ziskind gunned the T-bird and tried to run Orrizzi down. But the former Rutgers lineman sidestepped the onrushing Thunderbird, and when Ziskind was cut off by two more unmarked cars and had to pound on the brakes, Orrizzi reached in through the window and grabbed the suspect by the throat. Ziskind was a tough kid, ten years younger than Orrizzi and well-built, but the Secret Service agent lifted him out of the car and threw him on the ground like a toy. Ziskind was arrested with sixteen hundred dollars in cash on his person, and two pounds of marijuana and an ounce of cocaine in the trunk of his car.
