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Big Stick-Up at Brink’s!
Noel Behn
It took six years and eleven men
to rob Brink’s of $2,700,000.
It took another six years and $29,000,000
to catch them.
“Whatcha gonna call it?”
“Call what?”
“The big stick-up.”
Tony Pino’s final words to author
October 4, 1973
PROLOGUE
A Tear in the Eye of a Smiling Corpse
Saturday, October 6, 1973:
Adolph “Jazz” Maffie, Thomas F. “Sandy” Richardson and the fellow from New York turned off River Street shortly beyond Cleary Square in the Hyde Park section of Boston, passed under a long stretch of faded canvas awning bearing the legend “Pannachio & Son Funeral Service,” climbed three steps, strode across the creaky porch fronting a wood frame house, opened the rusty screen door and entered the ground-floor anteroom. They were met by Vincent James Costa. A few sober words were exchanged. Richardson moved off to shake hands with Michael Vincent Geagan, then joined Maffie and the New York man for the walk into the parlor. Maffie and Richardson genuflected and crossed themselves before the bier, stepped back to flank the fellow from New York and studied the deceased. Tony Pino’s five-foot seven-inch body lay with its hands crossed in a white satin-upholstered coffin.
“Quietest I ever heard him,” Richardson whispered.
“‘Yeah. It must be killing him,” Maffie replied, intending no pun.
“It looks like he’s smiling, don’t it?” Richardson observed.
Maffie stared harder at the round, chubby face. “He’s smiling okay. You think he’s got the money right in there with him?”
I was the fellow from New York hearing this exchange. By then I knew Jazz Maffie’s sotto voce question reflected speculations by many others at the wake and around Boston—including myself. In his lifetime Tony Pino may well have been responsible, directly or indirectly, for the theft of nearly $15,000,000.
Had there been a tear in the eye of the smiling corpse, then Tony Pino might well have passed on thinking about what is the focus of this book, the January 17, 1950, armed robbery of a Brink’s Incorporated vault room in Boston. He considered the theft his masterwork. The FBI, which cited the holdup as both the “crime of the century” and the “perfect crime,” considers the solving of the robbery among its highest achievements.
Though erroneously heralded by much of the media as the first million-dollar cash stickup in United States history, the 1950 heist in Boston was the largest ever perpetrated as of that date—an estimated $1,218,211.29 in currency and coin plus another $1,557,183.83 in checks, money orders and securities. The unique disguises worn by the looting gunmen helped prolong the most extensive and costly (an estimated $29,000,000) manhunt in an American nonpolitical criminal case. No such felony, before or since, has received the publicity afforded to the Brink’s robbery.
In all, eleven men participated in the 1950 armed theft. Eleven days before the Massachusetts statute of limitations for the crime would have run out, one of the thieves confessed to the FBI, providing what continues to be the official chronicle of the robbery. By the time the trial began two other members of the gang had died. The remaining eight “stood mute” at their arraignment and allowed the judge to enter pleas of “not guilty”; subsequently they refused to take the stand in their own defense. Had they testified before the jury, an appreciably different version of events would have been heard—the account found on the pages to come.
In October, 1972, four of the six surviving gang members, Tony Pino, Sandy Richardson, Jazz Maffie and Vincent James Costa, sat down with this author to begin what may be one of the longest admissions of complicity ever offered—nearly 1,000 tape-recorded hours of it. All four, while volunteering to “confess,” demanded money for their story. All four received that money. All four tended to talk in dialogue, as well as narrative, which led to the novelistic style of this book. All four were in their sixties and had very good memories when they chose to use them. At the onset the group let Tony Pino act as their spokesman, and that is one reason why what the author estimated would be an eight-month project took almost four and a half years.
Tony Pino, in his lifetime, was a monumental talker—and liar. He lied to this author for the better part of six months. Beyond the sheer joy he took in fibbing, Pino prevaricated in order to negate the testimony of the gang member who had turned prosecution witness; he also wanted to garner for himself every possible credit for the conceiving, organizing and directing of the robbery at Brink’s. Only when the other three thieves, who sat in on most of the interviewing sessions, lost patience with the time-consuming lies and evasions and forced a confrontation did what the author considers to be the facts emerge. In later 1973 a fifth gang member, Michael Vincent Geagan, added his statement to corroborate the account of the crime. Like the other four robbers, he relived the experience as best he could. What follows then is the reconstructed history of the robbery at Brink’s as revealed by five of its participants.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has made data available from the 305 extant volumes of reports covering its six-year investigation of the robbery. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, the Boston Police Department, the Massachusetts State Police, the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Boston Globe and Boston Herald-American, the Boston Public Library and Brink’s Incorporated are among the organizations and institutions which have contributed to the 50,000 pages of documents collected for this project. Present and former FBI agents and Boston and Massachusetts policemen were among the 150 people interviewed. Also interviewed were the Suffolk County district attorney, Garrick Byrne; the late and honorable trial judge, Felix Forte; members of the jury; journalists who covered the case; the chief attorney for the defense; and the family and friends of the gang members. George W. Gunn at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., contributed yeoman service in searching for file material.
No reconstructed history is devoid of editorial judgment. One of the more persistent phenomena encountered by the author during interviews and researching official records and news accounts was the tendency for all parties to refer to the holdup as “The Great Brink’s Robbery.”
What makes a crime “great”? And why are so many people proud of the fact?
N.B.
New York City
November 30, 1976
You try to think logically and that’s not the way to think because you don’t know all the facts.
—ED POWERS
Federal Bureau of
Investigation
BOOK ONE
THE CLOUT
Chapter One
Return of a Thief
September 12, 1944:
“You’ve got to ax-centuate the positive,” Johnny Mercer sang from the Philco cathedral radio.
“EE-liminate the negative,” added Bing Crosby.
“And don’t mess with Mr. In-Between,” they both warned as five-foot six-inch, 170-pound Tony Pino let his gray jute trousers drop to the slat-wood floor, stepped out of them, bent to make recovery, momentarily forgot to breathe through his mouth and, by forgetting, sucked in a nostril full of “shit trench” stink which permeated the long, low, frigid second-floor supply room. He flashed a ticlike wince which always tautened his pudged-moon face into what appeared to be a mocking grin, resumed inhaling by mouth, grabbed up the trousers, tossed them onto a pile of already-discarded gray jute prison garb and stood sway-backed and potbellied and naked. Stab wounds
ran along his thick neck and flabby left shoulder. There were bullet scars in the fleshy left buttock and thigh. He coughed to get the guard’s attention. He coughed again. The belly heaved again.
The supply room guard hitched a thumb toward a high shelf, leaned forward and turned up the radio’s volume. A 9 A.M. newscast began with word that Hitler’s Fortress Germany had been invaded by General Patch’s rampaging First Army.
Pino rose up on his tiptoes, brought down a newly postmarked carton. By the time General Patton’s Third Army had penetrated the impenetrable Siegfried Line and British forces were dashing into the Lowlands he was dressed in a baggy, creased blue serge suit, white-on-white Arrow shirt, dotted tie and a pair of seven-year-old but never worn Florsheim shoes.
The guard summoned a runner, filled out a yard pass and as an afterthought said, “Good luck.”
Pino flashed his ticlike grin, plucked the pass from the guard’s finger and grabbed up three comic books and a copy of Popular Mechanics. He led the way down the steps and out into a vast and hazy prison enclosure dominated by looming, hand-hewn granite block structures grown mawkish red-black with age and coal smoke drifting in from railway yards beyond the twenty-foot-high turreted and guard-mounted walls. He continued breathing through his mouth as he waved an expansive good-bye to the contingent of Crap Brigade cons hosing out the thousand-odd cell-numbered toilet buckets near an open latrine trench.
His pass was presented at the rotunda building. A screw opened the gate in the wire mesh barrier, and Pino stepped past, leaving the runner behind; he climbed the circular staircase, waited while another wire mesh barrier was opened, strode up a corridor and entered the guardroom without knocking. He ignored two burly civilians seated on a far bench, went to a door, knocked and in his raspy, slightly high-pitched voice announced, “Pino, Anthony.”
A clerk guard emerged munching a sandwich, dropped a sheath of papers onto the desk and said “Sign at the Xs.”
Pino signed without reading, opened an envelope, removed and counted $600, the rebate from his commissary account, argued he was entitled to an additional $10 he knew damn well was awarded only to convicts with no known source of income, finally abandoned his demand, pocketed the money, stood waiting.
The clerk countersigned several of the forms, tore off parole board copies, held them out.
After having served six years, eight months and six days of two consecutive three- to four-year sentences for the crime of breaking and entering in daytime with intent to commit a felony, as well as possession of burglary tools, Antonio Pino, alias Anthony Pino, Tony Pino, Anthony Pirro and John Gurno, had paid his debt to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and was therefore officially rehabilitated—on parole for two more years, but a free man.
He stepped across the room to where the two burly men were standing and held out his wrists.
“Sorry, Tony,” the larger of the federal marshals said while the smaller man jerked Pino’s arms around and up behind his back and clamped on a pair of handcuffs.
“What the hell, you’re only doing your job,” Tony replied.
“Don’t worry,” the larger federal officer whispered, holding open the rear door of a car parked at the base of the rotunda building, “I hear they’ll have you out before the day is over.”
Threat of reincarceration seemed to have little effect on Pino as he rode away from Massachusetts State Prison, better known as Charlestown since it stood in the Boston district of that name. He had spent better than a fourth of his thirty-eight years in state penal institutions, as the result of three separate convictions. Two of the terms he had served exceeded one year in duration, thereby warranting his present federal arrest for an infraction committed when he was less than a year old.
Anthony Pino was born on May 10, 1907, near the tiny vineyard village of Divieto, Province of Messina, Sicily. His father was away in America. The delivery was performed by a midwife and occurred in a dirt-floor shanty his family had occupied for generations, but to which they never held title. A local priest registered the birth.
Had Tony remained on the padrone-owned soil of his forebears, he might not in all his years have traveled more than twenty miles from Divieto. Like his father and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, Tony unquestionably would have become a tenant farmer and tended the padrone’s grapes from dusk to dawn. More likely than not, he would have been denied an education since that was the way it was with the eldest child of a peasant family—the eldest worked so the younger might have free hours in which to receive rudimentary schooling. Tony’s father, Francesco, was an eldest child and was illiterate. His mother, Katerina Arena Pino, was also an eldest child and illiterate.
Had he remained, Tony Pino probably would have married and at an early age reared a family where and how he had been reared. Compared to millions of others throughout Europe, it wouldn’t have been all that bad an existence. Granted, he would never have earned much money, cash-in-hand money—less than $80 in the best of years. On the other hand, he and his family would seldom have gone unfed. A two-room clay-walled shack would always have been at his disposal, plus a quarter of an acre on which to grow whatever food he needed, plus a share of the crop for the padrone.
The incentive that prompted Katerina’s semiliterate younger brother, Pietro Arena, to scrape, scrimp and finally muster the $40 fare to the New World was a steamship company placard posted on a wall in Divieto: It promised that anyone, absolutely anyone, regardless of birth, could own land in America.
There was no particular reason for Pietro to select Boston, other than its being the destination on the ticket issued him. He was, by apprenticeship and a half year’s actual practice, a barber. And there was need for barbers in the poorer sections of the Massachusetts port city. Pietro easily found employment. He saved and in 1906 leased the cheapest one-man shop he could find—on D Street in South Boston, a volatile Irish immigrant enclave called Southy by the locals. He sent a letter back to Sicily urging his newly acquired brother-in-law to come to Boston as soon as possible, not to wait until the baby was born, to emigrate at once while employment opportunities remained good.
Francesco and his pregnant twenty-one-year-old bride began another cycle of scrimping and borrowing and finally sold their single wedding present—a brand-new pick and shovel—and in late 1906 “Frank” joined “Peter” in Southy, shared the one-room apartment above the barbershop and found a job three blocks away, driving the horse-drawn wagon of a used-paper dealer fourteen hours a day, six days a week, for $6. He found extra work on Sunday. He held his eating down to a meal a day, if that, and after fourteen months sent a ticket back to Sicily.
On a long-forgotten date in 1908, eight-month-old Tony Pino was in his mother’s arms being carried down the gangplank from a four-stack coal-burning “Guinea clipper” named Columbia whose holds had been converted into bedless dormitories and which made the advertised two-week Atlantic crossing in twenty-one days.
“Katherine,” like Frank and Peter before her, arrived at Boston Harbor without official paper (WOP), save for a letter from the village priest attesting that she was of good character and properly married and mother of a male child.
Ten months later the young Pino family was ensconced at noisy Andrew Square in Southy’s Lower End—an animated wasteland of high hopes and despair and joyless three- and four-story wood-frame, often brick-façaded apartment buildings—where they would remain another fourteen years.
Frank worked long hours trying to meet the bills and rent and save enough to bring over more of the relatives. And relatives were arriving—Uncle Joe and Aunt Elizabeth—among others. Katherine always seemed to be pregnant and spending her days and nights taking one of the babies down to the toilet in the basement or fetching water from the hallway tap or washing or shopping or cleaning or sewing or preparing meals—all this in a tiny three-room third-floor apartment that reverberated day and night from the trolley, horse wagon, horse carriage, auto and truck traffic below the windows. The flat was
freezing in winter, suffocatingly hot in summer; always smelled of cooking.
Throughout, the Pinos’ spirit was generally high. They were a tightly knit and loving clan. Frank spent every Sunday with the family, managed to maintain a degree of patriarchal rule, attempted to see that his brood grew up adoring God and respecting the law of the land and taking full advantage of their opportunities.
Tony attended the Catholic church and, when old enough, first parochial, then public grammar school. He was always home promptly for meals. Sunday dinner with the whole family in attendance was his favorite. Aside from household chores he was out of doors, as he would have been in Divieto—as most of the neighborhood children would have been back in Ireland.
But the streets of Southy were a far cry from a rural lane or pastoral glen. It was a tough place in a tough time and even tougher for the hyperactive, competitive, hot-tempered, plump little Italian boy whose non-English-speaking parents had settled amid the nearly destitute, generally uneducated, often intolerant Irish.
“Mother of God, if you didn’t stand your ground against them Irish from the day you was born, you’re a goner,” Pino recalled. “They don’t trust a living soul, including themselves. And that goes for the teachers and nuns and priests and cops. Everything was Irish then. So you gotta prove your point fast, see what I mean? Prove you can hold your own.”
And from the earliest of ages, this proving—not coping—this showing other boys, Irish boys, that he was as good as they were was of great importance to him. He learned to fight with his fists, but never well, and therefore learned to sustain one devil of a beating. He wielded a club or knife with moderate efficiency, but tiny “dago” Tony wasn’t really going to scare anyone with brute ability. How could he? His funny round face, his sugar-bowl haircut, his bulging tummy and short, stubby legs and ill-fitting clothes were enough to make you laugh. When he became angry, red-faced and out of control, as often was the case, he went into one of his tantrums and began jumping up and down and cursing and threatening. And that could make you laugh all the more. Young Tony Pino grew aware of this reaction other boys had to him, and he began using it to his own advantage and acceptance: incorporating his inherent Arena sense of robust humor and Pino gift of nonstop gab to the fullest, he became the madcap kid of the block, the neighborhood jester—the clown.
