Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  “So I’m tying and untying and watching the cart kinda upside down. It rolls right up to the first elevator (on the left—nearest the Federal Street doors on the northern side of the lobby). And it stands there waiting. I’m bent over, getting desperate. You can only spend so much time with a shoelace. But I get lucky. The elevator door opens, and the elevator inside is empty. The guard pushes the cart on, and some secretary tries getting on, too. The guard stops her and makes her take a different elevator. That means this can only be Mr. Brink’s private elevator. That’s good to know, too—in case we wanna stick him up someday. I beat it t’hell outta there and over to Bickford’s.”

  Richardson at Bickford’s didn’t deny that Brink’s was potentially right for scoring, even implied he might be willing to go along on safe theft—when the time was ripe. In his opinion, and he told this to Pino, the time wasn’t ripe.

  “We didn’t have the equipment to take on a score one-tenth the size of Brink’s,” Sandy relates. “We had nothing, and as a matter of principle I wasn’t going to help in obtaining these things. Anthony said not to worry, he’d get all that on his own. I still wouldn’t answer him whether I wanted in or not. I was on the brink—Jesus, that’s a slip for you—”

  Richardson, at Bickford’s, recounted a reason for even delaying further casing of Brink’s.

  “You’re not in shape, Anthony. I watched you in the lobby. You were running around like a schoolboy.”

  “I got carried away,” Pino replied between mouthfuls and without looking up from his plate.

  “Anthony, you wouldn’t expect a doctor to lay off six years and a half and then come into a hospital and do a difficult brain operation, would you? He has to work up to it. You have to work up to it. You need practice.”

  “That’s what I been telling you all along. Let’s score on that ladies’ underwear factory Jimmy found.”

  “That’s my whole point. You’re not even thinking like you used to. One joint doesn’t get you back in shape.”

  “Two weeks from now we’ll make a dozen scores—and all old petes. The kind my gear can open.”

  “How the hell are you goin’ to find scores loading up trucks all night at Stop and Shop?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? Starting next week I got a promotion. I’m unloading ’em. I’ll be on the truck helping the driver make his deliveries. And you know where we unload, Sandy? Up dark alleys in the dead of night all over town. Ain’t it wonderful? So what say we get busy with two joints I lined up already?”

  “Two? A minute ago you only had one.”

  “I just come across a second.”

  “Where?”

  Pino shoveled in another mouthful. “Pick up your menu.”

  “I told you I’m not hungry.”

  “Pick it up, Mr. R., and read her real good.”

  Richardson raised the menu.

  “What you see?” Pino asked.

  “Gravy stains.”

  “What else?”

  “A list of unappetizing dishes.”

  “Look at the price column, Mr. R., and add it up and divide it in your mind. Everything averages out to ninety cents. Now just look around you and then count the people. It’s six o’clock in the morning, and they’re already thirty customers. From here on it gets three times as busy and stays busy. Then, if you look behind me, you can see where the cashier sits. And right behind her, you can see where there’s a door. Figuring from where this place is built, that door goes to an alley—see what I mean?”

  Early Sunday evening Pino led Richardson into and through the South Boston premises of a women’s underwear manufacturer. The safe was old and large and perfect for peeling, right for the tools Pino had on hand.

  No cashier’s ledger could be found.

  “How much did Jimmy say she was worth?” Sandy asked, looking down the rear steps from the office.

  “Eight to ten grand most evenings of the week. Friday’s payday. They got up to fourteen in her Thursday night.”

  “It’s a three-man job.”

  “Then you’re coming along?” Pino all but shouted.

  “If you find a third man.”

  “We’ll bring Jimmy.”

  “That’s worse than Big Steve. I want a third man with experience.”

  “Jesus, Sandy, I been promising Jimmy some action for ten years.”

  “I don’t go inside unless everyone’s had experience.”

  Costa was waiting impatiently in his apartment when Pino knocked on the door.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well, what?” Pino replied, handing over the car keys.

  “You got Sandy or don’t you?”

  “Of course I got him. Only I changed my mind about you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re too goddamn green and inexperienced, and I ain’t taking you inside.”

  “It’s my goddamn score. I found it.”

  “And it’s my goddamn crew and I’m boss and I’m deciding you ain’t ready yet. You get your share for finding it, and maybe if I feel like it, I’ll give you a break and let you drive.”

  “Break? I’ve driven you and Sandy a hundred times.”

  *Main entrance is on Federal Street, back entrance on the Congress Street parking lot.

  Chapter Four

  Jimmy

  Vincent James Costa was born on February 18, 1914, in a second-floor Hanover Street apartment in Boston’s North End, a picturesque and historic Casbah that had been appropriated from poor immigrant Irish by even poorer immigrant Italians, thus becoming known as Little Italy.

  Though his Sicilian mother and father, like most of the area’s parents, were stern, law-abiding and religious people, the narrow prerevolutionary streets on which Paul Revere and William Dawes had once strode offered other examples.

  “When I was a kid, we all knew what a big-time crook was, and most of us looked up to them,” Costa recalls. “I was always working to make money from the time I could walk. You wanted money because the parents were so poor. And I had all kinds of legitimate jobs, but they didn’t pay nothing. But these racket guys would drive up in those big touring cars filled with pretty girls and all the money they wanted. I remember one of them giving us kids five bucks each just to stand and watch his car while he and the girls went to eat at a restaurant. Jesus, five bucks was almost as much as my father made in a week.”

  Costa’s earliest idol was on the threadbare side.

  “I adored my untie. My uncle used to shoot crap on street corners. He was the best crap shooter in North End. I used to come and watch him shoot crap on Sunday right after I finished church. He used to let me shoot, too. That’s what I called Sunday school—my uncle letting me shoot.”

  Dice were not all that was being shot around the neighborhood. On two occasions young Costa, like everyone else, had to dive for cover as a pair of rival gangs, the Italian North End crowd and Irish Gustin’s from Southy, roared through in open touring cars, shooting at one another. Years later when the Sicilian dons invited the Gustin leaders to a friendly meet over a Hanover Street restaurant—ostensibly to work out a peace treaty and allocate bootlegging territory—and gunned down the Irishmen, Costa had run over in time to see the cops lifting the bloody corpses from the sidewalk.

  Jimmy was also tardy when somebody pumped twenty-eight slugs into a mobster named Griffith. Griffith lived and, three days after he was released from the hospital, went into Joe the Barber’s only to be shot again in the barber chair. Six-year-old Costa and his pals arrived as Griffith walked out into the street, kept walking and after several blocks crumpled and died.

  Then there was a racket guy named Scarzi. Scarzi was fooling around with another mobster’s wife and, as a result, got his throat slit from ear to ear. He staggered down the street, shouting for help and pressing a blood-soaked handkerchief to the “squirting” wound—with Jimmy and associates following at a safe distance—was refused refuge by a novelty store operator, reac
hed the corner of Hanover and Battery and dropped dead on the sidewalk outside the apartment building where his mother lived. The kids were all Italian and talked it over and had to adroit that Griffith, an Irishman, held the record for the “walking dead”—he had traveled a helluva lot farther than Scarzi and didn’t cry or scream any—and was the toughest guy they’d ever seen. When seven-year-old Jimmy Costa was playing hide-and-seek and ducked into a warehouse and found his thirty-year-old cousin lying dead and decapitated, he didn’t register much shock and didn’t tell anyone what he had seen.

  “There was a lot of crime then,” Costa explains. “Oh, yeah, a lot of deaths. A lot of killings. The cousin was a bad apple to begin with. A minor mob guy. I guess he crossed somebody he shouldn’t. But none of us were surprised.”

  Costa saw nothing unique with his childhood, felt North End was no different from other places on earth.

  “If you’re honest and good, you’re honest and good. If you’re a son of a bitch, that’s what you are. You’re born the way you are. I was a nasty son of a bitch. I loved my sister, but that didn’t stop anything. I used to rob all her money. Everything she saved—her money. I used to con her for money and never pay her back. You don’t learn that, you are that. You don’t even think you’re doing nothing bad, not when you’re a kid. And punishing don’t do any good.

  “I was the apple of my mother’s eye,” Costa relates, “but when I was bad—oh, my God Almighty. She used to kill me with bites. She used to bite me all over when I did something bad. She had a temper, my mother, God rest her.

  “And my father used to strap hell out of me with the razor strap, whale away at me with the strap so hard I nearly didn’t feel it. Except when I went on the bed. I never understood that. But it didn’t stop me from robbing my sister or being bad. Oh, Jesus, I was nasty back then.”

  At the age of six, Vincent James Costa and several friends burned a waterfront warehouse to the ground after the owner refused the children access to their favorite swimming pier. His first recorded arrest came two years later, on September 7, 1923: a larceny charge for swiping baseballs, bats and footballs from a delivery car. He was fined $3.

  In 1928 fourteen-year-old Costa lied about his age and began driving a taxi. He also attempted to start a lottery, only to be warned off by local toughs. The operation shifted to real estate ventures, but few North End Italian immigrants were interested in buying summer homes in New Jersey. When the Depression came, Jimmy lost the taxi driving job and turned to neighborhood-bootlegging. Even in good days an Italian community that made its own wine was hardly a bull market for cheap rotgut. By 1930 Costa had found better prospects in downtown Boston, where he and another young bootlegger tried their hand at counterfeiting, auto theft and a few minor burglaries. The following year Jimmy took on the affectations of the fashionable hoodlums of the day—double-breasted suits, spats, camel’s hair overcoats, soft hats—and, most important, hung around the speakeasies and restaurants along Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston Street, often called Gangster’s Row. It was here that he first met Tony Pino.

  “I had him figured for a seventeen-year-old flimflam man,” Pino, who was twenty-four at the time, revealed. “He always had unethical deals going, and some of them was legitimate. The first thing he ever tried selling me was a kennel in Newton. A kennel full of them red chow dogs. Sandy, me and Jimma [Faherty] had the crew going good, so what the hell did I need with a kennel? So I buy a couple of the chow dogs. I beat him way down on price. Now I can’t shake the kid. Every time I turn around there he is with another unethical deal. It’s not that he figures me for a bite; it’s he idolizes me. I don’t know what to do with the kid. I introduce him to my sister Nancy, and he goes and marries her. Now I got a goddamn chow dog salesman in the family, a brother-in-law who thinks he’s a crook but ain’t ever been pinched for anything respectable.”

  On July 15, 1931, Costa was apprehended on a pair of traffic violations: not slowing down and speeding. Shortly after his marriage to Nancy Pino in 1932, he received another traffic violation. His fourth and fifth arrests occurred in 1934 for assault and battery on wife and non-support of family. The charges were dropped after Pino interceded and effected a reconciliation.

  “Tony was the best goddamn thief I ever met,” states Costa. “The best. And he was the world’s biggest liar, too, as far as I was concerned. He kept promising to take me on the heavy, and all he kept doing was taking me on the boost with him and Steve. For chrissakes, I’d been boosting since I could walk, and there wasn’t any money in it. The money was in the big stuff—in taking petes.

  “So after Tony got sent away [in 1938 for the attempted robbery of Rhodes Brothers], I said, ‘What the hell.’ I went out and tried the heavy on my own. I tried sticking up some guy, and oh, my God, was I rotten at it. All I got was a dollar seventy-five and four months in Norfolk.

  “After I came out of Norfolk, I tried enlisting in the Army, but they weren’t desperate enough to take me. I was dead broke and took any job I could—legitimate job. I end up working at Kalis Clothing. Kalis made those Eisenhower jackets for the Army, and I get paid piecework, paid for each one I press. I’m a presser there.

  “I kept visiting Tony in Charlestown [Prison], too. He started in again about how I’d be on the crew once he got out. Like a dumbbell, I fell for it all over again. And when he gets out, he starts acting like he owns me. Bossing me around in front of people, for chrissakes.”

  Jimmy Costa’s public acceptance of the tyranny was, in part, deceptive. Once-alone, the two brothers-in-law argued incessantly, with Jimmy usually in the right and often shouting down Tony. Nor did the so-called “messenger boy” hesitate to change a Pino dictate should he feel it advisable. But of course, only Costa knew this. Usually undetected by friends and associates was Tony’s reliance on Jimmy in both a practical and cathartic sense.

  Five-foot-six-inch sad-faced Jimmy Costa had become the captive and sole confidant of the inveterately distrustful Pino, was privy to almost every detail of Tony’s life, illicit or otherwise. In terms of work relationships, Pino couldn’t have chosen a better person. Jimmy had, among other attributes, an exceedingly retentive memory and could recall details Tony often forgot or got jumbled.

  Vinnie, as some friends and relatives called Vincent James Costa, had faithfully and for six and a half years, acted as official liaison between imprisoned Tony and outside contacts. He had also “held” most of Pino’s stolen money and during this same period watched the account diminish to nothing as he paid off obligations, per instructions. It had been Jimmy who conferred with lawyers over the deportation actions and finally used the last of his brother-in-law’s funds to obtain the bail bond which effected Pino’s release from the Charles Street Jail. It was Jimmy Costa who arranged that Tony stay at Aunt Elizabeth’s apartment, just as it was Jimmy Costa who transported Pino’s possessions to the basement of that building.

  It was Jimmy Costa who was still fighting with the phone company to get an instrument installed in Tony’s flat. It was Jimmy Costa who was still visiting used-car lots and talking to friends trying to locate an auto Tony could buy or use. It was Jimmy Costa who had just procured a forged driver’s license Pino refused to use.

  Now, in mid-October, 1944, as Pino prepared to reestablish his thievery crew, it was Jimmy Costa who was delegated a good deal of work.

  “It was like going into any small service business,” Costa relates. “You need an office, in our case a plant, and personnel and equipment and transportation.

  “The only difference is, no one can know what you’re doing. Our big difference was Tony didn’t want to spend a goddamn dime. Even when he had it, he never spent it. Tony’s motto was: You have to steal to steal. And you know what the first thing he told me to go out and get was? Guns. Guns is definitely a cash outlay, and we don’t need guns anyway. The last thing we want is guns. He was going in on the light [breaking and entering and safe theft], not the heavy [armed robbery].

  �
��So I tell Tony the hell with guns and the hell with laying out any money for you. I’m not even part of the crew, so why should I do any of those things for him? Tony says he’ll give me half of his share on Brink’s. I know he’s never going to keep his word on that, so I tell him I want to be partners on the score I found him and want to be partners on the other scores like that—the pete score. The only way you make money is when you’re a full partner. I’m a full partner with Tony and Zig [AKA Big Steve] on the boost. And I want the same thing with some pete work.

  “Tony says he can’t guarantee he’ll get me on the old crew if he ever gets them back together. He’s right about that. Each guy’s got a vote on who comes in. And a couple of ’em don’t like me. He says he just about has Sandy ready to go back to work. He promises me I can drive for him and Sandy on their first job, and after that, he’ll try to work out a partnership between the three of us—Sandy, me and Tony.

  “So I say, okay, I’ll help him getting the gear. But it still doesn’t make any sense. Even if we get the stuff, there’s no place to take it. We don’t have a plant. I got a perfect truck all lined up, but there’s no place to put that either. The first thing I remember grabbing were license plates. I took a set off a truck in Newton and took another set off a car in Wellesley.”

  Pino kicked the last of the cartons into the rear hallway of the local Stop and Shop grocery store, locked the door, told the waiting truck driver he had to take a leak, strode up the alley and relieved himself, examining the rear wall of a well-known fabric manufacturing concern. Immediately after work, he walked to the Chamber of Commerce and examined the building along Pearl Street. He particularly liked a tall, narrow edifice and tried its locked door. Twenty minutes after that he walked past the telegraph office; he saw only the thin, lanky clerk on duty. A half hour later he was in downtown Boston, where he entered an all-night novelty print shop whose placard announced twenty-four-hour service.