Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  At 4:35 P.M. eastern war time, Friday, April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in Warm Springs Georgia, from a cerebral hemorrhage. Whether because of grief or shame or respect, or for other reasons, the crew remained inoperative for several weeks, then scored a factory safe for about $9,000.

  As it would be in future years, crew activity was curtailed with the onset of warm weather and longer hours of sunlight. Jazz Maffie began rising early so he could get in a full thirty-six holes at the golf course. Richardson continued his daily stint down at the docks, looked forward to spending more time with his family. Faherty told Sandy he was going to use the summer to dry out and pulled a partial vanishing act. Costa knew there would be no respite from the boost with Tony and Big Steve over the summer, but his time would be free enough to open negotiations for buying a small dress manufacturing company and to look into a lottery franchise.

  For Pino it was time to form another partnership.

  “So I’m working over at Tony’s Socony [Tony Gaeta’s Socony oil service station directly across Columbus Avenue from Pino’s apartment], filling tanks and changing people’s oil, and one day Barney [thirty-six-year-old Joseph Silvester Banfield] shows up. Barney’s the nicest guy you ever want to meet. I done time with him a couple of times. Reform school, I think. And he was in Charlestown.

  “Barney was the best man I ever met with trucks and cars. His brother used to have a fleet. Barney’s a drunk, too. He gets so goddamn drunk Joe [McGinnis] has to chain him up in the cellar. Don’t laugh. Joe chains him to the cellar wall with bear chains ’cause Barney goes too cuckoo when he drinks; if you don’t chain him, he’ll vanish for two weeks and maybe hurt himself.

  “So Barney tells me [over at Tony Gaeta’s service station] that he’s working for Joe McGinnis. I can’t avoid Joe McGinnis, know what I mean? You go outta my back door and cross the street, and there he is in front of the package liquor store [Iberschied Liquor Store] hosing down his car. Joe McGinnis is the cheapest son of a bitch there is. And the crookedest. He makes me look like Rockefeller.

  “So Joe and me’s got what you could call a grunting relationship. When I pass him, we grunt at one another.

  “I don’t know what day it was, but Barney wants me to meet Joe. So he takes me over to Joe’s bottle club [J.A. Club]. The club’s right around the corner from the package liquor store. Joe and his wife live above the liquor store.

  “So Joe says he heard about me, and I tell him I heard about him, too, and he asks me if I wanna do a little business. We gotta lotta mutual friends, Joe knows I can spot and open anything. Joe’s gotta lot of important connections down in Providence and New York—places like that and out in the Midwest. What he wants is the two of us to work like experts, see, tell other people how to rob a joint. Somebody’ll send us blueprints, and I’ll figure out how to take the pete. The best way. Joe says we can work for both cash and get percentages, too. So I agree. That’s how we started doing business together.

  “And guess what the cheap son of a bitch did—he made me pay for the drink he invited me to have.”

  Among their mutual associates was James V. Crowley, the Boston detective for whom Pino was suspected of being an informant and whose number one source for underworld information was Joe McGinnis.

  When Adolf Hitler’s death was reported on April 30, Tony had followed the 48 Truck as far as Somerville, less than five miles from 80 Federal Street. Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies, May 7, had found him a mile beyond Somerville on Route 28. In mid-July, as President Truman met with Winston. Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Potsdam, Pino was watching 48 Truck drive through Stoneham, Massachusetts (some eleven miles north of Boston on Route 28). He had tailed the armored car three miles farther to the outskirts of Reading, Massachusetts, by August 6, when an atomic device dubbed Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima. The subsequent August 15, V-J Day, the Brink’s truck was observed leaving Reading. While the United States battleship Missouri lay at anchor in Tokyo Bay preparing for the formal Japanese surrender on September 2, Tony. Pino was crouched behind a manure pile on an abandoned farm off Route 28, seventeen miles from Boston.

  During the fall and early winter of 1945 the crew’s fortunes hit a postwar high in the Boston area, and 48 Truck was abandoned. The majority of safe scores ranged between $5,000 and $8,500 and the schedule had expanded to include several holdups in the $10,000 category. Geagan had taken charge of personnel problems, which left Pino free to spot even more work.

  After the Christmas Boost layoff so many jobs were being found that extra hands were often brought. For the larger thefts, the crew turned to a pair of New York City area criminals who had worked with them in preprison days. Young Stanley Gusciora of Stoughton, a former inmate with Tony, Mike, Jimma and Sandy at Massachusetts State, was the favorite recruit for the smaller jobs.

  Whether they were regular or “extra” crew members, the take was always divided evenly among the men participating in the specific robbery. All scores Tony found, which were by far the majority of those perpetrated by the gang, had to be first offered to the regular crew. If the regular crew members rejected the project, Tony was free to do with the location whatever he chose. Often he merged regular crew members and outside hands to do the job. More often than not, he turned a rejected score over to McGinnis, who “sold” it off to other gangs of local crooks. That was another business Pino and Joe had formed—score selling.

  In mid-January Pino was driving away from a Cambridge mansion he had been casing for a possible theft of silverware when he spotted a Brink’s truck pulling into a side street.

  “I hadn’t tailed one of them sweethearts in months and couldn’t figure out what she was doing over here, see?” he stated. “This ain’t the kind of neighborhood that they deliver to. Especially at night. So I follow her a block or two. She pulls into this alley, and I drive past. I see her park in front of a low garage building.

  “So I drive around and park and come walking back from the other side. Other side of the alley. Okay, the truck’s gone, so I look inside this long garage building—it’s long like the old stables they used to have.

  “Bang, there I seen ’em all lined up. Brink’s trucks. I know I got their garage, and I’m watching this janitor they got. This fella’s moppin’ up in between the trucks. He goes into the back, and fast, I open the door and sneak in. The first thing I see is a board nailed up on the wall with the keys on it.”

  The keys to the armored trucks.

  The crew’s continuing heavy schedule of Boston area thefts dissuaded Pino from returning to his tailing of 48 Truck which would have taken him too far from the city. Instead, he picked up where he had left off the previous late winter; he began following four different Brink’s armored cars: one on Tuesday, two on Wednesday mornings, one on Thursday mornings.

  By the beginning of February, 1946, he had grown very interested in a Thursday morning truck which left the Federal Street entrance of the Chamber of Commerce building at approximately 7 A.M.* In the course of almost one full year Tony had tailed this armored car along Atlantic Avenue and into Kneeland and then onto Albany Avenue and out toward Hyde Park. He had seen it cross a small bridge and stop at a shoe factory to drop off a money sack. Two weeks later he observed it delivering money sacks at the B. F. Sturtevant factory in Hyde Park. Fourteen days after that he was following at a safe distance as the truck pulled to a stop at Dedham Square.

  Richardson gazed into the rearview mirror. The Brink’s truck from Sturtevant was parking down the block at Dedham Square. The guard and driver got out of the cab, locked the doors, walked to the rear of the armored chassis and unlocked and opened the back door. A guard jumped down and waited while the door was relocked.

  The trio strode across the street and entered a restaurant.

  “Jesus,” Sandy muttered in disbelief.

  “They done it four Thursdays in a row now,” Pino said. “Each time they stay inside longer having their coffee. La
st time they didn’t come out for forty minutes.”

  Richardson turned casually, peered longingly at the crewless armored truck parked at the curb.

  “Think maybe we can mask her?” Pino asked. “Put up wood blinds like we were street workers or something? Sewer workers. Then we take out our equipment and open her up like a can of soup.”

  “Anthony, there are times I think you’re criminally insane.”

  “Yeah, ain’t it wonderful?”

  “Assuming we could detain the guards, exactly what equipment do we have to open her? Dynamite?”

  “This here, Mr. R.” Pino dangled a key in front of Richardson. “It fits their back door.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From Mr. B.’s garage. Snuck in and copied it off the board they got. Have a copy of every key for every truck they got.”

  The Thursday morning Brink’s armored car scheduled for Sturtevant and Dedham Square pulled off River Street, crossed a trestle and came to a stop before its first delivery of the day—a small factory. The driver unlocked the rear door. A guard jumped out, holding several sacks. The door was locked after him. Once the two men were on their way toward the building, Pino and Richardson sneaked out of the shrubbery, inserted a key and quietly pulled open the armored door in the rear of the vehicle. Pino reached inside, grabbed the first item he touched and bolted back into the foliage. Richardson calmly relocked the door, then tore off after his colleague.

  “Son of a bitch,” Tony muttered, going through the contents of the single white bag as Sandy drove away.

  “Son of a bitch what?”

  “There’s only thirty-five hundred in her.”

  Nothing appeared in the newspapers concerning the theft of $3,500 from a Brink’s truck. No change in armored car scheduling or personnel was noted at the Chamber of Commerce building in the early-morning hours. The number of packages observed being loaded onto each truck remained what it had been in previous days.

  “Okay, it ain’t so surprising Brink’s swallows the loss, see what I mean?” asks Tony. “They don’t wanna tell the papers they got knocked over ’cause that’ll be bad for business. Scare off new customers and maybe lose a couple they already got. And they don’t wanna tell the cops neither, ’cause then their insurance company will find out and jack the rates on ’em. So they swallow the loss.

  “What surprised the living hell outta me is they don’t do nothing about it. The first thing you’re gonna do if somebody’s been following your trucks and snitching ’em is change the routes and put on different loads. Brink’s don’t do that. They keep the routes and loads the same. If Brink’s figure a hack screwed up and lost the package, you’d expect them to change the hacks around. They didn’t. It was all the same guys on the same trucks.”

  After a ten- or twelve-day wait Tony and Sandy sneaked up on a Tuesday morning truck which had stopped to make a delivery. They unlocked and opened the back door and snitched a money bag containing $5,100.

  Again nothing appeared in the papers. No change in routing or loading or personnel was seen.

  The first phase of robbing Brink’s had begun—a phase which, by itself, would net the crew nearly $400,000*—with the bigger money yet to come.

  *Pino’s estimated time of departure.

  *Brink’s Incorporated states all its records for this period are gone and would make no comment regarding the Pino, Richardson, Costa allegation that money was stolen in this manner. Insurance companies covering this period would make no comment. Police records indicate no reported loss.

  Chapter Nine

  Light and Heavy

  By the first week of January, 1946, a Tuesday morning Brink’s truck had been followed to the end of its route, the value of individual deliveries estimated and the premises of several deliverees cased. By February the same was true for a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning truck. In mid-February the first safe belonging to a Brink’s customer was cracked by the robbery team and $7,300 taken.

  Again, there was a wait. This time the theft was given a few lines on the back pages of the paper, but no change in Brink’s routing or personnel was observed.

  The safes of three more Brink’s customers were rifled. There was still no variance in armored truck procedure. Four safes were cracked in one week.

  “We weren’t selecting joints that got payroll deliveries,” Sandy Richardson points out. “Those Thursday and Friday deliveries. There were several ways to tell it was payroll. Brink’s made up payroll themselves and often delivered them in long flat metal trays. We’d also been in the joints they delivered to, so we could often tell if they were getting payroll or something else. If you hit a joint right after they got a payroll from Brink’s, the cops might put two and two together.

  “We went after the regular deliveries. Places that needed a lot of cash on hand to conduct their business. That meant if Brink’s delivered on Tuesday, we could go in on Wednesday night and take the pete. That’s what we were doing that winter. Hitting joints like that. We were hitting so many other joints around that time—joints that had nothing to do with Brink’s—that I guess the cops never got suspicious.”

  By the time the days grew longer and the warm-weather hiatus began, an estimated twenty Brink’s customers had been robbed by the crew.

  The spring and summer of 1946 saw Pino make substantial additions to his collection of costumes.

  “Now when it comes to work, thievery, I need a whole different set depending on which operation I’m pulling. We was starting to burn a lotta petes then, see what I mean? Not peeling ’em down like I like, but putting the acetylene torch to her because of the new hard metals they’re using. You turn on the torch and sparks start flying. So what I do is go follow this Red Sox umpire. Follow the big suitcase he travels with and grab it. I mean it, I boosted a real suit off the umpire. Instead of wearing his wire mask I used the regular acetylene mask. But I used his protector [chest protector] to keep the sparks from burning me—only one night they burned up the protector because it wasn’t fireproof. Mother of God, you never saw such a mess. All that black smoke from the burning mattress stuffing.

  “One of my favorite costumes was the frog suit, the rubber suit our Navy frog fellas used in the war. Now the reason I needed one of those was because I got stuck in the holes, know what I mean? When you’re up against a great big pete, a walk-in vault, you don’t peel her, you burn her. And sometimes you don’t burn all of her. What you do is cut a neat round hole in her door and crawl in and take the money. Well, I was putting on weight, and once or twice when I tried crawling in, I got stuck. And once when I got in, it came time to get out and I got stuck again. That was the scariest. I’m trapped in a stranger’s goddamn vault, and the sun ain’t far from coming up. I tried getting out through the hole frontward and backward, and nothing worked. I’m desperate now. So I take off all my clothes and back up to her. Stick my legs through. The other fellas grab my legs and lug and tug and finally, plop, I’m through. I musta left three pounds of my ass on her. So I try going on a diet and I don’t lose a pound. I try using ladies’ corsets and the thing they advertise in the books [trusses and male girdles advertised in comic books], but they make me wider than I already am. Then I see a movie about these frog fellas blowing up a ship from underneath. So I go down to the Navy and boost one of their rubber suits. I had to boost two or three before I found one I could half get into. Then it’s so tight I’m walking around like the mechanical man, but it pushes my gut up to my chest. I can crawl in them holes if I have to.

  “Now my favorite costume was the tamer’s. I take my grandson to see the circus, and afterward we go around to look at the elephants. While he’s looking at them, I go boost the tamer’s costume, lion tamer. It’s gorgeous. All yellow and gold, but I got no place to wear it, know what I mean? There’s no place when I’m on the bend, and they’ll laugh if I wear it at Sunday dinner. And I don’t dare wear it when I’m spotting. When you’re spotting, you wanna blend into the neighb
orhood and become invisible. Look like everyone else around there. There ain’t many neighborhoods full of tamers in Boston. So I got nowhere to wear it except at home. After Mary goes to sleep a couple of times, I get up and put it on for a couple of hours.”

  Pino’s most extensive collection of contraband apparel was employed solely for spotting.

  “I could be a milkman or a busboy or hotel doorman and two dozen different other people. I liked being a chef because of the early hour of the day they gotta go to work. They come in early to bake the rolls, so I grabbed one a them big puffy hats they wear and the apron and whole shebang. Garbage men is good, too, because people ignore you. When’s the last time you looked the garbage man in the eye? You didn’t ’cause nobody does. You turn away and ignore the fella as fast you can. So when we go back to opening the tin cans [unlocking Brink’s trucks] in the fall, I’m a garbageman a lot.

  “Now there’s limits to who I’ll be,” Pino insisted. “I’ll go just so far and not a foot beyond. I draw the line on cops and priests. You never see me being a cop or priest.

  “You usually only wear the costume when you’re spotting on your feet, when you’re walking around the district. When I’m spotting from the car, I just wear regular workman clothes and nothing elaborate. I’m a workman on his way to work who happened to drive past. Or a salesman. Salesmen is good, too, because they’re always driving past someplace. When I was out chasing that truck [48] across the field the summer before [summer of 1945], I had these farmer’s overalls and straw hat on because of the fields. I had a fishing pole, too, in case anybody stopped me. Looking at me driving past, you’d think I was a farmer. Stopping and talking to me, you could tell I was going fishing.

  “What I’m trying to explain is the father of necessity. You grab a costume for the work at hand and stay up on things. When things change, you gotta change along with it. A crook don’t live in a vacuum. He’s gotta be more on the ball than anybody if he’s any good. The stock market goes down, and that changes some big company in Arizona, and maybe that changes some joint in Boston I been looking at, see what I mean? It’s all a part of free enterprise. Things is gotta move ahead and change, and if you ain’t ready to change with it, you shouldn’t be a crook.