Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  “That’s why I was so goddamn busy with costumes in ’46 and ’47. There was lots of changes. There was lots of crazy things happening.”

  Fall began, and Brink’s customers became a staple on the crew’s agenda. Pino industriously followed new armored trucks every morning of the week to ensure the supply of golden eggs.

  On the side, Tony and Sandy continued to open the back of armored cars and snitch money bags.

  “What the hell you letting all this stuff sit and rot for?”

  The department store auxiliary shipping clerk looked around at the little fat man in glasses wearing a porkpie hat and long white dust coat and holding a clipboard. “It isn’t rotting.”

  Pino pointed to the stacks of boxes and cartons on the loading pier. “This batch is all supposed to be shipped out as fast as you get it, ain’t it?”

  “It will be, sir.”

  “Will be ain’t good enough, mister. It’s supposed to be gone.”

  “We can’t ship unless we have trucks. I’m waiting for trucks.”

  “Why the hell you waiting on trucks when you’re supposed to use the wagons?”

  “Wagons?”

  “Where the hell you been, fella? The company hired half a dozen wagons to help. Look, there’s one waiting now.”

  Pino yelled and waved. A station wagon driven by Costa pulled up. Big Steve jumped out. The temporary-assistance shipping clerk helped them load the vehicle.

  The Christmas Boost was on. All other crew activity was off.

  Demand was outdistancing supply during the winter months of early 1947. Many Brink’s customers had their safes rifled for a second time. A handful for a third time.

  Pino returned to tailing 48 Truck.

  “It’s nothing but goddamn fields,” Tony complained to Richardson and Faherty as the three had dinner at the Egleston Square Diner several doors down from Pino’s apartment on Columbus Avenue. “It’s straight goddamn road, and nothing but farms and fields on both sides, and I gotta lay flat on my stomach and watch the goddamn truck like I was some kinda Indian.”

  “What happened to the fishing pole?” Jimma asked, rubbing a neatly cut square of thin, tough roast beef into the black/brown gravy.

  “I got the pole right with me, and I got on the farmer’s overalls and straw hat, but I can’t stand up and be seen,” Tony explained. “There ain’t a goddamn fishing pond in ten miles. Where the hell was I?”

  “On a stretch of road that leads only to Andover,” Richardson replied.

  “Only my ass,” snapped Pino. “There’s Route 62 cutoff up a couple of miles, and then there’s 125 [route] slantoff.”

  “Then, Anthony, why not simply go up ahead of both cutoffs, and if the truck doesn’t pass, you can work yourself back?” suggested Sandy. “My hunch, is she’ll pass. I feel she’s heading for Andover.”

  “Me, too,” said Faherty without bothering to look up from his plate. “She’s heading to Andover.”

  “I can’t do that because there’s no goddamn place to hide my red Chevrolet,” Tony replied, “and I ain’t laying on the ground no more because I got a cold and arthritis. That’s why I gotta borrow your car next Friday.”

  “My car is having a new transmission put in, and I doubt it will be ready Friday,” Richardson explained.

  “And I don’t have one,” announced Faherty through his mouthful. “—They came and repossessed it.”

  “Whaddaya mean repossessed?” demanded Pino.

  “I couldn’t meet the payments.”

  “You made over fifty with us in the last eight months alone,” Tony asserted.

  “And if I made fifty, that means you made twice that much,” Jimma countered, “so why don’t you shock us all and go buy a new car?”

  “I got expenses, for chrissakes,” Tony bellowed. “And I don’t have to be laying in the field anyway. I’m doing it for you fellas. Now you don’t wanna be no help and be selfish, that’s your business.”

  “Try borrowing Mike’s Ford,” someone suggested.

  “I used it once already,” said Tony. “And I used Jimmy’s a couple of times, too, and the cheap son of a bitch Jazz is holding onto his Pontiac like it had tits.”

  “What about your aunt’s?” was another suggestion.

  “Unh-unh. She charges by the mile.”

  “Well, there’s a stevedore down at work who has a ’34 Chrysler he doesn’t use much,” Richardson recalled. “It runs, but it’s a wreck.”

  “Anything that moves and ain’t bright red’ll do.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  Pino leaned forward, dug his fork into the mound of cold mashed potatoes and brought a heap forward, dropping a large gob on his napkin-covered belly. “Great food, huh?” he commented as he swallowed.

  “Tasty,” Faherty, who was blotting up the gravy with an end of bread, answered.

  “Great, huh, Sandy?”

  “Worst goddamn food I’ve ever looked at in my life,” Richardson said.

  “What the hell are you talking about? Look at Jimma, he’s cleaned off everything but the enamel on his plate.”

  “Jimma would eat mud if you put gravy on it,” Sandy proclaimed. “Anthony, you have an uncanny know-how to find the filthiest restaurants with the most ungodly food.”

  “All this joint needs is a good scrubbing, and it’ll look real high class.”

  “And how do you plan to decontaminate what’s cooking in the kitchen?”

  “What you getting so smart-assed about this joint for?”

  “Because, Anthony, it oughta be burned to the ground. And why, might I ask, are you defending this garbage dump?”

  “’Cause I own it!”

  “Own it?”

  “Yep, I bought every inch of her.* And what a steal. Got it for under two Gs.”

  “What in the name of God do you need a joint like this for?”

  “To have property and make a legitimate dollar. Once I give her a good scrubbing and add some salt and ketchup, they’ll be standing in line. Don’t worry, Sandy,” Pino said in dead earnest, “you’re in on it.”

  “I don’t want to own one rotten slat of it.”

  “Nobody owns any of her but me. But I’m staying open twenty-four hours a day, so you and Jimmy can work here between your other jobs.”

  By the end of June Tony had discarded his fishing pole and farmer’s overalls, emerged from the fields and followed 48 Truck to a textile mill in Shawsheen, Massachusetts, where he saw two guards deliver money sacks. Sandy Richardson followed up and estimated that the delivery contained a payroll of roughly $80,000. Friday after Friday through July, August and September the white armored car rolled on, with Tony on its tail and Sandy several weeks behind. A total of twenty-nine packages was left behind at the three mills in Andover—twenty-nine with an estimated value of $800,000. As the crew took out its burglary equipment and began using the longer nights of September to its best advantage in the immediate Boston area, the estimate for the payroll delivery to Lowell, Massachusetts’ Amoskeag Mills was placed at nearly $720,000. By the time the team ran out of safes and picked up their pistols the final stop on 48 Truck, Billerica, was given a value of $500,000.

  At 7:45 A.M., Thursday, October 30, 1947, the day before Halloween, Brink’s armored car personnel delivered a weekly payroll to the second-floor paymaster’s office in the three-story general manager’s building of the Sturtevant factory on Damon Street in Hyde Park. The Brink’s guards returned to their truck and drove away. Ten minutes later five men wielding sawed-off shotguns and pistols and dressed in either dungarees or work clothes emerged on the stairway leading down from the third floor. Three of the quintet wore Halloween masks, one held a burlap bag up before his face, and the fifth had blackened his face with cork.

  Once off the staircase and on the second floor, the bandits went to the telephone switchboard, pointed shotguns at the two female operators and ordered, “Pull all your plugs and get out of there.” The pair of terrified women disengag
ed all switchboard wires. One of the bandits moved down the hallway to act as lookout while the remaining four herded the two phone operators into the main office, where fifteen employees were beginning their day’s work. The staff, thinking it a prank, gazed on the masked men with a degree of amusement or annoyance. One of the gunmen expertly brandished his sawed-off shotgun and harshly said, “What do you think this is, a Halloween party?” The employees quickly realized their mistake and raised their hands.

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” the holdup spokesman warned. “All we want is the cabbage. Everyone lie down on the floor.”

  The office staff complied. Two gunmen stood over them, keeping a watch on the rest of the suite, while the last pair of bandits hurried for the mail room. En route they ran into an employee who had just left his traffic division office.

  “Get on the floor,” the man was told, “and you won’t get hurt. We want the cabbage.”

  The employee remained upright and immobile, staring at the pair of bandits, one masked by a burlap bag and the other by burnt-cork-darkened features. “We’re not fooling, mister,” the holdup man warned loudly. “Get on the floor.”

  The traffic man obeyed, and the two bandits strode into the mail room, where eight persons were at work. They, too, were commanded to lie on the floor. The woman in charge of the mail room also thought the two men were playing a prank. Her opinion changed when a gunman grabbed her roughly by the arm and ordered, “Get down on the floor before you get hurt.” The eight-person mail room staff obeyed.

  The pair of bandits cut across the mail room, walked up to the unlocked door of the vault room, turned the handle, pulled and entered. The burlap-masked robber trained his gun on the five employees who were in the process of filling pay envelopes and demanded, “Drop what you’re doing, and turn around and face the wall.”

  The staff turned away from three tables laden with money in boxes and bags and moved back to the wall. The bandit whose face was darkened with burnt cork stationed himself near the vault room door, where he could keep watch on the employees lying on the mail room floor, while his companion began stuffing bills into the burlap bag. Vault room personnel were continually warned, “Keep facing the wall. No one is going to get hurt if you keep following orders.”

  Nine-year-old Joanna Manartto walked up Damon Street, pulled open the main entrance door to the general manager’s building and entered. “I went to the plant to get twenty-five cents from Daddy for my lunch and our school Halloween party,” the child subsequently explained. “I went to the reception desk where the policeman who is always there gives me candy. The policeman said, ‘You wait here, honey, and I’ll get your daddy for you.’”

  Sixty-two-year-old Sturtevant guard John Cheefer started up the steps for the second floor in search of Joanna’s father, Anthony Manartto, a plant employee who worked in the second-floor heating and oil conditioning department. When Cheefer reached the second-floor landing, he was slugged in the chin and knocked down by the fifth bandit, who was standing sentinel there.

  “Stay down, mister,” the gunman warned. “Don’t move and you won’t get hurt.”

  Little Joanna went on to explain what followed: that, as she waited in the ground-floor reception area, “I heard a loud man’s voice say, ‘Get back there, you.’

  “A plain, fat man with a real gun came down the stairs. After him came a man carrying a big bag over his shoulder. The man with the bag and the other one ran outside to a car—a black shiny car. Then four more men all came down, and they were all carrying guns. And they all drove off with the door partly open.

  “The third man was also fat. The second man with the bag was thin.”

  Pino denies that he or the crew had anything to do with the Sturtevant robbery. He lies. Tony, Jazz, Mike and Sandy were all involved. They had crossed the field behind the plant before daybreak, sneaked inside and hidden upstairs until after the delivery was made. Their getaway was clean. The $109,000 stolen made it the largest cash stickup in the Boston area and not too far off the mark of what many considered to be the national cash theft record: $427,000 at gunpoint taken from the Ruble Ice Company of Brooklyn back in 1935.

  At approximately nine fifty the next morning, Friday, October 31, Halloween, and while the Boston Police Department was launching the largest manhunt in its history, a Brink’s truck made a payroll delivery to the American Sugar Refinery Company in South Boston. Ten minutes after the vehicle departed, Jimma Faherty, Stanley Gusciora and two other extra men Pino had used from time to time approached the building, wearing masks and carrying pistols and shotguns, stuck up a guard standing outside, marched him into the company’s 47 Granite Street entrance, missed seeing telephone operator Barbara Green, who was obscured from sight in the switchboard cubbyhole, prodded their captive along a thirty-foot stretch of first-floor hallway and ordered him to make the correct turn. One of the gunmen posted himself at the hallway corner. Barbara Green began dialing the number for Police Station House 6. Three armed robbers burst into the paymaster’s office, still holding the guard captive, shouted and yelled and cowed a staff of about thirty female employees into a corner. Two of the gunmen kept the prisoners covered as a third, whose head was covered by a burlap bag with eyeholes, walked directly to the cashier’s cage, pointed a gun at paymaster Albert Mamaty, who was making a call, and said, “Get the hell off the phone.”

  Mamaty faltered. The armed thief pulled the receiver from his hand and hung it up. Barbara Green waited as the phone at Station House 6 kept ringing.

  Several burly company workmen walked into the office for paychecks. The gunmen subdued them, but not too easily, and finally locked them into a small room, saying, “What’s wrong with you guys, this ain’t your money we’re taking.”

  “Where’s the box?” the burlap-masked robber at the cashier’s cage demanded of paymaster Mamaty. Another of the armed thieves pointed to a metal box containing small envelopes. Burlap Head grabbed it up.

  Station House 6 still didn’t answer. Barbara Green dialed Devonshire 1212—the police emergency number. An officer answered. She reported a robbery in progress just as the four masked men ran past, rushed out of the building and jumped into a car driven by Jimmy Costa.

  The getaway was successful. The total take was $29,000 in cash—of which Tony Pino, who was not present, received a full one-sixth share for having “owned” the score.

  *Records show Pino listed as an employee, not owner or operator of the diner. According to Pino, the lease was drawn in Tony Gaeta’s name; originally both he and Gaeta put up $1,000 per man to take over the operation and not long after, he allowed Gaeta to keep the $1,000 he had invested in the Socony service station in return for total control of the diner.

  Chapter Ten

  Last of the Eggs

  The American Sugar stickup, on the heels of the largest Boston heist in history—Sturtevant—added insult to injury, allowed the press corps to coin the phrase “Halloween Robberies,” but did little to intensify what was already the largest manhunt in memory for both the city and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. State troopers were placed on full alert, and roadblocks ordered for all main highways. In Boston itself the police department unleashed its favorite weapon as it had never been unleashed before—the SP or suspicious person pickup in which any suspect could be apprehended or questioned or detained without ever being officially placed under arrest. Geagan, Richardson, Faherty and Stanley Gusciora (a Pino extra), were all SP’d and questioned and released. Tony, who was almost never SP’d in situations like this, owing to the offices of detective Jim Crowley, was also brought in.

  “Mother of God, it was awful,” Tony attested. “They grabbed me on the street and took me to the basement at the police station and made me strip down to my skivvies. My skivvies was dirty and had holes in ’em. Them rotten sons of bitches didn’t gimme a chance to change into something respectable.”

  Pino was grilled by Jim Crowley; after swearing he knew nothing of the double robbe
ries, he was let go. Crowley spent extensive time talking to his number one informant, Joe McGinnis—who Pino swears knew nothing of the heists.

  On either Thursday or Friday, November 6 or 7—not November 8, as the papers would later print—Crowley arrived in Manhattan, along with Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant James F. Conniff. The pair of out-of-towners huddled with several old friends from the office of Manhattan DA, Frank Hogan, then went over to the Edison Hotel in midtown and planted a handful of electronic listening devices on phones in the rooms occupied by certain underworld money changers. The taps brought results. One of the money changers was seized and taken to the DA’s office. After a grilling by Assistant District Attorney William P. Sirigano, the suspect broke down, stated that Sam Granito had come to him several weeks earlier, saying he was going to Boston and “pull a big stickup,” that Granito was soliciting the changers’ future aid in converting “small bills into large ones.” The informer went on to say that Sam had returned from Boston a few days earlier, not only announcing the stickup was a success, but displaying newspaper clippings of the Sturtevant heist as well. Granito’s crowing to the money changer allegedly included the names of four accomplices—“Happy Joe” Bellino of New Jersey and a trio from the Boston area—Pino, Costa and Michael Geoghegan, AKA Geagan.

  Jim Crowley knew Granito well. He knew that Pino was arrested with Granito during the abortive robbery at Rhodes Brothers on Thanksgiving Day in 1937 (he believed that Sam, not Tony, was the boss of that ill-fated operation), knew that Granito had served time at Charlestown with Pino and Geagan, knew that Granito and Geagan had served on the same Merchant Marine ship during the war. Crowley may have known something else—something Pino found hard to admit: that approximately ten days before Sturtevant, Joe McGinnis may well have seen Granito entering Pino’s apartment on Columbus Avenue.