by Behn, Noel;
On Sunday, November 9, Joseph A. Bellino, a convicted jewel thief, was arrested in Newark, New Jersey. Crowley and Conniff participated in the Manhattan apprehension of Samuel S. Granito, leaving the seizure of Pino, Costa and Geagan to Boston area police. None of the fifteen eyewitnesses, employees and victims at either Sturtevant or American Sugar could identify Mike, Tony or Jimmy as holdup men. Geagan was released almost immediately. Costa was held for a short time while detectives tried to convince him to testify against his brother-in-law. Pino remained incommunicado and under arrest for thirteen days in lieu of $50,000 bail until a young criminal attorney by the name of Paul T. Smith was able to secure his release on November 22.
Pino never stood trial, but Joseph “Happy Joe” Bellino was extradited and did go before the jury, only to be found innocent. Sammy Granito, who had also been extradited, pleaded not guilty, was identified in court as the gunman whose mask had slipped during the Sturtevant robbery, was convicted for armed theft and sentenced to serve sixteen to twenty years at Massachusetts State Prison.
“I’m telling ya, the man they sent away for doing it didn’t do it!” Pino hotly avowed. Nevertheless, Tony, Sandy, Mike and Costa would, in the future, take a small percentage out of many a strictly crew-related haul and set it aside for Sam Granito.
James V. Crowley was publicly and departmentally credited and lauded for breaking the Sturtevant case—Boston’s largest armed robbery. The detective remained convinced that Tony had participated in the stickup but apparently didn’t believe he was the boss of the job; he would never fully forgive the garrulous pete man for having lied to him, could never fully conceive of Pino possessing the capacity to organize and direct a fair-to-middling criminal operation, let alone the ultimate in a slick, smooth, sophisticated caper—Sturtevant.
Crowley and other investigators would never solve the American Sugar armed robbery, wouldn’t be told until after the statute of limitations had run out that Pino, though not actually participating in the heist, had found, cased and “sold” the score to Faherty, Costa, Gusciora and two extra men for a full share of the take.
More surprisingly, the Boston police and officials of the money-moving company, while realizing that Sturtevant and American Sugar had each been held up only minutes after receiving a payroll shipment from Brink’s, never connected the two Halloween robberies to a conspiracy involving the following of armored trucks.
Fear of impromptu police surveillance forced a cessation of crew activity, even abbreviated. Pino’s annual Christmas Boost, but then as the new year of 1948 got under way, Tony, Mike, Sandy, often Jazz and Jimma, quite often Costa and Stanley Gusciora went back to what they did best together. Brink’s delivery operations were resurveilled, and although little change in procedure was noted, the robbery ring displayed an antipathy for company customers. New armored trucks were being surveilled—but not those belonging to Brink’s. Pino had grown interested in another money-carrying operation in the Boston area.
Had someone been observing the robbers’ public styles during this same period—as Pino professed to have feared and the others professedly doubted—little that was unusual would have been seen. Faherty vacillated between working part time as a bartender or stevedore or electrical handyman or janitor, usually could be found sometime during the course of most any winter’s night wandering drunkenly about without a topcoat and often without a jacket—occasionally without shoes or a shirt. Geagan appeared religiously at the docks each workday morning, as did Richardson, who in January had traded in his 1946 six-cylinder Oldsmobile and, through the auspices of a finance company, had bought a baby blue brand-new 1948 Oldsmobile 98. Barhopping and semiserious drunks remained Sandy and Mike’s favorite nighttime sports. Jazz Maffie continued to rise at noon, leisurely spend the afternoons at his ex officio office—Jimmy O’Keefe’s restaurant—making book or socializing, staying on into the evenings and having dinner there with his wife and friends. More often than not Gusciora would drop by Jimmy O’Keefe’s during the course of a night; more often than not he’d be accompanied by some attractive young lady-around-town or his latest pal—a smooth-moving, smooth-talking street thief with a pronounced lisp named Specs O’Keefe, who was not any relation to the restaurant’s proprietor.
Early February had seen Maffie have an exceptional run of gambling luck, winning $9,000. By the beginning of February he had lost it all—and more. As April neared, the small clothing factory Costa had purchased the year before went bankrupt.
The big news in the spring of 1948 dealt with Pino. Not only had he broken down and bought a new Buick, but he had also taken over as cook at the Egleston Square Diner—replete in a boosted white puffed chef’s hat and stolen white surgical gown.
“The food was starting to go to hell,” Mike Geagan recalls. “Tony’s cooking didn’t taste bad when we were in the joint. Anything that isn’t rat poison tastes good when you’re in the can. On the outside it could croak you. It was croaking us at the diner, but we had to be there. That’s where we made our meets—at Tony’s diner at night. We wouldn’t all come in together. We’d drop in one by one and get the news. Maybe that’s one reason Tony kept the joint open all night. We could drop in anytime and get the news.
“The clientele was getting worse than the food, worse than the coffee even,” Mike goes on to say. “A man could get badly damaged in there with the element that was coming in. Motorcycle guys and the like. They’d tangle with truck drivers who were steady customers. All our friends who were crooks stopped coming in there because of the blood. They called it the Bucket of Blood.
“The only one who could keep order was Mary. I was sitting next to her at the counter when a punk gave her some lip and—powee—her fist shot past me and knocked the chump cockeyed.”
Pino assessed the situation differently. “I was having trouble with cooks, that’s all. They kept passing out on me—from drink, not the smell of my food. I was cooking up the best pot of stew in town, and the coffee wasn’t as bad as people was saying. And them motorcycle fellas wasn’t so bad after you trained ’em. I kept a two-by-four under the counter, and after a few weeks they behaved.
“Now one a them motorcycle fellas give me one helluva scare,” Tony admitted. “I’m in there all alone behind the counter, and I hear him outside gunning his motorcycle and waking up the world. It’s maybe three in the morning. I only see his back, and when he comes in and up to the counter where I am, he has his head down. All I see is his leather back. Now he raises up his head and goes Grrrr. Mother of God, I damned near jumped through the roof. Not from the Grrr, see what I mean? Grrr don’t frighten nobody. What scared hell outta me was the gorilla face he’s wearing. He’s got on one of these rubber masks that was starting to be sold then. Rubber masks that go right over the head and make you look like a gorilla. I thought a goddamn gorilla had come up to me for a cup of coffee. It was gruesome. I never saw anything like it before.”
Mary Fryer, her four-year-old grandson and Tony Pino set out on a June trip. Their first stop was Atlantic City.
“So I’m walking with Mary and my grandchild down that boardwalk there,” Tony related, “and we see all these penny arcades where they gyp you. So we go in and take a look. Now one of the first things I spot are those masks like the motorcycle kid scared me with. Hideous-looking rubber items. And they didn’t only have gorillas you could pull down over your face, they had everybody—Chinese and Boris Karloff, too. So while Mary and my grandchild are looking in the other direction, pfft, I boost two or three. Stuff ’em under my coat. Every arcade we go to the next day I boost a coupla more.
“Now we go on down to Baltimore, and Mary and me get married [June, 1948]. When we go out to celebrate, I see more of them masks in the novelty stores. So I grab ’em.”
Brink’s had provided many a golden egg for the robbery crew over the previous two years. Five delivery routes had been followed from beginning to end, two more partially and, as a result, according to Pino’s estimate, individual
safecracks and stickups of customers serviced by the armored money movers had netted the thieves between $600,000 and $700,000—exclusive of Sturtevant [$109,000] and American Sugar [$29,000]—and another $350,000 to $400,000 from the pilferage of many sacks from parked trucks.*
By the time the winter thieving season of 1948 got under way, there was still many a lucrative score left on the Brink’s routes. A few involved safecracking. The balance required armed robbery.
Not that the thieves were averse to a stickup, if potential returns warranted it. But many of the regular crew members felt the robbery team had run out its string of luck with Brink’s, opined that sooner or later the police and company officials would have to realize what had been occurring—might have already done so—and were surreptitiously watching both the trucks and customers’ premises. If risks were to be taken, let them be taken elsewhere. Pino, for example, had tailed armored cars belonging to another money carrier in the Boston area, had spotted an estimated $3,000,000 in betting receipts being driven away from a local racetrack in a private car occupied by only two men.
Tony’s contention that every available golden egg be plucked from the nest before Brink’s was finally abandoned was overridden in a late September meet at his apartment. He kept sniping away in the weeks that followed, buttonholing fellow crew members at every opportunity to press for a continuation with Brink’s. In mid-October an accommodation was worked out. The crew would kill the duck that laid the golden eggs forever. They voted to pull a score that would force Brink’s to change almost every aspect of their operation and, therefore, discourage Pino, for all time, from ever venturing near the company again. They agreed to arm-rob 48 Truck of the estimated $2,000,000 in packages as it loaded up at the Chamber of Commerce building.
*These are strictly Pino’s assessments. Richardson and Maffie, while conceding the crew robbed Brink’s customers during this period, would give no further details. Costa, who was privy to most every side deal made by Tony, believes the $350,000 to $400,000 from pilferage is 50 percent too high, confirms that the other estimates, to his memory, are accurate.
Pino further stated that approximately seventy safe thefts and stickups were perpetrated against approximately forty-five different Brink’s customers but would name only a dozen of these robbery victims.
Brink’s Incorporated would make no comments on whether one dollar was stolen from parked trucks or the premises of customers during this period. Nor would they say how many customers they had in the Boston and northern New England area where Pino claims the bulk of the robberies occurred.
The Boston Police Department, while providing no actual records, confirms that at least eight of the robbery victims named by Pino had indeed been robbed. Seven of the thefts were believed to be unsolved. An arrest was made on the eighth, but there was no conviction.
Chapter Eleven
48 Track
Suspended in darkness, by heavy haze, a pair of shimmering beams descended, enlarged and intensified and slowed, came to a stop, after several seconds went off. Maffie waited for the clanking metal, then stepped out of the alcove. He could see the cab of the Brink’s armored truck and departing driver’s silhouette in the glare of light splashing out through the glass doors two blocks up Federal Street. Before crossing over to be on the same side of the street as the parked truck, Jazz watched the man enter the Chamber of Commerce building. He waited in the doorway for three or four minutes, saw a Brink’s guard carrying what looked like a rifle emerge into the slight splash of light and post himself—gun raised across his chest—beside the truck. Maffie adjusted his workman’s cap and jacket, stepped out onto the sidewalk and started walking toward the sentinel.
“It was five thirty or six [A.M.], and I’m walking at the guy,” Maffie relates. “He stood there with His gun, and I’m walking toward him dressed up like a jabone truck driver. I walked straight at him, and he don’t give me a burn. I see two more hacks inside the lobby pushing, the money cart for the doors, and they don’t give me a burn either. Nobody bothered with me. I kept walking. I walked right past the guy and his rifle, and he kept on acting like I wasn’t there.
“So I keep going up Federal to where Tony Pino’s hiding. Tony Pino’s been watching this whole thing because it’s his goddamn crazy idea. When I got to where Tony Pino was, he said, ‘What’d he do?’
“‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he shot me with his gun.’
“Tony Pino got all excited and said, ‘Where’d he get you? Where’d he get you? I didn’t hear no shots. We better get outta here!’
“What I wanted to say was he shot me three times and killed me with a silencer, but you can’t do things like that with Tony Pino. His sense of humor went down with the Titanic.
“Anyway, we knew the hack outside would be easy to grab, but we knew that anyway. I watched him the year before. What I found out walking down the street was the hacks inside were pushing the money truck off the elevator sooner than we expected.”
Other things that had been observed the year before were noted again a week later as the spotting continued. A week after that the final plan was worked out.
Pino would drive the paneled flower truck; drop Maffie off at the Federal Street corner above the Chamber of Commerce building; continue on and turn down Congress Street; drop Richardson, Geagan and Faherty a block below the Chamber of Commerce; swing around and turn into Federal Street and back into an alley two blocks below the Chamber of Commerce; park and let Gusciora off. 48 Truck had maintained an immaculate schedule in the previous weeks of casing and was expected to do so again. Gusciora, costumed as a window washer, would already be walking up Federal Street when 48 Truck turned in, starting for the Chamber of Commerce building on the near sidewalk. On seeing 48 Truck’s headlights, Maffie would step into Federal Street, starting down for the Chamber of Commerce doors on the far sidewalk. Richardson, Geagan and Faherty would be crossing the Congress Street parking lot, stationing themselves in the darkness so they could see through the glass door and up the lobby to the elevators. By the time 48 Truck had parked and the driver and gun-toting guard got out and the driver went into the building Maffie and Gus would be only about ten yards from the truck. Once Richardson, Geagan and Faherty saw the driver enter the elevator, they would move up near the doors and wait. Gusciora would pass the truck, wheel around and disarm the rifle-carrying guard. If there was any trouble in the subduing, Maffie, who would be crossing the street behind the truck, could lend a hand. Gusciora would handcuff the guard and slap tape over his mouth. On seeing Maffie signal through the far glass door, Richardson, Geagan and Faherty would enter the Congress Street end of the lobby and hurry past the elevators, descending the stairs just beyond the elevator. When the driver and guard, who had been upstairs, got off the elevator and pushed the cart of packages past the stairwell, Faherty, Geagan and Richardson would move in from behind and capture the pair. Sandy would push the cart on out through the door while Geagan assisted Faherty with taping the prisoner’s mouth and applying handcuffs. Once Pino saw Sandy emerge with the cart, he would drive hell-bent for leather up the street and pull in in front of the glass doors. Maffie would help Sandy load while Gusciora led the captive sidewalk guard into the lobby and turned him over to Faherty. By this time Geagan would be on his way out to help with the loading. Faherty would take the third captive down to the bottom of the stairwell and handcuff him to the railing to which the other two Brink’s truckmen were handcuffed. Gus would go out and help Mike, Jazz and Sandy. By the time Faherty got outside the loading would be finished. He would get on the truck with the others, and Tony would make the getaway.
Orders went out for all crewmen to desist from any type of crime and prepare their alibis. In traditional prescore procedure, not even Pino would go near the Chamber of Commerce building until the night of the strike. 48 Truck would be taken in fourteen days—Friday, December 10—at the onset of Pino’s usually sacrosanct Christmas Boost season.
The Christmas Boost officially beg
an on Monday morning, December 6, 1948, as Big Steve and Tony drove away from Boston. There was no particular reason for their selecting their first target, other than that Pino happened to be driving through Arlington en route to the first scheduled shoplifting site in Lincoln, Massachusetts. As a matter of fact, there was every reason for the pair of holiday boosters not to stop in Arlington, particularly not at the R. W. Shattuck Company. They had pilfered the premises so many times in the past it was almost a joke. As a matter of fact, they laughed when they saw the Shattuck storefront come into view. With a touch of evil glee, they decided what better place to launch their Yule thievery season.
Pino pulled to the curb, left the motor running. Big Steve got out, walked into Shattuck’s. Nothing of value was easily accessible. Rather than leave empty-handed, the booster slipped a package containing one dozen golf balls under his coat and started out. Tony waited until his partner was back in the car, released the emergency brake and shifted gears. Before he could accelerate, policemen blocked his way. Tony swore he didn’t know Big Steve, that the stranger must have climbed into the wrong car. Big Steve swore he didn’t know Pino. At the December 8 hearing in the Third District Court of Eastern Middlesex, Tony was charged with stealing a dozen golf balls of value less than one hundred dollars. He pleaded not guilty. The Court convicted him of larceny and on December 24, 1948, the Court passed sentence of one year’s imprisonment in the House of Correction. The decision was immediately appealed. Tony’s lawyer was optimistic, believed the jail sentence could be reduced to a probation. Pino wasn’t too sure, but at least he was free until a verdict was handed up.
The time, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, was shortly after 5:15 A.M. the first Friday in January—Friday, January 7, 1949.
