Big Stick-Up at Brink's!

by Behn, Noel;

  Needless to say, the $109,000 from Sturtevant was many a wide rung above what the men who were in on it—Pino, Geagan, Richardson, Maffie and Costa—usually grabbed. The bread-and-butter score for Tony and his regulars ranged from $5,000 to $15,000. Not that $10,000 or $15,000 was all that bad—not in the age when the FBI itself considered $25,000 a major haul.

  The problem, if a problem existed, was that Tony Pino was going about planning a possible $6,000,000 to $7,000,000 job on a $15,000 mentality. Nowhere was this more in evidence than with alibis. The conspirators discussed their postrobbery movements to some extent during a series of meets in Tony’s living room, but usually in general terms. As had always been true of Pino jobs in the past, one robber had little or no idea what the other intended to do subsequent to a few requisite post-haul activities. What had been applicable in the past for a $10,000 job was now applied to a potential $6,000,000 or $7,000,000 stick-up: Each man was solely responsible for where he went, what he did and what he said following the score; each man would stay away from the next man unless otherwise instructed by Tony; each man would return to his usual way of life following the haul.

  One previous rule was stressed: No one was to spend one cent of loot money in an ostentatious way.

  “That’s the coppers’ best way of finding you,” states Mike Geagan. “They wait for the man who goes around spending big. Throwing the dough away. Our men were told not to do that. Our men were told not to have one dollar more than they usually had in their pocket.”

  On the threat of death they were told.

  “It was a ’49 black Chevy four-door,” Costa recalls. “Barney and me went up to Brockton to get it. Barney said he spotted it when he was going to knock over a house up there. The people were away on vacation. Barney left the silver alone and came back and got me. We went and grabbed the car. That was the car I was going to follow the truck in. I put it over at Savin Hill.”

  Susceptibility to arrest and the ultimate availability of men for the immediate postrobbery chores were discussed at several meets in Tony’s living room. Geagan was still on parole and had been questioned recently concerning several large stickups. It was imperative that he be home as soon as possible after the score. It was decided that whatever else, he would be let off the getaway truck first. Jimma Faherty had recently had his parole revoked, effective September 30, 1949, and was awaiting word whether it would be reinstated or he would be sent back to prison, so his time subsequent to the robbery was at best limited. O’Keefe and Baker were also on parole, but didn’t seem concerned, said they could help out for a while. Pino, always a prime SP candidate in any Boston area robbery of note, insisted he would have to get off the truck as soon as possible and establish his alibi. Sandy and Gus had time. Jazz, not known to the police as anything other than a bookmaker, could be counted on as well. Costa, Banfield and McGinnis already had their postrobbery activities stipulated.

  A plan evolved which called for all the men who would go to the robbery site, save for Pino and Geagan, to return to wherever the plant would be. Faherty would assist Costa in gathering up the costumes and the gun satchel and taking them away. Costa would subsequently drop Jimma off. Sandy, Henry, Jazz, Gus and Specs would unload the money itself. Barney would drive the truck away to whatever hiding place he and McGinnis chose, wipe it clean of fingerprints and then go out and establish his alibi. Jazz, Gus and Specs would also leave following the unloading. Sandy and Henry would stay behind and count as much of the $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 as they could before Jazz came back to relieve them. Jazz would continue counting until Barney showed up to take the tabulated amount away for safe overnight keeping. Just who would stay with the balance of the loot overnight wasn’t resolved. It certainly wasn’t going to be McGinnis. Joe himself had made it clear he wasn’t going anywhere near the loot until noon the next day, when the official count took place.

  Banfield and Costa, each in his own car, began practicing the run into Brink’s.

  Pino did relent a degree in regards to the garage on Blue Hill Avenue. The premises could be used—but only as the starting point for the haul. The truck was moved in, and so were the costumes and rope and tape and sisal bags and laundry bags. The leather gun satchel remained at the Savin Hill plant, along with the hot Chevrolet from Brockton.

  The meets in Tony’s living room went on. More than were really needed. Someone or other suggested that they hit the joint on Halloween because they would be wearing Halloween masks. That was turned down because of what the police and newspapers still referred to as the Halloween Robberies—Sturtevant and American Sugar. Even the police might be able to put two and two together. Someone else suggested they go in around Thanksgiving. Pino gave a categorical no to that. Someone wondered aloud what the seven armed robbers on the premises should do if the Brink’s guards balked at their command. And someone else said maybe they should bring in bigger guns, and Mike Geagan grew incensed at that and shouted, “Sure, why don’t you bring in goddamn machine guns—try putting machine guns under those pea coats.” And Specs O’Keefe, who was already starting to complain about all the delays and starting to blame Pino for the delays, got it in his mind that Pino had suggested taking in machine guns under their pea coats. And Joe McGinnis was getting pissed off at all the delays and blaming Pino. And Gus and Mike and Sandy and Costa were all going out and burglarizing other scores with Pino, and most of these scores had been found by Tony while he followed armored trucks belonging to companies other than Brink’s. And Jimma Faherty was drinking too much to care about delays or anything else, and Jazz Maffie was in no hurry. And Jimmy Costa and Barney Banfield kept making practice runs from the Blue Hill garage into Brink’s in their own cars and got it down pretty well. And assignments were given as to where each robber would get on the truck, and nobody knew where the hell they were going after the score because Tony Pino hadn’t come up with a joint, and nobody but Tony Pino and Jimmy Costa and Mike Geagan and Sandy Richardson and Joe McGinnis knew this. And one of the guys who didn’t know this was Specs O’Keefe, so he started bellyaching all the more to Gus, or at least that’s what Gus told Jazz, and Gus told Sandy he thought they should hold off Brink’s until they hit that civilian car that belonged to the armored truck service that Pino had followed and that picked up receipts from the racetrack that Sandy estimated ran to about $2,000,000 in cash. And Tony himself preferred ripping off the Brink’s truck that always parked on the main street in Danvers. And Halloween passed while all this was going on and Thanksgiving passed and Jimmy Costa was running his butt between the lottery and Harbor Motor Terminal and driving for the out-of-town scores the regular crew and Gus were hitting and practicing with the cars for the Big Haul and every free night climbing onto the roof at 109 Prince Street and watching the employees in the vault room close up—and he didn’t like the setup at all on Thursday or Friday night. On Thursday and Friday nights the lights were all wrong; the counting room had people in it on Thursday and Friday nights, people who often stayed until after the vault was closed.

  Pino and Geagan kept sneaking into Brink’s late at night and reading the clipboard, and as Thanksgiving neared, they saw the tally for Thursday and Friday nights go up to $9,000,000 and $8,000,000 respectively, and when Thanksgiving passed, the totals for Wednesday night started to go up.

  “So I was stuck, see what I mean?” said Pino. “We had to get going. We had to hit her between Thanksgiving and Christmas when all them holiday receipts was in. We already seen nine million for Thursday, and we figure all it can do before Christmas is get healthier.

  “So I said okay, you can use the goddamn plant. It damn near broke my heart. Blue Hill was the best goddamn plant I ever had in my life, but we had to get going. Thursday was our night to be the richest millionaires in the world.

  “The last thing I think I done,” Tony recalled, “was notch them keys. I filed notches on the head so Henry could feel which was which with his gloves on in the dark. The downstairs door [the main door at 165 P
rince] got one notch, and the metal door [the door from the staircase into the outer lobby] got two, and the one to the left [the door in the lobby opening into the corridor] got three.

  “Oh, yeah, another thing. I give the fellas a code word. ‘Paul Revere is off.’ When they heard that, they know we were off and running for Brink’s—‘Paul Revere is off.’”

  *This was solely a Pino observation. Tony insisted that when, the previous winter, he first saw the vault door it was a dark color with the date of construction painted on it. Costa, Richardson, Geagan and Maffie have no clear memory of what color the vault door was in either 1948 or 1949. By the winter of 1949, the vault door was definitely off-white. FBI records do not indicate whether it had recently been painted. Boston Police Department and Brink’s Incorporated information on this point was not made available to the author.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Lights and Window

  Richardson jerked back the flap in the rear of the rigged truck. Maffie scrambled on. Pino slapped the back of the cab. Barney accelerated. Sandy rebuttoned the flap. Maffie felt his way through the darkness, touched Tony’s hand, took the laundry sack given him and sat down. His eyes adjusted quickly. He began shedding his hat, topcoat and jacket. The truck stopped for Jimma and Henry to board, then drove on to where Gus and Specs were waiting. Sandy kept his eye to the rear peephole. The Chevrolet driven by Costa was about thirty feet behind. Pino moved through the darkness, checking each man’s costume, made sure each had his gun. The wood beams creaked more than anticipated. Tony moved forward, slapped the top of the cab twice. Twice meant to slow down. The sisal bags and rope and tape were distributed. Pino again checked the men. Everything was fine. He took the large round ring bearing three notched keys out of his pocket and handed it to Henry Baker. Then he went to the front peephole.

  South Station could be seen ahead. Pino whispered something to Sandy. The truck slowed to a stop. Sandy pulled open the flap. Mike Geagan jumped on. Barney accelerated too rapidly. Mike was almost thrown to the floor. Costumed robbers already seated fell back on one another. The cab roof was pounded twice.

  Sandy checked out Mike’s costume and gave him his sisal bag while Tony stayed at the front peephole. Wide Atlantic Avenue lay ahead. The police station came into view to the right. The flat ground to the left began to rise. The reinforced front of Copps Hill could be seen ahead to the left. Atlantic began to turn, continued to run around the base of the hill. Atlantic became Commercial, and Commercial continued to turn, then finally straightened out. Tony could see the North Terminal building ahead to the left. He hurried back to the rear of the truck, grabbed onto the rigging, warned the others to brace themselves.

  The truck slowed, turned sharply to the left, straightened out, seemed to continue on even more slowly. Pino kept his eye tight against the rear right peephole. Costa’s car turned onto Prince. The vehicle and people doors of the garage building were seen. Moments later the door at 165 was visible. The truck decelerated to almost a crawl. Tony watched the edge of the building pass. He squinted up. Barney slowed to barely a crawl. He grumbled something that no one understood. The truck inched forward. His angle still wasn’t right to see the windows over the playground. A few more feet of road were traveled, and then the truck completely stopped. Pino could see the windows—all were dark. He hurried forward and pounded hard on the cab—pounded four times. The truck lurched ahead and immediately took a sharp right turn.

  The following Thursday night Costa started out twenty minutes earlier. The truck was already parked and waiting when he reached Atherton and Copley just behind Egleston Square in Roxbury. Jimmy raised and dimmed his lights. The canvas-backed truck started off. He followed behind about thirty to forty feet, fell back farther when the red taillights ahead glowed on. The Thursday before, he had been too close when gang members boarded. Maffie had been caught in his headlight beam. Tonight he didn’t let that happen. All he could see ahead was a dark form climbing onto the truck. Jimma and Henry were dark forms to him, as were Gus and Specs when they got on some five minutes later. Geagan, unfortunately, was standing near a streetlight.

  Jimmy let the back of the truck get some fifty feet ahead of him as he drove along Atlantic Avenue. The canvas-rigged Ford pickup maintained a steady forty-mile-an-hour pace. Jimmy sped up and narrowed the gap by ten feet when he saw Copps Hill begin to loom to the left. He momentarily lost sight of the rear red lights as they traveled around the Commercial Street circle at the hill base. He accelerated on the straightaway, was only twenty-five feet behind when the humped canvas-back truck slowed and turned left into Prince Street. As the truck crawled past the door at 165, he was no more than ten feet to the rear.

  The truck slowed to a near stop just past the end of the building, suddenly shot forward, took a sharp right turn and sped into Lafayette. Jimmy pulled beyond the end of the building and gazed up. The lights were on in the first, second, third, fourth and fifth windows.

  Jimmy accelerated gently, wheeled a hard right onto Lafayette, took another right onto Endicott at about five miles an hour. He drove somewhat faster up Endicott and around right onto Commercial, slowed again as he pulled back into Prince and parked opposite the garage and people door. He got out and started walking.

  When he reached the playground, he knew he had moved too slowly. The top of the canvas rigging could be seen passing up on Hull Street. He increased his stride, entered the door at 109 Prince, took the steps he had so often taken in the past two at a time, reached the roof and glanced to his right. The truck was parked up in the shadows on the Snowhill side of the intersection.

  Jimmy stared across the playground. The first five windows were still illuminated. The vault was clearly visible behind the fifth window. The vault was open. Jimmy raised his binoculars. Two men were handing canvas bags to another man inside the vault. The binoculars swung across the fourth window and stopped at the third. Two men were standing at one of the desks in the counting room talking. The binoculars moved to the second window. Two more men were seated at counting room desks, doing some type of paperwork.

  The glasses swung ninety degrees to the right. Someone was coming forward from the truck. The glasses moved back to the fifth window. Grayish white canvas sacks were still going into the vault. Again the glasses moved, and then again. People remained in the counting room. The men standing atop Hull Street seemed to be staring at him. More sacks were going into the vault. Two of the men in the counting room left through the corridor door. Another left. More sacks went into the vault. The last man in the counting room, the one seated at a desk, rose, turned out all the lights and walked into the vault room.

  Costa got ready to give a go-ahead signal. And as he did, the vault door closed. He flashed a different code instruction off to the right. The men standing on Hull Street scrambled back into the truck. The humped-back canvas Ford pulled away—headed for home.

  “We went in there later in the night,” Mike Geagan relates. “We read the chart. They had ten million six hundred thousand in there. That’s what we missed. Ten million six hundred thousand dollars. It was right near Christmas. That’s why we came right back the next night. Friday always held close to what Thursday had. This was Christmas time.”

  It was drizzling. Costa’s binocular lenses were moist, but even so he could see that the vault was open and being loaded. All the other windows on the line were dark. He gave the go-ahead signal.

  The truck was parked at a different angle from the night before. He could barely see even the top of the humped canvas-covered back, didn’t observe any activity at all. Then, one by one, figures came into view at the head of the terraced staircase—two, three, four, then after a brief interval, five, six and seven semisilhouetted figures all with the look of Brink’s armored car crewmen about them: peaked caps, square-shouldered jackets. One by one they descended to the second-level terrace, angled away back across and reached the steps leading down to the third and final far broader terrace.

  The bi
noculars rose, swung to the left, stopped at the only illuminated window—the fifth window. The man kneeling before the open vault handed up bags. The man inside took them, placed them on a shelf in the rear. Another man came forward from the far end of the vault room, from the control room. The man kneeling before the vault stood up, went to talk with the man from the rear—from the control room.

  Three, four, five capped coated figures reached the third terrace and started across the third terrace.

  The man inside the vault stepped out and joined the conversation between the man who had been kneeling and the man from the control room. Two more men entered the vault room from the check-in room. One carried a Coke. One wore a uniform Brink’s jacket. Everyone else, the other four, was in shirt sleeves. Three of the four in shirt sleeves wore gun holsters.

  The sixth and seventh capped and coated figures stepped onto the third terrace and hurried to catch up to the line which was nearing the final staircase.

  The man carrying a Coke gazed down at the yellow sheet the man from the control booth was displaying. The man with the Coke shook his head, raised the Coke bottle in the direction of the vault. The man in the uniform jacket and the man who had been kneeling walked over to the vault and pulled close the heavy door.

  Jimmy Costa flashed a signal. The capped and coated figures turned around and started back up the terraced staircase.

  “Let me tell you how much was in it that night,” Pino says. “Mike and me came back and read the chart that night. We missed nine goddamn million dollars.”

  The glowing white ball atop the three-sided namesake building at the south tip of Times Square began its descent. Tony Pino listened to the event over a stolen radio console, heard that the blanket of watching faces below the tower numbered no more or less than on New Year’s Eves gone by.

  If the crowd was not as jubilant as usual, which was reported, perhaps there was cause. Not only was 1949 drawing to a close and a decade drawing to a close, but so was the first half of what Winston Churchill had already called “the horrible twentieth century.” It hadn’t started out that horrible, not for a young, energetic United States rich in natural and human resources. Allan Nevins summed up the first fifty years of the 1900’s in a syndrome he called Audacious America; lauded Mark Twain whose “get rich schemes display a high deference to America’s spirit of trial and error.” Chicago, back in the early thirties, celebrated the period with a world’s fair entitled Century of Progress.