Final Confession

by Brian P. Wallace

  “I own ’em.”

  “Honest to God?” Phil heard a voice from behind him say. Startled, Phil turned quickly and saw Tony for the first time. He was only five-three and would barely tip the scales at 110 pounds, but he had managed to remain undetected, which gained Phil’s immediate respect. Later, Phil said of Tony, “He had big black glasses. They looked like he’d taken the bottoms off of two Coke bottles and put frames around them. He wasn’t at all what I’d expected.” Tony was from Revere, Angelo told Phil, but had always hung out with kids from the North End.

  Of the time they met, Phil said, laughing, “When the guy said ‘Honest to God’ he blessed himself!” It reminded me of when we were little kids in the North End and someone would challenge whatever you said by saying, ‘Mother’s honor?’ Then you had to raise your right hand and say ‘Mother’s honor’ back to him. If you couldn’t say ‘Mother’s honor,’ everyone knew you were lying. I don’t even know why, but that day I said to Tony, ‘Mother’s honor.’ All three of us started to laugh hysterically.”

  That was the start of a three-man team that would become legendary in New England throughout the 1960s. They were a most unlikely threesome.

  Phil was quiet, introspective, always plotting the next move. He never shared himself or any details of his life with any of them. They learned, though, that, like his father, he had a temper.

  Angelo was an imposing physical presence whose menacing look was enough to scare anyone. Like Phil, Angelo was quiet and a perfectionist who never tired of going over details. He had a steady temperament.

  And Tony. “The son of a bitch never shut up,” joked Phil. “He had a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and then apologizing over and over until he had to be physically threatened to make him shut up. I once told him he had foot-in-the-mouth disease, and Angelo said, ‘Don’t tell him that; he’ll be at Mass General tomorrow demanding a checkup.’ We would be clocking jobs, and there were times when Tony spoke nonstop for over two hours,” Phil said in amazement. “It would get so bad, Angelo and I would have to completely shut him out—but he’d keep on talking anyway.”

  While Phil and Angelo looked like wise guys, Tony looked the exact opposite, which worked in their favor on many occasions. “Not only could he talk,” Phil said, “the son of a bitch could eat. And he never stopped talking about food. He’d say, ‘Hey, Phil, how about this for a sangwich?’ and then he’d describe his idea for a new kind of sandwich for the next half hour. Once he told me, ‘Phil, I could make you a sangwich that would make your dick stiff.’”

  That was the team: three men nobody knew. Three men who would steal millions of dollars in just six and a half years. Three men—one from the North End, one from Medford, and one from Revere—who would have died for each other and often came close to doing so. Their three-man crime wave eventually had everyone from J. Edgar Hoover to Brink’s, Incorporated, trying in exasperation to catch them.

  IN SOME WAYS Phil Cresta was unlike any of the other wise guys who hung around the North End. First of all, he didn’t consider himself a wise guy, and he certainly never gambled. A lot of the North End wise guys walked around with the thousand-dollar suits and four pounds of jewelry. Phil Cresta thought that jewelry was something to steal, not wear. Because he shunned the limelight, most police officers didn’t know Phil Cresta from Phil Rizzuto. That was just the way Cresta wanted it. In today’s jargon Phil would be called a control freak. Back then he was often called a taskmaster.

  He went over every detail of every plan until he knew what he’d be doing step by step. When he teamed up with Angelo and Tony, he’d have them go over details until they could recite in their sleep where they were to be, and at what time exactly, because it was planning and good decision making that kept them alive and out of jail.

  While Phil was planning the parking meter scam, he watched parking attendants for hours. He noted what they wore, how they opened the meters, all their mannerisms. When he went to Chicago to have the duplicate keys made, he asked the gang’s locksmith if the Accardo mob had a tailor. People who heard the question assumed Phil wanted to pick up a few new suits while he was in the Windy City. He was given the name and address of a guy the Chicago syndicate used. “Can this guy be trusted?” Phil asked one of Accardo’s hit men. “Yeah, I promise he won’t tell a soul that you wear a forty-four long,” the guy said, laughing. “I don’t want a suit,” Phil responded, “I don’t wear them. I need someone to make me a uniform.” He was driven to the tailor in downtown Chicago.

  Phil handed the tailor a picture of a Boston parking meter attendant and asked if he could make that uniform. The tailor studied the photo and said, “I can match everything except the patches.” Phil produced two pristine patches that a certain woman in the Boston traffic commissioner’s office had given to him. “Are these all right?” he asked. “They’re perfect,” the tailor answered, full of new respect. This was the start of a long friendship and working relationship between Cresta and the Chicago tailor, who received a nice Christmas bonus from Boston from then on.

  The tailor kept Phil’s, Angelo’s, and Tony’s sizes on file. Phil would fly to Chicago and have whatever uniform he needed made while he visited his sister, or he would send the tailor a photo in the mail with specific instructions. All three uniforms would be sent to Phil by mail.

  “Blending in was half the battle,” Phil said. “My guy in Chicago was the best. He would even put phony name tags on the uniforms that we wore. We felt invincible, and that helped us to do what we had to do. We had every kind of armored guard uniform in existence. We had Brink’s uniforms and hats, Skelly uniforms and hats, Armored Car Carrier Corporation uniforms and hats. We also had painters’ uniforms or mechanics’ uniforms, UPS uniforms—you name it, we had it. When we pulled a job in broad daylight, it didn’t matter what we wore, as long as we had masks that concealed our faces. We never wore anything twice, because it would give the feds an MO [method of operation]. Most guys get caught because they forget to take care of the little things. I vowed that would never happen to us.”

  How they got to and from a crime scene was just as important to Phil as what they did once there. “We would get trucks from different rental companies and have them professionally painted with a bogus company name on the side. Once the job was done, we’d have them repainted the color they were when we rented them.” Many times, when they returned a truck or van, the owner would remark how clean the truck looked, never realizing that it had a brand-new paint job.

  The same thing held true for cars. Tony and Angelo were two of the best car thieves in the business. When they spotted the car they wanted, they would break into it and take off in less than a minute. “Stealing the car wasn’t the hard part, it was where you stole it that mattered,” Phil noted. They never had a stolen car for more than one day. That was an absolute rule. “The last thing we needed,” Phil pointed out, “was to have the car we were riding in on the stolen car list.”

  Logan Airport’s long-term parking lot was an ideal source of cars. The night before a score was to go down, Tony and Angelo would drive over to the airport and park their car near the long-term lot. It was amazing to Phil how naive people could be. “People would actually put a note on the dashboard near the front window saying when they’d be returning from their trip. It was like taking candy from a baby.” Angelo and Tony would search for a car with such a note. As soon as they found one it was theirs, as long as the car’s inspection sticker was valid. Long-term parking was one twenty-dollar fee, whether your car sat for five or twenty days—so there were no tickets. Tony or Angelo, whoever was driving, would pay twenty dollars and be buzzing through the tunnel between the airport and Boston proper before you could say “stolen car.”

  Then they’d wash the car and inspect it. They looked at the headlights, the brake lights, the directional lights, and anything else that a cop or a state trooper might pull them over for. Once confident that the car was in decent shape, they would p
ark it at the Fenway Motor Inn lot until the job began. When the job was completed, Tony would drive the car back to Logan and put it back where he’d found it or in a spot nearby. He’d walk out of the lot and drive home with Angelo, who would have followed him.

  Nobody ever reported a stolen car because of them, and the owners were often pleasantly surprised that their cars were so clean when they returned. Except for the people who were the team’s victims, it was a win-win situation.

  5

  A Key for Your Thoughts

  IN SOME WAYS Boston is a small town, and everyone knows who’s doing what. By August 1963 Cresta’s team was pulling off respectable smaller jobs and not getting caught. “You had to be on your toes all the time,” Phil said. “No matter how many friends you had or how many cops you paid off, there was always one guy who didn’t like you or one cop who didn’t get enough. I was constantly watching my back, constantly paying off people to be quiet. It only takes one pissed-off guy to bring you down. Most of the guys who ended up in Walpole never knew who ratted them out. It was expensive. We had to provide our own muscle just to keep people off our backs. But in a tough business, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

  Phil, Tony, and Angelo worked at developing a string of “ears” throughout Boston. “You can never have enough ears,” Phil stated. “I might have had only two eyes, but I had a couple of hundred ears working for me by the mid-sixties.”

  These hired ears, not unlike the ones on people’s heads, came in different styles. One ear might share information on one good score he’d been planning for years but never had the courage to pull off himself. Another ear might work in a bank or at an armored car facility or in some other business where money changed hands and either wanted more money or simply talked too much. Still another might have a vendetta against a certain individual or company. Everyone knows that the best way to get back at someone is through the pocketbook.

  A friendly bartender or barber was one of the best kind of ears; people told them things without being aware they were doing so. Pretty women were great ears too. Then there were the professional ears, or “moles,” who made a living out of dealing in information. “I liked working with reliable moles because they knew the importance of keeping their own mouths shut, even though they made a living out of other people opening theirs,” Phil explained. A good mole could make a fine living without worrying about going to prison or getting shot, as long as he knew who he was dealing with.

  Being an ear was a very competitive business and, as in any other, buyers who paid the most usually got the best results. Everyone knew that Angiulo, now clearly an underboss to Patriarca, could pay the highest price for ears, but a lot of people on the street were afraid to hook up with the mob. This drove them to listen for Phil, Angelo, and Tony. “That was fine with us,” Phil said, laughing. “We always paid top dollar for good information. When word got around that we could deliver—and the return was good—we had more info on potential jobs than we could handle. It was simple: you had to spend money to make money. We treated people with respect—not like Angiulo, who intimidated and insulted people—and the good ears always came back to us.”

  One of Phil’s favorite ears was a barber who still owns a shop on Commonwealth Avenue, in Kenmore Square. Phil would hang out there and act as if he were waiting for a haircut. He’d listen to some of the stories and watch the ball players, who stayed at the nearby Kenmore Hotel, come in for haircuts. Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Billy Martin were among the players who came in whenever they were in town, playing the Red Sox. It wasn’t surprising to see Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin in the barbershop one morning and then at McGrail’s, getting last call that night. The bartender at McGrail’s was Phil’s other favorite ear. “People tend to tell a friendly bartender or barber a lot more than they tell anyone else. Every bartender and barber who worked in Kenmore Square was on our payroll,” Phil explained.

  Kenmore Square was now Phil’s center of operation. It was away from Angiulo’s North End operations, and since Phil had separated from his wife, Dorothy, earlier in 1963, he’d been living rent-free at the Fenway Motor Inn, across the street from McGrail’s. The motel was owned by the legendary Boston ex-dentist and bookmaker Doc Sagansky, who was a close friend of Phil’s. Since the mobster didn’t charge for the two rooms Phil kept there, whenever he scored big, Phil compensated Sagansky in return.

  At this time, there were several banks around Kenmore Square. One day after a Sox game a bartender at McGrail’s mentioned to Phil that a guard had been coming into the bar after the bank closed, and he regularly stayed until last call. Phil stored the information away and asked the bartender, who was on Phil’s payroll, to point the guy out the next time he came in. About a week later, Phil and Angelo were in the bar, and the bartender kept looking toward Phil to get his attention. When the bartender had it, he motioned his head toward a guy sitting alone at the end of the bar. The guy wore a bank guard’s uniform.

  Phil told Angelo he had some business to attend to and moved to the stool next to the bank guard. Phil started talking about the Red Sox, a subject everyone in Boston had an opinion about. Within an hour he had this guard thinking he was his new best friend.

  The guard, it turned out, had no family and was bitter that life had passed him by. He made little money at his job, and it was obvious that he liked to drink. Phil began buying him top-shelf whiskey, meeting him nightly, and listening to his tales of woe. Within a week Phil had the guard in his pocket.

  One night the guard got really drunk. When last call came, Phil invited him to sleep it off at one his rooms at the Fenway Motor Inn. He had two, he pointed out, and they were conveniently located right across the street. The guard was reluctant at first. Phil told him he’d set the alarm so the guard would be on time for work. When Cresta added that there was unlimited booze at the inn, the setup was synched. A half hour after entering Phil’s room, the guard was out cold.

  Phil telephoned Angelo, who came over. Together they went through the guard’s belongings. “The guy had a key ring hooked onto his belt, so we took the keys off one by one. When we had them all, we took them next door to the room I used for a workshop and made duplicates,” Phil said. He set the alarm for the guard as he’d told him he would, returned all the keys to the key ring, and spent the night in his second room. Two nights later the guy was back at McGrail’s, falling all over himself, thanking Phil for his kindness and hospitality. After giving the man half a dozen drinks, Phil remarked that the guard carried a lot of keys on his ring and asked what they were all for. “Oh, some are for my house and some are for work,” the guy replied nonchalantly. Phil called Angelo.

  Several hours later, around three-thirty in the morning, they headed over to a certain Kenmore Square bank. “There’s no way they’d give that drunk any important keys,” Angelo insisted as Phil tried one in the bank’s back door, then a second. The tumblers clicked. Phil turned to Angelo and responded, “That drunk just got us into this bank.” Phil and Angelo looked at each other, laughed, relocked the door, and walked away.

  Within a week, Phil’s team knew everything they needed to know about the bank’s layout. “Getting into a bank isn’t that hard, all you have to do is break the window. It’s what you do once you’re in that determines whether you go from there to Hawaii or Walpole,” Phil said philosophically.

  They waited for a night when the Red Sox would be away and the weather rainy. That night came in late August 1963.

  Tony drove the car, which he parked behind the bank, to wait for the getaway. Phil and Angelo, dressed as industrial cleaning men, carried their equipment down a long alley. They dumped that equipment at the bank’s back door. Within seconds Phil had disabled the alarm, and they were inside, thanks to the duplicate key they had made. They headed directly toward the vault, knowing that it would take at least seven minutes before anyone would come to check on the disabled alarm. Having made several earlier trips to case the bank, they were as familiar with its la
yout as they were with their own homes. They did not turn on any lights, for Phil considered that too risky.

  Within thirty seconds of entering, Phil was kneeling in front of the vault. Since there were no windows in the room, he turned on a little flashlight that gave him just enough light to see the numbers. In less than a minute Phil had the lock picked and he was inside the ancient vault. “I can’t believe how much banks spend on alarms and how little they spend on vault locks,” Phil later commented. They were in and out of the bank in less than three minutes.

  “We scared the shit out of Tony when we came back out so quick,” Phil said, laughing. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” he kept asking. “Nothing. Just drive—and take your time. We’re in no hurry. Just take it easy,” Phil said to reassure his nervous partner. The next day the bank reported that $75,000 was stolen from the vault by professional thieves. “We appreciated the compliment,” Phil said, “but we got only fifty-five thousand that night. It seems we weren’t the only crooks in that bank.” The bank president inflated the amount stolen, to get more insurance money. He was not caught.

  As planned, the guard they got the key from never knew he was in any way connected to the robbery. He was questioned on five different occasions, but he had nothing to tell. Phil, who was never questioned about that heist, made it a habit to pick up the guard’s bar tab from that night on. Keeping a source safe was a matter of pride.

  6

  Expensive Cup of Java

  FROM 1962 THROUGH 1964 the team made a living—not a great one, but they managed to get by. As they began to rob higher-level marks, they found themselves spending more time clocking and pulling jobs and, eventually, no time at legitimate jobs. They kept the appearance of holding down legal jobs, however. Phil paid a car dealer to make it look as if he worked for the man. This gave Phil an alibi when jobs were pulled, and gave the car dealer extra money.