“What’s this?” Angelo asked. “This,” Phil said, “is what’s stopping Tony’s car.” Angelo looked down at the device and then looked at Tony, who again was searching under his hood. “Get the hook,” Angelo said, meaning he didn’t believe Phil. Phil just laughed and told him, “Grab that knucklehead before he does something crazy to that car.”
Angelo jumped out and told Tony to try starting the car again, which he did. This time he made it the three blocks to Kilmarnock Street.
Angelo was so excited that he bounded into McGrail’s, ordered a round for them, and grabbed a booth by the back window. Tony followed, still cursing his car. Angelo could hardly contain himself and urged Phil to tell Tony. “Easy, easy,” was Phil’s response.
Tony was staring at the two of them with a puzzled look. “Tell Tony what?” he asked. “Phil stalled your car today. Twice,” Angelo proudly announced. “Get lost. My car just needs a tune-up,” Tony answered. “When was the last time you had a tune-up?” Phil asked. Tony pondered the question for a moment and then said, “Shit, Phil, it was only two weeks ago.” “See, asshole? It was Phil who stalled your car,” Angelo boastfully insisted.
Tony may not have been known for his intelligence, but he knew when he was being made to look foolish. “Why you guys always fucking with me?” he asked angrily. “We’re not, Tony,” Phil said as he produced the little remote-control device. Tony examined it and began to laugh. “You’re trying to tell me this little thing, which isn’t even in my car, stalled it?” “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Phil answered. Then he finished his beer and invited his partners to follow him outside.
Phil led them over to Tony’s car, opened the hood, and said to Tony, “See if there’s anything on that engine that doesn’t belong there.” Taking the bait, Tony inspected his engine block. After a few minutes he remarked, “Holy shit.” With his right hand he gingerly picked up an object the size of a cigarette pack, holding it away from his body, as if it were a bomb. “Don’t worry, it’s not gonna hurt you,” Phil assured him. Angelo ran over and took it out of Tony’s hand. Tony kept repeating, “Wow, wow, wow,” and then added, “Phil, you’re a son of a bitch.” Still examining the mysterious little device, Angelo commented, “Yeah, but he is one smart son of a bitch.”
The three of them walked across the street to the Fenway Motor Inn and into room nine. Angelo was like a little kid in a candy store. “Phil, you know what this thing means, don’t you?” he asked. “Of course I do. Why do you think I invented it?” Tony, still in the dark, asked, “Phil, why did you have to do that to me?” “I’m sorry, Tony, but I had to see if it would work, and then I had to see if you’d be able to find it once you opened up the hood,” Phil explained. “Oh, okay, then.” But he sounded unconvinced, so Phil added, “Tony, you know everything about cars. I figured if you couldn’t find it, then nobody will be able to.” Tony beamed with pride. “Thanks, Phil. Thanks for trying it on me.” Phil told them the next step would be a call from Louie Diamonds, after which they would put the little gadget to work.
THE CALL FROM LOUIE came on January 10, 1966. He told Phil that a diamond merchant representing Baumgold, Incorporated, a major jewelry company in New York, would be driving north the next day and had several meetings set up in Boston. One would be at Louie’s office, in the Jeweler’s Building at 333 Washington Street in Boston, opposite Filene’s.
Phil was being extremely wary of anything to do with New York since the OMAS theft. “Does this guy have even the remotest connection with the Gambinos?” Phil asked Louie. “This guy is strictly an independent who does buying for some of New York’s largest houses,” Louie answered him. “He’ll be meeting with me at noon, in my office. You can take it from there. Remember, he’s coming here to buy. Don’t do anything to him until he’s completed his work. Not anything,” Louie emphasized, “until you’re sure he’s driving back to New York, okay?”
The next day, a skinny little guy with Coke-bottle-thick glasses was sitting in Louie Diamonds’s waiting room. At few minutes later a well-dressed short man carrying a black case walked into the office and insisted on seeing Louie Cohen immediately. Just as Louie came out to greet his self-important customer, the man with the glasses, having viewed the mark, rose and left the office.
He took the elevator down three floors, walked out of the Jeweler’s Building, and got into a waiting car. In the car were two men, both wearing sunglasses and baseball caps. The driver, Phil Cresta, asked whether Tony had seen “him.” “Yeah, I saw him and I don’t like him,” Tony replied. “Did he put the make on you?” Angelo asked. “That stuck-up little son of a bitch only wanted Louie. Elizabeth Taylor could’ve been in that room and he wouldn’t have noticed,” Tony said angrily. Phil and Angelo responded at the same time, “Good.”
Thirty-five minutes later the well-dressed diamond merchant from New York strode out the building’s front door and walked along Washington Street, with Angelo close behind. He went into three nearby jewelry stores. Each visit lasted about an hour. After the third stop, he headed back toward Diamonds’s office building, but kept walking in the direction of the subway stop by Filene’s. Phil motioned Angelo to stay with him, started the car, and took a right onto Franklin Street.
Phil knew the guy would never travel by subway; he was too good for that. He also noticed that there were two unoccupied taxis parked right there, which the jeweler never even looked at. “So I quickly figured he had to have his own car parked somewhere downtown. Since Washington Street is one-way and there weren’t a whole lot of parking lots on Washington, I went around the block and took a right onto Summer.”
As Phil turned onto Summer Street Tony spotted the jeweler, with Angelo behind him. They had lucked out. “It’s always important to know the lay of the land,” Phil said. “If something like that had happened to us in Kansas City or St. Louis, we would’ve been up shit’s creek, but this was where I grew up; I know Boston. I was working in a comfort zone I liked.” As the New York jeweler headed into a parking lot on Summer, Angelo quickly jumped into the back of the car Phil was driving, a car that had, of course, been freshly lifted from Logan Airport.
They followed the jeweler as he got on the Massachusetts Turnpike and headed to Newton. He made a couple of stops in Chestnut Hill, in the shadow of Boston College, and around seven that evening he went into a restaurant in Brighton, carrying the black case with him. Tony was going crazy because he hadn’t eaten for at least four hours. “He wanted to go into the same restaurant that our mark was in and get takeout,” Phil said in disbelief. Angelo sent him elsewhere to get some pizza, which they’d eat in the car as they waited for the salesman to finish his dinner.
While Tony was getting the pizzas, Phil walked across Market Street and into the restaurant’s parking lot, opened the hood of the car with the blue New York license plates, and placed something on the car’s engine. An hour later the diamond merchant left the restaurant with the black case held firmly in his right hand. He started the car and headed home to the New York.
But a funny thing happened as he drove toward the turnpike; he had just passed the Brighton courthouse when his car gave a groan and abruptly stopped. Darkness was descending as the angry salesman jumped out of his car and began to walk up Chestnut Hill Avenue. “Now what’s he doing?” Tony asked. “Probably going to a gas station,” Phil answered. He sent Angelo to follow the man, who had taken the heavy black case with him.
Ten minutes later the New Yorker was back with a mechanic and a tow truck. The mechanic got in the car and tried unsuccessfully to start it. Then he hooked it up to his tow truck. The salesman, who was still holding on to the black case, got in the truck’s passenger side and they drove off. Phil waited a few seconds and then followed the truck two blocks up the street to a gas station. Angelo was standing on the sidewalk as Phil parked.
There were two brothers running the full-service station that night. One signaled the other—the tow truck driver—to bring the stalled car
into the garage and pull it into one of the bays, then he went back into the office, where he could see if anyone pulled in wanting gas. Angelo followed him and began asking directions to Somerville. But he only pretended to listen to the answer. The information he was really interested in came from the attendant’s brother, who was now telling the angry man from New York that it would be at least twenty-five minutes before he could even look at his car.
“Don’t worry. We’ll get it going, but it’s going to take a little time. We’re open till nine, but we’ll stay till we get it fixed,” he told the driver. The disgruntled New Yorker asked where he could get a coffee. The mechanic pointed to a mom-and-pop store right next door. “Don’t worry, your car’s not going anywhere,” he joked. The New Yorker saw nothing humorous in the situation.
The well-dressed little man said he’d be back in ten minutes. He walked over to the car and opened the trunk. Angelo couldn’t believe their good fortune as the guy put the heavy black case in the trunk before going for his coffee.
The mechanic went back to the car he was working on before the tow call, his head under the hood.
Before Angelo, who had wandered into the garage area, could say “diamonds,” Phil slipped into the station. He went right to the trunk, opened it, reached in, and grabbed the black case. It took thirty seconds at most. Then, passing the case to Angelo, Phil headed toward the front end of the car where he opened the hood, reached in, grabbed his electronic device, gently closed the hood, and left. The mechanic never looked up.
Tony was in the driver’s seat waiting for them. Angelo got in front and Phil climbed into the back. They headed back to McGrail’s. It would turn out to be the most expensive cup of coffee the New Yorker had ever ordered—around $150,000. The police, the gas station attendants, not to mention the diamond salesman, were all baffled.
THE “STALLER”—Tony’s name for the little device—would be used in four more robberies. All thanks to Louie Diamonds, all successful, all unsolved. One of the Boston TV stations labeled the next such theft the work of the “Highwaymen Robbers” because it occurred while jewelry salesmen were driving on the highway. The name stuck for all but this first of the staller robberies.
The next three of the four so-called highwaymen robberies alarmed every jewelry salesman driving in and around Boston, for they all occurred within a month. They angered local police departments, who didn’t have a clue as to why the cars were breaking down at night, in the most desolate locations, and were always pounced upon within minutes of becoming disabled. There were never any witnesses other than the jewelry salesmen themselves, who were never injured and who saw only the masks of the men who robbed them. No clues were left behind, but each highwaymen robbery had the same MO.
The driver who had diamonds or other precious jewels in his possession would feel his car begin to sputter, and then it would stall. As soon as the car came to a dead stop, two men, both wearing masks, were on top of the driver. On each occasion, one of the gunmen instructed the driver to turn off the car engine.
In each but the last robbery, one of the thieves would open the hood of the car to make it look to any passing motorists as if the auto had broken down. That is, at least, what police theorized. In fact, what Phil was doing as Angelo helped himself to the jewels was reaching into the engine block and retrieving the staller. Phil knew that most people were not going to stop on a deserted road in the middle of the night to help anyone.
Three of the four subsequent diamond salesmen were also from New York, and all four told the police that the robbery was over almost before it started. Two of the men had driven their own cars from New York and were using them at the time of the robberies. The third salesman was driving a rental car when he was hit; the last, who wasn’t hit till May, was again driving his own car.
Police at first theorized that the robbers had put sand or sugar in the cars, but MDC police lieutenant Neil Cadigan dismissed that notion. Though he couldn’t explain how the robbers had achieved the stall-outs, Cadigan told reporters that sugar or sand might have caused each car to stall in similar ways. But how could the robbers have determined when and where the cars would stall? Sand or sugar didn’t give such exact results. The police were back to square one, as the highwaymen grew rich feeding off New York diamond merchants.
The three subsequent staller robberies that the Cresta crew pulled in January and February of 1966 went like clockwork. The team couldn’t have been hotter. The cops were going crazy trying to catch them, and Angiulo’s guys were trying to figure out who was pulling all those major scores in their territory. Angiulo also started getting heat from Gambino because some of the larger New York diamond merchants went to Gambino for protection after the third highwaymen robbery. Gambino was tied into the diamond business in a large way and the highwaymen robbers were hurting his pocketbook. Gambino warned Angiulo that he’d better find out who was behind the diamond robberies or there would be trouble between them, which was the last thing Angiulo wanted.
Things were getting way too hot for the highwaymen robbers by late February 1966. It was also getting too easy, which worried Phil. They’d done four such heists now, and he felt they were losing their edge. He’d seen too many good crooks become greedy and end up either dead or in jail. The staller was worth its weight in gold, but Phil knew it was time to retire it before it retired them. There was just too much heat on from all sides. Plus, Phil had heard that Angiulo had summoned Louie Diamonds for an interrogation. Louie would be under a lot of pressure to come up with names, and Phil knew that a weak man like Diamonds would need incentive to stand up to Angiulo’s pressure.
After the third highwaymen robbery (the fourth staller heist) in February 1966, Phil called Louie Diamonds and asked to meet him at Castle Island in South Boston. “Louie thought we were gonna whack him,” Phil recalled. “I could see how nervous he was, so I told him straight up that we were out of the diamond business, and that he would be out of business permanently if anyone ever found out who the highwaymen were.” Louie was obviously feeling a great deal of pressure from Angiulo, and now from Cresta. Phil reminded Cohen of the fact that he had made a good buck by supplying information. “If we go down hard, Louie, you go down hard too,” Phil warned.
Louie asked what to say to Angiulo. Phil smiled and said, “Tell him that you aren’t sure, but you heard the name Ben Tilley tossed around. You don’t know any more than that. That’ll get you off the hook.”
As Phil left Castle Island he took a right onto Farragut Road, where his mother had been born. He was not thinking about any of his family, though, as he went on to McGrail’s to meet his partners. He explained to Tony and Angelo that they were out of the diamond business for good. Counting the first score in Brighton, which was never connected to the highwaymen, they had pulled four diamond robberies in the span of a month. The take, after Louie deducted his cut, was $870,000, which was split among the three of them. They had been fortunate and Phil told his two buddies to sit back and enjoy it for a while. And that is exactly what Phil Cresta did … for two days.
11
Cresta Tries It Alone
ON FEBRUARY 25, 1966, Phil went to Brookline Bank to make a very large deposit in one of his many safe-deposit boxes. Since he was a man who preferred to come early and check out his surroundings, especially the means of egress, he arrived that morning around eight-fifteen. As was the case when he was planning jobs, Phil had learned that when he carried money to deposit somewhere, there was no such thing as being too careful. He parked his Bonneville and entered a small restaurant on Harvard Street to have breakfast, kill time before the bank opened at nine, and make sure no one was following him.
No one was. But as he was finishing his coffee, he noticed a Skelly armored truck parking directly across from the restaurant. Phil watched in amazement as both guards left the armored truck, locked but with its engine running, and carried moneybags into the New England Food Fair. He paid for his breakfast and went outside in order to ob
serve the guards’ movements more effectively. They stayed in the supermarket for about ten minutes, which astonished Phil. When the two came out, they both carried bags that, Phil suspected, contained the receipts from the day before. Phil watched closely as the taller and older of the two guards reached down, grabbed a key from his belt, and opened the back door of the truck.
Phil remembered standing there watching the armored truck disappear. “I had a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars in my gym bag, which I was just about to bring into the bank and put in my safe-deposit box. I should’ve walked away and kept on walking, but I couldn’t. I had just watched two armored truck guards break every rule in the book. Most people wouldn’t have noticed a thing, but I am not most people.”
Phil deposited his money and went home, but he couldn’t get those Skelly guards out of his mind. The next morning, as the truck pulled up outside the New England Food Fair, Phil stood directly across the street at the bus stop. Dressed in a security guard’s uniform, he carried a lunch box and thermos. The apparent security guard looked as if he were waiting for a bus to take him to work. But he was already at work.
Phil observed the same two Skelly guards get out of the armored truck. The driver checked to make sure his door was locked and then he went to the back of the truck and grabbed three moneybags. Phil could not see the other guard, but he soon joined the driver and reached in and took out two moneybags. They both headed into the supermarket. From where Phil stood, he could see smoke coming from the truck’s tailpipe. Once again it took them about ten minutes before they reappeared and put new bags into the back of the armored truck. As they were doing this, the apparent security guard who had seemed to be waiting for a bus crossed Harvard Street, walked directly behind the truck, and disappeared around the corner.
Final Confession Page 10
