Final Confession

by Brian P. Wallace

  Phil explained that he had needed to make sure they didn’t have another guard in back, as some companies did. “I assumed those cheap bastards who owned Skelly’s would never spring for three guards, but you know what they say about people who assume. In my line of work, if your assumption is wrong, it can be the last time you assume anything.”

  For the next six working days that same “security guard” was standing at the bus stop with his lunch box and thermos. Every day he watched as the same two guards went through the same routine. But the curious security guard never got on a bus.

  Phil didn’t tell Angelo and Tony about the Skelly truck. He had just encouraged them to take some time off and he wasn’t about to draw them back to work. Moreover, he had devised a plan for a one-man show. A show that would use one of the three Skelly uniforms that his Chicago tailor had made for him.

  Phil did ask Angelo and Tony to meet him in the back parking lot of the Joseph P. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Brighton on Thursday morning at 8:45. “Angelo got all upset when I asked him to meet me there,” Phil recalled. “He thought I was going in there to die or something.” Phil assured his friend that he was fine, but he needed them to be on time. And by the way, Phil asked Angelo, could they make a stop at Logan Airport and steal a car for their meeting at the hospital? “Are we doing a job?” Angelo asked. “Not really,” said Phil, “but I want to be on the safe side.”

  On Thursday, March 3, 1966, nobody paid any attention as the same security guard, with lunch box and thermos in hand, stood at the bus stop across from the New England Food Fair. He had become part of the scenery. Today he wore a light blue jacket over his uniform and he had a hat under his right arm. He kept looking at his watch, which was perfectly normal for anyone waiting for a bus. But that wasn’t what Phil was waiting for. The seven previous times he had clocked this route, the two guards were always at the supermarket by 8:20. He was starting to worry when they didn’t appear by 8:30.

  He was ready to leave and head over to the Kennedy Hospital when he saw the armored truck with the name SKELLY DETECTIVE AGENCY turn onto Harvard Street and stop in front of the New England Food Fair.

  Two guards, one of whom Phil hadn’t seen before, got out of the truck, locked both front doors, and took out five moneybags through the back door of the truck. The larger and older guard locked the back door and checked to make sure the truck was secure. The engine was left running.

  Phil hesitated about going through with the job because he hated unanticipated change. But once both guards, carrying the bags of money, headed into the supermarket to pick up the receipts from the day before, he decided to proceed as planned. The urge to try such an easy job was irresistible. The bus appeared, and all the people standing at the Harvard Street bus stop got on. All except one.

  Once the bus pulled away, the lone man quickly stripped off his light blue jacket, revealing a Skelly jacket underneath, and put on his uniform hat. He put the blue jacket, the newspaper, the lunch box, and the thermos into a trash barrel and walked up the street until he was even with the armored truck. The man quickly crossed the street, pulled a key ring from his pants pocket, and inserted first one key, then another. On the third try the front door opened. He got in, slid over to the driver’s seat, put the truck in gear, and slowly drove up Harvard Street in the direction of Boston.

  As Phil drove the truck into the Kennedy Hospital parking lot, he could see Angelo and Tony sitting in a parked car. It was 8:50. He drove by the stolen car, and both of them, out of habit, started to check out the armored truck. They never looked at the driver.

  Phil circled them with the truck and came to a stop next to the car. They looked at the truck, looked at each other, and shrugged. Phil finally got out of the truck and knocked on the car’s window on the passenger side, where Tony was sitting. He stopped breathing for a moment, then jumped out of the car when he finally realized that the guy in the Skelly uniform was Phil.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” Tony hissed. “Just looking for a little help unloading some moneybags,” Phil responded coolly. Both Angelo’s and Tony’s faces went white and Tony exclaimed, “You hit a truck by yourself?” “What are you, crazy?” Angelo added.

  “Are you two gonna talk or help me?” Phil asked. It took only two minutes to transfer all the moneybags from the armored truck into the stolen car. Once finished, Angelo tossed Tony the keys and told him to drive. Phil jumped in the front, Angelo got in the back, and Tony left rubber as they peeled out of the parking lot. “I couldn’t believe that knucklehead drove out of the lot like he was in the Indianapolis Five Hundred,” Phil remembered. “I yelled, ‘Tony, for crissake, take it easy! We don’t need to get pulled over now.’ Tony slowed down as we took the Mass Pike to Southie,” Phil said.

  On Thursday, March 3, a Boston Evening Globe front-page headline dubbed him THE LONER BANDIT.

  The next day, in a front-page story in the Boston Globe a store employee said that, as the armored truck had moved off, he had been stocking a window display. He looked up and saw a man, whom he described to police as being about forty-five years old and wearing a Skelly uniform and hat, driving the truck away. The employee said, “I didn’t think anything of it until I saw the two Skelly guards still in the store.” He yelled to them, “Hey, there goes your truck!” The guards ran out of the store just as the truck turned left.

  Police from Boston and Brookline were immediately called to the scene. Meanwhile, an employee of the Joseph P. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Brighton saw a car containing three men speed out of the hospital parking lot between eight-thirty and nine-thirty. The hospital employee later told Boston police detectives that he attached little significance to the speeding car until around noontime, when he spotted a Skelly armored truck abandoned in the same lot.

  Detectives Harry O’Malley and Anthony Manfra found no signs of the truck having been broken into. O’Malley told reporters that the lone robber must have had a key for the truck’s front door. O’Malley stated, “The carbine was in its regular place inside the truck, but the fifty-eight thousand dollars the truck was carrying was missing.”

  Phil was dismayed to read that one of the store employees had spotted him in the driver’s seat. He’d had his hat pulled down pretty far over his face and thought that nobody would take a second look, even if they took a first one.

  It was the first armored truck job Phil had pulled in a while, and he felt the old adrenaline rush return. The money from that job was far less than they’d been getting from the jewel and fur robberies, but for Phil nothing compared with taking down an armored truck or opening a bank vault. “There’s just no feeling in the world like that one,” Phil said.

  They picked up a clean car in Southie, transferred the money, and went down to the Cape for a few days. “I thought there’d be a lot more than fifty-eight thousand in the truck,” Phil said. “But it was harder explaining why I pulled the score without Angelo and Tony than it was stealing the money. They shut up when they each received their nineteen grand, though. We always split everything three ways. Always. I promised I’d never do anything like that without them again,” Phil went on. “And I kept that promise.”

  Because the truck’s lock was undamaged, police in Brookline and Boston focused their investigations on the Skelly guards, but they were exonerated after two days of questioning. They never discovered Phil’s jacket, lunch box, or thermos in the trash barrel, which was only twenty yards from where he stole the Skelly truck, which was owned by Armored Car Carrier Corporation.

  In a recent deal, Phil had come by copies of copies of the master keys for almost every Armored Car Carrier truck in Massachusetts. He hadn’t really trusted that they were usable and hadn’t intended ever to use them. But when he saw those Skelly guards leave their truck running, unguarded, the temptation had been too strong to resist. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, Phil knew, for he had read all the armored truck companies’ manuals and knew that rule number one was “Never leave
a truck unguarded.”

  Phil later found out that it was the younger guard’s first day on the job. Poor guy, he was working less than an hour when he was robbed and treated like a suspect—all before lunch. Two weeks later he quit. But Phil felt Skelly deserved what they got: they had become complacent and they paid for it.

  Police had no usable leads, and the case was never solved.

  PHIL KNEW ANGIULO suspected him of being one of the highwaymen robbers. He was too street-smart not to know. He knew too that if he was found out, he was, as the wise guys would say, walking around in a dead man’s suit. Making so much money in Angiulo’s territory without paying dues was frowned upon.

  Angelo and Tony weren’t much safer. Phil told them he had a plan that he hoped would take some of the heat off. He didn’t trust that, even if Louie Diamonds stuck to the story Phil had suggested, Angiulo would swallow easily.

  They stayed at the Hyannis Sheraton and relaxed for a few days before heading back to Boston. Phil’s plan went into effect once they were back.

  Tony called Ben Tilley from McGrail’s and set up a meeting in a small Dorchester restaurant called Linda Mae’s. Tilley was happy to see his old partner Tony, and he was even more anxious to talk about Tony’s new friend and partner, the now-successful Phil Cresta. Tilley wasted no time.

  “I figured you’d be driving a new Cadoo,” he said, laughing.

  “I’m lucky I’m eating three meals a day,” Tony shot back.

  “The way I hear it, you guys have been making a killing,” Tilley said, obviously probing.

  Tony threw out the bait. “Ben, we made one good score in the last six months, and we thought the haul would be three times what we took in.”

  “What about the diamond jobs?” Tilley asked. “Word on the street is that Phil either did them or knows who did.”

  Tony began to laugh, just as he had when he and Phil had rehearsed. “You gutta be shittin’ me. You think we did the highwaymen stuff?”

  “Well … maybe not you, but word is that Phil knows something about them,” Tilley insisted.

  “Ben, let me just tell you, Phil isn’t as good as people think. In fact he’s a pain in the ass. He spent the last three months clocking that stupid job in Brookline the other day, and what do we get but fifty-eight large. Fifty-eight large, for crissake! That’s less than twenty large apiece—for three months’ work,” he lied. “You don’t buy Cadoos with that kind of green.”

  Tilley was all excited, as Phil knew he would be. “You pulled that Brookline job? I knew it, I knew it!” Tilley beamed.

  “Hey, I’m not bragging about that score. My brother-in-law makes more a week, and he’s legit.” Tony scowled.

  “It was still a fine piece of work, Tony.” Tilley laughed. “And fifty-eight large is fifty-eight large. I’d take that kind of money any day.”

  Tony then went in for the kill. “Hey, I’m not saying I can’t use the money, but compared to what those highwaymen are taking down, fifty-eight large is just chump change.”

  Tilley responded with, “Tony, I’ll be honest with you. I thought you guys were somewhere behind those scores.”

  “I wish.” Tony shrugged.

  “Ya know, I got called into the North End on the highwaymen hits,” Tilley whispered.

  “No way!” Tony said, as if shocked.

  “Yeah. The big guy himself sat me down and grilled me about the scores,” Tilley said nervously.

  “Angiulo called you in? Were you scared?”

  Tilley looked Tony straight in the eyes and admitted, “I was shittin’ bricks, but you know how it is: if he calls, you answer.” Tilley wiped sweat from his face at just the thought of the incident.

  Tony whispered, “Angiulo thought you were behind the highwaymen hits?”

  “Yeah,” Tilley answered. “Can you imagine that? I have no idea where he got my name, but I squared it with him.”

  Tony asked how.

  “Luckily I was out of the country when two of the jobs went down,” Tilley explained.

  “So he bought it?” Tony asked.

  “Yeah, but the prick made me show him my passport. Can you believe that?”

  “With Angiulo I’ll believe anything.” Tony sighed. “So you’re off the hook?”

  “As far as I know,” Tilley said, looking around.

  “Good.” Tony smiled. “Maybe we can do some stuff together. I’m sick of working with Cresta, and Angelo feels the same way.”

  “Seriously?” Tilley was smiling now.

  “Absolutely. We’re both tired of Mr. Perfection and all his planning and waiting and then more planning and more waiting,” Tony scoffed.

  Tilley was thrilled at the prospect that his prodigal sons might be returning. He grabbed the check and paid it.

  On the way to their cars, Tony said, “Who knows, Ben, maybe we can start our own highwaymen scores.”

  Tilley spun around and said with a scowl, “Don’t even kid like that, Tony. Whoever did those jobs, they’re already dead. They just don’t know it yet.”

  By that afternoon word had spread throughout the criminal population of Boston and beyond that Phil Cresta was the loner who robbed the Brookline armored truck—just as Phil had hoped it would. The highwaymen heat was turned way down, as the robberies stopped and crime went back to normal.

  Not long after Tony’s meeting with Tilley, Phil, Angelo, and Tony watched the 1966 St. Patrick’s Day parade in front of the Transit Cafe in South Boston with some wise guys from Southie. “It was funny,” Phil said. “We’d made more than a million dollars in just over two months and we couldn’t tell anybody. Everyone in Southie that St. Patrick’s Day was talking about the highwaymen scores and they were all praising the robbers. I felt like jumping up on the table and yelling, ‘We did them, we did them.’ We would’ve been big heroes that day in Southie, but we would’ve been buried the next day. So we just sat there listening to all the gossip. It was pretty funny. Whitey Bulger, according to one Southie wise guy, was the only one smart enough to plan jobs like that. On and on the speculation and the theories went.”

  A Southie guy named Nee asked, “What about you, Phil? Who do you think the highwaymen are?” Angelo and Tony spun around and looked at Phil, who was cool as a cucumber. “I have no idea,” Phil responded, laughing, “and I don’t really give a shit as long as they stay away from armored cars.” “Yeah, a loner doesn’t need company, right, Phil?” Nee asked, chuckling as did everyone else in the room, all of whom were fully aware that Phil was the loner who’d stolen $58,000 two weeks before. “Hey, I didn’t pull that score,” Phil protested weakly. “Yeah,” Nee shouted, “you probably wouldn’t tell us if you were one of the highwaymen either.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Phil protested again. And again everyone laughed.

  12

  The No-Headlined Theft

  PHIL SPENT the rest of March 1966 lying low and catching up on some homework. Both the police and Angiulo wanted the highwaymen. Phil wasn’t worried about the cops—there had been no extras on their team for the highway robberies, so there was no possibility of an informant. He wanted to give Angiulo time to cool down, though. Boston’s boss did not like his turf being invaded.

  Back in 1962, when Phil had been making a couple of hundred bucks a day from parking meters, tax free, he’d wisely invested in some property in New Hampshire, just over the Massachusetts border—a long way from the hellhole where he grew up. By New England standards, the land was miles from civilization, and he loved going there. But the farm, as he called it, ended up being used more for business than for pleasure. It was his East Coast place for studying the newest alarm systems, the newest locks and vaults. This is where Phil spent the early spring of 1966.

  On that farm he had a whole workshop in which he could spend hour after hour improving his skills. Angelo noted, “Once Phil got with those locks and alarms he was in another world. He would not leave that back room until he had mastered every new lock on the market. H
e got a huge kick out of being able to open those new locks and alarms. And, man, he was good at it.”

  The isolated farmhouse also served as a shooting range. Phil, Tony, and Angelo would practice with handguns, shotguns, and rifles that they bought or stole. Practice kept them busy during the down times, and their skills sharp. For the next few weeks Phil stayed at the farm. Angelo and Tony visited often.

  In mid-April Phil returned to Boston, rested and anxious to use his skills. Louie Diamonds had gotten word to him at the farm, through either Angelo or Tony, that he had some information to sell. Phil was anxious to buy.

  He hadn’t talked to Louie since their meeting at Castle Island. He wondered how Louie would greet him. As soon as he entered Louie’s office, he relaxed. Louie seemed genuinely happy to see him. Louie told about being called to the North End to meet with the boss, and how, maybe thanks to Phil’s advice and threat, Louie had been smarter than Phil had really hoped.

  Louie had admitted doing business with Phil on the first diamond merchant robbed in Brighton; but since that theft hadn’t been classified as a highwaymen hit, Angiulo didn’t care. He believed Louie when Louie said he’d had nothing to do with the other three New York guys. But, being thorough, Angiulo sniffed Louie Diamonds out for other names. Ben Tilley was the only name Louie could come up with.

  Phil was relieved that his own name hadn’t come up. And more relieved when Louie informed him that nobody had mentioned the highwaymen stuff in over a month. The Angiulo investigation appeared to be over.

  In the very next breath Louie said, “It’s too bad you’re out of business, though.” “Why?” Phil asked. “Well, I just got wind of a big diamond guy who’ll be in Boston next week.” “Go on,” Phil said, “I’m listening.”

  For the next half hour Louie told Phil about a diamond salesman who worked between Boston and New York and who wasn’t connected in any way with the mob. “Are you sure?” Phil pressed. “The last guys, according to you, weren’t connected either, and look what happened.” “You’re wrong, Phil. They weren’t connected when you hit them. They went to Gambino for protection after a couple of jobs went down.” Phil thought about it and realized that Louie was right, but he countered, “Don’t you think the same thing will happen with what’s-his-name?” “Walter Bain,” Louie said helpfully, and then, “If you make this your last highwaymen robbery ever, what do you care what kind of heat Gambino puts on Angiulo? Fuck both of them.”