The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  Though the two ballplayers crossed paths only briefly more than a half-century ago—one going up, the other going down—Michael never forgot Lerner, a good fielder and a great line-drive hitter who advocated chopping down on the ball to beat out the throw to first. Over dinner one night, Lerner lectured on baseball strategy and training in ways that the younger, less experienced Michael had never heard before.

  “He was way ahead of us,” Michael says. “Way ahead of us.”

  No question. Pro Lerner was looking ahead. By the summer of 1961, the professional ballplayer was also trying out for a life of crime.

  He was playing at the time for the Macon Peaches, a collection of has-beens and never-will-bes. One knock-around veteran had struck out in all three of his major league at-bats. Another had toiled for 16 years in the minors, got called up for one game, and didn’t even get to bat.

  “A bastard club,” says Tony Bartirome, one of its players. “All on their way down.” Including its good-hitting middle infielder.

  Bartirome remembers Lerner being so well mannered that “he was like a priest, almost.” Oh, and another thing: he would occasionally leave the team to take care of some personal matters.

  Those personal matters might have included Lerner’s arrest that summer for the armed robbery of a Boston furniture store. He was later sentenced to three years’ probation.

  Lerner was arrested again a few months later, charged with conspiring to commit armed robbery and carrying a firearm without a permit. According to Brookline police records, detectives interrupted Lerner and his ex-con companion in the midst of robbing an acquaintance.

  Questioned by the police, Lerner repeatedly lied. And while he eventually beat the rap, the young ballplayer made an unfavorable impression. “I know the Brookline police were not fond of him,” Glen Lerner says. “A Jewish troublemaker would not be well looked upon by an Irish police force.”

  Maury Lerner held on a little longer to his baseball dreams. He spent part of the 1962 season with the Raleigh Capitals, of the Senators organization, batting .308 and hitting eight home runs, the most of his professional career (“A two-run homer by first baseman Maury Lerner in the eighth inning won the game”).

  A teammate, John Kennedy, a future major leaguer, hasn’t forgotten the sounds of obsession that emanated from Lerner’s home in Raleigh, North Carolina, the rhythmic whacks of a fixated hitter striking a tire with a bat.

  Thum, thum, thum . . .

  “He couldn’t care less about anything but hit, hit, hit,” Kennedy says.

  One time Lerner coaxed a homeless man who used to linger outside the Devereux Meadow ballpark onto the team bus. He hid the man from the manager and supplied him with enough beer to last the daylong road trip. An act of kindness, Kennedy says. “As far as I’m concerned, he was a helluva guy.”

  A helluva guy who was also passing worthless checks in Tennessee, stealing a television set from a hotel not far from Fenway Park, and hustling some college saps in games of pool.

  Baseball scouts used to scrutinize Lerner’s every move. Now agents from the FBI were the ones watching.

  By this point, Lerner was hanging around with two well-known New England criminals, John Kelley, also known as Red, and George Agisotelis, also known as Billy A. Those two were central suspects in the notorious and still unsolved mail truck robbery in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1962, in which men dressed as police officers commandeered a Postal Service truck and made off with the then-record haul of $1.5 million in cash.

  But he was also still playing baseball, holding on with a Senators affiliate in Pennsylvania with the exquisite name the York White Roses. He batted .250 in only 28 games, the reasons for his truncated 1963 season unclear, except for an internal FBI document from that time:

  Joseph McKenney, Director of Publicity, American Baseball League, and Joseph Cronin, President of the American League, after reviewing records, advised Maurice Lerner is presently on the suspended list of the York, Pennsylvania, Baseball Team subject to moving up to a higher classification.

  Cronin stated that being on the suspended list indicates either Lerner did not report to the York team or was suspended while there for some infraction of the club’s training regulations.

  There was no formal announcement, no issued news release. But Pro Lerner had given up baseball to concentrate on a new career. A name that once appeared in scouting sheets and small-town newspapers was now popping up in police intelligence reports.

  Maurice Lerner, aka Pro, aka Reno. Newly wedded to Arrene Siegel. Suspect in the robberies of the Boston Five Cent Savings Bank and the Suburban National Bank. Associate of known criminals Kelley and Agisotelis. Formerly employed as a professional baseball player. Considered armed and dangerous—whether with gun or bat, it seems.

  Part of the growing Lerner reputation was how Pro once applied his bat skills to his new profession by ringing a doorbell and taking a cut at the head of the man who answered. The oft-told story may be apocryphal, but word of Lerner’s penchant for violence had clearly reached the front office of the Patriarca crime family, the Boston Red Sox of the underworld. And he got called up.

  When some men made the ill-conceived decision to rob a bookie operation linked to a high-ranking mafioso, it was Lerner, along with Kelley, who was dispatched to straighten things out. When certain people disappeared or stopped breathing, Lerner often seemed to be, shall we say, part of the postmortem conversation.

  In January 1965, the body of an inconsequential gangster named Robert Rasmussen was found in Wilmington, Massachusetts, having taken a .38 bullet to the back of his head. An informant later claimed that Rasmussen had tried to extort money from Kelley, so he was lured to Lerner’s apartment with the promise of a nice score, a bookie’s cash-jammed safe—only to wind up dead in a snowbank, wearing little more than a necktie.

  Then there was Tommy Richards, another member of Kelley’s crew, who vanished just before the 1967 trial for the mail heist in Plymouth. The well-known lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who represented Kelley, recalls that when he asked about Richards’s whereabouts, he was told, “Well, Tommy won’t be joining us.”

  Richards had a decent excuse; he was dead. Another Kelley associate later told Bailey of being present when Lerner shot Richards in the head, right after the man pleaded for his life, saying, “I never did anything to hurt any of you guys.”

  It was not what Richards had done, but what he might do. Kelley didn’t think his friend would hold up on the stand, so, apparently, he had to go. Kelley and the other living defendants were acquitted in the Plymouth case, and the disappearance of Richards remains unsolved.

  “I didn’t see nothing, I didn’t hear nothing,” said the owner of a small store close to Pannone’s Market. On the clear and cool Saturday of April 20, 1968, a pair of masked gunmen had just left two dead bodies on the market’s floor. Their getaway Buick was later recovered, with a sawed-off M1 carbine, two sawed-off shotguns, and two .38-caliber pistols still inside.

  “You want information?” someone told an inquisitive Providence Journal reporter. “Call 411.”

  Months passed without any solid leads, although the involvement of Patriarca, the New England mob boss, was generally stipulated. Nothing moved in Providence without the say-so of “the old man,” who would sit outside his small coin-vending business on Federal Hill, working his cigar as he watched the cops watch him.

  “One of the most powerful crime bosses in the country,” said Thomas Verdi, a Providence deputy police chief and former commander of the department’s organized crime unit. “He was revered and feared by all.”

  But in 1969, the Patriarca operation suffered a critical security breach when one of its associates turned informant. Unfortunately for Pro Lerner, the canary was his friend and mentor Red Kelley.

  A recent Brink’s armored-car robbery of a half-million dollars had been too tidy to be anything other than an inside job, leading investigators to an errant Brink’s employee who quickly named his acc
omplices. Among them was Kelley, who soon indicated his desire to exchange information for the comforts of protective custody.

  Kelley told federal investigators that Lerner, the primary gunman, was bright, courageous, and homicidal: the most dangerous man he had known in his 25 years on the dark side.

  Kelley kept talking. About how a Patriarca lieutenant, Luigi Manocchio, had recruited Lerner for his controlled violence, and how Lerner had recruited Kelley for his meticulous attention to escape plans. How they repeatedly scouted the daily movements of their intended victims, the wayward bookie, Rudy Marfeo, and his bodyguard, Anthony Melei. How Manocchio later shook hands after a job well executed and conveyed the message that “George”—code for Patriarca—was pleased.

  FBI agents arrested Lerner early one morning at the Brookline apartment he shared with his wife and two young children. While Lerner dressed, an agent noticed a brown gun case. When law enforcement officials returned hours later with a search warrant, they discovered its contents, a pump-action shotgun and a fully loaded pearl-handled .45-caliber pistol.

  As Lerner’s wife took sick and went upstairs, they went downstairs to find a cellar converted into a shooting range. A silhouette target had been drawn on the bullet-pocked wall, and bits of lead peppered the floor.

  The shooting of imaginary men, it seemed, had replaced the swinging of bats at imaginary balls. Thum, thum, thum . . .

  Lerner’s arrest allowed others to relax. According to FBI records, another federal informant, Richard Chicofsky, told his handlers that “that bastard Lerner got what he deserved.”

  “When asked what he meant by that, he replied that Lerner was a sadistic killer and that he got his kicks from watching people bleed. He told of the time that Lerner had bragged to him how he killed Billy Aggie (Agisotelis) with a .45 while he and Aggie held a casual conversation in an automobile.

  “Chicofsky further stated that he feels a lot better now that Lerner is off the streets because when Lerner was around, he was never really sure when Lerner might decide to ‘plank’ him.”

  The hearings and trial for the Marfeo-Melei killings included the usual mob theatrics. One defendant screamed at a prosecutor (“I’ll get you, you bastard. I’ll see tears running down your face before this is over”), punched a wooden door, and broke his hand. A witness for the prosecution disappeared for a day, only to resurface with a tale of being whisked to a secret location and asked to testify against everyone except Patriarca and Lerner; as the witness left the stand, a defendant’s relative threatened her life.

  Through it all, Lerner was the odd man out: a Jew from Brookline, not an Italian from Providence, who sought comfort in the regular visits to the prison by a Boston rabbi.

  After three days of deliberations in March 1970, a jury in Providence convicted Lerner, Patriarca, and three others of conspiracy, while Lerner was also convicted of murder. The man with a career batting average of .308 was given two life sentences. He was 34.

  The former ballplayer sent word that he didn’t want any more visits from the rabbi.

  John Kennedy and Gene Michael. Ed Brinkman and Bernie Allen. Rich Rollins and Donn Clendenon. Tony Perez and Rusty Staub and Steve Blass and Rico Petrocelli and Tommie Agee and César Tovar and Roy White and Mel Stottlemyre. All those former teammates and opponents were still playing and even thriving in the major leagues.

  And where was Maury Lerner, the hit-obsessed prospect who once sat beside them in dugouts, joined in on those long bus rides, and shared small talk around second base? Occupying a first-floor cell in an infamous corner of Rhode Island’s Adult Correctional Institutions.

  “One of those should-have-beens,” his son says. “An American tragedy, when you think of it.”

  Facing life behind bars, Lerner could easily have assimilated into the hard culture of the prison’s north wing, an area reserved for big-name inmates that was controlled by Gerard Ouimette, a vicious and unpredictable gangster connected to the Patriarca crime family. The rules were so lax, and Ouimette so powerful, that inmates could do pretty much anything but leave.

  “I remember walking into the prison one time to work on a case, and there in an office were these big food containers full of steaks and lobster tails,” Vincent Vespia, a former state police detective, recalls. “So I asked: ‘What’s all this for?’ ”

  The answer: “Ouimette’s having a party.”

  But rather than join in, Lerner removed himself, capitalizing on the uncommon deference he had earned by keeping his mouth shut about Patriarca. He was, after all, a pro.

  An inveterate reader, Lerner had the second-highest IQ in the prison, and he took pride in learning a new vocabulary word every day. A fitness fanatic still, he was an early advocate for the health benefits of raw vegetables. And whenever a law enforcement official stopped by to try to draw him out, he clammed up.

  “A disciplined guy; the coldest, hardest guy there,” says Brian Andrews, a former detective commander for the Rhode Island State Police. “And Pro wouldn’t talk. Sometimes he’d look at you and wouldn’t even answer you.”

  Lerner “conformed strictly to the rules of the institution,” a prison record indicates. He retreated to his cell when fights broke out, fulfilled his work assignments, took multiple furloughs without incident, and ably handled a work-release job at a nearby landfill. A model inmate.

  In 1980, Lerner came to the rescue of a correction officer who was being choked with a cord by another inmate. He subdued the inmate and escorted the injured officer to the infirmary. A formal commendation was entered into Lerner’s file, applauding him for a “heroic action” that would not be forgotten.

  Gerald Tillinghast spent a lot of time with Lerner in prison. Now 70 and out on parole, Tillinghast was a particularly feared figure in the Rhode Island underworld, the reasons for which become clear during a breakfast conversation. Over a crime scene plate of scrambled eggs slathered with ketchup, Tillinghast recalls a beef he once had with a federal informant:

  “So I come up behind him, I spun him around, said what are you doing? He said it’s none of my effing business. Boom. I knocked him right out, threw him down the stairs and, uh, stabbed him with an ice pick a couple of times.”

  He says Lerner, whom he respected, was of a different prison stripe than most.

  “Take organized crime away, or any kind of crimes like that,” Tillinghast says. “If you was to know him, you would never equate him with that. Never. When you get to know him? Very charismatic—if he likes you. Very seldom you’d get him laughing.”

  All the while, Lerner remained a family man; that is, to his own family. When appeals to overturn his conviction seemed at a dead end, Lerner moved his wife, Arrene, and their two young children, Glen and Jenni, to a small house close to the prison.

  “I never met a more loyal woman in my life,” Tillinghast says of Arrene. And when Pro would come into the visiting room, he says, “them kids would run to him.”

  Glen, who was raised to believe that his father had been framed, says he spent more time with him than most children do with their unincarcerated fathers. “I saw him five days a week, two hours a day, across a table in the visiting room,” he says.

  Still, it was not easy on the Lerner children. Glen says he often brawled with other kids who teased him about a father serving life for a double homicide. And his father could be controlling—“You need to do this, you need to do that”—partly because he had lost control of his own life, and partly because he wanted to steer his children away from that life.

  But Glen says with admiration that domestic normality was somehow established in a profoundly abnormal situation. “My parents did an amazing job to overcome this stigma,” he says, and to convey to others that “we’re not who you think we are.”

  His father had a concrete wall installed in the backyard so Glen could practice soccer kicks, and he learned all he could about a game he never played so he could counsel his son. When furloughs allowed him brief freedom, he would att
end his son’s high school soccer games, cheering Glen on to star status.

  “He gave us every opportunity to succeed,” Glen says. “Everybody would always say to me, ‘Man, I wish your dad was my dad.’ ”

  Glen added, “I wouldn’t trade him for anybody as my father.”

  Maury Lerner did his time: 1975, 1980, 1985. Through it all, he found distraction, and maybe even sustenance, in his former profession as a ballplayer. When he heard that a prison job counselor, Joseph Filipkowski, was the father of a promising Little Leaguer, he offered to work on the boy’s mechanics. On a prison ball field, an inmate in khakis tossed Wiffle ball pitches to a 12-year-old.

  The kid’s doing fine, the incarcerated ex-ballplayer advised.

  Lerner also became the demanding player-coach for a competitive softball team that took on all comers: correction officers, professional football players, anyone willing to play an opponent who would always have home-field advantage. The younger players listened to him, Tillinghast says, because they feared him.

  “He wanted perfection,” he says, adding, “God forbid you lost a game, you know what I mean?”

  In some ways, Lerner still considered himself part of the professional baseball family. He once contacted a former minor league manager of his to say he had a hot prospect on his prison softball team: this kid could do it all. The former manager, by then a high-ranking Pirates executive, dispatched a scout to run the inmate through a workout.

  The player turned out to be exceptionally good—at softball.

  According to Tillinghast, Lerner’s interaction with his players ended on the ball field. He might say hi to a teammate in the yard, but he rarely engaged in serious conversation.

  “He just wanted to do his time,” Tillinghast says, cleaning his teeth with a toothpick. “He did his time like 10 men. Never complained.”