Animal

by Casey Sherman

  Three weeks later, Sacco and Vanzetti, both Italian immigrants and avowed anarchists, were arrested after appearing at a garage in Brockton, Massachusetts, to retrieve the car investigators believed had been used in the holdup. Despite the fact that neither man had a criminal record and that prosecutors had virtually no evidence against them, the men were quickly indicted and put on trial for the murders. Their arrests sparked a fuse that would ignite a conflagration of violent protest around the world. Anarchists sent bombs to U.S. embassies across the globe. Most were diffused, but one bomb sent to the American ambassador in Paris did explode, injuring the ambassador’s valet. As the trial got under way at the Norfolk County Courthouse in Dedham, Massachusetts, authorities fortified the courtroom with sliding steel doors and cast-iron shutters to prevent damage from a possible bomb attack. Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

  After the trial, a Portuguese immigrant named Celestino Madeiros made a startling confession while locked up alongside Nicola Sacco in Dedham. Madeiros, a convicted killer and member of the Morelli Gang, slipped Sacco a note stating that he had been involved in the deadly holdup. Police in New Bedford, who had had a long history with the Morelli Gang, suspected them in the murders fifty miles to the north. More than two dozen witnesses had also come forward, many of them offering descriptions of the assailants that generally fit members of the Morelli Gang. Despite the confession of Madeiros, and despite ardent support from notables including Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, and Dorothy Parker, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were sent to their death on August 23, 1927. Nicola Sacco was defiant to the end. As he was being strapped down in the electric chair, he shouted, Vive l’anarchia! More subdued, Bartolomeo Vanzetti whispered under his thick mustache that he forgave those who were about to put him to death. Morelli Gang member Celestino Madeiros was sent to the electric chair that same day for an unrelated murder. His execution had been delayed in case his testimony had been required in a retrial of Sacco and Vanzetti. In his 1973 memoir My Life in the Mafia, Vincent Teresa claimed that he once had discussed the case with Butsey Morelli decades after the crime. Morelli told Teresa, “We whacked them out. We killed those two guys (Parmenter and Berardelli). These two greaseballs (Sacco & Vanzetti) took it on the chin. They got in our way so we just ran over them.”8 Decades later, a similar case would play out in a Massachusetts courtroom with Joseph Barboza playing the leading role.

  The foundation for Barboza’s criminal career was set on the streets of New Bedford where Joe, just entering his teenage years, gathered together a small band of roaming bandits and in the spirit of Oliver Twist ran about the city stealing from local department stores to fence for cash. In the beginning, Barboza and his young crew would simply gather up the courage to walk into a store and target something small and valuable, such as a watch or piece of jewelry. They would then slide the item into a coat pocket, slip out of the store, and run. Eventually, however, the gang learned how to pick locks and operate like more seasoned criminals—at night. Joe believed that these nighttime raids cut the risk of getting caught. He was wrong. At the tender age of thirteen, Joe Barboza found himself behind bars for the first time. The charge was breaking and entering. Soon after, he was shipped off to the Lyman School for Boys, a notorious reform school located nearly one hundred miles northwest of New Bedford in the small farming town of Westborough, Massachusetts. Established in 1886, the Lyman School was built on the grounds of the State Reform School, the oldest reformatory in the United States. The Lyman School was spread over a thousand acres, half of which was rich farmland maintained by the young inmates, or students, as they were called. The school had its share of notorious graduates, including Albert DeSalvo, who would eventually confess to and later recant his claim of being the Boston Strangler.

  For Barboza, this was the first time he had traveled more than ten miles from his home. Gone were the familiar sights and sounds of his New Bedford neighborhood. Gone was the familiar aroma of Palmeda’s ethnic Portuguese dishes wafting through their apartment from her tiny kitchen. The choked streets and exotic smells he was accustomed to were now replaced by acre after acre of rolling farmland. It was as much like home to Barboza as the craters of the moon. Many of the students were just like him, kids who had committed petty crimes, rather than violent offenses. Some had been sent to Lyman for being truant from school, or even for the sheer audacity of being a “stubborn child.”

  Young Joe and the other boys were housed in cottages with pleasant names such as Sunset, Hillside, Wachusett, Elms, and Oak. From the outside, Lyman appeared no different from a prep school that might cater to the sons of blue-blooded masters of industry. The inside told a different story, however. The children were given a strict religious education and taught a trade, such as carpentry, masonry, or plumbing. These so-called benefits were overshadowed by the harsh disciplinary doctrine of the institution. With extreme prejudice, beatings were handed out daily by cottage masters wielding a variety of weapons, including belts and even pick handles. Children who committed even minor infractions were marched down to Oak Cottage (the disciplinary cottage) and given brutal “attitude adjustments.” Barboza received countless beatings, including one particularly savage punishment called “the hot foot,” whereby a cottage master would strike repeated blows to the arch of a child’s naked foot.

  There were no walls or wired fences to keep the inmates on the grounds. Instead, fear of reprisal gave potential runaways enough of an incentive to stay put. Those students who did manage to escape were never talked about or heard from again. Rumors were spread among the children, and perhaps even encouraged by the adults, that runaways were killed and their bodies buried in the black waters of a nearby swamp. As frightening as those rumors were, they were not bad enough to dissuade Barboza from running away. He simply walked away from the facility one day and spent two weeks on the run. His parents were harassed daily by New Bedford police officers, all of whom believed they were withholding information on the boy’s whereabouts. In reality, Joe’s brief stint as a teenage fugitive was as much a mystery to his family as it was to the cops. One night young Joe turned up at his parent’s apartment wearing a big smile and an engineer’s hat with the visor turned up. When asked by his mother where he had been for the last two weeks, Joe explained that he had found work selling vegetables from a cart on the street. His parents did not immediately call police as they had been instructed to do; instead they drove Joe back to the Lyman School themselves the next day. Joe Sr. and Palmeda handed Joe back over to school administrators with the promise that he would never escape again. As his parents got into their car for the long journey home, Joe was marched down to Oak Cottage for another “attitude adjustment.”

  Hating—yet also wanting to emulate—his father, young Joe picked up the sport of boxing while a student at Lyman. Joe’s prowess in the ring both astonished and annoyed his schoolmasters, who had not forgiven him for his escape. The school’s boxing coach put Joe in the ring with an older student with the aim of teaching the young punk from New Bedford a painful lesson. Joe mauled his opponent from the opening bell, hitting him with a series of savage shots. The boy crumbled to the gym floor wincing in pain and admitting defeat. Joe unlaced his gloves and strode by the boxing coach with a toothy grin plastered on his long face. The frustrated coach followed Barboza into the locker room and attacked him while he was untying his shoes. The coach threw a powerful uppercut that connected with the boy’s jaw. Young Joe took a serious beating that day and later somehow managed to get word to his family. An enraged Joe Sr. drove up to the Lyman School and challenged the coach and other school administrators to a fight. It was the one time that young Joe was proud to be his father’s son.

  Not only was Barboza forced to fend off sadistic school masters, he also had to defend himself against other young inmates. Young Joe was constantly mocked by older boys for his large head, long arms, and stubby legs. Word of Joe’s fighting prowe
ss on the streets of New Bedford had not traveled with him to the Lyman School. Instead, his young tormentors would have to learn the hard way, both in the ring and in the dormitory. When out from under the watchful eyes of the cottage masters, the children meted out their own justices and injustices against each other in a struggle for power reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. At the Lyman School, a boy was either predator or prey. Weaker children were beaten and molested by stronger students who, growing into their sexuality, looked upon everything with carnal intent and seething anger. Young Joe took to the role of predator early on. Despite his incarceration, he had been granted a freedom that he had never experienced before. No longer tethered to his mother and manipulated by her to keep the elder Barboza in line, Joe’s only responsibility now was to himself. Once again, Joe tucked his chin to his chest and came out swinging. The only way to become king of this violent teenage jungle was to fight for it—and fight he did. He would later claim to have been involved in more than three hundred brawls during his three terms at Lyman, and bragged to have won them all.

  The goal of the school may have been to reform misguided children, but it sadly had the opposite effect on most. Kids left Lyman with a harder edge, more dangerous than when they had gone in. A classic example was the case of Jesse Pomeroy, who would become the youngest person ever convicted of first-degree murder in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Jesse had been sent to the state reform school in Westborough in the late 1800s after he had been arrested and found guilty of torturing young boys in his South Boston neighborhood. Pomeroy would strip his young victims, tie them to a post, and lash them with a thick rope while ordering them to recite an obscene version of the Lord’s Prayer. He would then mutilate the faces of his victims with a pocket knife. Like Joe Barboza, Jesse Pomeroy looked different from other boys his age. He had a large head, lumbering frame, and a milky right eye. Pomeroy had gone partially blind after receiving a smallpox vaccination as an infant. Jesse was known to stick needles in the eyes of his victims as retribution against the God who had plagued him with this striking deformity.

  Jesse Pomeroy’s first reign of terror was brief, as his milky, or “marble,” eye, as it was described, was an easily identifiable mark used by police to track him down. Like Barboza, Pomeroy was also sent to reform school at the age of thirteen. But unlike young Joe, Jesse proved to be a good student and a model inmate. Pomeroy himself never broke school rules or acted out in a way to warrant a beating by institution superiors. Most children stayed far away from the disciplinary rooms while their classmates were being punished, but not Jesse. He was drawn to the screams of beating victims and would later ask them to describe to him in vivid detail how they had been flogged. Jesse had always been fascinated by the torture of innocents. He had twisted the heads off birds as a child and later graduated to assaulting young boys. Through his conversations with those young beating victims at the reform school in Westborough, Jesse had learned new methods with which to apply his fiendish trade.

  Jesse Pomeroy had served sixteen months and still had two years remaining on his sentence when he was discharged from the state reform school for good behavior. Less than two months after his release, the boy (now fourteen) was back in South Boston working at his mother’s shop when a ten-year-old girl wearing a plaid skirt walked in and asked him if she could buy a notebook for school. The milky eyed boy invited the girl to the basement of the shop, where he told her that he had one notebook left but that the cover had been stained with ink. The girl offered to buy it for two cents less than the retail price and was shown the cellar door. Jesse opened the door and followed her down the steps. Moments later, he put his arm around her neck, pulled out a knife, and cut her throat. He then dragged the body of ten-year-old Katie Curran behind a water closet and stuffed it in a trash heap. A few weeks later, Jesse lured four-year-old Horace Millen to the edge of Boston Harbor to see a new steamship. With the same knife he had used to murder Katie Curran, Pomeroy slashed the boy’s throat and then tried to castrate him. The young boy’s body was discovered a short time later by two boys who were playing on the beach. In addition to stabbing Horace Millen nearly two dozen times, the killer had also punctured the boy’s eyeball.

  Jesse Pomeroy was the lead suspect from the early stages of the investigation and later admitted to the boy’s murder along with the killing of Katie Curran. Dubbed the “Boy Fiend” by the press, he was charged and convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. But because he was only fourteen years old, his sentence was commuted to life behind bars in solitary confinement. The violent culture of the state reform school is certainly not to blame for Jesse Pomeroy’s murder spree, but it may have accelerated his homicidal behavior. The same can be said about Joe Barboza. He arrived at the Lyman School a troubled kid and left with a new hunger for violence and eventually murder.

  Young Joe was walking the razor’s edge when he was discharged from the Lyman School and sent back to the streets of New Bedford. He was looking for new scores with which to put money in his empty pockets. He still had little support at home despite his mother’s best efforts. She fed Joe and his brother, Donald, scraps that she brought home from the hospital cafeteria. The bleak financial situation forced Donald to quit school at the age of sixteen in an attempt to help his family out. He got a job as a welder’s apprentice at a shipyard in Providence. Donald would hand over a portion of his paycheck to his father every week in the belief that the elder Barboza would use the money to support his family. Years later, Donald Barboza found out that Joe Sr. had pocketed the money.

  Young Joe would not make his older brother’s mistake. He had no interest in spending long hours leaning over a hot blowtorch at some shipyard—whatever money he made he was going to keep. According to the Boston Herald Traveler, Barboza and his gang robbed sixteen houses in the New Bedford area over the span of just a couple of days, stealing money, watches, liquor, and guns. Easy money was not Joe’s only motivation. Sometimes he was inspired by the simple act of revenge. When a shop teacher insulted him for his lack of woodworking skills at the vocational school he was attending, Joe broke into the man’s house and went on a rampage. Lamps were toppled, photographs were smashed, and that wasn’t all. When police spoke to reporters about the incident, they said that the robbers had left a cream pie dripping from the wall. Of course, the press seized on this unique news nugget and dubbed the gang the “Cream Pie Bandits.” The real version of the robbery was too vile for even hardened investigators to reveal. What was dripping from the wall wasn’t pastry cream at all. Barboza had defecated on the floor and smeared some along every wall in the house.

  3

  That Pig on the Hill

  So this is where it happens.

  The power games and bribes

  THE DEAD KENNEDYS

  Raymond L. S. Patriarca balled his hands into tight fists as he stared across the committee room into the hard-bitten eyes of the bootlegger’s son. The air was thick with the acrid stench of cigarette and pipe smoke, and the blood pumping through the mob boss’s veins was fueled by a seething hatred for his inquisitor. It was a bitterly cold day in February 1959, and Patriarca had been summoned to Washington, D.C., to testify before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor Management—or the McClellan Hearings as they were called, after Senator John L. McClellan, the bespectacled Arkansas Democrat and World War I veteran who chaired the committee. McClellan’s attack dog was a young attorney from Massachusetts named Robert F. Kennedy. McClellan had hired the thirty-three-year-old brother of U.S. senator John F. Kennedy (also a committee member) as lead investigator and chief counsel for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It was Kennedy’s job to investigate and expose the mob’s violent infiltration of labor unions from coast to coast.

  This was a plum assignment for Kennedy, who hoped his racket-busting crusade would one day overshadow the high profile Kefauver Hearings, which had been broadcast nationwide in 1952. Under the alias Mr.
Rogers, RFK traveled far and wide documenting horrific tales of moblabor abuse, including the story of a union organizer in San Diego who had received the ultimate indignity of having a cucumber shoved up his ass as a painful and humiliating warning to stay away. If the organizer did not heed the warning, mobsters had vowed to split his rectum with a watermelon on the next go-round.

  Accounts like this outraged Kennedy, who went after the mob with unfettered zeal. During the committee’s 270 days of testimony, RFK went toe to toe with Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa, and had even accused Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana of “giggling like a little girl” while Kennedy tried to question him about mob activities. Giancana had invoked his Fifth Amendment right during the hearing, as did all the Mafia bosses—except Raymond Patriarca.

  When grilled about allegations of beatings and threats dished out by his employees at the National Cigarette Service vending machine company in Providence, Patriarca insisted that the stories were pure fantasy. The mob boss painted himself as an honest businessman unfairly targeted and harassed by police. “I’ve been a goat around Rhode Island for twenty years,”9 Patriarca said, in a deep, booming voice. When grilled by Kennedy about the origin of the $80,000 to $90,000 used by Patriarca to start his vending machine business, the mob boss claimed that the cash had been a gift from his dying mother. According to Patriarca, the small fortune had been left for him in a box in the family basement. Kennedy took another hard look at the witness’s lengthy rap sheet and shook his head.

  “Why, if you had $80,000 or so sitting in the basement, did you become involved in burglaries?” Kennedy asked.

  “Why do a lot of young fellows do a lot of things when they haven’t a father?” Patriarca replied incredulously.