Animal

by Casey Sherman

  Rico joined the bureau on February 26, 1951, and was immediately dispatched to the FBI’S Chicago office, where he spent a year learning the ropes before getting summoned back to Boston when his father became gravely ill. Rico was reassigned to the Boston office, where he would stay for the rest of his FBI career. H. Paul Rico made his way onto J. Edgar Hoover’s radar screen early, first by working behind the scenes assisting fellow agent Jack Kehoe’s investigation of the infamous Brink’s Job. The case had remained unsolved for five years before Kehoe broke it wide open in 1955, when he convinced robber Joseph “Specs” O’Keefe to cooperate with authorities. Kehoe had learned that O’Keefe was outraged that thieves had snatched his cut of the stolen money. To add insult to injury, O’Keefe’s former Brink’s partner, Tony Pino, had hired a hitman to silence Specs once and for all. The gunman, Elmer “Trigger” Burke, drove up to Boston from New York City and found O’Keefe at a Dorchester housing project. After chasing him around the building for thirty minutes, Burke finally shot Specs in the leg. The wound required hospitalization. Kehoe paid Specs a bedside visit and used O’Keefe’s anger to his advantage. O’Keefe eventually cooperated with Kehoe, and soon all the Brink’s robbers (including Tony Pino) were behind bars.

  Jack Kehoe became a legend within the ranks of the FBI, and H. Paul Rico nibbled around that fame until he landed a major collar himself just a year later in 1956. The feds were on the hunt for a twenty-five-year-old accused bank robber from South Boston named James “Whitey” Bulger. During the previous year, Bulger and his gang had knocked over two banks, one in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and another in Hammond, Indiana, for a combined take of $54,612.28. During the Indiana job, Bulger served as a cover man, holding two pistols on customers and bank employees while another member of the gang cleaned out the tellers’ cages. The witnesses all got a good look at the robbers, as they were not wearing masks. Instead, Bulger and his bandits sported Elmer Fudd–like hunting caps with flaps covering their ears.

  An arrest warrant was issued for Whitey Bulger on January 4, 1956. Bulger knew enough to steer clear of his old haunts, at least for a while. His one reported visit back to Boston occurred during the Christmas holiday. Whitey Bulger kept moving; he’d be in California one week, New Mexico the next. He traveled with a girlfriend under several aliases, including Leo McLaughlin, Martin Kelley, and Paul John Rose. Not only had Bulger changed his name, but he also changed his appearance. He dyed his soft blond hair jet black and began to sport horn-rimmed glasses. The FBI had also learned that Bulger (a nonsmoker) had taken to walking around with a cigar stuffed in his mouth in an attempt to distort his facial features.

  H. Paul Rico had known Bulger for a couple of years. The two ran into each other often in Boston’s gay nightclub district, where Bulger worked as a hustler and where Rico cultivated informants. There has been much speculation over the years, however, that their interests in Boston’s homosexual scene had more to do with pleasure than it did with business. In March 1956, Rico and another fellow FBI agent, Herbert F. Briick, received a tip that Bulger had returned to Boston and was spending time at a nightclub in Revere, just a few miles north of the city. Rico and Briick staked out the place for a couple of nights until they spotted a disguised Bulger walking out of the joint with another local thug named John DeFeo. Rico and his men swooped in and captured the fugitive Bulger, who was unarmed. During his arraignment the next day, the prosecutor called Bulger “a vicious person, known to carry guns, and [who] by his own admittance has an intense dislike for police and law enforcement officers.”21

  A few months later, Bulger was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He was shipped off to federal lockups in Atlanta, Georgia, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and then the “Rock” itself—Alcatraz. Meanwhile, H. Paul Rico stayed in Boston and reaped the rewards connected with the high-profile capture. Rico’s boss in the Boston office sent a personal and confidential memo to J. Edgar Hoover praising the young agent for taking Whitey Bulger off the street. The special agent in charge described the South Boston hoodlum as “extremely dangerous,” a person with remarkable agility and reckless daring in driving vehicles and overall unstable and vicious characteristics.

  Upon receiving the memo, J. Edgar Hoover swiftly promoted Rico to special agent and wrote him a letter in which he stated, “It is a pleasure to approve this promotion in view of your superior accomplishments in connection with the Bank Robbery case involving James J. Bulger Jr. and others.” The FBI director went on to praise Rico for his ability to develop valuable and confidential sources of information. Rico’s new special agent status also came with a cash bonus and a trip to Washington, DC, for a celebratory photo with Hoover himself. Rico boasted to colleague and criminal alike that he had a close relationship with the nation’s top cop. Given the rumors about each man’s sexual orientation, Rico’s braggadocio no doubt triggered snickers behind his back.

  The FBI’S use of electronic surveillance (ELSUR) had been paying dividends in the bureau’s fight against the mob, but Hoover continued to stress the need for his agents to cultivate informants in the hope of gathering solid human intelligence (HUMINT). One confidential source developed by the Boston office provided agents with significant information about disharmony at the highest levels in the New England Mafia. The story began to unfold when underboss Jerry Angiulo awoke to find his car riddled with bullets outside his apartment in Boston’s North End. Was it merely a warning? Or had the gunman believed Angiulo to be in the car at the time? The informant had no way of knowing. What he did tell the FBI was that a gangster named Salvatore Iacone had gone to Raymond Patriarca the day before the shooting to complain about Angiulo. Iacone and Angiulo had recently gone in on the Indian Meadow Country Club in Worcester, Massachusetts. The two men had been arguing about proprietorship of the club when the short-tempered Angiulo launched into an obscenity-laced tirade against his business partner. Iacone wanted to kill Angiulo on the spot, but chose not to act out of respect for Patriarca. When Iacone described the incident to the Man, Patriarca just scoffed.

  “You shoulda killed him,” Patriarca told Iacone. He also gave Iacone the green light to whack Angiulo on the spot with no questions asked if the underboss disrespected him in the future. As stated by the Boston office in a confidential memo to a top FBI official in Washington, “We have had recent indications of a growing coolness in attitude by Patriarca toward Angiulo.” These “indications” were exactly what the bureau had been waiting for. It suggested a soft spot in Patriarca’s impenetrable armor and gave agents hope that the growing divide between the boss and underboss would spread to the rest of the New England mob family.

  In the early 1960s, the nation’s most infamous gangster was not Raymond Patriarca, Sam Giancana, or any of their counterparts. Instead, America’s most celebrated mobster was a low-level, square-headed drug smuggler named Joseph Valachi. Valachi had been in prison since his conviction on federal narcotics charges in 1959. Agents from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) approached Valachi while he was behind bars at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. The drug smuggler had just killed a man in the prison yard he believed had been sent by New York Mafia boss Vito Genovese to assassinate him. Valachi crushed the man’s skull with a two-foot section of iron pipe. It had been the desperate act of a desperate man. Valachi had already survived three attempts on his life. He believed that he had been marked for death after another mobster began spreading erroneous rumors that Valachi had turned informer. Valachi told authorities that Genovese had planted his lips on Valachi’s cheeks, giving him the “kiss of death” while the two shared a cell shortly before the deadly jail-yard confrontation. By the time Valachi smashed the pipe against his victim’s head, he was weak and delusional, having been on a self-imposed hunger strike for several days out of fear that his prison food was poisoned. The sad truth was that Valachi’s “assassin” had not been trying to kill him at all. The victim, John Joseph Saupp, was serving time for mail robbery and f
orgery and had no mob ties. Valachi had mistaken Saupp for a dangerous mobster named Joseph “Joe Beck” DiPalermo. FBN agents informed the paranoid Valachi that he had in fact killed the wrong man and then threatened to return him to the prison’s general population unless he cooperated.

  Valachi made up his mind quickly. In an attempt to save his own neck, he agreed to flip on old friends as well as total strangers, and in doing so broke the Mafia’s cardinal rule of Omerta (Silence). Valachi was transferred to New York’s Westchester County Jail in late June 1962 under the alias Joseph DeMarco. Initial questioning had been done by the FBN, but once Attorney General Bobby Kennedy learned about the underworld defection, he pressed J. Edgar Hoover to insert one of his own agents into the interrogation.

  Despite Valachi’s low-level status within the mob, he was able to provide a wealth of information both real and imagined about the syndicate’s organizational structure and its most influential and ruthless members. This information was not gleaned easily, however. At first, Valachi tried to say as little as possible. The FBI assigned Special Agent James Flynn to the case with an order to break down the mobster’s stone wall of silence. “I could see there was a definite hatred on Joe’s part against anybody in law enforcement at that point,” Flynn recalled years later in a documentary for A&E television.22 “He would talk and not talk. He would recognize the fact that you were in the room and stop talking altogether.” Flynn worked on Valachi for two months, plying the overweight prisoner with Italian specialties including Genoa sausage, pasta, and cheese. But the key to Valachi’s heart turned out not to be his stomach after all. It was information. Special Agent Flynn sat Valachi down for a talk that would either make or break his case.

  “Joe, I’m gonna tell you one word and I want you to give me the other. If you don’t give it to me, we’re finished,” Flynn told Valachi. “Cosa,” the special agent whispered.23

  “Cosa Nostra,” Valachi replied, nodding his head. “You know about it?”

  Flynn nodded back. He had heard the words Cosa Nostra mentioned several times on wiretaps but was not fully aware of its meaning. Valachi would have to fill in the rest. Valachi informed Flynn that those inside the mob never referred to themselves as members of the Mafia. “That’s the expression the outside uses,” Valachi told him. The mobster explained that Cosa Nostra was a Sicilian phrase that meant Our Thing. La Cosa Nostra (the FBI added the La) quickly replaced words like “syndicate” and “hoodlum” in the bureau’s lexicon. Valachi then broke down LCN’S business model, which was a combination of best practices from both the corporate world and the military. Valachi described himself and others as soldiers, criminal infantry working in tightly knit crews called regimas who were led by capo regimes (lieutenants) that reported to twelve capos (heads) in select geographical areas.

  Contrary to popular belief, Valachi had not been the first man to expose the inner workings of the mob. That information had been provided decades before, in 1940, by a Jewish contract killer named Abe “Kid Twist” Reles. Kid Twist, a vicious killer for the notorious hit squad Murder Inc., came under indictment for a string of gangland slayings in which he had applied a number of different killing methods from pistols to his personal favorite—the ice pick. With threats of the electric chair, prosecutors realized they could twist Kid Twist into giving up his Murder Inc. boss, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. Abe “Kid Twist” Reles implicated Buchalter in the murder of a Brooklyn candystore owner for which he was later convicted and sent to the electric chair. Reles also turned in five other mobsters who were all found guilty and later executed for their crimes. The Murder Inc. turncoat was not done yet, however. Prosecutors had set their sights on Albert Anastasia, a high-ranking member of Cosa Nostra. Reles had given investigators key information to tie Anastasia to the murder of a longshoreman and union activist named Pete Panto, who had led an unsuccessful revolt against International Longshoremen’s Association leader Joseph P. Ryan, a close ally of the New York mob. Pete Panto disappeared in July 1939, and his remains were not discovered until nearly three years later, when they turned up in a lime pit in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

  Panto’s story was later used as an inspiration for the Oscar-winning 1954 film On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando. While Panto was still missing and feared dead, Reles told investigators that the union activist had been killed by fellow Murder Inc. hitman Mendy Weiss on orders from Albert Anastasia. Before Reles could testify, however, he took flight from a sixth-floor window at the Half Moon Hotel on New York’s Coney Island while guarded by six detectives. Investigators claimed Reles was killed while trying to escape, but popular theory suggests that the guards had been paid $100,000 to push Kid Twist out the window to his death. With his early and mysterious demise, Reles was immortalized by one New York newspaper as “the canary who sang, but couldn’t fly.”

  Abe “Kid Twist” Reles never got the chance to point fingers and tell his story in a public forum. That job would be left for Joseph Valachi. It wasn’t enough for Valachi to give up the goods on La Cosa Nostra behind closed doors. Attorney General Kennedy and FBI director Hoover both wanted a spectacle. These powerful men wanted the story told, but each through his own prism. J. Edgar Hoover originally tried to break the story in Reader’s Digest, with the FBI taking full credit for exposing La Cosa Nostra, but he was overruled by the attorney general, who leaked his own version of the story to reporter Peter Maas at the Saturday Evening Post. Hoover was furious over the slight. “I never saw such skullduggery,” he complained in a May 23, 1962, memo. Hoover also added that Bobby Kennedy’s aides were “exploiting this whole situation for their own benefit.”24

  Despite much infighting behind the scenes, Kennedy and Hoover presented a united front against the mob when they paraded Joe Valachi before Congress and the world in October 1963. The gangster’s highly anticipated testimony before Senator John L. McClellan’s committee on organized crime had become the hottest ticket in town. The attorney general’s wife, Ethel Kennedy, arrived early for a front-row seat. Caroline Kennedy’s White House kindergarten teacher was also there. Curiosity also got the better of Civil Rights pioneer James Meredith and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who were both in attendance. “I wanted to get the smell of it,” the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt told newspaper reporters.25

  Once again, Valachi re-created the Mafia’s organizational blueprint for lawmakers and reporters in attendance. He also described the history of La Cosa Nostra in America as he knew it. The gallery hung on the informant’s every word, and as a reporter from Time magazine observed, “Valachi seemed to enjoy it thoroughly.” Battling a sore throat, the gravelly voiced Valachi sucked from a juice filled plastic lemon as he described his motive for breaking Omerta.

  “First of all I want revenge,” Valachi told the committee. “I want to destroy them, Cosa Nostra, the leaders, the bosses, the whole thing that exists… . What did I get out of it? Nothin’ but misery.”26

  Valachi’s testimony was carried live on national television for two straight weeks. He identified Vito Genovese as his Cosa Nostra boss and listed the names of Joseph Bonanno, Gaetano Gagliano, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Vincent Mangano, and Joseph Profaci as the original bosses of La Cosa Nostra’s five families. Valachi also revealed the Mafia’s secret initiation ritual for the first time in public. It started with a finger prick and the sharing of blood and culminated with the burning of the image of a saint in the palm of one’s hand. Valachi demonstrated the ceremony for the committee and muttered the words he claimed he was once ordered to recite during his own induction. “This is the way I burn if I expose this organization.”

  America was captivated by Valachi’s testimony and overlooked his penchant for mistakes. Despite having what was called a “photographic memory,” Valachi stumbled several times during the hearing, mixing up names and places of his alleged underworld exploits. Committee member Edmund Muskie of Maine called the hearings “a waste of time.” The true impact of Joe Valachi’s testimony w
ould not be felt until years later, when Congress passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act of 1970, better known as RICO, which strengthened and extended criminal penalties against the mob. Valachi also paved the way for FBI agents like H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condon to go after other mob associates, hoping to use them as weapons in the ongoing war against La Cosa Nostra.

  7

  Uncaged

  There’s just no place for a street fighting man

  THE ROLLING STONES

  Following his parole in 1960, Joe Barboza carried over his bookmaking business from prison to the street. Starting with a $2,000 loan from his boxing manager, Eddie Fisher, Barboza managed to parlay the money into $25,000 in just one year. Fisher also kept Barboza on the books as an employee at Scooterland, a scooter sales showroom behind the Hotel Statler. He worked there for nine months and was made assistant manager despite the fact that he rarely set foot in the place. Instead, Joe took to running around with like-minded young thugs looking to make a quick score. One of those men was Guy Frizzi, an East Boston tough guy who reminded Barboza of the actor George Raft. Frizzi had a short temper and a long rap sheet. He was known to slap around his girlfriends and anyone else that fell out of his favor. Barboza was drawn to Frizzi partly because of to their similar backgrounds. Both had grown up in reform school and prison and had been behind bars at the same places at different times. Frizzi had also been incarcerated at the Concord Reformatory, where he once had his two front teeth knocked out. The two made a dangerous pair, and even on the nights they weren’t looking for trouble, trouble certainly found them.