The decision was made: Joe Barboza must die before being allowed to testify at trial. But in order for the mob to put down the Animal, they would have to go through John Partington and his U.S Marshals, and those men had an obligation to keep Barboza breathing even at the cost of their lives.
Once the Thacher Island location was exposed, the U.S. Marshal Service decided that it was best to move Barboza and his family back to the mainland. This time they secured a sprawling estate near Freshwater Cove in Gloucester. For the U.S. marshals the move was a major concern, as it would eliminate the added layer of protection provided by the sea. The decision was gleefully supported by Barboza, however, as he felt the island was slowly driving him insane.
The island would have one last laugh on its most notorious guest. On the day of the move, Partington made several trips by helicopter transferring equipment and supplies from Thacher Island to the Gloucester estate. Once Partington felt the new location was secure and ready to hold and protect Barboza, he called for the chopper to take him back to the island to retrieve Joe and his family. By this time, however, heavy fog had shrouded the island, making it impossible for the helicopter to land. Partington had not accounted for the possibility of bad weather. He had shipped all the family’s clothes, and more important, their food to the mainland. To make matters worse, there was no heat in Barboza’s cottage, and forecasters were predicting an autumn frost. Partington radioed the deputy he had left in charge on the island to notify him that Barboza would have to spend one more night on the island with no supplies and very little comfort.
Upon hearing about the situation, an enraged Barboza grabbed the radio from the deputy.
“You really fucked this up right,” he growled at Partington. “John, I’m not blaming you but you fucking left me. My baby, my baby is out here!”121
Barboza also threatened to pummel Robert Morey, the top U.S. marshal for Massachusetts, who had originally conceived the plan to use Thacher Island as sanctuary for the mob killer. Morey had planned to meet with Barboza upon his relocation to the estate at Fresh Water Cove. Partington relayed the threat to his superior and tried to dissuade him from meeting Barboza until Joe had a chance to cool down. Morey was unfazed and wanted to remind the Animal that he was not a hotel guest but a prisoner with no rights of his own. The next morning Morey stood stone straight as the chopper carrying Barboza landed on the plush lawn of the Gloucester estate. Barboza leaped from the helicopter like a soldier heading into combat and began making his way toward Morey with fists clenched. Sensing the impending confrontation, Partington grabbed little Stacy Barboza from her mother’s arms and handed her over to Morey, the little girl serving as a human shield against her father’s rage. Seeing his daughter’s bright smile, the Animal uncoiled his fists. Not here, not now, he thought. Joe would have to wait for another opportunity to express his anger to Morey. That moment came later in the day in a private meeting at the estate. Barboza unloaded a laundry list of gripes to Morey, who nodded occasionally but showed little or no emotion. When Joe was finished and nearly out of breath, Morey began to speak in a slow and deliberate manner.
“Now Joseph, you have a very nice place here,” he said, waving his arms around the lavish room. “You see this place you have here? It’s a lot nicer than that Barnstable County jail, right?”
Barboza nodded reluctantly.
Morey’s soft voice suddenly grew louder. “Now if you don’t like it, your ass can go down to Barnstable.”122
Morey stood from his chair and walked out of the room, leaving Joe speechless. The U.S. marshal was not one to be fucked with.
“Everything’s cool,” Barboza bellowed a few seconds later, loud enough for Morey to hear.
The security detail was increased from a dozen men to twenty. The U.S. marshals ran barbed wire along the seawall and planted flare bombs with trip wires along the tree line. Spotlights were set up outside the four houses on the estate, while four German shepherds, a gift to Joe from the U.S. Marshal Service, patrolled the perimeter.
Their cover was almost blown again when a reporter living nearby got curious and began poking around the estate. The marshals sat the newspaper man down and negotiated a deal with him. They would grant the reporter the first behind the scenes story of exactly what was happening at Fresh Water Cove if the man maintained his silence for the time being. The reporter recognized the potential for a big scoop and signed off on the agreement.
Another agreement was also in the works involving one of the suspects in the Deegan murder case. Lawyers for Louis Grieco were so confident of their client’s innocence that they agreed to have him take a polygraph test administered by police. Subjecting a client to a lie detector test is always a risky move, especially when the client is a career criminal. But Grieco had nothing to hide, at least not in this case. He sat down for the polygraph test and calmly answered questions as to where he had been on the night of Teddy Deegan’s murder.
“I was in Florida and nowhere near Chelsea on March 12th, 1965,” Grieco told police.123
The polygraph indicated that the gangster had answered truthfully to the question. The results of the test were problematic for FBI agents Condon and Rico, as was the news that the mob was applying added pressure to Barboza’s attorney, John Fitzgerald. First, Fitzgerald’s law partner, Al Farese, who represented a number of gangsters, said that he had tape recorded some of his conversations with Barboza and that he was prepared to testify against the Animal for obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald’s wife, Carol, then received an anonymous call informing her that her husband had taken up with Dottie Barchard, the notorious gangster moll who had inadvertently gotten her boyfriend Ronnie Dermody murdered a few years before. The same caller also reached out to Dottie and warned her to stay away from Fitzgerald or that she and her children would be killed. Barchard was still married to convict Jimmy O’Toole, and the Office had promised to have the man killed if Fitzgerald would help them weaken Barboza. The attorney had danced too close to the mob’s flame for years, and now he was paying a price that could cost him his family and even his life. He met with Paul Rico at a restaurant in Dorchester to relay his growing fears. In Rico’s eyes, Fitzgerald was a shaken man.
“Recently, a couple guys came to my office and asked where the ‘Barboza braintrust’ was,”124 Fitzgerald confided. “I wasn’t there at the time, but my secretary later told me that one of the men was about 5'7", paunchy and in his mid-fifties. I think it was Henry Tameleo’s brother.”
Fitzgerald told Rico that he blamed his law partner, Al Farese, for his latest troubles.
“I told Al about what I was gonna do to Patriarca and others for causing Joe and me all of this trouble, and Al turned around and told the Office. Now I’m on the hit parade.”
Rico knew that if the Mafia could not get to Barboza or his family—they would go after his closest friends, and at this point Joe had no more trusted confidant than Fitzgerald.
The lawyer was an easy target. Despite the threats, he did not keep a low profile. Fitzgerald refused to be taken into protective custody and instead paraded around the city in Barboza’s James Bond car, with one and sometimes two mistresses on his arm. To make matters worse, he continued to confer with mob killers like Larry Baione. The two met at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts. Baione had heard that Barboza was trying to bury him along with Patriarca, Anguilo, and the Deegan suspects.
“I need to know what Joe is telling the law,” Baione explained to Fitzgerald. “It’ll be worth a lot of money to you if you can find out and help me.”125
Fitzgerald would not budge. “I hold no influence with Joe Barboza,” he replied. “I’m only his legal counsel. I don’t discuss any of these matters with Joe and I cannot help you.”126
These were pious statements made by a lawyer who had carved out a successful career as Barboza’s personal consigliere. Fitzgerald then leaned forward and whispered a message for Baione to take back to Raymond Patriarca. “You tell that di
abetic asshole in Rhode Island that if he doesn’t lay off me, I’ll testify against him myself.”127
The harassing phone calls to Fitzgerald’s wife and girlfriend began soon after this meeting. Paul Rico knew that blackmail was just the first lever to be pulled by the Mafia, which would soon resort to murder if it didn’t get what it wanted.
The mob also targeted Joe’s older brother. Don Barboza arrived home one night to find two gangsters parked across the street. He recognized one of the men as Blu D’Agostino, a former bodyguard for slain Winter Hill chief Buddy McLean. Blu stepped out of his car and motioned Don Barboza over.
“I’ve got some papers for your brother,” he said with a telling smile.128
Don Barboza did not take the bait. Instead, he ran inside his home, locked the door, and closed the shades. He never saw Blu D’Agostino again.
The Animal was livid when he learned of the threats to both his lawyer and his brother. He had also learned that Jerry Angiulo had hired New York Mafia killer “Crazy” Joe Gallo to drive up to Massachusetts to finish Barboza once and for all. Joe managed to sneak a phone call to Gallo’s Manhattan headquarters.
“It’s the Animal,” Barboza snarled into the phone. “I want you to remember one fucking thing. The distance from New York to Boston is the same as Boston to New York.”129
Barboza threatened Gallo that he would break out of protective custody, drive to New York City, and cut his head off.
The Animal then put pen to paper in a telegram to Tameleo and Angiulo. With help from Claire, Joe wrote down the biblical phrase Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin—which, in the Talmudic explanation, means “The king had been weighed and found wanting, and his kingdom is now divided.” According to the Bible, the phrase means, “The writing is on the wall.” Either definition would have suited Barboza’s purpose. He wanted to put the Mafia on notice that its empire was crumbling. He signed the note simply—The Animal.
As autumn turned to winter, the FBI agents increased the number of visits to the estate at Fresh Water Cove, where they prepared the Animal for his close-up before a judge and jury.
A few days before Christmas, Barboza was whisked into Boston for his first face-to-face meeting with Raymond Patriarca since the indictments were handed down. Joe had been asked to testify briefly at a pretrial conference about Patriarca’s role in the murder of Willie Marfeo. He got up on the witness stand and performed his song and dance for the judge while Patriarca sat silently at the defense table shooting him bullets with his eyes. Once Joe was finished, the Man ran his thumb across his own neck in a garroting gesture. “You rat,” he whispered.
“Go fuck your dead mother in the mouth,” Barboza shouted as he sprang from the witness stand and headed toward his former boss. John Partington grabbed him before he could reach Patriarca and escorted him out of the courtroom. To calm the seething Animal’s nerves, Partington and his men went out and purchased a stuffed Santa Claus for Joe to bring back to little Stacy. Holding the toy in his beefy palms, a macabre grin spread across the Animal’s face.
“You know, I used to buy her a stuffed animal after every hit,” he said with pride.130
After months of rehearsals, it was now time to lift the curtain. Barboza’s first public performance took place in January 1968 at the Rocco DiSeglio murder trial. Joe had implicated Jerry Angiulo and three other mobsters—Richard DeVincent, Marino Lepore, and Benjamin Zinna—in the slaying, and now he had to make his words stick. Barboza wasn’t the only one getting his first real shot at center stage. U.S. marshal John Partington had also spent months preparing for his role. The feds had received information that all four doors of the Suffolk County Superior Courthouse were going to be covered by mob snipers, so Partington slipped Barboza into the building at 2:00 a.m. on the first day of the trial. Barboza was surrounded by twenty members of the protective detail, each man wearing hoods with slits for eyes. Partington wanted to make sure that Barboza could not be indentified by any potential gunman. The trip from Gloucester to the courthouse at Pemberton Square in Boston was as tightly controlled as a presidential motorcade. A lead car was deployed several miles ahead to look for potential Mafia roadblocks and to scout for sniper positions on bridges and along roadways. The convoy carrying Barboza followed a route of right turns only, out of fear they could be susceptible to a double road block. Once safely inside the courthouse, marshals provided Barboza with his own water and food to ward off any attempt of poisoning.
The Animal was then cleaned up, given a freshly pressed gray suit, and escorted into the eighth-floor courtroom, where he passed the prisoners box avoiding eye contact with Angiulo and the other men who no doubt looked upon him as the rat he had become. The murder trial was the hottest ticket in town as reporters and spectators alike stood in line for more than an hour to get inside. Each had to pass through a metal detector and was subjected to an additional patdown by police looking for guns, knives, or anything that could be used as a weapon.
Earlier that morning, the sixteen-member jury heard the presentation of forensic evidence gathered from the crime scene. The prosecutor, John Pino, then called Joe Barboza to the stand. Pino took little time zeroing in on the night in question. Pino had spent several weeks coaching Barboza in Gloucester, and it was now time to perform their act before a live audience.
“What did you say to Mr. Zinna, and what did he say to you?”131
“I said what are you doing around here at this time? You’re up to no good.”
“Then what was said?” asked Pino.
“Benny [Zinna] said to Vinny [DeVincent], ‘Joe says we’re up to no good.’” Vinny said, “We’re up to no good for our own good.”
Barboza then told the jury that Zinna informed him that they were waiting for Rocco DiSeglio and that Joe would read about it in the papers tomorrow. Joe also said that he saw the three alleged hitmen get into a car and spoke to them again hours after the murder. The Animal also contended that Jerry Angiulo had given a kill-or-be-killed order to the other defendants in the case, and that the underboss had marked DiSeglio for death because he had acted as the “fingerman” in several holdups of Mafia-controlled gambling games. The Animal performed well under Pino’s direct questioning. The real test would come during cross-examination.
Angiulo’s lawyers were ready for a firefight. They had received information that Barboza had been in talks with author Truman Capote about penning his life story.
“He’s the man who wrote In Cold Blood, isn’t he?” defense attorney Joseph Balliro asked the Animal.132
“I think so.”
“Have you ever read it?”
“Ah, no.”
Attorney Balliro smiled. “I think you’d like that book, Mr. Barboza.”
Balliro then asked Barboza if profit was his true motivation for testifying in the case.
“I only started negotiating a book after they killed my friends,” the Animal responded angrily. He did not elaborate on who “they” were. He didn’t have to. Everyone in the courtroom knew he was talking about the Office. Still, the judge had the comment stricken from the record. The defense immediately called for a mistrial, but the motion was denied.
Once the trial resumed, Balliro, smelling blood in the water, began where he’d left off.
“Did you expect to receive any consideration from anyone for telling this story?”
The question confused Barboza. “Consideration? What consideration?” he asked.
“Did you expect to get any money?” Balliro shouted. “Did you discuss a book or a movie?”
Joe told the court that he began exploring his literary options long before the murder of Rocco DiSeglio. Balliro refused to allow Barboza any room to pivot away from his line of questioning.
“And it all depended on a guilty finding by this jury, didn’t it?”
“I’m up here telling the truth, and I’m not motivated by capital gains,” Barboza shouted while pointing directly at the defense attorney.133
Balliro turned his
back on Joe and waved his hand in the air, dismissing him out of hand.
The gesture dug under Barboza’s skin as he trembled with rage on the witness stand. If he could have jumped onto the courtroom floor and strangled Balliro with his bare hands, he would have.
The Animal was in the legal ring with an opponent who could attack him from just about any angle. Balliro had Joe on the ropes now and would have landed a knockout punch had the judge not stepped in and called “time.” The Animal was transported back to the Gloucester estate with his ego bruised and his brain battered. Dennis Condon and Paul Rico wondered if Barboza had the mental stamina to finish the trial. They had to come up with a better answer to the question of motive. They bounced around several ideas until they settled on what was the most obvious and what would be the most impactful to the jury—Joe’s family.
The next morning when testimony resumed, Barboza made an impassioned plea that his testimony in the DiSeglio case had not been fueled by money, promise of a lighter sentence, or revenge. “I decided to tell what I knew after they threatened my wife and kid,” he told the jury.134
Although members of the Office had never threatened Claire or Stacy Barboza directly, the implication had been there. Barboza’s story may have struck a chord with the media and those others who were merely following the trial for sport, but prosecutors could not gauge how it was playing with the most important audience of all—the jury. The defense had pounded away at Barboza’s credibility and at one time during the trial had even suggested that he had committed the DiSeglio murder himself and then blamed it on the defendants.
When it was time for the defense to make its final arguments, Balliro was joined by fellow counsel Lawrence O’Donnell, who made an impassioned speech of his own before the court. He implored the jury to steer away from stereotypes when deciding this case.
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