Sinatra denied knowing Raymond Patriarca and told the committee that he had never visited the racetrack. One member of the committee informed the singer about wiretaps which had revealed that Patriarca had known the track planned to add Sinatra to its board of directors in an attempt to add a little class to the business. As the hearing came to a close, the legislators all but apologized to Sinatra. This unusual show of respect sparked Washington Post reporter Gerald Strine to write: “The House Select Committee on Crime appeared before Frank Sinatra yesterday.” Strine also wrote that he had overheard one legislator wonder aloud, “Who does he think he is?” To which another congressman replied, “He must think he’s Frank Sinatra.”198
The day following Sinatra’s testimony, the committee called on Raymond Patriarca, who was still serving time in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Patriarca told lawmakers that he had never met Sinatra and that he had seen him only “on television and in the moving pictures.”199 The jailed Mafia boss also denied any involvement in the failed racetrack.
“I read that I had $215,000 in Berkshire Downs,” Patriarca said. “I wish I had. I’ve never had $215,000 in my life. I don’t own no horses and nobody I know owns horses.”200
For some members of the panel, their only exposure to the underworld had been through reading Mario Puzo’s runaway bestseller The Godfather. When asked whether the fictional version of La Cosa Nostra resembled real life, Patriarca gave his thumbs up. “In my opinion, it’s a good book,” he said. “People like to read stuff about organized crime. If they came out with the Patriarca papers, it would make a million dollars.”
He also continued the attack on Barboza, the hitman who had caused him so much trouble over the years. “He’s a nutcake. To keep himself outta prison, he’d lie. He’d say anything. He’d even sell his own mother.” Patriarca also volunteered to come back and testify about “what’s really going on in the country… . I’m talking about the government, the administration, the FBI and the harassment that goes on in the United States. I got framed.”
Patriarca would never testify against the government and the FBI, which was in a state of flux following the death of Director J. Edgar Hoover in May 1972. Although the bureau’s often illegal relationship with mob killers had not been brought to light, the FBI’S reputation had taken a major public relations hit thanks to a series of articles written by Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson in which he accused Hoover and his agents of conducting investigations into the private lives of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Marlon Brando, and Joe Namath, among others.
President Richard Nixon, a close friend of Hoover’s, ordered that the legendary director receive a state funeral with full military honors.
“The good J. Edgar Hoover has done will not die,” President Nixon told a gathering of a thousand friends and dignitaries at the National Presbyterian Church during his eulogy. “The profound principles associated with his name will not fade away. Rather I would predict that in the time ahead, those principles of respect for law, order and justice will come to govern our national life more completely than ever before.”
After the funeral, President Nixon announced that the FBI’S new headquarters, which was still under construction, would be named after its first director.
Shortly after Barboza’s testimony in Washington, DC, Billy Geraway received a jailhouse visit from congressional investigator Roy Bedell, who represented Claude Pepper’s Select Committee on Crime. Geraway understood this to be part of some quid pro quo deal between Barboza and the government to gain parole in exchange for his testimony against Sinatra, Patriarca, and others. Geraway later said that Bedell tried to extract corroboration that Barboza had killed Ricky Clay Wilson in self-defense, which Geraway found absurd. Bedell also pressed Geraway to say that Joe’s testimony in the Deegan trial had not been perjury. Geraway refused to play ball and never heard from Bedell again. Meanwhile, Barboza sat in a jail cell thousands of miles away, at Folsom State Prison in California. He told friends that six attempts had already been made on his life, and that he would continue to work on his memoir to “add to the public awareness of the diabolical menacing foothold which the Mafia is embracing this country.” Barboza continued to incentivize his mysterious friend James Chalmas to take a more active role in the production of the manuscript, for which he would be paid 25 percent of book profits, which Barboza naively estimated to be around $200,000.
Barboza was transferred from Folsom to Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge, Montana, in late fall 1972. He spent the majority of his time recounting his criminal exploits on a tape recorder and then sending the tapes to Edward Harrington, who passed them along to author Bob Patterson to transcribe. Barboza’s prospect for literary riches began to fade as publishers became aware of the controversy surrounding the Deegan case. Too many people were grumbling now that Barboza might have lied on the witness stand.
“It looks like the book will be shelved until I get home,” he wrote a friend. “I am not going to say anything more about it. A lot of plans have to be postponed until I get the book going. But time will work itself out. I’ll be coming out broke so we’ll have to plan and adjust to it until I get this book going on my own.”201
Edward Harrington tried to keep Barboza’s spirits up and offered to write remarks in the preface of the book, “extolling your [Barboza’s] contribution to law enforcement in the organized crime field.” Harrington also continued to lobby for Joe’s parole, telling the director of Montana’s parole board that Barboza’s defection from the underworld and his decision to become a government witness was “the single most important factor in the success of the federal government’s campaign against organized crime in New England.”202 Harrington also noted that more government witnesses, including Vinnie Teresa, were influenced by Barboza’s commitment to break the Mafia’s code of silence. The Animal was granted a parole hearing in Montana, but a decision regarding his freedom was slow in coming. The book deal was also coming apart at the seams. Bob Patterson had dropped out, leaving Joe with very few prospects if and when he won his release. Frustrated, Barboza lashed out at inmates and guards alike. He got into a fight with one guard and broke his jaw. The fracas got him transferred back to California, this time to San Quentin.
His long-gestating book project was finally completed with the help of another author named Hank Messick. The book was titled simply Barboza, and its publisher promised that it was “the most nakedly brutal book you have ever read. An infamous hitman tells his story kill by kill.” The novel, which Barboza dedicated to his friend Ted Harrington—“with respect”—did not quite live up to its billing. The Animal did take readers through his criminal past but also made sure that he protected himself and his friends, such as Jimmy Flemmi. The result was a collection of anecdotal stories clumsily put together by his coauthor. Barboza was not the financial success he had hoped for, but he also hoped to turn that around by promoting it heavily after his release from prison.
Barboza elicited the help of a new girlfriend to begin a letter-writing campaign to his friends in the FBI in hopes they would pull some levers to grant him early parole. He told his girlfriend that Dennis Condon had the most class of any agent he had dealt with but warned her that he also had viper blood in him, and that she should watch her back.
Condon’s partner, H. Paul Rico, retired from the FBI in May 1975 and shortly thereafter was named director of security for World Jai Alai. Before retiring from the bureau, Rico had groomed another young agent, John Connolly, to take his place on the front lines and back alleys of the war on organized crime. Connolly’s first order of business was to reopen James “Whitey” Bulger as an FBI informant. For the bureau, Bulger represented the future, while Barboza was part of its past. Lessons learned from their experience with the Animal would no doubt help agents cultivate their relationship with the rising mob star from South Boston. One stark difference between Bulger and Barboza was that Whitey was content to remain in the shadows and not draw attention to hims
elf, while the Animal was front and center and in your face. Barboza antagonized both the government and the Mafia incessantly. One California prison official warned the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force that protecting Barboza was a lost cause. “I don’t know what [Barboza] has indicated to you, but he is a most prolific letter writer. He can’t keep his mouth shut… . [We] are fully aware that if something should happen to [Barboza] it might further affect your witness protection program in the New England area. However we aren’t getting much help from [Barboza].203
Killing the Animal was still a top priority for the New England Mafia. La Cosa Nostra had placed a $100,000 price tag on Barboza’s head and had no shortage of trained assassins eager to collect the bounty. Boston underboss Jerry Angiulo reviled Barboza, but he also had much to thank him for. Angiulo had filled the power vacuum left by Raymond Patriarca after the boss was sent off to prison. The underboss had always felt underappreciated by Patriarca and privately harbored wishes for his demise. Barboza’s testimony against the Man was in essence a bloodless coup d’etat that allowed Angiulo to ascend to the Mafia throne in New England. Angiulo had seen how dangerous Barboza could be with his mouth and with a gun. There were rumors circulating that once paroled, the Animal would head back East to attempt to wrestle control of Boston’s underworld from Angiulo and his gang. Certainly, Barboza did not have the men to mobilize such an offensive, but Angiulo believed that he was just crazy enough to try.
In September 1975, Boston FBI agents sent word to their counterparts in San Francisco that Angiulo had dispatched two hitmen to the Bay Area to find out when and where Barboza would be paroled, and set him up for the kill. The FBI also warned that Angiulo’s men were planning for a public execution. Joe Barboza was quietly paroled a month later from the Sierra Conservation Camp in California after serving four years of a five-year prison sentence for the murder of Ricky Clay Wilson. He was given a new name, Joseph Donati, and secured work as a cook at the Rathskeller Restaurant, a popular hangout for cops in San Francisco. He also moved in with James Chalmas. Barboza had grown suspicious of Chalmas, whom he knew by the alias Ted Sharliss. In a letter to a friend, Barboza expressed a deep concern that Chalmas, or “Teddy” as he called him, might be talking to gangsters on the East Coast, and Joe was determined to find out whom he was speaking with. Why he moved in with Chalmas remains a mystery. Barboza might have thought it best to stick close to Chalmas in order to find out if he was providing information to his enemies, or he might have simply let his guard down for the offer of a free place to stay.
Chalmas tried to appease Joe by giving him two to three hundred dollars per week as walking-around money and a .38 revolver to defend himself with. Yet the two men did not remain roommates for long, as Joe moved in with a girlfriend fifteen days after his parole. He continued to meet daily with Chalmas to discuss some possible scores they could set up in the San Francisco underworld, which Joe believed was ripe for a takeover. Chalmas listened to Barboza’s grandiose plans and constantly fed the Animal’s large ego. Joe vowed to get even with all those who had crossed him, and he also hoped that his book would earn him enough money to reunite with Claire, who had begun to correspond with him again using Dennis Condon as an intermediary. Chalmas made mental notes of each conversation and relayed the information to J. R. Russo, the East Boston Mafiosi who had murdered Barboza’s close friend Chico Amico several years before. Russo had recently met with Chalmas in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in downtown San Francisco and asked the ex-con if he would like to make some big bucks by killing Barboza. Russo held up five fingers five times. “That’s twenty-five big ones, and that’s a lot of money,” he told Chalmas.204 Russo offered him $25,000 to kill Barboza but Chalmas refused, stating that he wanted to take a neutral position on the matter. The normally cool Russo, who was known for his dapper attire and his trigger proficiency, exploded at Chalmas, jabbing him in the chest with the finger that bore a ring with his initials, JR, surrounded by a peace symbol.
“You made friends with that lying bum who testified against George (LCN’S name for Patriarca) and a number of other guys he put on death row,” Russo pointed out.205 The hitman later calmed down but warned Chalmas to keep his mouth shut. “Don’t say anything to Barboza or anybody else,” Russo advised. Chalmas, who was battling a serious drug addiction, finally decided that cold, hard cash was worth more than camaraderie. He told Russo that the restaurant where Barboza worked was “one good place to take care of business.”206
The two men never met again but talked several times by phone. “Is that lying bum still out there?” Russo would ask. The Mafia hitman also offered to send Chalmas tasteless, colorless poison with which to kill Barboza.
“I can’t handle it,” Chalmas admitted. “I’m in no position to do that.”
Knowing that applying pressure on Chalmas might mean a botched hit on Barboza, Russo ordered him to make no move against his so-called friend, even if an opportunity fell into his lap.
Chalmas was clearly no triggerman, but his relationship with the Animal was still very valuable to the Mafia. In early 1976, he met with another Angiulo surrogate, Larry Baione, at the Hilton Inn, San Francisco International Airport, where he allegedly received $5,000 to set a trap for the Animal. Still nervous, Chalmas asked Baione and Russo to wait until he went on a planned trip to Miami before moving on Barboza. Russo scratched the idea. He was concerned that Joe might flee the area in Chalmas’s absence.
Meanwhile, other criminals were looking to get their hands on the Barboza bounty. Two inmates at the Orange County Jail in Santa Ana had heard through the grapevine that the Animal dined regularly at two restaurants, Luigi’s and La Pentera in San Francisco. They sent word to Boston and were told that two Mafia “torpedoes” would begin casing the cafes immediately.
Despite Barboza’s determination to publicize his new book and launch a comeback in the underworld, he sensed that he was living on borrowed time. In late January 1976, Joe telephoned his daughter, Stacy, back in Massachusetts. It had been several years since he had spoken to her, and the young girl did not recognize her father’s voice. Fighting back tears, Joe told his daughter to live a good and righteous life and stressed that education would be her pathway to success.
The words were certainly over the child’s head, but Barboza had hoped that she would be able to absorb them over time.
On the morning of February 11, 1976, Barboza borrowed Chalmas’s wife’s car and took their dog for a long ride. He later dropped off the pet and picked up Chalmas and drove to a nearby deli, where the two men ate lunch. They returned to Chalmas’s home and talked for several more minutes before Barboza left at 3:30 p.m. Chalmas walked Barboza back to his own car, which was parked at the intersection of Moraga Street and 25th Avenue. Joe took a can of Spam and other canned goods out of his pocket and placed them on the car. He was fishing for his car key and inserting it into the lock when he noticed Chalmas turn suddenly and walk nervously away. Barboza’s attention was then drawn to a white van as it came barreling down the street. The sliding door of the van pulled open, and J. R. Russo, with a stocking covering his head, leaned out with a carbine pointed at the Animal’s chest.
Another gunman stuck the barrel of a shotgun out the passenger side window. The assassins both opened fire. The first bullet missed Barboza and penetrated the side of his car. The next blast struck him squarely in the chest, lifting him off his feet as twenty-two shotgun pellets attacked his vital organs. The Animal fell to the ground next to his vehicle as the van sped away. Chalmas heard the gunshots and waited for the van to flee the scene before returning to Barboza’s side. The Animal was covered in blood and his eyes were closed under his dark, wrap-around sunglasses. Chalmas noticed that Joe had not even had time to reach for his own pistol, a loaded .38 that was tucked away in his jacket pocket. Joe Barboza, at forty-three years old, was dead in the street. The Mafia had promised a public execution for the vicious turncoat, and J. R. Russo made good on that pledge. The
van was recovered the next day in a driveway five blocks from the murder scene. One of the murder weapons, a 12-gauge shotgun, was discovered inside. When news spread of Barboza’s stunningly violent death, controversial attorney F. Lee Bailey, who happened to be in San Francisco defending Patricia Hearst, summed it up this way: “With all due respect to my former client, I don’t think society has suffered a great loss.”207
A great loss was felt, however, by Joe Barboza’s family, who had all been holding their collective breath since his parole. Joe’s brother, Donald, was enjoying a rare family vacation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when he received a phone call at the hotel from his sister Ann.
“Joe has died,” she told him. “He was killed in California.” Don Barboza did not have to ask her how their brother had been killed, as he already knew. Instead of taking his wife and their four children to Disney World that day as planned, Donald piled everyone into the family car for the long ride back to New Bedford, where he would have to take care of Joe’s funeral arrangements.
The Animal’s body was shipped back from San Francisco to Perry’s Funeral Home in Barboza’s hometown. Donald walked into the funeral parlor and peered into the open casket. He leaned down and whispered into his brother’s ear. “You’re one tough son of a bitch,” he said softly. “You always told me this is how it would end. At least you’re at peace now.”208 The funeral service for Joe Barboza was attended by Donald, their sisters Ann and Carol, and their brother Anthony, a U.S. marine who had served three tours in Vietnam. Joe’s mother, Palmeda, had been long dead by that time, but his father, the man he had spent a lifetime rebelling against and emulating to a certain degree, did attend. Claire Barboza and their children, Stacy and Ricky, stayed away from the funeral, as did Joe’s former friends in the FBI. As a small group of mourners gathered at the gravesite at St. Mary’s Cemetery in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, the presiding priest asked Donald whether the family wanted him to deliver his brother’s eulogy in English.
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