The Underboss

  He liked the hypothetical victory and the logic of the Turkette argument claiming RICO didn’t apply to him, “It says that if they don’t prove that a legitimate business was infiltrated we’re off the hook,” he went on. “We can do anything we want. They can stick RICO.” He felt like his old cocky self. “I wouldn’t be in a legitimate business for all the fuckin’ money in the world to begin with.”

  The duet of Angiulo and Zannino suddenly launched into a bizarre, tribal chant for the hometown Mafia club. “The law says that whoever infiltrates legitimate businesses in interstate commerce shall be susceptible to this,” opened Jerry.

  “That’s right,” cheered Zannino.

  “Our argument is, we’re illegitimate business.”

  “We’re a shylock,” noted Zannino.

  “We’re a shylock,” repeated Angiulo, as if relishing the sound of it.

  “Yeah,” gushed Zannino.

  “We’re a fucking bookmaker,” added Angiulo.

  “Bookmaker.”

  “We’re selling marijuana.”

  “We’re not infiltrating.”

  “We’re, we’re, we’re illegal here, illegal there, arsonists!” declared Angiulo, for once sounding almost at a loss for words. “We’re every fucking thing.”

  “Pimps! Prostitutes!”

  “The law does not cover us. Is that right?”

  QUINN and Morris also worried about the outcome of the Turkette case before the Supreme Court. The concern was part of the reason behind the gambling raids and the pressure from the strike force to accumulate massive amounts of evidence for a major gambling case if they lost the RICO option. Ultimately, the investigation would have to go either way: a series of cases accusing Angiulo and the others of separate crimes or a single RICO case against a Mafia crime family based on the combination of offenses. While they waited for the high court decision they had the comfort of knowing they had the evidence for a solid case—either way. But they all preferred RICO. Much more punch.

  For all of the bug’s high points, the grueling investigation was beginning to take its toll on the crew. There was a ceiling on the overtime an agent could earn, so no one was getting rich working everyday, all day, on top of a $35,000-a-year salary.

  Quinn’s day began by 7:00 A.M., when he stopped off in Charlestown to pick up the tapes, and didn’t end until after 10:00 P.M. He’d make it as far as his couch in the television room of his home south of Boston. The television might be on, or, more often, he’d try to talk with his wife. They didn’t much get into the Mafia case, although she knew what he was doing. During their nearly twenty years together, she never really pressed him about his work, which was how Quinn preferred it.

  He wanted to know what was going on at home, what their three kids were up to. During the bug probe, he had lost his family life. In the four months it was “up,” each of his kids and his wife had celebrated a birthday—well, maybe not celebrated, but had a birthday. By the time he’d get home at night, he would pop a Budweiser and try to reconnect. But he usually caved into fatigue and fell asleep within five minutes.

  Pete Kennedy, his muscles in knots from the daily battle to decipher Mafia dialogue, found himself getting more and more edgy as the days wore on, so he found some relief by pounding 2-by-4s in his basement. By the time the bugging was completed, so was a new family room.

  The guilt Tom Donlan felt about never being home worsened when his mother-in-law, who lived with his family, learned she had cancer. His pregnant wife not only had to manage the house but now had to take her mother to chemotherapy.

  The Donlans weren’t the only ones who had a baby during Operation Bostar. Bill Regii’s kid, born early on in the bugging, was the first of four “Bostar brats.” The Regii’s baby was followed by Thomas Gianturco, son of Nick Gianturco, then Brendan Donlan, and finally, Michael Buckley, named after his father, agent Mike Buckley.

  The strain on family life was not lost on Quinn and Morris. They understood how taxing the reentries and video car shuffles were for the agents already beleagured by the monotonous monitoring in Charlestown, but this was the price for staying inside the bureau and not relying on any outside agencies or utilities. And it worked, for despite a few scares, there had been no leaks.

  As if juggling these pieces weren’t enough, there was also the installation and maintenance of a second bug at Larry Zannino’s club at 51 North Margin Street to worry about, a controversial installation within the bureau because of the drain on manpower and the added risk of the Mafia uncovering the FBI mission in the North End. But all along, squad leader Morris had insisted the two-bug strategy was worth it and, despite setbacks, he prevailed.

  Nearly three weeks after the January 19 installation of the 98 Prince Street bug, Morris sent agent Shaun Rafferty down to the North End to set up the Zannino bug. For a while, it appeared the move was a mistake. Not that Rafferty and his team of agents had any trouble staking out the club. It was actually easier than Prince Street. North Margin was not as residential as Prince; it was darker and less traveled. Because of the card games, dozens of strangers came and left during the course of an evening, so that undercover agents approaching the front door late at night did not automatically trigger suspicion even if they were spotted. People lived in apartments upstairs from the Angiulo office. The North Margin Street club was above a garage. You could count on not bumping into anyone. Surveillance of the club had also been easier—you just had to sit on a stool munching on pizza in the pizza joint across the street.

  Debbie Richard was drafted again to play her role as decoy, and on the morning of February 11 she and a locksmith made their way to the club entrance posing as a lovestruck couple. At the entry-way they stopped and necked. The locksmith knelt and sprung the door, and four technical agents hurried inside behind them. In less than an hour, two microphones were hidden and working—one in the large gaming room and a second in the small rear room that was Zannino’s office.

  But North Margin proved to be a technical nightmare. First, there’d been a delay in getting any bugging equipment from Washington. The shelves were bare, with the equipment on loan to other offices around the country. Morris called Washington daily trying to drum up something. But by the time Richard and the others had two mikes to install, the FBI had already watched twelve days pass from the thirty-day bugging period the court had approved back on January 30.

  Then came the miscalculation about the bug in the gaming room. The microphone worked, but there was no way to tell who was talking or what was said by the dozens of card players. The room was like an echo chamber. The agents heard eating and drinking noises and even a lot of gambling talk about raising bets and borrowing money. Players lost up to $59,000 in a single night. Many losses were converted into loan-shark debts with weekly interest of I to 2.5 percent. The house took its 2.5 percent share of every pot. But it was hard to pin down the voices.

  Morris and Itafferty decided the gambling room was a lost cause. They had agents break into the club on February 16 to move the microphone from the card room to Zannino’s office, with the one already hidden there.

  The Zannino bug was ultimately first-rate, delivering the interplay between the city’s two most powerful mafiosi that Morris had so badly wanted. It gave them the plan to kill Harvey Cohen, as well as a third murder plot, and it gave them a Larry Zannino uninhibited by Jerry Angiulo, the only mafioso with a bigger ego.

  “I’M A CAPO regime and I’m talking to you as a soldier,” Zannino declared to two of his men early one morning inside the office at 51 North Margin Street, which was his domain. He was the consummate company man, disturbed to learn that in a dispute between a non-Mafia party and a mafioso, one of his soldiers had not been clear about whose side he was on. “Don’t you ever dare, in your fuckin’ life, ever tell me that you’re neutral with an outsider, whether he’s right or wrong. Didn’t you ever hear Jerry when he made his speech? If you have to give the edge, it’s the soldier that’s right.”

&nb
sp; Zannino exuded mafiosi pride. “Remember one thing. I didn’t become a capo regime for political reasons. I never asked. I never went and wiped asses. And I never went down to Providence. No one helped me. Jerry, or nobody.” And he took seriously his responsibility toward his men.

  Throughout the winter, Zannino worried about Carmen Tortora, a soldier who was about to go off to federal prison. Tortora had been secretly taped the year before while trying to collect on an illegal loan. He was a stand-up wiseguy who would take his legal lumps for the family. After reviewing the evidence, Zannino had even advised his man to plead guilty. “He’ll get a hundred years if he goes to trial,” he told his men one night after giving Tortora a pep talk. “He’s dead. Ain’t got a fuckin’ chance.... He’s got a fourteen page, ‘I’ll kill you, you cocksucker ... ’”

  Zannino was referring to the transcript of Tortora that was the heart of the government’s case. Twice Tortora had confronted Paul Alexander about late payments for a $250 loan. Alexander, secretly cooperating with authorities, had worn a body wire both times.

  “Where’s my motherfuckin’ money?” Tortora had demanded as he approached Alexander on Freeport Street in Dorchester for the second time in two months.

  “I don’t have any money to come down there to give ya, Carmen!” Alexander replied.

  “I’m gonna split your motherfuckin’ head open if I don’t start getting some money! This fuckin’ bullshit, fuckin’ hidin’; I’ll cut your throat! Now, you get me some mothenuckin’ money down there!”

  “I haven’t been working at all, Carmen.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about your working or not. You can fuckin’ work. Go out and fuckin’ work and get me my fuckin’ money. ’Cause yours is way the fuck up there now. You know that, don’t ya?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.” Tortora couldn’t believe his ears. “I want motherfuckin’ money there this fuckin’ weekend! Or the next time I see ya, I’ll send the guys out to split your fuckin’ head open! I’ll tell them to cut your motherfuckin’ head off.”

  The problem was Tortora didn’t let up in thirteen more pages of transcript. Who would ever have guessed Alexander would go crawling to the feds for such a small loan. “You know, if it was $25,000 I could understand the guy panicking,” Zannino said. “He can’t get it up. But $250 motherfuckin’. Cocksucker ... they wired him and oh how he set him up.”

  But Zannino nevertheless liked his man’s style. “You’re my fuckin’ guy,” he told Tortora. “Don’t ever forget that. I wish I had three more like you. Three more like you.”

  Still, Zannino’s counsel had been to cop a plea. “Hey, that’s part of the game,” Zannino explained to his men. “He’s thirty-three years old, he’s a big boy, he’s got good shoulders, he’ll go and do his fuckin’ time. If he gets like five or six years, he’s in good shape. This way he goes to the farm in four months. ’Cause he’s a model prisoner.... Then from there we go to work. Once he’s on the farm, he’ll get parole.”

  That was the Zannino line on the case. He tried to boost Tortora’s sagging spirits as best he could, slipping him a grand as well as later promising Tortora’s mother to send the kid a television in prison, because Tortora couldn’t read.

  The night before his sentencing in late February, Zannino even escorted Tortora to see the top man, Jerry Angiulo. But Angiulo wasn’t there, causing Zannino embarrassment.

  “Look, Frankie, the reason I want, brought, ah, Carmen here, cause you people are aware how Carmen is close to us. You understand? Carmen might go to jail tomorrow, three, four years. You understand? He wants to say good-bye to Jerry, but Jerry’s not here. So he’s saying good-bye to the brothers.” Then Zannino turned to Tortora. “Ya know they’re in your fuckin’ corner. Not good-bye, but see you later, ya know ...”

  “Nice meeting ya,” remarked Tortora lamely.

  Filling in for Jerry the other Angiulos did their best to join Zannino in stirring up a ceremonial send-off. But it was a hasty, half-hearted effort. Frank, the only Angiulo to really try to rally Tortora from his slump, said, “You’ll be back. What is this, ‘Nice meeting you’?”

  “Got any white wine in there?” added Danny Angiulo.

  Zannino repeated the story of Tortora’s awful fate, brought down by a guy who’d borrowed only $250. “What about Skinny Kazonis’s case back in 1974?” Frank asked. Carmen shouldn’t feel so bad. “Seventy-five dollars,” Frank said. “He got eight years.”

  “Yeah, Skinny” remembered Zannino.

  “Seventy-five dollars. Five guys went to the can. The fuckin’ fines came to almost $50,000,” added Danny.

  “You want red?” Mike Angiulo asked Tortora.

  “You want white?” Zannino asked his soldier.

  “Red or white?” asked Mike.

  “Yeah,” replied Tortora.

  “Carmen, you want red or white?” Mike repeated.

  “Red.”

  Mike poured wine for everyone.

  “Carmen,” said Danny, raising his glass. “To your health, and a very short stay”

  “Any idea where you’re going?” asked Mike.

  “Lewisburg.”

  More wine was poured, and Zannino resumed his pep talk to Tortora about how to behave in the can so he could get to the farm quickly. But then, as if on cue, Zannino and another one of his soldiers, Ralph Lamattina, began reminding Tortora about another form of behavior that they all expected of Carmen Tortora while in prison—loyalty to the Mafia.

  “Carmen,” Lamattina warned. “Within two weeks there’ll be a couple of guys say, ‘Hey, how are ya?’”

  “Yeah,” interrupted Zannino. “‘What’d ya say, kid?”’

  “That’s it,” Lamattina said.

  “No matter who pats you on the shoulder,” explained Zannino, “have no conversation. ‘How are ya?’ Ah. ‘You know Larry?’ ‘Yeah, I know him casual.’ No conversation. Nothing we ever did and nothing we ever discussed.”

  “That’s it, that’s it,” Lamattina repeated in a kind of refrain, referring to other prisoners looking for “evidence” to trade for sentence reductions.

  “Because someone might be trying to get ya,” advised Zannino.

  “I know,” said Tortora.

  “That’s right,” Lamattina said.

  “You understand?” asked Zannino.

  Then came the zinger, the reminder for Tortora never to doubt for a second the significance of his special relationship with the Mafia.

  “Remember Joe Porter, kid,” Zannino said.

  It was a reference to Joe Porter Patrizzi, one-time trusted Mafia associate, partner to Skinny Kazonis in a loan-shark operation. Patrizzi was even involved in the Kazonis loan-shark case of 1974. But in 1978, after Patrizzi began talking too much, began strutting around the city as if he were bigger than any one of them, well, Joe Porter was executed.

  “He was an asshole,” Zannino said. “He wasn’t you.”

  11

  Mafia Murder

  For more than a month in early 1981, two young thugs on the outskirts of the Mafia had been circling each other around Boston in a clumsy death dance. They would have coffee together, shoot the breeze at a garage in Revere, all the while looking for just the right chance to slit the other’s throat.

  Given the odds, it could never be a fair fight. In one corner was Freddie Simone of Waltham, a full-fledged Mafia soldier with a mandate from the bosses to kill a maverick with blood in his eye. In the other corner was the badly outgunned Angelo Patrizzi, an ex-con and petty thief who had just escaped from prison and was subsisting on the fringe of the underworld, nursing his dangerous personal agenda. He was after two made soldiers for killing his brother four years earlier and there was even a hint that he might murder the son of Capo Larry Zannino, who was believed to have been behind the 1978 slaying of Joseph “Joe Porter” Patrizzi.

  It was the kind of mindless mission that marked much of the bloody history of the Mafia in which vendettas wiped out entire families.
In the New York wars of the early thirties and the Boston gangland slayings of the mid-sixties, it became almost axiomatic: kill one brother, kill them all. Or be killed. Interfamily fratricide has filled entire graveyards in Sicily.

  Such antecedents produced a skulking Angelo Patrizzi, hiding from the law and the mob in a South Boston tenement, determined to even the score on his dead brother’s behalf. But he kept tripping over treacherous pals trying to set him up to make points with mob leaders. He was all alone, operating with what one friend reluctantly described as the intelligence of an amoeba.

  By the beginning of March 1981, it was literally Angelo Patrizzi against all the soldiers in Revere, a reservoir of unruly mobsters who paid tribute to Gennaro Angiulo but always had leaders who could go over his head to Providence, to Raymond Patriarca.

  Patrizzi was too brutish and dim-witted to consider the odds in the cold light of day. He was ruled by his primordial grudge and saddled with an eighth-grade education, a drinking and drug problem, and .32-caliber bullet fragments in his skull from a previous encounter with violence. Nicknamed “Hole in the Head,” he had foolishly telegraphed his intentions, publicly vowing vengeance against mob leaders after his brother Joseph was killed for skimming on loan-shark collections.

  In March 1981, Patrizzi was being phased out of prison, living in a prerelease center in Boston’s South End, having served five years for attempted murder. He had been back in town for more than a month and everyone was getting more nervous as each day went by that he wasn’t dead.

  The Revere mob leaders knew Angelo was being tracked for a hit but were unsettled when they heard Patrizzi was hiding out after smelling a rat. On March 3, Patrizzi had fled the South End prerelease center and moved in with a girlfriend in South Boston. But not for long. He became a priority matter whose fate would be settled by the top two Mafia men in Boston: Jerry Angiulo and Larry Zannino.