Marc Songini - Boston Mob: The Rise and Fall of the New England Mob and Its Most Notorious Killer

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To Cian, my wonderful and best buddyhoping he will choose the straight path, even when its not the easiest one.

CONTENTS

But thou, O God, shalt bring them down into the pit of destruction: bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days

PSALM 55

They were killing people at bus stops, walking in their house and killing them, walking in nightclubs and killing them. People were found in backs of trunks with their heads sawed off. People were found in suitcases, dissected. Guys were found floating in the river. There was a lot of hits in Boston and all different types of hits.

JOSEPH BARBOZA

INTRODUCTION

It was winter 2002 in Washington, D.C., many years after the bloodbath. How many had died so prematurely? Sixty people? Eighty? The estimates varied. Some people had just vanished without a trace, making the count difficult.

Most players were off the field now. Their names had already appeared in the Irish sporting pagesthat is, the obituaries. The McLaughlins, Bernie and Punchy, were memories, so were all three Bennetts, and Jimmy the Bear, the craziest of them allas well as Buddy McLean, the toughest, perhaps. The top Mafiosi were long gone, or in jail: Raymond Patriarca, Larry Baione, Jerry Angiulo, and others.

And there, before a largely impotent congressional panel, stood the ancient gnomelike FBI agent, H. Paul Rico. His hair was silver, his skin tanned from the Florida sun. His sickening heart was rapidly making him a ghost, and he had many secrets to take with him. On that winter day in Washington, there was blood in the water, old and badand the representatives wanted to hand the public a victim. The congressmen even had feared Rico would go the usual route of gangsters, and take the Fifth. But he didnt.

Then the assembled representatives ineptly tried to force the ancient lawman to incriminate himself. But the ever-canny Rico couched all his answers to take any responsibility away from himself or the sacred bureau. That was how the system worked. To be fair, Rico did what the public, the president, and the FBI had asked him to do. The bureau was central in all this, surviving everything. But Ricos former Department of Justice bosses, J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Kennedy, were already ghostsand tarnished ones, at that. Yet, so was their onetime enemy, the Mafia.

So on this day, even a mere U.S. congressman could dare throw accusations at an FBI special agent. The congressman even bemoaned the fate of a small-time crook, Joseph the Horse Salvati. Ricos efforts meant that Salvati had done a lot of time for a matter that, at most, hed only been slightly connected to.

You dont care, the congressman charged Rico. Does it bother you that this man was in jail for thirty years?

It would probably be a nice movie or something, Rico responded.

The congressman eventually asked: Do you have any remorse?

Remorse for what?

For the fact that you played a role in this.

I believe the role I played was the role I should have played. Thats it. I cannot

So you dont really care much and you dont really have any remorse. Is that true?

Rico sneered. Would you like tears or something?

Pardon me?

What do you want, tears?

PROLOGUE

Smile, I miss you so much with such a constant ache of loneliness & love they cant break the one constant train of thought & image I have you, you, you!

So Joseph Barboza Baron wrote with his elegant penmanship to a far-off woman he barely knew. But he was familiar with letter romance, having once conducted such a courtship for years, with his first wife. Indeed, Joe did write tender letters, even if he was, in the words of one observer, one of the most dangerous psychopaths in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Perhaps more noteworthy than the tone of the letter was the location where Joe was penning it. It was a place even he, admittedly, was surprised to be: the historical territorial prison of Deer Lodge, Montana. Given the New England branch of La Cosa Nostra had put a $300,000 open contract on his massive head, he signed his letters Joe Bentley. By now, it was November 1972, and he was forty, a self-described Portugee from New Bedford with a crime record of Torah length. Joes careers included those of thief, arsonist, extortionist, boxer, assassin, strong-arm man, cook, and public relations specialist. Currently married to a second (and unhappy) wife, Joe had two children (acknowledged, at least) and faced years of jail. On release, beckoning to Joe was an existence that would be nasty, abrupt, and brutishrather like Joe himself.

Already, Joe had measured out half of his life behind bars for a cornucopia of misdemeanors and felonies. One novelty of his current sentence (besides the out-of-state penal venues) was that it was Joes first for murderand a particularly sloppy killing at that. In public, hed shot a business partner in the head in front of two eyewitnesses, including the victims wife. Joe had even bragged that, after laying the partners body to rest, he then laid the mans wife. Still, no surprises there. An all-but-certified sociopath, Joe the Animal Barboza had a way of generating unsavory tales. There was the story of how he beat a taxi driver to death with a tire iron. Joe himself boasted he shot a onetime friend at point-blank rangethen brushed pieces of the victims skull and brains out of his own thick hair. He also bragged about the near-fatal stabbing of a nineteen-year-old over a five-dollars interest payment. He stuck an eighteen-year-old girl in the thigh because of her uncles debt. Personally, he tallied his crimes at a Herculean seventy-five stabbings, five hundred beatings, and twenty murders.

And the Animal possessed near-mechanical speed and precision. When it came to killing, I always thought he was more of a device than an animal, said North End gangster Willie Fopiano. Yet, Joe the Device Barboza didnt have the same ring. But Joe was so magnetic and charming that his victims never knew they were in danger. He might be drinking or schmoozing with a target, and then a gun or a knife could appear in the next instant. As Willie explained: He was perfect for a war.

A mere disagreement with Joe could earn bodily harm and even death. He demonstrated a capacity for revenge that makes Caligula look like a benevolent saint, said underworld colleague William Geraway.

By now, parked in the garage, as it were, Joe occupied his mind with his fiance, along with various outlandish schemes. Joe gushed teenage sentiments into his letters, claiming he read one of his beloveds epistles no less than eight times. During one Christmasa holiday that he, as a Jew, didnt observehe wrote, Of course I want you more then anything in life, not only on Xmas but all year around even more then Maple Walnut ice cream!

Joes betrothed, Green Eyes, was a five-foot-four-inch, 170-pound thirtysomething San Francisco redhead who could rebuild Corvettes. He told, imaginatively, of his pleasure in seeing and reaching the happiness hed brought alive in her. Joe knew shed been hurt in the past, like he had been. The Animal kept asking himself, Was this girl for real? The answer was yes: Joe asked her Where were you when I was growing up and needed you!