A Death in Belmont (14 page)

A
LBERT DESALVO WAS
born in 1931 into a poor and violence-stunted family in the working-class city of Chelsea, which faces Boston across the foul waters of Chelsea Creek. There were oil terminals up Chelsea Creek, and tug-and-barge combos plowed past the Marginal Street wharves day and night pumping diesel exhaust up into the air. Al's father, Frank, was a drunk and a bully and a petty criminal who regularly brought prostitutes back to the apartment. The only quiet times in the DeSalvo household were when Frank was in jail. Al once saw his father punch his mother so hard that he knocked out most of her teeth. He also saw his father grab his mother's hand and bend her fingers back one by one until they broke. Frank regularly beat Albert and the other five children with a wide leather strap and once clubbed him with a length of pipe. When Albert was seven he had a sexual encounter with his older sister that was undoubtedly inspired by the father's wide-open displays with prostitutes. Frank DeSalvo appeared before judges on criminal charges eighteen times
while Albert was growing up, five of them for assault against his wife. He was also brought in for larceny, breaking and entering, and nonpayment of child support.

Chelsea was a cramped little industrial city filled with people that Europe didn't want. The Irish came during the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s and established themselves by volunteering in huge numbers during the American Civil War. Every man who survived the war got a total of three hundred dollars, which many then used to start a small business in town. The Italians and the Poles came twenty years later, fleeing economic conditions that approached feudalism in their home countries. They were rough, uneducated people who were willing to work hard on the Chelsea waterfront and in the factories and freight businesses that sprang up in the postwar boom. The Jews came last, flushed out of Russia by a nationalistic frenzy instituted by Czar Alexander III in the 1880s. His ambition was to force Russia's Jews to convert, starve, or flee, and not surprisingly, many of them decided to flee. They arrived by the tens of thousands in New York and Boston and Chicago much the way blacks like Roy Smith arrived a generation or two later.

DeSalvo claimed that he was five when his father first taught him to shoplift, and he quickly moved up to theft, robbery, and breaking and entering. At age twelve he spent nearly a year in reform school for beating up a newspaper boy for the money in his pocket, and he returned to Chelsea to find his mother finally divorced from his father and living in a three-story brick tenement building at 353 Broadway. When young Albert leaned out his window he could look straight down Broadway to the Front Street wharves, and from the wharves he could see Charlestown across the harbor. Charlestown was run by Irish gangs, and if an Italian boy from Chelsea took the ferry over to Charlestown he would not come home looking the
same. In the other direction DeSalvo could look up Broadway to the clamor and din of Bellingham Square and the Jewish-owned businesses clustered around city hall. His home was on the corner of Fourth and Broadway. Across Fourth was a three-story building known as the Goldberg Executive Building. It was constructed of grim mustard-colored brick and ran the entire length of the block toward Bellingham Square. There were small businesses on the street level and a bank on the corner of Fourth and a movie theater upstairs that was known as the Scratch Theater because a dime—“scratch money”—would get a kid in all day.

The Executive Building was built in 1920 by a Russian Jew named Simon Goldberg who had fled his home thirty years earlier and settled in nearby Lawrence. He married a Chelsea woman of similar background and had a son named Israel and a daughter named Miriam, both of whom went to law school and became lawyers. Israel, however, soon took over managing his father's properties, and after some ten or twenty years saved up enough money to move to the quieter streets of Belmont. By then Israel had married a Chelsea woman named Bessie Koplevitz and had a young daughter named Leah. He was known in Chelsea to wear an overcoat even when the weather was clear and to smoke a cigar and to stand in the lobby of his theater on Saturdays to watch the people come in for the show. DeSalvo must have passed him many times, dime in hand, as he and the other children shuffled up the stairs and in toward the cool darkness of the theater.

Every wave of immigrants to Chelsea brought with them not only their particular brand of industry, but their particular brand of crime, and by DeSalvo's time, Chelsea was awash in backroom hustles and illicit cash. It was said that the Irish ran Chelsea but that the Jews owned it. It was said that in Chelsea, a C-note would get you
anything you wanted. It was said that Chelsea was the most corrupt city in America. “I can't remember a time when I wasn't learning something I was better off not knowing,” DeSalvo later told investigators about growing up there. Boston gangsters oversaw high-stakes dice games in Chelsea and old ladies ran numbers from corner stores and bartenders cashed checks for bookies who walked around with thousands of dollars in their pockets. The entire enterprise was overseen by a succession of corrupt mayors who financed their political campaigns by getting kickbacks from the thugs they were elected to protect. The corruption got so bad that when a fire burned much of West Chelsea in 1973, someone from the mayor's office tried to shake down a state telephone crew that had been sent to rehang the lines. The crew foreman tossed the mayor's man a hard hat from the back of a truck and told him to go back to city hall with that.

Despite its problems Chelsea remained in a prewar limbo of close neighborhoods and petty crime well into the sixties. There was a nighttime curfew for children—one of the few in the country—and paperboys had to dodge patrolmen in order to finish their routes in the morning. Middle-class families lived in graceful houses on Bellingham Hill, and everyone else was smashed into the neighborhoods of brick tenements and wood-frame triple-deckers that started a couple of blocks from the waterfront. There were acres of scrapyards in Chelsea, and iron foundries along Broadway, and lumberyards and varnish works on the waterfront, and Jewish rag shops that bought by the pound from old ragpickers who moved slowly through town on horse-drawn carts. When word came to Chelsea in 1963 that Israel Goldberg's wife, Bessie, had been murdered over in Belmont, old men on carts were still creaking down cobblestone streets in the poorer neighborhoods, calling out for rags.

The Poles and the Jews and the Italians and the Irish lived side by side in Chelsea without much trouble, and when violence happened it generally came from the outside. In 1963 a trio of small-time criminals drove into Chelsea, strode into the Goldberg Executive Building, and robbed the Lincoln National Bank. The police cornered them on Fourth Street, but they shot their way out, jumped into a car, and raced for the bridge out of town. The two who were caught immediately were arraigned in Chelsea District Court, where they faced a judge who happened to be president of the bank they had just robbed. Two years later a slope-eyed thug named Teddy Deegan was found shot to death in an alley behind the Goldberg building, having been lured there by several fellow gangsters who said they needed his help robbing a credit union on the second floor. The gangsters let Deegan walk into the alley first and then put two rounds in the back of his head and four in his chest.

The murder was the eleventh in a gang war that would see forty people dead before it was over, and the alley was immediately named “Deegan's Alley” in his honor. There were rumors that the men had then gone on to rob the credit union—and that Israel Goldberg was strongly advised to not report the matter—but that was never proved. One of Deegan's murderers, Joe “the Animal” Barboza, would go on to be an FBI informant, and when Barboza showed up on the initial Chelsea police investigation, the FBI stepped in to quash the arrest. The Chelsea police files disappeared almost immediately after the crime and did not turn up until 1998, when a construction worker found them buried beneath the police chief's floor.

DeSalvo grew up in Chelsea's odd blend of hard work and petty crime and quickly familiarized himself with both. He worked as a shoeshine boy and in a junk shop and on a pickle truck and spent
his free time down along the waterfront looking for trouble and sex. From the waterfront he could look across Chelsea Creek at the flat-topped triple-deckers of East Boston. “There was always somebody to teach a boy over there about sex,” DeSalvo told Bottomly about those years. “There was queers and funny old men and Greeks and older women who weren't getting what they wanted from grown men and they come around fooling with us kids. There was even a queer cop used to go under the piers. I used to swim a lot in the harbor in the summer, it was nice there in the water all alone with the city across the water and nobody to tell you what to do or how to do it. I used to shoot cats in the waterfront with a bow and arrow, put it right through their bellies, and sometimes they'd run away with the arrow right through them, yowling. Sometimes when I would see them, before the shot, I'd get such a feeling of anger that I think I could've torn those cats apart with my bare hands. I don't understand this. I don't usually hate cats or like them, either, for that matter. You understand me?”

The wharves provided refuge to the town's drunks and homeless and insane, and DeSalvo seemed to be able to hang out with them without getting drawn into their ruthless world. “There was kids there with no homes at all,” he told John Bottomly. “That was where they lived, under the piers and in the old warehouses and wharves. They was wharf rats, that's what people called them and they was just like rats—I saw them roll a drunk one night, landing on him the way real rats would. They got that drunk down just like real rats and they practically tore him to pieces and then dumped the body into the water. We used to lie under a wharf near Maverick Square where the penny ferryboats came across from the Boston side and listen to the ship whistles in the harbor, funny, lonely sounds and the water slapping against the supports and the gulls out there sounding like cats.”

At age fourteen DeSalvo stole a car and was sent to reform school. A few weeks into his sentence he escaped with two friends, but they were quickly tracked down and returned to custody. DeSalvo had to earn back three thousand demerit points even to be considered for parole. He got out the following year and returned to Chelsea, where he and his friends amused themselves by catching stray cats and dogs and starving them in boxes before releasing them to fight. The cats generally clawed the dogs' eyes out before the dogs managed to kill them. “The war was going on and there was a lot of sailors and soldiers around,” DeSalvo told John Bottomly about those days. “We had a gang of kids used to hang around outside Arnie's Bar and Grill on First Street looking to roll these guys when they was too drunk to fight us kids off. I never was much for that stuff. I was a B&E [breaking-and-entering] man mostly, there was something exciting, thrilling about going into somebody's home…. I think now, too, that it had something to do with going into bedrooms where women had been sleeping or were sleeping and there was times when I would get a rail on just standing there outside the bedroom door listening to some woman breathe. It was only a matter of time before I would feel strong and tough enough to go into the bedroom when the woman was there alone and make her do what I wanted with her. But in those days I was a straight B&E man with a lot of sex on the side from the girls and the queers around the neighborhood. They…would pay for it, too, which was all right with me since I needed the dough and there was some relief from the urge that was pushing me to sex all the time, but it really was
woman
that I wanted, not any special one, just
woman
, with what a woman has.”

DeSalvo made it to age seventeen without going to jail and—
much like Roy Smith—enlisted in the army as soon as he could. He trained in New Jersey and then was sent to Germany, where he was promoted to the rank of sergeant in the military police. He boxed his way to the army middleweight title in Europe despite having been injured when a shell misfired and exploded in the breech of a tank barrel. He met a young German woman named Irmgard Beck and eventually married her, but that did not prevent him from getting a lot of sex on the side. He claims he seduced the wives of American servicemen as well as German women who were just looking for a good time. He also pretended to be a scout for
Stars and Stripes
and would take the measurements of American nurses for what he called the “Best Sweetheart of All” contest. First prize was supposedly a trip to Italy. DeSalvo wasn't tall, but he was powerfully built and had a tough, handsome face and a surprising sweetness that many women must have imagined was especially for them.

Plenty of young men with violent fathers have gone on to lead turbulent lives, and DeSalvo was no exception. His troubles took a disturbing turn, though, when he was charged with carnal abuse of a young child in January 1955. He had been reassigned to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and was living there with his new wife, Irmgard. One afternoon he had knocked on the door of a private home in a nearby town and found himself talking to a nine-year-old girl whose mother had gone out to buy food for dinner. He told the girl he was looking for a house to rent, and the girl claimed he had then proceeded to put his hand on her chest and between her legs. He stopped and left the house only when the girl's younger brother wandered into the room. DeSalvo was picked up by the police because he was already under suspicion for entering another woman's house, and the girl positively identified him as the man
who had touched her. The charges were eventually dropped because the girl's mother was reluctant to subject her daughter to the publicity of a trial.