Animal (4 page)

Teresa was an unlikely choice for such a mission. Known in mob circles as “Fat Vinnie,” Teresa was obese, weighing well over three hundred pounds, with beady eyes and black, slicked-back hair. Teresa was a swindler and a thief. He was a money man, not a button man. Teresa was given the assignment because he had recently purchased a forty-three-foot pleasure cruiser that he named
The Living End
. Built by craftsman at the prestigious Egg Harbor Yachts in southern New Jersey, the vessel had been designed with two large staterooms, a plush living area, and a large galley with a three-burner stove and stainless steel sink. The vessel even had chrome-plated anchors. Teresa had bought the boat to lure suckers
with cash-stuffed wallets to crooked card games. Vinnie later claimed that the yacht had made him $150,000 in the first couple of months he owned it.

Now, for the first time,
The Living End
was being used to end a man’s life.

Maurice “Pro” Lerner was given the order simply because he lived up to his nickname. Whatever the job, Lerner handled it like a pro. Lerner was also an expert diver. He packed his wetsuit, in the hope of infiltrating the island James Bond style and getting the opportunity to take out Barboza up close and personal.

The assassins boarded
The Living End
armed with high-powered rifles, shotguns, binoculars, and a telescope. Soon the boat’s motors roared and the vessel began cutting its way through the rough waters and thick fog toward Thacher Island. The perilous seas surrounding the island are littered with the skeletons of ships that have gone down over the centuries. In fact, that is how the island first got its name. In 1635 the land had been bestowed to Anthony Thacher, an Englishman whose four children were among the twenty-one passengers killed when the vessel
Watch and Wait
was torn apart in a hellacious storm during a sail from Ipswich to Marblehead, where Thacher’s cousin, Reverend Joseph Avery, was to be ordained as pastor of the fishing village. The passengers embarked from Ipswich on August 11, 1635, but the first sign of trouble did not appear until three days later, when gale-force winds shattered the evening calm and split the sails of their pinnace—a small vessel with two masts rigged like a schooner. Instead of hoisting new sails, the captain and his crew decided to drop anchor and wait until morning. This would prove to be a deadly mistake.

When dawn broke on August 15, 1635, the crew and their passengers were pummeled by driving rains, howling winds, and gigantic seas. Thacher would later describe it in his journal as “so mighty a storm, as the like was never known in New England since the English came, nor in the memory of any of the Indians.” Eventually a monster wave tossed the small vessel against a large rock; it was soon followed by an even greater wave that drowned the victims, including ten children. Somehow, Thacher and his wife survived and washed ashore onto the desolate island, half-naked, freezing, and near death. Stumbling along the rocks half-crazed, Thacher was fortunate to find a drowned goat, flint, and a
powder horn. He also found a coat that had belonged to his dead son Peter, with which he and his wife kept themselves warm. The body of his cousin’s eldest daughter washed ashore, and Thacher and his wife buried the girl’s remains on the island’s promontory.

Thacher would long blame himself for the deaths of his children and relatives, and he believed that God had punished him and Elizabeth with their very survival. The General Court offered Thacher the island as compensation for his enormous loss. The shipwrecked Englishman named the island Thacher’s Woe. Although Anthony and his wife eventually moved to Cape Cod, the island would stay in the Thacher family for eighty years before it was bought back by the colonial government for the purpose of building a light station. Twin lighthouses, each forty-five feet high and made of stone, were constructed on the island in 1771, providing many European immigrants with their first glimpse of America as they sailed into Massachusetts Bay. The twin lighthouses, some three hundred yards apart, stood sentry over the rough waters off Cape Ann for the next hundred years, eventually earning the nickname “Ann’s Eyes.” In 1861 the lighthouses were replaced by even taller towers that scraped the sky at 124 feet.

Joe Barboza was now calling one of the twin lighthouses home. Joe and his family shared two small bedrooms and two small bathrooms. Their spartan quarters were weather-beaten and rundown. John Partington’s living quarters were equally cramped and bleak. The marshal and his men slept on bunk beds three to a room. Their shower operated from a catch basin that trapped rainwater from the storms that were all too frequent on the island.

The U.S. Coast Guard had taken stewardship of the island in 1948 but had abandoned it a few years before Barboza’s arrival. There was no television, no phone, and no link to the outside world. The mobster complained almost nonstop about the isolation, and so did his wife and child. Claire Barboza had no one to talk to, no one to confide in. Little Stacy Barboza had no playmates to go exploring with. Thacher Island had been home to many children over the years: the sons and daughters of light keepers, who lived on the mainland during the week to attend school. Their high-pitched laughter had faded into the seascape long ago, replaced by the unsettling sounds of wave crashing against rock, the whistling
wind, and the ever-present fog horn. Joe and his wife always had to keep a close eye on Stacy, out of fear that she could disappear into the fog. The vapors were so thick that the fog horn had once sounded for 211 consecutive hours—the equivalent of 38,145 blasts. Fog was just one of the many concerns for parents raising a young daughter there. The island was also pockmarked with snake holes and surrounded by steep cliffs where a child could get easily hurt or even killed.

John Partington believed that Barboza and his family were well protected, but he also knew that Thacher Island was far from an armed fortress. The marshal had four lookout posts on the island: Partington’s deputies were stationed at the boat launch, along the island’s perimeter, around the Barboza family quarters, and atop one of lighthouse towers, which provided a view of the entire island and the dangerous white-capped waters beyond.

As
The Living End
entered the waters surrounding the island, Teresa grabbed the binoculars with his pudgy fingers and lifted them to his puffy eyes. He spotted the tip of a lighthouse on Thacher Island. It reminded him of a candle sitting in the middle of a basin. One of Partington’s deputies, perched high atop the lighthouse, spotted the boat through a blanket of thick fog about a mile off shore. Partington sensed correctly that the vessel was no simple pleasure boat. No experienced yachtsman would venture out on a day like this. Fortunately, the marshal had a plan. Partington gathered his twelve deputies and lined them up in full view of the approaching vessel. There was no way they could allow the yacht to reach the island. Partington had also received a tip that the assassins were carrying sixteen hundred pounds of dynamite on board, with the intention of blowing up everything on the island. Each of Partington’s deputies was armed with a carbine and bad intentions of his own for any possible intruder. Partington had also made Barboza wear a U.S. marshal’s uniform, in an effort to confuse the killers.

Seeing the small army standing at attention on the island’s edge gave Vincent Teresa and Pro Lerner second thoughts. The choppy waters also made it virtually impossible to get off a proper shot. The chances of getting to Barboza were a million to one. After cruising back and forth several times,
The Living End
turned around and headed back to Boston.

Looking out at the boat, Barboza must have wondered if any of his
erstwhile friends were on board—friends he had extorted money with—friends he had killed with. Barboza had painted a target on the backs of both friends and foes alike. Now he was the target, and all he could think about was exacting revenge.

2

Deviltry, Dirt, and Degradation

Pleased to meet you.
Hope you guessed my name
.

THE ROLLING STONES

The second son of first-generation Portuguese-American parents, Joseph Barboza, Jr., was born on September 20, 1932, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the historic whaling city made familiar to readers around the world by Herman Melville in his epic novel
Moby-Dick
. Portuguese fishermen, mostly from the Azores, had been immigrating to New Bedford en masse since the early part of the nineteenth century, when the harbor was home to 120 square-rigged ships that brought in more than forty thousand barrels of whale oil each year. Thousands of Azorean harpooners signed on with American whaling crews at busy ports such as Cais do Pico, known for its bountiful whaling grounds, and sailed on to the southern coast of Massachusetts for the prospect of better wages and a better life. By 1857, New Bedford was home to as many as 326 whaling ships, making it the unrivaled whaling capital of the world.

At the time, the city accounted for more than half of the whale oil brought into American ports. Sperm oil was even more valuable than oil derived from other whales, because it burned more cleanly, illuminating the night in millions of homes around the globe. Whalers also harvested baleen, a substance taken from the mouths of the giant mammals; it was used for any number of things, from buggy whips and fishing rods to corset stays and hoops for women’s skirts. The whaling industry in North America saw profits of more than $9 million per year, and much of that bounty was generated from schooners sailing out of New Bedford. But with the growth of commerce came an increase in crime. Sections of the city, especially the area around Howland Street near the docks, were rife with hooliganism. As one writer colorfully described it, “Rookeries and gin shops were in full blast and the streets thronged with tipsy sailors and bold women, when the air was filled with the sounds of ribald jest and profanity—deviltry, dirt and degradation reigning supreme.”
²

The mid-1800s saw a steady decline of the whaling industry in New Bedford. The outbreak of the Civil War had lured most sailors away, as had the California Gold Rush and the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania. Furthermore, in 1849, Abraham Gesner, a Canadian geologist, created a method of distilling kerosene from petroleum. This innovation would trigger the end of the whaling industry in America. There were 726 ships in the U.S. whaling fleet in 1846. That number would shrink to 39 just three decades later. The virtual death blow to the whaling industry, however, came in 1871, when 33 whaling ships in the Arctic fleet were lost after becoming trapped by ice before they could return home at end of the summer season. Some 22 of those ships had set sail from New Bedford. By the end of the nineteenth century, many of those who had amassed fortunes from whaling in New Bedford had begun shifting their profits to build the next great industry—textiles.

Once again, an influx of Portuguese immigrants heeded the call to fill jobs at massive brick mills built along the waterfront. Thanks to the textile boom, New Bedford was growing faster than any other city along the East Coast. This growth forced mill owners and city planners to build new tenements to house the workers and their families. The conditions were far from sanitary. As many as twelve families were crammed together in poorly constructed two-and three-story wood-frame buildings with no bath and only one toilet, curtained off in the corner of the room. The families were predominantly Portuguese, although there were also immigrants from Greece, Syria, and Poland. It was not only the men who were put to work for long, grueling hours in the mills; women and children also were forced to sweat eleven hours a day and six days a week for meager wages. There was little opportunity for advancement for Portuguese immigrants who had arrived in America with limited skills and virtually no grasp of the English language. The tenements they lived in were a breeding ground for deadly diseases such as cholera and smallpox. Nearly half of all pregnant Portuguese women continued working in the mills, and their infant mortality rate was twice the national average.
³
Portuguese men often sought refuge from family pressures at any one of a dozen saloons, such as Denny Shay’s Barroom at the corners of Elm Street and Acushnet Avenue, where the barkeep served anyone regardless of color, creed, or race, and oftentimes served their horses as well.

Conditions for workers did improve for a short time in the early 1920s, when seventy mills operated across the city employing more than 41,000 of New Bedford’s 120,000 residents. Immigrants held nine out of every ten jobs at the mill. Many even saw their wages triple at the height of the boom. The prosperity was short-lived, however. High salaries for mill executives and overproduction combined to create a major drop in revenue. But mill officials never considered tightening their own belts; instead, the losses were handed down to the workers, who were ordered to take a 10 percent cut in pay. Outraged textile workers took to the streets upon hearing the decision, and soon thereafter a labor strike was born. Some 20,000 textile workers, many of them Portuguese, walked out of the mills and off the job for six months. New Bedford police made more than two thousand arrests during the strike. One strike captain, Augusto Pinto, was arrested twenty-two times on the picket lines and was later deported back to Portugal. The fascist government there shipped Pinto to a prison in Cape Verde, and he died en route under mysterious circumstances. New Bedford textile workers eventually returned to the mills under an agreement stating that they would receive a 5 percent wage cut, not the original 10 percent reduction. The agreement had the effect of placing a Band-Aid over a gunshot wound. The damage had been done and was irreversible. Several business owners moved their textile companies out of New Bedford and headed south; those who stayed would not be around for much longer.