Animal (5 page)

In late October 1929, a year after the New Bedford textile strike, the American stock market suffered catastrophic losses, plunging the United States and the rest of the world into the Great Depression. Industrial cities like New Bedford were decimated. Two-thirds of the city’s remaining mills shut down completely. The head of one textile union summed up the economic despair this way: “Lowell, Lawrence, New Bedford, Maynard and Fall River … and most of the mill towns of the Blackstone Valley … are sad places.”
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One unemployed mill worker described eating dandelion greens and raiding garbage barrels to fill his stomach. His story was no different from those of millions around the country whose everyday battles to stave off hunger and disease were life and death struggles. This is the world that Joe Barboza was born into.

His father, Joseph Sr., was a milkman and part-time boxer who fought
under the name of Jackie Wolgast. His mother, Palmeda Camille Barboza, worked in a hospital cafeteria and occasionally found work as a seamstress. Together they lived in a dilapidated three-decker on Short Street, which was between Allen and Grape streets and directly across from the hospital where Palmeda worked.

Joe had a brother, Donald, who was four years older. Younger brother Anthony and a sister, Anne, would arrive nearly twenty years later. Grim economic realities and Joseph Sr.’s wandering eye made the air in the Barboza household thick with tension from the very beginning. Joe Barboza’s parents had married in 1927, and the relationship appeared doomed from the start. Barboza Sr. was a handsome, strapping man with a hair-trigger temper and a penchant for violence that he displayed both inside the ring and out. Weighing 180 pounds, Joe Sr. carved out a name for himself fighting as a light heavyweight in saloons and fair grounds in southeastern Massachusetts, Martha’s Vineyard, and Providence. He also handed out regular beatings to his wife and children and would disappear for weeks at a time, bedding down with mistresses scattered about the city. Joe Sr. had two children out of wedlock. He offered virtually no financial support for his family, and on the rare occasion that Joe Sr. found himself at home, he hovered over his wife and children with an air of sadism and brutality. During one fit of rage, Joe Sr. knocked his wife’s front teeth out while she was lying in bed with the infant Joe in her arms. Palmeda had been hugging the baby and weeping softly when Joe Sr. stormed into the room.

“Why the hell are you crying?” he asked with venom in his voice.
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Palmeda did not answer.

“I’ll give you something to cry about,” Joe Sr. shouted as he lunged forward and struck his wife, her head snapping back against the backboard of the bed. Palmeda clutched her baby as her teeth went flying to opposite sides of the small bedroom and her mouth filled with blood.

The next morning, young Donald crept into his mother’s bedroom, saw her battered face, and began to cry.

“What happened to you?” he asked, as tears flowed down his cheeks.

“Your father was chopping wood down in the cellar and one of the logs popped loose and hit me by accident,” she lied.

It was difficult enough to lie to her child, but Palmeda knew that it was
impossible to deceive herself. Constant pressure and sadness surrounding the relationship led Palmeda Barboza to attempt suicide. Joe and Donald came home from playing in the neighborhood one day and were met by the pungent smell of gas as they entered the apartment. They found their mother passed out on the floor and the gas jet open. “The house we lived in was more of sorrow than of happiness,”
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Joe later wrote in his autobiography,
Barboza
, published in 1975. “We were constantly on welfare. My mother was very much in love with my father regardless of his infidelities, and took out her loneliness by constantly keeping my brother and [me] around her. But both of us were wild.”

Like his father, young Joe had shown an affinity for sex and violence at a young age. His family had moved to First Street, on the south side of New Bedford, where he frequently found himself in scrapes with other boys. Young Joe was not a normal looking child. With a large head, long arms, and stubby legs, he was taunted constantly for his “apelike” appearance. However, he was always quick with a comeback and even quicker with his fists. Matching his father’s fighting style, Joe would tuck his thick chin to his chest and let his long, powerful arms do most of the work. Young Joe soon built a reputation as a boy who shouldn’t be trifled with. He also understood the attractions of the opposite sex early on. During a Halloween dance he attended as a child, Joe approached an attractive girl from the neighborhood who had dressed as a Polynesian princess complete with grass skirt and coconut bra. Instead of asking the girl to dance, Joe grabbed the coconut shells and flipped them over, exposing the poor girl to the public. Hearing her screams, the girl’s brothers chased Joe from the dance. Soon others joined in the pursuit as young Joe fled across town toward the waterfront, where he somehow managed to escape the angry mob. Joe later joked that he had felt like Quasimodo fleeing Louis XI’s blood-hungry soldiers in Victor Hugo’s
Hunchback of Notre Dame
.

Such moments of excitement offered a brief but welcome escape from Joe’s home life, where he felt that he was the bait his mother Palmeda would throw out every so often to lure her wayward husband home. Once Palmeda sent the boy to the home of his father’s mistress while she waited down the street. Young Joe found his father lounging in the yard with his girlfriend, a Portuguese woman named Cecilia. “I told him (Joe Sr.) that I wanted to see him,”
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Barboza recalled in his memoir. “He
looked at me with anger in his eyes and said: Get outta here you little bastard. I turned around blindly and ran down the street. I couldn’t stop crying.”

Later feeling a tinge of remorse, Joe Sr. bought his son a pigeon to make amends. The offering did not extinguish the burning rage building up inside the son against the father. “The punk broke my heart,” Joe would say years later.

To avoid becoming embroiled in the daily drama of his parent’s turbulent marriage, young Joe began to spend less time at home and more time on the streets. His small group of friends was made up mostly of the sons of Portuguese fishermen whose clothes and skin bore the stains and smells of days and weeks spent at sea. The life of a Portuguese fisherman in New Bedford in the 1930s was little better than it had been in the mid-1800s. Fishing was a job for hard men with few prospects, and Joe understood early on that he wanted no part of it. The rugged lifestyle of a fisherman had little appeal for Joe Barboza. Instead, he was drawn to the world of the gangster. As a child of the Great Depression, young Joe grew up in an era in which the American gangster was often cheered rather than loathed. This was the time of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Al Capone. Their fame, or more accurately, their infamy, rivaled that of the biggest sports and entertainment stars. One can imagine Joe and his group of young friends sneaking into the State Theater on Purchase Street to take in a matinee of gangster dramas like Humphrey Bogart’s
High Sierra
or James Cagney’s
Each Dawn I Die
. Young Joe was fascinated by the way these big screen hoodlums handled themselves.

However, Barboza did not need to sit in a darkened movie house to be exposed to the gangster lifestyle. For that, all he had to do was take a stroll through his struggling city. The whaling ships might have been long gone, but one could still find plenty of deviltry, dirt, and degradation in New Bedford. The city certainly had its share of hardened criminals, the most notorious being members of the Morelli Gang. Led by Frank “Butsey” Morelli, the gang included his four brothers. Natives of Brooklyn, New York, the Morelli brothers had moved to New England during World War I. With members carrying colorful nicknames like Gyp the Blood and Steve the Pole, the Morelli Gang roamed New Bedford, Providence, Rhode Island, and parts of Connecticut robbing railroad freight cars of
textiles and shoes. The gang would eventually be suspected in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, one of the most notorious cases in American history. Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been accused in the robbery and murder of a payroll master and his guard on April 15, 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The robbers ambushed the pair in broad daylight as they strolled up Pearl Street toward the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company with two metal boxes containing $15,776.73. The paymaster, Frank Parmenter, was shot several times. His guard, Alessandro Berardelli, was cut down by gunfire while trying to flee the scene. The killers sped away in a Buick touring car firing pot shots into neighboring buildings in an effort to keep potential witnesses inside.

Three weeks later, Sacco and Vanzetti, both Italian immigrants and avowed anarchists, were arrested after appearing at a garage in Brockton, Massachusetts, to retrieve the car investigators believed had been used in the holdup. Despite the fact that neither man had a criminal record and that prosecutors had virtually no evidence against them, the men were quickly indicted and put on trial for the murders. Their arrests sparked a fuse that would ignite a conflagration of violent protest around the world. Anarchists sent bombs to U.S. embassies across the globe. Most were diffused, but one bomb sent to the American ambassador in Paris did explode, injuring the ambassador’s valet. As the trial got under way at the Norfolk County Courthouse in Dedham, Massachusetts, authorities fortified the courtroom with sliding steel doors and cast-iron shutters to prevent damage from a possible bomb attack. Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

After the trial, a Portuguese immigrant named Celestino Madeiros made a startling confession while locked up alongside Nicola Sacco in Dedham. Madeiros, a convicted killer and member of the Morelli Gang, slipped Sacco a note stating that he had been involved in the deadly holdup. Police in New Bedford, who had had a long history with the Morelli Gang, suspected them in the murders fifty miles to the north. More than two dozen witnesses had also come forward, many of them offering descriptions of the assailants that generally fit members of the Morelli Gang. Despite the confession of Madeiros, and despite ardent support from notables including Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, and Dorothy Parker, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were sent to
their death on August 23, 1927. Nicola Sacco was defiant to the end. As he was being strapped down in the electric chair, he shouted,
Vive l’anarchia!
More subdued, Bartolomeo Vanzetti whispered under his thick mustache that he forgave those who were about to put him to death. Morelli Gang member Celestino Madeiros was sent to the electric chair that same day for an unrelated murder. His execution had been delayed in case his testimony had been required in a retrial of Sacco and Vanzetti. In his 1973 memoir
My Life in the Mafia
, Vincent Teresa claimed that he once had discussed the case with Butsey Morelli decades after the crime. Morelli told Teresa, “We whacked them out. We killed those two guys (Parmenter and Berardelli). These two greaseballs (Sacco & Vanzetti) took it on the chin. They got in our way so we just ran over them.”
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Decades later, a similar case would play out in a Massachusetts courtroom with Joseph Barboza playing the leading role.

The foundation for Barboza’s criminal career was set on the streets of New Bedford where Joe, just entering his teenage years, gathered together a small band of roaming bandits and in the spirit of
Oliver Twist
ran about the city stealing from local department stores to fence for cash. In the beginning, Barboza and his young crew would simply gather up the courage to walk into a store and target something small and valuable, such as a watch or piece of jewelry. They would then slide the item into a coat pocket, slip out of the store, and run. Eventually, however, the gang learned how to pick locks and operate like more seasoned criminals—at night. Joe believed that these nighttime raids cut the risk of getting caught. He was wrong. At the tender age of thirteen, Joe Barboza found himself behind bars for the first time. The charge was breaking and entering. Soon after, he was shipped off to the Lyman School for Boys, a notorious reform school located nearly one hundred miles northwest of New Bedford in the small farming town of Westborough, Massachusetts. Established in 1886, the Lyman School was built on the grounds of the State Reform School, the oldest reformatory in the United States. The Lyman School was spread over a thousand acres, half of which was rich farmland maintained by the young inmates, or students, as they were called. The school had its share of notorious graduates, including Albert DeSalvo, who would eventually confess to and later recant his claim of being the Boston Strangler.

For Barboza, this was the first time he had traveled more than ten miles from his home. Gone were the familiar sights and sounds of his New Bedford neighborhood. Gone was the familiar aroma of Palmeda’s ethnic Portuguese dishes wafting through their apartment from her tiny kitchen. The choked streets and exotic smells he was accustomed to were now replaced by acre after acre of rolling farmland. It was as much like home to Barboza as the craters of the moon. Many of the students were just like him, kids who had committed petty crimes, rather than violent offenses. Some had been sent to Lyman for being truant from school, or even for the sheer audacity of being a “stubborn child.”

Young Joe and the other boys were housed in cottages with pleasant names such as Sunset, Hillside, Wachusett, Elms, and Oak. From the outside, Lyman appeared no different from a prep school that might cater to the sons of blue-blooded masters of industry. The inside told a different story, however. The children were given a strict religious education and taught a trade, such as carpentry, masonry, or plumbing. These so-called benefits were overshadowed by the harsh disciplinary doctrine of the institution. With extreme prejudice, beatings were handed out daily by cottage masters wielding a variety of weapons, including belts and even pick handles. Children who committed even minor infractions were marched down to Oak Cottage (the disciplinary cottage) and given brutal “attitude adjustments.” Barboza received countless beatings, including one particularly savage punishment called “the hot foot,” whereby a cottage master would strike repeated blows to the arch of a child’s naked foot.