Animal (8 page)

Still, Wallace traveled to the meeting with two bodyguards, fellow Gustin members Barney Walsh and Timothy Coffey. The second tactical error was made when Wallace failed to position a lookout outside the meeting place. Had he done so, the lookout might have noticed seven rough looking Mafiosi entering the building in the hour or so leading up to the sit-down. Instead, Wallace and his bodyguards marched confidently into
the Testa Building on Hanover Street and quickly climbed three flights of stairs to the office of C and F Importing, which was owned by Lombardo. With Christmas just three days away, the mood inside the building had been festive up to that point. On the floor above C and F, a group of veterans of the Great War were busy stocking Christmas baskets for neighborhood children. The holiday cheer was interrupted by loud pounding on Lombardo’s office door. His men responded by unleashing a barrage of gunfire in the direction of the sound. Wallace was struck once in the heart, causing him to stagger into a nearby law office where he collapsed on a chair and died. Lombardo’s men chased Barney Walsh down to the second floor landing while shooting in midstride. Their bullets hit their mark, and Walsh crumbled to the floor, his lifeless face pressed against the worn tile. Timothy Coffey, the third member of the Gustin Gang, escaped to an office down the hall, where he hid quivering until police arrived.

Joe Lombardo went on the lam for over a week before turning himself in at Boston police headquarters on New Year’s Eve. He respectfully declined to discuss his whereabouts on the day of the shootings and was held on probable cause along with two other men, Salvatore Congemi and Frank Cucchiara, both of the North End. The charges were quickly dropped, however, after Timothy Coffey refused to testify before a grand jury.

The explosively bold ambush elevated Lombardo’s reputation in the Boston underworld, which was largely fractionalized at the time. The Gustins had been top dog up until that point, but their position had been precarious at best. The Mafia had accumulated power in the North End, and that power began slowly to grow. Lombardo may have been second in command to the older Buccola in the eyes of local cops and the public, but he was certainly the power behind the throne. Lombardo was the fist inside Buccola’s velvet glove.

Felippo “Phil” Buccola had immigrated to the United States from Palermo, Sicily, in 1920. He was an unlikely Mafia don from the very beginning. Born into a respected, wealthy family, Buccola was a highly educated world traveler. He attended school in Switzerland and the Universita degli Studi in his home city of Palermo before he was ordered by the Sicilian Mafia to Boston to organize underworld activities in the North End.
Buccola was no Edward G. Robinson, and he certainly did not look the part of mob boss. With his bow ties and rimless glasses, Buccola dressed and carried himself like something of a college professor. He was a self-described “sportsman” who managed a stable of hungry prize fighters in and around the city. Buccola had also been anointed as leader of the New England Mafia in 1932 by Charles “Lucky” Luciano’s mob commission in New York.

With the Gustin Gang no longer a threat, Buccola and Lombardo set their sights on another local mob rival, Charles “King” Solomon, a Jewish gangster, bootlegger, and narcotics trafficker who, like Buccola, also managed local boxers. Solomon was the Boston equivalent to Dutch Schultz. Like the Dutchman, “King” Solomon was brash and flashy. He was one of the most powerful Jewish mobsters in the country and arguably the most important bootlegger in Boston. Solomon was also an original member of the Seven Group, a precursor to Luciano’s Commission. The Seven Group, which included Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Frank Costello, gathered in Atlantic City in May of 1929 to add organizational structure to crime syndicates around the U.S. “King” Solomon literally helped organize organized crime. He was head of the dope racket and also ruled the Boston nightclub scene, where he operated several of his own including the Coconut Grove, scene of one of the deadliest fires in American history where, in 1942, 492 people were killed and hundreds more were injured. Solomon’s own demise had come nine years earlier inside another one of his nightclubs, the Cotton Club in the South End. The year was 1933 and Solomon had recently been indicted with three others on bootlegging charges. Running dope and pimping girls turned a nice profit, but booze smuggling was far and away the biggest cash cow during Prohibition. Authorities estimated that at least five thousand bootleggers operated in the Boston area alone, servicing about four thousand speakeasies. The annual spend for bootleg booze in Massachusetts was said to be a whopping $60 million per year.

The impending bootlegging trial was a major cause for concern for Solomon’s gangland associates, including Buccola and Lombardo, as well as for Joseph P. Kennedy; all wondered whether the King would give up his partners in hope of striking a deal with the feds. On January 24, 1933, four Irish hoods followed Solomon from his table into the washroom
at the Cotton Club and opened fire. Solomon was shot three times and stumbled out of the bathroom clutching his bleeding gut. He was rushed to City Hospital where, on his death bed, Solomon performed a final soliloquy straight out of a gangster movie. When questioned by detectives, the King wouldn’t give any up any names. Instead, with his final breaths, he damned “the dirty rats” who had shot him.

Those “rats” included James “Skeets” Coyne and John Burke, a couple of Irish “pug uglies” with no direct gang affiliation. Coyne was captured in Indiana one year later. He and his accomplices claimed they had targeted Solomon because he was known to carry a fat bank roll. “Skeets” Coyne was sent to prison for manslaughter, while the other gunmen were all acquitted on murder and robbery charges.

Virtually no one believed Coyne’s account of the shooting, and over the decades there has been widespread speculation about who directly ordered the hit on Solomon. Buccola and Lombardo are as likely as anyone to have orchestrated the murder. Both had much to lose and so much to gain with their Jewish rival out of the picture.

With Buccola’s status as Godfather of Boston, the Sicilian native gained the attention of the federal authorities despite his attempts to stay above the criminal fray. The boss was rarely seen in the North End, choosing instead to live in nearby Newton, a predominantly Jewish suburb that was a short distance but a world away from Hanover Street. Buccola lived in an apartment with his Irish wife, Rose Hogan, and their live-in maid. Joe Lombardo also chose to live outside of Boston’s gangster hemisphere. Although he spent much of his time at his North End importing company headquarters, Lombardo lived twenty miles away in the leafy town of Framingham, where he ran a horse stable and was considered a pillar of the community. He was known to dress in understated light gray suits, and his neighbors had little or no idea of the power Lombardo wielded in the back rooms, smoky bars, and dark alleys of Boston. The only hint of his membership in the mob was the pearl gray sapphire ring he flashed on his finger.

“Lombardo was the Mr. Big of the mob,”
¹²
recalled criminal associate Vincent Teresa. “There was no doubt of what he was when you saw him with others. Everyone bowed down to him—treated him with respect. Whether you were a boss in Rhode Island or in Springfield or in a section
of Boston, you went to Mr. Lombardo for a decision. If he said no, that was it—there were no further arguments.” In contemporary parlance, Lombardo was to Buccola what Dick Cheney was to George W. Bush. Lombardo was happy to stay in the background, where the heat brought by law enforcement was less intense. His official title was
Consigliere
, but it was Buccola who followed Lombardo’s orders, even when it meant taking control over the rackets in Providence where Frank “Butsey” Morelli had recently announced his “retirement.”

Buccola wasn’t cut out for the expanded role. Running gambling operations and resolving territory disputes in two states proved too much for the patrician from Palermo. With investigators from the Kefauver Committee hot on his trail, Buccola fled with his wife to his native Sicily, where he had built a six-room villa just after World War II. Buccola lived there in semiretirement, conferring every so often with Lucky Luciano about mob related matters back in the United States. For the most part, though, Buccola lived out his remaining years in complete content, working as a chicken farmer with birds he had imported from New Hampshire.

Buccola’s graceful exit was not seen as an affront to the Mafia, either in New England or in New York. Instead they welcomed it. New England’s Mafia was in dire need of strong leadership. Joe Lombardo’s strength had come in his ability to remain in the shadows. Thus there was no real structure to organized crime in New England. It was every gang or organization for itself, with the Italians exerting the most influence. What the mob needed was a hammer. That hammer would be swung when, in 1954, Lombardo and other high-ranking Mafia leaders chose Raymond L. S. Patriarca as Phil Buccola’s successor.

4

Wild Thing

Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in this town
.

THIN LIZZY

On New Year’s Eve, 1949, Joe Barboza was arrested for the breakins he had committed in New Bedford as leader of the Cream Pie Bandits. He was now seventeen and considered too old for the Lyman School, and too young for state prison, so the judge sentenced him to five years and one day at the Massachusetts Reformatory in Concord. Opened in 1884, the institution had been established as a school where males under the age of thirty could learn a trade that would be useful upon their re-entry into the community. The jail had seen its share of tough and crafty prisoners, including a red-haired African American drug dealer who would later change his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X. Barboza entered the prison on February 9, 1950, the same day that Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy made headlines around the world, in a speech given to a women’s club in West Virginia, by claiming that the U.S. State Department was infiltrated with communists.

At this stage in his life, Barboza was no doubt more comfortable under guard than he was on the streets. Prison was home to him. He understood the culture, and he understood what it took to survive. He was first put to work in the weaving mill but asked to be transferred to the cafeteria, where he wanted to learn to be a cook. Barboza’s new assignment did not last long. He quickly picked a fight with an older inmate, one with a fearsome reputation, and laid the guy out with a ferocious punch, breaking the man’s jaw in two places. Barboza was immediately tossed into solitary confinement for nine days. Once he was let out, the guards ordered him down to the boiler room, where he was assigned to shovel coal. The punishment was worth it. He had accomplished his first goal. Barboza was now the alpha dog. He knew that if he took down the toughest guy in jail, the others would fear him. He was right. Shoveling coal might have sounded like back-breaking work to some prisoners, but
Barboza welcomed it. He treated the penalty like a reward, using the work to build up his muscular arms and thick, sturdy legs.

Eventually, his jailers believed that there was more than just a sliver of hope that the young tough from New Bedford could be rehabilitated. A year after his incarceration at Concord, he was shipped off to the Norfolk Prison Colony, considered at the time to be a “model prison community.” Once again, Barboza was following in the steps of the future Malcolm X, who had served as a member of the Norfolk Debating Society while incarcerated there. Joe, now eighteen, had no interest in joining the debate team, glee club, or any other jailhouse extracurricular activity. The prison did, however, have a boxing ring where he could continue his training. Joe wanted to best his father in every way—from the amount of money he earned to the number of wins in the ring. Joe’s hatred of his father continued to fuel his fire behind bars. He trained as a middleweight, routinely thumping fellow prisoners who were oftentimes older and heavier than he. Sparring sessions and ring work kept him in superior physical condition and kept his brain sharp. Yet once he stepped foot outside the gym, the monotony of prison life weighed heavily.

To escape boredom, Barboza spent his days looking for new ways to get high. Normally a buzz would mellow out a prisoner, which is why guards often turned a blind eye to the use of drugs. But chemicals had the opposite effect on Barboza. When he got high—he got even meaner. Not only did Barboza set out to dominate his fellow prisoners, he sought to dominate his jailers as well. One night after sniffing paint thinner, Joe led a prison revolt and challenged the guards to a brawl. Joe waited in his cell with pupils dilated, throwing lightning quick combinations and howling at the moon. He challenged the guards to come in after him. One, two, three at a time—Barboza called on all the guards as he spewed obscenity-laced insults about their mothers, wives, and girlfriends. The guards had seen the kind of violence Barboza was capable of inside the ring, and no guard was crazy enough to go near him. Instead, the warden negotiated peace terms during a tense two-hour stalemate. Once his buzz wore off, Joe gave himself up without a struggle, smiling at his jailers as they handcuffed him and led him off to solitary. The stunt proved one thing to prison administrators—Joe Barboza was “beyond rehabilitation.” He was transferred back to Concord to serve out the remainder of his sentence.