I was a trooper for four years altogether, and the work went well. I was a producer, so I was in on a lot of police action, arrests especially, which get you noticed.
After a while you develop a reputation, good or bad, and opportunities come with it. I was approached several times about joining the district attorney’s drug unit, but it would take something more for me to move to a different assignment. I liked the job I had.
That year, 1984, Colonel Canty asked Dave Mattioli, a sharp, young lieutenant in the State Police, to start up an Intelligence Unit to focus on organized crime. Mattioli was a real up-and-comer, smart and well liked, and when the colonel gave him that assignment, it meant the top brass was going to get behind it. The State Police already had an OC unit called Special Services commanded by Lieutenant Charlie Henderson, but it concentrated more on gaming than on more serious mob crimes. Mattioli’s unit would strike at the OC hierarchy, working with the FBI to do it. In fact, the unit was the FBI’s idea.
Dave told me all about it one night. I was out on patrol, and he got me by radio and asked me to meet him at a Friendly’s in Worcester. We were in a booth there when he laid it all out.
“So, would you be interested in joining it?” he asked me.
“Absolutely,” I told him. It was no decision at all. Working with Mattioli and with the FBI on serious stuff like the mob? Count me in.
Organized crime had always been a federal topic. The FBI had started hitting mobsters with its Top Hoodlum Program of 1953, and it had made a famous score in 1957, when it rounded up a slew of baffled mafiosi at what was supposed to be their top-secret gathering in Binghamton, New York. But the Bureau had been more preoccupied with headline targets like bank robbers and Communists, and it never went all that hard against syndicates, as they were known, until Hoover decided to make the syndicates a top priority during the Kennedy administration. One of the first mobsters he went after was Raymond Patriarca Sr., in Providence. Crawling with mobsters in those days, Providence was the Mafia headquarters for all of New England.
Still, the FBI didn’t have much luck against the mob until 1970, when Congress passed an antiracketeering act, RICO, that made it illegal to be in a mob at all. Since RICO is federal, only the feds can act on it, so they’d been doing the bulk of the OC work. But recently, some state police had started to move in on the OC action, seeing how much the mob was eating away at their cities.
Plus, the Intelligence Unit was designed to work closely with the FBI, following up on leads that the feds had been developing. They’d just had those indictments that hit hard at the leadership of the Italian mob, starting with Jerry Angiulo, and going pretty deep, after they bugged the mob’s headquarters on Prince Street in the North End.
A nervy FBI agent, Ed Quinn, arrested Angiulo at a North End restaurant. It was one of those moments the FBI loves to publicize, and it sure impressed me when I heard about it. After Quinn cuffed him, Angiulo was so sure the charges would never stick that he told the waiter at the restaurant to leave his pork chops on the table. He’d be back before they got cold. They must be icy now. At the time, I had to hand it to Quinn. That was a hell of an operation, and it is hard to tell the story without a chuckle.
In those days, I had nothing but admiration for J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men. I viewed them all as solid professionals—highly qualified and well trained and all the rest of it. They were the elite of our profession. And that wasn’t just a line. I really believed it. And if I had any doubt, all those skills were on full display in the Angiulo investigation. It was no easy thing to penetrate a secretive and deadly organization like La Cosa Nostra—the LCN—but the feds did, and they got a raft of indictments out of it. The whole idea was really exciting. I couldn’t wait.
The FBI offices were up in the McCormack Building at that time, across the plaza from City Hall. From up there you can see up the Charles, and out to Boston Harbor. By contrast, Mattioli’s group would be working out of offices in suburban Framingham in a low-rise that looked out onto a parking lot. Jim Ring ran the FBI’s organized crime unit of the Boston office, the one we’d be allied with. The Boston office was a bigger deal than you’d think. It didn’t just run Boston, but all of New England. Hundreds of agents took their orders from the Boston office; many of them worked there in the McCormack Building, and the others spread out to branch offices throughout the six states.
Strangely enough, everybody seemed to have worked in Worcester. Not just Mattioli and Henderson, but Ring, too. He’d worked out of the FBI branch office there. I didn’t know him, but he knew Mattioli and Henderson. It seemed to me that this would help everybody get along, but it didn’t. For one thing, Henderson didn’t get along with Ring, and I soon realized that few people did.
It wasn’t until I spent some time with Ring myself that I got it. He smoked a pipe—a rarity in any office and unheard-of in law enforcement—and he liked to sit back in his chair, puffing out a cloud of pipe smoke, occasionally sending a little of it your way, as he went on and on about something that, often, didn’t have much to do with anything.
Ring chose Nick Gianturco to be his case agent, the one in charge of any investigation we did from the FBI side. I’d do that on the State Police side. So Nick and I were set up to work together, and to show how the Staties and the feds can get along. And we did that. We actually were friends, up to a point anyway. Nick talked with his hands and was full of laughter. A fun guy. Everybody liked him, and I did, too. And we opened up to each other a fair amount.
Still, it didn’t take long for me to figure out that, as much fun as he was, Nick set firm limits on any friendship. It would never go beyond his loyalty to the FBI even if the FBI was wrong. So I knew where I stood with Nick. His friendship was conditional.
When I got into organized crime investigations, it took me a while to see the big picture. Usually with homicides, when you have a dead body at your feet, the explanation is right there—somebody got mad, or greedy, and the gun came out. But with a mob hit, the explanation always lies somewhere else, often far away. It takes a while to figure out.
Also, one mob is not like another one. The Italian mob is night and day different from the Irish mob. The Mafia is like a little army, with military ranks like all that capo and consiglieri stuff they take very seriously. The Irish mob is more like a gang, one that doesn’t have much order beyond the fact that the toughest bastard in the group usually runs it.
When you look at it like that, it’s pretty clear, but it gets blurry at the borders, when you see Italians bringing the Irish in on something, and the Irish doing a favor for the Italians back, and both groups working together if the money is right. And there are times when someone from one mob gets wasted by someone from the other. That can be shrugged off or lead to total war, and it’s anyone’s guess which.
I wasn’t the only one having trouble figuring it out. In April 1986, a couple of years after I got into OC, President Reagan’s Commission on Organized Crime issued a book, “The Impact: Organized Crime Today,” that tried to lay out the basics. A presidential report, a big fat volume, all the experts—and they still got a lot of it wrong. For instance, the report had the McLaughlins as a major presence in Boston—when they hadn’t been seen in years. And the commission didn’t pay much attention to the bookmakers who were the basis for a lot of mob revenue.
But the report did provide a useful overview of the Irish mob, which can be hard to track because it’s so free-form. The commission indicated that, while the Irish mob was generally in retreat, it was growing in a few northeastern cities, including Boston. The report had “Howard Winter”—known to everyone as Howie—running the Irish mob out of an auto repair shop in Winter Hill, although Whitey was even then vying with him for supremacy.
The report also claimed that another of the three most powerful mobs was run by a man it identified as “James Bolger.” Bolger. Whitey, of course. Aside from the misspelling, the commission was smart to describe Whitey as on his own, free from Winter Hill. It was telling that, while Angiulo was Mafia and Winter was Winter Hill, Whitey was just Whitey, largely on his own, beholden only to himself, even if he was in with Steve Flemmi. But the names indicated how hard it can be to draw the line between the Irish and the Italians, since Flemmi was with the Irish, despite his Italian descent. (And he had been with the Mafia once, only to be lured away by Whitey.) The report failed to mention the territories in Boston where the different mobs actually operated. Winter Hill was based in Somerville, just over the Cambridge border, and drew its strength from there. Bulger had South Boston, as everybody knew, and his power extended out from there. And the Italians had the North End, a slice of the northern part of the original city, near the water.
In Boston, the Irish weren’t entirely independent of the Italians, however. They couldn’t afford to be. A bigger organization, with a broader reach, the Italians had the money, and the Irish had to use it to bankroll their heavy loan-sharking operation. So the Mafia was the Irish mob’s bank. The Irish borrowed the money at 1 to 2 percent a week, and turned around to shylock it out at 5 or 6 percent to people who had nowhere else to go. And Whitey worked with Winter Hill as necessary, too. The Winter Hill mob controlled the docks along the Boston waterfront and was tight with the Teamsters who operated down there. Anyone who wanted to bring anything onto or off the docks had to pay Howie’s people a hefty toll. If anyone wanted to run a business down there, the charge was steeper, a quarter of the profits. But Bulger and Flemmi policed that, and they took their share.
At this point, Angiulo had been arrested, his pork chops cooling, but the Mafia headquarters remained on Prince Street in the North End. That was a festive, light-filled part of downtown, long Italian to the core, but it was finally getting gentrified as ethnic barriers were coming down all over the city. Big as the city was, the Boston Mafia was still subservient to the boys in Providence, chiefly Raymond Patriarca’s son Ray Jr., a stubby guy who was the new godfather after his father’s death a few years back.
Given the Italians’ superior power, why did they put up with the Irish? Why not just wipe out the Irish and have all of Boston to themselves? When I asked Mattioli about that, he just smiled. “It’s because the Italians are scared shitless by the Irish, just like everybody else is,” he told me. “The Winter Hill mob may not be long on numbers, but they’re killers, Tommy.” One bullet, that’s all it takes for them to solve a problem. That was the idea. If they want you dead, order your casket.
When the Mafia wanted to take somebody out, it often subcontracted the job to Winter Hill, especially to a hit man named John Martorano for the most important jobs. He’d developed a reputation for being lethal and silent. When the Irish wanted to liquidate someone, they did it themselves.