For the first case in our joint effort with the FBI, the feds decided to go after Frank Oreto Sr., an edgy mafioso who’d done fifteen years for the gangland slaying of another Italian mobster, Joe Lanzi, back in 1967. Apparently, Lanzi needed to be taught a lesson. Now Oreto was out of prison and back with the mob like he’d never left, this time running a huge loan-sharking operation out of a nightclub called Fasads in Revere—a tough town along the water just past Logan Airport.
Just like the Irish loan sharks in the presidential commission’s report, Oreto was putting out thick wads of Mafia cash onto the street, with a roving gang of thugs to collect the payments due. If you didn’t pay up—well, the idea was that you’d never think about not paying up. But if it came to that, they’d definitely hurt you, hurt you in all the most sensitive places, and bad enough that you’d happily pay them more than they asked. But they would never hurt you enough to keep you from paying. If they’ve lent you money, they don’t want you disabled, just like they don’t want you dead.
The FBI focused on the loan-sharking, but the feds were aware that Oreto was a contract killer. And they were afraid that he might want to move up in the LCN by derailing the case the FBI had built so painstakingly against Angiulo by knocking off a juror or the judge, or maybe even by blowing up the courthouse. If he was going to try such a thing, the feds wanted wiretaps and bugs in place to let them know about it well in advance. And Oreto was the kind of guy who’d do something crazy like that. The feds thought so, anyway, and they wanted us to take him out of the picture.
Oreto made for a long, heavy, exhausting investigation, a lot more of everything than anything I’d ever faced before. Nothing I’d ever done in Worcester prepared me for it. The feds figured it could last six months, but they were short by six. It wasn’t just a matter of getting Oreto; it involved getting his whole network—his leg breakers, his Mafia contacts, his partners, and a lot of others. And, again, it was a test to see if the State Police and FBI could work together. The feds knew everything there was to know about mob investigation; we knew the territory. They had money; we had manpower. But then, there’s always a difference between how you draw up the play on the blackboard and how you run it in the game.
In the early stages, Nick and I were going to handle it all by ourselves. State Police, FBI. Go to it. I learned quickly what to expect from Nick. You couldn’t wait around to get something done; you just had to do it yourself. Clearly there were two different work ethics in play when it came down to the State Police and the FBI. We did most of the street work; they manned the interior jobs, monitoring the recorders. We worked the late hours; them not so much.
An investigation like Oreto is a real grind—there’s the months of undercover surveillance to gather the evidence you need to persuade a judge to approve a wiretap, and then there are all the months after that holed up in some listening station monitoring the bugs, and don’t ask about the transcribing, which is done by hand and causes cramps and the sort of brain fatigue that can’t be cured by sleep. For the first part, I spent a lot of time in Fasads, which is one of the more depressing places I’ve ever been in. It had a huge dance floor—empty most of the time—with some of those big glittering balls dangling overhead. Hell looks different, I expect, but it probably feels like that.
That was in the main room. There was a bar out back, and I’d usually park myself there, nursing a beer for as long as I could. I’d watch people out of the corner of my eye, and try to look like just another guy in no hurry to get home. The bartender was the suspicious type, and he kept eyeing me, but after a few days he took me for a regular and would set down a Bud Lite for me practically as soon as I walked in.
I saw a lot of Oreto down there. You couldn’t miss him. In the bar, behind the counter, all over the place. Short guy—he couldn’t have been more than five-six—but he was built like a refrigerator, and he had a cartoonish Fu Manchu mustache and an Italian Afro. He was a wild man. He seemed to have electricity in his veins, and you never knew when he was going to go off. He might be talking to somebody, calm as anything, and then—zing!—he’d just lose it. He’d start hopping around, hands going everywhere, and screaming like he was going to kill somebody. He had to be on coke. Nobody is that crazy.
When I wasn’t at the bar, I was out in the parking lot, sitting in my car, checking out the people coming and going. If I saw someone suspicious, I’d fire off a few photographs out my rear window, and I’d take down the plate number to run. I’d get the ID, then do a background check. Anyone who didn’t seem to be coming in to get laid or drunk—those were the ones who interested me. They were obviously here for Oreto. Some of these players were hard to miss—the loud suits, the man jewelry, the shiny shoes. Others were guys who carried a lot of darkness around with them.
A fair amount of the ID checks I ordered on the people at Fasads came back positive, and gradually I could start putting the people together into Oreto’s world. I had the money guys, the muscle, the Mafia connections, and a lot more who were hard to classify.
A lot of these guys were straight out of Goodfellas, but the one who caught me up was the fellow who rolled up in a Lincoln Town Car. He seemed to be out of a different movie altogether. An imposing character, but smooth, he was dressed for a night out, in a jacket and tie. At first, I thought he was just a rich suburbanite out on the town, but he kept coming back. And he always greeted Oreto warmly, with a smile and a slap on the back, and then a few quiet words. I didn’t get it—why would a man like that be so chummy with a guy with a Fu Manchu?
So I ran the plates, and found out that his name was Sid Weiner, pronounced “whiner.” He had a few years on him; he lived in a nice part of Wakefield; and the stunner: he was vice president of Capitol Bank, one of the largest banks in Boston back then.
What was the vice president of Capitol Bank doing here? I dug into that for weeks, pulled out bank records, hit the newspaper morgue, and followed Weiner wherever he went. I’d never tracked anyone before, and I got very curious to see where he would lead, where this would lead.
And finally I had it: Oreto and Weiner were partners in a side operation that skimmed off some of Weiner’s own Capitol Bank customers, the ones that Weiner had pegged as deadbeats. Which made them perfect for Oreto. When they couldn’t make their Capitol payments, Weiner recommended they turn to this other financier he knew, a Mr. Frank Oreto, who’d be happy to tide them over with a short-term loan. He left out the part about the interest rate. Weiner then wrote the bank loan off as uncollectable, so Capitol wouldn’t expect the money back. But with his posse of leg breakers, Oreto had a way to collect what Capitol Bank couldn’t. Oreto and Weiner split the proceeds. It was sweet: they got to keep the capital and the interest, both.
When I brought all this back to Ring and Mattioli, they were thrilled by the Capitol Bank connection. This was obviously much bigger than they thought. We put together an affidavit for a judge’s permission to wiretap, and soon we were good to go.
For a listening post, I rented a nasty little one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a condominium about a mile away. No AC, broiling in summer, and, without much heat, freezing in winter, it was like a grubby bachelor pad. I slept over a few times; a bunch of people did, since we had to monitor the taps pretty much around the clock. There were three phones tapped, and a bug in the office, which meant four people to man them, and, since Fasads was open late into the night, long hours. Sweaty headphones clapped over your ears, hours of messy conversations in heavy Italian accents long on fuckin’ this and fuckin’ that—this wasn’t always easy listening. We had to record all the conversations on multiple machines with multiple cassettes for the different parties: one for the judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense, one for us, etc. And we had to go by the book, so we could follow an off-case conversation only for a few minutes before shutting it down for a bit, and then tuning back in. Repeat and repeat and repeat. The rule of minimization, they called it. Judges are sensitive to people’s privacy, and they should be, but it was a total pain for us. And then there was the transcription.
The feds were supposed to go in with us, and I saw a few agents in there besides Nick. One of them was John Connolly. Seeing him on Oreto, you’d almost think he was Mafia, not fed. He had the chunky ring, the slicked-back hair, the jet-black Italian suit, the glad-to-see-ya smile. He could have been John Gotti’s younger brother, but I’ll give him this: The guy exuded likability. He used to come in with pizza on the late Sunday shift, and, back then, he was a welcome sight.
First time we met there, he came right up to me and stuck out a hand. “You’re Danny’s nephew, right? Danny Foley?” He meant my uncle Dan Foley, a longtime state senator from Worcester, who was the Democratic majority leader and Billy Bulger’s number two. How he knew, I don’t know. But that was Connolly. Always ready to make a connection, and to use one.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“I’m pretty close to Billy.” He brightened and tapped me on the shoulder, his face shining.
“Nice to meet you, John.” I felt like I’d been cleared, accepted into the club. John made you feel that way. He was engaging and disarming at the same time.
Connolly had grown up with the Bulgers in the Old Harbor project in Southie. He’d known Bill Bulger from there—Whitey, too, but he didn’t mention that. As he talked, he continued to play up the Billy connection. A lot of Billy this and Billy that. He made it sound like he spent every afternoon lazing about the senate president’s office.
That first time, Connolly didn’t stay much longer than it took to have that little conversation. Gianturco did his time on the machines, but for the most part I got the feeling that the FBI saw this kind of grunt work as beneath them. The FBI was different, no question. It had that elite mentality, and, when it was doing OC, it had those RICO statutes that only it could enforce. But we had stuff of our own. Only we could enforce the state laws, meaning only we could stop a car for speeding or arrest someone for murder. Ring knew this and wanted our authority to enhance his. On Oreto at one point, we needed to plant a bug in the building he was using. The problem was the lock was a Medeco, which is absolutely impossible to pick. If you don’t have a key, forget it. But I saw a janitor use a key to go in, and I knew how I could get a copy of it without coming right out and demanding it. I did what the feds couldn’t: I got the plate number of the janitor’s car, and ran it by the registry, and registry told me his license was about to expire. Perfect.
The next day, I was in my cruiser, and I followed the janitor out from the apartment building. When he was out on the road, I flipped on the siren and pulled him over. I took his license and registration, strolled back to the cruiser, waited a few beats, then came back and told him that he had a little problem with his license that would take a few minutes. “I’ll have to take your keys while I straighten it out,” I told him. The Medeco key was on the chain with the car key. Back in the car, I took a photograph of it with a 35-millimeter camera. Pretty sharp focus. I gave the shot to the FBI lab, which duped the key for us, and we were in.
When I showed the feds the key, they just gaped at me.
We finally collected enough evidence of loan-sharking and conspiracy to win indictments of Oreto and Weiner. We grabbed Oreto in the early afternoon. He was sprawled out in his bed, dead asleep, obviously drugged out. He barely knew what was happening when we woke him up and slapped the cuffs on him. But Weiner was staggered. We nabbed him in his big house in the suburbs, and when we cuffed him there in his front hall, with his wife watching, he went dead white.
With the Capitol dimension, the case had a lot of elements and pulled in a couple of dozen people all together. The FBI agents said it was the biggest loan-sharking case they’d ever been in on, anywhere. Gianturco and I and a few others from both the State Police and the FBI handled the arrests. We’d worked together, and we’d gotten the job done. And the Angiulo trial went ahead without incident.
One guy we grabbed was a bruiser with heavy arms and a wide neck. Dan Forte, pronounced “forty.” A leg breaker, obviously. He was shacked up with a prostitute in a bad part of Peabody, farther north. I followed him from Fasads a few times, watching him make the rounds of bars and back alleys for his pickups. I had him: dates, times, photographs. I ran him. He had a bit of a rap sheet—no surprise there—but nothing serious. Still, it wasn’t going to go well for him when we arrested him in the loan-sharking operation.
But he seemed like a guy who got around, so I had a proposition for him.
“Here’s how it is,” I told him. “I can send you to prison for probably five or six years. Or maybe we can work something out.”
“Like?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.
“Help us out with a little information now and again. You know some people that I’d like to know a little more about.”
“Aw, fuck, man. Be an informer, that what you mean?”
“Do everything you’re doing now is what I’m saying, just pay attention to who, what.”
“A wire?”
“Maybe sometimes.”
“Fuck,” Forte said.
I spelled out a little more about what we had in mind, and where the limits were.
“Don’t worry,” I wound up. “Nothing will happen. And if it does, I’ll always be right outside. No shit. Right there.”
“How many years did you say?”
“Five, six.”
“Fuck,” he repeated.
And so Forte became my first Boston informant. I’d had plenty in Worcester and around there. And there would be plenty more in Boston after Forte. But he showed the way—both as to what you should do with informants and as to what you shouldn’t. I knew enough to know you can’t just let informants go. You have to watch them, be careful. They can be manipulative and often calculating, but you do end up depending on them, and they on you. To a degree, you’re in it together, the two of you moving around in the dark.