Animal (26 page)

In July 1966, as some were beginning to question the control Raymond Patriarca had over the rackets in New England, the Man answered his doubters in a big way. Patriarca had learned that a bookie named Willie Marfeo had gone into business for himself on Federal Hill in Providence.
This was a major no-no. To make matters worse, Marfeo had refused to pay tribute to Patriarca. When the Man sent underboss Henry Tameleo to warn Marfeo that he had better pay up or else, Tameleo was greeted with nothing more than a slap in the mouth. The insult was a slap in the face to Patriarca, who sent out the order that Marfeo had to go. The only question now was how to do it. Marfeo knew all the muscle that Patriarca employed, so it would be nearly impossible to get a jump on the bookie with local hitmen. Patriarca decided to bring in an outside assassination squad for the job. The boss provided the killers with weapons, cars, and an escape route. He also selected the best possible place to find Marfeo flatfooted. The assassins caught Willie Marfeo enjoying a slice of pizza at a joint called the Korner Kitchen on Atwells Avenue in Providence. After ordering all the patrons to lie down on the floor, the killers grabbed Marfeo and shoved him into a phone booth. They closed the door, raised their guns, and unloaded on the bookie—killing him with four gunshots to the head and chest. The Marfeo hit proved to those inside law enforcement, and inside the mob, that Raymond Patriarca’s bite was still every bit as deadly as his bark.

Two years later, in April 1968, the Man ordered the murder of Willie’s brother. Rudy Marfeo shared his brother’s stubborn streak and had also been interfering with Patriarca’s gambling business. Adding to the size of the target on his back was the fact that Rudy had sworn revenge against his brother’s killers. For this gangland hit, Patriarca did not subcontract the violence; instead he used five of his own men, including Maurice “Pro” Lerner. The assassins found out that Marfeo always did his grocery shopping at a certain market on Pocasset Avenue in Providence. The killers had conducted surveillance on the grocery store for several weeks while trying to determine the right time to strike. The delays frustrated Patriarca. “I don’t want to hear anymore stories,” he told one of the hitmen. “I just want him (Marfeo) killed.”
⁷⁰

On a bright Saturday afternoon soon thereafter, the hit squad donned Halloween masks and followed Rudy Marfeo and his bodyguard Anthony Melei into the market, where they opened fire with a carbine and sawed off shotgun. The killers fled in a stolen car that they ditched in the parking lot of a nearby golf course. After wiping the stolen car clean of fingerprints, the assassins drove away in a maroon Buick.

Sibling loyalty often proved fatal in the New England mob. What the Marfeo brothers had found out, the Hughes brothers would soon learn. Stevie Hughes would outlive his brother Connie by only four months. Each man had a criminal career that had spanned over two decades. Police in Charlestown had been chasing after them since they were in knickers. For the Hughes brothers, crime was a family tradition that had been passed down by their father, Stevie Sr., a shipyard electrician who had served time at Walpole for possession of a machine gun. Crime was in their blood, and it was also in their neighborhood. Most of Connie and Stevie Hughes’s early capers, which included robbery and car theft, were committed with their childhood friends Bernie and Punchy McLaughlin. The McLaughlins and the Hugheses were peat from the same bog. Now three of them were dead, George McLaughlin was on death row, and Stevie was the only one left on the street to ensure the gang’s survival.

Everyone understood that a successful hit on Stevie Hughes would bring an end to one of the bloodiest gang wars in American history. There were no shortage of volunteers as members of the Winter Hill Gang, the Mafia, and others all offered themselves up for the plum assignment. Stevie Hughes knew that he was vastly outnumbered and that his time was running out. He asked his close friend Sammy Lindenbaum (Sammy Linden) to make peace with Barboza and the other mob killers. The Animal would never accept such a deal, knowing that Stevie Hughes had killed Joe’s friend and mentor Buddy McLean. “Tell him to go fuck his mother,”
⁷¹
Joe told Lindenbaum.

Barboza was surprised that Lindenbaum had reached out to him, as the loanshark had been on Joe’s hit list just the year before. Raymond Patriarca had wanted Lindenbaum killed, and the contract had originally been assigned to the Bear. But after Jimmy Flemmi had been ambushed and shot, Barboza felt that it was his responsibility to see the assignment through. He had asked Lindenbaum for a tour of his house overlooking Revere Beach. Lindenbaum had just put the place up for sale, and Barboza said he was interested in buying. The Animal’s real plan was to lure his victim to the home and kill him inside with no witnesses. When Lindenbaum arrived at Barboza’s East Boston headquarters to pick him up for the tour, he brought two small dogs with him—a red flag for the Animal, who knew the damned things would yip and yap and draw attention once
Joe had clipped Lindenbaum. As he was trying to figure out a way around the situation, Barboza got a call from his friend Ronnie Cassesso, who had participated in the murder of Teddy Deegan. Cassesso told Joe that the Office had revoked the order but that no reason had been given by Patriarca. Joe later discovered that the Man wanted to keep Lindenbaum alive just long enough to borrow $80,000 from him, with no intention of paying it back. Joe Lombardo had also wanted to keep Sammy alive because he was deemed good for business.

Lindenbaum was a walking cash machine, with money on the streets of at least twenty cities and towns in Massachusetts. Along with running numbers, the squat, dough-faced crook was also a popular abortionist who could “fix” a problem for as little as $450. Sterilization and safety were foreign concepts to the sixty-seven-year-old Lindenbaum, who would correct his medical mistakes by simply making the patient disappear. Now, a year after the hit was called off, it was back on, and with any luck the mob would rid themselves of Lindenbaum and Stevie Hughes at the same time.

The Pearson stabbing case was still unfolding, and Barboza was under pressure by his lawyer to stay out of trouble. When Joe learned that Lindenbaum’s demise was imminent, he skipped town for New York and left the hunt to fellow predators Stevie “the Rifleman” Flemmi and Cadillac Frank Salemme.

The two killers pounced on their prey on a Friday afternoon in late September 1966. Lindenbaum and Stevie Hughes had just enjoyed a long lunch after making the collection rounds in Lawrence and were traveling along busy Route 114 just two miles from the town of Middleton when a black sedan appeared virtually out of nowhere. The car overtook Lindenbaum’s Pontiac Tempest at the top of a hill near the Three Pines Inn. The passenger-side window of the black sedan was rolled down and sticking out of it was the barrel of an M-1 rifle. The gunman opened fire with at least seven shots. One bullet ripped the fingers off Lindenbaum’s hand. Screaming in pain, he let go of the steering wheel and the Pontiac veered dangerously close to a steep embankment. Stevie Hughes reached inside his trench coat for his own gun but was cut down by bullets. The 1965 Pontiac Tempest hit the embankment and plummeted ten feet into a swamp. The black sedan kept going. The manager of the Three Pines
Inn heard what he thought was a car backfiring and looked out a window. When he saw that the guardrail had been torn down, he yelled to a waitress to call the police for help. The manager then rushed outside, crossed the street, and maneuvered his way down the steep embankment to the wreck, where he discovered that not only had both men been killed but that they had been shot several times each. When a tow truck finally arrived to haul the car away, the driver discovered Lindenbaum’s two dogs, a Chihuahua and a mutt, alive and hiding under a seat.

Sammy Lindenbaum was carrying more than $1,000 at the time of his murder. Stevie Hughes had roughly half that amount, but police also found a newspaper clipping in his pocket dated March 16, 1966, describing how he had barely survived an ambush outside his brother’s Malden home. News of Hughes’s death came as no surprise to the Charlestown cops, who had known him during his brief and violent life. “They [Stevie and Connie Hughes] went the route,” veteran Charlestown police detective John Donovan told the
Boston Globe
. “The brothers had been too close to the McLaughlins to expect anything but a gangland death.”
⁷²

Police from Charlestown to Somerville to Boston and beyond were bracing themselves for a reprisal, but the murder of Stevie Hughes served as a death blow to the McLaughlin Gang. The Boston mob war was now unofficially over. Of course there would be more gangland slayings, but none would be blamed on the blood feud between Somerville and Charlestown. Joe Barboza had survived the purge unscathed, and he was now in position to fill the power vacuum left wide open by the war. Virtually all of Barboza’s enemies and friends were gone—either dead or in jail—and now he was one of the only men standing in the way of the Mafia’s total control of the Boston rackets. The Animal weighed these options heavily in his mind. Would he attempt to seize the brass ring and all the risk and reward that went with it? Barboza was a pathological killer, as were most of his comrades in arms, but there was also a practical side to his personality. He recognized and understood his limitations better than anyone. Joe knew that he was not equipped to handle the rigors of running a big organization. Joe’s skills were ill suited for pulling strings from behind a desk like Raymond Patriarca. Barboza had to be on or near the front lines of the battle. He was General Patton to Patriarca’s General Eisenhower. If anything, Joe thought the void left behind after the
McLean-McLaughlin feud would solidify his standing with the Office. The Mafia needed someone who could manage the growing number of independent contractors whose only allegiance was to the all-mighty dollar. Henry Tameleo was growing old, and Jerry Angiulo had not done enough to earn the respect of the Boston underworld. Barboza believed that he was now a major step closer to his dream of becoming the first non-Sicilian to join the ranks of
La Cosa Nostra
.

14

Double Cross

No one man should have all that power

KANYE WEST

The Animal could dream all he wanted, but Raymond Patriarca had other plans. The Irish mob war had cost the Office countless millions in lost revenue. The Wild West had shipped East during the war, and what was once a mob boom town had now become a ghost town as the steady flow of money slowed to a trickle. Fear of violence had kept people away from gambling parlors, race tracks, and mob-controlled bars. Patriarca and his underbosses Henry Tameleo and Jerry Angiulo needed to get business moving again, and a gunslinger like Barboza had become a burr under their saddle. The same was true with law enforcement. Suffolk County district attorney Garrett Byrne had made it a top priority to take Barboza off the streets. Cops began harassing the Animal at every turn. Joe stopped driving his “James Bond” car, as it had become a magnet for police. They had even given the automobile its own code—66. The Animal had to adapt to his new environment, so he began traveling by cab and subway; when he needed a car, he made sure that he never used the same vehicle twice. He also relied more heavily on tipsters to keep him one step ahead of the law. One evening in the fall of 1966, Joe received a phone call from a detective friend who told him that police were staking out his headquarters and that they planned to arrest him the minute he was on the move.

“The heat’s on. They wanna catch you, Nicky (Femia), and Chico (Amico) with guns,” the detective whispered into the phone. “The word is out to get you guys off the street one way or the other.”
⁷³

At the time, Joe was driving a friend’s black convertible, which had a trunk loaded with handguns and an M-1 rifle. Barboza ordered his men to dispose of all the weapons before they picked him up for a ride into the city. Normally he would not venture away from his headquarters unarmed, but the mob war was over now and the heat from law enforcement
was indeed on. Police spotted the black convertible later that night as Joe and his crew pulled up to a local bar. Officers jumped out of their vehicles with weapons drawn and ordered Barboza out of the convertible. A detective working with the district attorney’s office was also on the scene. The police officers shoved Barboza up against the side of the car and searched his body. They did the same with Nicky Femia and Chico Amico but found nothing. An exhaustive search of the car found the same. Barboza smiled as he stood by watching the spectacle. After about an hour, the frustrated officers were forced to let Joe and his men go on their way. Barboza made sure that the tipster got an extra $100 for his effort.

A few days later, Barboza was having a drink with his crew and counting his blessings at the Intermission Lounge on Washington Street in Boston. A friend walked by Joe’s table and motioned him to meet outside. Once there, the friend informed Joe that a mob killer was on his way to Boston to take him out.