Animal (34 page)

The mob also targeted Joe’s older brother. Don Barboza arrived home one night to find two gangsters parked across the street. He recognized one of the men as Blu D’Agostino, a former bodyguard for slain Winter Hill chief Buddy McLean. Blu stepped out of his car and motioned Don Barboza over.

“I’ve got some papers for your brother,” he said with a telling smile.
¹²⁸

Don Barboza did not take the bait. Instead, he ran inside his home, locked the door, and closed the shades. He never saw Blu D’Agostino again.

The Animal was livid when he learned of the threats to both his lawyer and his brother. He had also learned that Jerry Angiulo had hired New York Mafia killer “Crazy” Joe Gallo to drive up to Massachusetts to finish Barboza once and for all. Joe managed to sneak a phone call to Gallo’s Manhattan headquarters.

“It’s the Animal,” Barboza snarled into the phone. “I want you to remember one fucking thing. The distance from New York to Boston is the same as Boston to New York.”
¹²⁹

Barboza threatened Gallo that he would break out of protective custody, drive to New York City, and cut his head off.

The Animal then put pen to paper in a telegram to Tameleo and Angiulo. With help from Claire, Joe wrote down the biblical phrase
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
—which, in the Talmudic explanation, means “The king had been weighed and found wanting, and his kingdom is now divided.” According to the Bible, the phrase means, “The writing is on the wall.” Either definition would have suited Barboza’s purpose. He wanted to put the Mafia on notice that its empire was crumbling. He signed the note simply—
The Animal
.

As autumn turned to winter, the
FBI
agents increased the number of visits to the estate at Fresh Water Cove, where they prepared the Animal for his close-up before a judge and jury.

A few days before Christmas, Barboza was whisked into Boston for his first face-to-face meeting with Raymond Patriarca since the indictments were handed down. Joe had been asked to testify briefly at a pretrial conference about Patriarca’s role in the murder of Willie Marfeo. He got up
on the witness stand and performed his song and dance for the judge while Patriarca sat silently at the defense table shooting him bullets with his eyes. Once Joe was finished, the Man ran his thumb across his own neck in a garroting gesture. “You rat,” he whispered.

“Go fuck your dead mother in the mouth,” Barboza shouted as he sprang from the witness stand and headed toward his former boss. John Partington grabbed him before he could reach Patriarca and escorted him out of the courtroom. To calm the seething Animal’s nerves, Partington and his men went out and purchased a stuffed Santa Claus for Joe to bring back to little Stacy. Holding the toy in his beefy palms, a macabre grin spread across the Animal’s face.

“You know, I used to buy her a stuffed animal after every hit,” he said with pride.
¹³⁰

After months of rehearsals, it was now time to lift the curtain. Barboza’s first public performance took place in January 1968 at the Rocco DiSeglio murder trial. Joe had implicated Jerry Angiulo and three other mobsters—Richard DeVincent, Marino Lepore, and Benjamin Zinna—in the slaying, and now he had to make his words stick. Barboza wasn’t the only one getting his first real shot at center stage. U.S. marshal John Partington had also spent months preparing for his role. The feds had received information that all four doors of the Suffolk County Superior Courthouse were going to be covered by mob snipers, so Partington slipped Barboza into the building at 2:00 a.m. on the first day of the trial. Barboza was surrounded by twenty members of the protective detail, each man wearing hoods with slits for eyes. Partington wanted to make sure that Barboza could not be indentified by any potential gunman. The trip from Gloucester to the courthouse at Pemberton Square in Boston was as tightly controlled as a presidential motorcade. A lead car was deployed several miles ahead to look for potential Mafia roadblocks and to scout for sniper positions on bridges and along roadways. The convoy carrying Barboza followed a route of right turns only, out of fear they could be susceptible to a double road block. Once safely inside the courthouse, marshals provided Barboza with his own water and food to ward off any attempt of poisoning.

The Animal was then cleaned up, given a freshly pressed gray suit, and escorted into the eighth-floor courtroom, where he passed the prisoners
box avoiding eye contact with Angiulo and the other men who no doubt looked upon him as the rat he had become. The murder trial was the hottest ticket in town as reporters and spectators alike stood in line for more than an hour to get inside. Each had to pass through a metal detector and was subjected to an additional patdown by police looking for guns, knives, or anything that could be used as a weapon.

Earlier that morning, the sixteen-member jury heard the presentation of forensic evidence gathered from the crime scene. The prosecutor, John Pino, then called Joe Barboza to the stand. Pino took little time zeroing in on the night in question. Pino had spent several weeks coaching Barboza in Gloucester, and it was now time to perform their act before a live audience.

“What did you say to Mr. Zinna, and what did he say to you?”
¹³¹

“I said what are you doing around here at this time? You’re up to no good.”

“Then what was said?” asked Pino.

“Benny [Zinna] said to Vinny [DeVincent], ‘Joe says we’re up to no good.’” Vinny said, “We’re up to no good for our
own
good.”

Barboza then told the jury that Zinna informed him that they were waiting for Rocco DiSeglio and that Joe would read about it in the papers tomorrow. Joe also said that he saw the three alleged hitmen get into a car and spoke to them again hours after the murder. The Animal also contended that Jerry Angiulo had given a kill-or-be-killed order to the other defendants in the case, and that the underboss had marked DiSeglio for death because he had acted as the “fingerman” in several holdups of Mafia-controlled gambling games. The Animal performed well under Pino’s direct questioning. The real test would come during cross-examination.

Angiulo’s lawyers were ready for a firefight. They had received information that Barboza had been in talks with author Truman Capote about penning his life story.

“He’s the man who wrote
In Cold Blood
, isn’t he?” defense attorney Joseph Balliro asked the Animal.
¹³²

“I think so.”

“Have you ever read it?”

“Ah, no.”

Attorney Balliro smiled. “I think you’d like that book, Mr. Barboza.”

Balliro then asked Barboza if profit was his true motivation for testifying in the case.

“I only started negotiating a book after they killed my friends,” the Animal responded angrily. He did not elaborate on who “they” were. He didn’t have to. Everyone in the courtroom knew he was talking about the Office. Still, the judge had the comment stricken from the record. The defense immediately called for a mistrial, but the motion was denied.

Once the trial resumed, Balliro, smelling blood in the water, began where he’d left off.

“Did you expect to receive any consideration from anyone for telling this story?”

The question confused Barboza. “Consideration? What consideration?” he asked.

“Did you expect to get any money?” Balliro shouted. “Did you discuss a book or a movie?”

Joe told the court that he began exploring his literary options long before the murder of Rocco DiSeglio. Balliro refused to allow Barboza any room to pivot away from his line of questioning.

“And it all depended on a guilty finding by this jury, didn’t it?”

“I’m up here telling the truth, and I’m not motivated by capital gains,” Barboza shouted while pointing directly at the defense attorney.
¹³³

Balliro turned his back on Joe and waved his hand in the air, dismissing him out of hand.

The gesture dug under Barboza’s skin as he trembled with rage on the witness stand. If he could have jumped onto the courtroom floor and strangled Balliro with his bare hands, he would have.

The Animal was in the legal ring with an opponent who could attack him from just about any angle. Balliro had Joe on the ropes now and would have landed a knockout punch had the judge not stepped in and called “time.” The Animal was transported back to the Gloucester estate with his ego bruised and his brain battered. Dennis Condon and Paul Rico wondered if Barboza had the mental stamina to finish the trial. They had to come up with a better answer to the question of motive. They bounced around several ideas until they settled on what was the most obvious and what would be the most impactful to the jury—Joe’s family.

The next morning when testimony resumed, Barboza made an impassioned plea that his testimony in the DiSeglio case had not been fueled by money, promise of a lighter sentence, or revenge. “I decided to tell what I knew after they threatened my wife and kid,” he told the jury.
¹³⁴

Although members of the Office had never threatened Claire or Stacy Barboza directly, the implication had been there. Barboza’s story may have struck a chord with the media and those others who were merely following the trial for sport, but prosecutors could not gauge how it was playing with the most important audience of all—the jury. The defense had pounded away at Barboza’s credibility and at one time during the trial had even suggested that he had committed the DiSeglio murder himself and then blamed it on the defendants.

When it was time for the defense to make its final arguments, Balliro was joined by fellow counsel Lawrence O’Donnell, who made an impassioned speech of his own before the court. He implored the jury to steer away from stereotypes when deciding this case.

“Society is eternally tugged toward the lynch law whenever they decide there is a criminal type,” O’Donnell argued.
¹³⁵
“Through propaganda we are told that all Irish are drunks, all Jews are sneaks and all Italians are gangsters. I don’t want any of that in the jury box. Michelangelo would turn in his grave. If that is the basis for your decision, scream it out now.” O’Donnell then raised his index finger to the jury before mentioning Barboza by his legal name. “In this case the evidence rests on the word of one man, Joseph Baron, and he should not be believed. A baron has no friends. A baron specializes in victims.”

The defense reminded the jury once again of the previous indictments against Barboza and asked the panel once again to question his whereabouts on the night of the DiSeglio murder. “Show me one honest man who has got up on the witness stand and testified to one single iota to the defendants,” O’Donnell asked rhetorically as he ended his speech.
¹³⁶

Prosecutor John Pino got the last word and made a desperate attempt to distance himself from his star witness and yet preserve his testimony. “This is the case of the Commonwealth against Angiulo, Zinna, DeVincent, and Lepore, and I respectfully direct your attention to that fact. This is not the case of Joe Baron against the defendants…. Joe Baron
told the truth, and who would know better than a man of Joseph Baron’s criminal record?”
¹³⁷

The jury received the case on January 18, 1968, and reached its verdict after only two hours of deliberations. Jerry Angiulo and his three fellow defendants were rushed back into the courtroom, where they sat quietly as the judge rendered the verdict. The underboss had cheated death numerous times during his service in World War II, and now sixteen ordinary American citizens—a jury of twelve plus four alternates—posed a greater threat to Angiulo’s survival than the Japanese Navy ever had. He would get the electric chair if convicted. In the anxious moments before the decision was read, it is possible that Angiulo thought back to the prophetic words in Barboza’s telegram:
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
. Would his kingdom be divided among his enemies? But in the end, it was Joe Barboza who had been weighed by the jury and found wanting. His murderous past had made him unbelievable in court. The state’s case rested almost entirely on Barboza’s testimony, and that was not enough for the jury. The verdict was unanimous—Angiulo and the other three defendants were found not guilty on all charges.

Jerry Angiulo, who had cultivated an image of a strong, stern Mafiosi fought back tears in court. Swallowing hard, he told a flock of reporters, “I don’t want to say anything right now. I want to see my mother. She’s seventy-three, and this thing has been bothering her.”

For the prosecution, the
FBI
, and Joe Barboza, the verdict was stunning to comprehend. How could a jury let a notorious gangster like Jerry Angiulo walk? And what would this mean for the trials against Raymond Patriarca, Henry Tameleo, and the suspects in the Deegan case? As Barboza was notified of the acquittal, he simply paused and stared out at the wave crests colliding with the rock along Freshwater Cove. “See what ya get for trying to do the right thing?” he muttered to himself.
¹³⁸

18

Ka-boom!

We like explosions. It’s only right we should

DEVO