Big Stick-Up at Brink's!: The Inside Story of the Gang Who Pulled Off Boston's Greatest Robbery

BOOK ONE

THE CLOUT

Chapter One

Return of a Thief

September 12, 1944:

You’ve got to ax-centuate the positive, Johnny Mercer sang from the Philco cathedral radio.

EE-liminate the negative, added Bing Crosby.

And don’t mess with Mr. In-Between, they both warned as five-foot six-inch, 170-pound Tony Pino let his gray jute trousers drop to the slat-wood floor, stepped out of them, bent to make recovery, momentarily forgot to breathe through his mouth and, by forgetting, sucked in a nostril full of shit trench stink which permeated the long, low, frigid second-floor supply room. He flashed a ticlike wince which always tautened his pudged-moon face into what appeared to be a mocking grin, resumed inhaling by mouth, grabbed up the trousers, tossed them onto a pile of already-discarded gray jute prison garb and stood sway-backed and potbellied and naked. Stab wounds ran along his thick neck and flabby left shoulder. There were bullet scars in the fleshy left buttock and thigh. He coughed to get the guard’s attention. He coughed again. The belly heaved again.

The supply room guard hitched a thumb toward a high shelf, leaned forward and turned up the radio’s volume. A 9 A.M. newscast began with word that Hitler’s Fortress Germany had been invaded by General Patch’s rampaging First Army.

Pino rose up on his tiptoes, brought down a newly postmarked carton. By the time General Patton’s Third Army had penetrated the impenetrable Siegfried Line and British forces were dashing into the Lowlands he was dressed in a baggy, creased blue serge suit, white-on-white Arrow shirt, dotted tie and a pair of seven-year-old but never worn Florsheim shoes.

The guard summoned a runner, filled out a yard pass and as an afterthought said, Good luck.

Pino flashed his ticlike grin, plucked the pass from the guard’s finger and grabbed up three comic books and a copy of Popular Mechanics. He led the way down the steps and out into a vast and hazy prison enclosure dominated by looming, hand-hewn granite block structures grown mawkish red-black with age and coal smoke drifting in from railway yards beyond the twenty-foot-high turreted and guard-mounted walls. He continued breathing through his mouth as he waved an expansive good-bye to the contingent of Crap Brigade cons hosing out the thousand-odd cell-numbered toilet buckets near an open latrine trench.

His pass was presented at the rotunda building. A screw opened the gate in the wire mesh barrier, and Pino stepped past, leaving the runner behind; he climbed the circular staircase, waited while another wire mesh barrier was opened, strode up a corridor and entered the guardroom without knocking. He ignored two burly civilians seated on a far bench, went to a door, knocked and in his raspy, slightly high-pitched voice announced, Pino, Anthony.

A clerk guard emerged munching a sandwich, dropped a sheath of papers onto the desk and said Sign at the Xs.

Pino signed without reading, opened an envelope, removed and counted $600, the rebate from his commissary account, argued he was entitled to an additional $10 he knew damn well was awarded only to convicts with no known source of income, finally abandoned his demand, pocketed the money, stood waiting.

The clerk countersigned several of the forms, tore off parole board copies, held them out.

After having served six years, eight months and six days of two consecutive three- to four-year sentences for the crime of breaking and entering in daytime with intent to commit a felony, as well as possession of burglary tools, Antonio Pino, alias Anthony Pino, Tony Pino, Anthony Pirro and John Gurno, had paid his debt to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and was therefore officially rehabilitated—on parole for two more years, but a free man.

He stepped across the room to where the two burly men were standing and held out his wrists.

Sorry, Tony, the larger of the federal marshals said while the smaller man jerked Pino’s arms around and up behind his back and clamped on a pair of handcuffs.

What the hell, you’re only doing your job, Tony replied.

Don’t worry, the larger federal officer whispered, holding open the rear door of a car parked at the base of the rotunda building, I hear they’ll have you out before the day is over.

Threat of reincarceration seemed to have little effect on Pino as he rode away from Massachusetts State Prison, better known as Charlestown since it stood in the Boston district of that name. He had spent better than a fourth of his thirty-eight years in state penal institutions, as the result of three separate convictions. Two of the terms he had served exceeded one year in duration, thereby warranting his present federal arrest for an infraction committed when he was less than a year old.

Anthony Pino was born on May 10, 1907, near the tiny vineyard village of Divieto, Province of Messina, Sicily. His father was away in America. The delivery was performed by a midwife and occurred in a dirt-floor shanty his family had occupied for generations, but to which they never held title. A local priest registered the birth.

Had Tony remained on the padrone-owned soil of his forebears, he might not in all his years have traveled more than twenty miles from Divieto. Like his father and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, Tony unquestionably would have become a tenant farmer and tended the padrone’s grapes from dusk to dawn. More likely than not, he would have been denied an education since that was the way it was with the eldest child of a peasant family—the eldest worked so the younger might have free hours in which to receive rudimentary schooling. Tony’s father, Francesco, was an eldest child and was illiterate. His mother, Katerina Arena Pino, was also an eldest child and illiterate.

Had he remained, Tony Pino probably would have married and at an early age reared a family where and how he had been reared. Compared to millions of others throughout Europe, it wouldn’t have been all that bad an existence. Granted, he would never have earned much money, cash-in-hand money—less than $80 in the best of years. On the other hand, he and his family would seldom have gone unfed. A two-room clay-walled shack would always have been at his disposal, plus a quarter of an acre on which to grow whatever food he needed, plus a share of the crop for the padrone.

The incentive that prompted Katerina’s semiliterate younger brother, Pietro Arena, to scrape, scrimp and finally muster the $40 fare to the New World was a steamship company placard posted on a wall in Divieto: It promised that anyone, absolutely anyone, regardless of birth, could own land in America.

There was no particular reason for Pietro to select Boston, other than its being the destination on the ticket issued him. He was, by apprenticeship and a half year’s actual practice, a barber. And there was need for barbers in the poorer sections of the Massachusetts port city. Pietro easily found employment. He saved and in 1906 leased the cheapest one-man shop he could find—on D Street in South Boston, a volatile Irish immigrant enclave called Southy by the locals. He sent a letter back to Sicily urging his newly acquired brother-in-law to come to Boston as soon as possible, not to wait until the baby was born, to emigrate at once while employment opportunities remained good.

Francesco and his pregnant twenty-one-year-old bride began another cycle of scrimping and borrowing and finally sold their single wedding present—a brand-new pick and shovel—and in late 1906 Frank joined Peter in Southy, shared the one-room apartment above the barbershop and found a job three blocks away, driving the horse-drawn wagon of a used-paper dealer fourteen hours a day, six days a week, for $6. He found extra work on Sunday. He held his eating down to a meal a day, if that, and after fourteen months sent a ticket back to Sicily.

On a long-forgotten date in 1908, eight-month-old Tony Pino was in his mother’s arms being carried down the gangplank from a four-stack coal-burning Guinea clipper named Columbia whose holds had been converted into bedless dormitories and which made the advertised two-week Atlantic crossing in twenty-one days.

Katherine, like Frank and Peter before her, arrived at Boston Harbor without official paper (WOP), save for a letter from the village priest attesting that she was of good character and properly married and mother of a male child.

Ten months later the young Pino family was ensconced at noisy Andrew Square in Southy’s Lower End—an animated wasteland of high hopes and despair and joyless three- and four-story wood-frame, often brick-façaded apartment buildings—where they would remain another fourteen years.

Frank worked long hours trying to meet the bills and rent and save enough to bring over more of the relatives. And relatives were arriving—Uncle Joe and Aunt Elizabeth—among others. Katherine always seemed to be pregnant and spending her days and nights taking one of the babies down to the toilet in the basement or fetching water from the hallway tap or washing or shopping or cleaning or sewing or preparing meals—all this in a tiny three-room third-floor apartment that reverberated day and night from the trolley, horse wagon, horse carriage, auto and truck traffic below the windows. The flat was freezing in winter, suffocatingly hot in summer; always smelled of cooking.

Throughout, the Pinos’ spirit was generally high. They were a tightly knit and loving clan. Frank spent every Sunday with the family, managed to maintain a degree of patriarchal rule, attempted to see that his brood grew up adoring God and respecting the law of the land and taking full advantage of their opportunities.

Tony attended the Catholic church and, when old enough, first parochial, then public grammar school. He was always home promptly for meals. Sunday dinner with the whole family in attendance was his favorite. Aside from household chores he was out of doors, as he would have been in Divieto—as most of the neighborhood children would have been back in Ireland.

But the streets of Southy were a far cry from a rural lane or pastoral glen. It was a tough place in a tough time and even tougher for the hyperactive, competitive, hot-tempered, plump little Italian boy whose non-English-speaking parents had settled amid the nearly destitute, generally uneducated, often intolerant Irish.

Mother of God, if you didn’t stand your ground against them Irish from the day you was born, you’re a goner, Pino recalled. They don’t trust a living soul, including themselves. And that goes for the teachers and nuns and priests and cops. Everything was Irish then. So you gotta prove your point fast, see what I mean? Prove you can hold your own.

And from the earliest of ages, this proving—not coping—this showing other boys, Irish boys, that he was as good as they were was of great importance to him. He learned to fight with his fists, but never well, and therefore learned to sustain one devil of a beating. He wielded a club or knife with moderate efficiency, but tiny dago Tony wasn’t really going to scare anyone with brute ability. How could he? His funny round face, his sugar-bowl haircut, his bulging tummy and short, stubby legs and ill-fitting clothes were enough to make you laugh. When he became angry, red-faced and out of control, as often was the case, he went into one of his tantrums and began jumping up and down and cursing and threatening. And that could make you laugh all the more. Young Tony Pino grew aware of this reaction other boys had to him, and he began using it to his own advantage and acceptance: incorporating his inherent Arena sense of robust humor and Pino gift of nonstop gab to the fullest, he became the madcap kid of the block, the neighborhood jester—the clown.

Tony couldn’t win many running races or pass a football very far, but his short, thick fingers were facile and strong. He was adept at building things and fixing things, which didn’t account for very much in the world of the young.

There were other areas where he more than held his own, often winning the esteem of his particular crowd of urchins. He could climb a tree or shinny up a drainpipe with the best of them. Tony was also one of the most accomplished liars Andrew Square ever produced. There was often no particular reason for lying. It was merely something he did naturally, which seemed to be as much a characteristic or congenital talent as his humor. Often he employed the fibbing to con his teachers or the priest or the nuns. Some thought he was the most well-behaved, clean-cut, delightful little boy in the neighborhood—and he usually was, at school or at church or at home.

In an age when finding or stealing coal to feed the ever-hungry potbellied kitchen stove was considered a routine duty for the children of the financially strapped, chubby six-year-old Tony Pino excelled at the latter. He appropriated his baby sister’s perambulator almost every night of the week, boldly rolled up the block, across the street and into a railroad coalyard and returned with a full load of the precious black fuel. His parents believed the perpetual explanation that he had picked the lumps up one at a time along the tracks, never suspecting that their eldest was peddling off the overage at three cents a pound.

Membership in a neighborhood youth gang dedicated to the five Bs—baseball, boosting (shoplifting), boozing, burglary and brawling—when he was seven soon allowed Tony to display his superiority in boosting and burglary. He was fearless, inventive, insatiable.

Tony Pino’s first arrest came at the age of eight for stealing a ride on a streetcar. The following year he was apprehended trying to swipe candy from a vendor’s stand, dragged into court on two charges of breaking and entering and larceny, reprimanded by the judge, released and subsequently thrashed by his father, two teachers and one nun.

The youngster promised his parents he’d go straight, swore the same with his hand on a Bible to the priest, took the first in a long series of legitimate jobs he would hold for the rest of his life, gave his earnings to his parents as he would more or less try to do the rest of his life, helped out his junk-collecting Uncle Joe Pino, thereby learning the skill of furniture rebuilding and refinishing—and went right on stealing. He passed a good portion of his ill-gotten gains on to his parents under the guise of salary bonuses or lottery winnings.

By the time he was shot in the buttock and thigh atop a fence, while trying to escape a police raid prompted by the theft of some cakes and milk the gang had stolen and were consuming, fifteen-year-old Tony’s record boasted eight arrests, three probations and one seven-month stint in a reformatory for a $20 theft—$20 in cash taken from his junk peddler Uncle Joe’s basement-apartment storeroom.

When thirty-one-year-old Tony Pino was taken across the Charles River from Boston to Charlestown and incarcerated at Massachusetts State Prison on January 6, 1938, his recorded arrests totaled twenty—another two and one-half years had been spent in a reformatory. And he was by no means a big-time hood. The feds had never heard of him. Until recently not even the news-sharking crime-beat reporters of the Boston dailies were aware of his name.

Pino’s reputation among the cons who had known him on the outside was diverse. Inmates who had worked with him before, Jimma Faherty, Mike Geagan, Sandy Richardson and Henry Baker, ranked Tony a master safecracker, a top-rate case man and ingenious organizer-operator of well-drilled robbery teams. And Tony, according to his supporters, wasn’t lacking in muscle with politicians and the cops. For God’s sakes, said they, hadn’t Tony been caught dead to rights up in Manchester, New Hampshire? Hadn’t an eyewitness identified him as the guy who walked in with a pistol and stuck up the joint? And hadn’t three local cops—three of the biggest Boston cops including Jim Crowley—all said they saw Pino sitting in a Boston restaurant when the heist was coming off in Manchester? You don’t get Detective Jim Crowley going to bat for you unless you got plenty of muscle, believe you me, fella.

Tony Pino’s con enemies were numerous, vocal, hardly charitable and usually Irish. They called Tony the Pig, claimed he was the messiest, cheapest son of a bitch that ever lived, a loud-mouth blowhard given to constant exaggeration and flat-out invention instead of concrete criminal achievement. After all, how could a chronic shoplifter like Pino organize and run anything big, of major illicit merit? To begin with, he was Italian and this was Boston—Irish Boston. Times were changing. But not enough for good, solid Irish crooks to let an Italian booster tell them what to do. Consider Tony’s so-called crew. Everyone knew that the Irishmen working with him were falling-down drunks. Nice fellows, but drunks. And there was a Jew on it, too. A nice guy and clever thief, but a Jew. And what had they ever scored that was worth crowing about? Had they ever pulled off a major haul? No. Had they ever risked breaking a federal statute? No. They were small beans—nickel-and-dime operators. And Tony the Pig was a goddamn lousy stoolie, a rat. An informer. A Jim Crowley informer. Jim Crowley owned him and used him and got him off the hook up in New Hampshire so Pino could go right on informing on fellow crooks.

Most of these assessments were shared by a majority of officers at the Boston Police Department—an almost totally Irish cadre.

Two allegations which bothered Pino the most were contradictory: that he was a rapist and that the shooting incident which almost took his life when he was fifteen had left him impotent and sterile.

Once inside Charlestown (Massachusetts State), Pino fashioned a new image. He energetically became a merchant, one of the lowest forms of prisoner species—a con who makes a profit from other cons. Pino sold any bit of prison property he could lay his hands on. To facilitate the pilferage, he remodeled his prison coat and trousers with trick or hidden pockets. A half shoulder of beef could be slipped into the baggy pants and smuggled out of the kitchen freezer. This access to prison foodstuffs eventually resulted in Pino’s opening a private kitchen—right in the foundry where he was assigned. He and fellow prisoners and several screws would stand roasting meat and potatoes over the molten sewer lids.

The indefatigable merchant-prisoner gave a great deal of time to mixing powders and poultices which he quietly marketed as surefire cures for crab lice, diarrhea, constipation and other institutional maladies. Pino’s alchemy led to a near disaster when one of his concoctions blew up.

After World War II broke out and American civilians faced shortages of many staples, convict Pino of Charlestown Prison was often blessed with a surplus. Cigarettes and liquor and candy bars were smuggled in with regularity. Screws solved their transportation problems by visiting inmate Pino and receiving either bona fide gasoline ration stamps or the address of two local stations that would fill car tanks on presentation of a written note bearing his signature.

The secret to this wartime profiteering lay in Pino’s propensity for entering into partnerships. An assistant cook conspired with him to steal rationed beef in bulk from the prison cold-storage locker. Rationed canned goods and sugar by the case were obtained by another partner—a storeroom screw. Yet another business merger was effected with a guard who drove a prison supply truck, who delivered the precious cargo beyond the wall to two more partners—each of whom ran a filling station and paid for the contraband with a combination of cash and items to be smuggled back into Charlestown.

Not every successful undertaking was profitable. His three guard partners in the rationed food theft ring beat him out of the money, never depositing a cent in his outside account, as per agreement.

Not every undertaken venture was successful. Tony’s attempts to establish a private laundry inside Charlestown by cutting off buttons and in other ways mutilating inmates’ uniforms that were sent to the regular and free prison laundry ended when a group of indignant cons worked him over in a lavatory late one evening.

That Pino harbored any regret as he rode away from Charlestown Prison in the custody of federal marshals the morning of September 12, 1944, was due to oversight and a bit of bad luck. He had never bothered to apply for United States citizenship. A 1942 Board of Immigration Appeals ruling, citing Pino for having twice served prison terms of one year or more in duration, deemed him an undesirable alien and ordered his deportation to Italy.

I had them citizen’s papers all filled in and ready to mail two or three times and don’t know why I didn’t, stated Pino. "But let me ask you, if I became undesirable, where did I learn it, huh? I got here when I was eight months old, so you can’t blame Italy for me turning crook. I’m not ashamed of being a crook, because that’s what I could do best. When you’re a little kid, you do what you can do best; then all the other little kids pay attention to you.

"Now, if you wanna see luck coming up bad, you take them two pinches that sent me to the can [March 29, 1928, to October 29, 1930, at Massachusetts Reformatory for abuse of a female child and January 6, 1938, to September 12, 1944, at Charlestown], them two arrests the immigration people used against me.

That abuse thing was worse than a frame. It was stupidity, see what I mean? I’m only twenty at the time and going straight, and there’s nothing more stupid than that. A green punk. I got this honest job bootlegging, making maybe a hundred bucks a night and buying them fancy suits. The shiny kind. It was Prohibition time, and this one night me and another bootlegger let go at one another [with knives]. Slash at one another over who sells them dollar pints on what corner. That’s where the scars come from on my stomach. So the ambulance comes, and they go and patch us up at the hospital and take us to the police station. Well, we ain’t gonna prefer no charges against each other, so they let us go. I start walking out, and some young girl they’re bringing in starts pointing at me and yelling, He’s one, he’s one. He was there, too. He did it to me, too."

"‘Mother of God,’ I thought, ‘what’s she yelling about? What is this thing anyway?’

"Now, what I find out later is the cops raided a friend of mine’s apartment. The bootlegger I work for. Raided a party at his apartment and find a couple of girls, only one ain’t up to age. She’s escaped from a girls’ reformatory, too. I know who she is but never talked to her. So she says I was at the party raping her along with the others. I can’t go and confess I been in a knife fight or they’ll book me for assault. And I’m too young and dumb to plead guilty and take a lower sentence like they’re offering. I think being innocent is enough. Anyway, she was crazy, and I did thirty months.

"That’s when I got bitter and started listening—started learning about peeling and other things [during incarceration for abusing a female child]—and that’s when I became a real crook, too. A guy from Illinois—I’ll never forget him—started teaching me about petes [safes]. When I got put, he sent me to old Jake. Old Jake had been the best pete man ever born, and he liked helping out young, promising fellas. Right away, the first night almost, he took me with him on a score. I learned the way you should, by doing. Pretty soon I was teaching him a thing or two—the student teaching the teacher, see what I mean? So maybe if that crazy girl hadn’t fingered me, I’d be an honest man. I don’t think so, but maybe.

"Now the guy that was really crazy was the Minister. He’s this common house thief who’s running around cleaning out apartments and running straight to the telephone and telling the cops, ‘Hello, this is the Minister speaking to ya, and I just committed another breaking and entering.’ This Minister’s rifling and calling day and night and driving everyone cuckoo. Got everyone peeking under beds and pokin’ up chimneys. Only I don’t know nothing, understand? Never heard of him.

"Okay, it’s Thanksgiving [1937]. I been doing pretty good taking petes. Got together a lot of reliable fellas, a good crew, and I’d say we was doing two or three pieces of work a week. This was Depression time, so we put in extra effort.

"So we all eat our own turkey dinners at our own homes and tell our families we’re going out for a walk, and we meet up. We drive to Rhodes Brothers Market on Massachusetts Avenue. It’s bad times, like I said, Depression, and this pete in there must have sixteen-thousand dollars inside her—all them receipts for Thanksgiving food. I looked the place over pretty good, know it inside and out, only someone screws me up. Someone pulled down title outside metal door in back, and that’s the way I was planning to go in. So I tell the fellas to wait a couple minutes and come round to the front door. I pick the lock to the side door so nobody knows it’s been picked and come on through and open the front door—let the fellas in the front way, see what I mean?

"So what I don’t know is this is the Minister’s favorite neighborhood. And it’s Thanksgiving, too, and a man has just finished eatin’ his turkey and reaches over to the windowsill where he had his pipe. What he seen through the window is my fellas going in the front door of the joint. This man with the pipe thinks he’s seeing a whole platoon of ministers.

"Okay, I’m inside moving the pete out. I’ve got a man holding the leg ’cause they’re heavy, and I’m moving it out so I can start peeling. I hear a siren, and somebody said, ‘Jesus, you hear a siren?’

"I said, ‘Don’t pay no attention. That’s probably an ambulance going by.’

"I take out the tools, and all of a sudden there’s banging on the door, and I let out a holler, ‘Don’t nobody move. Stay below the counter and lie on your bellies.’

"It works. The cops look in the window and don’t see nothing and start going away. The fella I told to lay near the window to be lookout decides they’re already gone and starts sliding toward us. Only the last cop is just passing the window and sees this fella sliding along like a snake. This cop lets out a holler, ‘Did you see the man in there? He’s in there. He’s in there.’

"He thinks he’s seen the fucking Minister, and all of Boston comes running. Every cop on the force is trying to bust in. I gotta couple a fellas along who ain’t from Boston, so I tell ’em they better not run or they’ll get killed. Boston cops do lotsa killing when they get excited. So we grab the tools and run to the cellar and hide the tools and then hide ourselves in the candle room where all the chicken eggs are, where they look inside the eggs with a candle to see if the eggs is rotten. We hear the cops break in upstairs and go running and shouting all around and come on downstairs. And don’t do nothing ’cept whisper to one another when they get down to the basement. I know we’re cooked, see, so I don’t wanna take no chances. Get shot unnecessarily. I yell out, ‘Lookit, we have no pistols.’ We’re not armed and ready to give ourselves up.

"And they said, ‘Come out, come on out.’

"They bring us upstairs and out into the lot where no one can see, know what I mean? None of the reporters or the couple of dozen innocent people who is watching can see. So now maybe we’re surrounded by maybe a hundred cops, and they’re all panicked and start jostling me.

"‘Whatcha getting mad about?’ I ask ’em. ‘You grabbed us, ain’t that enough?’

"‘The nitro,’ they say to me. ‘Whatcha do with the nitro?’

"They’re scared to death of nitro, and we don’t have none along, but I don’t tell ’em that.

"‘Stick your nose up my ass and you’ll find it,’ I tell ’em.

I guess that’s what caused all the trouble. Maybe I did push one of ’em—gentle like—but first thing you know one of ’em hits me over the head with his rifle. And all the rest of ’em start hitting me with fists for no good reason, can you imagine?

For the first time, Tony Pino’s name made the front page of local newspapers. According to the headline account in Boston’s Daily Globe, 1,500 bystanders witnessed the capture by thirty police officers in which the thieves made a frantic bid to escape.

Kicking wildly, swinging with both arms, the live men went down under the rush of policemen after one of the alleged robbers, Anthony Peno, 30, of Kennebec St., Dorchester, tried to snatch the revolver of a patrolman, whose arms previously had been jammed in the door.

The September 12, 1944, trip from Charlestown Prison across the river to Back Bay Boston took approximately fifteen minutes.

So the two feds drop me off at Charles Street [Suffolk County Jail], Pino explains. "I’m sitting in there waiting for Jimmy [Tony’s brother-in-law, Vincent James Costa]. He’s the one who’s supposed to go post the bail. The son of a bitch is two hours late, and some fairy con is trying to get me to take a shower with him, so when he [Costa] gets there, I let him have it.

‘Where the goddamn hell you been all this time?’ I tell him.

"‘I got caught in traffic,’ he tells me.

"That got me. ‘What the hell traffic can there be in five goddamn blocks? It’s only five goddamn blocks from the bailman to here!’

"Well, it makes no sense arguing with ignorance. So I walk outta Charles Street. I’m a free man. Mary’s waiting in the car—she’s my fiancée. Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Joe are in the car, too. So is my sister Nancy. Nancy’s married to Jimmy [Costa]. Everybody hugs and kisses me, and we all drive out to my father and mother’s house in Mattapan. My father, me and my brother and some cousins built the house with our very own hands—I think back in 1923 or 1924. We got a helluva buy on the land, too, ’cause it’s right next door to Calvary Cemetery. Look out their back window and there’s the stiffs.

"Oh, that was some party we had. All the aunts and uncles and cousins. I musta put on twenty pounds eating that delicious food. Some of the older aunts and uncles was at the party they had back in Italy when I was born, and they start talking about the old days—how everybody was scrimping and saving to get over to Boston and went on scrimping and saving when they got here so they could bring the next one over. They were proud of that, and so was I. I always liked hearing about it.

"My father wants me to stay out at the house in Mattapan with them, but I tell them I can’t. I have to stay at Aunt Elizabeth’s apartment house in Dorchester. Dorchester is closer into town than Mattapan, and Jimmy’s already moved my stuff there.

So everybody was happy and dancing and enjoying themselves. Nobody mentions where you been for six years. They never do. They’re honest, law-abiding people. I’m the only rotten apple, but I never admitted it. They never admitted it, too. They gotta believe everything I tell ’em or else they’d go nuts. But when I promised them I’m rehabilitated for good, I really meant it. I know you always mean it when you first come out, but this time I meant it for real. It was the least you can do for the people that love you.

Chapter Two

Whip Cream

Tony Pino began serving his parole with a minimum of expenses. He occupied, rent free, the second-floor flat of Aunt Elizabeth’s three-story apartment building at 3 Fuller Street, Dorchester, Boston’s southernmost section. Owing to wartime priorities, he had no telephone; he made the majority of his calls from the top-floor apartment of his aunt or the ground-level apartment of Nancy and Jimmy Costa. Certain phone conversations, those relating to his legal predicament, were placed up the block at the home of his attorney. For more private telecommunications he walked the three blocks to his fiancée Mary Fryer’s apartment. The most confidential calls cost him a coin in the outdoor phone booth down the block from Fuller Street at the rapid transit station.

He had no suit other than one sent him at Charlestown just before his release, only three pairs of underwear and two of socks and three or four shirts. Everything else had been mistaken as old clothes by Aunt Elizabeth and destroyed a week before.

Because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had long ago revoked his driver’s license and because insurance companies, as in the case of many professional criminals, had refused to issue him an auto policy, he owned no car; he had sold the one registered under a cousin’s name back in 1938. For the better part of two weeks Mary Fryer took mornings off from her nursing assignment at a nearby hospital to drive him around Boston, reacquainting him with the post-Depression city, more than anything, trying to consummate their nine-year engagement by finding a large apartment for them to share. Mary paid for lunch. Afternoon chauffeuring was delegated to Jimmy Costa, who always found some way of sneaking off from his job as presser in a clothing factory. Costa paid for late snacks and drinks. Every evening either Mary or Costa drove Tony out to her parents’ house for dinner.

He had no job and didn’t particularly want one, but he needed one to meet parole board stipulations. Boston’s ports and industry were booming as a result of the war and offered a wide variety of employment opportunities even to ex-cons, so, like it or not, he couldn’t hold out for long. He didn’t like it. Almost every opening required manual labor. Tony hadn’t exerted himself all that much in stir.

He had no money other than the $600 he had earned at Charlestown, and by his second week of freedom it became obvious he would need much more than that. The lawyer required $1,000 to begin the fight against deportation. Tony borrowed $500, laid out $500 of his own and was left with approximately $75.

His first boosting, which had more to do with practice than gain, had occurred the second week Mary was driving him around Boston. Both had gone into a five-and-dime so Mary could buy some thread. When her back was turned, Tony swiped an emery board.

Not long after, he was reunited with Big Steve, a former partner in the boost. Their first week’s shoplifting take was a disappointing $180 per man.

The lawyer intimated to Pino that bribing several high state officials was the expedient way to fight deportation. Once paid off, these officials could get the governor officially to grant Tony a full and complete pardon on his 1938 conviction for the Rhodes Brothers’ robbery. Such a pardon would technically strike the offense from the books and leave him with a record of only one for which he had served a year or more in prison. Since the minimum federal requirement for deportation was the serving of two jail terms of no less than one year for two different convictions, the United States Immigration Board would have no action against him and would have to drop the case.

The estimated cost of securing such a pardon was $5,000, and $1,500 would have to be paid almost immediately. The balance would be due in the coming months.

Had Pino wanted to go back into safe theft, as he now contemplated, there were many obstacles. His prize collection of thieves’ costumes, which Costa had transferred from the storage shed behind the Mattapan house to the basement of 3 Fuller Street, wouldn’t fit in the overcrowded and locked closet, had been discovered and mistaken for old clothes, along with Tony’s regular clothes, and burned in the furnace by Aunt Elizabeth the week before he was paroled from Charlestown. The battered leather valise containing burglar’s tools was safely in the cellar under lock and key, but many of the implements had become outmoded even before Tony went away. The use of wartime-developed miracle metals—ultrahard metals—in the construction of new safes rendered even more of the tools obsolete.

He had considered reactivating his prewar robbery crew, but there were even greater difficulties. Jimma Faherty was still in prison, along with Henry Baker. Mike Geagan was out, but off in the Merchant Marine sailing the North Atlantic, the provision on which he had received an early parole.

The one remaining bright spot was Pino’s old-time pal and former robbery crew associate, as well as fellow con, Sandy Richardson.

With all the others gone, that leaves us only three hands, Pino had stated in their first meeting in late September.

Two hands, Anthony, Sandy had answered.

Three, Pino had insisted. I’m thinking of bringing in Sam.

Sam’s on the same boat with Mike.

Mother of God.

Anthony, I think you ought to know—

The Kid, Pino interjected, we’ll bring in the Kid!

Gus?

Sure, why not? I promised him up at Charlestown he could come along anytime.

Anthony, Gus came right out of the joint in May and went right into the Army.

Why are you telling me all these horrible things?

Sandy parked in a lot beside a waterfront bar without answering.

Where’s the plant? Pino asked as they left the car.

There isn’t one.

Whaddaya mean, there isn’t one? Tony demanded. How can you do business if you don’t have no plant?

We don’t have a plant because I didn’t rent one. I didn’t rent one because I don’t need one. Try to understand, Anthony. There’s a lot of strong feelings about the war. What I’m trying to tell you, I guess, is I haven’t been on the grab since I got out!

Pino seized Sandy’s arms. Are you standing there more or less saying you’re laying off because of the war?

That’s what I’m saying more or less. Our men are getting killed fighting!

And nobody’s making a buck off the whole thing? No general or supply sergeant or congressman or nobody isn’t robbing the country blind while them boys is getting blasted?

That’s their business, not mine!

Okay, okay, Pino said quickly. "Now what about after the