Final Confession (12 page)

Things were getting way too hot for the highwaymen robbers by late February 1966. It was also getting too easy, which worried Phil. They'd done four such heists now, and he felt they were losing their edge. He'd seen too many good crooks become greedy and end up either dead or in jail. The staller was worth its weight in gold, but Phil knew it was time to retire it before it retired them. There was just too much heat on from all sides. Plus, Phil had heard that Angiulo had summoned Louie Diamonds for an interrogation. Louie would be under a lot of pressure to come up with names, and Phil knew that a weak man like Diamonds would need incentive to stand up to Angiulo's pressure.

After the third highwaymen robbery (the fourth staller heist) in February 1966, Phil called Louie Diamonds and asked to meet him at Castle Island in South Boston. “Louie thought we were gonna whack him,” Phil recalled. “I could see how nervous he was, so I told him straight up that we were out of the diamond business, and that
he
would be out of business permanently if anyone ever found out who the highwaymen were.” Louie was obviously feeling a great deal of pressure from Angiulo, and now from Cresta. Phil reminded Cohen of the fact that he had made a good buck by supplying information. “If
we
go down hard, Louie,
you
go down hard too,” Phil warned.

Louie asked what to say to Angiulo. Phil smiled and said, “Tell him that you aren't sure, but you heard the name Ben Tilley
tossed around. You don't know any more than that. That'll get you off the hook.”

As Phil left Castle Island he took a right onto Farragut Road, where his mother had been born. He was not thinking about any of his family, though, as he went on to McGrail's to meet his partners. He explained to Tony and Angelo that they were out of the diamond business for good. Counting the first score in Brighton, which was never connected to the highwaymen, they had pulled four diamond robberies in the span of a month. The take, after Louie deducted his cut, was $870,000, which was split among the three of them. They had been fortunate and Phil told his two buddies to sit back and enjoy it for a while. And that is exactly what Phil Cresta did … for two days.

O
N FEBRUARY
25, 1966, Phil went to Brookline Bank to make a very large deposit in one of his many safe-deposit boxes. Since he was a man who preferred to come early and check out his surroundings, especially the means of egress, he arrived that morning around eight-fifteen. As was the case when he was planning jobs, Phil had learned that when he carried money to deposit somewhere, there was no such thing as being too careful. He parked his Bonneville and entered a small restaurant on Harvard Street to have breakfast, kill time before the bank opened at nine, and make sure no one was following him.

No one was. But as he was finishing his coffee, he noticed a Skelly armored truck parking directly across from the restaurant. Phil watched in amazement as both guards left the armored truck, locked but with its engine running, and carried moneybags into the New England Food Fair. He paid for his breakfast and went outside in order to observe the guards' movements more effectively. They stayed in the supermarket for about ten minutes, which astonished Phil. When the two came out, they both carried bags that, Phil suspected, contained the receipts from the day before. Phil watched closely as the taller
and older of the two guards reached down, grabbed a key from his belt, and opened the back door of the truck.

Phil remembered standing there watching the armored truck disappear. “I had a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars in my gym bag, which I was just about to bring into the bank and put in my safe-deposit box. I should've walked away and kept on walking, but I couldn't. I had just watched two armored truck guards break every rule in the book. Most people wouldn't have noticed a thing, but I am not most people.”

Phil deposited his money and went home, but he couldn't get those Skelly guards out of his mind. The next morning, as the truck pulled up outside the New England Food Fair, Phil stood directly across the street at the bus stop. Dressed in a security guard's uniform, he carried a lunch box and thermos. The apparent security guard looked as if he were waiting for a bus to take him to work. But he was already at work.

Phil observed the same two Skelly guards get out of the armored truck. The driver checked to make sure his door was locked and then he went to the back of the truck and grabbed three moneybags. Phil could not see the other guard, but he soon joined the driver and reached in and took out two moneybags. They both headed into the supermarket. From where Phil stood, he could see smoke coming from the truck's tailpipe. Once again it took them about ten minutes before they reappeared and put new bags into the back of the armored truck. As they were doing this, the apparent security guard who had seemed to be waiting for a bus crossed Harvard Street, walked directly behind the truck, and disappeared around the corner.

Phil explained that he had needed to make sure they didn't have another guard in back, as some companies did. “I assumed those cheap bastards who owned Skelly's would never spring for three guards, but you know what they say about people who assume. In my line of work, if your assumption is wrong, it can be the last time you assume
anything
.”

For the next six working days that same “security guard” was standing at the bus stop with his lunch box and thermos. Every
day he watched as the same two guards went through the same routine. But the curious security guard never got on a bus.

Phil didn't tell Angelo and Tony about the Skelly truck. He had just encouraged them to take some time off and he wasn't about to draw them back to work. Moreover, he had devised a plan for a one-man show. A show that would use one of the three Skelly uniforms that his Chicago tailor had made for him.

Phil did ask Angelo and Tony to meet him in the back parking lot of the Joseph P. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Brighton on Thursday morning at 8:45. “Angelo got all upset when I asked him to meet me there,” Phil recalled. “He thought I was going in there to die or something.” Phil assured his friend that he was fine, but he needed them to be on time. And by the way, Phil asked Angelo, could they make a stop at Logan Airport and steal a car for their meeting at the hospital? “Are we doing a job?” Angelo asked. “Not really,” said Phil, “but I want to be on the safe side.”

On Thursday, March 3, 1966, nobody paid any attention as the same security guard, with lunch box and thermos in hand, stood at the bus stop across from the New England Food Fair. He had become part of the scenery. Today he wore a light blue jacket over his uniform and he had a hat under his right arm. He kept looking at his watch, which was perfectly normal for anyone waiting for a bus. But that wasn't what Phil was waiting for. The seven previous times he had clocked this route, the two guards were always at the supermarket by 8:20. He was starting to worry when they didn't appear by 8:30.

He was ready to leave and head over to the Kennedy Hospital when he saw the armored truck with the name
SKELLY DETECTIVE AGENCY
turn onto Harvard Street and stop in front of the New England Food Fair.

Two guards, one of whom Phil hadn't seen before, got out of the truck, locked both front doors, and took out five moneybags through the back door of the truck. The larger and older guard locked the back door and checked to make sure the truck was secure. The engine was left running.

Phil hesitated about going through with the job because he hated unanticipated change. But once both guards, carrying the bags of money, headed into the supermarket to pick up the receipts from the day before, he decided to proceed as planned. The urge to try such an easy job was irresistible. The bus appeared, and all the people standing at the Harvard Street bus stop got on. All except one.

Once the bus pulled away, the lone man quickly stripped off his light blue jacket, revealing a Skelly jacket underneath, and put on his uniform hat. He put the blue jacket, the newspaper, the lunch box, and the thermos into a trash barrel and walked up the street until he was even with the armored truck. The man quickly crossed the street, pulled a key ring from his pants pocket, and inserted first one key, then another. On the third try the front door opened. He got in, slid over to the driver's seat, put the truck in gear, and slowly drove up Harvard Street in the direction of Boston.

As Phil drove the truck into the Kennedy Hospital parking lot, he could see Angelo and Tony sitting in a parked car. It was 8:50. He drove by the stolen car, and both of them, out of habit, started to check out the armored truck. They never looked at the driver.

Phil circled them with the truck and came to a stop next to the car. They looked at the truck, looked at each other, and shrugged. Phil finally got out of the truck and knocked on the car's window on the passenger side, where Tony was sitting. He stopped breathing for a moment, then jumped out of the car when he finally realized that the guy in the Skelly uniform was Phil.

“What in God's name are you doing?” Tony hissed. “Just looking for a little help unloading some moneybags,” Phil responded coolly. Both Angelo's and Tony's faces went white and Tony exclaimed, “You hit a truck by yourself?” “What are you, crazy?” Angelo added.

“Are you two gonna talk or help me?” Phil asked. It took only two minutes to transfer all the moneybags from the armored truck into the stolen car. Once finished, Angelo tossed Tony the
keys and told him to drive. Phil jumped in the front, Angelo got in the back, and Tony left rubber as they peeled out of the parking lot. “I couldn't believe that knucklehead drove out of the lot like he was in the Indianapolis Five Hundred,” Phil remembered. “I yelled, ‘Tony, for crissake, take it easy! We don't need to get pulled over now.' Tony slowed down as we took the Mass Pike to Southie,” Phil said.

On Thursday, March 3, a
Boston Evening Globe
front-page headline dubbed him
THE LONER BANDIT
.

The next day, in a front-page story in the
Boston Globe
a store employee said that, as the armored truck had moved off, he had been stocking a window display. He looked up and saw a man, whom he described to police as being about forty-five years old and wearing a Skelly uniform and hat, driving the truck away. The employee said, “I didn't think anything of it until I saw the two Skelly guards still in the store.” He yelled to them,
“Hey, there goes your truck!”
The guards ran out of the store just as the truck turned left.

Police from Boston and Brookline were immediately called to the scene. Meanwhile, an employee of the Joseph P. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Brighton saw a car containing three men speed out of the hospital parking lot between eight-thirty and nine-thirty. The hospital employee later told Boston police detectives that he attached little significance to the speeding car until around noontime, when he spotted a Skelly armored truck abandoned in the same lot.

Detectives Harry O'Malley and Anthony Manfra found no signs of the truck having been broken into. O'Malley told reporters that the lone robber must have had a key for the truck's front door. O'Malley stated, “The carbine was in its regular place inside the truck, but the fifty-eight thousand dollars the truck was carrying was missing.”

Phil was dismayed to read that one of the store employees had spotted him in the driver's seat. He'd had his hat pulled down pretty far over his face and thought that nobody would take a second look, even if they took a first one.

It was the first armored truck job Phil had pulled in a while,
and he felt the old adrenaline rush return. The money from that job was far less than they'd been getting from the jewel and fur robberies, but for Phil nothing compared with taking down an armored truck or opening a bank vault. “There's just no feeling in the world like that one,” Phil said.

They picked up a clean car in Southie, transferred the money, and went down to the Cape for a few days. “I thought there'd be a lot more than fifty-eight thousand in the truck,” Phil said. “But it was harder explaining why I pulled the score without Angelo and Tony than it was stealing the money. They shut up when they each received their nineteen grand, though. We always split everything three ways. Always. I promised I'd never do anything like that without them again,” Phil went on. “And I kept that promise.”

Because the truck's lock was undamaged, police in Brookline and Boston focused their investigations on the Skelly guards, but they were exonerated after two days of questioning. They never discovered Phil's jacket, lunch box, or thermos in the trash barrel, which was only twenty yards from where he stole the Skelly truck, which was owned by Armored Car Carrier Corporation.

In a recent deal, Phil had come by copies of copies of the master keys for almost every Armored Car Carrier truck in Massachusetts. He hadn't really trusted that they were usable and hadn't intended ever to use them. But when he saw those Skelly guards leave their truck running, unguarded, the temptation had been too strong to resist. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, Phil knew, for he had read all the armored truck companies' manuals and knew that rule number one was “Never leave a truck unguarded.”

Phil later found out that it was the younger guard's first day on the job. Poor guy, he was working less than an hour when he was robbed and treated like a suspect—all before lunch. Two weeks later he quit. But Phil felt Skelly deserved what they got: they had become complacent and they paid for it.

Police had no usable leads, and the case was never solved.

PHIL KNEW ANGIULO
suspected him of being one of the highwaymen robbers. He was too street-smart not to know. He knew too that if he was found out, he was, as the wise guys would say, walking around in a dead man's suit. Making so much money in Angiulo's territory without paying dues was frowned upon.

Angelo and Tony weren't much safer. Phil told them he had a plan that he hoped would take some of the heat off. He didn't trust that, even if Louie Diamonds stuck to the story Phil had suggested, Angiulo would swallow easily.

They stayed at the Hyannis Sheraton and relaxed for a few days before heading back to Boston. Phil's plan went into effect once they were back.

Tony called Ben Tilley from McGrail's and set up a meeting in a small Dorchester restaurant called Linda Mae's. Tilley was happy to see his old partner Tony, and he was even more anxious to talk about Tony's new friend and partner, the now-successful Phil Cresta. Tilley wasted no time.

“I figured you'd be driving a new Cadoo,” he said, laughing.

“I'm lucky I'm eating three meals a day,” Tony shot back.

“The way I hear it, you guys have been making a killing,” Tilley said, obviously probing.

Tony threw out the bait. “Ben, we made one good score in the last six months, and we thought the haul would be three times what we took in.”

“What about the diamond jobs?” Tilley asked. “Word on the street is that Phil either did them or knows who did.”

Tony began to laugh, just as he had when he and Phil had rehearsed. “You gutta be shittin' me. You think we did the highwaymen stuff?”

“Well … maybe not you, but word is that Phil knows something about them,” Tilley insisted.

“Ben, let me just tell you, Phil isn't as good as people think. In fact he's a pain in the ass. He spent the last three months clocking that stupid job in Brookline the other day, and what do we get but fifty-eight large. Fifty-eight large, for crissake! That's less
than twenty large apiece—for three months' work,” he lied. “You don't buy Cadoos with that kind of green.”

Tilley was all excited, as Phil knew he would be. “You pulled that Brookline job? I knew it, I knew it!” Tilley beamed.

“Hey, I'm not bragging about that score. My brother-in-law makes more a week, and he's legit.” Tony scowled.

“It was still a fine piece of work, Tony.” Tilley laughed. “And fifty-eight large is fifty-eight large. I'd take that kind of money any day.”