Final Confession (24 page)

The officer was summoned to the station, where the FBI and some high-ranking Boston police officers anxiously awaited his arrival. After hearing his explanation, the department held a disciplinary hearing. The officer who had called Phil Cresta a sucker immediately “retired” from the Boston Police Department. Phil Cresta, in Chicago, laughed like hell when he was told the story.

WHILE BOSTON'S FINEST
were hushing up the story about Phil's car being driven by one of their own, the feds were putting the heat on Phil's family and friends. The FBI had moved Phil to their Ten Most Wanted list and his picture regularly appeared on the popular show
The FBI
, hosted by Efrem Zimbalist Jr. Hoover was creating a mountain of paperwork with the same theme: find Phil Cresta.

Phil's younger brother Bobby knew he was under surveillance. He responded one day by pulling into the parking garage next to the Area A police station. “I was directly across the street from the FBI offices. I parked the car on the fourth floor and could look into their offices from there. I knew the feds
wouldn't follow me into the garage. There was only one way out, so they'd wait across the street until I came out, which I did about fifteen minutes later. I could tell they were surprised as I drove out onto New Sudbury Street. They'd figured I'd be walking, I guess, but they quickly followed me. I traveled down Congress Street and over to Stuart. I parked on Berkeley Street, directly across from Boston Police headquarters. I walked down St. James Avenue and into the Greyhound Bus terminal. I quickly ran to a bus that was headed for Florida, and removed from my pocket the bug that I'd taken from my car in that parking garage. I placed the bug under the cushion of one of the seats and ran off the bus before it left the terminal. I ran into the men's room and stayed there for an hour. When I returned to my car on Berkeley Street, the tail was gone. It was the last bug I ever found on or in my car,” Bobby said.

Bobby Cresta knew, too, that his phone was being tapped. But he and his brother Phil stayed in contact by telephone, by using an intricate system that Phil had devised long before he fled. Phil had given Bobby a list of twelve pay phones, each in a different part of Boston. Next to each phone's number and address was the phone's location. Part of it looked like this:

1.  269-0080—460 West Broadway, South Boston; next to South Boston Savings Bank

2.  265-66378—1120 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester; in front of Fields Corner MBTA station

3.  242-7897—312 Main Street, Charlestown; next to Warren Tavern

The plan worked as follows. On January 1 at one
P.M
., Bobby Cresta would be standing in front of a pay phone located at 460 West Broadway. At exactly one o'clock the phone would ring and Bobby would talk to his older brother Phil on the other end. Their conversation would be brief and straight to the point. Phil would probably say, “Anything I should know?” Bobby might answer, “No, everything is cool.” Phil would hang up and Bobby would be on his way.

The next month the second listing would be the one to use: On February 2 at two
P.M
. Bobby Cresta would be in front of 1120 Dorchester Avenue and at exactly two o'clock the pay phone at that location would ring. Bobby would pick it up. And so it went.

The conversations varied from seconds to minutes, but the feds never had the time or the expertise to track where the call originated, and even if they had, it would have done them no good. Phil always used a different pay phone to call from, just as Bobby used a different pay phone to answer. If Bobby missed a call, Phil would wait until the next month to call again. If Phil had to reach Bobby for an emergency, everything was to go through Augie, but that happened only once.

WHILE THE FEDS
were looking for Cresta, three indictments were handed down by a Suffolk County grand jury in October 1969 for the VA Hospital job, naming Phil Cresta and, of all people, Ben Tilley—and Jerry Angiulo as an accessory after the fact. The indictments went nowhere and nobody ever went to trial. Phil, of course, was already long gone from Boston.

Angiulo, though, was extremely annoyed that his name was in the indictment. He was trying to lie low at the time, and was dealing with more important things: a gang war going on in Southie, Charlestown, and Somerville that threatened to compromise Angiulo's power. Nobody ever won in those kind of battles, as Angiulo, who had been involved in a few, knew only too well.

Still, people were disappearing left and right, both in Southie and Somerville, and the two names that kept cropping up were Whitey Bulger and Howie Winter.

Bulger was known to be a fitness freak who had served time in Alcatraz and Leavenworth for bank robbery, and now was back home in South Boston, teamed up with people like Steve “The Rifleman” Flemmi. He had met Phil Cresta through mutual acquaintances, and while they weren't close friends there was a mutual respect. Many people saw Bulger as trouble and
there were a few attempts on his life, which he somehow managed to escape. The attempts were thought to have been made by Angiulo's men, but that was never proven.

Howie Winter, who was the leader of the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville, was also seen as an up-and-coming player who had a lot more in common with Bulger than with Angiulo. Angiulo was clearly having problems, and his boss in Providence, Raymond Patriarca, the head of New England's La Cosa Nostra, was having serious problems too. The last thing Jerry Angiulo needed was the kind of publicity that the VA Hospital indictment brought.

Phil had no sympathy for the man he had once worked for, the man who had tried to get him killed—by his own brother. “I understood that Jerry Angiulo wasn't too pleased with me when he got pulled into the hospital rap,” Phil said, smiling. “Tough shit.”

J. EDGAR HOOVER
died in 1972 but the FBI continued the search for Phil Cresta. Cresta, however, had been quietly swallowed up by his friends in the Chicago syndicate. He now answered to the name Joey Paul Zito, and he was the owner of a toy store in Chicago.

While Phil was lying low in Chicago, Tony and Angelo were serving their sentences in Walpole. “It really bothered me that they were in the can, but they understood why I was in no hurry to join them,” Phil said. Every Christmas both Angelo and Tony would receive huge goody packages from different states. An accompanying card was signed, “
a friend
.”

Phil had been in Chicago for a year before the intense heat started to subside a little. He made a lot of friends while there: some legitimate, some not. One person whom Phil (aka Joey Zito) became very friendly with was none other than the mayor, Richard Daley. There had been rumors circulating around Chicago that Mayor Daley was “in bed” with the mob ever since some well-known wise guys gave Daley some serious campaign money in 1955. It was rumored that Daley had more direct ties
to the Chicago mob, and it was a well-known fact that the Chicago Police Department was owned lock, stock, and barrel by gangsters.

Phil had been introduced to Mayor Daley through friends of Augie. “The mayor and I hit it off,” Phil said. “He never for a minute knew who I was or that I was wanted by the FBI. He knew me as Joey Zito, the guy who owned Toy World downtown. He knew I had some connections, but that was a plus and not a minus in Chicago. Mayor Daley personally gave me what was called a legislative aide's badge, which, he told me, would come in handy at times. And it did,” Phil said, laughing. “I was stopped for speeding on three different occasions. Each time, when I produced my license and registration, I also produced my badge, which got me a warning instead of a ticket. Police or anyone else in Chicago didn't fool around with Mayor Daley.”

Phil became even closer to his sister Mari while he was on the run. Mari and Augie knew almost everyone on the hustle in Chicago. It was not uncommon for Joey Zito to have dinner with Mayor Daley on a Wednesday and then dine with Tony Accardo or Joey Aiuppa on Thursday.

In 1972, after Phil had been on the run for three years, the feds began to focus on Chicago and to tail Mari. She had a beautiful apartment in one of Chicago's most fashionable highrise buildings and Phil often stopped by unannounced, after work or on the weekends, to visit his sister. On one of those occasions, he was just about to walk into the lobby when he spotted a man conspicuously trying to be inconspicuous. Phil headed out the door to his car.

He waited and watched for thirty minutes. The guy who was sitting in the lobby left Mari's building along with three other guys; they got into two cars and left. Phil waited another ten minutes and then went to see Mari, who was shaken up. “They know you're in Chicago,” she cried. “They might
think
I'm in Chicago, but they don't
know
anything,” Phil replied, wondering
how the feds had figured out where he was. He headed home to his new wife, Molly.

Phil called some of his new friends in Chicago and asked them to do a little snooping to see if there were any new memos about his fugitive status. “After a week or so, I got a call from a well-known Chicago wise guy who asked me to meet him at Augie's theater. As I stepped from my car, I could see feds everywhere. It was too late to do anything, so I just got out of my car and walked right past the place. I figured they had compromised the wise guy and knew I was coming there to meet him.

“I was wrong. They never looked at me because they were there to bust a guy named Jackie Cerone, who I saw being led out of the Follies in handcuffs a few minutes later. It could've been a pretty good twofer if they'd done their homework. Here I was on the Top Ten list and not one of those feds—and there had to be at least twenty of them—even looked my way. I walked around the block and came back just in time to see them leading Jackie away. That was too close. I went into the Follies and met my guy.”

The Chicago wise guy was sitting alone at the end of the bar, pretty shook up. His eyes went wide when he saw Phil approach. “Phil, I'm glad you're okay.” “I thought you'd set me up,” Phil told him in a menacing tone. “Believe me, Phil, I had nothing to do with this. But I knew if they grabbed you on your way in here, I was a dead man.” “You thought right,” Phil said seriously. Then he sat down, paused, and extended his hand to the gangster, who was instantly relieved.

The wise guy told Phil that his sources in the Chicago Police Department knew absolutely nothing. It was almost as if they had been purposely left in the dark. Then he'd talked to some of the guys on the mob's payroll who worked with the feds. The FBI had gotten a tip from a police informer about Phil's whereabouts.

“I knew it,” Phil said. “Where did the tip come from?”

“Boston,” the wise guy answered.
Almost to himself, Phil murmured, “Tilley.”
“What?” the Chicago gangster asked.
“Nothing, it's just a score I have to settle,” Phil said.

FOR THE NEXT SIX MONTHS
the feds were everywhere, and Phil, using his Joey Zito passport and some of the money he still had left from the half million he'd had when he ran, took off until things quieted down. He asked Augie to make an emergency phone call to Bobby Cresta and tell him Phil would be incommunicado for several months. Then Joey Zito took his new wife on a cruise around the world, where the only thing he had to worry about was whether to eat five or six times a day.

He returned to Chicago in March of 1973 and went back to his toy store as if nothing had happened. The people who'd missed Phil the most while he was away, beside Mari, were members of the Chicago Police Department. They were used to getting special half-price deals on Christmas toys at Toy World. He continued his life in Chicago through Christmas 1973 as the most popular businessman in the eyes of the Chicago Police.

The feds continued to harass Mari. “One day in December Phil contacted her and asked her to meet him in a downtown lounge. She checked for tails and was sure nobody was tailing her when she went into the place. She sat down in a booth and waited for Phil. As soon as she ordered a drink she saw two men enter the lounge. Both were wearing suits that might as well have said
FEDS
on the sleeves. She panicked, knowing Phil was due momentarily.

Not knowing what else to do, she continued drinking her drink and smoking her cigarette. A minute later a hippie with long hair and a scraggly beard, who looked like he hadn't bathed in a week, came over and asked Mari, “Hey, lady, got a light?” She looked him straight in the eyes, tapped her cigarette on the ashtray, and in a hard voice told him that she didn't smoke. The hippie got the message and left. Phil never showed up.

After a while Mari went back home. The phone was ringing when she let herself into her luxury apartment. Mari, frightened for her brother, said, “Phil?” He just laughed in reply. “What's so funny?” she said. “So you don't smoke, huh?” It took Mari a few seconds and then she screamed, “You have
got
to be shittin' me. Tell me you weren't that hippie.” “I confess. … And by the way, you weren't too friendly.”

“I don't believe you, I just don't believe you!” Mari was laughing now. After a while she asked, “Why did you do that?” “I just wanted to see for myself if they were still tailing you,” Phil said.

“Couldn't you have watched from across the street?” Mari asked. “What fun is that?” Phil asked, still laughing. But Mari could sense that Phil was getting restless, even careless. It was almost as if he were challenging the feds to catch him. Maybe being an ordinary citizen no longer satisfied him. “I think part of him wanted to get caught,” Mari recalled later.

“A few weeks after the hippie incident, in January 1974, Phil called and asked me to accompany him to get some snow chains for his tires. There was a huge snowstorm predicted for the Chicago area. So we drove to Sears Roebuck, where we both went our separate ways, promising to meet in half an hour at a designated spot. Later I saw Phil at the spot but was surprised to see he didn't have anything in his hands. I asked him where the chains were and he said he didn't like what they had in the store. When we got into the parking lot, I heard some kind of noise and I asked him what it was. Phil opened his coat; he had the snow chains under his coat. I went crazy,” Mari recalled. “He had a couple of thousand on him and he stole snow chains worth only twenty bucks!” Mari was upset that he'd taken such a risk. But Phil just laughed his head off. Mari couldn't help herself. He was having such a good time, she had to laugh with him. But not without fear that Phil wasn't adjusting well to such a tame lifestyle.