Final Confession (5 page)

A
FTER THE PARKING METER SCAM
and a few other jobs that he pulled off solo, Phil achieved newfound respect in the ranks of the Boston underworld. He was well liked and well connected, but he was still no fan of Jerry Angiulo. Though a number of people talked incessantly to Phil about “being made” (initiated into Angiulo's branch of La Cosa Nostra), Phil wasn't sure he wanted to go that route. He listened, though.

“I never closed one door before another one opened,” Phil noted years later. “At that time nobody was beating down my door with work, so I went along with the made-guy routine for a while. I was between a rock and a hard place. I knew that if I went with Angiulo and became a made man, I'd have the benefit of their protection and muscle, which was considerable. But I would also have to give them a piece of everything I stole, and I didn't like giving Angiulo anything.

“If I went out on my own, I knew I'd have to keep one eye on the law and the other on Angiulo's stooges, who didn't take too kindly to independents working their area. I knew Angiulo was pissed at me for the parking meter thing. He told a few people
close to me that I should've given him more respect. What he meant was I should've given him a
cut
.

“Make no mistake about it, everything has to do with money. Money is respect. If you brought in a lot of money, you gained a lot of respect. If you didn't, you were at the bottom of the totem pole. We used to say, ‘If you earn money, you're funny; if you're broke, you're a joke.' ”

A FEW MONTHS
after Ben Tilley got pinched with the parking meter key, Phil was standing at the bar in McGrail's, where lawyers, cops, Red Sox players, visiting-team baseball players, judges, newspapermen, crooks, and blue-collar workers all gathered to have a few beers and share stories. It was summer 1962. Someone mentioned Tilley's name and a big guy at the end of the bar jerked his head around and looked up. He was obviously listening in on the conversation and trying to be discreet about it. His interest caught Phil's attention. “A lot of guys in this business have big mouths and they usually bring themselves down by opening them at the wrong time,” Phil commented. “This guy caught no one's attention but mine, and
that
got me interested in him.”

Phil waited until most of the others had left and then introduced himself. “I know who you are,” the big guy said to Phil. Phil bought him a drink and they talked. His name will be given here only as Angelo. He had grown up in Medford and he stood over six feet three inches, weighing in at about 240 pounds. He told Phil that he'd been doing some work for Tilley and was always interested in what was being said about his boss. Then Angelo said he'd never been arrested.

“He was kind of ashamed to tell me,” Phil remembered, “but I told him it was good he had no record. If the cops don't know ya, then they can't suspect ya.” This made Angelo feel better about his virgin status. According to Phil, he was strictly small-time, but had a great deal of potential. “I liked him right from the get-go,” Phil said.

“Whadda ya hear on Tilley?” Phil asked Angelo cautiously.

“I hear he's blaming you for his pinch,” Angelo said, looking Phil straight in the eyes.

“Are
you?
”

“Hey, I owe Tilley shit. He's a big boy; if he don't know how to steal, then he shouldn't be in the business.”

“I really liked this kid,” Phil recounted. “There was no bullshit about him. If you asked him a question, you got an answer—no song and dance—and I liked that.” Still, Phil checked him out. Angelo's reputation turned out to be solid. As Phil put it, “The word on the street was that Angelo was somebody you didn't mess with.”

A few days later Angelo was back in McGrail's. Phil Cresta went there too—mostly just to listen, but that night he did some more talking.

Angelo had heard that Cresta was an independent who worked alone, so couldn't believe his luck when Phil asked if he'd be interested in working together. Angelo later stated, “I could tell he was a straight-up guy—just the opposite of Tilley—and I really liked that. I couldn't believe all the shit Tilley was pulling. His arrest was strictly nickel-and-dime, and he made a federal case out of it, almost literally. When Phil asked me if I'd be interested in doing some work with him, I almost shit. I said yes before he had a chance to change his mind.” Angelo then suggested including his best friend, who also did some work for Tilley.

“I really didn't want to meet anyone's friend, but I liked this Angelo kid, so I took a chance,” Phil said. “I was sitting in McGrail's and the Sox were playing a doubleheader. The place was packed. I had my back to the wall, which was something I did whenever I was in public. I never let anyone get behind me, anywhere, anytime. I'd seen too many guys get hit from behind. It wasn't going to happen to me,” Phil explained. “I was talking to a few Boston dicks when I spotted Angelo coming in. It looked like he was alone, so I motioned him over with a jerk of
my head. He froze. Then he turned around and walked out. I had no idea what was going on. All I could think of, as I followed him out, was how ghost-white his face had turned.”

Phil pushed through the Sox fans and made his way out to the street. “What's the matter?” he asked Angelo, who was apparently alone.

Angelo blurted, “Phil, those two guys you were talking to are cops!”

“I know,” Phil said.

“One of those motherfuckers busted a friend of mine three years ago.”

“Well, I can guarantee they won't bust
you
.” Phil smiled.

“How the fuck can you do that, Phil? They're cops, for crissake.”

“I own 'em.”

“Honest to God?” Phil heard a voice from behind him say. Startled, Phil turned quickly and saw Tony for the first time. He was only five-three and would barely tip the scales at 110 pounds, but he had managed to remain undetected, which gained Phil's immediate respect. Later, Phil said of Tony, “He had big black glasses. They looked like he'd taken the bottoms off of two Coke bottles and put frames around them. He wasn't at all what I'd expected.” Tony was from Revere, Angelo told Phil, but had always hung out with kids from the North End.

Of the time they met, Phil said, laughing, “When the guy said ‘Honest to God' he blessed himself!” It reminded me of when we were little kids in the North End and someone would challenge whatever you said by saying, ‘Mother's honor?' Then you had to raise your right hand and say ‘Mother's honor' back to him. If you couldn't say ‘Mother's honor,' everyone knew you were lying. I don't even know why, but that day I said to Tony, ‘Mother's honor.' All three of us started to laugh hysterically.”

That was the start of a three-man team that would become legendary in New England throughout the 1960s. They were a most unlikely threesome.

Phil was quiet, introspective, always plotting the next move. He never shared himself or any details of his life with any of them. They learned, though, that, like his father, he had a temper.

Angelo was an imposing physical presence whose menacing look was enough to scare anyone. Like Phil, Angelo was quiet and a perfectionist who never tired of going over details. He had a steady temperament.

And Tony. “The son of a bitch never shut up,” joked Phil. “He had a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and then apologizing over and over until he had to be physically threatened to make him shut up. I once told him he had foot-in-the-mouth disease, and Angelo said, ‘Don't tell him that; he'll be at Mass General tomorrow demanding a checkup.' We would be clocking jobs, and there were times when Tony spoke nonstop for over two hours,” Phil said in amazement. “It would get so bad, Angelo and I would have to completely shut him out—but he'd keep on talking anyway.”

While Phil and Angelo looked like wise guys, Tony looked the exact opposite, which worked in their favor on many occasions. “Not only could he talk,” Phil said, “the son of a bitch could eat. And he never stopped talking about food. He'd say, ‘Hey, Phil, how about this for a sangwich?' and then he'd describe his idea for a new kind of sandwich for the next half hour. Once he told me, ‘Phil, I could make you a sangwich that would make your dick stiff.'”

That was the team: three men nobody knew. Three men who would steal millions of dollars in just six and a half years. Three men—one from the North End, one from Medford, and one from Revere—who would have died for each other and often came close to doing so. Their three-man crime wave eventually had everyone from J. Edgar Hoover to Brink's, Incorporated, trying in exasperation to catch them.

IN SOME WAYS
Phil Cresta was unlike any of the other wise guys who hung around the North End. First of all, he didn't
consider himself a wise guy, and he certainly never gambled. A lot of the North End wise guys walked around with the thousand-dollar suits and four pounds of jewelry. Phil Cresta thought that jewelry was something to steal, not wear. Because he shunned the limelight, most police officers didn't know Phil Cresta from Phil Rizzuto. That was just the way Cresta wanted it. In today's jargon Phil would be called a control freak. Back then he was often called a taskmaster.

He went over every detail of every plan until he knew what he'd be doing step by step. When he teamed up with Angelo and Tony, he'd have them go over details until they could recite in their sleep where they were to be, and at what time exactly, because it was planning and good decision making that kept them alive and out of jail.

While Phil was planning the parking meter scam, he watched parking attendants for hours. He noted what they wore, how they opened the meters, all their mannerisms. When he went to Chicago to have the duplicate keys made, he asked the gang's locksmith if the Accardo mob had a tailor. People who heard the question assumed Phil wanted to pick up a few new suits while he was in the Windy City. He was given the name and address of a guy the Chicago syndicate used. “Can this guy be trusted?” Phil asked one of Accardo's hit men. “Yeah, I promise he won't tell a soul that you wear a forty-four long,” the guy said, laughing. “I don't want a suit,” Phil responded, “I don't wear them. I need someone to make me a uniform.” He was driven to the tailor in downtown Chicago.

Phil handed the tailor a picture of a Boston parking meter attendant and asked if he could make that uniform. The tailor studied the photo and said, “I can match everything except the patches.” Phil produced two pristine patches that a certain woman in the Boston traffic commissioner's office had given to him. “Are these all right?” he asked. “They're perfect,” the tailor answered, full of new respect. This was the start of a long friendship and working relationship between Cresta and the
Chicago tailor, who received a nice Christmas bonus from Boston from then on.

The tailor kept Phil's, Angelo's, and Tony's sizes on file. Phil would fly to Chicago and have whatever uniform he needed made while he visited his sister, or he would send the tailor a photo in the mail with specific instructions. All three uniforms would be sent to Phil by mail.

“Blending in was half the battle,” Phil said. “My guy in Chicago was the best. He would even put phony name tags on the uniforms that we wore. We felt invincible, and that helped us to do what we had to do. We had every kind of armored guard uniform in existence. We had Brink's uniforms and hats, Skelly uniforms and hats, Armored Car Carrier Corporation uniforms and hats. We also had painters' uniforms or mechanics' uniforms, UPS uniforms—you name it, we had it. When we pulled a job in broad daylight, it didn't matter what we wore, as long as we had masks that concealed our faces. We never wore anything twice, because it would give the feds an MO [method of operation]. Most guys get caught because they forget to take care of the little things. I vowed that would never happen to us.”

How they got to and from a crime scene was just as important to Phil as what they did once there. “We would get trucks from different rental companies and have them professionally painted with a bogus company name on the side. Once the job was done, we'd have them repainted the color they were when we rented them.” Many times, when they returned a truck or van, the owner would remark how clean the truck looked, never realizing that it had a brand-new paint job.

The same thing held true for cars. Tony and Angelo were two of the best car thieves in the business. When they spotted the car they wanted, they would break into it and take off in less than a minute. “Stealing the car wasn't the hard part, it was
where
you stole it that mattered,” Phil noted. They never had a stolen car for more than one day. That was an absolute rule.
“The last thing we needed,” Phil pointed out, “was to have the car we were riding in on the stolen car list.”

Logan Airport's long-term parking lot was an ideal source of cars. The night before a score was to go down, Tony and Angelo would drive over to the airport and park their car near the long-term lot. It was amazing to Phil how naive people could be. “People would actually put a note on the dashboard near the front window saying when they'd be returning from their trip. It was like taking candy from a baby.” Angelo and Tony would search for a car with such a note. As soon as they found one it was theirs, as long as the car's inspection sticker was valid. Long-term parking was one twenty-dollar fee, whether your car sat for five or twenty days—so there were no tickets. Tony or Angelo, whoever was driving, would pay twenty dollars and be buzzing through the tunnel between the airport and Boston proper before you could say “stolen car.”

Then they'd wash the car and inspect it. They looked at the headlights, the brake lights, the directional lights, and anything else that a cop or a state trooper might pull them over for. Once confident that the car was in decent shape, they would park it at the Fenway Motor Inn lot until the job began. When the job was completed, Tony would drive the car back to Logan and put it back where he'd found it or in a spot nearby. He'd walk out of the lot and drive home with Angelo, who would have followed him.