Final Confession (7 page)

B
Y THE TIME
1965 rolled around, the Cresta crew was on the edge of “living large.” Besides the Quincy armored car heist, they had hit another Kenmore Square bank for $40,000, working on a tip from a woman employed in the bank, who was dating Angelo. As with the bank guard, she never knew that she had given out crucial information to her boyfriend, who was just a plain mechanic—or so she thought. It got to the point where Phil's crew was getting too many leads, and as a result, they were able to choose their jobs.

“We were sitting pretty good in the mid-sixties. We had a lot of money stored away, and the word on the street was that we were stand-up guys who could be trusted. I always worried about Angiulo, because we weren't giving him a dime, which pissed him off. But he never bothered us,” Phil said. “For a guy in my business, it's always important to be dealing from strength. We were on top in the sixties and everyone knew it. We had juice even though we weren't made men. You always rob from strength; never rob when you're down, that's when you get caught. We paid what we had to pay for information, and we never got burned. You do what you have to do, you pay what you have to pay, and you go on to the next job. Simple as that.”

The barbershop where Phil hung out is located on the bottom floor of a five-story apartment building on Commonwealth Avenue. Phil was in the shop one day in April 1965 when a well-dressed man entered and asked Phil if he was next. Phil shook his head. The well-dressed man got in the chair and gave the barber precise instructions on how to cut his hair. When he left, Phil asked his barber friend, Frank, who the rich guy was. His name was Percy Rideout, Frank said, and he was a coin and stamp collector. “What's he doing here?” Phil asked, his curiosity piqued. “He lives upstairs, on the third floor,” Frank replied. “How often does he come in for a haircut?” Phil asked. “Too friggin often,” the barber replied, not hiding his disdain. “He says the same friggin thing every time he comes in this friggin place. I guess he thinks I'm retarded or something. Those rich people, they're all assholes.”

“Do you get a lot of rich people in here?” Phil asked.

“Naw, thank God. He's about the only one.”

Phil left the barbershop and walked down Commonwealth Avenue to Copley Square. He went into the public library there, to do a little research on this Mr. Percy Rideout. What he found started his juices flowing.

“This guy Rideout was the real deal,” Phil said. “Just about every publication on stamps, coins, or rare documents had a quote from this guy or at least used his name somewhere in the article.”

Phil left the library, called Tony and Angelo, and asked them to meet him at McGrail's. He told them about his run-in with Rideout and about his research at the library. They both listened intently. “What do you think?” Phil asked. “Let's go for it,” Angelo said. Tony, a little hesitant, said, “Honestly, Phil, it seems like a lot of work just to get some stamps. Can't we just buy them at the post office?” After they explained to Tony that they weren't going to steal
current
postage stamps, he felt a lot better. From that night on, Percy Rideout's habits were under intense scrutiny, although Rideout never had a clue.

“There was no way of knowing exactly what Rideout had in his apartment and his office, which were on the second and third floors of the building,” Phil explained. “Though Rideout was clearly one of the top collectors of stamps, coins, and historical documents in the United States, nobody had ever estimated how much he or his collection was worth. We didn't know if we were looking at two mil or only a hundred thousand dollars,” Phil said, “but we knew it was big.”

Phil, Angelo, and Tony tailed Rideout for over a month. They learned his habits, his hangouts, his friends—and when he got his weekly haircut, which ultimately proved to be more important than all the other tips combined. Rideout was a creature of habit, and every Wednesday at one o'clock he sat in that barber's chair and issued the same instructions to Frank. “Not too much off the top, just even the sides and trim the back.” Cresta and his partners took turns being in the barbershop when Rideout came in so that he wouldn't recognize them. “But,” as Phil observed, “that guy was so caught up in himself, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Roger Maris could all have been sitting there for a haircut and he wouldn't have noticed.”

One Wednesday afternoon Phil took a call from an excited Angelo. “I just left the barbershop,” he sputtered. “Rideout told Frank he wouldn't be in next week because he's going to Maine on a fishing trip.” The break they'd sought had finally come. They put everything into motion for the Memorial Day weekend, just a few days away.

Rideout's building had two elevators, one for residents, the other a service elevator for deliveries. On Saturday, May 29, Phil placed an Out of Order sign on the service elevator. Phil, Angelo, and Tony were dressed as painters, complete with those white masks for keeping out dust and fumes—and for preventing curious residents from getting a good look at their faces. Their white uniforms had even been painstakingly soiled with three different paint colors. Phil was again acting on his observation that normal people didn't pay much attention to workmen
going about their duties; they had their own problems to think about. Rich people paid absolutely
no
attention whatsoever, as long as the workmen seemed ordinary.

“The place was deserted as we put the sign on the elevator and headed up to Rideout's apartment. We even had a work order with Rideout's forged signature, in case anyone questioned us,” Phil explained.

Phil picked the lock easily, and they entered the apartment. They were stunned by the size of the safes.

“There were two huge safes in one room and another one in the downstairs room,” Phil said. “Anyone with that many huge safes has a lot of stuff he doesn't want other people to get their hands on. From the minute we saw those safes I knew this was going to be a good score.” But Phil's exuberance was dampened when he got a close look at the top-of-the-line locks on Rideout's safes: he'd never seen any locks like them. “We've got trouble, Ange,” Phil said. “These boxes won't be easy.”

Phil spent the next two hours trying to crack the safes. Nothing worked. Angelo and Tony were downstairs in Rideout's office. When they came back, Phil told them it was no-go. “Let's blow 'em,” Angelo suggested. “What, are you, crazy?” Tony responded. “We're in an apartment building in the middle of Kenmore Square and you want to blow three safes?” Angelo shot back, “I'm not walking out of here empty-handed.” “Let's think this thing over,” Phil said, trying to calm them down. After discussing alternatives, they decided to blow the upstairs safes.

They brought four mattresses from Rideout's bedroom and put them next to the larger safe, which was six feet high and four feet wide, and brand-new. Phil told Angelo and Tony to go downstairs and wait, with the truck ready, in case it was needed for a quick escape. Then he measured the charge, attached a long fuse, and taped it to the top two hinges. The charge had to be perfect—if too little, nothing would happen; if too much, the police and firemen would be all over the place. Phil taped the four mattresses around the safe. Then he waited until he heard the truck being started. He lit the fuse, ran into the bathroom,
jumped into the bathtub, and waited. In case the blast turned out to be bigger than expected, he didn't want to be too close. “The wait seemed to take forever,” Phil remembered.

Finally there was the sound of a mild explosion. Phil went into the den to see if it had worked, for he'd been expecting a much louder blow. The four mattresses had cushioned the sound.

“Those mattresses were pretty well shot, but they'd done the job. I waited for about ten minutes. No cavalry came, so I looked out the back window and told Angelo and Tony to come up,” Phil said. “When ya gonna blow it?” Tony asked. Phil smiled and led them into the den, where the two safes were. “Holy shit, Phil, that was good. We didn't even hear nothing,” Tony commented. “Cut those hinges like butter,” Angelo marveled, as he examined Phil's work.

They emptied out the contents of the large safe, and Tony seemed disappointed. “What's wrong?” Phil asked. “Phil, are you sure this stuff is worth money? It all looks pretty old, if you ask me.” “That's the whole point, numbskull,” Angelo piped up. “This stuff is valuable
because
it's so old.” “I don't get it,” Tony replied, frowning, but he continued to take box after box out of the huge safe.

The stuff that baffled Tony sat in more than 250 boxes, each about eighteen inches by four inches, containing valuable coins. There were also 130 albums of rare stamps taken out of the smaller safe, which Phil blew later that day. They had never done a job like this before. The coins weighed more than half a ton, and it took six trips on the service elevator to get everything into the U-Haul truck they'd painted on both sides to say
CARDOZZA & SONS PAINTING
.

It took them all day and half the night to empty the two safes and transport the contents to a garage in Everett. Two days later, Monday, May 31, the building superintendent discovered the break-in, but it wasn't until June 2, when Rideout returned, that the robbery was reported to the Boston Police. The
Boston Globe
's front-page headline on Friday, June 4, 1965, read:
FAMED COIN COLLECTION LOOTED HERE
.
The
Globe
reported that the Back Bay collection of Percy Rideout was considered one of the most prized in the world. The
Herald
stated that Rideout thought the robbery similar to ones pulled by some thieves who had been hitting the largest coin collectors across Europe. After Rideout inventoried his collection it was announced that the Memorial Day robbery was the largest of its kind in history. The
Herald Traveler
's front page that same day was headlined: rare
COIN COLLECTION VALUED AT $200,000 WIPED OUT
. Rideout told police that the thieves' only mistake was that they'd overlooked albums of early American historical material valued at between $100,000 and $150,000. They had been sitting under two photo albums.

Boston policemen assigned to the crime could find no marks indicating that the apartment door had been forced. So, the
Globe
reported, authorities believed the thieves had been well acquainted with Rideout's movements and had used a master key to enter both the second- and third-floor apartments. Authorities were correct about the gang's careful clocking of Rideout, but wrong about their means of entry. Phil's excellent lock picking left little trace of his work.

The team stored all the loot in a garage in Everett that belonged to Phil's friend Jackie the Wolf, a former loan shark, scalper, and bookie who knew Phil from the North End. “Jackie had gotten in real deep and was almost whacked,” Phil related. “Sometime before that heist, he'd come crying to me that Angiulo was going to whack him if he didn't pay. I asked him how much he owed. It was $5,500, and he didn't have two nickels to rub together.” Phil had intervened with Angiulo on Jackie's behalf and saved Jackie's life. Then he'd made Jackie promise to get out of the business. To say Jackie owed Phil would be an understatement.

Jackie had been married a month when Phil, Angelo, and Tony lined his garage with the stamps, coins, and valuable documents. He was worried about having hot property in his garage: what if his wife found it? Phil told him not to worry; it would be moved in two or three days. But Cresta couldn't get a fence.
It was such unique—and hot—loot that nobody wanted to touch it.

On Friday, with news of the robbery in the papers, Phil met Angelo and Tony at the motor inn. He explained that he'd had no success fencing the material. Tony argued that if they hadn't been able to fence it in the last couple of days, what were they going to do now that the story was on the front page of every newspaper in Boston? Angelo wanted to hold on to the goods until things cooled down. Phil recalled, “I knew Jackie was already having a heart attack; the last thing he needed was for me to tell him to keep the stuff in his garage for a few more months. So we decided to use some of our contacts to see if there was any interest for what we had.”

Two days later Tony called Phil to say that he had a guy interested in fencing the loot. He neglected to mention that the fence was his old boss, Ben Tilley.

After Tony told him that Phil was trying to unload the Rideout stuff for the right price, Tilley called a guy named Paul Nester, who just happened to be married to Percy Rideout's daughter. Tilley said he could get his hands on all the property that had been stolen; his asking price was $50,000. Nester agreed to discuss the matter with Percy Rideout and get back to Tilley.

But when Nester told Rideout about his conversation with Tilley, the collector hit the roof and called the police. Detective Charlie Hutchinson and another detective who will be identified here as Joe Leonard were assigned to the case. As soon as they heard Nester's story, they brought Tilley in for questioning.

Tilley told them that someone had phoned him and asked him to be an intermediary. He said he'd been instructed to contact Rideout and make him an offer. Detective Leonard asked Tilley who'd called him. Tilley said he didn't know. Although the detectives knew he was lying, there was nothing they could do.

Rideout told police he'd never pay thieves for his own property. “I don't care about the money,” Rideout said, “but I'll never give those bastards a dime. Never.”

Nester, on his own, called Tilley and offered $30,000 for the goods. Tilley took the proposal to Tony. Phil refused it and went into a rage when he heard that Tilley was the go-between. As soon as he heard Tilley was involved, he ended the negotiations. Rather than deal with Tilley, Phil called Augie Circella in Chicago. In the meantime, Jackie the Wolf was howling nervously at the moon, as the media jumped all over the “coin robbery of the century.”