Quinn turned his collar to the night and started down Snow Hill Street to Prince Street, linking his arm with the uninhibited Richards, who carried a bottle of scotch that Quinn brought from home so the trio could look like revelers sharing a drink and looking for an after-hours party. They meandered down the hill but stepped lively when they hit the street, moving quickly to the faintly lit doorway at 98 Prince Street. Quinn and Richards, no longer the party seekers, stood with arms folded across bulletproof vests while the third agent dropped to one knee to pick the front door lock. Across the street, freezing in the trapped arctic cold of a parked van, two other agents watched their back as the trio entered the foyer. One more door to go.
Using radio code, Morris issued orders for FBI cars to shut down a section of Prince Street. Blocks apart, hoods were popped and agents stood by “disabled” cars to make sure no traffic drove by 98 Prince while agents were making their way into the Mafia’s sanctuary. Larry Sarhatt stood outside his blue Buick until word came that Ed Quinn was standing in the garlic-saturated darkness of Jerry Angiulo’s office. Inside, the inner sanctum came slowly into view—restaurant stoves against the back wall, a table in the middle, and cheap vinyl chairs by the television near the front windows.
Morris then ordered a second team of agents inside. No meandering down the hill with scotch this time. These were the “techies”—this was a military operation now. The three techies hit the ground running, lugging heavy satchels of equipment and looking like paratroopers taking a beachhead. All the paths to 98 Prince Street were now blocked by agents in vans and cars as Quinn opened the door for the reinforcements. Suddenly there were six agents inside of Jerry Angiulo’s impregnable domain. They all stood still for ten minutes to make sure no hidden alarms had gone off and to acclimate themselves to the dark room.
Then the techies got out their cloth-covered flashlights and got to work. It took three hours to plant two microphones at the top of the side wall and wire them to big batteries the size of logs that were hidden on top of the ceiling. The bugs would transmit a scrambled signal to foil scanners and send Angiulo’s conversations across Boston Harbor to an apartment in Charlestown that was jammed with agents. After several problematic tests of the signal, Ed Quinn was finally able to talk clearly to agent Joe Kelly from Jerry Angiulo’s kitchen. The tape reels that would prove so lethal to Angiulo were mounted and ready to roll.
At first light, a drained Ed Quinn walked out of the Prince Street office. The last thing he did was make sure sawdust from drilled holes was swept up. At five in the morning, he climbed back up Snow Hill Street and clambered into the backseat of Morris’s car. They pumped each other’s hand, but it was a quiet jubilation. Wide grins but no loud yelps. It was the FBI, after all.
Four hours later Frankie Angiulo, the Mafia’s day shift manager whose job was to stay on top of local bookies, made his short commute across Prince Street. While agents had worked in the dark office, Frankie had slept about thirty yards away in a ramshackle apartment in a vacant building that concealed wads of cash stuffed in heavy safes. As he did every morning at 9:00 A.M., Frankie started the day at 98 Prince Street by spitting in the kitchen sink and putting on the coffee.
By the time Jerry Angiulo showed up for work at 4:00 P.M.—working the night shift as he had for three decades—about the only thing on his mind was a trip to Florida to beat the unusually prolonged cold spell of a bitter January. But nasty weather would soon be the least of his problems.
AFTER more than a year of secretly gathering evidence in an edgy neighborhood, the new enemy in the FBI’s pursuit of the Angiulos was the deafening din inside 98 Prince Street. Listening in a Charlestown outpost five miles away, agents struggled to decipher the fractured syntax of the five Angiulo brothers and their henchmen as they all talked at once against the background of a blaring all-talk radio station that was on around the clock.
Some, like John Morris, never got the hang of it. John Connolly never even tried, ducking out on the tedium of listening to mob talk, protesting that he was needed more on the street. But the rest of the agents managed to master the maddening argot of Prince Street, getting so they could follow staccato bursts of profane half sentences, snatches of Italian vernacular, gutter slang, and lightning changes in subject. The star in every way was the domineering Gennaro. For one thing, he shouted and could be heard over the incessant radio. For another, he mostly made sense. He was self-absorbed and bloodless and opinionated, but you could follow what he was saying. There was no mistaking his message, for example, when he talked about some underlings who were arrested after a gambling raid. “We find that one of these individuals that we use becomes intolerable, we kill the fuckin’ motherfucker and that’s the end. We’ll find another one.”
Usually the bugging at Prince Street didn’t reveal much until Jerry’s four o’clock arrival from his waterfront mansion in Nahant, north of Boston. His red and silver AMC Pacer or his baby blue Cadillac would pull up, Angiulo would enter the building, and the mood changed immediately. There was almost no small talk. Angiulo walked in the door barking questions about food and gambling and money and murder, holding court with the imperious impatience of a judge too long on the bench. At seven-thirty he took a supper break, frequently cooked by the youngest Angiulo brother, Mikey. The only other break was for the public television series The Wild, Wild World of Animals. The underboss never missed an episode and provided a running commentary on the wonders and strength of reptiles.
Having successfully fought off conspiracy charges in long trials in state court during the 1960s, Angiulo was ever wary of law enforcement’s reach and tools. His were prescient concerns: the FBI bugs captured a frustrated Angiulo shouting, “They can stick RICO.” But no one else in the office knew what he was talking about. Angiulo worried out loud about the ease with which a racketeering case could be made against his long-running criminal organization. He alone saw the jeopardy.
Over the years Angiulo had come to view himself as shrewd beyond his merit, but he was right about the power and danger of the RICO statute. Reading out loud to indifferent henchmen, Angiulo dissected newspaper articles about a Massachusetts defendant’s appeal of his twenty-year racketeering sentence that was before the U.S. Supreme Court. He lectured his brothers about the danger posed by federal prosecutors only having to prove the Angiulos committed two of thirty-two federal and state crimes over a ten-year period to establish a pattern of racketeering. He lamented that “if you break one of those crimes this year and within the next ten years you break the other one, they will take your fuckin’ head off.”