Black Mass

It was a chance encounter on a crisp winter day.

Connolly, recognizing the reporter, stopped on the sidewalk to say hello. They didn’t know each other very well, although Connolly was well known by a corps of reporters in the Boston media who covered organized crime as a regular beat. Of all the FBI agents in Boston, Connolly was the most accessible, the agent most eager to talk to the media about his work and the FBI.

Crime was not Lehr’s beat. But he had met Connolly the year before, in 1987. He was part of a team of Globe reporters who spent months interviewing FBI agents from the Organized Crime Squad about the Angiulo bugging. Lehr and the reporters had met with nearly a dozen agents— Connolly, John Morris, Ed Quinn, Nick Gianturco, Jack Cloherty, Shaun Rafferty, Mike Buckley, Bill Schopperle, Pete Kennedy, Bill Regii, and Tom Donlan. The series had been a hit with both the newspaper’s readers and the bureau, for it showed the FBI at its technical best: breaking into the Mafia’s inner sanctum to plant a listening device. Lehr had not seen or talked to Connolly since the newspaper project a year earlier. There was a round of greetings, and then the reporter asked the FBI agent how things were going.

Connolly, jingling the shiny keys in his hand, didn’t hesitate. He began talking about a new FBI bug, one targeting the post-Angiulo mafiosi who were jockeying for position and power. Connolly said that for about six months, from late 1986 to mid-1987, the FBI had monitored the new Mafia lineup conducting business in the back of a grinder shop located in a shopping plaza at the foot of a Boston landmark, the Prudential Tower.

“It was great,” the agent said about the bug that agents installed inside Vanessa’s Italian Food Shop.

Lehr listened intently, realizing right away that the information might make for a great story. But the reporter was also taken aback by Connolly’s loose manner. There was no talk of the conversation being “on background” or “off the record” or restricted in any of the ways information can be when passed along to reporters. To the agent, talking about Vanessa’s seemed to be the same as talking about the Boston Bruins, who the night before had beaten the Calgary Flames, 6-3, to take over first place in their division in the National Hockey League. Or politics. The Democratic Party’s Iowa caucus was under way that very same day, featuring a challenge by Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis to the front-runner status of Richard Gephardt. Connolly, it appeared, was used to putting tidbits into orbit and not having them traced back to him.

There had been no press coverage whatsoever of an FBI bug inside an eatery in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood. If anything, Boston reporters who covered crime had been puzzling over the status of the Mafia in the aftermath of the 98 Prince Street operation. It was known that a certain amount of Mafia disarray naturally followed the removal of a long-standing Mafia leader like Angiulo, and the names of a number of relatively unknown Mafia figures had begun to circulate. There was Vincent M. Ferrara, who combined a degree in business administration from Boston College with “a taste for blood”; an older mafioso named J. R. Russo; and Russo’s half-brother, Bobby Carrozza of East Boston. Those three men were serving as capo de regimes, or lieutenants, in the struggling Mafia, but not a lot was known about them. In addition, Cadillac Frank Salemme was finally coming home, released from federal prison after serving fifteen years for the 1968 bombing of a lawyer’s car, the assassination attempt for which his accomplice and pal Stevie Flemmi had never been prosecuted.

Outside the hardware store, Connolly was buoyant about the bureau’s ability to track the Mafia from its traditional base in the North End to the upscale plaza in the Back Bay. Vanessa’s Back Bay location constituted an altogether new twist, an unlikely spot for the Mafia, churlish bulls in a china shop. Polished shoppers and young urban professionals might be catching a quick bite at the counter while at the same time, in the back room, a fiery Ferrara was spewing vulgar ultimatums to bookmakers as he explained that a new Mafia day was dawning.

The windowless room was isolated and could only be reached by a convoluted route. The gangsters would park their cars in the Pru Center’s underground garage-maze, and no one could follow them without being made. Connolly delighted in the fact that the brazen Ferrara, Russo, and Carrozza all thought they’d found a place to meet that was impenetrable, and he relished the prospect of bringing down Ferrara. Ferrara was “arrogant” and “cocky,” “a real troublemaker.” He was hated by his peers for his vicious streak and disrespectful way. In fact, noted Connolly, Ferrara would be dead already if word hadn’t gotten around Boston’s underworld that the FBI was after him. The other wiseguys, said Connolly, could “sit back and let us chew him up.”

Subsequently, Lehr teamed up with fellow reporter Kevin Cullen and, after more reporting to confirm Connolly’s account, wrote a front-page piece about Vanessa’s that ran on Sunday, April 17, 1988, and started out: “It was a perfect spot. The cops couldn’t tail you, and you could park your car in the underground garage, walk to a freight elevator and ride up in secrecy.” Though the article included a lot of information, the reporters didn’t have the actual recordings from the Vanessa’s bug. That meant they couldn’t hear Connolly’s favorite recording: Ferrara’s shakedown of “Doc” Sagansky.

“We got a lot of guys in trouble, Doc,” Ferrara told Sagansky. Ferrara was going for the soft touch in his approach to his target, who, at eighty-nine, was the elder statesman in the world of bookmaking. Born at the end of the last century, Doc was a practicing dentist as a young man, a graduate of Tufts Dental School, but he became a millionaire as the city’s premier bookmaker. By the 1940s he was regarded by police as the “financial top man” in the city’s rackets and held ownership interests in two Boston nightclubs and a loan company. In 1941 he’d loaned $8,500 to James Michael Curley, the legendary Boston mayor and then congressman. In return, Sagansky was named a beneficiary in a $50,000 life insurance policy that Curley had taken out as security for a loan. That the two were linked publicly raised a few eyebrows and made headlines. Sagansky’s name had surfaced in every major gambling investigation in Boston since the Depression. In the storeroom of Vanessa’s on January 14, 1987, Ferrara was trying to come off as reasonable with the old man, explaining the Mafia’s hard times—five Angiulo brothers and many other soldiers gone, in jail.