Animal Read online

  Joe Barboza was now calling one of the twin lighthouses home. Joe and his family shared two small bedrooms and two small bathrooms. Their spartan quarters were weather-beaten and rundown. John Partington’s living quarters were equally cramped and bleak. The marshal and his men slept on bunk beds three to a room. Their shower operated from a catch basin that trapped rainwater from the storms that were all too frequent on the island.

  The U.S. Coast Guard had taken stewardship of the island in 1948 but had abandoned it a few years before Barboza’s arrival. There was no television, no phone, and no link to the outside world. The mobster complained almost nonstop about the isolation, and so did his wife and child. Claire Barboza had no one to talk to, no one to confide in. Little Stacy Barboza had no playmates to go exploring with. Thacher Island had been home to many children over the years: the sons and daughters of light keepers, who lived on the mainland during the week to attend school. Their high-pitched laughter had faded into the seascape long ago, replaced by the unsettling sounds of wave crashing against rock, the whistling wind, and the ever-present fog horn. Joe and his wife always had to keep a close eye on Stacy, out of fear that she could disappear into the fog. The vapors were so thick that the fog horn had once sounded for 211 consecutive hours—the equivalent of 38,145 blasts. Fog was just one of the many concerns for parents raising a young daughter there. The island was also pockmarked with snake holes and surrounded by steep cliffs where a child could get easily hurt or even killed.

  John Partington believed that Barboza and his family were well protected, but he also knew that Thacher Island was far from an armed fortress. The marshal had four lookout posts on the island: Partington’s deputies were stationed at the boat launch, along the island’s perimeter, around the Barboza family quarters, and atop one of lighthouse towers, which provided a view of the entire island and the dangerous white-capped waters beyond.

  As The Living End entered the waters surrounding the island, Teresa grabbed the binoculars with his pudgy fingers and lifted them to his puffy eyes. He spotted the tip of a lighthouse on Thacher Island. It reminded him of a candle sitting in the middle of a basin. One of Partington’s deputies, perched high atop the lighthouse, spotted the boat through a blanket of thick fog about a mile off shore. Partington sensed correctly that the vessel was no simple pleasure boat. No experienced yachtsman would venture out on a day like this. Fortunately, the marshal had a plan. Partington gathered his twelve deputies and lined them up in full view of the approaching vessel. There was no way they could allow the yacht to reach the island. Partington had also received a tip that the assassins were carrying sixteen hundred pounds of dynamite on board, with the intention of blowing up everything on the island. Each of Partington’s deputies was armed with a carbine and bad intentions of his own for any possible intruder. Partington had also made Barboza wear a U.S. marshal’s uniform, in an effort to confuse the killers.

  Seeing the small army standing at attention on the island’s edge gave Vincent Teresa and Pro Lerner second thoughts. The choppy waters also made it virtually impossible to get off a proper shot. The chances of getting to Barboza were a million to one. After cruising back and forth several times, The Living End turned around and headed back to Boston.

  Looking out at the boat, Barboza must have wondered if any of his erstwhile friends were on board—friends he had extorted money with—friends he had killed with. Barboza had painted a target on the backs of both friends and foes alike. Now he was the target, and all he could think about was exacting revenge.

  2

  Deviltry, Dirt, and Degradation

  Pleased to meet you.

  Hope you guessed my name.

  THE ROLLING STONES

  The second son of first-generation Portuguese-American parents, Joseph Barboza, Jr., was born on September 20, 1932, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the historic whaling city made familiar to readers around the world by Herman Melville in his epic novel Moby-Dick. Portuguese fishermen, mostly from the Azores, had been immigrating to New Bedford en masse since the early part of the nineteenth century, when the harbor was home to 120 square-rigged ships that brought in more than forty thousand barrels of whale oil each year. Thousands of Azorean harpooners signed on with American whaling crews at busy ports such as Cais do Pico, known for its bountiful whaling grounds, and sailed on to the southern coast of Massachusetts for the prospect of better wages and a better life. By 1857, New Bedford was home to as many as 326 whaling ships, making it the unrivaled whaling capital of the world.

  At the time, the city accounted for more than half of the whale oil brought into American ports. Sperm oil was even more valuable than oil derived from other whales, because it burned more cleanly, illuminating the night in millions of homes around the globe. Whalers also harvested baleen, a substance taken from the mouths of the giant mammals; it was used for any number of things, from buggy whips and fishing rods to corset stays and hoops for women’s skirts. The whaling industry in North America saw profits of more than $9 million per year, and much of that bounty was generated from schooners sailing out of New Bedford. But with the growth of commerce came an increase in crime. Sections of the city, especially the area around Howland Street near the docks, were rife with hooliganism. As one writer colorfully described it, “Rookeries and gin shops were in full blast and the streets thronged with tipsy sailors and bold women, when the air was filled with the sounds of ribald jest and profanity—deviltry, dirt and degradation reigning supreme.”2

  The mid-1800s saw a steady decline of the whaling industry in New Bedford. The outbreak of the Civil War had lured most sailors away, as had the California Gold Rush and the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania. Furthermore, in 1849, Abraham Gesner, a Canadian geologist, created a method of distilling kerosene from petroleum. This innovation would trigger the end of the whaling industry in America. There were 726 ships in the U.S. whaling fleet in 1846. That number would shrink to 39 just three decades later. The virtual death blow to the whaling industry, however, came in 1871, when 33 whaling ships in the Arctic fleet were lost after becoming trapped by ice before they could return home at end of the summer season. Some 22 of those ships had set sail from New Bedford. By the end of the nineteenth century, many of those who had amassed fortunes from whaling in New Bedford had begun shifting their profits to build the next great industry—textiles.

  Once again, an influx of Portuguese immigrants heeded the call to fill jobs at massive brick mills built along the waterfront. Thanks to the textile boom, New Bedford was growing faster than any other city along the East Coast. This growth forced mill owners and city planners to build new tenements to house the workers and their families. The conditions were far from sanitary. As many as twelve families were crammed together in poorly constructed two- and three-story wood-frame buildings with no bath and only one toilet, curtained off in the corner of the room. The families were predominantly Portuguese, although there were also immigrants from Greece, Syria, and Poland. It was not only the men who were put to work for long, grueling hours in the mills; women and children also were forced to sweat eleven hours a day and six days a week for meager wages. There was little opportunity for advancement for Portuguese immigrants who had arrived in America with limited skills and virtually no grasp of the English language. The tenements they lived in were a breeding ground for deadly diseases such as cholera and smallpox. Nearly half of all pregnant Portuguese women continued working in the mills, and their infant mortality rate was twice the national average.3 Portuguese men often sought refuge from family pressures at any one of a dozen saloons, such as Denny Shay’s Barroom at the corners of Elm Street and Acushnet Avenue, where the barkeep served anyone regardless of color, creed, or race, and oftentimes served their horses as well.

  Conditions for workers did improve for a short time in the early 1920s, when seventy mills operated across the city employing more than 41,000 of New Bedford’s 120,000 residents. Immigrants held nine out of every ten jobs at the mill. Many
even saw their wages triple at the height of the boom. The prosperity was short-lived, however. High salaries for mill executives and overproduction combined to create a major drop in revenue. But mill officials never considered tightening their own belts; instead, the losses were handed down to the workers, who were ordered to take a 10 percent cut in pay. Outraged textile workers took to the streets upon hearing the decision, and soon thereafter a labor strike was born. Some 20,000 textile workers, many of them Portuguese, walked out of the mills and off the job for six months. New Bedford police made more than two thousand arrests during the strike. One strike captain, Augusto Pinto, was arrested twenty-two times on the picket lines and was later deported back to Portugal. The fascist government there shipped Pinto to a prison in Cape Verde, and he died en route under mysterious circumstances. New Bedford textile workers eventually returned to the mills under an agreement stating that they would receive a 5 percent wage cut, not the original 10 percent reduction. The agreement had the effect of placing a Band-Aid over a gunshot wound. The damage had been done and was irreversible. Several business owners moved their textile companies out of New Bedford and headed south; those who stayed would not be around for much longer.

  In late October 1929, a year after the New Bedford textile strike, the American stock market suffered catastrophic losses, plunging the United States and the rest of the world into the Great Depression. Industrial cities like New Bedford were decimated. Two-thirds of the city’s remaining mills shut down completely. The head of one textile union summed up the economic despair this way: “Lowell, Lawrence, New Bedford, Maynard and Fall River … and most of the mill towns of the Blackstone Valley … are sad places.”4 One unemployed mill worker described eating dandelion greens and raiding garbage barrels to fill his stomach. His story was no different from those of millions around the country whose everyday battles to stave off hunger and disease were life and death struggles. This is the world that Joe Barboza was born into.

  His father, Joseph Sr., was a milkman and part-time boxer who fought under the name of Jackie Wolgast. His mother, Palmeda Camille Barboza, worked in a hospital cafeteria and occasionally found work as a seamstress. Together they lived in a dilapidated three-decker on Short Street, which was between Allen and Grape streets and directly across from the hospital where Palmeda worked.

  Joe had a brother, Donald, who was four years older. Younger brother Anthony and a sister, Anne, would arrive nearly twenty years later. Grim economic realities and Joseph Sr.’s wandering eye made the air in the Barboza household thick with tension from the very beginning. Joe Barboza’s parents had married in 1927, and the relationship appeared doomed from the start. Barboza Sr. was a handsome, strapping man with a hair-trigger temper and a penchant for violence that he displayed both inside the ring and out. Weighing 180 pounds, Joe Sr. carved out a name for himself fighting as a light heavyweight in saloons and fair grounds in southeastern Massachusetts, Martha’s Vineyard, and Providence. He also handed out regular beatings to his wife and children and would disappear for weeks at a time, bedding down with mistresses scattered about the city. Joe Sr. had two children out of wedlock. He offered virtually no financial support for his family, and on the rare occasion that Joe Sr. found himself at home, he hovered over his wife and children with an air of sadism and brutality. During one fit of rage, Joe Sr. knocked his wife’s front teeth out while she was lying in bed with the infant Joe in her arms. Palmeda had been hugging the baby and weeping softly when Joe Sr. stormed into the room.

  “Why the hell are you crying?” he asked with venom in his voice.5

  Palmeda did not answer.

  “I’ll give you something to cry about,” Joe Sr. shouted as he lunged forward and struck his wife, her head snapping back against the backboard of the bed. Palmeda clutched her baby as her teeth went flying to opposite sides of the small bedroom and her mouth filled with blood.

  The next morning, young Donald crept into his mother’s bedroom, saw her battered face, and began to cry.

  “What happened to you?” he asked, as tears flowed down his cheeks.

  “Your father was chopping wood down in the cellar and one of the logs popped loose and hit me by accident,” she lied.

  It was difficult enough to lie to her child, but Palmeda knew that it was impossible to deceive herself. Constant pressure and sadness surrounding the relationship led Palmeda Barboza to attempt suicide. Joe and Donald came home from playing in the neighborhood one day and were met by the pungent smell of gas as they entered the apartment. They found their mother passed out on the floor and the gas jet open. “The house we lived in was more of sorrow than of happiness,”6 Joe later wrote in his autobiography, Barboza, published in 1975. “We were constantly on welfare. My mother was very much in love with my father regardless of his infidelities, and took out her loneliness by constantly keeping my brother and [me] around her. But both of us were wild.”

  Like his father, young Joe had shown an affinity for sex and violence at a young age. His family had moved to First Street, on the south side of New Bedford, where he frequently found himself in scrapes with other boys. Young Joe was not a normal looking child. With a large head, long arms, and stubby legs, he was taunted constantly for his “apelike” appearance. However, he was always quick with a comeback and even quicker with his fists. Matching his father’s fighting style, Joe would tuck his thick chin to his chest and let his long, powerful arms do most of the work. Young Joe soon built a reputation as a boy who shouldn’t be trifled with. He also understood the attractions of the opposite sex early on. During a Halloween dance he attended as a child, Joe approached an attractive girl from the neighborhood who had dressed as a Polynesian princess complete with grass skirt and coconut bra. Instead of asking the girl to dance, Joe grabbed the coconut shells and flipped them over, exposing the poor girl to the public. Hearing her screams, the girl’s brothers chased Joe from the dance. Soon others joined in the pursuit as young Joe fled across town toward the waterfront, where he somehow managed to escape the angry mob. Joe later joked that he had felt like Quasimodo fleeing Louis XI’s blood-hungry soldiers in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  Such moments of excitement offered a brief but welcome escape from Joe’s home life, where he felt that he was the bait his mother Palmeda would throw out every so often to lure her wayward husband home. Once Palmeda sent the boy to the home of his father’s mistress while she waited down the street. Young Joe found his father lounging in the yard with his girlfriend, a Portuguese woman named Cecilia. “I told him (Joe Sr.) that I wanted to see him,”7 Barboza recalled in his memoir. “He looked at me with anger in his eyes and said: Get outta here you little bastard. I turned around blindly and ran down the street. I couldn’t stop crying.”

  Later feeling a tinge of remorse, Joe Sr. bought his son a pigeon to make amends. The offering did not extinguish the burning rage building up inside the son against the father. “The punk broke my heart,” Joe would say years later.

  To avoid becoming embroiled in the daily drama of his parent’s turbulent marriage, young Joe began to spend less time at home and more time on the streets. His small group of friends was made up mostly of the sons of Portuguese fishermen whose clothes and skin bore the stains and smells of days and weeks spent at sea. The life of a Portuguese fisherman in New Bedford in the 1930s was little better than it had been in the mid-1800s. Fishing was a job for hard men with few prospects, and Joe understood early on that he wanted no part of it. The rugged lifestyle of a fisherman had little appeal for Joe Barboza. Instead, he was drawn to the world of the gangster. As a child of the Great Depression, young Joe grew up in an era in which the American gangster was often cheered rather than loathed. This was the time of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Al Capone. Their fame, or more accurately, their infamy, rivaled that of the biggest sports and entertainment stars. One can imagine Joe and his group of young friends sneaking into the State Theater on Purchase Street to take in a matinee of gangster dra
mas like Humphrey Bogart’s High Sierra or James Cagney’s Each Dawn I Die. Young Joe was fascinated by the way these big screen hoodlums handled themselves.

  However, Barboza did not need to sit in a darkened movie house to be exposed to the gangster lifestyle. For that, all he had to do was take a stroll through his struggling city. The whaling ships might have been long gone, but one could still find plenty of deviltry, dirt, and degradation in New Bedford. The city certainly had its share of hardened criminals, the most notorious being members of the Morelli Gang. Led by Frank “Butsey” Morelli, the gang included his four brothers. Natives of Brooklyn, New York, the Morelli brothers had moved to New England during World War I. With members carrying colorful nicknames like Gyp the Blood and Steve the Pole, the Morelli Gang roamed New Bedford, Providence, Rhode Island, and parts of Connecticut robbing railroad freight cars of textiles and shoes. The gang would eventually be suspected in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, one of the most notorious cases in American history. Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been accused in the robbery and murder of a payroll master and his guard on April 15, 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The robbers ambushed the pair in broad daylight as they strolled up Pearl Street toward the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company with two metal boxes containing $15,776.73. The paymaster, Frank Parmenter, was shot several times. His guard, Alessandro Berardelli, was cut down by gunfire while trying to flee the scene. The killers sped away in a Buick touring car firing pot shots into neighboring buildings in an effort to keep potential witnesses inside.