Final Confession (26 page)

Testimony began the next day, June 20. District Attorney Sullivan's witnesses, just as Al Farese had said they would, told the jury about the Brink's robbery, but none of them placed Phil Cresta at the scene. The jury heard from Richard Haines, the guard who had been tied up inside the truck. Part of his testimony provided an inkling of Phil's expertise and prowess as a keymaker. This is a partial transcript of Haines's testimony:

DA JAMES SULLIVAN
(Assistant District Attorney for Suffolk County): Mr. Haines, is this key, to the best of your knowledge, the same key that the thieves used to enter armored car number 6280?

RICHARD HAINES
: Yes, sir, it is.

DA
: How do you know that this is the key used in the robbery? Are there any identifying marks on it?

HAINES
: “Yes, sir, there's an
F
scratched on the bow of the key.

DA
: Do you know what that
F
stands for, Mr. Haines?

HAINES
: I would assume it stands for the front door?

DEFENSE ATTORNEY AL FARESE
: Objection, Your Honor.

JUDGE JAMES ROY
: On what grounds?

FARESE
: That answer calls for personal knowledge, Your Honor.

JUDGE
: Sustained.

DA
: Do you know from your personal knowledge if that key with the
F
scratched in its bow opens the front door of armored car number 6280?

HAINES
: Yes, sir, it does.

DA
: Did you personally try this key in the front door of number 6280 at any time after the robbery?

HAINES
: Yes, sir, I did.

DA
: And this key [he held up the key] is without a doubt the key that let two armed, masked robbers into number 6280 on the night of December 28, 1968. Is that right, Mr. Haines?

HAINES
: Yes, sir, and I might add that it opened the front door a lot easier than the key the Brink's office gave me every day.

The courtroom erupted in laughter. Judge Roy banged his gavel repeatedly, demanding quiet. Phil Cresta did not admit in court that he'd made that key, but he later said that it was one of the best picks he'd ever made.

After Haines left the stand, the DA paraded witness after witness, from Boston police detectives to FBI agents to MDC policemen, each of whom told his story about the Brink's robbery. Then the jury heard from Andrew DeLeary.

DeLeary told about meeting Red Kelley and Angelo and about his $51,000 cut from the robbery.

After each prosecution witness finished his testimony Judge Roy would turn and say to Al Farese, “Mr. Farese, do you have any questions from this witness?”

Each and every time, Farese stood up and asked the same question—“Do you know this man?”—as he pointed to Phil
Cresta. Each time the prosecution witness answered, “No.” Farese would then ask, “Have you ever seen this man before today?” And again each witness would answer, “No.” Farese would then say, “That's all I have, Your Honor. Thank you very much.”

On June 24, all that changed. At nine
A.M
. a Suffolk County Superior Court officer led a man with glasses and white hair to the witness stand. The man looked as though he could be everyone's grandfather. He was, in fact, a cold-blooded killer with a police record dating back to the 1940s. It had been sixty-six months since Phil had last seen Red Kelley, when they split the Brink's money in a Brockton Holiday Inn room.

District Attorney Sullivan asked the man on the stand his name. “John Kelley,” he answered slowly. “Are you known by any other name, Mr. Kelley?” Again very slowly, the elderly man said, “Yeah. Red.”

“Do you know that man?” Sullivan asked, pointing to Phil Cresta. “Yes,” Kelley answered. “Do you know his name?” Again Kelley nodded.

“Cresta. Phil Cresta.” “How do you know Phil Cresta?” Sullivan continued. Kelley identified Cresta as one of the bandits who robbed the Brink's truck and further testified that it was Cresta who used a key-making machine to copy the truck's key that Andrew DeLeary turned over to Angelo in a phone booth on Boylston Street.

Kelley told of clocking the truck's route for three or four Saturdays, and of making two aborted attempts before the robbery was accomplished. “Was Mr. Cresta involved in the planning of the robbery?” Sullivan asked. “Yes.” “What role did Mr. Cresta have?” “I assigned him to be a driver,” Kelley lied. “I watched from a station wagon as Angelo and Diaferio used the key Cresta made to enter the Brink's truck.” “What happened next?” Sullivan asked. “We followed the route I had designed, from Canal Street to the parking lot behind the Registry of Motor Vehicles,” Kelley said. “Where was Mr. Cresta at that time?” Sullivan
asked. “He was following me in one of the cars,” Kelley said, looking directly at Phil for the first time since he'd started manufacturing his testimony.

Phil said later that he was thinking, “That son of a bitch didn't even have the balls to be there when we took the truck down, and there he was on the stand lying about how he'd masterminded the job and how he was in the lead car, when he was at home faking an illness! What could I do, stand up in front of the jury and say, ‘You're a fucking liar. You weren't even there'?

“I don't know what made me madder, his taking me down or his lying to make himself a big shot, when he was nothing but a turncoat coward. I knew that Kelley had set up Bobby Rasmussen, Jackie Murray, Leo Lowry, Frankie Benjamin, and Georgie Ash. They were all killed because they'd trusted that rat-bastard Kelley. And there he was trying to kill me by taking away my freedom for a long, long time. I should've whacked him when I had the chance. I never should've gotten involved with him in the first place. It turned out that we only needed him to meet with DeLeary—anyone could've done that.”

Phil sat through two days of Kelley's bravado-filled testimony. “It was the most difficult two days of my life,” Phil recalled, “having to sit there and listen to that rat bastard making himself the mastermind when he wasn't even there.” Not only did Phil have to listen to Kelley's fabrications of Cresta's Brink's robbery, he had to look at them in print. On June 25 the
Record American
headline read, $1
M BRINKS HEIST MASTERMIND TELLS OF PLANNING, BANDITS' ROLES
.

Farese went after Kelley's credibility. He basically let the jury see what kind of man Red Kelley was and how he had spent his life. Farese was able to introduce some of the things he wanted the jury to hear but was not allowed to discuss others. He knew it was a crapshoot anyway, and Phil's fate would rest on whether the jury believed Red Kelley's story or not. Farese rested his case on June 26.

On June 28, 1974, a memo was sent to the director of the FBI:

TO: DIRECTOR, FBI

FROM: SAC, BOSTON

SUBJECT: PHILIP JOSEPH CRESTA JR. AKA JOSEPH PAUL ZITO

On 6/28/74 Suffolk County, Boston, Mass. Jury returned guilty verdict re
PHILIP J. CRESTA
, former Bureau 10 fugitive, and
CRESTA
then received a State Prison term of 25–40 years.

Phil was taken from the Suffolk County Courthouse immediately after the verdict was read and transported to Walpole State Prison, where he was reunited with Angelo and Tony. They were in the fifth year of their own twenty-five-to-forty-year sentences.

ON THE INSIDE
, Phil Cresta's brain, which had helped him outwit authorities during hundreds of jobs, went to work helping other convicts. Phil became what is known as a jailhouse lawyer, and he filed brief after brief with courts throughout Massachusetts on behalf of convicts doing time at Walpole. Regarding his petition to overturn his own verdict, Phil received a letter from a Harvard Law School student, who said that Phil's argument to overturn, based on the seven-year plea that was offered, was absolutely brilliant.

One day, in the prison waiting room, Phil ran into F. Lee Bailey, Kelley's defense lawyer both for the Plymouth mail robbery and for Cresta's Brink's robbery. Phil couldn't help himself. All the old bitterness came out—at Kelley, and at Bailey. Their argument had to be broken up by guards, but not before Cresta spit in Bailey's face.

Other than that confrontation, Phil Cresta became known as a model prisoner during his last stay at Walpole. His only crime in jail was picking the lock of the candy machine once a month, which drove the prison guards wild. It was a crime, like most of the others he committed, that has not been solved until now.

P
OLICE RECOVERED
$35,360 from
ANDREW DELEARY'S
share of the 1968 Brink's take, buried outside a little cottage in New Hampshire owned by DeLeary's father-in-law. No other Brink's money was ever recovered.

ANGELO
and
TONY
are alive and free; hence their real names have not been given.

PHIL CRESTA
served twelve years at Walpole State Prison. Following his release in 1986, he moved to Chicago, where he stayed in an apartment that his sister Mari continued to rent but seldom lived in. She, by that time, had divorced Augie and moved to Miami, where her brother Billy “Bad” was living. Phil did not get along with some of the Miami wise guys Billy hung out with, so he preferred Chicago. Besides, Phil thought, he'd done enough time, and if he hung out in Miami with Billy and his friends, chances were …

Phil had had enough of prison.

While in Chicago Phil was treated at University Hospital for a heart condition. In 1990 he moved back to the Boston area and lived with his mother and his sister Rose, in Malden. Just about all his savings had been spent.

Then, broke, he moved in with Billy Crowley in South Boston, where he lived from March 1991 until July 1994. In August 1994 his heart problems intensified, so he decided to go back to Chicago, to be near the doctors who had previously treated him. There he lived with friends for the last few months of his life.

On January 8, 1995, Phil Cresta, the man who stole more than ten million dollars in his lifetime, died in Chicago's University Hospital. He was penniless.

I
N FEBRUARY
1972, Harvard Law professor Archibald Cox, who would be the special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal from 1973 on, served for three months as counsel to a Massachusetts legislative committee investigating charges of judicial impropriety against two state Superior Court judges, Edward J. DeSaulnier Jr. and
VICTOR BOWMAN
. The committee had the sole power to remove either judge from the bench. In January of that same year, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had ordered disbarment as a lawyer for Judge DeSaulnier, but DeSaulnier subsequently resigned from the bench, so Cox declared that case moot. That same Supreme Court had censured Judge Bowman and referred the case to Cox's legislative committee for decision.

On April 11, 1972, on the basis of Cox's investigation, the legislative committee recommended no further action against Judge Bowman. Bowman continued to serve as a judge of the Massachusetts Superior Court until March 1982, when he resigned, citing low salary as a reason. In his letter to then-governor Edward J. King, Bowman stated, “The salary of a Superior Court judge may be enough to live on if one has no dependents; unfortunately, it is not enough to die on.” Victor Bowman took up the practice of law as a defense attorney.

On December 2, 1982, according to the
Boston Globe
, minutes after payroll driver “Andrew DeLeary drove away from an East Boston bank with his company's weekly payroll—almost $4,200 in cash—he was held at gunpoint. One of the robbers grabbed the money and ordered DeLeary into the trunk of his car. He was rescued 20 minutes later after a bystander who had witnessed the incident called police.” Given that it was DeLeary who originally approached Angelo and Tony about the 1968 Brink's robbery, one might wonder—was this also planned? Or was it some kind of odd retribution?

JERRY ANGIULO
is presently in prison on federal racketeering charges.

JOHN “RED” KELLEY
was placed in protective custody on June 4, 1969. He became one of the FBI's top witnesses against the mob. He apparently was held under heavy guard at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire when needed for testimony. In March 1970, after having testified in several other cases, he helped put Raymond Patriarca, the head of La Cosa Nostra, in prison. He was then placed in the witness protection program. Nobody knows for sure if he is alive or dead today. If he is alive, which is highly unlikely, he would be in his eighties.

AUGIE CIRCELLA
, along with his brother Nicky and other Chicago mobsters, was arrested on a charge of extortion in connection with a million-dollar scandal involving the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and 20th Century Fox. Augie's brother was found guilty and deported to Mexico, where he ran a fleet of shrimp boats until he died. Charges against Augie were dismissed for lack of evidence. He returned to Chicago, where he died.

Phil Cresta's older brother,
MIKE
, became a Medford police officer, and pretty much separated himself from most of his family.

The date of
MARI
Cresta Circella's divorce from Augie has not been established, but it is known that they continued to spend time together. She lived in various cities after leaving Chicago, including Miami, where she dated Johnny Irish for a while. She died in Las Vegas, Nevada, on March 25, 1998.

Phil's younger sister, rose, took care of her mother until she died in 1999.

His younger brother
BILLY “BAD” CRESTA
became well-known in Miami and New York, and was considered to be close to Columbo's Carmine Persico and Johnny Irish. He died early in the year 2000.

His youngest brother,
BOBBY
, like Phil, became an expert pick man. He was arrested in December 1983 and did six years for conspiracy to import twenty-five tons of marijuana. He is presently free and living in New Hampshire, and contributed greatly to this book.

EDWARD MCALENEY
is no longer living.

SERGEANT JIM DOHERTY
is alive and well, living on Cape Cod. He has vivid memories of “that Cresta kid” as being the “toughest son of a bitch” he ever met. He especially remembers the night Phil fought the entire on-duty staff at the Cambridge police station, when Doherty was trying to arrest him.

LOUIE “DIAMONDS” COHEN
, Phil once said, “reminded me of Ben Tilley. He liked to hang around with wise guys and he loved the action. But he didn't want to take any of the risks involved. Like Tilley, he also kissed Angiulo's ass—which made me sick.” Phil was not sympathetic when he heard that Louie Diamonds, who always seemed to be a phone call away from being whacked, disappeared. It is not clear whether he was killed, or whether he took off before being killed.

After Phil was released from his last prison term, he received an invitation to meet
WHITEY BULGER
at a bar in Southie. As usual, Phil arrived early. While drinking a beer in Triple O's, he noticed a lot of punks and druggies hanging out there. Uneasy, Phil left, telling the bartender to tell Bulger he'd been there. He never heard from Whitey again.

In late 1994 Whitey Bulger, anticipating indictments from the feds he had informed for from 1971 through 1990, went on vacation. It was a good idea. On January 4, 1995, a federal warrant was secretly issued for him, for extortion. A federal racketeering indictment followed a week later. Bulger was placed on the
FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Phil Cresta's advice helped prepare Bulger to run.

“Whitey Bulger was always two steps ahead of everyone else,” Phil said before he died. “Before my trial we talked often about how I'd avoided the feds for so many years. He wanted to know everything: how much money I had when I left, what kind of contacts I had, how I got in touch with friends and family back home, what aliases I used, whether I used disguises. … He was like a sponge, taking everything in with those ice-cold blue eyes. Bulger, like me, knew there's always someone out there trying to take you down. Sometimes it's the cops, sometimes the robbers, but it's always someone. He knew that when the time came—and it will always come for guys like us—he'd have to be ready to go on a minute's notice. How long you stay gone depends on how much preparation you've done before.”

Both Whitey Bulger and Phil Cresta were masters of preparation. As of this writing, Bulger, who has been seen here and there, remains at large.