Final Confession (3 page)

A week later, Phil received a call at McGrail's from a guy who told the bartender his name was Augie. “Kid, they're all talking about you here in Chicago.” Phil laughed. Very seriously Augie said, “I mean it, even the boss, Tony Accardo, asked me about you. You've made a lot of friends out here, especially those two old jewelry guys.” Phil asked, “Yeah? How're they doing?” “How're they
doing?
Thanks to you they're both retiring, for crissake.” Augie laughed. “They got a twofer. They hit the insurance company for a quarter of a mil on the diamonds they ‘lost' at the show, and they fenced the ice you guys snatched for another half a mil, that's how they're doing. … I got my share. … Did they take care of you and your guys all right?” Augie asked, concerned. “We did fine, Augie. I have no complaints, and thanks for the help,” Phil said. “Kid, whatever you need from now on, you call your brother-in-law Augie, all right?” Phil laughed and answered, “All right, Augie. And take care of my sister.” Phil chuckled again when he thought of Tony scrunched inside the box, with his Italian spuckie in his back pocket.

The non-insurance take on that job came to $550,000. It was split six ways. But the heist cost the various insurance companies a lot more than that, once all the victims' claims were processed. “Those jewelry bastards were bigger thieves than we were,” Phil said in admiration. “They all saw a good thing and jumped on the bandwagon. If we hit a merchant for seventy-five thousand, he told his insurance company he'd lost a hundred and fifty thousand.”

The great Parker House diamond robbery was not publicized. The hotel made sure it stayed out of the papers. Despite much effort, the crime has not, until now, been solved. Boston police
and insurance company investigators didn't have a clue how anyone could steal valuable jewels from a locked safe. Or how the jewels could be fenced without surfacing in Boston. That's because they were not yet well-enough acquainted with Phil Cresta Jr.

I
T WAS OVERCAST AND STORMY
when Phil Cresta was born on March 2, 1928, which may have been a portent of things to come. He was the third child of Philip Cresta Sr., a first-generation Italian, and a woman who in this story will be called Ruth. Ruth Cresta had been born in Southie, on Farragut Road. The couple lived in the North End of Boston in the shadow of Paul Revere's house, just off Boston's famous Freedom Trail. At the time, Boston was teeming with immigrants eager to succeed.

Though the area called South Boston, or Southie, was the territory of the Irish newcomers, the North End held thousands of Italians. Philip Cresta Jr. and his five siblings—Mike and Mari, who were older than Phil, and Rose, Billy, and Bobby—grew up on those narrow streets of the North End. Peddlers hawked their goods on Hanover and Prince streets as the Italian boys and girls played the games of their ancestors and of America. The neighborhood could have been the site of a nice childhood with fond memories for Philip Cresta to gaze back upon. But none of the Cresta children have fond memories. Freedom for young Philip Cresta became any time he could spend outside his family's small home.

Philip Cresta Sr., seen as a truck driver to the world outside his family, was his sadistic, ignorant self at home. His main pleasures in life seemed to be cheating on his wife or—when he
was
at home and not carousing—inflicting physical and mental punishment on his wife and offspring. The children's formative years were spent watching their mother—who was only four feet eleven inches tall—being constantly beaten and kicked by their father. Not only did he abuse his petite wife, he made all his children watch and listen as their mother screamed for mercy. The family, along with Mike, the father's younger brother, lived in a tiny shed that had been converted into a two-story house. It had a coal stove in the kitchen and very little furniture. In this rodent-infested so-called home, Philip Cresta Sr. abused, tormented, and tortured his six children and his wife, Ruth. According to Phil's brothers and sisters, it was Phil who bore the brunt of these physical and psychological attacks.

While Phil Cresta Sr. might not have treasured his family, it was clear that he never met a piece of junk he didn't like. If something, anything, wasn't tied down, he considered it his, from napkins to paper clips to trash lying in the street. “Finders keepers, losers weepers” was a song that the kids in the North End sang, but the things that Cresta Sr. took were things that other people had thrown away, not lost.

He did so cleverly. In the floor of his personal car, near the gas pedal, he cut a trapdoor replete with hinges and springs. If he happened to see an object in the street that he wanted, be it an old shoe or a magazine, he would park over it, open the trapdoor, reach down, and seize the object. The Cresta house was filled to the brim with items of no earthly value except in the mind of Phil Cresta Sr.

When the dilapidated old house began running out of room for what Cresta Sr. treasured, he removed the floorboards or stuck his worthless pieces into the walls. This was the house of horrors that Phil and his siblings grew up in. Once something came into the Cresta house, it never left—especially tools.

Cresta Sr. was mechanically inclined, and he loved his tools a good deal more than he loved his kids. One day Phil, who was
thirteen years old, returned home from school to find his father in a rage because one of his prized tools was missing. After beating Phil, his father handed him a shovel and said, “Dig.” Phil was accustomed to the beatings, but this was new. He looked at his father and said, “What?” “You heard me,” his father screamed, “I want you to dig your own grave. And when you're finished I'm going to kill you.” Ruth, hearing this, ran upstairs and sent one of her daughters to her brother-in-law's house, a block away.

Mike Cresta, who moved in and out of the family's house at will, rushed over and confronted his brother as the boy continued digging. Mike was usually no savior, but he sometimes had more sense of decency than his brother. When Phil Sr. finally relented, he said to his son, “If there's ever another tool missing from this house, nobody will be able to save you from this grave.”

On other occasions—and they were numerous—Cresta Sr. would take a child upstairs to one of the bedrooms. Once there, he would take the youngster's hands and place them in two holes precut in an interior wall. When the hands were through the opening, he would go into the adjoining room and place handcuffs on them, then laugh like hell at the child's predicament. Once the child was shackled, he would return downstairs or go out for hours at a time, leaving the child handcuffed. This was his idea of entertainment. No one else had keys to unlock the handcuffs or the courage to face Phil Sr.'s wrath.

Although Ruth Cresta tried her best, she was no match for her sadistic husband. The Cresta children loved their mother and cried in unison on those many occasions when their father would beat her senseless or fling her down the stairs.

Everyone around Phil Jr. knew how much he hated authority. That trait stayed with him until the day he died. It doesn't take a psychologist to figure out that his hatred of authority stemmed from how his father treated him and his family. Young Phil Cresta also had no love for athletics, or for school. He went only because the law stipulated that he must, and he planned to drop out as soon as the law allowed.

The constant beatings by his father toughened him far beyond his age. He never looked for a fight, but he never backed down from one either. He was, according to those who grew up with him, quiet and almost shy. His younger sister, Rose, recalled, “I never heard Phil say a bad word about anybody. My father beat him more than any of us; maybe that's why he became so daring.”

As the Cresta kids grew older, their father became more sadistic, with the help of his brother Mike. With an electric cord, the Cresta brothers would take turns whipping the kids. Phil's older sister, Mari, remembered one occasion: “Once, for some reason, Uncle Mike reached into his back pocket and pulled out a long knife. He grabbed Phil from behind and placed the blade of the knife on his neck, screaming that he was going to kill him. But my mother grabbed Phil from Mike's grasp and disaster was averted.” She went on. “We were all scared to death of my father and my uncle. My mother did not want Uncle Mike living with us, but my father insisted. It was a terrible time.”

One of Phil's younger brothers, Bobby, noted, “We were constantly being beaten, Phil more than anyone, and with the beatings came the rantings and the ravings and the screaming that were almost as bad as the physical abuse. I don't think I ever saw my father happy. He was always pissed off, always ready to strike one of us. I didn't think things
could
get any worse, but then, whenever Uncle Mike came to live with us, they did. My father never gave us any credit for anything or showed us any encouragement. He always tried to tear us down, both physically and mentally.”

After the United States entered World War II Phil Cresta Jr. volunteered for the army, even though he was much too young. He was rejected but encouraged to join a Civil Defense unit. His assignment was to go around the North End neighborhood to make certain that everyone's lights were out after curfew. Phil liked the job and the sense of doing something worthwhile, but it was hard for him to spend hours patrolling the city to make sure everyone maintained blackout instructions, and then come
home to see what his father was doing. Phil Sr., never one to abide by anybody else's rules, had devised special black curtains and window shades that gave the appearance from the outside that all the lights were shut off, which they weren't. He taunted his son for his role in the Civil Defense.

As Phil began to become independent, he showed a bent for acquisitiveness not unlike his father's. One day while on his Civil Defense rounds, Phil saw a couple of ration booklets and stole them. He was caught, but because this was Phil's first offense, he was placed on probation.

A few months later he was arrested again, this time for stealing tires with some of his friends. One of those arrested with Phil was the son of a Medford police sergeant. The Medford cop offered each set of parents to “make this thing go away.” The parents of the other boys were grateful for the offer, but Phil Cresta Sr. insisted on teaching his second son a lesson. It was one lesson that Phil never forgot—or forgave. At sixteen years of age Phil Cresta Jr. was taken out of one prison—his home—and placed in another, where he would spend the next two years. This new home was the Massachusetts Reformatory at Concord. The other boys went free.

One month after Phil was released from Concord, he was convicted of assault and battery. No longer a juvenile, he was sentenced to two more years, this time at Norfolk Prison.

Six months into that sentence, Phil's family received a letter stating that their son had been drafted into the army, but once the army heard where Phil was living at the time, he was categorized as undesirable. It's hard not to wonder what Phil's future might have been if he had been drafted six months earlier or had the chance to enter the army with the clean slate the policeman had suggested.

On September 5, 1947, while at Norfolk, Phil received word that his father, while driving his beloved specialized car, had died from a massive heart attack. Phil felt no sadness at his father's death, only resentment toward the man he blamed for putting him in Concord.

Ruth, everyone was sure, would now be much happier. Her tormentor was gone. But shortly after burying her husband, she suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never fully recovered. She and the younger children moved to Medford, where she was tended by her teenage daughter, Rose, who also finished raising the younger boys. Mari had left home some time before, and was not coming back. She teamed up with Orson Bean for a while, then went out on her own as a dancer.

When Phil came out of Norfolk at twenty years of age, he had no parents to speak of. Within a few months, on July 4, 1948, he married a woman who in this book will be called Dorothy. The couple rented an apartment at 20 Headland Way in Medford, near where Phil's mother was living with his sister Rose. Phil and Dorothy began to raise a family. Ostensibly now a car salesman, Phil put his heart into his real line of work, which had been learned, at government expense, from older crooks. He may never have been much of a student in school, but his Norfolk friends had noticed how quick a study he was, especially with picking locks. Phil's proficiency in this “elective subject” at Norfolk had brought him such admiration that he finally realized he was good at something other than taking a beating. Now free and with a family to provide for, Phil decided to put his new skill to use.

BOSTON'S CRIMINAL ELEMENT
has always been considered a poor stepsister to the more organized and deadly crime syndicates in Chicago and New York, but it was no less deadly. Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, Mad Dog Coll, and Frank Costello were famous Mafia figures who led dangerous and glamorous lives elsewhere. Movies and newspapers could not get enough of the cigar-chewing, police-baiting gangsters who flaunted their wealth and seemed invincible.

While everyone in Boston knew the name Capone, only a handful of people, mostly in South Boston, knew of Frankie Wallace. On December 2, 1931, Wallace, leader of the Gustin
Gang of South Boston, had been invited to a meeting in the office of Joseph Lombardo, in the Testa Building in the North End. Wallace was accompanied by his top two lieutenants, Barney Walsh and Tim Coffey. The South Boston gangsters walked up the three flights of stairs to Lombardo's importing company and knocked on the door. Within seconds Wallace and Walsh were dead at the hands of seven or eight of Lombardo's men. Coffey hid in a broom closet until the cops arrived, but he refused to testify against Lombardo, whose gangland stock had risen after the daring daylight massacre that eliminated his only rivals. At the time of the Testa Building massacre Joe Lombardo was thirty-six years old.

For the next twenty-four years he and a fight promoter named Phil Buccola (also known as Filippo Bruccola) ran the loosely organized crime syndicate in Boston. Buccola was of the old school and often gave second and third chances to those who went against him. His successors, Patriarca and Angiulo, who began to take over in the 1950s, were less forgiving.

In the early 1950s Phil Cresta, then in his mid-twenties, was busy breaking and entering, laundering money, and working at other small-time endeavors to pay the bills his growing family incurred. He wanted, however, to do a lot more than just pay his bills. He wanted respect and wealth, and he was convinced that neither would be attained by carrying a lunch pail. He began to associate with Jerry Angiulo.

Jerry—nine years older than Phil, whom Phil knew from his early days in the North End—had been just twelve years old when the bullet-ridden bodies of Frankie Wallace and Barney Walsh were carried down the stairs of the Testa Building on Hanover Street. It was a lesson that young Angiulo never forgot. As the long careers of Joe Lombardo and Phil Buccola were coming to an end, a newer, tougher, more educated breed of criminal was rising to power. Angiulo—one of this breed—knew that Cresta had guts, and that he was hungry to get ahead. This would make him a perfect soldier for Angiulo's burgeoning crime empire, which he ran out of Boston's North End.

Working for Angiulo was Cresta's night job, you could say. During the day, Phil played a respectable, law-abiding citizen in various ways. For example, he ran a small West End diner called Lucy's Snack Bar. Owning a diner can be profitable, depending on how it's run and how many customers walk through the door. There was no restaurant in Boston, however, making as much money as Lucy's Snack Bar.

Most businesses, when they open, figure what their overhead will be—things such as rent, equipment, furniture, and electricity. Then they figure what they'll need to take in, to turn a profit. Most businesses. Phil Cresta and his partner, a low-level Angiulo operator named Bones, ran things differently. They had no overhead. Everything in the restaurant came from one of Phil's five-finger discounts, that is, everything was stolen. Even the rent was free; the storefront was owned by Bones's brother.