My father was born on June 22, 1937 in Belmont, Massachusetts, the second eldest of five children in a typical Italian family in a predominately Italian neighborhood. He attended the local catholic school run by a group of sadistic monks that believed that learning should be painful and that at times it was necessary to beat the information into their students. Being naturally left-handed, the brothers used the sting of the ruler to incentivize him into learning to write with his right hand (to this date, he has the smallest handwriting I have ever seen).
My father spent a good part of his childhood in trouble at school, and in even more trouble at home. His father was very strict, and would punish him physically every time he got into trouble at school. My grandfather worked his way up through the local A&P grocery store, managing three stores when he finally retired. My grandmother was the typical Italian mom that showed her love through an overabundance of food at all times.
My father spent his winters shoveling snow and playing hockey, but spent his summers at a beach cottage that my grandfather had in Scituate, a small costal town located about 90 minutes south of Belmont. The cottage was eventually dragged into the sea many years later, but was heaven on earth for my father as a kid.
There was a doctor who lived about a block away from the Scituate cottage, in the largest house in the area. The doctor had a son that was around my father’s age, so they always hung out with each other during the summer months. The doctor was married to a woman who had three brothers who happened to comprise the leading Italian-American organized crime group operating in Boston’s North End. During the summer, the three brothers would often come down to Scituate and hold meetings at the doctor’s house, far from the prying eyes of the government.
When the brothers were in town, their bodyguards would always remain outside of the house waiting for the bosses to finish. So, my father crossed paths with them on many occasions when coming and going from the doctor’s residence. The bodyguards were always watchful, but treated my father well, for the most part.
On one occasion, when my father was around 15, he and the doctor’s son convinced a bum who was on the beach to buy them some beer. My father and the doctor’s son were drinking the beer on the other side of a dune that separated the ocean from the doctor’s house, when suddenly one of the bodyguards appeared. This bodyguard was short and heavily built, and could have been typecast out of some mafia movie, complete with the cigar, broken accent and all. When he saw the doctor’s son drinking the beer, he grabbed him and slapped him around a bit, and then proceeded to do the same to my father and his brother. The bodyguard then poured all of the beer out onto the sand and said “what are youse guys doing? Do you want to turn out like me? If I ever see you drinking again, I will tell each of your fathers”. From that point on, every time that bodyguard saw my father, he smiled and said “I’m watching you”. So, while these guys were serious criminals, they were always looking out for my father and the doctor’s son. And they always treated them like family.
Little did he know at the time, but my father was to cross paths with the brothers again in the future.
My father started his law enforcement career with the Border Patrol in the late 1950’s and was stationed at Comstock, Texas. While my father always wanted to be in federal law enforcement, his time with the Border Patrol was not pleasant and would be short-lived.
His first night on the job, they had him perched on the ledge of a cave that looked out on the border with Mexico. The training officer dropped him off at the spot, handed my father some binoculars and a canteen, and told him to watch the border to ensure no illegal aliens were crossing. He also told my father not to go into the cave behind him as it was a nesting area for rattle snakes. He then hopped in his truck and left. That night, my father spent more time watching the cave behind him than he did the border.
His time at the Border Patrol was short and he soon moved on to a position as an auditor with the Internal Revenue Service. He later transferred over to the Intelligence Division, which was the law enforcement branch of the IRS. A year later, in 1960, my father married my mother.
Right around this time, John Kennedy was elected as President and he selected his brother, Robert Kennedy, as the Attorney General. Robert Kennedy began a push to rid the U.S. of organized crime, and started forming small groups of law enforcement officers in New York, Chicago and Boston to dismantle the organized crime families. Because of my father’s previous association with the mafia brothers, he was selected as part of the Boston law enforcement group. At the time, he was 24 years old.
For 3 or 4 years, the group focused on making cases against the three brothers. The first targets were the illegal bookies. The idea was to make cases against the bookies, and then try to “turn” them to provide evidence against the brothers in exchange for a more lenient sentence.
Since my father had history with the brothers, but had not been seen around them or any of their members for several years, he was chosen for a lot of the undercover work. He used the pretext that he was just out of the army, returned to Boston and was looking for work. He would hang around at the bars on the North End and Revere, which was one of their strongholds, drink beer and get to know everyone. He would then feed this information to other agents providing profiles on the bookies that he met.
Eventually, the bookies offered him a job as a runner. His IRS supervisors met to determine whether my father should take the job. Secretly, my father was hoping that they would reject the idea as he was beginning to feel some empathy for the bookies who had always treated him like family. Ultimately, the powers to be decided that it would be beneficial to their investigation to have my father take the job, which left him no out.
My father started slowly by running errands for the bookies, and slowly progressed to collecting and delivering the betting sheets. Being a kid from the neighborhood, he was trusted completely and treated like part of the family. Little by little, my father was becoming privy to how the organization operated and who were the key players, feeding this all back to his supervisory agent at the IRS.
At one point, my father identified a drop-off location for money in a neighborhood hair salon. At the request of my father’s supervisor, my mother was asked to go hang out at the hair salon to see if she could pick up any valuable intelligence. She spent several hours one day on the government’s dime getting her hair and nails done, engaging people in conversation, and memorizing names and places. By the time she left, she knew all of the names of the spouses and girlfriends of the crime bosses, and had a good idea of where they spent their time and money. This information later proved to be invaluable in building a case against the bookies.
My father continued in his undercover role for almost three years, after which time the Department of Justice decided to take down the organization. Federal law enforcement officers arrested almost 30 bookies in New York, Chicago and Boston and my father suddenly became the star witness. My father was required to testify in each and every trial, where he was forced to identify himself as a federal agent, and provide detailed accounts of what he learned during his time undercover. During one trial, while my father was testifying, one of the defendants stood up and yelled “You traitor! You were one of us and you turned on us. And we were always good to you!”
My father recalled feeling like a traitor. The bookie was right – they had always treated my father well, like he was one of the family. My father had grown up where they did, in the north end of Boston, and could have easily been on the other side of the fence. Bookies were not seen as criminals within the neighborhood. To the contrary, they were seen as providing a service, as taking bets was part of the culture and just seen as something natural. While these were members of a larger organized crime family, they were far from hardened criminals; they were family men and respected members of the community.
During the trials, the brothers sent my father a case of very high-end whiskey, inviting my father to meet with them to talk. My father advised his supervisors, who held a strategy meeting with the IRS Inspections division. The inspections division wanted my father to accept the whiskey and meet, while the intelligence division, where he was assigned, did not.
Ultimately, the face-to-face meeting with the three brothers never happened, to my father’s relief. Meeting with the brothers without the benefit of any real back-up was not a comforting notion. And while my father was firmly on the side of the IRS, he could not help feeling empathy with these neighborhood men who he at one time looked up to in his youth.
The disagreement among the two IRS units turned into a pissing contest, ending when the inspections division pulled rank and transferred my father over to their department. My father’s former co-workers at the intelligence division now wanted nothing to do with him as they were afraid that he would be watching over them. So, at that point, my father became “persona non gratta” within both his own agency, as well as the community in which he was raised.
Right about that time, the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control was being formed, so my father applied and was accepted for their Denver office. It was time to head out west for a new beginning.