Jul 13 2007
Ex-mob boss to be freed Sept. 18
Angiulo’s parole request granted
As FBI agents cuffed Boston Mafia leader Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo and hauled him out of Francesco’s Restaurant in the North End on Sept. 19, 1983, he yelled, “I’ll be back before my pork chops get cold.”
He never did get to finish that meal.
The 88-year-old Mafioso, serving a 45-year prison term for racketeering, is about to taste freedom for the first time since his arrest nearly a quarter century ago.
The US Parole Commission quietly granted Angiulo’s request for parole two weeks ago and ordered his release from the federal prison hospital in Devens , a spokesman for the commission confirmed yesterday. Angiulo had been slated for release in May 2010.
The former underboss of the New England Mafia, who ruled the Boston rackets from the 1960s into the ’80s from an office at 98 Prince St., won’t be able to return to his old North End haunt, Francesco’s, when he is released because it has gone out of business, replaced by an upscale pizzeria. But many longtime residents said Angiulo won’t find the essence of the neighborhood much different.
“The houses haven’t changed, the restaurants hardly changed, but one thing that has changed is that there aren’t many of us left,” said Fred Sarno, 69, sitting on a chair yesterday outside an apartment building on Endicott Street. He was a child when he first met Angiulo, Sarno said. “Many of his friends are gone, but I’ll be glad to see him,”
Angiulo and his three brothers, Donato, Francesco, and Michele, were all convicted in February 1986 in the region’s first sweeping federal racketeering case against the mob.
Michele, who served a three-year prison term for illegal gambling, died in November of lung cancer. But Francesco, 86, is back living on Prince Street after his release from prison seven years ago. Donato, 84, who finished his sentence in 1997, resides in Medford.
The son of Sicilian immigrants who ran a North End grocery store, Gennaro Angiulo rose through the ranks under Raymond L.S. Patriarca of Providence because of his keen skill at making money. The Angiulo brothers were disciplined hands-on operators, who had a virtual monopoly on the region’s illegal gambling and loansharking, according to law enforcement officials.
But the Angiulo empire was toppled when the FBI planted bugs in their Prince Street headquarters and at a social club on North Margin Street for three months in 1981, as Angiulo ordered murders and beatings and boasted of his misdeeds.
A self-styled jailhouse lawyer, Angiulo represented himself in numerous unsuccessful bids to get his conviction overturned.
In one failed petition to the court in 2002, Angiulo said he was framed by the FBI and its gangster informants, James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi. It had been revealed in federal court in 1998 that Bulger and Flemmi had visited Angiulo’s Prince Street headquarters at the FBI’s request, then drew them a diagram with instructions on where the bugs should be planted in 1981.
In an affidavit filed in federal court three years ago, Angiulo wrote that he was in poor health and that his term was “tantamount to an illegal death sentence.”
Angiulo’s former lawyer, Anthony Cardinale, said that the Angiulos might have been acquitted if it was revealed during their trial that Bulger and Flemmi were informants who had corrupted some of their handlers.
“He’s not getting a break,” Cardinale said yesterday, adding that Angiulo became eligible for parole in 1996. “He’s actually doing considerably more time than anybody would expect him to do.”
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