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Big Stick-Up at Brink's!
By Noel Behn OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1977 Noel Behn
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3664-1
CHAPTER 1
Return of a Thief
September 12, 1944:
"You've got to ax-centuate the positive," Johnny Mercer sang from the Philco cathedral radio.
"EE-liminate the negative," added Bing Crosby.
"And don't mess with Mr. In-Between," they both warned as five-foot six-inch, 170-pound Tony Pino let his gray jute trousers drop to the slat-wood floor, stepped out of them, bent to make recovery, momentarily forgot to breathe through his mouth and, by forgetting, sucked in a nostril full of "shit trench" stink which permeated the long, low, frigid second-floor supply room. He flashed a ticlike wince which always tautened his pudged-moon face into what appeared to be a mocking grin, resumed inhaling by mouth, grabbed up the trousers, tossed them onto a pile of already-discarded gray jute prison garb and stood sway-backed and potbellied and naked. Stab wounds ran along his thick neck and flabby left shoulder. There were bullet scars in the fleshy left buttock and thigh. He coughed to get the guard's attention. He coughed again. The belly heaved again.
The supply room guard hitched a thumb toward a high shelf, leaned forward and turned up the radio's volume. A 9 A.M. newscast began with word that Hitler's Fortress Germany had been invaded by General Patch's rampaging First Army.
Pino rose up on his tiptoes, brought down a newly postmarked carton. By the time General Patton's Third Army had penetrated the impenetrable Siegfried Line and British forces were dashing into the Lowlands he was dressed in a baggy, creased blue serge suit, white-on-white Arrow shirt, dotted tie and a pair of seven-year-old but never worn Florsheim shoes.
The guard summoned a runner, filled out a yard pass and as an afterthought said, "Good luck."
Pino flashed his ticlike grin, plucked the pass from the guard's finger and grabbed up three comic books and a copy of Popular Mechanics. He led the way down the steps and out into a vast and hazy prison enclosure dominated by looming, hand-hewn granite block structures grown mawkish red-black with age and coal smoke drifting in from railway yards beyond the twenty-foot-high turreted and guard-mounted walls. He continued breathing through his mouth as he waved an expansive good-bye to the contingent of Crap Brigade cons hosing out the thousand-odd cell-numbered toilet buckets near an open latrine trench.
His pass was presented at the rotunda building. A screw opened the gate in the wire mesh barrier, and Pino stepped past, leaving the runner behind; he climbed the circular staircase, waited while another wire mesh barrier was opened, strode up a corridor and entered the guardroom without knocking. He ignored two burly civilians seated on a far bench, went to a door, knocked and in his raspy, slightly high-pitched voice announced, "Pino, Anthony."
A clerk guard emerged munching a sandwich, dropped a sheath of papers onto the desk and said "Sign at the Xs."
Pino signed without reading, opened an envelope, removed and counted $600, the rebate from his commissary account, argued he was entitled to an additional $10 he knew damn well was awarded only to convicts with no known source of income, finally abandoned his demand, pocketed the money, stood waiting.
The clerk countersigned several of the forms, tore off parole board copies, held them out.
After having served six years, eight months and six days of two consecutive three- to four-year sentences for the crime of breaking and entering in daytime with intent to commit a felony, as well as possession of burglary tools, Antonio Pino, alias Anthony Pino, Tony Pino, Anthony Pirro and John Gurno, had paid his debt to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and was therefore officially rehabilitated — on parole for two more years, but a free man.
He stepped across the room to where the two burly men were standing and held out his wrists.
"Sorry, Tony," the larger of the federal marshals said while the smaller man jerked Pino's arms around and up behind his back and clamped on a pair of handcuffs.
"What the hell, you're only doing your job," Tony replied.
"Don't worry," the larger federal officer whispered, holding open the rear door of a car parked at the base of the rotunda building, "I hear they'll have you out before the day is over."
Threat of reincarceration seemed to have little effect on Pino as he rode away from Massachusetts State Prison, better known as Charlestown since it stood in the Boston district of that name. He had spent better than a fourth of his thirty-eight years in state penal institutions, as the result of three separate convictions. Two of the terms he had served exceeded one year in duration, thereby warranting his present federal arrest for an infraction committed when he was less than a year old.
Anthony Pino was born on May 10, 1907, near the tiny vineyard village of Divieto, Province of Messina, Sicily. His father was away in America. The delivery was performed by a midwife and occurred in a dirt-floor shanty his family had occupied for generations, but to which they never held title. A local priest registered the birth.
Had Tony remained on the padrone-owned soil of his forebears, he might not in all his years have traveled more than twenty miles from Divieto. Like his father and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, Tony unquestionably would have become a tenant farmer and tended the padrone's grapes from dusk to dawn. More likely than not, he would have been denied an education since that was the way it was with the eldest child of a peasant family — the eldest worked so the younger might have free hours in which to receive rudimentary schooling. Tony's father, Francesco, was an eldest child and was illiterate. His mother, Katerina Arena Pino, was also an eldest child and illiterate.
Had he remained, Tony Pino probably would have married and at an early age reared a family where and how he had been reared. Compared to millions of others throughout Europe, it wouldn't have been all that bad an existence. Granted, he would never have earned much money, cash-in-hand money — less than $80 in the best of years. On the other hand, he and his family would seldom have gone unfed. A two-room clay-walled shack would always have been at his disposal, plus a quarter of an acre on which to grow whatever food he needed, plus a share of the crop for the padrone.
The incentive that prompted Katerina's semiliterate younger brother, Pietro Arena, to scrape, scrimp and finally muster the $40 fare to the New World was a steamship company placard posted on a wall in Divieto: It promised that anyone, absolutely anyone, regardless of birth, could own land in America.
There was no particular reason for Pietro to select Boston, other than its being the destination on the ticket issued him. He was, by apprenticeship and a half year's actual practice, a barber. And there was need for barbers in the poorer sections of the Massachusetts port city. Pietro easily found employment. He saved and in 1906 leased the cheapest one-man shop he could find — on D Street in South Boston, a volatile Irish immigrant enclave called Southy by the locals. He sent a letter back to Sicily urging his newly acquired brother-in-law to come to Boston as soon as possible, not to wait until the baby was born, to emigrate at once while employment opportunities remained good.
Francesco and his pregnant twenty-one-year-old bride began another cycle of scrimping and borrowing and finally sold their single wedding present — a brand-new pick and shovel — and in late 1906 "Frank" joined "Peter" in Southy, shared the one-room apartment above the barbershop and found a job three blocks away, driving the horse-drawn wagon of a used-paper dealer fourteen hours a day, six days a week, for $6. He found extra work on Sunday. He held his eating down to a meal a day, if that, and after fourteen months sent a ticket back to Sicily.
On a long-forgotten date in 1908, eight-month-old Tony Pino was in his mother's arms being carried down the gangplank from a four-stack coal-burning "Guinea clipper" named Columbia whose holds had been converted into bedless dormitories and which made the advertised two-week Atlantic crossing in twenty-one days.
"Katherine," like Frank and Peter before her, arrived at Boston Harbor without official paper (WOP), save for a letter from the village priest attesting that she was of good character and properly married and mother of a male child.
Ten months later the young Pino family was ensconced at noisy Andrew Square in Southy's Lower End — an animated wasteland of high hopes and despair and joyless three- and four-story wood-frame, often brick-façaded apartment buildings — where they would remain another fourteen years.
Frank worked long hours trying to meet the bills and rent and save enough to bring over more of the relatives. And relatives were arriving — Uncle Joe and Aunt Elizabeth — among others. Katherine always seemed to be pregnant and spending her days and nights taking one of the babies down to the toilet in the basement or fetching water from the hallway tap or washing or shopping or cleaning or sewing or preparing meals — all this in a tiny three-room third-floor apartment that reverberated day and night from the trolley, horse wagon, horse carriage, auto and truck traffic below the windows. The flat was freezing in winter, suffocatingly hot in summer; always smelled of cooking.
Throughout, the Pinos' spirit was generally high. They were a tightly knit and loving clan. Frank spent every Sunday with the family, managed to maintain a degree of patriarchal rule, attempted to see that his brood grew up adoring God and respecting the law of the land and taking full advantage of their opportunities.
Tony attended the Catholic church and, when old enough, first parochial, then public grammar school. He was always home promptly for meals. Sunday dinner with the whole family in attendance was his favorite. Aside from household chores he was out of doors, as he would have been in Divieto — as most of the neighborhood children would have been back in Ireland.
But the streets of Southy were a far cry from a rural lane or pastoral glen. It was a tough place in a tough time and even tougher for the hyperactive, competitive, hot-tempered, plump little Italian boy whose non-English-speaking parents had settled amid the nearly destitute, generally uneducated, often intolerant Irish.
"Mother of God, if you didn't stand your ground against them Irish from the day you was born, you're a goner," Pino recalled. "They don't trust a living soul, including themselves. And that goes for the teachers and nuns and priests and cops. Everything was Irish then. So you gotta prove your point fast, see what I mean? Prove you can hold your own."
And from the earliest of ages, this proving — not coping — this showing other boys, Irish boys, that he was as good as they were was of great importance to him. He learned to fight with his fists, but never well, and therefore learned to sustain one devil of a beating. He wielded a club or knife with moderate efficiency, but tiny "dago" Tony wasn't really going to scare anyone with brute ability. How could he? His funny round face, his sugar-bowl haircut, his bulging tummy and short, stubby legs and ill-fitting clothes were enough to make you laugh. When he became angry, red-faced and out of control, as often was the case, he went into one of his tantrums and began jumping up and down and cursing and threatening. And that could make you laugh all the more. Young Tony Pino grew aware of this reaction other boys had to him, and he began using it to his own advantage and acceptance: incorporating his inherent Arena sense of robust humor and Pino gift of nonstop gab to the fullest, he became the madcap kid of the block, the neighborhood jester — the clown.
Tony couldn't win many running races or pass a football very far, but his short, thick fingers were facile and strong. He was adept at building things and fixing things, which didn't account for very much in the world of the young.
There were other areas where he more than held his own, often winning the esteem of his particular crowd of urchins. He could climb a tree or shinny up a drainpipe with the best of them. Tony was also one of the most accomplished liars Andrew Square ever produced. There was often no particular reason for lying. It was merely something he did naturally, which seemed to be as much a characteristic or congenital talent as his humor. Often he employed the fibbing to con his teachers or the priest or the nuns. Some thought he was the most well-behaved, clean-cut, delightful little boy in the neighborhood — and he usually was, at school or at church or at home.
In an age when finding or stealing coal to feed the ever-hungry potbellied kitchen stove was considered a routine duty for the children of the financially strapped, chubby six-year-old Tony Pino excelled at the latter. He appropriated his baby sister's perambulator almost every night of the week, boldly rolled up the block, across the street and into a railroad coalyard and returned with a full load of the precious black fuel. His parents believed the perpetual explanation that he had picked the lumps up one at a time along the tracks, never suspecting that their eldest was peddling off the overage at three cents a pound.
Membership in a neighborhood youth gang dedicated to the five Bs — baseball, boosting (shoplifting), boozing, burglary and brawling — when he was seven soon allowed Tony to display his superiority in boosting and burglary. He was fearless, inventive, insatiable.
Tony Pino's first arrest came at the age of eight for stealing a ride on a streetcar. The following year he was apprehended trying to swipe candy from a vendor's stand, dragged into court on two charges of breaking and entering and larceny, reprimanded by the judge, released and subsequently thrashed by his father, two teachers and one nun.
The youngster promised his parents he'd go straight, swore the same with his hand on a Bible to the priest, took the first in a long series of legitimate jobs he would hold for the rest of his life, gave his earnings to his parents as he would more or less try to do the rest of his life, helped out his junk-collecting Uncle Joe Pino, thereby learning the skill of furniture rebuilding and refinishing — and went right on stealing. He passed a good portion of his ill-gotten gains on to his parents under the guise of salary bonuses or lottery winnings.
By the time he was shot in the buttock and thigh atop a fence, while trying to escape a police raid prompted by the theft of some cakes and milk the gang had stolen and were consuming, fifteen-year-old Tony's record boasted eight arrests, three probations and one seven-month stint in a reformatory for a $20 theft — $20 in cash taken from his junk peddler Uncle Joe's basement-apartment storeroom.
When thirty-one-year-old Tony Pino was taken across the Charles River from Boston to Charlestown and incarcerated at Massachusetts State Prison on January 6, 1938, his recorded arrests totaled twenty — another two and one-half years had been spent in a reformatory. And he was by no means a big-time hood. The feds had never heard of him. Until recently not even the news-sharking crime-beat reporters of the Boston dailies were aware of his name.
Pino's reputation among the cons who had known him on the outside was diverse. Inmates who had worked with him before, Jimma Faherty, Mike Geagan, Sandy Richardson and Henry Baker, ranked Tony a master safecracker, a top-rate case man and ingenious organizer-operator of well-drilled robbery teams. And Tony, according to his supporters, wasn't lacking in muscle with politicians and the cops. For God's sakes, said they, hadn't Tony been caught dead to rights up in Manchester, New Hampshire? Hadn't an eyewitness identified him as the guy who walked in with a pistol and stuck up the joint? And hadn't three local cops — three of the biggest Boston cops including Jim Crowley — all said they saw Pino sitting in a Boston restaurant when the heist was coming off in Manchester? You don't get Detective Jim Crowley going to bat for you unless you got plenty of muscle, believe you me, fella.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Big Stick-Up at Brink's! by Noel Behn. Copyright © 1977 Noel Behn. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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