The Art of the Heist

Seven

On February 27, 1967, I was transferred from the Charles Street jail to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole. My sentence was twelve to twenty years, though in our last conversation my attorney had assured me that with time credited for good behavior I could be back on the streets in as little as six. In theory, I might be back in the art business by the age of thirty. The only question was whether I would live that long.

At the time Walpole housed some of the most notorious criminals on the East Coast, including some of New England’s highest-ranking mob bosses. Since opening in the mid-1950s, the prison had earned a well-deserved reputation for being one of the toughest maximum-security facilities in the country, a place where inmates of dubious character-skinners and diddlers and snitches-were routinely beaten and frequently killed.

I was barely twenty-four when I passed through Walpole’s gate that first time, five foot six and 120 pounds, still recovering from the physical ordeal of the past ten months, with a rape indictment hanging perilously over my head. A betting man would not have wagered on my survival.

Despite the fact that the odds were decidedly against me, I don’t remember feeling afraid. Fear is not an emotion I’m prone to, nor do I dwell on the implications of death. The intake photos from that day show this to be true. My face, almost boyish, is that of a rookie, but my expression is a convict’s stony glare, a challenge and a warning to anyone foolish enough to take me on.

I was ready to fight for my life. Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to.

The friendships I’d cultivated at the Lewis Room extended far beyond the geographical boundaries of Revere Beach. By the time I got to Walpole, every Italian in the place knew I was coming and welcomed me with open arms. And they weren’t the only ones anticipating my arrival.

If I was a minor celebrity outside the prison walls, on the inside I was a superstar. The incredible details of that winter’s manhunt and the ensuing rooftop shoot-out, along with the earlier Maine jailbreak, were well known among the Walpole population. Being a con means living constantly under someone else’s thumb. The fact that I had refused to back down brought me instant respect from nearly every inmate I encountered. That I quickly proved myself to be loyal and a straight shooter firmly cemented those feelings.

Like all such places, Walpole prison is an ugly facility, mean in both intent and design. Viewed from the outside, it looks like some kind of alien fortification, a chalky monolith rising incongruously from the pastoral New England woods that surround it. The twenty-foot-high walls that form the rectangular outer perimeter are topped by coils of razor wire and electric fence, anchored at all four corners and both entrances by intimidating guard towers. Just inside the front entrance the main facility sprawls like a minicity, a series of two-and three-tiered cellblocks set at right angles off a four-hundred-foot long corridor. Beyond the cellblocks is a large exercise yard where the prison workshop is located. It’s a place I’ve come to know intimately over the course of several stays, mastering the nuances of the structure as well as the complex culture of those who inhabit it.

At the time of my first stay the cellblocks were divided between minimum-and maximum-security wings, each set at opposite ends of the central corridor, separated by the service facility, a large one-story building that housed the mess hall, auditorium, infirmary, and library, among other things.

One of the maximum-security cellblocks, Block Nine, was reserved for those in protective custody, mainly snitches or child molesters, who would have faced near-certain death in the general population. The other, Block Ten, housed especially violent or troublesome inmates. It was a foul place. Having been denied the most basic rights, the prisoners in Block Ten retaliated by throwing garbage, food scraps, and sometimes even their own feces into the long central corridor. The stench was unbearable, the cells crawling with every kind of vermin imaginable.

On the minimum-security end were three triple-tiered cellblocks, each housing seventy-two inmates. It was here, in Block B, in a windowed cell furnished only with toilet, sink, and cot, that I would serve out my sentence.

The daily routine at Walpole allowed us plenty of time outside our cells for both work and recreation. Employment was mandatory for every prisoner. Most inmates worked in either the kitchen, the laundry, the plate shop, or the foundry, and I fully expected to do the same. But the warden had other plans for me. Not long after my arrival I was appointed to the position of entertainment director.

My first order of business was to form a band. It was not a difficult task. Walpole was home to many talented musicians, all of whom were desperate to put their skills to use. I quickly assembled a top-notch backup group for myself. Our first show was a huge success, and we were soon playing every Sunday afternoon in the auditorium.

Our concerts were religiously attended, by both inmates and staff alike. As a rule, prison society is strictly segregated; it’s extremely rare to see everyone sitting down peacefully together. But on Sunday afternoons six hundred inmates of all races and religions gathered to hear us play. Not once was there an altercation.

When I wasn’t playing music I spent much of my free time in the gymnasium, lifting weights and keeping up with my martial arts practice. Already a serious student of Buddhism, I took advantage of the relative lack of distractions in prison to deepen my practice, reading whatever I could get my hands on through friends on the outside or the prison library, and meditating regularly in my cell.

Of course I continued my studies of art and antiques as well. Friends from that time often recall seeing me with my nose buried in the most recent Sotheby’s or Christie’s catalogue. I’ve always been blessed with a near-photographic memory. I’m able to digest and retain significant amounts of information. After that first stay in prison I probably knew more about art than most museum curators do.

As much as I loved reading about art, I was eager to try my hand at creating it myself. I soon became a frequent visitor to the crafts room. Over time I came to master the craft of scrimshaw, a painstaking art form most often associated with native Americans and nineteenth-century whalemen, in which detailed scenes are etched onto ivory or bone.

Though the conditions at Walpole were in no way comparable to those at Charles Street, the prison housed its fair share of vermin. Understandably, these creatures were not popular with most of my fellow inmates. But I welcomed their presence in my cell. A consummate animal lover, I viewed the creatures as my pets. Using matchsticks and scrap wood from the shop, I built tiny cages in which to house my growing menagerie of insects, spiders, and even mice.

As I mentioned before, Walpole was home to many well-known convicts. But perhaps none was quite as notorious as Albert DeSalvo, the confessed Boston Strangler. DeSalvo was an odd man with a head of thick black hair and a pugilist’s face. I came to know him quite well during my time at Walpole, as he often sat at the workstation next to mine in the crafts room. DeSalvo spent most of his time making chokers, the irony of which was entirely lost on him but which provided more than a few good laughs for the rest of us. When the weather was warm, DeSalvo ran a little ice cream stand in the prison yard, selling Hoodsies and Creamsicles. It was a position that made him quite popular with his fellow inmates.

DeSalvo loved music and never missed one of our Sunday concerts. In fact, my most vivid memory of him is from one of these events. Toward the end of my stay I talked the warden into letting me put on a big show and barbecue in the prison yard. I even convinced him to let Al Dotoli come in and produce the concert. Figuring the inmates there needed a distraction as much as we did, I also arranged to have a group of folks from the local senior citizens’ center bussed over for the occasion.

The show turned out to be quite a festive event, especially for DeSalvo, who spent most of the concert dancing with one or another of our gray-haired visitors. Al Dotoli still has an old home movie from that day, which he shot, that shows DeSalvo grinning like a madman, his arms thrown over the shoulders of two elderly women who, I’m certain, had no clue they were dancing with a notorious serial killer.

In person DeSalvo, who was not the sharpest con in the bunch, seemed an unlikely candidate for mass murderer. Most of us harbored serious doubts that he was the actual Boston Strangler. It’s a theory that has been bolstered both by glaring inaccuracies in DeSalvo’s confession and recently recovered DNA evidence from the crimes. Unfortunately, these revelations came too late for DeSalvo, who was brutally murdered not long after I left Walpole that first time.

Despite the best efforts of the prison staff to direct our attention to legitimate pursuits, the most popular class at Walpole was taught not in the workshops or the service facility but on the cellblocks and in the yard, where Criminal Arts 101 was an essential part of the core curriculum. An elite finishing school for robbers, con men, forgers, murderers, and every type of criminal in between, Walpole taught the basics and taught them well.

For my part, I was a straight-A student, constantly taking mental notes on the nuances of human interaction within the prison walls, learning as I went along. I quickly discovered the importance of allegiances and the skills necessary to cultivate these essential bonds.

Many prison gang leaders gain their authority through fear and the constant threat of violence against those who oppose them. This has never been my style. I’ve always found other tactics such as loyalty and kindness to be more effective. Most cons have lived lives of unimaginable deprivation. Orphaned or neglected as children, shuttled from one institution to another, a great many of the men who make up the prison population have never known love or true friendship. Offered these things for the first time, most respond with fierce devotion.

Within several months of my arrival at Walpole I had surrounded myself with a group of loyal associates. United by our youth and our reckless contempt for authority, we were a force to be reckoned with by anyone-inmate or guard-who dared to take us on. Among the group were men who would remain my lifelong friends. The friendship of one man in particular, Ralph Petrozziello, would alter the course of my life in ways none of us could have foreseen.

Ralph came to Walpole soon after I did. A tough kid from hardscrabble Roslindale, Ralph was my physical opposite in many ways. While I was fair and slight of build, Ralph was a dark-skinned Italian American with black eyes, a shock of jet black hair, and a brawny body. But our resumes were strikingly similar. Like me, Ralph had been sentenced to Walpole for shooting a cop, and had a reputation for defiance. He was also unfailingly loyal to his friends, commanding respect and affection from those around him.

Not surprisingly, we took to each other immediately. Ralph soon became like a brother to me.

Though I had carved out a place for myself in the complex world of the prison, I could not shake the specter of my upcoming rape trial. As serious as the charges were, I took solace in the fact that I would get a chance to disprove them once and for all in a court of law. Naively, I placed my faith in my actual innocence and my airtight alibi: at the time the rape was committed I’d been onstage, playing to a packed house at the Lewis Room. On the other hand, the only evidence the prosecution had linking me to the rape was the testimony of the young victim. The odds of an acquittal seemed squarely in my favor.

Unfortunately, my logic failed to take into account the power of an eyewitness identification.

An eyewitness is one of the most powerful and persuasive tools at a prosecutor’s disposal, especially when that witness is the victim and a child. A young girl bravely pointing out her attacker from the stand can sway any jury. But despite their emotional appeal, these identifications have been proven time and time again to be extremely unreliable. Human memory is a flawed system, highly susceptible to suggestion. Only with the widespread use of DNA testing have we come to understand exactly how inaccurate such testimony often is. According to the Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing, eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing.

It’s impossible for me to say what my young accuser believed or didn’t believe. By the date of my trial enough time had elapsed for her to have been convinced of almost anything regarding the events of the night she was attacked. That she was still a child and that one of the lead detectives on the case was her neighbor and a close family friend surely must have colored her memories. Given the vehemence with which he insisted upon my guilt, it’s difficult to imagine her denying it.

As soon as I saw her on the stand at my trial I understood that John Irwin had been right that day at the Charles Street Jail. No juror in the world could have ruled against her. Her vulnerability was palpable, as was her pain. Clearly, she had suffered deeply. As angry as I was, I could not help feeling for her.

When asked to point me out to the jury, she was unable to look at me. Keeping her head down, she raised her hand and gestured across the courtroom toward where I was sitting. Not only did she identify me as her attacker, but she also testified that I had referred to myself by name during the attack. Bizarrely, this utterly unbelievable detail became the strongest piece of “evidence” in the case against me.

The testimony of nearly a dozen people as to my whereabouts that night was utterly meaningless in the face of that one little girl.

On February 25, 1970, having been found guilty of assault and unnatural acts on a child, I was sentenced to an additional ten to fifteen years in state custody. I can truthfully say that, aside from the deaths of my mother and father, it was the only time in my life I ever shed a tear.

The conviction was devastating. Even so, I never once regretted my decision to decline the plea offer. There was the principle of it, of course, the fact that I simply would not admit to a crime I hadn’t committed. But there were other, more practical reasons to be grateful for having refused to make a deal. What John Irwin had failed to tell me during our last meeting at the Charles Street Jail was that although my prison sentence in the rape charge would have run concurrently with my other sentences, I would have faced additional time-most likely a life sentence-in a facility for sexual predators and the criminally insane upon my release from Walpole. Worse, a guilty plea on my part would have meant forfeiting any chance to appeal the jury’s verdict.

At least, I told myself as the van carried me back to Walpole after the sentencing hearing, there was still a possibility, however slim, that I might eventually clear my name.