The Art of the Heist

Twenty-Three

On January 5, 1976, my parole was formally revoked and I was returned to Walpole prison to serve out the remaining four years of my state sentence, along with the concurrent federal sentence for my role in the Wyeth thefts. No one looks forward to going to prison, and I was no exception. But I was relieved to get out of the Charles Street Jail and back to Walpole’s familiar-and relatively sanitary-confines. Having mastered the prison system once before, I was confident I could do so again. A number of my friends were also doing time, including Ralph Petrozziello, so I found myself with a ready-made crew.

My first order of business was to put together a band. I was soon playing to packed houses in the prison auditorium. Thanks to the production skills of Al Dotoli, who was granted special permission by the warden to come into the prison, these concerts were much more sophisticated than the shows I’d put on during my previous stay. To listen to the recordings Al made of them is to hear the combined hopes, fears, and frustrations of the six hundred men who called Walpole prison home.

Al brought in a number of special guests to play with us, including Lenny Baker, Danny McBride, and Chico Ryan from Sha Na Na, and the blues great James Cotton. But the most memorable performers to take the stage with us were not musicians. Al came to one of our earliest shows, in 1975, accompanied by two crew members I had never seen before. Fair-skinned and slighter of build than the average roadie, the pair fairly swam in their gray coveralls and baseball caps. I soon understood why.

We were about halfway through our first set, having just starting in on a rousing rendition of the Tom Jones version of “I (Who Have Nothing),” when the two roadies rushed out onto the stage and began fiddling with one of the microphones. Then, without warning, they tore their baseball caps and coveralls off, revealing long blond hair and two sets of perfect breasts. Needless to say, the crowd went wild. Al, who was recording the concert, caught the whole thing on tape.

Despite the popularity of my shows and the relative ease with which I reentered prison society, there were serious consequences to my incarceration, the most heartbreaking of which was my separation from Martha. We both understood without question that our relationship was over. I knew firsthand the humiliations endured by the girlfriends of my fellow prisoners, the body searches and public gropings that accompanied their weekly visits to Walpole, not to mention the loneliness and ridicule they suffered on the outside. I loved Martha too much to subject her to the consequences of my actions. Fortunately, she was self-possessed enough to come to the same conclusion.

While I was looking to the future and counting the days till I would once again be a free man, there were those who could not put the past behind them. Despite John Regan’s warning, I hadn’t truly understood the consequences of cutting the FBI, the Boston police, and their counterparts in the Suffolk County district attorney’s office out of the Rembrandt recovery. They were still pissed that Regan and Twomey had gotten all the glory, and they were determined to make me pay for snubbing them. Unfortunately for me, all three parties would soon gain some unlikely allies in their respective crusades against me.

Since his arrest earlier that winter Tommy Sperrazza had been of particular interest to both the FBI and the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, who were well aware of his association with me.

Aside from being under indictment for the Roslindale shootings and a suspect in the disappearances of Karen Spinney and Susan Webster, Sperrazza was a suspect in several other crimes. One of these was the cold-blooded killing of an off-duty cop named Donald Brown during a holdup at a Roslindale shopping center.

The details of the Brown shooting were especially tragic. Brown, a twenty-nine-year veteran of the Boston Police Department who was less than a week away from retirement, was working a paid detail escorting the manager of the Purity Supreme supermarket to make a night deposit of $3,600 at a nearby bank when they were accosted by three armed men. During the course of the holdup, Brown was shot and killed.

At the time of the shooting, in May 1974, I was bound to be a prime suspect in just about any crime that was committed in the Roslindale area, and rightly so. By then my associates and I had committed numerous crimes in the area, including the bank heists and Ralph Petrozziello’s contract jobs. Our reputation was such that the police had dubbed us the “Connor-Petrozziello Gang.”

What the authorities failed to realize was that we were less a gang than a loose collection of independent operators who sometimes worked together. Rarely, if ever, were we all involved in any one heist. Certainly I was in no way in charge of a crew. Frequently there were jobs of which I had little or no knowledge before the fact. The Purity Supreme holdup was one of these cases.

Despite the fact that there was absolutely no evidence to suggest I’d been in any way involved with the crime, the Suffolk County DA, who had jurisdiction in the case, immediately suspected me in the robbery and shooting and began leaning hard on Sperrazza to link me to the holdup.

The lead prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Phil Beauchesne, who had already convinced himself that I was guilty, was like a dog without a bone. Not long after I returned to Walpole he accosted my attorney, Marty Leppo, in the elevator of the Suffolk County Courthouse.

“I’m going to get your boy, Connor, on the Brown shooting,” Beauchesne, who was fairly foaming at the mouth with rage, told Marty. “One way or another.”

Marty tried to downplay the exchange at our next meeting. “It’s just a lot of saber rattling,” he told me. But I knew better than to dismiss the incident completely. And despite his assurances, Marty seemed to be taking Beauchesne’s threat seriously: he’d made a formal record of the exchange for his files.

Beauchesne wasn’t alone in vocalizing his feelings. One of the Boston police detectives on the case never passed up a chance to remind Marty that he had his sights set on me. “It’s a long dark alley with lots of trash barrels,” he used to say whenever he ran into my attorney at the courthouse. “One way or another, we’re going to get him.”

While the Suffolk County DA and the Boston PD were doggedly trying to conjure up a case against me in the Brown shooting, the FBI had their own agenda. The feds, who had jurisdiction in the Norfolk County Trust case because the stolen money was federally insured, had set their sights on finding a way to link me to the bank robbery. Unfortunately for me, they were about to get a significant break.

On February 28, 1976, two eleven-year-old boys were playing in the woods bordering a Norwood cemetery, looking for a place to build a fort, when they found a plastic bag, partially covered by leaves and tucked into the back of an old rock wall. Inside the bag were cloth bank bags, a number of $1,000 money bands, and a modest stash of pharmaceuticals. The boys, being the responsible young citizens they were, took their find to their parents, who immediately brought the bags to the Norwood Police Department. The police, recognizing that the cloth bags and money bands were undoubtedly the product of a bank robbery, in turn contacted the FBI.

It didn’t take long for the feds to trace the bank materials to the Norfolk County Trust. Aside from the scanner Santo had left behind, and which so far had provided no solid leads, the cemetery stash was the first real evidence to turn up in the case, and the federal agents wasted no time putting it to use.

The bags had, in fact, been hidden in the cemetery by my former crew member Bobby Fitzgerald, who lived with his mother less than a block from where the stash was found. Fitzgerald’s father was buried in the cemetery, and Bobby often hid drugs and other contraband in the stone wall near his grave.

During the winter of 1975 I had occasionally spent the night at Bobby’s house, sometimes with Martha. In return for his hospitality I’d given Bobby some of the money from the Milton bank robbery, along with the bank bags, which he agreed to hold for me.

Fitzgerald had been arrested for heroin distribution not long before and was doing time at the lockup on Deer Island. The FBI, who already suspected me in the Norfolk County Trust heist and who knew Fitzgerald was an associate of mine, soon put two and two together and approached Bobby about a possible deal in exchange for his testimony. He snapped at the chance to reduce his sentence.

With Fitzgerald’s help the federal prosecutor slowly began laying the groundwork for an indictment against me. It would prove to be a long and drawn-out process. But the feds could afford to take their time. After all, I wasn’t going anywhere.

As 1976 drew to a close, the whereabouts of Susan Webster and Karen Spinney, the two young women who’d disappeared after the Roslindale bar shooting, were still unknown. Although by now almost everyone involved in the case believed they were dead and that Sperrazza and John Stokes were responsible for their murder, the Norfolk County district attorney, whose office was prosecuting the case, could not bring formal murder charges until the women’s bodies were found.

To further complicate matters, Stokes, who had shown signs of being willing to cooperate with authorities, had been brutally stabbed to death the previous summer at Walpole. It was common knowledge on the inside that Sperrazza, who by then had been sentenced to life for the Cirvinale murder, was the one who’d killed his friend and former partner. People on the outside, including the staff of the Norfolk County DA’s office, couldn’t help drawing the same conclusion. With Stokes dead, it seemed unlikely that the girls would ever be found.

Then, early in the summer of 1977, Ralph Petrozziello pulled me aside on the yard one afternoon. “Tommy Sperrazza’s got a proposal for us,” he said, lowering his voice.

“Oh yeah?” I sneered, not about to do Sperrazza any favors. “Tell him he can go fuck himself.”

Ralph shook his head. “Just hear me out, okay?”

“I’m listening,” I said reluctantly, unable to refuse my friend.

“Sperrazza wants out of here,” Ralph said. “Bad.”

I laughed. “Don’t we all.”

“I’m serious, Myles. He wants to see his kid.”

Sperrazza’s wife, Deborah, had just given birth to a little girl, and Sperrazza was suddenly the proud papa, flashing pictures of the baby around his cellblock. It was hard for me to muster much sympathy for him. “He can make his case to the parole board in fifteen years.”

Ralph glanced around to make sure no one was in earshot. “He wants us to bust him out,” he announced.

Was he crazy? “Ignoring the fact that we’re stuck in this shithole ourselves, I wouldn’t help break that asshole out if he paid me a million dollars.”

“He’s not paying,” Ralph said, “but there might be something in it for us all the same. You remember those two girls?”

How could I forget? “You mean Karen Spinney and Susan Webster?”

Ralph nodded. “Sperrazza wants you to make a deal. Like you did with the Rembrandt.”

Now I was completely lost. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

“Ask your buddy Regan what it’d be worth to him if he could find out where those girls are. If he can make a deal to get you and me out of here early, Sperrazza will tell us what he did with Spinney and Webster. All we have to do is promise to bust Sperrazza out.”

I was right: Ralph was crazy. “Forget it,” I told him, turning to go.

“Come on,” he pleaded. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “You can do whatever you want to Sperrazza once he’s back on the street.”

I shook my head. “Forget it.”

The matter seemed to have been resolved, but as I lay in my bunk that night I couldn’t get the conversation out of my head. Losing a child is every parent’s worst nightmare. At the time my own daughter, Kim, was not far in age from Karen Spinney and Susan Webster. Though I had not been the best father to her, I loved her dearly. I could only imagine what the parents of the missing women were going through. Surely, I thought, the uncertainty of not knowing what had happened must have been unbearable.

Finding out where the girls were and helping to win an early parole for Ralph at the same time wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But even if Ralph could get Sperrazza to tell me what he’d done with Karen Spinney and Susan Webster, I knew I could never hold up my end of the bargain. I loathed the thought of helping put Sperrazza back on the street. Unless…

As I drifted off to sleep, I thought back to the last thing Ralph had said to me on the yard that day: You can do whatever you want to Sperrazza once he’s back on the street.

The next morning at breakfast I found Ralph. “I’ll do it,” I told him as we passed each other in the mess. “But only so I can kill the bastard myself once he’s out.” I wasn’t kidding, and I could see in Ralph’s eyes that he knew it.

Finally, I’d get a chance to do what I should have done on the way back from Northampton that night.

The next day I called Marty and asked him to come down to Walpole.

“I think I can get Sperrazza to tell me what he did with those girls,” I told my attorney when we met. “But I want something in return.”

“I’m not sure there’s much we can do to get your sentence reduced any further,” Marty said.

I shook my head. I wasn’t worried about my sentence. With good behavior, I’d be eligible for parole in another couple of months. “It’s Ralph I’m asking for.”

“Petrozziello?” Marty asked. “What’s he got to do with the girls?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I told him. “Except that he’s my friend and I want to help him out.”

Marty looked skeptical. But he knew better than to ask too many questions.

“Just ask around,” I said.

“Okay,” he agreed. “I’ll see what I can do.” He started to go, but I stopped him.

“One more thing. If I do this, I want to work with John Regan again.”

“The Norfolk County DA has jurisdiction,” Marty reminded me.

“I don’t care who has jurisdiction,” I told him. “Regan’s part of it or there’s no deal.”

For the next few months Marty worked diligently to win a guarantee of an early parole for Ralph in exchange for Sperrazza’s information. It was no small feat bringing all the parties involved together. By the time Marty, working closely with John Regan and the Norfolk County district attorney, Bill Delahunt, finally managed to iron out a deal that satisfied everyone, summer was nearly over. In early September he came to Walpole to give me the good news: Ralph would get his parole.

It was now time for Sperrazza to make good on his promise. Several days after Marty’s visit Ralph, Sperrazza, and I met on the yard.

“Swear on your mother’s life you’ll make good on this, Connor,” Sperrazza said.

I nodded, relieved to be able to give my word in good faith. “I swear. As soon as Ralph and I are out, we’ll do it.”

“I’ve got that bank robbery trial coming up,” Sperrazza suggested. “You could grab me on the way to court.”

I pondered his proposal. “Not a bad idea,” I said, my brain already humming with the outlines of a plan. “But first you have to tell us what you did with those girls. And don’t say you put them on a goddamned train.”

Sperrazza shook his head. “You remember that bank job we pulled up in Northampton?”

“Sure,” I answered, thinking of the hitchhiker once again, the expression on Sperrazza’s face when I’d confronted him by the side of the highway. Angry and incredulous, utterly devoid of pity.

“That’s where they are,” he said. “In the woods behind the VA hospital, near where we left the car that day.”

At the mention of Northampton my stomach lurched. “That night at Shaw’s Motel…,” I said, finally understanding what I’d been a party to.

Sperrazza nodded. Then, as if the news was somehow consolation, he added, “They were already dead.”

On September 14, 1977, Regan, Delahunt, and I made the trip up to Northampton together. It was much earlier in the season than it had been when Sperrazza, Stokes, Ozzy, and I had robbed the bank, and the trees, which at the time had been bare, were still in full leaf. I easily found the dirt road that ran into the woods behind the hospital. But the exact spot where we’d left the car was more elusive. Sperrazza had given me a rough description of the place where he and Stokes had buried the two women. Using these shaky details and my memory of the bank robbery, I was eventually able to lead the search team to the area where Sperrazza claimed the bodies lay. Having pointed out the approximate location, I was immediately taken back to Walpole.

Excavators as well as numerous volunteers had been brought in for the grisly task of unearthing the grave, and searchers quickly set about trying to find the women. They worked all through that afternoon and night without success. Then, at 9:25 the next morning, a volunteer searcher announced that his shovel had struck something solid.

Two years and seven months after they’d last been seen alive, Karen Spinney and Susan Webster were finally found. But the discovery was cold comfort to the women’s families. The bodies of Spinney and Webster had been stuffed into a green sleeping bag, along with the knife that was used to kill them, and buried one on top of the other in a shallow grave. An examination of the remains revealed that both women had been stabbed multiple times.

When the news was delivered to me at Walpole, I couldn’t help thinking back to the night of the Northampton bank robbery, and how different things might have been if I had taken Ozzy’s advice.