The Art of the Heist

Six

I owe my life to the extraordinary staff at Massachusetts General. Without the efforts of their skilled surgical team I most certainly would have died that night. But despite their best efforts, the damage to my spine was extensive, and the doctors prepared my family for the probability that I would never walk again.

I would eventually prove them all wrong-though my condition would worsen significantly before I could do so.

On May 16, after recuperating from my initial surgery, I was transferred to the hospital at the state prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts. To call the prison hospital a cesspool of squalor is to paint a rosy picture of conditions there. The facilities were filthy and overrun with vermin of every kind. The staff, overseen by a raging alcoholic with dubious medical credentials, was not just incompetent but purposely cruel in the treatment of patients.

Because of the extensive damage to my abdomen, the surgical team at Mass General had performed a colostomy on me. But I had not recuperated sufficiently for them to close it up before my transfer. Unfortunately for me, this task fell to the doctors at Norfolk. The suffering I endured at their hands during this procedure is almost unspeakable.

Motivated by cheapness-at the time a spinal block was a much less expensive procedure than administering a general anesthetic-the head surgeon at Norfolk made the decision to forgo general anesthetic in favor of a spinal block. This decision alone might not have had such dire consequences if he hadn’t also chosen to administer the neuromuscular blocker d-tubocurarine to me prior to my surgery.

Derived from the same plant native Amazonians have used for centuries as a paralytic poison, d-tubocurarine, or curare, is routinely used to immobilize patients for surgery and relax the trachea for easy intubation. But as integral as the use of curare is in major surgeries, the drug has been known to have side effects, the most serious of which occurs when the accompanying anesthetic, for whatever reason, does not take effect. In these gruesome cases, patients paralyzed by curare are unable to speak or move, and are consequently unable to communicate the fact that they are in pain. Recently, advanced systems have been instituted to better monitor whether surgery patients are fully anesthetized. Unfortunately for me, no such monitoring system existed in 1966.

As fate-or downright incompetence-would have it, the anesthesiologist chose the very spot where my spine had been struck by a bullet to insert his needle. Instead of flowing down through the spinal fluid, the anesthetic poured ineffectively into my body cavity. Of course the surgical team was entirely unaware of any of this.

For my part, I could only assume that the anesthetic had yet to take effect. As I lay there waiting for this to happen, the curare made its way down the IV tube and entered my bloodstream with the instantaneous force and power of a hard-swung baseball bat. There was a brilliant lightning flash in my brain and I could feel my mind jump within my skull. My hands went suddenly limp. My head lolled to the side. My tongue felt like a loose piece of meat in my mouth. I tried to roll my eyes but found them locked into place. I struggled to speak, but could not. To my absolute horror, I soon realized that I could not even breathe on my own.

After what I’d been through on the rooftop, my first thought was that the doctors and nurses had conspired with the police to kill me. As I struggled in vain to take a breath, I mutely cursed the men and women standing around me. How could they do this? I wondered, raging now, feeling myself slowly suffocating. It was a horrible sensation, much like what I’d felt the summer before when I came close to drowning in the Union River. But where bravado had buoyed me then, I was now driven purely by revenge. If I survived this, I railed, I would make Deschamps, and everyone else involved, pay dearly for what they’d done.

But the doctors were not in fact trying to kill me. What I was about to endure was much worse than death. Soon I felt a gloved hand on my mouth and the uncomfortable sensation of having a tube thrust into my throat. In an instant my lungs were filled with air. I heard the steady pumping of a ventilator and the ominous words, “He’s ready!” Someone swabbed my skin with benzoin, then stretched a sterile adhesive sheet across my abdomen. My God! I thought, struggling to communicate the fact that I was not yet numb. They’re about to perform surgery on me!

More than the sensation, the sound of the initial incision is something I will never forget. As the scalpel sliced through the sterile sheet and the skin below, it hissed angrily. In the instant that followed I felt nothing; then the white-hot pain hit me, the feeling of being torn open from my sternum to my pubic area. But this was nothing compared with what was to come.

After cutting me open, the surgeon proceeded to spread apart my abdominal cavity, tearing muscle and tendon. Abdominal surgery is not a delicate process, but rather requires brute force on the part of the surgeon. Think of a butcher taking apart a chicken.

It is impossible for me to accurately describe what I felt from this point on. I tried to call on my years of martial arts training to help me focus my mind away from the pain, but it was no use. The agony was so severe, so relentless, that it consumed me entirely, clattering in my head like the iron wheels of a steam locomotive. In my despair I turned to God, not for succor but out of blind rage, cursing him shamelessly for my suffering. I am not proud of the things I called him. In the years since, through extensive study of both Eastern and Western religions, I have come to believe in the essential goodness of God. But at that moment, I severed myself from him entirely.

So extreme was my agony and rage that the notion of time became utterly meaningless to me. I later learned that I endured three hours of surgery in this fully conscious state.

Pain wasn’t the only result of my treatment at the prison hospital. Not only did the surgical team botch the colostomy operation, but they also made the serious mistake of feeding me solid food just days after the surgery. As a result, I contracted acute peritonitis, an extremely serious condition in which the membrane that lines the abdominal cavity becomes infected. I was in agony, my abdomen swollen like a balloon from the bacteria and gases. Still, the hospital surgeon refused to give me pain medication, saying he was concerned that I would become drug-dependent.

To make matters even worse, I required several blood transfusions, the suppliers of which were the general Norfolk prison population, many of them intravenous drug users, many of these infected with hepatitis. By late summer of 1966 I had contracted hepatitis. In September my liver suffered a complete breakdown, sending me into a coma.

After repeated requests by my family that I be moved, I was finally transferred to Boston City Hospital in late September. At the time of my arrival I weighed 66 pounds, down from my normal weight of 135 pounds. The infection was now so severe that it had eaten a hole in my diaphragm. As a result, my entire thoracic cavity was riddled with abscesses. My one remaining kidney was also badly infected, as was my circulatory system. I was in such bad shape that the chief of staff immediately called the morgue to request a body bag.

Incredibly, he would not need it. Thanks to the herculean efforts of the medical staff, which included several operations, extensive medication, and grueling aftercare, I eventually made a full recovery.

Despite the severity of my condition and the intense and almost constant pain I was in, my stay at Boston City Hospital was relatively pleasant. During the month and a half I spent there I developed personal relationships with several of the staff members, including one of the young nurses assigned to care for me, and several of the guards in my security detail.

One of the men sent to keep watch over me was a state policeman named John Regan. Regan was a close friend of my father’s and had volunteered for the job as a favor to him. Though I had been introduced to Regan on several occasions, we were not especially close. But the time we spent together over the course of my long hospital stay changed that. The more I got to know Regan, the more I grew to like and admire him. My relationship with him would continue for years to come. Eventually he would become like a second father to me.

One of my other regular guards was a Suffolk County corrections officer named John Bergeron. At six foot four and nearly four hundred pounds, Bergeron looked like a cross between a sumo wrestler and an out-of-work Santa Claus. He was a naturally friendly man, with a sense of humor to match mine. We hit it off immediately and came to look forward to seeing each other. Bergeron especially loved hearing about my rock-and-roll escapades, and I happily obliged him with tales of raucous parties and crazed groupies.

As much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn’t stay at Boston City Hospital forever. In mid-December my doctors finally deemed me well enough to leave. It was a bittersweet pronouncement. Though I was relieved to have survived the physical ordeal that had begun so many months earlier, my release and subsequent transfer back into the care of the Suffolk County authorities meant I would now be awaiting trial in much less pleasant surroundings.

Today, the old Charles Street Jail has been reincarnated as a luxury hotel. Anyone with four hundred dollars to spare can spend a night between luxury sheets in their own private lockup, or dine on native oysters and Wagyu beef in the hotel’s cleverly named restaurant, Clink. But in 1967 the place was an unmitigated shithole.

Built in 1851 and seemingly unmaintained in the intervening years, the imposing granite structure housed more than two hundred cells, each a mere ten feet by eight feet in size, all linked to a ninety-foot central rotunda by a series of dramatic iron catwalks. At one time the jail served as a model for correctional facilities nationwide. But during my incarceration it was in a state of putrid decay, the first floor perpetually covered in several inches of standing water, the upper floors infested by giant rats and waterbugs the size of a man’s fist that had made their way over from the nearby Charles River. Many of the inmates were mentally ill, and their moans and screams could be heard nonstop.

Prisoners were literally pleading to get out of Charles Street, preferring to admit guilt and move on to the state system rather than go to trial and spend a few more months at the facility. In fact, the place was so squalid that the United States Supreme Court eventually ruled imprisonment there to be a violation of a person’s basic civil rights.

There was, however, one upside to my transfer to the jail. At the hospital I had been allowed visits only from close family members. At Charles Street my friends were able to come and see me as well. Those who did were shocked by what they saw. Though I had gained back some of the weight I’d lost while at Norfolk, I was still some forty pounds shy of my normal weight and nearly unrecognizable, even to those who knew me best. John Bergeron, my former guard from Boston City Hospital, occasionally dropped by my cell as well. His visits, along with my mother’s daily pilgrimages, provided a huge boost to my spirits.

Fortunately, I knew I wouldn’t be at Charles Street for long. My guilt in the Back Bay shooting was indisputable, and even I had to concede that a plea bargain was the best possible option. Since I wouldn’t be going to trial, I no longer needed the services of Al Farese, and was now being represented by a close friend of my father’s named John Irwin, who had offered to defend me for free.

Not long after arriving at the jail, I was taken to the Suffolk County Court House for my arraignment and bail hearing. The charges against me, stemming from the Back Bay shoot-out and other incidents, including the earlier police raid on my apartment in Revere, were numerous and included assault with intent to kill and several counts of assault with a dangerous weapon. After my successful escape in Maine, the guards weren’t taking any chances. I was led into the courtroom in handcuffs and chains, shackled to a fellow prisoner.

From my place in the dock I spotted a contingent of family and friends, all seated together in the second row back from the front of the courtroom. My attorney, John Irwin, was there, of course, along with my mother and father, my sister, Patsy, and two longtime family friends, Pat Hunt and Jackie O’Donal.

As we waited for the proceedings to begin, Irwin approached the dock and spoke to me.

“This is just a formality, Myles,” he said reassuringly. “Waive the formal reading of the indictments and plead not guilty.”

After Irwin had returned to his seat, my father rose and came forward. I had not seen much of him since my arrest. The hospital visits, I knew, were unbearably painful for him. And I certainly could not blame him for being reluctant to visit me in jail. No cop wants to see his son behind bars.

“How are you doing, Myles?” he asked.

His concern was so genuine that I felt instantly guilty for what I’d put him through. He was a good man, I thought, and hardly deserved this.

“Good, Dad,” I told him.

“You feelin’ okay?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been better. But yeah, I’m okay.”

“Do you see anyone you know here today?”

“Sure,” I answered, motioning to the array of familiar faces in the second row. “There’s Mom and Patsy, and Pat and Jackie.”

“Anyone else? Down there in the front row?”

I scanned the faces, quickly recognizing two MDC cops I knew from Revere. “Yeah,” I said, glaring at the men. “Nick Caselli and John Hurley.”

“Anyone else?” my father prodded.

I shook my head, puzzled by his line of questioning. The only other people in the front row of seats were a handful of teenage girls who I assumed were in the custody of Caselli and Hurley and, like me, awaiting arraignment.

My father returned to his seat. Not long after, following Irwin’s instructions, I entered my not guilty plea and, along with the poor fellow I was shackled to, was taken back to Charles Street. Though by all appearances it had been a routine day in court, my father’s questions regarding the identities of the girls in the front row of the courtroom continued to nag at me.

It was not until a week later, when John Bergeron came to visit me, that I finally understood why my father had been so persistent with his inquiry.

I knew in my gut that something was wrong as soon as Bergeron appeared on the catwalk outside my cell. Though he made an attempt at small talk, the normally easygoing guard was subdued and standoffish. He was carrying that morning’s edition of the Boston Herald-Traveler with him. I soon learned why.

“You made the papers again today,” he said after our initial, slightly awkward exchange.

“I did?” I asked, pleased, though hardly surprised. By then I had grown used to having my escapades reported on. A natural showman, I relished every minute of fame-or infamy. “What are they saying this time?”

Bergeron shrugged, clearly uncomfortable with the subject. “I’m not really sure,” he said at last.

“C’mon,” I pressed. “You read the article, didn’t you? What have I been up to now?”

“Something to do with a morals charge,” he said reluctantly, after a moment’s hesitation.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, feeling relieved, certain now that this was the lead-in to one of Bergeron’s signature bawdy jokes. I had never seen him deadpan so well.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “Something about underage girls in Revere.”

I looked him in the eye, still trying to get the joke in all of this. He turned away. Plainly, he was telling a difficult truth.

My mind raced back to every woman I’d been even vaguely involved with over the past several years. I’d had a number of girlfriends and plenty of short-term flings. But I was always careful to make sure everyone I dated was of legal age. There had been one instance where a girl had lied to me and I’d found out her real age after taking her out a few times, but I seriously doubted she would have gone to the police. Our parting had been amicable, and she had even introduced me to her parents. It was possible there might have been someone else like her about whom I had been ignorant.

“Let me see the paper,” I told Bergeron.

He passed it between the bars of my cell.

Reading the article, I quickly understood why Bergeron had been so reluctant to come to me. The police were claiming that I was a prime suspect for a violent rape on a young girl committed in the Revere area during the summer of 1965. In fact, I was being indicted for assault with intent to commit rape, commission of an unnatural act, and armed robbery of a minor. The article went on to say that Caselli and Hurley, the two detectives who had been at my arraignment hearing, were responsible for cracking the case, and that I had been identified by my accusers in a police lineup.

Rape is a despicable crime, rape of a young girl one of the foulest acts a person can commit. I felt physically ill at the thought of being linked to something so heinous. That I can be a stubborn son of a bitch with no fear and even less respect for authority is something to which I readily admit. But I have always lived by a strong code of ethics when it comes to civilians. I was loyal to the extreme to my family and friends, and roundtable chivalrous in my treatment of women.

My greatest fear at that moment was not the consequences these charges would have for me in prison, where being labeled a “skinner” carried severe, often deadly, penalties, but what my family and friends would think of me. How could I possibly look my mother in the eye knowing she had read this about me? I wondered desperately. I thought of all the people who would read the story and believe it: my old school chums, friends from Revere, ex-girlfriends, the young nurse at Boston City Hospital who had been so kind to me.

For a moment I was numb. Again, I tried to remember anything that might explain the horrid accusations. Finding nothing, I looked up at Bergeron.

“I’ve never done anything like that in my life, Mr. B.,” I said. “How the hell can they say that? Besides, I was never in any lineup.”

Bergeron’s posture softened. He knew and liked me well enough to want to believe me. “I know you’d never do this sort of thing, Myles,” he said. But I could tell he wasn’t sure what to think.

As I would soon find out, it’s a whole lot easier to tell a lie than to prove one wrong. That’s the dirty thing about accusations: once made, they stick, no matter how much proof to the contrary is produced.

Suddenly I understood: I’d been framed. My humiliation and horror turned to smoldering anger. That had to be it. Deschamps and his buddies from Revere, not content with the prospect of a twenty-year prison sentence, were determined to see me severely punished-perhaps even killed-by my fellow inmates.

The realization that I had been deliberately set up drove me into a blind fury. I exploded in my cell, ranting like a lunatic, cursing myself for having failed to kill each and every cop on the Marlborough Street rooftop, threatening Deschamps and the other two detectives, Caselli and Hurley, with unspeakable acts of violence. I was, literally, insane with rage. Because of my weakened physical condition, I had armed myself with a variety of homemade weapons, and I was fully prepared to use them on anyone stupid enough to even imply they thought I might be capable of the heinous crimes of which I had been accused.

As a result of the atrocious conditions we were all forced to endure, and the fact that most of the guards and inmates at Charles Street shared common backgrounds-working class Irish or Italian-there was a general sense of camaraderie at the jail. My friendship with Bergeron and the fact that my father was also a cop had served to further endear me to the staff. Up to that point I’d returned their goodwill by being a model prisoner, so the guards were understandably disturbed to see me so violently agitated.

A few hours into my tirade the guard captain, an old Irishman, came to my cell to inform me that he had called my father and my attorney, John Irwin, and that both men were on their way to see me.

“Myles,” he said, “for whatever it’s worth, no one here believes that stuff in the paper. We all know about your battles with the police and that this is their way of getting you back. Just realize we aren’t part of it. We’re not your enemies.”

The captain’s speech had a calming effect. I knew he was right and that I was taking out my frustration on the wrong people by lashing out at the Charles Street staff. But I was still seething.

When, half an hour later, I was taken from my cell to one of the conference rooms to meet with my father and John Irwin, I erupted once again, cursing the Boston police and the MDC, voicing my regrets over having let Deschamps and the others live. Eventually my rage ebbed and I realized the pain my words were causing my father. After all, he was one of them.

“I can understand why you’re so angry and upset,” my father said when I finally let him speak. “But don’t be. I know you didn’t do these things.”

“How can you say you know anything?” I asked. “It was in the goddamn paper. Even if you don’t believe it, everyone else will.”

My father laid his hand on my arm. I could tell he was struggling with the accusations, wanting more than anything to believe it was all a lie. “Remember when you were brought into court shackled to that other fellow?”

“Sure,” I answered, recalling my arraignment hearing.

“And you remember those girls in the front row with Caselli and Hurley?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that was your lineup. That girl had been brought in to pick you out as the person who assaulted her.”

Though the fact that Caselli and Hurley had conducted their lineup during my hearing was disturbing, I was nonetheless comforted by this revelation. Surely, I thought, the identifications wouldn’t hold up in court. You can’t just point out a shackled prisoner to a bunch of teenage girls and ask them if he’s a rapist. No judge in the world would allow this kind of testimony in his or her courtroom.

My father and I talked for a while longer, and by the time I returned to my cell I was feeling better. I was innocent, after all, and still possessed the false confidence of all innocent men.

John Irwin visited me several times over the next few weeks to discuss the details of my plea agreement. On his counsel, I eventually agreed to plead guilty to the several charges of assault with intent to murder-reduced from about ninety such charges-that had been brought against me in conjunction with the Back Bay shoot-out. In addition, I would also plead guilty to a handful of charges stemming from the contraband police had discovered during the raid on my Revere apartment. The charges included possession of a silencer, a pen gun, stolen goods, and counterfeit money. By all rights, I should have also been charged with possession of the explosive C-4, which the cops had found during the raid. But amazingly, they had failed to recognize the substance.

In return for my guilty plea, Irwin surmised, I would likely face a sentence of anywhere from seven to fifteen years in state prison, this to run concurrently with the time I had yet to serve for the Maine burglary and the jail escape. It was hardly ideal, but it seemed to be the best I could hope for under the circumstances.

Just days before my final court date and transfer to the state prison at Walpole, my attorney came to see me one last time. The prosecution had approached him with yet another offer.

“If you plead guilty to the statutory rape charge and the indecent assault and battery and unnatural acts charges,” Irwin informed me, “the Commonwealth will recommend a three-to-five-year sentence to run concurrent with the sentence you’re already serving.” He smiled enthusiastically. “It’s a gift with no downside risk.”

“A gift?” I was flabbergasted and insulted. “Do you really think I had anything to do with those crimes?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “But it doesn’t matter what I think. The prosecution has an eyewitness now, and it’s very hard to refute that kind of testimony.”

“I won’t do it,” I said. “I won’t plead guilty to a crime I know I didn’t commit, especially something like this.”

“Look, Myles,” Irwin persisted. “The costs associated with a trial like this are astronomical, and the odds of an acquittal at this point are slim to none. My advice to you is to take the deal. It won’t make any difference in your sentence.”

“I don’t care about my sentence or the cost,” I protested. In fact, I would have gladly doubled my sentence rather than plead to the morals charge. “I’m going to fight this. You can tell the goddamn cops and prosecutors who are behind this that they can go fuck themselves. Understand?”

Irwin nodded. “I do,” he said. “But I’m not so sure the same can be said for you.”