CRIME: The Big Payoff

Late one night last week, a slight, balding man with a hawklike nose, wearing a sharp gabardine suit and the air of an English butler, emerged from the jailer’s office at the East Cambridge, Mass, jail and barked, “Gimme an aspirin, will you?” He was Joseph James (“Specs”) O’Keefe, 47, and he had been talking almost continuously for three days. Outside, on the streets of Boston and all over the U.S., newspapers repeated Specs’ story in huge headlines and minute detail; after six years, the $2,775,395 Brink’s Inc. robbery, the largest cash haul in U.S. history, was solved.

Eleven Hoods. O’Keefe’s disclosures were just as fantastic as the known details of the robbery. The near-perfect crime had been committed by eleven Boston hoods, all of them veteran criminals. It had been painstakingly planned for 18 months, carefully rehearsed in several “dry runs” at the scene of the big crime. By the evening of the big heist, each member of the gang was letter-perfect in his role.

The scenario had been carefully prepared by the gang leader, fat Anthony Pino, 48, an alien from Sicily whose criminal record ranges from molesting a young girl to stealing a dozen golf balls, and whose oafish manner covers a keen intelligence. Before he was ready to stage the robbery, Pino carefully picked his cast and cased the North Terminal Garage (the Brink’s headquarters) many times, figuring escape routes and systematically noting schedules and shipments of money. He learned exactly where the big money was stored, went over every foot of the establishment after closing hours. Under the noses of lax Brink’s watchmen, he and his henchmen padded about the place in stocking feet, learning which way each door swung, locating the main vaults, honing their strategy. In their exacting research, the gang broke into a burglar-alarm company one night, and carefully studied the Brink’s alarm system. Every lock barrel on every door along their route through the Brink’s building was removed by the gang during their nightly visits, fitted with keys, and reinstalled in the doors before morning with such skill and skulduggery that nothing was suspected. An awed detective who listened to Specs O’Keefe’s story said that the planning of the crime reminded him “of those people on The $64,000 Question who know all there is to know about something.”

After one final dry run on D-minus-one, the gang was ready. “During the early evening of Jan. 17, 1950,” said the FBI’s announcement, “members of the gang met in the Roxbury section of Boston and entered the rear of a Ford stake-body truck, which had been stolen in Boston in November 1949 to be used in the robbery. Including the driver, this truck carried nine members of the gang to the scene. During the trip, seven of the men donned

Navy-type peacoats and chauffeurs’ caps, which were in the truck. Each also was given a pistol and a Halloween-type mask; each had gloves and wore either crepe-sole shoes or rubbers so their footsteps would be muffled.

“As they approached the Brink’s building, they looked for a signal from the lookout on the roof of a Prince Street building. He previously had arrived in a stolen Ford sedan. After receiving the go-ahead signal, seven members of the gang left the truck and walked through a playground to the Prince Street entrance of Brink’s. Using the outside door key they previously had obtained, the men quickly entered and donned the masks.” Big Tony Pino and his driver remained outside in the truck, with the motor idling.

Using their specially made keys, the seven robbers made their way through five doors to the second-floor vault, where five Brink’s men were busy counting the day’s cash. Confronted with seven short-nosed pistols, the Brink’s men surrendered without a fight. After tying and gagging them, the gang methodically began to stuff $1,218,211.29 in cash and $1,557,183.83 in checks, money orders and securities into burlap sacks they carried with them. While they worked, a buzzer went off. O’Keefe removed the adhesive-tape gag from Cashier Thomas B. Lloyd’s mouth, asked him what it was. Lloyd said that it was another Brink’s employee. The newcomer was admitted to the vault, bound and gagged with the others. As they were leaving with their bulging bags, the gang noticed a large, locked strongbox. They debated taking it along, decided against it. Later, in the newspapers, they learned that the strongbox contained another $1,000,000 in cash, the General Electric payroll.

After 20 minutes in the building, the robbers made their getaway, drove to the Roxbury home of Adolph (“Jazz”) Maffie, 44, quickly discovered that they had too much money to count in one night. Joseph McGinnis, 52, the eleventh member of the gang, took the pea jackets, caps, false faces and about $100,000 in new and traceable currency away to burn, and the others dispersed (McGinnis, the gang treasurer, had spent the evening in a restaurant, talking to a detective and establishing a foolproof alibi). Two months after the crime, police found the remains of the truck, carefully minced by an acetylene torch and buried in a dump near O’Keefe’s home.

No Honor Among Thieves. The case was ultimately broken by hard, routine investigation by the FBI and Boston police, and by a certain lack of honor among thieves. In two divisions of the loot, O’Keefe said, he was gypped out of $62,000. When he threatened reprisals, he was shot at twice in the streets of Dorchester. Then Bookie John H. Carlson, a close friend and confidant of O’Keefe’s, suddenly vanished—apparently the victim of a “ride.” Sixteen months ago Specs O’Keefe went back to jail in Springfield for gun-carrying and violation of parole. Brooding there last week, he decided to sing.

While O’Keefe told his story, the agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation rounded up Tony Pino and five other members of the gang (two, including O’Keefe, were already in jail, one was dead of natural causes, and the remaining two were still at large). O’Keefe’s story was no surprise to the FBI and police. For five years they have been frustratingly familiar with many of the details of the crime, and all but one of the eleven gang members (Fugitive James Ignatius Flaherty, 44, a bartender, burglar and escape artist) have been primary suspects. In 1953 a federal grand jury refused to indict the ten for lack of legally admissible evidence. A year later Joseph F. Dineen, 57, a veteran Boston police reporter, wrote under the guise of “fiction” a magazine article and a book giving a highly accurate account of the crime and the criminals. Said one investigator last week: “We had all the pieces to the puzzle for a long time and knew pretty well how they went together, but we didn’t have anything to make them stay together until O’Keefe talked.”

After listening to Specs O’Keefe, a Suffolk County grand jury speedily indicted the entire gang on 148 counts. The indictments came just four days before the Massachusetts statute of limitations expired.* Still notably missing, though, was one important item of evidence. Not a penny of the missing millions has been recovered.

*Last year the Massachusetts legislature extended the statute of limitations on robbery from six to nine years, largely as a result of the Brink’s case. But a great many lawyers doubted that the extension would have applied to the Brink’s robbery, since it occurred before the extension.