Last week’s arrest of Spucky Spagnolo made it official: The Mafia around here sleeps with the fishes.
Spucky, the feds assure us, is acting boss of not just the Boston mob, but the whole flippin’ family out of Providence, the New England mob.
Acting boss. I like that. As if the local branch of La Cosa Nostra has retained PricewaterhouseCoopers to lead a nationwide search to find a suitable permanent boss.
Here’s the ad: Are you management material? Do you like Jerry Vale? Does at least one of your grandmothers come from Palermo? When you toss your car keys to the valet are you overcome by an ineffable urge to smack him in the groin and say, ‘Badda boom’? Well, have we got the job for you!”
This isn’t your grandfather’s Mafia. It’s your grandfather. These guys aren’t Goodfellas. They’re Oldfellas.
Spucky is 72 now, but back in the day he was a serious wiseguy. The feds claim he was a hitman. He used to run with Bobby Carrozza and Bobby’s stepbrother, J.R. Russo. Joe Russo was the Bobby Thomson of the Boston mob, the man who got the biggest hit ever for The Outfit in the North End: He whacked Joe Barboza, a thug-turned-stool pigeon who testified against, among others, Boston underboss Jerry Angiulo.
Of course, almost everything Joe Barboza said, egged on by the FBI, was a lie, and he framed four guys for a murder they didn’t do.
Anyway, the point is Joe Russo clipped Joe Barboza, which put him in the local wiseguy hall of fame, and Spucky used to bask in that reflected glory. It was good for business.
Spucky lived a charmed life. When he was an up and comer, he was with Bobby Carrozza and Freddie Simone in a car the cops stopped outside a Revere nightclub. The club owner had just been beaten up, and Spucky and his pals matched the description of the attackers. When the cops found two guns under the car seats, Spucky and the boys looked at each other with wide eyes and said, “How’d those get there?”
Still, they beat the rap. I’ll never forget the words of Alan Chapman, Spucky’s lawyer, in pleading his innocence.
“You have nothing here,” Al told the jury, “but a lot of suspicious facts.”
That kind of summarizes Spucky’s life: a lot of suspicious facts.
In 1990, Spucky was among those who got nailed after participating in a Mafia induction ceremony where they burned the card of a saint at a house in Medford.
These days, the Mafia might as well burn an AARP card at the Moose Lodge in Revere.
Spucky ended up getting nine years for racketeering and drug dealing, but, God love him, he refused to admit he was in the Mafia. Spucky’s a stand up guy. Omerta still means something to Spucky.
Like all wiseguys, when he got out, the thought of perhaps getting a legitimate job didn’t cross his mind. That would be humiliating.
Still, there was more than a whiff of humiliation in the indictment unsealed last week accusing Spucky and one of his soldiers, Pryce Quintina, of threatening guys at the Moose Lodge in Revere over video poker games.
Bosses, acting or otherwise, used to be insulated from doing the dirty work. Now the only insulation they have is in their attics.
At the sprightly age of 74, Pryce Quintina might be the most aptly named gangster around here since the 400-pound Vincent “Fat Vinny” Roberto: His nickname is Stretch, and he and Spucky look like they’re about to do one.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.