![]() ![]() He once chewed off part of a man’s cheek and spit it out during a fight and gnawed on a piece of a man’s skull that blew off when he shot him. Sadistic enforcerĪs an intimidator, Barboza won the nickname “The Animal” for the viciousness he displayed on the street to collect late loan payments. Barboza boasted of making $5,500 a week on the “vig” or interest on his cash loans given out to inveterate gamblers and others on one street corner in Boston. At first he worked for the mostly ethnic Irish Dudley Street Crew. In court in 1968, he claimed he started off as a gang enforcer and loanshark in about 1961. Burglary and other arrests as a young man got him eight years in prison in the 1950s. He tried his hand unsuccessfully as a prizefighter, but the brutal skills he learned came in handy. Over the years, the strong, hulking, jut-jawed Barboza developed into a living, breathing Hollywood caricature of a Mob thug. ![]() Not only that, Barboza became the first Cosa Nostra associate to provide testimony in court against the Mob.īarboza, who legally changed his name to Baron in 1964, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1932 to a family of second-generation Portuguese immigrants, a fact that always made him feel left out, since his lack of Sicilian or Italian blood meant backhanded acceptance into the mobster fold only as an associate, never a made man. To safeguard him, the feds created the Witness Protection Program. Barboza had agreed to turn informant and testified against both Angiulo and Patriarca in 1968. And he accomplished the whole pot.”įor Angiulo, the hit on Barboza represented the end to The Animal’s life as a “stool pigeon” for the federal government. There, he couldn’t get in touch with nobody. I was with him every day,” Zannino told Angiulo. Zannino spoke respectfully of Russo in orchestrating the Bay Area hit, calling him “a brilliant guy.” Zannino also implicated himself as a shooter in the murder. The two men responsible for Barboza’s murder remained unknown until the FBI listened to bugged conservations by Angiulo and Zannino in 1981 in their social club near the Old North Church in Boston. As Barboza approached his parked car and pulled out his key, a van rolled up fast and Zannino and Russo at almost point-blank range fired four shotgun blasts at him through an open door. Zannino and Mob soldier Joseph Russo to watch for when Barboza left Chalmas’ residence near the corner of 25th Avenue and Moraga Street. He had been set up - by Chalmas, who earlier tipped off Patriarca family underboss Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo.Īngiulo sent caporegime Ilario M.A. Add to that the fact he’d been an FBI informant and trial witness years earlier and the first person admitted into the federal Witness Protection Program.īut on February 11, 1976, Barboza, once assigned by the feds to live in Santa Rosa, California, under the name Joe Denati, went to visit his old friend and Mob associate James Chalmas in San Francisco’s sleepy Sunset District. Trapping ‘The Animal’īased on his years as a crazed hitman, street loan collector and intimidator for Raymond Patriarca’s New England Mafia, Joe “The Animal” Barboza should have recognized he might have been set up. ![]() The Top 5 are: “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, Roy DeMeo, Joe “The Animal” Barboza and Giovanni Brusca. The richness of the stories, the amount of dependable research material and how the individuals fit into the greater context of their times mattered more to us than the number of victims they chalked up. ![]() Our selections are limited and the methodology subjective. In this fourth installment in our series on the Top 5 most notorious Mob hitmen, the focus shifts to the Boston area in the 1960s, when several dozen people died in an inter-gang war and the feds went too far in courting a turncoat. Joe “The Animal” Barboza was a hitman for Raymond Patriarca’s New England crime family in the 1960s. ![]()
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