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work was better off staying in the shadows. So he decided to get better at being unobtrusive.
    By the time Cresta returned to Boston’s streets in 1959, there weren’t many locks he couldn’t pick or alarms he couldn’t disable successfully. Phil had also become adept at making perfect molds of keys, a talent that had many uses. He began working his new skills.
    At some point around this time he also made an enemy who vowed to bring him down, a sergeant in the police department of Arlington, a bedroom community about six miles outside Boston. Nobody knows, or at least nobody is saying, why Sergeant Jim Doherty hated Phil Cresta so much.
    Doherty did his utmost to make Phil’s life miserable and, to a degree, he succeeded. It became routine for Doherty to drive into Boston, pick Phil up, not charge him with any crime, beat him up, and leave him bloodied.
Miranda
, of course, had not yet come to court. The only Miranda Doherty knew of was Carmen Miranda, the woman who danced with bananas on her head. Doherty knew he had no police authority in Boston, but he harassed Cresta there anyway.
    Phil retaliated with psychological warfare. Every time a severe rain- or snowstorm hit the Boston area, Cresta would drive to Arlington, pick the lock of Doherty’s car, roll down all the windows, and then return to Boston. After Sergeant Doherty’s shift was finished, he’d find his car’s interior completely drenched. He must have felt as if a permanent rain cloud were following him. For, despite his efforts to hide his car, Phil always managed to find it and go through his ritual.
    Sergeant Doherty wasn’t the only cop who knew that Phil Cresta was more than a car salesman, but few were able to discover exactly what he did for his “real” job, now that the dinerwas long closed. Phil received some unwanted publicity when on November 12, 1959, a worker in the Everett dump found the body of Joseph “Angie” DeMarco. A well-known North End criminal, DeMarco was found lying faceup, with six bullets in his head. His body was covered with wooden crates and rubble. “He definitely wasn’t killed in Everett,” Lieutenant Henry Fitzgerald of the Everett Police Department told the
Boston Herald
. “His body was dumped here by his attackers.” DeMarco had last been seen at an after-hours joint in Boston called the Coliseum, which was owned by the Mafia. The last person he was seen talking to was Phil Cresta.
    Middlesex District Attorney John Droney was aware of the public’s fascination with the Mafia and did not let go of the story until he’d milked it dry. He called the DeMarco slaying a gangland execution, and assured reporters that he was not going to stand by and watch Middlesex County become a dumping ground for “racketeers, dope peddlers, loan sharks, and other hoodlums.” DeMarco’s background was publicized: he had spent the better part of his forty-two years in prison. In 1943 he had been sentenced to fifteen to twenty years for manslaughter; he was released in 1955. Three years later he was arrested and sent away briefly for carrying a concealed weapon. He was released in November 1958, but was back in jail in March 1959, this time after a wild auto chase. The grand jury proceedings on the DeMarco killing became more of a media show than an inquiry.
    When the grand jury convened in Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge, they called six witnesses: Jerry Angiulo; Larry Baione, who would later become an underboss in the Angiulo syndicate; Phil Waggenheim, who was a notorious contract killer; Henry Noyes, a well-known Mafia member; Peter Jordan, the former mayor of Revere; and a young upstart named Phil Cresta Jr. It was pretty heady company for the former North End kid.
    Years later Cresta would say callously, “Angie DeMarco was a piece of shit, a low-life scumbag who couldn’t be trusted. He’dstarted robbing Angiulo’s