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Kennedy’s being sworn in, and his inauguration speech.”
    If someone had been watching the area that day, that person would have seen a trench-coated man stop at a parking meter, open his suitcase, and take out a hacksaw. He then very quickly sawed through the pole, just below the meter, as he kept an eye out for possible witnesses, snowplows, or police vehicles. There were none. Once the top of the parking meter was free, the man placed it in his suitcase and continued his stroll through downtown Boston.
    After he had cut the heads off three parking meters, Phil headed back to the warmth of his favorite North End social club on Hanover Street. “I was frozen by the time I got to the North End, but I knew I had what I’d come for, which made the trip a little easier,” Phil said. “As I walked into the club, there were about fifteen wise guys hanging in front of the TV, watching the Kennedy stuff. They looked at me like I was crazy to be out in that kind of weather, and when I opened the suitcase, they
really
thought I was crazy.” Phil laughed.
    The puzzled onlookers watched in amazement as Cresta brazenly dropped the three parking meter heads on a card table. The puzzlement quickly turned to scorn. “Hey, big fucking score, Cresta, you gutta have at least a double sawbuck in there,” one guy yelled out as everyone laughed with the speaker. “Hey, Phil, ya get caught with that and you do life with no ticket,” a well-known mob figure screamed. “No ticket, ya get it?” In the parlance of Walpole State Prison, where most of the guys in that room had spent some time, a ticket was more formally known as parole.
    â€œI stayed in that zoo just long enough to get warm and then I loaded the three meters back into the suitcase and screwed,” Phil said. “Where ya going, Cresta, on ya honeymoon?” “What ya gut, a new sex toy?” some of the goons called out as Philclosed the door behind him. They may have all thought that Phil had lost his marbles, but the laughter soon turned to jealousy when Phil Cresta became Boston’s most wanted scofflaw.
    The day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was sworn in as President of the United States, Phil Cresta took a cab from his home in Lynn, where he was living at that time with his wife Dorothy and his four children, to Logan International Airport in East Boston. He had in his possession one black suitcase. With his newspaper, suitcase, and boarding pass for a flight to Chicago, he looked like any normal passenger. But while other passengers’ suitcases contained clothes and personal items, Phil Cresta’s contained items that belonged to the City of Boston. By this time, though his sister had not yet married Augie Circella, Phil had some very good friends in Chicago’s syndicate, a hugely profitable corporation grown out of the efforts of people like Al Capone, Frank Nitti, and Tony Accardo. Nobody in Boston’s mob could hold a candle to Chicago, and nobody could “smoke” (duplicate) keys like the Chicago guys.
    While serving time, Phil had become captivated with cons who were called “picks” by the other cons. Picks weren’t the biggest or the toughest prisoners; in fact, they looked like accountants or businessmen. But they impressed Phil with their expertise and with the fact that they didn’t tend to get rubbed out like the mob’s heavies did. Cresta was close to six feet tall and his weight, though it fluctuated, averaged about 190 pounds. He was as tough as any con in prison, but though he didn’t graduate from high school, he was intelligent enough to see that learning to pick locks was a win-win situation. He decided in prison to become the best pickman in Boston.
    As Phil later said, “I could’ve been muscle for anybody in the United States, but those guys, like Barboza and DeMarco, always wind up with a bullet behind their ear, and that wasn’t going