Anthony Spagnolo, the longtime wiseguy known as Spucky who rose through attrition to become acting boss of the New England Mafia, died on Tuesday at his home in East Boston. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by his lawyer, Tracy Miner, who declined to give a cause. Kevin Cullen, a Boston Globe columnist, wrote that Mr. Spagnolo’s passing was also the passing of the Boston mob he served, an outfit that by the end had dwindled to sports betting and small scams before legalized gambling took even that away.
Mr. Spagnolo became acting boss of the Patriarca crime family in 2012. The family was headquartered in Providence, R.I., and Boston was one of its fiefdoms. By then, Cullen wrote, there were not many made members left, and bosses who once delegated the dirty work had to do it themselves. In 2014, Mr. Spagnolo and a soldier named Pryce “Stretch” Quintina were charged with threatening men at the Moose Lodge in Revere over illegal video poker games.
Federal authorities claimed Mr. Spagnolo was a lookout and getaway driver in one of the most storied hits in New England mob history: the 1976 killing in San Francisco of Joe Barboza, a feared enforcer turned government witness whose F.B.I.-coached testimony had helped convict, among others, the Boston underboss Jerry Angiulo, and had framed four men for a murder they did not commit. Joe Russo, a friend of Mr. Spagnolo’s, was convicted of the Barboza killing. Mr. Spagnolo was never charged.
In 1981, the authorities said, Mr. Spagnolo was in a car stopped by the police outside a Revere nightclub whose owner had just been beaten. Officers found two guns under the seats. The four men in the car beat the rap. His lawyer at the time, Alan Chapman, told the jury, “You have nothing here, but a lot of suspicious facts.”
What secured Mr. Spagnolo’s place in mob history was the Mafia induction ceremony he attended in Medford in 1989, presided over by the family’s boss at the time, Raymond Patriarca Jr. The F.B.I. recorded it. The tapes led to a wave of indictments, Mr. Spagnolo’s among them in 1991, and federal prosecutors used the recordings for decades to prove in court that the Mafia existed. He received nine years for racketeering and drug dealing. He never acknowledged being in the mob, or that there was a mob at all.
Cullen noted the irony: Mr. Patriarca routinely called in to Providence radio talk shows, which made it easy for agents to identify his voice on the bugs planted at the ceremony.
At that ceremony, Mr. Spagnolo watched as the newly inducted burned the card of a saint, the old oath-taking rite. Cullen’s column ended on what has become of it all. “These days, the Mafia might as well burn an AARP card at the Moose Lodge in Revere.”