Joseph Barbosa, earned the nickname “Animal” due to the violence with which he “worked” for the Mafia organization "La Cosa Nostra", in the USA
Being Portuguese stopped Joseph Barbosa's rise to the Italian mafia in the United States, but his funeral praise was in Portuguese, after being murdered for denouncing mobsters and exposing the FBI's complicity in his lies.
Joseph Barbosa was classified by the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Edgar Hoover, as "the most dangerous individual" that the police organization knew. The link between the two was to undermine the United States' judicial system after the arrest of several Mafia leaders.
The life of Joseph Barbosa, known as “Animal”, a nickname he won due to the violence with which he “worked” for the Mafia organization Cosa Nostra in the United States, is told by journalist Casey Sherman in a book that reveals “the true story of the Portuguese who he became the most feared murderer in the mafia ”and that the publisher Desassossego has just published.
The book Animal has almost 300 pages with details about the crimes of the Italian mafia that marked the 1960s and 1970s, namely in Boston, where most of the action takes place, at a time when the country was fighting the war in Vietnam and was fighting against organized crime.
“Second son of Portuguese-American parents, Joseph Barbosa Jr. was born on September 20, 1932 in New Bedford, Massachusetts,” writes the author. “Animal's” father was “part-time milkman and boxer [and] fought under the name of Jackie Wolgast”, while “his mother, Palmeda Camille Barbosa, worked in a hospital canteen and occasionally found work as a seamstress”.
It reads in the work that “the foundations of Barbosa's criminal career were built on the streets of New Bedford" where, having just reached his teens, “Joe gathered a small group of wandering bandits and, in the spirit of Oliver Twist, ran through the city stealing warehouses to sell the theft products ”.
At the age of 13, Joe Barbosa “found himself for the first time behind bars”, accused of “burglary with burglary”. Shortly afterwards he was sent to the Lyman School for Boys. "Barbosa took countless tugs, including a particularly violent punishment called" hot foot ", in which a head of accommodation repeatedly tapped the arch of a child's naked foot."
Several crimes and arrests followed, at a time marked by violence on the streets of Boston and the suburbs, with particularly macabre homicides, mostly alcohol-related.
Joe Barbosa was always "fascinated by the mafia, but he found himself looking outside". “After all, he was Portuguese”, writes the author, recalling that being Italian was essential to succeed in the organization: “he had long been in the frustrating agony of class envy, much like a Harvard Catholic or Jewish student, prohibited from joining the best social and academic clubs ”.
Barbosa's fame grew and gained the attention of the FBI, which had embraced the fight against organized crime, using informants.
When Joe realizes that he was arrested after being betrayed by the mobsters he trusted, he finds himself swearing revenge, particularly against the "godfather" of Cosa Nostra, Raymond Patriarca.
“Barbosa's commandments were simple: never harm women and children and never‘ bark ’friends or even enemies. Any help given to the FBI would violate all unwritten rules in the organized crime jungle. ”
Joe even tried to contact Raymond Patriarch, to which he responded with a death sentence. “The murder decree left him with no alternatives. The ‘Animal’ had to totally ally with the FBI, which it did, trying to destroy with its mouth what it didn’t achieve with fists or weapons ”.
When the collaboration was known, Joe was “reduced to tears at the way he was characterized by the newspapers”, which he nicknamed canary, snitch and turncoats. "For a mafia killer like Joe Barbosa, those were the worst insults imaginable."
Thanks to his testimony, the mafia chief and his enemy were arrested: “for the first time in history, a prominent figure of the mafia had been brought down only by the testimony of one of his men. The verdict proved the FBI's theory that the only way to defeat Cosa Nostra was to destroy it from the inside, ”writes Casey Sherman.
The list of Barbosa's denunciations also told lies. However, “Animal” was not alone in this farce, and in the following century, US justice ruled that “secret FBI documents had demonstrated that the agency was responsible for framing four innocent men for murder”. "The bulk of these documents consisted of memos that suggested that agents and employees, including Edgar Hoover, knew that their main witness, Joe" Animal "Barbosa, had lied in the testimony he had given."
The two convicts and the relatives of two other men who were convicted "sued the United States Department of Justice and were awarded compensation of $ 101.7 million, the largest compensation of its kind in American history."
Betrayed by an alleged friend, Joe died after being hit by more than 20 shotgun rounds, in the middle of the street, at the age of 43.
There were few who accompanied Barbosa to a cemetery in Massachusetts, where "the priest asked his brother if the family wanted him to pay his brother's eulogy in English". “No, father. Do it in Portuguese, please, ”asked Donald. “My brother was Portuguese”, it reads in the book, which can already be found in Portuguese bookstores.
