Aging former Boston mobster Vincent “The Animal” Ferrara is suing Attorney General Maura Healey, claiming the guv hopeful’s office wrongfully swiped a bunch of his money — and he wants it back.
Ferrara, now 73 and of Revere, alleges that Healey’s assistant attorneys general rolled in last September with a warrant and confiscated $268,000 across two bank accounts in his name as part of some sort of new enforcement operation.
This is the latest in a line of encounters between Ferrara and the law that have had a mixed bag of outcomes. Ferrara, a former “capo de regime” lieutenant in the Boston North End mob, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in the early 1990s on racketeering charges — only for the same judge 17 years later to spring him when it came to light that the prosecution had withheld key evidence related to a 1980s gangland slaying that was one of several charges he’d pleaded guilty in connection with.
Authorities then, just days before his probation was due to expire, came back at him with allegations that he’d been involved in an illicit Norfolk County bookmaking racket, but Ferrara beat that rap cleanly.
And now, according to Ferrara’s longtime lawyer Michael Natola, Ferrara might have thought he was out, but now it seems they’re trying to pull him back into the legal system through some sort of new investigation.
“They are trying to even a score that doesn’t exist,” Natola fumed to the Herald on Wednesday. “He beat them in a couple of different cases, and they’re trying to make up for that — they want to get him on something.”
Ferrara, according to the civil complaint filed last week in Suffolk Superior Court, was working in 2020 as a “facilitator” between a buyer and seller in a Boston real-estate deal that resulted in the seller — the complaint gives alliterative and statedly fake names like “Aaron Adams” for everyone else mentioned in the suit — paying him $250,000 “for his services.”
That bumped the amount in the two accounts in question to $268,000 when it mixed with money “that had been lawfully earned by Ferrara from business endeavors other than the purchase and sale of the Boston real estate, and from Social Security,” according to the complaint, which the septuagenarian former wiseguy certified under penalty of perjury.
“That money came from a legitimate business deal,” Natola said.
According to the suit, they had a search warrant but never told him why, or what was happening. Authorities ignored a letter in February demanding that they give the cash back.
Healey’s office told the Herald this is part of a “broad, ongoing criminal investigation” and declined to comment further.
Her criminal investigations unit — which Natola was very uncomplimentary of, calling it “totally redundant and superfluous” to local prosecutors — doesn’t normally make many headlines, with the civil unit doing most of the flashy work filing lawsuits.
There’s a hearing scheduled for 2 p.m. Monday in Suffolk Superior in which both sides have to make their case before a judge, who is deciding whether to issue an injunction.
“Vinny the Animal,” who “Black Mass” authors Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill described in their Whitey Bulger-centric book as combining “a degree in business administration from Boston College with ‘a taste for blood,'” was reported to be a made man in the North End “La Cosa Nostra” affiliate.
La Cosa Nostra, or LCN, is Italian for “the thing of ours” — a euphemism mafiosos used to describe organized crime when talking to each other. It’s become a common term for what’s considered the mafia.
The LCN chapter in Boston, which was something of a subsidiary of the larger Providence-based Patriarca crime family that spanned New England, was largely wiped out in the second of two sweeping enforcement operations.
After the one a decade earlier based in part on tips from Winter Hill gangsters James “Whitey” Bulger and Stevie “The Rifleman” Flemmi cleared out boss Jerry Angiulo, the feds came back with racketeering charges of 23 wiseguys in 1992 and 93 — many with similarly colorful sobriquets as “Vinny the Animal” — leading to guilty pleas across the board, including from Ferrara.
