1.

THE PORTUGEE FROM NEW BEDFORD

“In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.”

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

On September 20, 1932, was born the infant destined to mutate into “one of the worst men on the face of the earth.” Joseph Barboza Jr. spent his first years in the small coastal city of New Bedford. This once-legendary former whaling port nestled on a North Atlantic peninsula. But Joe had selected an inopportune time to join this city’s oppressed and hard-toiling population. Eight decades before his arrival, the city was “perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England,” Herman Melville claimed. “It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine … nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.”

Had Joe been born a hundred years prior, his savagery and viciousness would hardly have drawn attention in a whaleship’s forecastle. There had been legal opportunities back then for fierce, bold men like him. However, before Joe arrived, the whalers’ staple game, the sperm and bowhead leviathans, grew very scarce. The Civil War and a run of Arctic disasters pared down New Bedford’s once-famous whaling fleet. In 1924, New Bedford’s last whaler of note, the Wanderer, had smashed into the shallows off Cuttyhunk Island during a gale. That had clearly marked the death and burial of Yankee whaling.

By the 1930s, New Bedford’s smart money had relocated into unheroic and unglamorous industries, such as textiles or railroads. Graceful ships’ masts went out; smokestacks replaced them. With muscle, blood, spindles, smoke, grime, and decaying grandeur to sustain it, New Bedford persisted in a second (or third) life. Its ugly factories crowded the skyline, and its dirty and overflowing tenements competed for space with the fine houses, banks, shipyards, and church spires of a prior era. In short, the onetime “City of Light” was like any other New England factory metropolis on the slide down.

At the time of Joe’s birth, the white leviathan sinking New Bedford was the Depression. In 1932, a local textile baron kindly loaned a desperate New Bedford $100,000 so it could make its payroll. But this was akin to applying a bandage to an incurable sore. Needless to say, a New Bedford working family’s life was then very harsh, only slightly better than a slave’s. Factory wages barely sustained life, and malnutrition and poverty killed off more children in New Bedford than in almost any other U.S. city. A favored child learned the useful skill of weaving from a parent, without pay. Hopefully, the apprentice lasted until age fourteen, when he started working legally and repaying the investment made in him.

The second Barboza child, Joe was about as isolated as one can get. In tiny compartmentalized New Bedford, the Portuguese managed to stand apart, clannish, with a separate tongue and unique flavor of Roman Catholicism. In that little hardscrabble community, Joseph Barboza Sr. managed an uneasy truce with his wife, Palmeda “Patty” Camile, with whom, for a while, he raised five children. Barboza eked out a subsistence living, and sometimes less, as a milkman and factory worker. For cash, he also boxed, proving “one of the best little 160-pounders” from the region. But Barboza was also a convicted petty criminal, with a taste for women and drink, and not exactly monogamous. He was also a wifebeater, and once scattered Patty’s front teeth with a blow.

In the long-suffering manner of the time, Patty pretended he was faithful. But the domestic misery was as contagious as measles. “The house we lived in was more of sorrow than of happiness,” as Joe later noted. “We were constantly on welfare.” One day, Joe came home and found his mother unconscious, with the gas jet on. Patty survived, but her mate abandoned the family completely.

Once, Patty ordered Joe to beg for his father to return home. While Patty waited on the street, the boy found Joseph Sr. outside in a yard with a woman he’d “shacked up” with.

“Get out of here, you little bastard,” his father said.

“The punk broke my heart,” the future career criminal admitted. Crying, Joe turned and ran down the street to his mother. Having a change of heart, Joseph Sr. drove after him and found him with his mother.

“He will never forget this,” Patty told her husband. Joe wept all the way home. Although Barboza bought Joe a pigeon, he didn’t return to the family flat.

Minus the family breadwinner, Patty also worked as a waitress and even shoplifted, for which she was arrested. Shunned by her husband, for solace, Patty clung to Joe and his brother—who were then running “wild.” Joe felt she used him as bait to keep something, any little bit, of her husband.

Joe never forgot his extreme poverty, nor how his mother had suffered through it. This unhappy childhood packed him with enough explosive rage for a lifetime. Aware he was a shuttlecock between his parents, Joe took to freely roaming the streets with other urchins. There, as he put it, “I had a better type of love.” And if his father ignored him, at least he could command the attention of New Bedford. Thus, Joe drifted steadily into wild waters. He started smoking at age seven; at fourteen, police arrested him, apparently for damaging an electronic streetcar signal.

Lacking a stable family at home, Joe created another type of family by forming a gang. Joe’s criminal apprenticeship moved from shoplifting to burglary. During the day, Joe’s crew would go window-shopping, and then return later to steal whatever items the members had coveted. In 1945, the police arrested Joe for breaking and entering, and at age fourteen, Joe graduated to the Lyman Reform School, a “hellhole” of constant brutality. Orderlies beat Joe and the other residents with belts and pick handles. But the house specialty on the pain menu was the “hot foot,” where orderlies struck the naked arch. To survive, Joe made himself the brawling champion of Lyman, getting into three hundred fights.

When released, he began to box in the ring.

“He was tough and strong,” noted a New Bedford boxing fan, “a real crowd pleaser who could take an opponent out with one punch—if he could hit him.” Few boxers wanted to mix with Joe, who was all attack without much defense. In one notable fight in a Boston arena, a lanky black middleweight knocked Joe down twice, but won by decision. “Actually, it was a hell of a fight; the guy beat Barboza only because he was the better sharpshooter and made his punches count,” a fan recalled years later. Against very good fighters, Joe had little chance at all. The incarcerated boxing great (and fellow psychopath) Bobby Quinn sparred in jail with young Joe. “I used to beat him till my hands hurt,” he recalled.

*   *   *

The state tried again to rehabilitate Joe, this time by sending him to a...