**Inside the Town of Bank Robbers: These Professional Thieves Turned Into Killers**
“Get down. Get down. Get down.”
There’s always an urgency when you’re dealing with armed criminals.
“Get your hands up.”
This was an extremely dangerous crew.
They were well rehearsed and well planned.
They were heavily armed. They were prepared to do battles.
There’s a matter of time before someone gets hurt.
They were just awful human beings. We need to take these guys off as quickly as we possibly can.
“Here he comes. It’s on.”
Adrenaline-fueled manhunts, tactical takedowns, high-stakes games of cat and mouse. Across America, elite teams of FBI agents are on a mission to hunt down the most wanted criminals in the country. Every day they put their lives at risk to save yours. This is law enforcement to the extreme. This is FBI takedowns.
All’s been quiet on this beautiful day in the Boston area. When a routine armored car pickup proves to be anything but.
“Your hands up. Your hands up. Hands up.”
“Don’t be a cowboy.”
The first robber’s job was to gain control of the courier. The second robber would disarm the courier. The third robber’s job was to disarm the driver. They were heavily armed. They were prepared to do battle if they had to.
In an armored car robbery, you always know that the people who work for the armored car company are armed themselves. The robbers that did these, they knew their business, and they knew it well.
This crew was quick. They wanted to go in and get out, do the robbery, and get away.
Shocking as it is, the robbery in Lynn, Massachusetts is just one of many in the Boston area in the early 90s. This is a time when armored cars are getting knocked off at a startling rate, three times more than most states.
“Two suspects were waiting in the Bank of Boston lobby.”
“An armored car was hijacked as it pulled into it.”
An extremely dangerous problem that the Boston FBI field office responds to by forming a specialized bank robbery task force.
So when there was a bank robbery or armored car robbery in our area of responsibility, we would get a phone call.
“All right. So…”
There’s always an urgency when you’re dealing with armed criminals because you just don’t know when things are going to go wrong and innocent people are going to be hurt or killed.
So on the day 500 grand is swiped from the armored car in Lynn, the task force quickly descends on the scene.
“My height, they were wearing masks. I couldn’t see. The assault vehicle was a minivan. They darkened the windows so that nobody could see in. They stripped the seats out so that there would be room for the assault crew.”
Full Halloween masks that completely obscure their identity.
They were professionals.
A fact they confirm across town a few hours later with the discovery of the getaway car.
The inside is completely burned out. That would cover up any type of evidence that might be left behind, like fingerprints or DNA, hair, things that could be discovered by forensics examiners.
These guys struck fast before disappearing in a puff of smoke.
“We got handicap plates.”
“We got masks. It’s got to be the same group.”
All signs point directly to one notorious Boston neighborhood.
It was well known amongst law enforcement when you had a robbery that was sophisticated and well planned or an armored car robbery and that it was very likely Charlestown.
Most of Charlestown is a typical blue-collar suburb, but a small group earns the area its reputation.
Historically, there have been a lot of bank robbers from Charlestown. We would start there to find out who was responsible.
I was told as a young new agent, the reason why Charlestown had such a large bank and armored car robbery presence was because the old Boston State prison had been in Charlestown. And a lot of the families had moved into Charlestown to be close to the inmates to visit them. And once the inmates actually got out of jail, they decided to take up roots and stay.
Charlestown has a rich history of being a very close-knit almost tribal neighborhood. It was a very Irish enclave. It was one of the most focused places in the country. It’s only one mile square and people lived there for generations and they just never leave. You had several families wherein the trade of bank robbery, armored car robbery, petty thievery was passed down from one generation to the next generation.
Becoming a good bank robber was like a right of passage for that small element in Charlestown.
For better or worse, Charlestown residents fiercely protect their neighborhood industry.
“Hey guys, can I speak to you for a minute?”
It was pretty well known as a town that had a code of silence. Very few people would give information about those robbers for whatever reason, whether it was an admiration for them or a fear of them.
“You guys know anything about some robberies in the area?”
Sometimes they would walk away. Sometimes they would just not answer the question or just let you know that they were not interested in cooperating.
Individuals from Charlestown would not rat, would not snitch.
That made it very, very difficult because nobody wanted to testify.
“Code of silence, man. Come on, man. Come on. Get out of here, cop.”
So, code of silence became something that you would hear people say on the streets. It was like a mocking way of saying, “Screw you. Don’t bug me.”
Agents canvasing the area for information about the robbery in Lynn get nowhere fast. 5 months later, to no one’s surprise, there’s another armored car heist whose resemblance to the one in Lynn is uncanny. Though, this one is a little more polished than the one before.
Typically, the best parking spots are handicap spots. So, they would park there because armored car would park near the front door because the armored car guards and couriers want to spend as little time as possible between the business and the truck. They were well rehearsed and well planned. They cased their robberies. They did their surveillance. They had stolen cars and usually a switch car. They wore masks. They wore gloves. They didn’t leave any evidence behind. They would always try and have a second set of athletic gear that they could strip off after the robbery so they could alter their appearance.
The brazen criminals even have a backup plan in case the flames leave anything behind. They would try and salt evidence. Like for example, they had obtained hair from the floor of a barber shop and they spread that inside the getaway vehicles to contaminate any potential evidence.
They had done enough robberies where they had frankly gotten very good at it. It’s not going to be the amateur things where, you know, one calls another by his name or something.
Even so, agents think they’ve got a beat on who the operations ringleader is.
Anthony Shea was a professional bank robber, a professional armored car robber.
We had information that Anthony Shea was active at the time, so that made it likely that he was involved in that robbery and we assumed he was involved in subsequent robberies as well.
Anthony would be meticulous in scoping out his locations. And his reason for being so meticulous. A six-year stint in prison following a bank robbery conviction in the early 80s. It’s a place he swears he’ll never go back to.
In the early ’90s, a lot of bank robberies were committed by guys using presidential masks. And Anthony always talked about the fact that this was the reason why the movie Point Break had been made because he was the first to go out and actually use these masks.
If Shea’s their man, the FBI has got to bring him in soon. If he remains free, there’s real danger someone might get killed.
Anthony Shea was ruthless in the sense that he would have no problem pulling a gun and shooting at somebody.
“All right, moving along. Let’s go. Let’s go.”
As a string of armored car heists in and around Boston reach historic levels, the FBI’s Boston bank robbery task force has reason to believe notorious bank robber Anthony Shea and his crew are somehow involved. Though there’s no tangible evidence Shea is behind these recent jobs, they bear a striking similarity to the Minutemen robberies he was involved in several years earlier.
“We got one minute. You’re going to count us down.”
The Minute Man robberies was a moniker that was given to a series of robberies that were committed by Anthony Shea, Mattie McDonald, and criminal associates.
“Get down. Get down. Get out. Put your hands up.”
They did what we called a takeover robbery. Typically what that meant is the robbers were over the counter trying to get into the vault getting behind the teller line to get more money. What characterized these robberies was the amount of planning and the type of planning that went into each one. Anthony Shea would head directly towards the vault. Mattie McDonald would scoop the cash out of the teller drawers and then they would have a third hold the floor with a stopwatch.
“45 seconds.”
He would be calling out times because they wanted to be in and out of the bank under a minute.
“30 seconds.”
That’s how the Minuteman robberies got the name. They would go in, get the money, and get out of there so that the odds of being caught during the robbery would be far less than with an untrained crew.
“15 seconds.”
“Let’s go. Let’s go.”
Everything was planned out and it wasn’t something that they lingered on the scene very long at all.
“Right on schedule.”
Two years later, it appears the Minutemen have graduated from terrorizing defenseless bank tellers to knocking off armored cars.
That’s just the way they do it in Charlestown.
It was a strong tradition up in that area to progress from bank robberies into armored cars.
They would be able to obtain more loot if they were able to get into the armored car and take the bags the armored car was delivering or picking up.
Boosting armored cars means tangling with armed guards, which immediately amps up the violence potential, not a game for amateurs.
“So, a ths.”
With Shea and McDonald on its radar, the task force puts them under surveillance and starts compiling a list of other likely Minutemen.
“Uh, you got any skills?”
Anthony Shea was a very smart, cunning individual. He was very deliberate in everything that he did. He was very cautious. He was reluctant to take just anybody in his inner circle.
And then Steven Burke. Steven Burke was another very intelligent, low-key individual. He was one of the individuals that Shea loved to work with because he was so good. He was basically the architect of the switch from bank robberies to armored car robberies.
McGonagle was an older guy. He was what we call a 10-percenter. He would set up the job for 10% of the take.
Michael O’Halerin had grown up in Charlestown and had done time in federal prison for bank robberies. His nickname was the quiet man because you never knew he was around. You never knew he was involved in anything.
The real wild card in the crew is Shea’s right-hand man, Mattie McDonald. He has a sordid violent history.
Mattie McDonald was just a stone cold junkie. Mattie McDonald had been convicted in 1979 of murdering a criminal associate in Charlestown and he was released after serving 10 years of an 18-year sentence. That’s when he hooked up with Anthony Shea.
Agents know so much about the crew, who they are, where they live, how they operate, but they don’t know where they’ll strike next or how to catch them.
Surveillances in Charlestown were tough to do. We kind of stood out out there. It was just a very tough place because it’s so condensed and it’s one of those communities where everyone knows everybody.
But for the agents responsible for solving these crimes, it’s not the only thing handcuffing their investigation.
They weren’t the only guys robbing armored cars.
There were a lot of investigations going on in the Boston FBI office at that time. So, in some periods of time, they were under surveillance. Other periods they weren’t as something else would come up and the surveillance squad would be working something else.
For the Minutemen, this business model works. So, it’s only a matter of time before payday rolls around again.
That’s what they do for a living. They rob armored cars and they rob banks. You have to do some to keep the money flowing. Would rob an armored car in a bank and depending on how successful they were, you could sort of gauge when you might expect them to do another one.
After the Seabrook heist in ’93, the crew takes down two more armored cars around the Boston area in January and March of ’94. 5 months later, the FBI suspects their funds are starting to run low, meaning the next heist is just around the corner.
At 9:15 a.m. that morning, the armored car arrived. The courier exited the vehicle, went into the bank, made some deliveries.
“Okay, we got 45 seconds on this.”
They were doing more robberies, and the more you do, the more likely it is that there’s going to be violence. It almost always feels that there’s a matter of time before someone gets hurt.
For nearly 2 years, a specialized FBI task force has been trying to bring down a notorious gang of professional armed bandits when the unthinkable happens.
The courier exited and opened the door.
At that point, the assault crew jumped from the minivan. The first robber got the drop on the courier.
“Robbery.”
Almost immediately, a shot is heard and one of the guards goes down.
The courier reached for his weapon. So, he was shot and thrown into the minivan.
Then, one of the individuals in the crew made their way into the armored car. Steven Burke entered the driving compartment and got into some sort of a tussle with the driver.
In the tussle. He lost his mask.
“WHAT HAPPENED?”
“THIS SCUMBAG TOOK MY MASK OFF.”
The events at Hudson were not typical of how this crew robbed. There had never been any shots fired. There had never been any person or individual shot.
“Get this thing out of here.”
This was way above the norm. This was a horrendous armored car robbery.
“What are we going to do?”
After years of doing these by the same playbook, the crew finally breaks its routine. Realizing everything was falling apart, they drove the armored car and the van to the wooded area where they had their rental truck waiting for them as a getaway vehicle. Pelham Road.
This is just a long back road. It’s got a couple of houses on it. Um, and there was a path, dirt path that led into the woods.
“Go ahead. Time off.”
At that location, there was some type of a switch. The proceeds from the armored car were transferred from the armored car to a rental truck.
There’s still a loose end to tie up. What do they do with the wounded courier, Ronald Normandeau?
“Take the money and go, man. Please.”
Normandeau was pleading for his life.
“Please, you don’t have to do this. Please, you let me go. You don’t have to do this.”
Michael O’Halerin began duct taping his hands, duct taping his ankles, and actually tried to comfort him to reassure him that he was going to be okay.
“Shea, this is not good.”
“Yeah, this stuff happened.”
“Just just let me go now. We got to take care of this.”
Then the decision was made that because he had seen their faces, knew where they were from, he had to be killed.
“You don’t do this, please.”
And that’s when he was executed.
So, in keeping with the code of silence to make sure that no one would be more culpable, they each shot both guards. The theory is the suspects wouldn’t have any incentive to talk about the crime or be the weak link that would talk to the police because they had all shot the guards.
It was not something that you normally see during a robbery where you have two executions like this.
Killing the witnesses doesn’t end the crew’s trouble. A mechanic at a nearby vehicle dump sees the rental truck and a white car leaving the woods and calls the police.
Hudson PD arrives to the most grisly crime scene in the town’s history. Detective Ray Melo is one of the first to respond. It’s a scene he’ll never forget.
I was in court and received a call to come back to Hudson right away because there had been this robbery. There had been a robbery and it had gone bad.
The robbers drove the truck and police believe two other vehicles in a caravan approximately 2 miles east of Hudson to a clearing off Pelham Road. One witness said he saw a van pull out. When the Hudson police initially arrived, rather than go down the pathway, they actually cut through the woods so as to not contaminate any evidence that might be found at that scene.
They’re hoping to preserve anything, footprints, tire tracks, you name it, that the killers left behind.
I saw Mr. Normandeau’s body. Uh he had been executed, was restrained, and then I walked over to the armored car. I hadn’t seen anything like that where people had just been executed. It was traumatic for all of us.
The FBI rushes to the scene. Murder is not the Charlestown crew’s MO. Still, this heist reeks of them.
We figured literally on day one that there was probably involvement from the Charlestown armored car robbers.
Agents always knew what this crew was capable of. They just prayed they’d catch them before they escalated to murder.
At that point, we sent out all sorts of resources. Everything from evidence technicians to surveillance squads.
This time, the rattled crew fled without covering their tracks. They left behind the mask in the armored car as well as footprints, other trace evidence in the path. They also left a tire print on the side of Pelham Road which became critical in the case.
The decision to cut their way through the woods pays off for investigators. Forensic technicians make casts of the tire track. They can compare them to the tread on the getaway vehicle if they can find it.
The task force brings in renowned composite sketch artist Ed Boudreau to interview witnesses near both the bank and the dump site. Boudreau heads to the local diner to test a theory.
The MO of this group would be not to go into a place cold, but to case it for a couple of days. So, by asking the waitresses, have you seen a group of people that you haven’t seen before coming in here? And the answer was yes.
When you have somebody who relies on their memory to help maintain their livelihood, they know that you walk in and you’re the poached egg with a black coffee, it’s going to affect the size of the tip. So, these waitresses made very good witnesses. It doesn’t matter how brief the encounter might be. The amount of information that people are capable of retaining is incredible.
Boudreau’s hunch pays off. The waitresses describe Anthony Shea and his crew. The task force has the positive link to Shea they’ve been looking for, but they still need concrete physical evidence before they can take him and his gang off the street for good.
And their witness at the vehicle dump site could hold the key. He had worked on truck engines and car engines his whole life. So, he was able to give us a description not only of the truck, but gave us a pretty good description of what kind of engine it had in it.
The rental truck is a cabover design, which means the cab sits directly over the engine.
A New Hampshire State Trooper got into the yellow pages and started looking for the rental truck places that corresponded to that specific make.
Turns out there’s only one place in the entire region that rents cabover trucks. They found out there had been one rented shortly before the robbery.
The next step then was to figure out when the truck was being returned.
Investigators call the company and discover the truck’s due back the following day.
So, a plan was put in place to have a Massachusetts state trooper pose as an employee of the rental company to receive that truck back so we know exactly who returned the truck.
The undercover officer just needs to wait for the suspect to come to him. But whoever’s driving will be jittery after the bungled bank job. The robber is now a desperate, wanted killer, which means the officer must be ready for anything.
Through quick thinking and incredible detective work, the FBI bank robbery task force learns that the truck used in the deadly Hudson, New Hampshire armored car robbery is on its way back to a Boston rental lot. To apprehend its driver, an undercover state trooper poses as an employee.
While we were waiting for this truck to be returned, the trooper was in place.
As the truck pulls into the lot, no one is sure who’s going to get out or what will happen if the driver makes him as a cop.
Patrick McGonagle returned that truck to the rental company. The same Patrick McGonagle who’s a known associate of Anthony Shea, Mattie McDonald, and the rest of the Minutemen bank robbers.
“You think I can get you to sign this?”
Agents were present when McGonagle returned that vehicle.
It was immediately apparent that he was either involved or he may have known who was involved in this crime.
The FBI and the Mass State Police were able to open up their intelligence files on Patrick McGonagle.
Returning a truck isn’t enough for an arrest, so they let McGonagle walk for now.
The vehicle was impounded by the FBI for further examination.
A forensic team pours over the rental truck. Special Agent Charlie Walsh, head of the FBI’s Boston Division Evidence Response Team, gives it the fine tooth comb treatment.
When everything was said and done, it was my job to evaluate the evidence that was collected. And specifically, what we were doing is processing fingerprints.
One print is especially promising. The state police lieutenant was processing the side door of the truck and as he was dusting along the molding, a fingerprint appeared. I photographed the fingerprint and lifted the fingerprint with a hinge fingerprint lifter and adhesive lifter and turned the fingerprint over to put in AFIS.
AFIS, the integrated automated fingerprint identification system maintained by the FBI. They run dozens of prints from the rental truck through the database, but only the one from the truck door fingers a member of the crew.
The fingerprint was identified as one of the known fingerprints of Steven Burke. From that point on, evidence began to develop toward that crew for the robbery and the murders.
To make their case, agents need a strong foundation. And that starts by proving the rental truck is linked to where the guards’ bodies were dumped.
A lab examiner built a frame and we packed the frame with playground quality sand. Packed it hard and tight. And then we drove the truck over the sandbox and got the impression off the tire of the vehicle. And then we made a cast of that tire and matched the cast of the tire along with the cast left at the crime scene. And we were certain that we had the right vehicle.
They’ve conclusively tied two of the Charlestown crew to the Hudson robbery and murders. It’s a good start that also gives the task force leverage they hope leads to bringing the entire team down.
And as it turns out, the events in Hudson rattle the once meticulous gang so much they begin making stupid mistakes. Early the next morning, a car was found burning in Revere by a Revere police officer. The car wasn’t fully burnt at that point, and there were a number of items located in that trunk that were able to be processed as evidence. They had set the car on fire but then closed all the windows. So the car being shut up as it was cut off all the oxygen so the fire went out and so we found some t-shirts one that had reference to leprechauns on it.
The Boston Leprechaun logo belongs to a softball team at a federal prison in Virginia. A former member of that team’s roster, Anthony Shea.
Now certain who he’s dealing with, lead investigator Larry Travaglia heads to Charlestown. He’s determined to find someone with ties to the Shea crew he can persuade to break the code of silence.
Steven Connolly was a mid-level drug dealer. He was a drug dealer to Anthony Shea. He was a drug dealer to Mattie McDonald. We went to Connolly’s girlfriend’s apartment to try and locate Steven. We were trying to establish alibis and then through the investigation defeat the alibi with facts.
When I first met Connolly, I pretty much walked into a full-blown domestic with Connolly and Connolly’s girlfriend, who was 7 months pregnant at the time.
“Calm down.”
“Yeah. Good luck keeping Earth.”
It was just a terrific mess that we had to break up.
Like everyone else in Charlestown, Steven Connolly refuses to rat to the FBI.
“I just want to ask a couple questions.”
“No way, man. Code of silence. I ain’t talking about nothing.”
But when Connolly gets arrested weeks later on unrelated charges, Travaglia seizes the opportunity.
I believe strongly that Connolly could help us out. And we figured that if we can convince Connolly’s girlfriend, we may be able to do something with Steven. So, we would periodically check in on her. And if she needed $20 to buy milk, we would give her $20 to buy milk.
“You can’t be here.”
“I’m just trying to help you out.”
With Connolly out of the picture, little by little, she starts warming to the FBI’s overtures. In the meantime, under the watchful eye of the task force, Anthony Shea and his crew are on their best behavior.
And they’re starting to think they’ve got away with it. We did a lot more surveillance on them than we typically would, but again, you have to understand at the time they knew they screwed up by shooting those guards and they were going to be extra cautious.
They didn’t flash money. They had money stashed and they would slowly spend it, support their children, the mothers of their children. It was really not a flashy lifestyle that anyone would notice.
Days turn into weeks while the agents try to build their case. Several months after Hudson, Mattie McDonald is arrested on a parole violation and sent to prison in New Hampshire.
With McDonald out of the picture, the feeling is the crew’s vulnerable. But is it enough for them to win over Steven Connolly’s girlfriend? No one rats in Charlestown ever.
Time for Agent Travaglia to make another move and change that.
Every time we went, we would leave her with the thought that there could be something better for her if she and Steven decided mutually that this is what they wanted to do.
“Stephen, I just think it’s a good idea. Okay.”
It works. She convinces her boyfriend to talk.
We had him removed from the Massachusetts Correctional Institution that he was being housed at and we spent 4 hours talking to him about all the things that he could do for us. Steven had information on almost every bank and/or armored car robbery that had happened within the last 7 years.
Agents have cracked the code of silence and now it’s time to leverage it. So Connolly is transferred to the same prison as Mattie McDonald.
“How are they treating you and him?”
“I’m fine.”
The wire was put on Connolly. Connolly went out for yard time, walked the yard, and engaged McDonald in a conversation.
“How’s Shea doing? Is he mad?”
“No, man. He’s he’s cool.”
The big thing that McDonald told Connolly over and over was,
“I don’t mind going to jail for the Hudson case as long as it’s not because of some screw up that I made.”
“I I know I burnt that car in the wrong way.”
Mattie McDonald’s job was to burn the vehicle, but he wasn’t particularly successful.
“I screwed up, man.”
With Mattie McDonald’s taped admission, this makes three Minutemen crew members the FBI can connect to the Hudson double murder. But the task force is determined to get everyone, especially the man at the top, Anthony Shea.
As we began to debrief Connolly more and more and Connolly would talk about knowledge of bank robberies of Anthony Shea, McDonald, O’Halerin, Burke. We started to think about a RICO prosecution.
RICO, racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations. It’s the federal statute the FBI often uses to go after the mafia.
The RICO statute allows for prosecuting as a criminal organization engaged in bank robbery, extortion, so on and so forth. It’s designed to be very heavy-handed in a good way and you can bring that charge against groups like this where it was a lot of planning, a lot of conspiracy aspects to it and they were doing crimes over in a very organized sort of way over a period of time. It’s a very effective statute to be able to use.
A RICO conviction could mean life sentences for the entire Charlestown crew. But RICO cases are not without risks.
Shea was still out on the street. Michael O’Halerin and Steven Burke were smart enough that they were just completely laying low. They were not engaging in any type of criminal activity. Shea couldn’t help himself though. He had to rob something.
Robbery is part of Shea’s DNA, and he’s never going to stop until the FBI takes him down.
Nearly a year after two guards are killed during an armored car robbery, a crack in the once impenetrable Charlestown Code of Silence gives the FBI the edge it needs to zero in on their prime suspects.
Everything that we had learned about the crew made us realize that we need to take these guys off as quickly as we possibly can.
We had surveillance assets on our suspects for a long time and one of our surveillance teams that was on Anthony Shea observed him steal a Jeep Cherokee.
There’s only one reason for Shea to steal a vehicle. There were certain patterns, one of which they would steal a car that would then stash it and use it in an upcoming robbery.
After the Jeep was stolen, it was driven from Braintree on the south side of Boston through downtown Boston and up to a town called Peabody, which is a suburb north of Boston. There it was parked in a hotel parking lot and was left. When we saw that, we were hoping that this time we were ahead of him. So, we put surveillance on that vehicle and one of the other agents on the squad was actually able to get a court order authorizing us to install a microphone and listening device in the vehicle.
The FBI keeps eyes on Shea around the clock.
We knew he was going to hit a bank, so we had the special surveillance group out watching that vehicle and watching Shea to make his move.
The agents watch as Shea and his new accomplices select their target.
We just knew that they were casing banks to see which one they were going to do. And then they started coming back and back to the bank in Wakefield.
With a target selected, it will only be a matter of time. After two days, their waiting pays off.
Friday afternoon, approximately 2:00 in the afternoon, the surveillance team reported that somebody had come back to that vehicle. There was a second vehicle involved. It was a Ford Bronco and there were three people altogether. The Bronco pulled up and two got out and got into the Jeep. Two vehicles then left in tandem. They parked the Bronco a half a mile away from the Wakefield bank. One person remained in the Bronco. Shea and another accomplice continue on towards the bank in the second vehicle.
What they don’t know, the FBI has a SWAT team following them every step of the way. The plan, the SWAT team will pen them in once they reach the parking lot before they can enter the bank.
The tricky part is you don’t want the robbers to get inside the bank. So you’re trying to stop them before they get into the bank, but you have to let them go pretty far because otherwise the legality is that they say, “Yes, we were thinking about robbing the bank, but we changed our mind before we did.”
They started to approach the bank that we thought they were going to rob. And they were approaching it very slowly. They were coming through the bank parking lot. We moved the SWAT team into the Wakefield parking lot.
They were watching the bank and then we’re listening to them because of the bug in the car.
“All right, I’m going to go on the ball and clear it out.”
“You’re going to go straight to the teller.”
“All right, it’s on.”
Agents move into Carroll Shea’s SUV. When the driver saw the vehicles coming toward him, he said,
The guy in the back said,
“What? What is it?”
“Nothing.”
Shea said, “Never mind.”
“Anyway, so like I was saying, you’re going to go straight for the teller.”
Then he said again. The guy in the back seat said,
“What is the problem?”
“What?”
And Shea said,
“Feds. Feds. Feds. Feds. Feds.”
“Oh, SHOOT. Hands up. PUT YOUR HANDS UP. Drop the gun. Get up.”
It was chaotic because there was commotion with the other guys on the SWAT team and the passenger in the back.
“Drop the gun. Drop the gun.”
He had a submachine gun, so they were concerned for their safety.
“Drop the gun. Drop the gun. Drop the gun. Drop it. Keep your hands up. Hold it over.”
I took the mask off the driver and it was Anthony Shea. I was satisfied that I was able to be the one to put the handcuffs on Anthony Shea because of all the robberies that he’d done, all the robberies I’d gone to, and all the witnesses I interviewed who were very upset based on their fear of this guy during those robberies.
What goes around comes around. Finally, you’re not in control. We’re in control.
A year after the Hudson murders, Anthony Shea is behind bars. It takes another 10 months to build cases against the rest of the Charlestown crew.
Once we determined that we had enough probable cause to arrest these people, a plan was put in place to round up the entire group at one time. The idea was to get them all very early in the morning all at the same time. You’ve got the list of the subjects we’ve got arrest warrants for, and you’re basically checking them off as they’re taken into custody. Over the course of a couple of hours, they all got arrested. I remember thinking that is an end of an era, but there will probably be another era.
When Mr. McGonagle was arrested, we put Hudson police handcuffs on Mr. McGonagle. It was a symbolic gesture, but it was an important gesture for the people of Hudson. The town had been so rocked by this crime that we wanted to be able to tell the town’s people that we didn’t give up. We brought this man to justice and Hudson police handcuffs were put on his wrist as he was being led off.
Anthony Shea, Mattie McDonald, Steven Burke, Michael O’Halerin, and Patrick McGonagle are charged under the federal RICO statute. Shea, McDonald, Burke, and O’Halerin are convicted in federal court on dozens of racketeering charges that include bank robbery and the murder of the two guards in Hudson. All get life sentences.
McGonagle, who is not charged with the Hudson deaths, is also convicted of racketeering and handed a 30-year sentence. He dies behind bars in 2009.
For Anthony Shea in Charlestown, his role models were his fathers, the uncles, the brothers that were all involved in criminal activities. Shea and McDonald both told Connolly,
“Everybody thinks we do this for the money. That’s only part of it. We do it for the rush. There’s nothing like doing this.”
The feeling that you get, the feeling of power is unbelievable. They were just awful human beings.
We pulled it off. It took a long time. It was almost 4 years in the making and it was just like a tremendous exhale. It’s finally over. Thank God we got him off the street.
