SHOTS IN THE DARK-Daniel Zimmerman

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young woman and her toddler's son lay dead. The story of Rocco Berlero, a petty criminal enforcer for New England crime boss Raymond Patriarca, played out in glaring headlines across the country. Following the shootout with the Boston police, had he heeded the commands of the cops to drop his weapon Rocco would not have spent the next fifty years behind bars, and his girlfriend and her son might still be alive today. Instead, he fired the gun, erupting death

and mayhem in the apartment. In the aftermath of the shootings, all fingers pointed at Rocco, but he would maintain his innocence in the death of his girlfriend and her son for the rest of his life, though plague with lingering questions. Did he fire the deadly bullets or did they come from another source? Did he unlowingly kill the pair? Or was he simply guilty of an ill advised home invasion? What was the police's true involvement? Balero agreed to meet

with the author. Over the span of a couple of years. Along with countless tales of criminal escapades, Balero handed over raims of documents, correspondence, and clippings related to his life and the alleged crime that put him behind bars, while Balero arranged for meetings with many of his family members and associates. This is Rocco's own story of his life, but more importantly, it is his version of the events

from the night of February second, nineteen sixty three. In a Boston suburb and his profession of innocence and until his dying breath. The book they were featuring this evening is Shots in the Dark, The Saga of Rocco Balero, with my special guest author Zimmerman. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this program, Daniel Zimmern.

to write a story. And I had this story about Rocco Blero since very early years, very early age, because I grew up with it. The victims, the two victims, Toby Wagner and Mock Wagner, were my aunt and my cousin, and I grew up through the sixties and seventies fully aware of the story. My family shared it with me. But what they shared with me was a story of Rocco Balero, cold blooded killer, cold blooded murderer. And that's what That's what I believed, because that's what I was told.

So when I decided to write this book, I went into the prison for the first visit with Rocco, and it didn't take very long for him to convince me that I was wrong, and so were my family members, that in fact, he hadn't killed my aunt and my cousin. They were killed by police bullets. Allegedly, Rocco was actually in love with my aunt. He wanted to make a family with her and her two children, Mark and Bernice. It was just one of those situations where he he

was living with her. Uh. They had fallen in love over a span of seven months after they met. Her husband was in jail, she was married, her husband was in jail, and true, probably not the best set of circumstances. Uh, her seeing Rocco while her husband's locked away, and that came to light when her husband was due to be released on February first, nineteen sixty three. You know, obviously bad things were gonna happen as a result of that release from jail. But again I grew up with the

story and I went into the prison. My first visit was Roco. After reaching out to him be a letter, he couldn't get me in there fast enough. He actually reached out to one of his relatives as sister and asked her to track me down so that he could he could arrange for that first that first meeting, that first visit to the prison, and once I was there, very interesting. I went through the processing, I walked into the visiting area, I sat down and waited. Obviously I

knew what Ruckabullero looked like. I had photos I had, you know, seen photos throughout the years. He didn't know me or what I looked like, obviously, But when he came through the entryway and checked in, he's looking around the room and I stood up and kind of raised a hand, and he came over, and I expected I reached out to shake his hand, and he actually put his arms around me and embraced me, and then stepped back and he said, I can't believe it, standing in

front of me, Toby's DNA. And it kind of struck me that fifty years later, fifty years after her death, this man I could sense that there was something not right about the story I've been told. I could sense

that he truly loved my aunt Toby. And over the course of the next three weeks, three or four weeks, between communications with Rocco, between twice weekly visits and him providing a documentation, as I said in my intro or correspondence Affi David's testimony, Major Major Documents, that it was

just a stack of material. Every day I'd get something in the mail from him, and I'd go through it, and then I'd take the time, obviously as a researcher of researching into this crime, I would corroborate a lot of the material that he gave me. I'd reach out to attorneys, I'd reach out to police officers, I'd gather other materials to ensure that what he was giving me was accurate. And one hundred percent of the time, anything that he told me, or gave me, or provided towards

my research, it was accurate. I seldom found anything, and if anything was not accurate, it was only because of the passage of time. So many years had gone by that even the best memories stayed somewhat and I came to understand in a very short period of time that I had it all wrong. I wasn't about to write a book about a cold blooded murder Rocco Balro. I was about to write a book about an innocent man who was sent to prison for a crime he did not commit.

in Boston. It was called the Combat Zone. Locals around here would know exactly what that is, but it's a red it's the Red Lake District, and it's loaded with assorted peep shows, bookstores, but also many many lounges kind of dotted the landscape in the combat Zone, and most of them were run by mob figures, they were owned by most most of them are owned by the underworld, and she she frequented one called the New Yorker, where in the in the basement, the downstairs area, as Roco

described it, it was kind of the movers and movers and shaker of the underworld. A lot of a lot of mob figures would would kind of apply their trade there.

And she met Rocco there. She was with another out with another gentleman, but Rocco kind of worked his way into her graces, and before long they were sharing, sharing stories and drinks, and they they fell for each other, uh so quickly, in fact, that Rocco literally moved in with her into her apartment and they they basically were I guess you could call a family against you had two young children, a two year old boy and a six month old girl, and Rocco Rocco made them his family.

He treated them as his family. He'd fill the refrigerator with groceries. He he'd buy her new things. She was kind of a little bit downtrodden financially because of her her husband being locked away, so she struggled to get by and and Rocco would help her with that in that respect, he would buy her things and and UH and it was a it was a good situation for him. Unfortunately, Rocco also was a was a c was a criminal. I mean honestly, UH. He would admit. He would admit

that every every time he talked his career. His work was to UH burgalarize UH local businesses, jewelry stores, anything that UH that he could that he could fence off to to more or less make a living. And that was all as UH. As part of the organization, he was an enforcer UH for the UH patriarchic family. His family was one level of U tiers of mafia involvement. In the in the Boston area, they uh the Ballero family worked directly for the Andulo family, and then turn

the Angulo family work for the patriarchate family. So it was uh several levels away. But Rocco was still officially a uh uh. He could use the title mob enforcer, and he again committed crimes to to supplement his income.

the permission. Her husband, Barney Wagner, was a distant, distant member of the Irish faction, the Irish Mob, who at the time didn't have much much power, much sway in the city, and Rocco basically he was you know, he felt that he could do pretty much anything he wanted,

and his brothers really didn't stand in his way. They would they would give him advice, but he was twenty sixth at the time, and he'd uh, he'd already been in prison a couple of times for different crimes, and they felt that, you know, he had the right and the maturity to make his own decisions about what he

would do. And there really is nobody to stand in his way as far as getting into a relationship with with Toby, and that he did, and that persisted for about seven months until the till February of sixty three. Of the stories in the book, I'm sorry, sure, yah.

of gold? And I explained to her that other than first responders and maybe a physician in an emergency room, there are very few people that walk this planet that can claim to have saved three lives, and Rocco was one who could. During the course of his life, he saved three people, and there are families there that exist

today because of his actions. For instance, he during during one of his stays in prison, there was an uprising, a riot and m m c. I. Wallpole, it's one of the most notorious prisons in on the East Coast, and there was a riot in nineteen sixty seven where Rocco risked his own life to step in front of a guard and hold off some of the rampaging inmates who wanted a piece of that guard, and that guard managed to survive. He got he got away as a

result of Rocco's delaying, delaying the the attack. And later on in his life when he was on he had he had made one of his several escapes. As you as you read, he was pretty good at escaping from prisons. Several times he he managed to find his way out.

But during one of his escapes, he was living in San Francisco with a former associate and they were at the uh San Francisco Pier was on July fourth, nineteen eighty and the associate had a two year old daughter who they lost track of her for a few seconds. She stumbled and fell into the San Francisco Bay and most people just froze. According to the description in the newspaper, people froze. No nobody reacted except for Rocco. He didn't hesitate. He dove into the water, he fished her out, he

rescued her. And you know, it was just one of those things where yes he was a criminal. Yes he robbed stores, Yes he broke into businesses in the in the dark of night. But he also, as I described, had a heart of gold. He would he would risk his own life to save others.

some of them for income. So they robbed the store, and then they got a hold of a panel truck and set it all up and hung the coats there, so that it was actually a store on wheels, as he described it, where people would come and look at the coat, and they take one for their wives and girlfriends, and and then then came the time to uh to transport them to Providence to hand them off to the patriarchate family. And that night turned turned out to be

very pivotal in Rocco's life. During the the transportation phase, they were pulled over by a police cruiser with a number of officers in the in the in the cruiser, and they were subsequently UH subsequently arrested, and Rocco soon landed in a uh in jail, the UH the best house of corrections, and he knew with his with his history he had, he had been released from prison for other crimes not too in the not too distant pass, and he understood that he was facing a long stretch

as a result. So like like Rocco ballero Is, he decided he wanted to escape and he enlisted. He enlisted my aunt Toby UH to assist him in that. He he figured out at this prison was in excess of one hundred years years old. The UH cast iron bars that fronted the cells were very porous, very UH basically easy to cut if he could get his hands on a cutting tool. And that's exactly where Toby came in. She ended up smuggling in hacks all blades and getting

them to to Rocco. Prisons were different in those days. They didn't have metal detectors, the guards, the the officers were less apt to pat down a woman. It was just a whole different time. And she managed to get the hacksaw blades and it took Rocco forty days to cut through these bars, but he managed to do so and escape. He went out a window and managed to get back to Boston and his family and Toby. They

they got together soon after the escape. He he was pretty adept at using an axe all blade, let me just put it that way. He did it a couple of times in a very short span of time.

they eventually got married, had had the two kids. Toby absolutely adored Mark. My mother would describe it. I believe I used it in the book that he was attached to her hip. Wherever she was, Mark was. But for some reason, Bernice wasn't quite the love child that that Mark was. And oddly enough, after as I was doing my research, I didn't have to talk to Bernice. It wasn't necessary because she was a six month old infant and I had the story as it was given to

me and written. But curiosity, obviously, and most authors are curious about characters and people they're writing about, so I sought her out and she had ended up being adopted by a family very close to where I lived at the It was one of those strange coincidences where I discovered where she grew up after adoption. She was literally just four miles away from where I lived the entire time.

And this is a blood cousin, first cousin. She she's she's got a good life for herself now she's runs a business on Cape Cod and she's doing very well. My memories of Mark are basically triggered by photos that I have that were provided to me by by relatives of us together. There were oftentimes my mother and Toby would go out on shopping missions and take the two of us in the same carriage and kind of kind of push us along. And those are those are my

my association with Mark. We were the same age, and had this incident not happened, we would have grown up again first cousins, and because we were close in age, we like would have been close as relatives and uh over over time. My mother I I used it in the book. My mother would often tell me a story that when she was married to my father and and

Toby was married to Wagner. Uh, there wasn't a lot of money yet on hand, and so one night they suggested to Toby and my mother that they go to the nearby market and see if they can get a couple of good steaks, uh free of charge, so to speak. And they actually uh put them under the mattresses of the the the baby carriage that Mark and I sat

in and strolled on out of the supermarket. And uh when I told when I told Rocco the story, as we went through some of the things of uh my memory, my recall, he uh he he kind of gave it a laugh and he said, we have a room for you here at the prison. So you know, there was

little snippets like that. But I was testing the memory of my mother and she was in her late sixties at the time when I was doing my research, and she had some good stories and some good recall, but again, as a two year old, I don't recall very much myself.

about Barney that weren't very They weren't very nice. She basically described him in a in a poor way, and Rocco backed that up because obviously Rocco spent seven months with her and discussions would lead to him at times, and he realized that Toby was being mistreated by this man, and he wanted he wanted to correct that. He wanted to treat her like she deserved to be treated, and

that was his goal. Obviously, he was an escapee from prison and escape x Kahn on the run in Boston after he managed to escape the first time and get back. But they had plans. He and Toby were going to take the kids. They were going to run off to the West Coast, make a life life for themselves and change obviously, change names and and and just live as a family. That was his that was his plan. That

was his goal, and she was on board. But unfortunately, February one, nineteen sixty three year olled around and bad things started to happen as a result.

So at a breakfast UH one morning, she after some hesitation, she came out with it. She said, my husband's getting out, and his reaction was to not disclosed that he already knew, and and basically ask her what she planned to do? What was what was her thoughts? And her plan was that she was going to gather the kids, UH go out to to see Barney and ask him for a divorce. And once that was done and she and Ronco could could uh run off, make them make their escape, so

to speak. But time went by. She left the apartment they UH they were hiding out in in uh Chelsea, which is the suburb of uh north of Boston. She didn't return and for some time, UH there were no phone calls, there was no communication from her, and Rocco grew concerned UH that something that had happened to her that her husband uh was maybe angry because of her request for a divorce, and he thought maybe some harm

had come to her. So he'd gotten his car and he took a drive to where he thought she might be, and he encountered Barney with a couple of a couple of his friends, including a hired hand in the Irish mafia. They had an altercation that included h shots being fired. Nobody was hit at the time, but once Rocco had

separated himself from that he returned to his apartment. He gathered more weapons and a couple of friends, a brother and a third hand, and together they went back to the location where they thought Toby was being held against her will by Barney and his friends. It was a small apartment in Roxbury, which is just on the outskirts of Boston. And after some time they stormed this apartment which was pitch black. Uh you, it was so dark you just couldn't see the hand in front of your face.

And in that apartment Rocco surmised that Barney was there holding Toby against her will, when in fact the people waiting in the apartment in the darkness were Boston police. Officers. They had gotten word that Rocco was on potentially on his way there, and they staked out the apartment. They plunged it into darkness, and they waited for him, and he did in fact show up and there was a

huge gun battle. Rocco went his two associates and three police officers that had exchanged fire in the darker apartment. One of the descriptions in the UH police report and the follow up was that it was so dark that they weren't shooting at people, They were shooting at gun flashes.

not there anymore? And he later told me, he said, you know, if had I known there were police officers in that apartment, I woulded to have gone within a hundred miles of that place. I I I'm not uh, you know, I'm not crazy to the point where I'm going to assault an apartment and and go into a situation like that where their police are there. I I would've turned tail and and and just waited out Toby

at that point. But he thought he was rescuing her the entire time that he planned and staged this, this uh invasion, this assault in this apartment. He thought he was rescuing Toby from the clutches of her, her unhappy husband and his friends. And that wasn't the fact.

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make ship Happen. When we last left off, Daniel, I think we need to go a little bit words in terms of what happened in that apartment and the altercation that you spoke of with which is very important with the muscle for Barney Wagner, and an initial altercation when they came out of their vehicles and Clifford came and interrupted the conversation that Rocco was having with Toby's ex husband.

Tell us about that exchange, what he had said to Wagner, what Wagner had said to him, which is important to what led to this tragedy.

was also four other babies in that apartment. Three, I'm sorry, three other babies in that apartment. Those were the children of a woman named Mary Adams, who owned the apartment and was friends with Toby. So Rocco, you know suit the baby, cleaned her up a little bit, put her back on the bed, and as he ventured back outside, wondering where the mothers were in the entire time, he saw a car just ahead. And then that car there were three figures, and one of them was Barney Wagner.

And so what Rocco did is he summoned mister Wagner over to his car, and after some hesitation, Wagner agreed to get in the car and have a discussion with Rocco, and it was a heated discussion.

that was was going well. It also uh well, let me back up a little bit. The discussion between them included that Barney Wagner just wanted his son. He wanted Mark only he he didn't want Toby any longer. He wanted he He would be willing to accept that divorce request, but he just wanted his son. And obviously he couldn't take uh, take Mark away from from Toby. That wasn't gonna happen. Uh Toby, when it let it happen, Mark, when it let it, I mean, I'm Brocco, wouldn't let

it happen. So the discussion was going along, and next thing you know, there's a knock on the window and it's uh, it's Freeman. And he basically his nickname was Punchy Punchy Freeman. He basically was Barney's arm strong arm. He was a boxer, he was he was an Irish tough. He worked for the Irish Gang and he was there basically to give Barney a little extra muscle in this situation with Roco Bolero, and he broke up the conversation.

He actually suggested that they ended, and Barney agreed. He got out of the car and they left and there was a minor car chase. Brocco followed them. He wasn't gonna let it rest at that point, and ultimately Punchy lost control of his car on some roads and slammed into a snowbank, and Rocco took the opportunity to fire

his weapon at the car. It didn't hint anybody the slogan embedded in the car seat in the front, but it set some new situations, set a situation in motion that Rocco has now fired as gun, and it escalated the altercation at that point, and that's when he decided to return to his apartment in Chelsea and gather some more people and weapons in return, return in search of Toby. He still hadn't seen her.

out of that situation. He had told me, in hindsight, he wished he just never let her go to see him, uh and ask for that divorce. And his brother, his brother, Salvatore, was just loyal. I mean that the man was loyal to him. They were, they would They were inseparable, most of the Bolero brothers were. There were six of them, and these men were just inseparable. And they they'd run into a burning building or a building filled with potential assailants with guns to do what they had to do.

And the third guy as well. It's just all about loyalty. Whether whether Rocco's decision to run into that apartment was the right or the wrong one, they were going with him. There was no tooth, there was no two ways about it.

who was upset. Mary Adams was Barney's sister, and she was upset that number one Rocco had broken into her apartment, never saying that she had left her children behind in the apartment, but also that she that Rocco had shot at her brother. She became aware of that, he has to speak to Toby. Meanwhile, the police are already there.

They're standing there observing these conversations as they're taking place, and Toby takes the phone and her last words with Rocco basically she's telling him not to come to the apartment. They're waiting for you and what he took as they're waiting for you, wasn't. She never said the word police

or cops. She just said they're waiting for you. And his first assumption was it was Barney and his men, and that's what That's what registered with him, and that's where the plan started taking ape once he heard that, And those are the last words they spoke.

and a police chase ensued. Earlier, when Rocco was running on the sidewalk to get to his brother's car and get out of that area. He heard those shots in the apartment, more shooting after a pause, and the conjecture was that Toby and Mark and Mary Adams and her kids were hidden in the apartment. They were in the back of the apartment. It was kind of a rectangular building, and the police had pushed them into the back of

the building and hit them in spare rooms. So the conjecture was that in the darkness, the police thought that Rocco and his associates were still there excuse me, and they reloaded their weapons and started firing again, and what

they were doing was actually firing at each other. Rocco was long gone, and in the midst of this, during the lull in the shooting, that Toby had picked up Mark and made her way to the front of the apartment, thinking the shooting's over, here's a chance to get out, when in fact, as she reached the front of the apartment and the cops began firing again, that's when she was she took a bullet, and as well as Mark,

both of them were hit. She was hitting the head, Mark was hitting this and the stomach, and they were both fatal wounds. As it turned out, so that you know, in the meantime Rocco's escaping, there's a car chase between him and the two police that were staked out further up the street. The Rocco's car he escapes. He jumps out of the car at an opportunity and escapes. Meanwhile, his brother in the third the third hand, crashed into a taxi cab and they're Eventually his brother escapes, the

third hand is arrested, but eventually everybody. Roco and his brother Salvatore, they both turned themselves in to face the legal consequences. After a couple of days, they decided to turn themselves in.

to the crime. You you plead guilty to a first green murder, you're signing and sailing your death warrant. At the time, Boston actually had the death penalty for first screen murder was available. Over time, they overturned that, but it was still going to be a life in prison sentence. So he decided he wanted to fight the charges, do what he had to do to try to either reduce his sentence or or go free one or the other.

He always admitted during our discussions whenever it came around to the fact that he stormed that apartment like he did, he always admitted that that was wrong. It was a crime. He understood that he should do time for that. He said, fifteen twenty years. It was a bid he could do without too much trouble. He was only twenty six. He'd

be out in his forties. But then, unfortunately, one of the attorneys who happened to be his cousin came along and came up with a plan to get his brother in the third hand, get them released on an earlier sentence, a manslaughter charge, so they would do just ten years. But to make that work, Rocco had to agree to plead guilty to the first degree murder charge, which was

a mistake. Every attorney I talked to while I was researching this book agreed that that was a huge mistake because it was basically admitting guilt when he was claiming that he wasn't he was innocent, and that triggered a very long prison term. And then as he went through his career, unfortunately, he was actually getting close to a potential parole in the eighties when he decided to walk away from a farm detail and more or less just escape from prison a third time, and that reset the clock.

Once they got him back. That reset the clock in Rocco was a was in it for the long run.

plush year string of visits. Twice a week, typically every Tuesday night I would go, and every Saturday morning I would go and spend a couple hours with Rocco. One of the difficulties I encountered was I really didn't have any connections with the prison folks. I tried. I made an effort, but they wouldn't allow me to bring anything into the prison such as a notebook or a pen or a tape recorder. Anything of that nature was not allowed, So all of our discussions over the two years were

done by memory. What I would typically do is I'd sit and talk and I'd ask questions, and then I would race back to my car after the visit was over and scribble down as much as I could remember in a notebook. Eventually we had correspondents where I would write them a letter with a series of questions and he would he would write back with answers and detailed answers, and I have a stack of letters of this nature that we used to to gather the information I would

need to write the book. There was a a on a side note, this is a story I like to tell my wife Mary. She at the time, she's she had a huge fear of prisons. She would watch those television shows on TV and and see some of the conditions inside prisons, and it would just make her wide eyed. And so as time went on, we actually got permission for Rocco to call me call at my home where he would have a ten or fifteen minute allowance, and

he would call me and we'd have conversations. But a lot of times I was I was working nights at the time, and he never knew when I would be home. It was tough to s He couldn't schedule the calls. It was kind of a random thing. And he would call. My wife would answer, and they they He befriended her, They became very close friends. She would send him greeting cards, uh sending sending materials to the prison magazines, whatever it

may be. And uh So one Saturday morning, I was getting ready to go for my weekly visit, and she looked at me, and she said I'm going with you, and I'm like, I'm going to the prison. She suggest I know, I want to meet him, and she came and it was difficult for her, but she processed through and met Rocco Ballero and they became the best of friends, and she was the one that was holding his hand bedside when he passed away.

he would give me so it was great. He had so much information to share with me and he was willing to do that, and he actually during the course of this this research, he actually introduced me. We had dinner with at the time the head of Lakoss for the head of the mafia in New England, a gentleman named Peter Lamont. And that was pretty exciting. A lot of people would would kind of look at that sideways and say, you're sitting down at the table with the

head of the mafia, how can you enjoy that? And believe me, it was. It was very exciting, very uh. I appreciated the allot the ability to meet this man, and he too, he had spent time with Rocah and prison. He too was able to share some snippets that that reached the book with his permission.

apprehended by the police. The shirt that he's the shirt that he's wearing in that photo is an identical shirt to the one he had the night he went to the cemetery. He went up and he managed to get another shirt just like it because he loved it so much. But the one that Toby had given him he was wearing the night at the cemetery, and he decided to scratch a little bit of the soil on her grave site. After he and his brother found the gravesite, they searched

the cemetery in the darkness, and they found it. He scratched the surface of the soil and took the shirt off and buried it with her. And he once told me during our conversations, he said, if you don't believe me about the shirt, he says, go there, he said, dig a little hole and you'll find probably shards of the shirt or buttons or something of that nature. And I basically said, no, recall, I'll take your word that the shirt's there. I'm not kind of go and dig

a hole on my aunt's grave. So little little side note on that.

to this house, and did this on their own. They didn't grant and get permission for it. A little bit of a renegade operation, so to speak. So they took a lot of flak and at the time the police was getting the Boston Police Department was getting a pretty serious beat down by the media and for their failure to apprehend the Boston Strangler. When the shootings took place, the strangler was about halfway through his run of murders

and the police didn't have a shred of evidence. The word and net I actually borrowed that word because when the movie came out about the Boston Strangler with Tony Curtis as a star, the movie posters actually used the word and that police force, and I thought it was the best word to describe the operations of the Boston police at the time. They actually never caught the Boston strangle. He was captured by a suburban police department, and so

they couldn't take credit for his capture. But there the media approach to them was exactly that, how could you let something like this happen where an innocent twenty one year old woman and her two year old son killed in the midst of a city that's just totally up in arms over the inability of these police officers to capture this individual. It was just a bad time for the Boston police. A lot of bad press.

It wasn't totally clear. I don't know if it was clear to me if the police reasoning for how they got shot was any anyhow corroborated or proven.

where they were thinking. Although I don't agree with it. It's one in the morning, it's February in Boston, it's freezing cold outside, and you're talking two women and five children. Where do you put them? So they made the decision to keep them in the apartment, knowing all well that they they could be there could be violence taking place there at any time. So that was a pretty bad

mistake on their part. Callan was in the room with him, but he did move up to the kitchen during the gunfight and engaged at the time, So all three cops were involved in it. What they did after the fact was Mary Adams, the owner of the apartment. She was twenty one as well with three kids, and they kept in custody for several months and they worked on her. They she they had some weapons, they had some ammunition, so to speak. Her husband was was also a criminal.

He was one of the three men that was with Barney. His name was Bob Adams, and so they used the fact that there were charges pending against him to work with her to basically make her a witness. And in the newspapers she actually came out and claimed that she saw Rocco walk up to Toby and shoot her point blank in the head, and then he also fired it at Mark. But the attorneys, the attorneys basically made her look kind of I guess you could say they made

her look kind of silly. In the courtroom, one of the questions was if the police couldn't see who they were shooting at, how could you see Rocco Bolero shoot these two victims, and her testimony fell apart as a result. But they tried, they tried some different things to make that case, but the case was really already made because Rocco Bolero was a gangster. He was part of an organization that committed crime. There was no question about that.

And as I said before, he was guilty before even stepped inside of the courtroom.

reduced sentence of manslaughter. Did the authorities use that good natured, that sense of loyalty and duty in this case wrongfully?

But he's in his early twenties and even today. I mean, you talk about kids at that age, they think they're invincible. And Rocco had kind of a mentality that he was invincible. And as he went about some of these things that nothing could happen to him. He was going to be okay, he was going to come out of it okay. But I come back to the word loyalty, the sacrifices they made for each other. It was just he didn't see

that in other places. You didn't. You didn't. Uh, you don't get that kind of loyalty in a lot of organizations and uh, even families. Rocco was upset. Actually, we talked to him about his brother who was in in on the shootings with him, and he was really upset that he had made that sacrifice, that he had pled guilty to first screen murder to give his brother an opportunity to get out of prison sooner. And the reason

was that his brother had a young, young child. His wife had just had a baby right around the same time that he They ended up in jail, and so Rocco was upset that his brother didn't use the time to his benefit and to his family's benefit. He went back into the life. Uh, he got caught up in drugs and drinking again, and and just uh he died

young as a result. And that really that bothered Rocco, that that he you know, he he did this for his brother, and his brother didn't reciprocate with uh doing the right thing.

so much for the money. It was for the craving, the craving, the excitement, craving the life. And that's what he was going to have to separate from. He was going to have to find the means to to to and roy his life outside the criminal world. And that was a task. That was a tough task. When he when he would explain some of his some of his crimes to me and we'd kind of go over them, Uh,

he got very animated. It was it was something like kind of a I used to compare it to an athletic endeavor, where an athlete would do something really exciting and succeed at his sport or and Rocca was the same way. He found a lot of success in some of his crimes.

your family is gone. Your family's no longer here, so you really don't have a family, unlike your brother, he has a family. You know, your family's gone. Do this for his family. Rocco would would basically say, I loved Yourn. And funny thing is, every time I met one of his relatives. As Rocco would introduce me to some of his relatives and I would I would go to meet them and have discussions with him, they would say the

same thing to a person you know. They would say, Dan, you know her, your brocle loved Giron, He had daugh her, he worshiped her, and it was believable. He actually told the police as he was being taken from one precinct to another and a cruiser, he actually asked the police if he could visit where her body rested and say his goodbyes, and they basically blew him off on that. But those are the kind of feelings he had. For obviously, as time went on during his life, he didn't meet

other women. He married a woman while he was in prison, and then when he was when he escaped and fled to San Francisco, he met a woman there and they eventually got married. But it was always about Toby. It always circled back to her.

that was my family's benefit. But then it turned it became something altogether different, and it became telling the Rocco Blero story about a man who was wrongly accused of a double murder and spent the rest of his life in prison and died there. Just I wanted to tell that story to show how unfair it was. And I sacrificed a few things along the way, but again minor things, people who disagreed with some of my some of my beliefs,

and some of my philosophies about the whole thing. I did turn some people, which I found great success in that with with relatives that had originally had different thoughts, and once they had an opportunity to read the book and listen to what I had to say, they they they were on board. Others know, others who are a little more stubborn about the approach, and they stuck with their they stuck with their beliefs that that he wasn't as quite quite as innocent as I claim he was.

But for his sake, I'm sorry.

with his remaining family member us. It's obvious that I wrote this book because I wanted to make a friend, show his innocence, show the fact that his life was wasted as a result of some mistakes he made, but certainly not because of the crimes or the alleged crimes.