A Suffolk County Grand Jury last week returned a seven-count indictment charging a Dorchester man with a series of violent armed robberies that took place throughout Boston during a two-month period earlier this year, including the armed robbery of Sarni’s Cleaners on Cambridge Street, said the Suffolk County DA’s office.
Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley announced the charges against Alan “Bubba” Daughtry, 37, including five counts of armed robbery and one count each of assault with a dangerous weapon and assault and battery.
On the evening of June 20, Daughtry allegedly entered Sarni’s with a black bag over his shoulder, produced a weapon resembling a sawed-off shotgun and ordered two employees to open the cash register, give him the money, and lie down in the rear of the store. The employees complied, and the assailant fled with about $250.
Prosecutors introduced Daughtry’s 1985 conviction for indecent assault and battery and 1990 conviction for armed robbery as evidence that he is a habitual offender; if convicted of the underlying offense and being a habitual offender, he may be subject to the maximum penalty allowed under law.
The maximum sentence for armed robbery is life in prison.
Evidence developed during an extensive investigation by Boston Police, Boston University Police, and Suffolk prosecutors suggests that Daughtry committed at least five armed robberies in the downtown, Kenmore, and South Bay areas of Boston between early May and his July 10 arrest by Boston Police.
Daughtry is believed to be responsible for a May 9 robbery at Truly Jörg’s Patisserie at Kenmore Square’s Commonwealth Hotel. The next evening, Daughtry allegedly robbed Papyrus, a stationery store on Summer Street. The next robbery linked to Daughtry came on July 5 at City Convenience, just outside Kenmore Square. It was the July 9 robbery of a footwear store at the South Bay shopping center that led to Daughtry’s identification and capture.
Boston Police detectives interviewed both witnesses and assembled a photographic array that included Daughtry’s picture. Independent of one another, both witnesses picked out Daughtry’s photo and positively identified him as the man who had robbed them. The next day, investigators tracked Daughtry to his Columbia Road residence and placed him under arrest. Search warrants executed at his home led to the recovery of clothing identical to that seen on surveillance footage of the robberies and witnesses’ descriptions of the assailant, as well as additional physical evidence linking him to the crimes.
The indictments move Daughtry’s case from district court to Suffolk Superior Court, where it will be adjudicated. No arraignment date has been set.
In order to maintain the integrity of potential eyewitness testimony, prosecutors are not releasing Daughtry’s booking photograph at this time.
CAPTION: Al Pescatore will close the Cuttery on August 31.
Al Pescatore has announced he is closing The Cuttery hair salon on August 31. The shop has been in business on Charles Street since 1974. Boston Art & Framing, the frame shop and gallery that clients must walk through to get to the basement salon, will take over the space.
“It’s the end of an era,” said Pescatore, 74. He said he doesn’t feel up to running the shop without his business partner, Rick Faretra, who died on July 4.
As a young man, Pescatore apprenticed at Diego’s and then went to Gilchrist Department Store’s beauty salon, where he worked with Faretra’s sister. At the time, Rick Faretra was 14 years old.
When Pescatore decided to go out on his own, he launched his business at 119 Charles Street, rather than Newbury Street, because he liked Charles Street’s atmosphere.
Well, perhaps not all its atmosphere. Pescatore recalled that in the mid-70s Charles Street had a couple of head shops and a porn shop. Pescatore said a few times customers tried to tip him with a joint or a little capsule of cocaine. He said he never touched the stuff.
One day, about two years after he moved in, he came into the shop and Faretra was sweeping the floor. “What are you doing here,” Pescatore asked.
“I work here,” answered Faretra. So then he did.
After three years at 119 Charles, the rent doubled, said Pescatore. But a broker told him that the building at 100 Charles Street was for sale. Pescatore bought it in 1977, turned it into condominiums, and sold off the top floors. He kept the two-level shop at the street level and the basement.
By 1979, Faretra, 20, still a kid in Pescatore’s mind, said he would take over managing the business when Pescatore had to let a manager go. So Pescatore made Faretra a partner, and the salon became popular because of him, according to Pescatore. “He was the best,” said Pescatore. “We never fought over anything.”
At first the salon occupied both floors and the mezzanine, but when he had more trouble with employees, he scaled back. In 1992, he leased the street level floor to David Poutré of Boston Art & Framing, who ran a frame shop from the space that now holds the Ristorante Toscano bar. Al and Rick installed their down-sized salon in the basement.
They built up a substantial local clientele, and the men and their clients got to know one another well. “When there was just the two of them, there was a splitting of clients,” said Ann Kramer of Pinckney Street, who went to the Cuttery for at least 15 years. “Al’s favorite thing is science fiction books, which he would read while waiting for his next client.”
Meanwhile Pescatore was moving around. He grew up in the North End, but lived in Somerville, Beacon Hill, Brookline two times, Beacon Hill again, the South End, where he was mugged, and East Boston where Rick had a three-family house.
In 1984, a client told him about a one-bedroom cottage in Winthrop that was for sale, and Pescatore jumped at the chance. He fixed it up, added a room and feels very much at home there. “It needed a lot of work,” he said. “I hired people to do most of the work, but I’m handy and a good decorator.”
When Rick died at age 49, Pescatore said he realized he couldn’t go on with the salon. His sadness was too great.
“I’m in a state of confusion,” he said. “I can’t think straight.”
Clients say they understand how deeply Pescatore has felt the loss of Rick, since they have felt it too. But they are sorry to see the salon leave.
“The closing is so sad,” said Kramer. She hopes Pescatore will now have some time to visit friends in California and rest a bit. “Al and I have been good friends forever,” she said. “He really is a dear, special person.”
“It’s depressing news, second only to the news of Rick’s death,” said Joe Govern of River Street, who has gone to the salon for haircuts for more than 20 years. “They cared about the neighborhood.”
Pescatore knows he will miss his clients and understands that they will miss his salon as a source of good gossip, stories and the exchange of advice.
“You come to work every morning, cut a lot of hair and do some color,” he said, “and you don’t realize what you mean to the community.”
Last week Jackie Landry of Minizicians performed original and fun songs for the children at the Myrtle Street Playground as part of the Friends of the Myrtle Street Playground’s weekly summer activities. Seen here are Abby Reohr of Walnut Street and Maggie Gohlmann of Lime Street.
On Thursday, August 30, at 4 p.m., kids can learn to move with Jumpin' Jacks Fitness with Jackie Squeglia of the Clubs at Charles River Park.
District Attorney’s office looks for witnesses by Sun staff
The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office and Massachusetts State Police are urging members of the public to come forward with information that may be valuable in the investigation into two sexual assaults earlier this summer on the Esplanade.
Investigators probing the sexual assaults of two women on June 16 and July 29 believe that a total of five individuals may have made observations that could prove valuable in bringing the at-large suspect to justice.
The suspect is described as a heavily built black male with a shaved head who is in his late 20s or early 30s. He is believed to stand between 5’8” and 5’10” and weigh approximately 200 lbs.
Specifically, investigators are looking for a lone male who was present near one of the Esplanade footbridges at about 11:15 on the night of June 16. That individual saw the victim and the assailant. A pair of bicyclists wearing helmets and cycling gear who were walking their bikes near the footbridges between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. on July 29 saw the assailant and the second victim, prompting the assailant to put his arm around the woman as if they were a couple. A male and female, both well-dressed and in their late 20s, who were near Joe’s American Bar and Grill at the intersection of Dartmouth and Newbury streets between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. on July 29 also saw the assailant.
State Police criminalists have used forensic science to link the June 16 and July 29 incidents to a single offender. That offender has also been linked to a July 2006 assault near Moakley Park in South Boston.
In the June 16 incident, an adult female was jogging at the Charles River Esplanade on a path near the Massachusetts Avenue bridge shortly after 11:00 p.m. when she was sexually assaulted.
In the July 29 incident, an adult female was abducted at knifepoint on Beacon Street and forced to walk to the Esplanade, where she was sexually assaulted and robbed.
Anyone with knowledge of the crimes or the suspect, or who was present near the Esplanade or Dartmouth Street areas at the times noted above, is urged to contact the State Police Barracks in Boston at 617-727-6780, call the Boston Police CrimeStoppers line at 617-494-TIPS, or text the word “tip” to CRIME (27463).
The Beacon Hill Times follows the progress, or lack thereof, on Cambridge Street through direct observation and interviews with the project’s supervisor John Lepore.
Progress during the week of Aug. 20 - 24
Traffic signals: No progress. Still working on controller programming at Grove Street.
Street paving: Still needs to be completed between Staniford and New Chardon Streets.
Street lights: Still not working properly.
Plants: Doing fairly well, except along the sidewalks, where people are throwing things into the tree pits. The day lilies are beginning to die off.
Storrow Drive has been much in the news lately because Richard K. Sullivan, the new commissioner of the Department of Conservation and Recreation, finally let the Storrow Drive Advisory Committee and the rest of Massachusetts know that he planned to build a temporary road 40 feet into the narrow Esplanade while he fixed the crumbling Storrow Drive tunnel between Clarendon and Arlington streets. So much for the jewel in the crown of DCR parklands, which is what he called the piece of land he proposes to destroy.
We predict this idea ultimately won’t happen. For one thing, a whole bevy of Esplanade advocates will go stand in front of the bull dozers. So will the editors of this newspapers and their whole families.
This unfortunate distraction has to be stopped, and we are confident that under the leadership of Mayor Menino and state Representative Marty Walz, it will be.
But it is only a distraction. There are more important things to consider: we have to get rid of the commissioner’s other unfortunate plan — his proposal to fix Storrow Drive but not change a thing except for putting in a little landscaping here and there.
That is an extremely bad idea.
A better idea would be to ditch the present-day Storrow Drive and go for one of the options in the B family. These are mostly surface road configurations that have not benefited from the close study that the plan for renovating the current tunnel has been given over about 12 years.
Here’s why it’s a bad idea to re-do the present configuration. It is probably more expensive. No one trusts the consultants’ estimates, since common sense says it has to be more expensive to rebuild the tunnel than it does to build a surface road or a slightly depressed roadway.
The time lines are also suspect. Rebuilding the tunnel has to take longer than building a surface road or a partially depressed roadway without a ceiling.
Everyone agrees the tunnel will not last as long as the other options, which adds ultimately to the cost. And, most important of all, a tunnel will be more costly to maintain than the B options. Why would we build another tunnel when we can’t maintain the bridges and tunnels we already have built?
The B options are cheaper, faster to complete and better in the long run for Boston.
So far, the advisory committees have been presented only with doomsday traffic scenarios associated with some B proposals. Predictions of egregious traffic snarls in 50 years did not take into account any improvements to other roads, new mass transit options, or congestion pricing, which will surely come to Boston eventually.
An even more egregious mistake is that the consultants approached the plans from only a traffic point of view. Move traffic at the cost of everything else is no longer appropriate for any American city.
It’s at times like this we wish our planners had a San Francisco set of mind.
San Franciscans faced replacing a portion of Route 101, the Central Freeway, which was damaged by the 1989 earthquake. After a few years of squabbling and doomsday predictions similar to those evoked by the consultants for one of the B options, they did the unthinkable. They tore down the freeway, which carried 90,000 cars a day, and replaced it with a city street, Octavia Street, with traffic lights at every intersection. It opened in 2005. Everything is just fine.
The situations are not exactly analogous. What is important to learn, however, is that no city in American can afford to rebuild roads as we did in the 1950s, when the decision to tear up the Esplanade for Storrow Drive passed the legislature by only one vote. We must find ways to calm traffic everywhere if we are to be pleased with driving when we are forced to or when we make a choice to do so.
Fred Salvucci suggested that another engineering consultant be hired to vet the conclusions that the current consultant has come to. That is a good idea. Better yet, is to engage the new consultant to work over all the B options with an eye to maintaining the entrances and exits to Storrow, calming the traffic enough to make drivers seek other routes and making a surface or slightly depressed option create a better entrance to the park.
Just as we junked Scheme Z in the Big Dig, we should junk Option A, rebuilding the Storrow Drive tunnel as it is now.
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