Grant, and John Wilkes Booth. Booth used the shooting range in the hotel’s basement to hone his skills eight days before he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. The Parker House’s basement vault also became the site of one of Boston’s most ingenious jewel robberies. The year was 1965. It was early October and the Red Sox had long since put away their gloves and were sitting home, like everyone else, watching Sandy Koufax and the Los Angeles Dodgers beat Harmon Killebrew and the Minnesota Twins in a seven-game World Series. Early October in Boston is a teasing time of year, tossing out samples of summer and winter from opposite hands while painting the landscape with wonderfully colored foliage. Phil Cresta’s only interest was in the green of money. While shopping in Filene’s Basement one day, he ran into an old acquaintance, Louie Cohen, a well-known Boston diamond merchant known on the street as Louie Diamonds. He had one foot in the jewelry business and the other in the wise-guy business.
