Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (45 page)

Now the pressure on Krantz went up a notch. The state dropped the gaming charges against him in 1992 and turned the evidence over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In September, Foley told Krantz that he and his wife, who cashed checks for Chico while he was sick, were going to be indicted for money laundering. Foley even showed him draft copies of indictments. Chico sighed and asked to sleep on it.

The next day Krantz got a new lawyer and finally stopped playing games. He graduated from CI status to the witness protection program. He filled in holes in his earlier statements and finally talked about Whitey Bulger and his one-way loyalty.

In November, Chico and seven other bookies from Heller’s Café were indicted for money laundering in a massive check-cashing scheme. About the same time that London was sentenced in 1993, Chico Krantz slipped into another federal courtroom under tight security and pled guilty. He formally forfeited his $2 million in cash, with a wink and a nod on half of it that the government agreed to give back if he cooperated. And he admitted guilt on washing $2 million in checks, much of it at Heller’s. He also became number one on the witness list in the developing case against Bulger and Flemmi.

Jimmy Katz, who had also washed big money through Heller’s, found himself mired in the quicksand between Fred Wyshak and Stevie Flemmi. Just before Katz went to trial, Flemmi met him at a hamburger joint in downtown Boston. Flemmi offered him the parable of Eddie Lewis, another bookie in the Chico camp. Lewis had refused to give immunized testimony to a grand jury about rent and had gone off to do eighteen months for contempt. Stevie then got to the point: if Katz went off quietly to jail like stand-up Eddie, he would be well taken care of in prison. It would be worth his while.

They parted, and Katz went to trial. But he lost and was sentenced to four years. As his wife and daughter cried quietly beside him in the courtroom, Katz said he was standing on principle by refusing to cut a deal with Wyshak. “I won’t do that,” he said. “The government is turning everyone into rats. It’ll become Russia. Every other day they call me: ‘You wanna go with Chico?’”

Katz went off to prison in Pennsylvania. After he settled in and made a few friends, he was abruptly transferred to a spartan holding cell in Massachusetts. He was put in front of a grand jury to answer questions about rents. If he refused, it would mean eighteen more months in prison.

After a year in jail Katz rolled, deciding he did “wanna go with Chico” to the witness protection program after all. He became another key witness against Bulger and Flemmi.

JOE YERARDI was next up in the march toward Winter Hill. Going after Joey Y was cutting closer to the bone. Krantz and Katz paid to be left alone. But Yerardi was a leg-breaker who worked for Bulger and Flemmi, putting over $1 million of their money on the street and collecting their debts. Yerardi did run some bookies, but loan-sharking was his thing. And his criminal record was far different from the other customers at Heller’s. There were firearm violations and several assault and battery convictions in state court.

Yerardi’s main line of work had become handling usurious loans for the bad-to-the-bone Johnny Martorano. His formal ties with Flemmi and Martorano made him a prime target for Wyshak as he assembled his witness list. Yerardi knew that too. And so did Stevie and Whitey.

By the middle of 1993, with Krantz in hand and Katz up against it, the writing was on the wall. A grand jury was going strong, and indictments were in the air. Whitey pulled Stevie aside: time for a vacation. Stevie lit out for Canada, just as he had two decades earlier. Bulger took one of his slow drives across America with Theresa Stanley.

And Yerardi fled too, heading to Florida with $2,500 sent him by Martorano. But he made the mistake of using an old alias from Massachusetts, and six months after he was indicted the Massachusetts State Police found him living in Deerfield Beach as Louis Ferragamo. The fatalistic if bumbling Yerardi asked the troopers, “What took you so long?”

Joey Y became the Gordon Liddy of Heller’s Café. He continued making loan collections while under house arrest and never complained about the United States becoming Russia. He could have croaked Flemmi, with whom he had extensive dealings. In fact Stevie was on a tapped line talking business with Yerardi. But Yerardi stood up, taking an eleven-year sentence as the price of saying no to Wyshak, and law enforcement had to move forward with Chico and Katz and others who lined up at the cashier’s cage in Heller’s Café.

THE BOOKIE brigade had become the soft underbelly of the Bulger gang. It kept Whitey and Stevie on the firing range and shifted the prospect of indictments from the outlandish to the inevitable. And it left the FBI scrambling for a piece of the action, if only to avoid the embarrassment of sitting on the sidelines while a major case was made against the most renowned gangsters in Boston by the Massachusetts State Police. The bureau saw the train leaving and jumped on board at the end.

By the middle of 1994, with London and Yerardi in prison and all the Heller Café tapes deciphered, prosecutors began assembling the rest of the racketeering case that involved historical evidence from 98 Prince Street, Vanessa’s Italian Food Shop, and the 1989 mob induction. This required the FBI to designate someone to help round up the material, and that job fell to Edward Quinn, the hero of the Angiulo case who now headed the Organized Crime Squad.

Though Quinn commanded respect from other investigators, the intramural jockeying continued and showed itself in a spate of news stories, several from the FBI, that reported promising developments in the quest for Bulger. Stories with unnamed sources said, “It’s getting close to Bulger, but it’s not quite there.” The analysis could be read as a warning for Bulger to stay gone. And behind the news stories, John Connolly had been keeping Bulger and Flemmi updated on grand jury progress. In particular, they discussed the Yerardi investigation, which had veered toward Bulger’s gang.

THOUGH bookies were the mainstays in the percolating case, prosecutors also finally broke through the South Boston code of silence. In addition to Timothy Connolly’s testimony, there was the momentous flip of true believer Paul Moore, a skilled boxer and renowned street fighter whose nickname “Polecat” derived from his fast hands and feet. Moore had headed one of Bulger’s cocaine distribution networks and was the real deal, a genuinely tough guy who had pled guilty in the 1990 drug case. He went off to do nine years at a federal prison in Pennsylvania, tight-lipped but buoyed by expectations that were also part of the code—a good lawyer, family support, home insurance. But after a few years in prison he felt that his questions about an appeal were falling on deaf ears. His wife was not getting the support she needed. And a bank foreclosed on his home.

In 1995 Moore had the epiphany that comes to those sitting in a prison cell while other more deserving candidates are walking the streets back home. By this time he was hearing stage whispers from the prison network that Whitey was a rat. He began asking himself the rhetorical question that prosecutors count on: what am I, an asshole? The process accelerated when Moore was hauled before a grand jury and faced another year and a half in prison if he didn’t answer questions about Bulger. Breaking with Whitey the Rat was the easy part. The code was a different story. But Moore had had enough. He asked one thing: put me near the water so it will be as much like South Boston as a modest house and a small shoreline can make it. He entered the witness protection program as someone who would testify against Bulger.

AS THE doggedly determined prosecution moved forward, the strategy remained the same, even as the witness list was reshuffled. Katz and a half-dozen bookies replaced Krantz, who was diagnosed with the leukemia that eventually killed him. Paul Moore and loan officer Timothy Connolly replaced the adamant holdout Yerardi as belly-of-the-beast witnesses.

But the heart of the matter remained the mundane business of Bulger and Flemmi shaking down vulnerable bookies from Heller’s Café. Though the bookies had dealt mostly with Bulger’s out-front man, George Kaufman, most had endured at least one moment alone with the marble eyes of Whitey Bulger or the unfriendly smile of Stevie Flemmi. The “other” crimes that supported racketeering charges against the pair reached back into the ancient history of Bulger’s early work in Winter Hill’s sports-betting network in the I970s. Flemmi’s racketeering was linked to gangland murders from the 1960s.

Frank Salemme was the next mob figure to get into trouble. Despite his years on the mean streets, Salemme remained oblivious about the dangers of his boyhood friend Stevie Flemmi. He had no clue that he had spent fifteen years in jail for attempted murder because Stevie tipped off the Boston FBI about where to find him.

After his 1988 release from prison, Salemme soon began taking the easy money that Stevie pushed his way from independent bookies who had broken free from the Ferrara network. It left Salemme as vulnerable to bookie extortion charges as the Bulger gang. But Salemme fell into another deep hole on his own. About a year out of prison he began working on an ill-advised deal brought to him by his son. He allegedly began extorting a Hollywood production company that wanted to avoid paying expensive union workers as it made a movie in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. For a price, Salemme got the Teamsters to go along. The fatal catch: the head of the production company was an undercover FBI agent. The spider’s web had caught Cadillac Frank.