Hitman (10 page)

Somehow Abie Sarkis got upstairs and escaped by jumping out a window. According to the story later told in Boston underworld circles, Mrs. Sarkis then told Palladino and his friends, “You might as well just burn us now, because Abie's never giving you any money now that he's escaped.”

The crew fled, not quite empty-handed, but with a lot less cash than they'd envisioned when they were planning the score. Frank the Trapper had done his work well.

*   *   *

FOR A
well-planned hit, Johnny would have stolen a car. But it seemed imperative to find Palladino immediately, before he could talk, if indeed he was talking. So that night Johnny was hunting Palladino in his own brand-new car, a 1966 emerald green Cadillac El Dorado convertible with white leather upholstery.

I know this makes me look like a pimp, which I really wasn't, but a working girl gave me that car. She liked me. Back in those days, the higher-class hookers all had this circuit that they worked, and she'd gone off to work at a bordello in Gary, Indiana. While she was gone, she gave me the keys to her apartment in Brookline and to the Cadillac.

Johnny and his friend went from downtown bar to bar—the Attic, the Carribe, the 1-2-3, the 4 Corners. Around 2:30
A.M.
, they found Palladino in a blackjack game at Footsie Pucino's club, which he operated above a deli on Blue Hill Avenue. They asked Palladino to step outside, and he shrugged and walked out onto the sidewalk. Palladino had been drinking, but was cooperative until Johnny told him he'd been “hearing stories.” Finally, though, they reached the street and got into the Cadillac, Palladino very warily. Johnny's friend was driving, and Palladino sat next to him in the front seat, with Johnny in the back—the first of many times over the next seventeen years that Johnny would end up in the hitman's seat.

“Let's go for a ride,” Johnny said. As his friend pulled the Caddy out into traffic, heading back downtown, Palladino panicked and pulled out a revolver and fired at Johnny's friend. He missed, instead blasting out the front window on the driver's side. Johnny drew his revolver and fired at Palladino's head from point-blank range. One shot was all it took.

Johnny Martorano, age twenty-four, was a murderer.

At first it didn't sink in what he'd done. The body of a guy he knew well was slumped in the front seat, dead, and Johnny had killed him. Now he had to get rid of the gun, figure out what to do with the blood-soaked Cadillac, and, most important, get rid of Palladino's corpse. He had neither the time nor the inclination to ruminate over what he had done. All Johnny and his friend could think about was how to avoid getting caught and sent to prison for the rest of their lives. Johnny's friend kept driving north on Blue Hill Avenue toward downtown, and they began a calm discussion of where they should dump Palladino's body.

They quickly decided the best place would be down by the North Station. Nobody was ever around down there at this time of night.

*   *   *

THEY DRAGGED
Palladino's body out of the car and propped it up against one of the stanchions under the Central Artery, but the corpse fell over onto the pavement. Early that morning a
Herald
photographer got a grainy shot of the corpse from up above on the highway, with a Boston police car and a detective nearby. It was a perfect picture that
Life
magazine used in 1967 as the lead illustration of its four-page spread about the carnage in the Boston underworld.

Bobby Palladino's body was dumped at North Station.

It was almost dawn when Johnny got the Cadillac to the Inter-City Garage on Mass Ave in the South End. Waiting for him was another of his new friends—George Kaufman, a skilled mechanic and gang associate. Kaufman chopped up the Caddy, the first of many favors he would do for Johnny over the years.

George Kaufman chopped up the Cadillac that had been used in the Palladino hit.

The murder itself led the Boston papers' evening editions, but Palladino's death was quickly relegated to the back pages a few hours later when Joe Barboza and Jimmy the Bear committed one of their most atrocious crimes. They'd been looking for one of the McLaughlin Gang's few Italian members, and had decided to take him out on a slow weeknight at the Revere Beach club where he tended bar—the Mickey Mouse Lounge. But when Barboza and Flemmi walked in, a construction worker was buying cigarettes at the bar. He was a young father of four from New Hampshire who'd been planning to move back to the White Mountains. Barboza and the Bear didn't care—they shot the McLaughlin gangster first, then the construction worker as he begged for his life.

For the next few days, the papers were full of pictures of the construction worker's attractive young widow and her four adorable children. As angry editorials were written demanding an end to the underworld carnage, everybody forgot about Bobby Palladino. Everybody except In Town—specifically Jerry Angiulo. The murder might have left the police “baffled,” as the papers always put it, but Angiulo wasn't. The next day, Johnny got the message that he and his friend were expected at Angiulo's headquarters, the Dog House—immediately. It was an invitation they couldn't turn down.

Once they sat down, Jerry Angiulo got right to the point. They'd dumped the body too close to 98 Prince Street, maybe five blocks away.

“The fuck is it with youse guys!” he yelled. “Ya leave a fuckin' stiff in my fuckin' backyard! What the fuck was ya thinking?”

“Jerry,” said Johnny, “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

 

3

Gang War

LAWYER:
Were you ever known as Bwana Johnny?

MARTORANO:
No.

LAWYER:
Machine Gun Johnny?

MARTORANO:
No.

LAWYER:
You don't recall that being your nickname when you were running with Barboza?

MARTORANO:
No. I never had a machine gun when I knew Barboza.

LAWYER:
You just got those later?

MARTORANO:
Wasn't when I was with Barboza.

FBI AGENT H. PAUL
Rico's assigned task was to destroy the Mafia in Boston. His hobby—his obsession—was wiping out the McLaughlin Gang. With La Cosa Nostra, it was just business, another assignment from “the Director,” J. Edgar Hoover. With the McLaughlins, it was personal. They were barroom brawlers, up from the docks. Two of their brothers had been killed in World War II. They were old-line shanty Irish. When somebody died, they didn't have the wake at a funeral home. They'd put the casket in the front parlor, passing beers back and forth across the bier. They didn't like cops, and they hated homosexuals, which they assumed Rico was.

Rico knew this because Hoover had instructed his agents to install “gypsy” wires—illegal taps on phones as well as hidden recording devices, known as bugs—anywhere hoodlums did business. Having no warrant, the FBI couldn't directly use any of the information they obtained from the gypsy bugs as evidence in court, but that did not prove to be an insurmountable problem. All the G-men had to do was attribute the information to an anonymous “source,” and then they could go to a judge and obtain a legal search warrant.

The feds put a gypsy wire on a phone in some McLaughlin hangout, right around the time Rico made his occasional pilgrimage to D.C. to pick up a crime-fighting award and token cash bonus from the Director. Every year, the
Record-American
would dutifully run the photo of Rico at FBI headquarters, shaking hands with J. Edgar as Hoover's top deputy, while another confirmed bachelor named Clyde Tolson looked on.

Punchy McLaughlin, murdered by Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme in 1965.

On the day the
Record
was carrying its annual story about Rico's visit to Hoover to pick up his latest commendation, the agents were listening. And they heard Punchy McLaughlin sneering to another gangster about the Boston FBI office.

In his 2003 testimony, the mobster Frank Salemme recounted for a congressional committee what Rico had once told him about this one bugged conversation between the McLaughlins.

“They were always on the phone, according to him, and … the feds would pick up the McLaughlins and the Hugheses casting aspersions on Paul's manhood and his relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, and J. Edgar Hoover was, excuse me again, a fag, and that Paul used to go down there and have a relationship with Colson. They had a ménage à trois with a guy by the name of Colson, I think—”

The prosecutor interrupted: “I believe the name was Tolson.”

“So Paul naturally didn't like that,” Salemme continued. “He was always on their case, Paul was.”

Rico often hung out down at the Roxbury gang's two garages, on Dudley Street in Roxbury and on Hancock Street in Dorchester. Wimpy Bennett stopped by daily, as did Stevie Flemmi and Salemme. George Kaufman ran the actual business, with some help from Salemme, a tall hoodlum from Jamaica Plain who had had some vocational training as both an auto mechanic and an electrician. Despite the fact that Salemme was half-Irish—his middle name was Patrick—like Barboza he dreamed of someday being inducted into La Cosa Nostra. Because of his taste in automobiles, everyone called Salemme “Cadillac Frank.”

When Rico declared war on the McLaughlins, he swore that if he ever got the right opportunity—that is, no witnesses—he would shoot Punchy or anyone else from Charlestown in cold blood. He regarded them all as his “archenemies,” as Salemme put it. They had called him a fag.

Rico often spent his weekday afternoons at Suffolk Downs in East Boston. One day his official FBI vehicle was sideswiped in the horse track's parking lot. There was no way Rico could explain such an accident to his superiors. So he called Salemme, and Kaufman sent over a tow truck. They brought the fed's car back to the garage, where they worked all night completing the repair job so that Rico could drive the car to work in the morning as if nothing had happened.