Hitman (13 page)

In his final days, Punchy was depressed. He couldn't believe what had happened, how many of his friends, not to mention his brother, had been killed.

“All this,” he told one fellow hoodlum, “over a broad.”

On October 20, 1965, Punchy was boarding the bus in West Roxbury for Georgie's trial downtown when two men in suits suddenly approached on foot, drew guns, and began firing at him. Stevie was wearing a wig and makeup applied by one of his second-string girlfriends; he was carrying a .38-caliber, long-barrelled Webbley handgun. Punchy had no time to remove his own weapon from the bag, so he began running, pausing only long enough to hand his paper bag to a mother of five. The two men continued firing at Punchy until he fell. Witnesses later described them as having “olive complexions”—newspaper code for Italian. For Stevie and Frankie, the third time was indeed the charm. Punchy was pronounced dead at the Faulkner Hospital in Dorchester at 8:34
A.M.
The cause of death was “multiple gunshot wounds of the heart, lungs, spleen, liver and intestines,” as the coroner put it.

The housewife to whom Punchy handed the bag took it home where she opened it, saw the gun, and promptly fainted.

Rico had conveniently taken that day off to play a round of golf. But the next morning he showed up back at the garage. “Nice shooting,” he told Flemmi and Salemme.

*   *   *

TEN DAYS
later, Buddy McLean and two bodyguards were leaving the Peppermint Lounge on Winter Hill at midnight. Suddenly, on the sidewalk just outside the shuttered Capitol Theater across Broadway, Steve Hughes stepped from the shadows, raised an automatic rifle, and fired at Buddy, hitting him in the head. McLean died a few hours later. Both his bodyguards survived their wounds, but were returned to prison for parole violations.

The gang war continued.

*   *   *

JIMMY THE
Bear was still on the lam. And just as Punchy McLaughlin had struggled to support Georgie, Stevie was likewise hard-pressed to keep his fugitive brother in money. Stevie also needed cash for his estranged wife, and their two daughters. And now Stevie was living with another woman, the hot-tempered Marion Hussey, who had already borne him two illegitimate children. Stevie was paying all the bills for the Hussey household, which also included Marion's three children by her former husband. Stevie always had to be hustling, looking for new customers for his shylocking racket. He was continually starting up new businesses—a grocery store, a funeral home, a barroom. If they didn't pan out, Flemmi would just torch them for the insurance money. For Stevie, every day was a financial struggle.

Johnny Martorano wanted to help out the Flemmis, and he thought he had just the right place for the Bear to hide out in—the Brookline apartment that had been left to him by the working girl who'd also given him the Cadillac in which he'd murdered Bobby Palladino. Johnny had been staying there off and on for months, depending on how he was getting along with his various women.

One day in November 1965, Jimmy Martorano called the Brookline apartment looking for his brother. Jimmy the Bear picked up the phone, and after overcoming his surprise, Jimmy Martorano asked the Bear if he needed anything.

“Can you bring me a sandwich?” Flemmi said.

A couple of hours later, Jimmy Martorano arrived at his brother's apartment. A few seconds after he got inside, a posse of state and Brookline police burst through the door, accompanied by reporters and photographers from every paper in town. The cops claimed they had the apartment staked out and had seen someone raise a blind.

I never believed that. There were only two people who knew the Bear was there—me and his brother, Stevie. I know I didn't tell the cops. The Bear had become a pain in the ass for everybody, but especially for his brother. I think Stevie tipped the cops to save himself some money.

Johnny Martorano was spending more time with Joe Barboza and his East Boston crew. At nights they could be found at the Ebb Tide, and they usually spent their days at Champi's Bar at the corner of Brooks and Bennington streets. They also rented the rooms upstairs, where they stored their guns and ammunition in a refrigerator, and generally terrorized the owner of the bar and everyone else in the neighborhood.

Nicky Femia, one of Joe Barboza's top hands, later worked for Whitey.

Like the Bear, the Animal was certifiably insane. But he liked a good time, and with his East Boston roots Johnny fit in well with the Barboza gang. The crew included Chico Amico, a former short-order cook in Malden whom Barboza treated like a younger brother, and Nicky Femia, a hulking thug who likewise never strayed far from Barboza's side. He'd been the driver on the Mickey Mouse Lounge hit. There was Dido Vaccari, to whom Barboza had confessed his role in the Deegan hit. Barboza also had a younger guy named Patsy Fabiano, who was a sort of mascot, comic relief, for the rest of the gang.

The crew also included Jimmy Kearns, Tommy DePrisco, and Arthur “Tash” Bratsos. Like so many Boston hoods of the era, including Stevie Flemmi, Bratsos had a brother in the Boston Police Department. Tash also had an older brother, who had been a gangster in the South End, and who, back in 1954, had gotten into a beef with Larry Baione. Shortly thereafter, the older Bratsos brother disappeared. He had “gone to California,” as they said in the underworld. Baione had murdered the older Bratsos and then disposed of his body.

Whenever Tash got drunk, which was often, he would loudly proclaim his intention to kill Baione. Word had long since gotten back to Larry, and he looked askance not only at Tash, but at everyone who hung with him, and that now meant Johnny Martorano.

*   *   *

LAST CALL
at Basin Street South was usually only the beginning of Johnny's nightly prowls through the city. There were always women, either working girls or girlfriends or both. One night, he was in bed with a married woman when her estranged husband burst into the bedroom, brandishing a pistol. He pulled the trigger, but the gun misfired. Johnny picked up a bottle and hurled it at the husband. The husband threw down the misfiring gun and ran out of the apartment.

One night at Basin Street Johnny met a girl named Barbara who'd just gotten into town from Florida. Somehow she'd hooked up with a wiseguy from the North End, a guy who years later would set up another girlfriend for a gangland hit by telling her to wear a cowboy hat to a bar. He told her the hat turned him on. That night, as she waited for her gangster boyfriend in the bar, two guys she'd never seen before walked in, looked for the woman wearing a cowboy hat, then headed straight for her and shot her in the head.

Johnny and Barbara hit it off immediately, and soon the hood from In Town was history. And Barbara was pregnant with Johnny's first son, John. He was born in 1965. Jimmy the Bear sobered up long enough to appear at his godson's christening.

Despite his increasing familial responsibilities, Johnny never let it affect his social life. Another night he and Jimmy Kearns were drinking at the Attic when they noticed a new working girl, a teenager, sitting alone at a table, weeping.

I went over and asked her what the problem was. She said she couldn't go home without at least a couple of hundred dollars for her pimp. She'd just had a baby and she'd fallen in with the pimp, and now she was living in his apartment in the Back Bay and he'd put her out on the street. She said that he just sat around the apartment, smoking pot, and blowing the smoke in the baby's face to keep him quiet. I was furious when I heard that.

Jimmy Kearns, a friend of Johnny's, died in federal prison.

I asked her if she wanted to get out and she said yes. I went back to our table and asked Jimmy Kearns if he was doing anything and he said no. Then I said, “Jimmy, let's go take a ride.”

We drove over to the apartment with the girl and went in. I told the pimp the girl and the baby were going with us, and when he objected, I pistol-whipped him. I was hitting him so hard that somehow the trigger cut my middle finger at the bottom joint. To this day I still can't move it. Anyway, I ended up throwing the pimp out the window—his place was on the second floor.

We got the girl and her baby into the car and start driving away and Jimmy asked me, “Where are we going now?” And I said I have no idea. Jimmy smiled and said, “I see you have not thought this thing through.” So we considered where we could take her, especially with a baby and all. Finally we remembered this pharmacist in East Boston, on Pembroke Street, near where Barboza and Jimmy and the rest of them hung out. This guy's wife had just died recently, so we knew he had room, and we figured maybe he'd take her and the baby in as a favor to us.

And he did, and shortly afterward, they were married. She was supposed to stay there for a couple of weeks and she ended up living with the guy 'til he died. I bring this up only because sometimes I really did help people back in those days.

A lot of nights in the mid-sixties, Johnny would eventually drift into Roxbury and its flourishing after-hours clubs. Roxbury was changing. Blacks had been moving into the neighborhood since the 1950s, but now the pace of migration was quickening. So was white flight, and the resentment of the departing white working classes was growing.

The increasing crime in the neighborhood bothered even the white gangsters from Roxbury, like the Flemmis. Soon the FBI's informants were reporting that the Flemmis' mother had been mugged near Boston City Hospital “by a couple of colored fellows.” The Flemmis quickly moved out of Roxbury, to Mattapan, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood that, like Roxbury, would soon be devastated by a white exodus.

Johnny Martorano had no such worries. His Basin Street South was one of the few integrated nightspots in the city. But as time went on, the white presence in Roxbury began to fade, especially after midnight. In the after-hours joints in Roxbury, often Johnny would find only one other white man—a fellow gangster named Billy O'Sullivan. Billy O, as he was called, was a hard-nosed loan shark from Southie who had moved to Savin Hill in Dorchester. With six kids, he needed health insurance, so he'd finagled himself a no-show state job. He was a heavy drinker—at least six arrests for public drunkenness, and one for driving under. When Billy O drank, he'd sometimes start muttering about “the niggers.” More than once, Johnny had to sidle up to Billy O in some crowded after-hours barroom in Roxbury to whisper, “I don't know how many guns you got on you, Billy, but you and me are gonna need 'em all to shoot our way out of here if you don't calm down and shut the fuck up.”

At which point Billy O would laugh and then shut the fuck up.

One night in April 1966, Johnny bumped into Billy O. O'Sullivan told him he was opening a new after-hours club above the TV store on Dudley Street in Roxbury that was owned by Wimpy Bennett's older brother Walter. Directly across the street from Walter's Lounge, it was a good location for an after-hours spot, and Billy O invited Johnny to stop by on opening night. Martorano, always looking for a new place to party, said he'd be there.