Hitman (14 page)

Billy O'Sullivan, a friend of Johnny's—and Whitey's.

The night before the opening, Barboza gang member Tommy DePrisco had stopped by a bar in South Boston with another friend of Johnny's. DePrisco had been trying to collect a loansharking debt from Tony Veranis, a twenty-seven-year-old ex-boxer who had been undefeated in twenty-six bouts until a head injury prematurely ended his pugilistic career in 1958. After that Veranis had drifted into petty crime, and since completing a stretch in state prison he'd been working construction. Looking for money Veranis owed him, DePrisco made a foolhardy move—walking into a strange bar in somebody else's neighborhood.

“There were twenty or thirty guys in the bar,” Martorano recalled, “and they forced him to leave. He probably got a couple of whacks, and he got embarrassed.”

After being roughly thrown out of the bar, DePrisco and the other guy waited around outside the barroom for Veranis to leave, but they never saw him. So they gave up and drove back across the bridge. Guys like Veranis, they knew, you always run into again.

Tony Veranis, shot to death by Johnny Martorano in 1966.

The next night Johnny and Tash and their dates showed up at Billy O's new place around 3
A.M.
The joint was packed. Everyone was standing around when a short, wiry young guy suddenly got in Johnny's face and began yelling at him. He was loaded, blind drunk.

“I'm Tony Veranis,” he began, slurring his words. “You know who I am. I just had a beef with your friend. I kicked him outta Southie with his tail between his legs. Fuck him and fuck you, too.”

He reached for his gun but Johnny beat him to it with his .38. Taller than Veranis, he fired down, into the ex-boxer's skull. Dozens of after-hours partygoers instantly vanished. Within seconds, the only ones left in the room were Johnny, Tash, their dates, and the proprietor, Billy O. Johnny handed some bills to the girls and told them to grab a cab home and keep their mouths shut. Then the three gangsters looked down at Tony Veranis's body. He was lying on his back, mouth open, arms outstretched, his dead eyes wide open, an ever-larger pool of blood seeping out of his gaping head wound.

Arthur “Tash” Bratsos, one of two brothers murdered by Larry Baione.

Billy O shook his head sadly. Opening night was going to be closing night. He glanced over at Johnny Martorano.

“Thanks, pal,” he said.

Tash went down the stairs to get the car, while Billy O started cleaning up Tony Veranis's blood and brains. Johnny knew that after this, he owed Billy O—big time. When Tash came back, he and Johnny dragged the body downstairs, leaving Billy O to finish cleaning up. They put Veranis's body in the trunk of Tash's black Cadillac.

Johnny decided to dispose of the body in the woods, in Norfolk County. They drove through Milton into the Blue Hills, eventually dumping the corpse down a twenty-five-foot embankment. Then Tash noticed he needed gas, so they headed to an all-night service station on Route 128. It was almost dawn when Tash reached into his coat pocket and realized his wallet was gone.

They hurriedly drove back to where they had dumped the body. After parking the car, they scrambled down the embankment and saw Tash's wallet next to Veranis's corpse. Less than half an hour later, the body would be discovered by an early-morning jogger. The cops surveyed his pockets, finding $2.83 in change and two keys. On Veranis's fingers were tattooed the letters “l-u-c-k” and “T-o-n-y.”

The
Record-American
reported, accurately, that the dead man was “in the toils of loan sharks.” The
Globe
ran a sob story by sports columnist Bud Collins, who had known Veranis a decade earlier as a teenage welterweight.

“Nothing Tony Veranis ever did warranted his vicious killing,” Collins wrote. “He was a good kid, as nice as I've met in sports. Confused, I guess, but trying to find the right way. But he did something to offend the animals that killed him.…”

So the cops couldn't totally write off Veranis's murder. A year later, one of the witnesses, a small-time hood himself, was asked by a Suffolk County grand jury if he had witnessed the killing. He refused to answer, was found guilty of contempt, and was sent to prison for several months.

Meanwhile, a South Boston man in jail awaiting trial for another killing bragged to his fellow inmates that he had killed Veranis. That was enough for the prosecutors—they indicted him, although he was acquitted after a trial.

A couple of days after killing Veranis, Johnny was leaving a joint in the Combat Zone when one of the guys from In Town asked him for a ride home. Johnny said sure, and as they were driving to the Mafia soldier's home, the made man lowered his voice.

“We heard your crew had some problems with that kid Veranis,” the Mafia guy said. “So we took care of him for you.”

“You did?” Johnny said. “Good work. Thank you.”

*   *   *

IN 2002,
in Boston, Zip Connolly's lawyer asked Martorano about killing Veranis.

“He's another one reaching for a gun now,” she asked. “Is that right?”

“Right, and another time I was faster than the other guy.”

 

4

The Animal Flips

LAWYER:
People can be killed for so much as talking to another associate in a bar, isn't that right?

MARTORANO:
It happens.

LAWYER:
Happened a lot, didn't it?

MARTORANO:
The seventies and sixties were tough times.

BY 1966, THE
FBI was keeping tabs on Johnny Martorano. The source of their information was his good pal, Stevie “the Rifleman” Flemmi. FBI agent H. Paul Rico had hoped to make Stevie's older brother, Jimmy, his informant, but that just hadn't worked out, what with Jimmy's drug habit, his indiscriminate murders, and his increasingly frequent trips to jail.

But Stevie, from the earliest days of his twenty-five-year career as a “Top Echelon” informant, was an endless font of information about the Boston underworld. The Bear's younger brother tried to keep his hand in every racket in the city. The more wiseguys he talked to, the more gangland gossip he could pass on to Rico, and the more protection Rico could provide for him. Plus there was the occasional $20 or $25 in cash Stevie would collect as an informant's fee, although decades later he would claim Rico had been pocketing the government money for himself.

Stevie Flemmi officially became an FBI informant, complete with identification number, in November 1965. In the first report on his latest catch, Rico conceded that Stevie “probably is the individual” who murdered Punchy McLaughlin, which in fact he was. That justified Rico's description of Stevie as “a very capable individual,” if capable meant the ability to murder someone in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses at a busy bus station and get away with it.

Still, Rico pointed out that even very capable individuals have problems, which was why Flemmi “has no permanent residence at this time due to the fact that he realizes that if he established a permanent residence and the residence becomes known, an attempt would probably be made on his life.”

*   *   *

STEVIE FLEMMI
quickly became one of the FBI's main sources of information about the Boston underworld—a hoodlum, as Rico pointed out, “known to have contacts in the criminal elements in Somerville, East Boston, South Boston and Roxbury, Mass.”

The only missing link was In Town. Stevie never really got along that well with Jerry Angiulo and Larry Baione. He later claimed that when he was a young gangster back in the 1950s, In Town had declined to pay off on a $3,000 numbers hit, leaving him holding the bag. As he later explained it in court, “The only common denominator with them was crime. I certainly didn't play whist with them.”

*   *   *

JOHNNY MARTORANO
had already killed at least one person for Stevie Flemmi: Bobby Palladino. But Stevie had much greater plans in store for Johnny Martorano. In June 1966, Flemmi discussed with Rico his plans to do away with Larry Baione. Johnny Martorano had been assigned an important role in the plot—as the fall guy. The first part of the plan was to invent a false story that would give Johnny a reason for wanting to murder Baione. Stevie concocted a story to involve the Martoranos in the murder he was planning, and then fed it to Rico, who dutifully put it into his next report:

Informant advised that BAIONE definitely has “got to go.” The only thing is that suspicion has to be thrown on to some other group. Informant advised that it is for this reason there was a story being manufactured now that indicates it is partially based on fact that the MARTORANO brothers are very disturbed over LARRY BAIONE and over the way one of BAIONE's associates slapped their [MARTORANOS] father around in Basin Street South.

Informant advised that he is hopeful that if BAIONE is killed that suspicion will go to one of the MARTORANOS.

Johnny Martorano was, as usual, hustling. Basin Street South was a nice place to own, to hang out in, but profits were spotty. Overhead—with musical acts, a chorus line, and rent, among other expenses—was high. Bad weather, or a weak act, and the club could lose thousands in a weekend.

Johnny didn't spend all his time at Basin Street. Sometimes he would head into the North End. One of his regular after-hours haunts was Bobby the Greaser's joint on Commercial Street. Bobby the Greaser's real name was Bobby LaBella. He was a friend of Wimpy Bennett's, and he and Johnny hit it off well.

“If you ever need me to drive on a hit, I'm glad to help out,” Bobby the Greaser would tell him. “Just don't ever ask me to lend you money. That is the one thing I will never do. That's bad business between friends.”

Most often, though, if Johnny wasn't hanging at Basin Street, he could now be found at Enrico's, a little Italian dive on LaGrange Street, on the edge of the Combat Zone. It was owned by an in-law of Ralphie Chong, whose real name was Lamattina. Ralphie Chong was In Town through-and-through, on Larry Baione's crew, and a member of the mobbed-up family that rented Basin Street South to Johnny. Enrico's was a popular hangout for working girls between tricks, and that naturally attracted a certain male clientele that Johnny was all too happy to get acquainted with.

The state attorney general had his investigative offices nearby, and soon Johnny was hobnobbing with various plainclothes state police, among them Dick Schneiderhan. One night in Enrico's, when Schneiderhan was jumped by bikers, Martorano came to his defense, and a fast friendship formed. It was cemented when Johnny began wordlessly leaving him envelopes of cash in return for, say, the telephone numbers of bookie parlors that the staties or Boston police were tapping in preparation for raids. Even though Johnny didn't yet have any bookmaking operations of his own, having lists of targeted phone numbers made him a very valuable person for other wiseguys to know, and guys with access to that kind of inside police information were a lot less likely to get knocked off.