Hitman (22 page)

When Johnny finally tired of beating Padron and told him to screw, Padron bolted for his car. Nobody rushed after him, since Padron couldn't get far on four flats. As they leisurely walked back out onto Tremont Street, they saw Padron tearing off in his Mercedes, throwing off a shower of sparks as he rode the rims of the sports car. Everyone started laughing, and Nelson Padron lived … to get shot by Johnny another day.

*   *   *

JOHNNY MARTORANO
wouldn't turn twenty-nine until December 1969, but already his life was changing. No nightclub lasts forever, and it was time to close Basin Street South. The city's new hot spot was the Sugar Shack.

One way or another, a lot of Johnny's old friends were gone. The Roxbury gang no longer existed. Wimpy Bennett and his brothers were dead, their killers, Frank Salemme and Stevie Flemmi, on the lam. Peter Poulos, the third guy who'd left town with them, had just been murdered by Stevie in the desert outside Las Vegas. Jimmy the Bear would soon be back in prison.

Joe Barboza was a free man, briefly, although he, too, would soon be back in stir, this time in California, for murdering an unemployed mechanic in a dispute over stolen securities. Most of Barboza's little crew had either been wiped out or absorbed by In Town.

Johnny found himself spending more and more time with the crew from Somerville. He'd never met Buddy McLean, but now he was hanging with his successor, Howie Winter. Like Buddy, Howie was an ex-marine born in 1929. Johnny had first met Howie in the mid-sixties at the various clubs in Boston, and the two men quickly discovered that they had a lot in common, including an avid interest in betting on pro sports, especially football games.

Howie Winter in custody in Boston, age 28, 1957.

Howie owned several parcels of land on Winter Hill, and George Kaufman had moved his operations to Howie's garage at the corner of Broadway and Marshall Street. Jimmy Martorano was out of prison, and he fit well with Howie, too. They liked talking about real estate. Both had the same idea about the South End of Boston—they thought it was going to come back. If they could just get into the right locations, Howie and Jimmy agreed, they could start making some real money.

*   *   *

JOHNNY MARTORANO
had a date, with a nurse.

It was an old high-school classmate from Milton, the girl he'd once taken to Andy's cottage in Scituate in the winter, and whom he had tried to keep warm by taking an ax to his father's living-room set to provide some wood for the fireplace.

He'd run into her somewhere and had noticed she still wasn't wearing a ring, so he asked her out. The Sugar Shack seemed like a nice spot for a first date. They treated Johnny Martorano like royalty—there he truly was “Bwana Johnny,” a nickname then used only by a few close friends, as a sort of inside joke until thirty years later, when the defense lawyers for crooked FBI agent Zip Connolly tried to resurrect the old moniker to destroy his credibility.

It was September 24, 1969. As usual at the Sugar Shack, Johnny didn't see a lot of white faces, but that was okay. But Johnny did notice one white guy, who was scowling at him. It was a slight, bearded thirty-four-year-old pimp from Philadelphia known as “Touch.” His real name was Jack Banno, and, although Johnny Martorano didn't know it, Touch was on the run from the Campbells.

Early the previous Sunday morning, Deke Chandler was making what had become his usual rounds in Roxbury, looking for nonaffiliated drug dealers to muscle. Chandler spotted one of the guys on his target list, a black cocaine dealer named Rat, sitting in a car with Touch. Deke swaggered up to the passenger side of the dealer's car, and quickly got into a beef with the pusher, as Touch sat in the middle between them.

One of Touch's whores later told the police, “He didn't tell me all the words that were passed between the two of them but it had to do with cocaine, that is what Touch told me. It had to do with dope. There were threats … he couldn't come here with any kind of cocaine without the Campbell brothers' okay.… That is when Deke pulled out his pistol.”

After that confrontation, Touch was terrified that the Campbells were going to kill him. He'd seen too much. He could put Deke, an ex-con, on Blue Hill Avenue with a .45. Or so he told his woman. Apparently, things had not been going well for Touch, as the police discovered after his murder. Touch had been banned from the Sugar Shack after running up a tab of $27.99 “without funds.” He also owed the owner $135. He didn't have a car. He'd lost $3,200 in an after-hours card game. He was drunk or stoned most of the time.

But somehow, this night Touch was back inside the Sugar Shack, staring at Johnny Martorano and his nurse. Johnny wasn't exactly hiding—a BPD report the next day noted that “John Martorano was seen in the Sugar Shack early 10:30 or 11:00
P.M.
with a female, on Wednesday.”

*   *   *

JOHNNY AND
his date were leaving around 11, through the back door, when suddenly, out in the alley, Touch jumped him, with a knife. He wasn't big enough to take on Johnny in any kind of physical confrontation, so he was probably high on something. They struggled, rolling around in the alley, until Johnny was finally able to get his own knife out and stab him. Johnny didn't have a gun with him that night—he was, after all, out on a date—but out of habit he was carrying a blade.

Soon Touch was falling down, trying to get up, keeling over again, bleeding, still swearing at Johnny. Johnny gave the keys to his car to the nurse and told her to bring it around. He got Touch into the backseat and was wondering what he was going to do with him now. He was bleeding, but the wounds didn't appear to be life-threatening.

Johnny started driving through the South End. He saw an alley behind the Diplomat Hotel on East Berkeley Street and figured this was as good a place as any to dump Touch. He pulled the car into the alley, opened the back door, and dragged him out of the car. The plan was to leave him there in the alley until somebody could find him and call an ambulance.

All of a sudden, though, Touch got one final burst of strength—a second wind. He started yelling “Motherfucker!” and lunged at Johnny. Johnny pulled out his knife again and stabbed him until Touch fell over. The last word Touch ever spoke was to Johnny Martorano.

“Motherfucker!”

*   *   *

TOUCH'S BODY
was discovered around 3
A.M.
The dead pimp's personal effects included $49 cash and a pawn ticket dated September 2 from Hudson Jewelers on Stuart Street for a $250 ring. According to the autopsy report, he weighed 145 pounds, and had been wearing an orange shirt with matching orange socks and a tan sports coat. His body was identified at the Southern Mortuary by “Candy, colored female,” one of his two women.

Candy, who was twenty-three years old, turned over to police a letter she'd handwritten to Touch the night he died, complaining how badly he was treating her in his attempt to make more money. Touch was dead before she could deliver it to him.

“Dear Daddy,” it began. “You made me your woman for three years so how can I cope with just being your whore? Do you remember when I first meet [sic] you? I thought here is a man, my man so how can I let him down? Touch when you come for me as my Man and Pimp I will be ready ready Ready. Love, Candy.”

*   *   *

IN THEIR
report to the Boston police, the FBI noted that Martorano was likely involved in the slaying: “It is suspected that [REDACTED] either killed BANNO himself or took him to MARTORANO. MARTORANO was also the last person seen with Ronald HICKS, victim of a previous murder involving [REDACTED].”

*   *   *

MARTORANO NEVER
went out on another date with the nurse. But he didn't worry that she would ever go to the police.

“She knew it was self-defense—she saw Touch come after me first. And I never heard from any cops about it, either. They don't question you if they're going to arrest you. And they didn't have any witnesses. The thing is, nobody missed Touch.”

Except maybe Candy.

 

6

The Winter Hill Gang

LAWYER:
Jimmy Sims, Howie Winter, Joseph McDonald, did any of those persons have a relationship to an entity known as “Winter Hill”?

MARTORANO:
Yes.

LAWYER:
And what was the relationship to Winter Hill?

MARTORANO:
There was a gang in Winter Hill and that was the gang.

BILLY O'SULLIVAN WOULD
be dead before he could call in the marker Johnny Martorano owed him for killing a guy in Billy O's after-hours joint. But one of Billy O's underworld pals would parlay the unpaid debt into the formation of a gang that would someday rival the Mafia for power in Boston's underworld.

When Frankie Salemme and Stevie Flemmi went on the lam in September 1969, in South Boston Donald Killeen may have thought his troubles were behind him, but they were only beginning. And it was homegrown trouble—the Mullens, that loosely knit gang of younger criminals.

The more the Mullens saw of the Killeens, the less impressed they were. Holed up in the Transit Café in the Lower End, appearing occasionally on West Broadway, bleary-eyed, their faces splotchy, beer bellies hanging over their belts, the Killeens just looked like another crew of toothless tigers, project rats taking bets on the dogs when they weren't sucking down dimeys and musties—half–Pickwick Ale, half–Narragansett beer drafts. Donald Killeen didn't even live in Southie anymore. He'd moved out to the suburbs. He was pushing fifty. His two top guns were both over forty—Billy O and Whitey Bulger.

On the other side, the Mullens were led by Paulie McGonagle, who had a twin brother, as well as another brother on the fire department who was dating a blond dental hygienist named Catherine Greig. The gang also included an Irish-born ex-marine named Pat Nee, and Buddy Roache, another hard drinker whose brother had just gotten onto the BPD. Perhaps the toughest of the Mullens was Tommy King, an ironworker and career criminal. Whenever King's name was mentioned in the Southie underworld, someone would bring up the time he and two younger South Boston kids had been arrested in Newton in 1960 for robbing a pharmacy of a large amount of cash and drugs. Even then, Southie was a good place to deal black-market prescription pharmaceuticals. A fourth guy in the crew—Paulie McGonagle—escaped.

Pat Nee, Irish-born member of the Mullen gang in South Boston, a friend of Johnny's.

Tommy King, a Mullen, murdered by Johnny, 1975.

One of the younger Southie guys who'd been arrested had a broken jaw. In those pre-Miranda, pre-ACLU days, the Newton cops took him into a back room at headquarters. They were working the kid over, trying to beat the name of the fourth guy out of him. He was screaming out in agony every time they smacked him in the jaw. In a nearby cell, King started yelling at the cops to send in their best guy, and they'd have at it, one-on-one.