Hitman (24 page)

The guy appeared to be in his early forties, with a very light complexion, blond hair, and blue eyes. He was dressed sharply, wearing a suit and tie, which pegged him as someone who was not from the South End. He stopped at Johnny's table, extended his hand, and smiled.

“You may not remember me, Johnny. I'm Jimmy Bulger. Billy O told me to come see you if I ever had a problem.”

Johnny studied the man in front of him. He vaguely recalled maybe meeting him once before, one night at the Attic. But he said his name was Jimmy. Johnny seemed to remember that the guy in front of him had been introduced by another name—was it “Whitey”?

Johnny Martorano smiled at the guy with two names.

“Any friend of Billy's is a friend of mine,” Johnny said and invited him to sit down and have a drink.

Whitey looked like a gangster-politician in that suit. He says he wants to meet with Howie Winter. He says, I have to get this thing in the Town resolved. That was what they all called Southie—“the Town.” He showed respect. He knew how to ask for a favor. You knew he wasn't going to go see the Mafia because if Jerry Angiulo intervened he'd want to take over everything. I hadn't really been following what was going on over there in Southie, none of us had. But Whitey must have thought things weren't going well, or he wouldn't have reached out to me, to set up a meeting for him with Howie.

Whitey had figured out a way to end the war between the Killeens and the Mullens that didn't end with his own murder. The only way to accomplish that would be to dispose of his boss, Donald Killeen. Whitey naturally wouldn't even consider getting involved in such a plot unless he had a deal in place with the Mullens, who disliked him for a very good reason—he'd been trying to kill them, and vice versa.

Whitey needed someone to broker the deal for him, which was where Howie Winter came in. Howie knew the Mullens—Whitey had told Condon that much, months earlier—and they could be expected to go along with whatever Howie asked them to do. When they weren't stalking the Killeens, the Mullens were truck hijackers and tailgaters. They also burgled a lot of warehouses. They always needed a place to sell their truckloads of hot merchandise, and that was where Howie Winter came in. He was the Mullens' biggest fence, and once they got paid, the Mullens often stayed in Somerville to get drunk, recycling their profits back into various Winter Hill gin mills. It was a win-win, at least for Somerville.

Naturally Howie and the others in Somerville liked the Mullens a lot—they were earners. Whitey wanted Howie to guarantee that if he set up Donald Killeen, the Mullens wouldn't come looking for him next.

There was one other major sticking point. Once Donald Killeen was dead, Whitey wanted to merge the two crews, with himself as the boss. It was certainly an audacious suggestion, eliminating your own crew chief and then taking over the more powerful gang that had handled the murder on your behalf. But Whitey's pitch was that it would be in everyone's interest to halt the bloodshed. All the other gangs in Boston were consolidating—why shouldn't Southie's? As long as Southie was divided, it would be easy pickings for In Town. Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme might be gone, but sooner or later somebody else would move in to fill the vacuum. And ultimately, that couldn't be good news for Somerville, or for the remaining independents, like Johnny.

Howie agreed to arrange a sit-down for Whitey and the Mullens, but Whitey wasn't taking any chances. He didn't know many people from In Town, but one he had become friendly with was J. R. “Joe” Russo from East Boston. Whitey asked Russo to check with Howie, just to make sure he wasn't walking into a trap. Russo made the call to Winter Hill and then reported back to Whitey that Howie had assured him everything was on the level. Less than a decade later, Whitey would be telling his FBI handlers how much he despised the Mafia, but in 1972 when his back was to the wall, he had no qualms about seeking their assistance—any port in a storm.

The sit-down was at Chandler's, which we'd just opened. It was after hours, early one morning. For the Mullens, it was Pat Nee, Weasel Mantville, and Tommy King. I don't know where McGonagle was. Whitey was the only one on the other side. Howie was the mediator. He told them, he'd just been through one of these wars, and it made no sense. Everybody'd be better off if it got settled. At the end of the night I guess they had a deal.

Donald Killeen now lived in Framingham, and that was where they would get him. May 13 was a Saturday, and it was his son Greg's fourth birthday. His parents bought him a toy fire engine as his present. Shortly after 9
P.M.
, with the sun long down, Donald Killeen got a phone call. He told his wife he wanted to buy a newspaper, and went outside to his 1971 Chevrolet Nova.

“Several men charged the car,” the
Globe
would later report, “rammed a submachine gun into the driver's side, and fired sixteen bullets.”

Inside the house, Killeen's ten-year-old daughter heard the shots and thought they were fireworks. Killeen had seen the Mullens advancing on him, in a group, just the way they had with Billy O. Like Billy O, he'd been caught flat-footed. He died reaching into the glove compartment for the .38-caliber revolver police later found under his body.

Weasel Mantville, a Mullen who died in the 1980s.

The next day, at the funeral home, a large bouquet arrived for Donald Killen from a Brookline florist, collect.

The card read, “Au Revoir.”

*   *   *

JOHNNY MARTORANO
was making ends meet, barely. Chandler's had just opened, and his name was on the payroll, if not the liquor license. But his women and his children were costing him a fortune every month. None of the mothers of his children worked. He was responsible for at least two rent payments, car payments, utility bills, wardrobes, and more. Everything that cost money, Johnny Martorano had two of.

He now had two daughters and two sons—his second son, Vincent, had been born in 1970. Johnny was now remarried, to Vincent's mother. They'd gotten hitched in New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, his first ex-wife, the former Nancy O'Neill, had remarried.

Her new husband was some guy from East Milton, he was a little older than me. I knew him. He'd been a friend of Wimpy Bennett's. I was visiting the girls one day, and I asked Jeannie how she was getting along with the new guy. Of course kids never really like their stepparents, I understand that. But she didn't care for him much at all, so I decided to have a private chat with him. I told this guy, if you ever lay a hand on either one of the girls, I'll shoot you in the head. Jeannie and Lisa didn't have any more complaints after that.

About the same time, Barbara got sick, and I asked Nancy to take in my son Johnny. He lived with his sisters maybe six months—they're still really close, after all these years. Barbara and Nancy always got along well, surprisingly I guess.

Everyone had to be supported. And there were other expenses as well—Johnny continued giving a couple of hundred a week to Stevie's common-law wife, Marion Hussey. That was what friends did for each other, when somebody had to go on the lam. And Stevie was, after all, Johnny's best friend

Johnny Martorano's life had become a country-music song—“Livin' here, lovin' there, lyin' in between.” The new Mrs. Martorano was riding him hard all the time, inquiring in rather caustic terms where he was sleeping all those nights when he didn't come home.

“Life was a party, but you know, I couldn't have paid for everything with a 9-to-5 job, and I've never had one of those.” So Johnny was hustling. He had some money out on the street, at a couple of points a week. The afternoons he'd spend at whatever track was open, along with most of his friends. Then he'd drive back to the South End, where he hung out nights. Duffy's Tavern was a dive—after last call, if nothing else was going on, Johnny would sometimes turn out the lights and sit by himself in the dark with a pellet gun, shooting the rats one by one as they slithered out of the walls.

Duffy's quickly became popular among the local boosters as a good place to unload their shoplifted merchandise. The way Johnny figured it, he was merely a pawnbroker without a license. He paid his thieves as much as they could have gotten at the pawnshops on Washington Street under the Orange Line. The only difference was that Johnny didn't have to let the cops periodically check out his shelves full of tagged swag.

Soon a continuous stream of junkies was showing up at Duffy's, lugging shopping bags full of obviously stolen merchandise. They boosted so much women's apparel Johnny finally got some clothing racks, which he used to set up his own version of Filene's Basement in the cellar. He paid the boosters between 10 and 15 percent of the price on the tags, then put the stolen clothes on sale for one-third of the label's list price, subject to haggling.

“That was enough of a markup so that I could make a profit and give a lot of stuff away,” Martorano said. “It's an easy way to make friends. Somebody comes over, and you bring out a rack of fur coats and tell them, pick one or two out for yourself. It's something people remember. Gets 'em in good with their girlfriends, maybe even their wives.”

Most of Martorano's boosters were black, but his best one was a white schoolteacher with a black boyfriend who Johnny knew from Roxbury. During the summer and school vacations she'd crisscross the country, hitting high-end department stores, stuffing the goods into cheap suitcases she'd send back to her boyfriend, who would call Johnny to come pick up the stuff.

Another regular booster at Duffy's was the head of an all-night cleaning crew in the downtown office buildings. He'd come in every few days with a couple of IBM Selectric typewriters, the best of that era, which usually retailed for about $300. The cleaning-crew boss wasn't greedy, he'd just steal one or two every week, from different buildings he cleaned. At $40 apiece, Johnny couldn't get his hands on enough Selectrics to keep the basement stocked. He also bought whatever stolen jewelry or gold he could pick up, and then moved it along for whatever markup he could get.

But no matter how fast Martorano made, or stole, money, he was falling further and further behind, even though Chandler's had become an immediate success as soon as it opened. Jimmy Martorano and Howie Winter had been right—there were enough affluent white people in the South End now to support a decent club.

Joe McDonald, added to the FBI's Most Wanted List in 1976, at different points in his life.

Eventually they shut down Duffy's Tavern. Then they rented the old Duffy's space to Joe McDonald, one of Howie Winter's partners in Somerville. Joe Mac, as he was known, set up his son-in-law in a new liquor store. As for Chandler's itself, it quickly became the place where both Howie and Johnny conducted a lot of their business. For their Boston associates, it was a more convenient location than the garage on Winter Hill that served as Howie's hometown headquarters. And the ambience was a lot more upscale than it had ever been at Duffy's Tavern.

Howie and Johnny weren't formally hooked up yet, but it was moving in that direction.

*   *   *

WITH THE
murder of Donald Killeen, Whitey Bulger was now on top of the rackets in South Boston. But that wasn't nearly enough for Whitey. Like Howie Winter and a host of other Boston gangsters, he was another one of those guys born in 1929—just a couple of years too young to have fought in World War II. The gangsters born in 1929 were forever trying to prove to the slightly older World War II vets in their neighborhoods that they were every bit as tough as they were, even if they hadn't gotten the chance to battle the Japs and the Nazis the way Jerry Angiulo and Louie Grieco had.

Whitey was a World War II buff, always reading military history books and later buying videotapes about the war. But his greater regret was that he had wasted so many of his prime robbing years in prison. Now he wanted to make up for lost time, and so he had another idea he wanted to bounce off Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano. He arranged to meet them at Chandler's to discuss a business proposition.