Hitman (25 page)

Whitey's pitch to Howie and Johnny was simple, and irresistible. He said the city was full of “independent” bookies, taking action but not paying anybody for what he called protection. In Town couldn't get all of them, so the time was ripe for another gang to move in and start grabbing the unaffiliated bookmakers.

Whitey had obviously worked out his spiel beforehand, and he delivered it flawlessly. Like any good speaker, he began with a joke. His mother, he said, had actually come up with the proposal he was pitching them.

“My mother says to me, Jimmy, stick to gambling. If they pinch you, the most you can get is one, maybe two years. She says, don't rob no more banks, Jimmy. I can't handle another thirty-year sentence. I'm tired of visiting you in prison.”

Howie and Johnny chuckled. It wasn't true, of course. It was Whitey's late father and younger brother Billy, the state rep and now state senator from Southie, who'd made the early trips. And later, as James Bulger Sr. aged and Billy had to assume the responsibilities of a father with a new baby every year, it was a sportswriter for the
Globe
named Will McDonough who would stop by Leavenworth whenever the Red Sox were playing the A's in Kansas City. Another Southie guy who had made several journeys to dreary Leavenworth was a homosexual bar owner from Southie, Hank Garrity. According to a 1973 FBI report, Garrity was one of the first tavern owners in Southie to start paying Whitey for “protection”—$500 a week. So Whitey's story about his mother's prison visits wasn't true. But the way he embellished this personal anecdote was almost … charming.

He then regaled his fellow gangsters with various prison stories—mostly about Alcatraz, the Rock—that in the coming years they would hear over and over and over again, at the garage on Marshall Street. Having softened them up, Whitey utilized another ancient rhetorical technique. He flattered his listeners.

Whitey said he envisioned this new gang of theirs as a group of “working partners.” Everyone would be “capable.” It wasn't going to be like In Town, with its hierarchical structure—Jerry Angiulo holding court at the Dog House or Café Pompeii, a guy who'd never even personally killed anybody, barking out orders to Larry Baione, who'd then dispatch his made men to tell the “associates” to do something.…

In this new gang that Whitey envisioned, everyone would have notches on their guns—real notches, not by proxy.

Whitey wasn't disrespecting In Town, he stressed, glancing at Johnny, the only one at the table with any Italian blood. But this mob would have none of the Mass-card-burning nonsense and all the rest of the mumbo-jumbo about “this thing of ours.” There would be plenty of business opportunities for both In Town and this new crew, Whitey explained, and nobody would have to step on the other guys' toes.

LAWYER:
Is there an area in Boston called Winter Hill?

MARTORANO:
Yes, Winter Hill is a section of Somerville, Mass.

LAWYER:
And where is Somerville again in relation to Boston?

MARTORANO:
Just outside of Boston.

LAWYER:
Winter Hill Gang, why did it get that name?

MARTORANO:
A bunch of guys from Winter Hill.

LAWYER:
Were there any particular requirements to be part of Winter Hill?

MARTORANO:
No.

LAWYER:
Did you have to be Italian. You are Italian, right?

MARTORANO:
No.

LAWYER:
Didn't have to be Italian. Did you have some Italians as part of Winter Hill?

MARTORANO:
Correct.

LAWYER:
Did you have some people who weren't Italian?

MARTORANO:
Correct.

The way Whitey saw it, there were five guys who weren't with In Town who were especially capable, and who should be working together. Three of them are sitting here tonight, Whitey said. Howie, Johnny, and himself.

He proposed two other Somerville guys, who had long been hooked up with Howie in some of his rackets, mainly numbers. One was Joe McDonald, who had already been cut in on the Columbus Avenue project. Joe McDonald was a taciturn killer, solid as a rock. Born in 1917, Joe Mac was another one of those World War II guys. He'd been serving on the USS
Indianapolis
with his brother when it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in 1945. Bobbing with hundreds of other men in the oil-slick waters, he'd watched as sharks closed in on the helpless, floating sailors. Joe Mac's brother had been one of those devoured by the sharks, as Joe watched helplessly. After he was rescued and sent back to Pearl Harbor, Joe Mac had immediately volunteered to go back out on the next warship headed for Japan.

Joe McDonald was a man's man. I loved him. I liked to think of myself as being just like him. You know, since Joe died, I've tried to find out more about what he did in World War II. I've asked everybody who knew him, and all I can find out is that he just never talked about it to anybody. But boy, he was tough. And you could count on him—totally, absolutely. The only problem he had was alcohol. Most of the time he was fine, but he was a binge drinker. He lived on Marshall Street, too, just down from the garage. We called Joe's place the Fire House, because that's where we hung out when we were waiting to hit somebody. We'd have spotters out looking for the guy we wanted to hit, and when they'd see him, they'd use walkie-talkies to call us—give us the alarm.

Sometimes Joe wouldn't show up at the garage in the morning, and you'd go down to see him at the Fire House, and his family would say, ‘He's sick.' That meant he was on a bender.

Joe Mac made a lot of money, but when it came to spending it, he was like Wimpy. Ten bucks could dress Joe for years. One time, he was in the can, and his older brother Leo was out, and Leo sent him $50 for sneakers and to buy a few things at the commissary. Joe sent the money back to Leo. He said, “I don't need anything in here. They got everything in here for free.”

In 1960, Joe and Leo McDonald robbed a dairy in Stoneham with a third man. The McDonalds were quickly arrested, but the third man got away. After their convictions, the judge called the McDonalds into the courtroom and demanded the name of the third man. Leo haughtily refused and got hit with another ten years. Then Joe was brought in and offered the same deal. He shook his head.

“I can't tell you, judge,” he said. “The reason I can't tell you is because I wasn't there. You convicted the wrong man.”

McDonald was shipped back to prison, with no additional time. He'd handled it perfectly.

About '63, Joe's doing time for the dairy robbery in one of those minimum-security-prison forest colonies, and he just took off. He wanted to help out Buddy in the gang war, and he was one of the Hill's top guns. I heard later, he's the one who took the acetylene torch to the balls of one of the McLaughlins. Another time, I heard he buried a hammer in a guy's skull. So he lasts on the street until 1966, but then he gets into a brawl in some barroom on Com Ave in Brighton, and the cops come, and he shoots it out with them, and they don't take Joe Mac 'til he runs out of bullets.

They ship him back to prison, and now he's got this extra time on and after for the escape and the shootout. But he goes to the prison law library every day, does the research, and all by himself, pro se, no lawyer, he gets the original conviction overturned. Then, since he shouldn't have been in jail in the first place, how can he have “escaped”? And you can't charge him with shooting at the cops because they were trying to get him for a crime he didn't commit. So he walked. It was pretty amazing what he did.

The fifth partner in the gang would be Jimmy Sims, born in 1935, the wheelman everyone wanted to work with on a hit. He'd been the driver on the hits on both Hughes brothers. He was a car-stealing whiz, the quickest thief in Somerville, which was saying a lot. He could grab a Ford in thirty seconds. Despite the age difference with Joe Mac, they had been partners for years. He was a member of Teamsters Local 25—all the Somerville guys were. They owned Local 25 and its president, Billy McCarthy, who would one day become national president of the International Brotherhood.

Jimmy Sims, a partner in the Winter Hill Gang, vanished in 1987.

Jimmy Sims was an Irish kid, an orphan, did time, reform school, Walpole, the usual. He was a very good thief. Besides being a Teamster, he had another trade—he was a steeple jack. He could go up a steeple and tear it down, one brick at a time. He was another guy that liked to drink—Howie always said he was worse than Joe when he got going, but I never saw it.

He used to hang around the Playboy Club, and Joe Namath's place downtown. He was tight with Jimmy Flynn, another Teamster from Winter Hill who later became the boss of the Local 25 movie crews. Flynn even wangled himself a bit part in
Good Will Hunting.
He was the judge, which was pretty funny, considering he'd been tried for the murder of Brian Halloran, which of course Whitey did. I can still remember both of 'em, Sims and Flynn, swaggering into the Playboy Club, dressed in full-length mink coats.

Jimmy Flynn, a Winter Hill associate and later high-ranking official of Teamsters Local 25.

LAWYER:
Other than thinking somebody is a good guy or somebody might be a good earner, were there any requirements to join the Winter Hill Gang?

MARTORANO:
No, these were neighborhood guys, army, navy, marines, or just from the neighborhood. No membership or none of this.

LAWYER:
You didn't have to take oaths or any of that?

MARTORANO:
No oaths, no.

LAWYER:
You didn't have to go through this rigamarole of the Mafia?

MARTORANO:
No.

Whitey proposed that everyone keep their own separate rackets. Whitey would still have the bars in Southie. Sims and McDonald wouldn't have to cut anybody in on their truck hijackings, not to mention their increasingly brazen robberies of stamp and coin dealers. Howie and his Somerville crew could still control numbers and horse-racing bets in what
Look
magazine once described as the All-American City. Meanwhile, Johnny would retain his boosters and his bank scams and whatever else he was doing with the Campbell brothers in Roxbury.

Everybody would still have their “associates.” The associates just wouldn't be cut in on the new sports gambling. That racket would be reserved for the partners. That was where the real money was going to be from now on, Whitey explained.

LAWYER:
And you were also doing a shylocking business at the time, were you not?

MARTORANO:
Minimal.

LAWYER:
Goes hand in hand with gambling, doesn't it?

MARTORANO:
Once you're in gambling, you end up in the shylocking business.

LAWYER:
Weren't you a gambler yourself?

MARTORANO:
I was a gambler. It's a different thing.

What this new gang first needed to do, Whitey continued, was find bookies to “protect.” Then they could start moving the bookies they controlled away from numbers, and toward sports. Whitey reminded them that the state was starting its own lottery. For the time being, there would be only one drawing a week, on Saturday night, but the future seemed obvious. At some point the state would have the numbers racket wrapped up tight, under a different name of course.

The politicians would say that the money was going for “local aid” to the cities and towns. The take from the new numbers games would be “for the children.” This new Massachusetts State Lottery would be controlled by the state treasurer, Bob Crane, a close political ally of Whitey's brother. Soon, at Billy Bulger's annual St. Patrick's Day roast in South Boston, Whitey's brother would be introducing Crane as “the biggest bookie in the state.”