Hitman (26 page)

He wasn't kidding.

Once the state got into it, you could see numbers start to crumble. It was slow at first, because the state didn't pay off like nigger pool. When you won in the state lottery, you had taxes taken out of your money, there was no way around it. But even before the taxes it was less. When I was in numbers, I would use Doc Sagansky for the layoffs—all the big bookies did, Abie Sarkis, Bernie McGarry. Doc used to pay $800 for $1 on three numbers, $5,000 for four numbers. Before the state lottery, everybody always used the same number—that's how the
Record
could put it in the paper every night. It was based on the early races, that's why you couldn't play the number after 3 in the afternoon. If Suffolk was open, you used their numbers, if not, somewhere in New York. Aqueduct, maybe. By 4:30, 5, you had three of the four numbers, you could start sending out the runners.

Whitey explained to his future partners how dogs and horses were all right—Howie made a nice living controlling that action in all the bars in Somerville. And in Southie, Whitey himself handled dogs in the summer. It was one of the rackets he'd been involved in with Billy O. But all that was for old guys. The horses and dogs weren't on TV. The next big thing in gambling was going to be sports, specifically, the National Football League. The games were on TV every Sunday, and everybody watched them. Everybody wanted to bet on pro football, even squares. They all thought they were experts. They were ripe for the picking.

Outside of Nevada, the NFL didn't allow gambling on its games. So the mob wouldn't have to worry about this new state lottery commission eventually pushing them aside, the way it would be doing with the numbers.

So far Whitey had been the affable, self-effacing glad-hander they'd come to know. But when he outlined how the proceeds would be cut up, it became clear that he wasn't planning on being the junior partner for long.

Of the five partners, four would each get one-sixth of the proceeds. The fifth partner was Whitey, and he would take a third. After all, he explained, he had more expenses. He still had all these younger guys, the Mullens, to take care of back in Southie. Even though they were no longer in open revolt, “the kids” remained restive. His third, after he got through cutting it up with the Mullens, would actually be more like 5 percent.

Whitey asked Howie and Johnny to consider how different his situation was from theirs. All his enemies were not only alive, they were still hanging out in the same neighborhood with him. Whitey hadn't won his gang war in the same way that the other partners had won theirs, by wiping out the opposition. That would come later—Whitey didn't come right out and say that, but that was the impression he left.

It was an easy sell. One-sixth of something was better than one-third of nothing. It didn't take them long to figure out how they would grab the bookies. They would send out their own guys, their “associates” as Whitey preferred to call them. Their associates would find bookies to bet with, and as long as they won, they'd collect and keep playing. Once they lost, they'd just tell the bookie, “Fuck you, I ain't paying.”

If somebody from In Town showed up to collect, you'd know the guy was with the Angiulos. You'd pay what you owed, and cross that bookie off your list. If nobody came by to threaten you, then somebody—usually Johnny and Howie—would show up to tell the bookie about his new partners.

The bookie would now be splitting 50-50, but only on the profits, not the losses. Say a bookie lost $10,000 one week—the gang would not be on the hook for $5,000. If the bookie wanted to borrow the $10,000, the Hill would be there to loan it to him, at a point a week—$100. Then the next week the bookie makes, say, $30,000. He repays the Hill the $10,000 loan and is left with a profit of $20,000. He would then owe the gang half of his overall profit—$10,000.

Whitey's other idea was that they would offer to back bookies who wanted to get into betting on football. Long-term, that turned out to be the Hill's biggest mistake. In the numbers racket, everything was fairly predictable, especially if you could control the daily winner by manipulating the handle at the track—usually Suffolk Downs—that was used to establish the daily number. But Whitey and the others were novices at sports betting. They failed to take into account that if you hit a bad patch in sports gambling, even the bank—the gang—was going to be hemorrhaging such large amounts of cash that they, too, would have to go to bigger shylocks, and in Boston that meant Jerry Angiulo.

The way we considered it was, think about two people—one is a bookmaker you know and the other is a gambler you know. Guaranteed, the bookmaker is going to be living in a better house than the gambler. Because long-term the odds are on his side. As long as a bookmaker is patient and has enough money to ride out a bad stretch, in the end he wins. Bookmakers got no big edge in any one particular game. If you're a gambler, you can win anytime. You can hit a streak and keep winning for weeks. But in the end, greed takes over and you lose. It happens every time. What's the old saying? “All horseplayers die broke.” It's so true, and it applies to sports bettors, too.

In the beginning, the Hill had visions of going around to their bookies every week—guys like Dick O'Brien on the South Shore, Tommy Ryan in Cambridge, and Charlie Raso on the near North Shore—and cutting up huge pots of cash, 10 grand here, 20 grand there. They'd be rolling in dough, and with any luck, they wouldn't have to risk shooting anybody.

Now they just had to close the deal with Jerry Angiulo.

Meeting as usual at the Dog House on Prince Street, Angiulo and the new gang leaders, Howie and Johnny, quickly hammered out an agreement. From now on, all bookmakers had to be connected with either In Town or the Hill. In other words, it was open season on independent bookmakers. Angiulo knew he couldn't control every bookie anyway, and this way, he was partnering up with a group that might otherwise cause him problems down the road. The likelihood of an eventual war would be greatly diminished if everybody was making money, working together, more or less.

But before they left, Angiulo gave his two new, younger partners some prescient advice: “If you get into betting on games, make sure you got a barrel of money, 'cause you're gonna need it.”

Jerry had it figured out a lot better than we did. He was financing bookies; all he cared about was one point a week on the money they owed him, the interest—the vig, as it's called. He would back a guy who backed sports. Guy loses his shirt and has to borrow a hundred grand from Jerry, it's a point a week—a grand a week, forever. Jerry wasn't into sports gambling, he was into shylocking.

Just as Howie and Johnny weren't paying close enough attention when Angiulo mentioned that barrel of money they'd be needing, they likewise ignored the other tip Angiulo offered them, about a guy he'd heard had been hanging out at Chandler's lately.

“Stay the fuck away from Tony Ciulla,” the underboss of Boston said, not as a threat but as friendly advice, from one businessman to another. “He's no fuckin' good.”

Later on, they couldn't say they hadn't been warned.

*   *   *

CHANDLER'S BECAME
a hot spot, mentioned in the city's gossip columns. When the 1973 gangster movie
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
was being filmed in Boston, actor Robert Mitchum hung out there nightly, along with his driver from Local 25, Fat Harry Johnson. As someone who'd done time himself almost thirty years earlier on a trumped-up marijuana charge in Hollywood, Mitchum fit in well with the Chandler's crew.

Also in the cast, both in the movie and at Chandler's, was Bobo Petricone, Buddy McLean's old pal who'd moved to Hollywood, changed his name to Alex Rocco, and become an actor. With his role in
The Godfather
behind him, Bobo was now back in his hometown, playing a bank-robbing gangster who bought guns from Mitchum's title character.

Mitchum was a John Wayne type, a two-fisted drinking cowboy. Howie and I are having dinner with him one night in Chandler's and some cops come in and serve both of us with subpoenas for the grand jury. Howie is real embarrassed, and he apologizes to Mitchum, and Mitchum just laughs and says, “I'm just glad they didn't serve me.”

Fat Harry Johnson, Mitchum's driver during the making of
Eddie Coyle.

Another guy from the movie who was in Chandler's all the time was Peter Yates, the director. You know that scene at the end of the movie when they take Mitchum to the Bruins game and get him drunk, and then Peter Boyle shoots him in the head from the backseat? Before they shot it, Yates asked Howie for his … insight, I guess you'd say. Scene turned out pretty well, don't you think? Very realistic.

In addition to the nightly socializing, a lot of business was conducted out of Chandler's. As Jerry Angiulo had heard, one guy who had started hanging around was a local swindler and degenerate gambler named Fat Tony Ciulla. A few years earlier, he'd tried to run a past-posting scam on a Mafia bookie—that was how Angiulo had gotten to know, and intensely dislike, Ciulla.

Fat Tony was always working on a new grift. One of his more successful flimflams involved a large diamond pinkie ring that he always carried with him in a velvet-lined box from the high-end jeweler Shreve Crump & Lowe. Whenever he found a suitable mark, Fat Tony would offer to sell him his prized possession. To show what a trusting soul he was, Fat Tony would hand the Shreve box to the mark and tell him, take it to a jeweler, get it appraised, and then bring it back to me.

Fat Tony Ciulla, the race fixer who eventually went into the Witness Protection Program.

The mark would quickly find out the stone was genuine, worth maybe $30,000. He'd bring the box back to Fat Tony, who'd quickly stick it back in his pocket. After much negotiation, they'd finally agree on a very reasonable price and then Fat Tony would give the mark back the ring—except, of course, it wasn't the same ring. It was in an identical box from the same store, and the stone was in the exact same gold-plated setting. But instead of a diamond, the mark would have bought himself a zircon.

Whatever money Fat Tony could steal, he blew at the track. He had to place all his bets at the track, because bookies refused to take any action from him. Fat Tony was a pariah. On the first night that he had appeared in Chandler's in 1972, it was to settle a betting debt with one of Howie's top bookies in Somerville, Bobby Gallinaro. Fat Tony's brother-in-law, Eddie Ardolino, was a friend of Johnny's from the old days at Basin Street. So Martorano asked Ardolino to bring his wayward in-law around to Chandler's to settle up his debt to Bobby G.

Bobby Gallinaro, “Bobby G,” a Somerville bookie and associate of Howie Winter.

As Howie and Johnny sat at a table, Eddie Ardolino appeared in the doorway of Chandler's. Behind him stood a hulking, unshaven, shabbily dressed man. He was six feet five inches and had to weigh at least 300 pounds. It was Fat Tony Ciulla. He was only twenty-eight years old, but he looked decades older. They walked over to the table and Fat Tony pressed a bulging letter-size envelope into Ardolino's hand. Ardolino then handed the envelope to Howie as Fat Tony bowed his head, to avoid making eye contact.