Hitman (28 page)

But I can tell you he had at least one kid—a son. I never knew the girlfriend or the kid, because as far as I could tell he had nothing to do with them. But around 1973, one morning Whitey comes into the garage and says, My son died. It was a sudden thing, he says. The boy was about six at the time. He says I know you guys will probably want to do something, and I appreciate the thought but it's not necessary. That was it. He never missed a day for the funeral, or the wake, or anything. Never mentioned the kid again, either.

I read a story recently that described Whitey as a “doting dad.” Maybe, but I never saw it.

Everyone at the garage noticed Whitey's boots early on. Whitey claimed he wore them so that he could conceal a blade, a big Bowie knife, in the boot. As a convicted felon, he couldn't get a permit to legally carry a gun. Everybody understood that. In fact, Whitey's knife was good for business, because sometimes Whitey would suddenly stride over to the garage wall, pull the knife out of his boot, and begin stabbing the concrete blocks. It made quite an impression on more than one reluctant deadbeat who'd been summoned to Marshall Street. But as time went on, they began to realize there was another reason Whitey preferred boots.

His boots all had built-in lifts—high heels. He was using them to add two or three inches to his height. Whitey wasn't as short as his politician brother Billy, whom a judge would someday dub “the corrupt midget.” But in his stocking feet Whitey wasn't much over five feet seven—perhaps two or three inches taller than Billy.

Most of the hoods who hung around the garage shared the usual guys' locker-room banter. If they weren't discussing an upcoming score, they were talking about women, or sports. Whitey shunned such small talk. He preferred to discuss books—especially his reading list at Alcatraz. He liked to quote Machiavelli, and Sun Tzu's classic
The Art of War.
But perhaps the book he mentioned most often was
Mein Kampf
by Adolf Hitler.

I didn't even know what
Mein Kampf
was until years later. But every time I'd see him, with that blond hair and those blue eyes, I'd think how perfect he would have looked in an SS uniform in one of those World War II movies. He would have had to play a colonel, of course. He was already wearing the boots and he liked to click his heels, like Colonel Klink in
Hogan's Heroes
. The only difference was, Whitey was serious.

For a gangster, Whitey was a very strange guy.

In his infrequent lighter moods, Whitey would talk about his youth in South Boston, how he had tried to model himself on James Cagney, whose Warner Bros. gangster movies he would sit through all day, trying to pick up Cagney's mannerisms. He wanted to be Rocky Sullivan in
Angels with Dirty Faces,
or later Cody Jarrett in
White Heat
—without suffering their ultimate celluloid fates, of course.

“I got my first gun when I was sixteen,” Whitey used to tell them. “I went in to rob a liquor store and the guy behind the counter laughed at me, because I looked like I was about thirteen. He told me to get the fuck outta there, so I shot him in the leg before I ran out of the place.”

We used to laugh when he mentioned he modeled himself on Cagney. Because the first gangster movie that came to our minds when we thought about Whitey sure wasn't
Public Enemy
or
The Roaring Twenties.
We thought Whitey was Richard Widmark in
Kiss of Death.
You know, Tommy Udo—he's giggling as he pushes the old lady's wheelchair down the stairs. That's the kind of gangster Whitey was, not that I was complaining. I'm not kidding when I say it was good for business, at least the business we were in, to have somebody as insane as Whitey around the garage. People were afraid of him. Nobody even wanted to be in the same car when he was driving, he was out of control behind the wheel. Poor Jack Curran—he always said he was scared stiff coming over from Southie, the way Whitey was cutting in and out of that bumper-to-bumper traffic on the old Central Artery. Jack would just be hanging on for dear life.

Another of Whitey's obsessions was his failed flight back in 1955–56, after his indictment for that multistate string of bank robberies. He would recall his aimless driving across the country while on the lam with a young girlfriend. She had quickly begun to nag him, demanding that he turn around and drive her back home to Dorchester. After their return, it hadn't taken long for H. Paul Rico to make the pinch.

“Next time I have to go on the lam,” he would say, “I'll be ready.”

Indeed, as early as 1977, Whitey was already setting up fake identities for himself, taking the names of male infants who had died shortly after their births in 1929 and getting driver licenses in their names. As he said over and over again, he had no intention of ever going back to prison.

Despite his peccadilloes, the rest of the Hill quickly realized that Bulger was a capable guy with more than a few skills that would come in handy. Next to Jimmy Sims, he was the quickest car thief in the crew. He had impeccable police sources. Early on, he came up with a list of state police “undercover” license plates, which enabled the Hill to know if they were under more than the usual surveillance. He was a fearless driver, even if he did scare Jack Curran out of his wits.

More than anyone else at the garage, Whitey was into gadgetry. He loved going to the local cop shops and checking out the latest technological advances. He'd show up on Marshall Street with some new toy, like an infrared gun sight, or a tiny telescope that would fit into the palm of his hand, with which he claimed he could check out cops who might have the garage under surveillance. Whitey would demonstrate how the telescope worked by palming it while he raised his hand as if to scratch an eyebrow. He would then report on what was sticking out of a shopper's bag in the supermarket parking lot across Broadway. Nobody ever quite figured out what the telescope's real utility might be to the gang, but everyone agreed it was definitely impressive.

Whitey also mastered walkie-talkies and police radios. The Hill always tried to plan ahead, and one thing they knew they would need on any hit was a good crash car—somebody behind the boiler in which the shooters were riding. The crash car's job was to take out any pursuing police vehicles in an “accident,” so that the killers could make good their escape.

With Whitey in the crash car monitoring the police bands, and able to radio ahead to the main boiler, the odds of a successful escape were a lot higher. In fact, they theorized, perhaps eventually they could switch to a system of two crash cars—one with Whitey listening in to the cop chatter, and then a regular crash car behind him. After all, even the local cops might get suspicious if a gangster in a car full of police radios suddenly got into a traffic accident with a police vehicle on its way to the scene of an organized-crime hit.

In 1972, these were mostly theoretical considerations. But they wouldn't be for long.

*   *   *

THE FALL
of 1972 was not an ideal time to begin a football-betting business. The Miami Dolphins were on their way to an undefeated season, and like most sports fans, bettors tend to be front-runners. They naturally go with the favorites—in 1972, Don Shula's Dolphins. Soon the Hill's bookies were awash in red ink.

The actual process of rounding up bookies had gone smoothly. After identifying a bookie as an “independent,” Johnny and Howie would show up at his place of business, usually a barroom.

Martorano: “Do you know who we are?”

Bookie: “Yes, I've been expecting you.”

Martorano: “We're your new partners.”

Bookie: “Fine.”

Martorano: “If anybody else tries to do this to you, let us know and we'll take care of it.”

As their losses mounted, the Hill decided to change the line from 11-10 to 12-10. The way the line worked was, if you bet $100 on the Dolphins to win by three and they won by four, you got $100. If the Dolphins won by less than three, you lost, and you owed the bookie $110. Theoretically, if the bookmaker could fine-tune the spread, he would have enough bets—action—on both sides so that he finished in the black no matter who won the game.

But the only people losing in 1972 were the bookies who had to take the bets against the Dolphins. Finally, the Hill ordered its bookies to go with a 12-10 line. That might have worked if they'd controlled every bookie in the country, but of course they had no such monopoly. The bettors simply began switching to the remaining “independents,” or for the cost of a long-distance phone call placed their wagers out of town. As bad as business had been before, now it was worse. Plus, Larry Baione, Jerry Angiulo's muscle on the street, was another fanatical bettor, who'd play with anyone and everyone he could. So the new line was costing Larry money, too. Everybody was pissed at the Hill.

The line was quickly shifted back, but not before the Hill decided to make an example of one of their bigger bookies, who had cut his line back to 11-10 before he got the okay. He was “fined” $100,000, which he didn't have. So he went to Jerry Angiulo to borrow the money.

By this time, the Hill had also turned to Angiulo to underwrite the losses he'd warned them to prepare for. So when the bookie reached out to Angiulo, Jerry called Howie and Johnny and asked them to come over to the Dog House. His proposal: he would “loan” the bookie the 100 large, only he would just keep the dough to reduce the Hill's debt, which was by now well over six figures.

Howie and Johnny didn't care much for that deal. They needed cash, too. They held out for half of the $100,000—50 grand. Eventually Angiulo gave in, but he didn't like it.

“A guy comes to me for a hundred grand, out of which I then have to pay other guys who already owe me more than 100 large another $50,000 cash. How can it be that I get some money I'm owed paid back to me and I'm still out another 50 large? I think I'm getting fucked on this deal.”

Which he was. In a few months, though, Jerry Angiulo would come up with a way for the Hill to make it up to him.

 

7

Indian War

LAWYER:
You agreed to help Mr. Angiulo, isn't that right?

MARTORANO:
Yes.

LAWYER:
So you didn't hate the Mafia like you testified earlier, did you?

MARTORANO:
I didn't say I hate the Mafia. I get along with them. I wouldn't be part of it.

LAWYER:
Well, you got along with Mr. Angiulo well enough to agree to kill for him, didn't you?

MARTORANO:
He convinced us it was a mutual problem, that that guy could hurt friends of ours also if he would hurt friends of his.

LAWYER:
But it was primarily at Mr. Angiulo's request, isn't that right.

MARTORANO:
He was indirectly asking for help.… There was a meeting and he was waiting for us to offer our help.

JERRY ANGIULO HAD
a problem, and his name was Al Angeli. It was the winter of 1973, and the Mafia underboss of Boston invited his new associates, Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano, to the Dog House. Angiulo got to the point very quickly. Al Angeli, or “Indian Al,” as he'd been known since his early days as a boxer, was out of control.

Angeli, who had shortened his family surname from “Notarangeli,” was originally from Somerville. Most of his business was now centered in the Medford-Malden area. His arrest record dated back to 1952, when he was fifteen, and over the years he'd been mixed up in the usual assortment of rackets—arson, gaming, drugs. He'd served time, but he'd also made a lot of money—at age thirty-five, he owned pieces of at least three barrooms in Boston and Cambridge. He was an earner, and appeared a likely candidate for eventual induction into La Cosa Nostra. He personally knew a lot of people in In Town, including Angiulo, for whom he was a protégé of sorts, although that was a word, like mentor, that the egomaniacal Angiulo would never have used to describe his relationship to anyone, even his own sons.

But Indian Al couldn't wait his turn. He decided he could muscle in on the Mafia's bookmakers and get away with it.

Indian Al Angeli, murdered by Johnny in 1974.

Indian Al set up his own headquarters “in town” at the North Station, at a bar on Causeway Street called Mother's. It was right under the old elevated Green Line, less than a mile from 98 Prince Street, and fewer than two miles from Marshall Street. The location itself almost seemed like a provocation, a gauntlet thrown down to both big Boston mobs.

Angeli put together his own little crew, including his brother, Indian Joe, and various other wiseguys he'd done time with, another ex-boxer or two, assorted Mob wannabes and hangers-on and most significantly, at least two capable guys—killers. He was particularly close to his brother Joe—Al wore a large pinkie ring given to him by Joe, with a white gold setting and a large diamond in the center surrounded by smaller diamonds.