Hitman (3 page)

“Did you ever calculate how many months you did per body?” Casabielle asked Martorano.

“No.”

“Could it have been about seven months?”

“Could have been.”

“That's a pretty good deal, isn't it?”

“I had good lawyers. I made a good deal. I don't deny I made a good deal.”

*   *   *

THE JUDGE
was giving defense lawyer Casabielle a free hand. The prosecutors had gone through the list of killings in a perfunctory manner. But Zip's lawyer, knowing he had the jury's undivided attention, was still trying to pile as many additional gory details onto the record as possible. He wanted the jurors to be disgusted that their government would cut a deal with a killing machine like Johnny Martorano.

Flemmi, Casabielle knew, would not be nearly as effective a witness when he took the stand after Martorano. With his twitches, and his stuttering when challenged, the seventy-four-year-old Flemmi was easier to rattle. And he had trouble keeping his stories straight from one deposition or trial to another.

As Casabielle went over the list of Martorano's twenty victims, Johnny often admitted to killing hoodlums because he thought they might testify against someone he knew, or because they had disrespected one or another of his friends. But Casabielle preferred concentrating on the law-abiding citizens—the civilians—that Johnny Martorano had murdered by mistake. Like Michael Milano, a bartender Martorano machine-gunned at a stoplight in Brighton in 1973. Milano died because his new Mercedes and a long fur coat made him look like his employer—a gangster whose North Station bar the Hill had staked out.

“You killed him by mistake?” Casabielle asked.

“Not by my mistake,” Martorano said. “Somebody said that was a certain guy we were looking for.”

“Did you know what that person looked like?”

“No,” said Martorano.

“So you went out looking for someone you didn't know, that you didn't know what he looked like, and by mistake you shot Mr. Michael Milano?”

“Somebody else said that was him.”

“And you took that person's word?” Casabielle said.

“Yes.”

“That was enough for you to kill somebody?”

“At the time, yeah.”

*   *   *

A COUPLE
of murders later, Casabielle brought up a guy named William O'Brien. The Hill had been looking for a tough ex-con named Ralph DeMasi, and O'Brien was driving him on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester. They had just left a meeting at which they'd been trying to buy guns for the gang war in which the bartender had been killed a couple of weeks earlier. They were headed for South Boston to pick up O'Brien's ten-year-old daughter Marie. It was her birthday, and he had a cake for her in the backseat of the car. But O'Brien never made it back to South Boston. A Winter Hill hit car pulled up alongside his and Johnny Martorano opened fire with a machine gun, killing O'Brien and wounding DeMasi.

Casabielle asked Martorano about William O'Brien.

“I didn't know him. I was looking for the other guy that was with him.”

“So William O'Brien, again, was a mistake?”

“It could have been.”

“We are talking about somebody that was possibly innocent.”

“He was possibly guilty, too. They both showed up looking to buy guns to kill someone.”

The O'Brien hit was one of at least five murders committed by the Winter Hill Gang in 1973–74, when they were settling a score for the Mafia with a rogue organized-crime crew. Martorano explained how the other gang, which the Hill completely destroyed, had started the war by killing an LCN bookie—“his name was Paulie,” Martorano said, “I forget his last name.”

After the gang was wiped out, Johnny Martorano and Howie Winter went to the North End, and Jerry Angiulo, the Mafia underboss of Boston, gave them $25,000. But Johnny Martorano steadfastly maintained he never took money for killing people, not even from the Mafia and Jerry Angiulo.

“That was like a donation from him,” Martorano said of the $25,000, “for our help.”

Then Casabielle mentioned a 1981 murder he did in Oklahoma for John Callahan, whom Johnny would murder in Florida a year later. Callahan gave Martorano $50,000 after he traveled to Oklahoma to murder the owner of Callahan's former company, who had to die because he suspected Callahan had been skimming money from his jai-alai frontons.

When he got the money, Johnny gave half of it—$25,000—to his driver on the hit, fellow Winter Hill fugitive Joe McDonald. Then he split the remaining $25,000 with Stevie and Whitey back in Boston. So Johnny Martorano had banked a little over $8,000 for his nineteenth murder.

“Was that also a donation?” Casabielle asked.

“Positively.”

“What charity were they donating to?”

“To Winter Hill.”

“Are you seriously telling this group of people that the money … was a contribution to Winter Hill, the Winter Hill charity? Is that your testimony?”

“It was a gift from him [Callahan]. He was so happy he didn't get indicted. Better than giving it to a lawyer, I guess.”

At that point Casabielle didn't even bother to point out that a year after accepting the $50,000, Martorano killed the guy who had given it to him. Later Johnny would tell the jury he “felt lousy” about having to “kill a guy who I had just killed a guy for.”

“It was very distasteful,” he elaborated.

Instead, Casabielle stayed with the larger theme of the Winter Hill gang as a charity, returning to the money the Hill accepted for wiping out a small rival gang for the Mafia.

“And what good deeds did Winter Hill do other than kill people and feel good about it?”

“I believe they helped a lot of people over time.”

“And they hurt a lot of people as well?”

“Yes.”

“Are you saying to this group of people that when Mr. Angiulo gave you $25,000 for those murders, that was also a contribution to the Winter Hill charity?”

“Correct. He was giving us money because we killed a guy who killed his friends.”

“And your testimony, sir, is that you don't kill for money?”

“No.”

As the lawyer continued this line of questioning, Johnny Martorano was thinking to himself,
Does this guy really believe I'd kill somebody for $8,000? For a million maybe, but eight grand? Nobody risks his life for eight grand—a junkie possibly, but nobody else.
Jerry Angiulo understood that—it was just a nice gesture he'd made, splitting up the fifty large like that. He was cutting up a score with his partners, which is what the Winter Hill Gang was with the Mafia—partners.

*   *   *

IN THE
end, though, everything always seemed to come back to Whitey. After all the books and movies and FBI press conferences, after all the “age-enhanced” mug shots and all the dozen-plus segments about him on
America's Most Wanted,
most people still didn't get it. In the Boston underworld, until rather late in his career, Whitey had always been a small-timer, a ham-and-egger. He was from Southie, where a gang war was cowboys biting off one another's noses outside barrooms in the Lower End, driving around and shooting point-blank at each other—and missing.

Now that he had disappeared, though, Whitey had become a legend, a criminal mastermind, when all he really was was a rat. Zip Connolly's lawyer was trying to draw that bitterness out of Martorano, asking him what he thought now of his youngest son's godfather.

Casabielle: “He was dishonest with you for how many years, twenty-five, thirty years?”

Martorano: “From '72.”

When Johnny first got to know Whitey Bulger, Whitey was already forty-three, a late bloomer in criminal terms. Whitey had been shipped off to prison for bank robbery at the age of twenty-six in 1956, when Johnny was fifteen. Whitey didn't return to Boston until 1965. Johnny was running bars in Roxbury while Whitey was on the Rock—Alcatraz.

The first time Johnny actually sat down with Whitey, in early 1972, Whitey was up to his eyeballs in one of those slapstick Southie gang wars. He was being hunted all over town by younger, quicker hoods. Which was why he'd shown up at Johnny's bar in the South End, dressed in a suit. Whitey needed a favor—he asked Johnny to introduce him to Howie Winter over in Somerville.

He wanted Howie to use his muscle to settle the war over in Southie, even if it meant that Whitey's boss would have to be killed, not by Whitey of course, but by some of the guys in the other gang, the ones who had been chasing Whitey. No wonder Johnny's pal Joe McDonald had never trusted Whitey as far as he could throw him.

So Johnny and Whitey didn't go way back, the way Martorano did with Stevie Flemmi. Stevie he'd known since he was practically a kid. He'd killed guys for Stevie—well, he'd killed at least one guy in Southie for Whitey, too, but by then it wasn't personal, it was business, a Winter Hill rubout. But after all the favors, when Johnny Martorano went on the lam in 1979, Whitey told him that from now on he should do all his talking on the phone to Stevie. Whitey didn't do phones. Phones could be tapped.

Now Casabielle was again asking about Johnny Martorano's relationship with the two rats in his gang.

“Mr. Flemmi and Mr. Bulger were dishonest with you, correct?”

“Technically,” Martorano replied.

“What do you mean, ‘technically'?”

“With that [being informants]. But they were honest about a lot of things. You can't be dishonest without showing some honesty.”

“That's part of the charade, isn't it?” Casabielle said.

“Yeah,” Martorano said, with a slight sigh, “I guess.”

*   *   *

BY 1988,
Johnny Martorano had been on the lam for almost a decade. During that time, he'd killed two more guys for Whitey and Stevie. But his monthly cut from the Winter Hill rackets back in Boston continued to dwindle, and what could Johnny Martorano do about it from Florida? Whitey was the big shot now, and Martorano the supplicant. And Whitey was tiring of his responsibilities to his one-time partner, the guy who had once saved his life.

In 1987, Whitey had been recorded on a DEA bug saying, “Fuck Howie” and “There is no Winter Hill Gang.” But even as they were writing off their old Somerville partners, Whitey and Stevie were rolling in drug money. They were making more money than the old gang from Winter Hill had ever dreamed of—$5 million “protection money” from one marijuana dealer alone, Stevie would later brag.

And yet … the cops left Whitey and Stevie alone. If any police ever did make a move against them, they were slapped down, transferred, demoted, or forced to retire. The FBI, the Massachusetts State Police, the Boston PD—nobody could ever seem to build a case against “the two guys,” as they had become known on the street. After a while, few cops even tried.

Eventually, the inevitable question began to be asked: Was Whitey a rat?

“Did you ever ask Mr. Bulger,” Casabielle asked, “whether or not he was a rat?”

“No,” Martorano said. “There was one incident, though. There was an article in the
Globe,
1988, accusing him of being a rat, and I asked him about it. He said, ‘They just put that in the paper every time my brother runs for reelection.'”

“So you actually asked him if he was a rat?”

“I asked him what the article meant.”

“What was his response?” Casabielle asked.

“He said, ‘It was something to cause my brother trouble.'”

“So he denied being a rat, correct?”

“I only asked him because of the article.”

“So he was lying to you at that time?”

“Yeah,” said Martorano. “I don't blame him.”

“Why, sir? If you had found out he was a rat, what would you have done?”

“Well, I wouldn't have stayed friends with him.”

“You would have killed him, wouldn't you?” Casabielle asked.

“Maybe.”

“Possibly?”

“Possibly.”

“Probably?”

“Probably,” Martorano said. “You're using my words.”

“I guess after a few hours of hearing, you use them,” Casabielle conceded. “They kind of stick.”

 

1

“Always Be a Man”

FROM HIS BIRTH
at Cambridge City Hospital on December 13, 1940, John Vincent Martorano was an unlikely gangster. He had only one sibling, and he grew up in a stable middle-class household with both parents present. After the age of eleven he lived in the suburbs.

His father owned a profitable business and no one in the family ever lacked for money. In the somnabulent 1950s, young Johnny Martorano served as an altar boy and later went to both parochial and prep schools where his friends included, among others, a future congressman and a future CBS news reporter. Summers he and his brother Jimmy went to camp in the Berkshires. His parents owned a second home on the South Shore. At age sixteen, as soon as he got his driver's license, his father bought him a blue 1949 Plymouth sedan.

And yet somehow, Johnny Martorano was always fascinated by the city. He was always drawn back to the mean streets of Boston, where his father ran a restaurant and after-hours club in what would soon become known as the Combat Zone.

Both his parents came from large immigrant families. His maternal grandparents were Irish, had met in England, and later immigrated to the United States, where they raised eleven children in the Somerville-Medford area, just north of Boston. His mother's maiden name was Elizabeth Mary Hunt. Everyone called her Bess.

His father was born in Riesi, Sicily, the son of a cobbler, one of thirteen children, only five of whom survived beyond childhood. The Martoranos immigrated to the United States when Angelo Martorano was seven years old, around 1915. They lived in East Boston. His first name was soon Anglicized to “Andy,” and for the rest of his life he answered to either Angelo or Andy.