Hitman (30 page)

Other than taking a few bets if no one else was around the bar, and moving small amounts of stolen merchandise, Milano wasn't in the rackets at all. He was a typical Boston bartender of the early '70s—a few days later, police searching his apartment in Brighton would find gambling slips, small amounts of cocaine and marijuana, and a handwritten note from somebody saying “Save an oz. for me.”

John Hurley of Charlestown served as the fingerman on the (botched) Michael Milano and Indian Joe hits in 1973.

Another fact that the Hill shooters were unaware of: sitting in the backseat was a thirty-four-year-old friend of Milano's whom he had just hired as a new bartender at Mother's. The new bartender's twenty-three-year-old girlfriend was in the front seat beside Milano. Their plan that morning was to return to Milano's apartment in Brighton for a game of chess. Leaving the bar, they took with them three 12-ounce bottles of Schlitz beer.

LAWYER:
And he had people in the car with him, isn't that right?

MARTORANO:
Yeah.

LAWYER:
And you didn't care if you took out other people at the same time you were taking out your target, isn't that fair to say?

MARTORANO:
Yeah, sure, we were concerned about that.

LAWYER:
Not concerned enough to stop you from doing it, isn't that right?

MARTORANO:
Not—we kept going, yeah.

LAWYER:
And in fact one of the people in that car was a woman, isn't that right?

MARTORANO:
Turned out to be.

LAWYER:
You didn't care, did you?

MARTORANO:
Sure, I cared.

Milano's Mercedes left North Station, winding its way around to Storrow Drive, with the boiler remaining an inconspicuous distance behind. Milano got off by mistake at Kenmore Square, then headed down Brighton Avenue, around St. Elizabeth's Hospital, and onto Sparhawk Street. He was almost home to his apartment.

It was time for Sims to take the Mercedes, before it crossed Market Street and got too close to Brighton Center and a lot more witnesses. At the light, Sims pulled up alongside and Johnny and the guy from Somerville opened fire, Johnny spraying the front seat, the other guy the back. It was all over in a matter of seconds. Sims floored the boiler and headed back to the garage at the top of Winter Hill.

In the Mercedes, the new bartender slumped in the backseat, unconscious, critically wounded. In the front, the woman looked over at Michael Milano, slumped against the steering wheel. The woman later told police she'd thought some of the local punks were throwing rocks at the car, but then the car windows exploded, and she was hit in the shoulder.

“I ducked until the shots stopped and I was fine and I looked at Michael and said, ‘Are you okay?' and he was just about breathing.”

But not for long. Milano had four bullets in him, and less than three hours to live. He had $120 cash in his pocket when he died.

It wasn't until the next day that the Hill found out that they had shot up the wrong car. The Boston police quickly figured out what had happened—or at least why. The organized-crime squad informed homicide detectives that Indian Al “or his brother has been leaning on the local bookies to the extent that Angiulo has called him.”

What the cops didn't know was that it wasn't In Town, but Winter Hill that had handled the hit. So it would go into the books as an unsolved Mafia murder, a case of mistaken identity.

At the garage on Marshall Street, everyone was philosophical. Shit happens.

*   *   *

JOHNNY FOUND
out listening to the news on the radio. They said there'd been a shooting in Brighton, and a bartender had been killed. His first thought was,
There was another shooting last night?
Then he realized what had happened. The problem was, now Indian Al would know that someone was after him. They would never catch him off guard again. This was going to be a war.

Johnny blamed it all on Hurley. He wanted to kill him. But he knew the other guys would veto it. He'd been with them in the Charlestown war. But because Hurley blew that ID, five more people would end up dead, and even more wounded. None of it would have happened if they'd caught up with Indian Al first.

The other guy in Milano's car was paralyzed for life. We threw a fundraiser for him later at Chandler's, although of course we couldn't tell him why we felt so sorry for him and wanted to help out so bad. He's dead now, but when the feds were trying to settle all the cases I was involved in, they had to seek him out—he had moved to California. They told him who'd shot him, and his response was that he wasn't mad at anyone anymore. He'd gotten religion, I guess. I'm very appreciative of that.

The next day, Johnny and Howie returned to the Dog House. Angiulo had more names, addresses, photos, and license numbers for them. One guy Jerry wanted badly was Frank Capizzi, a loudmouthed thirty-eight-year-old North End native. He was now living in Winthrop, and he, too, had a Mercedes. Every morning he dropped his two young children off at Winthrop Elementary School. Whitey Bulger began looking for him.

One morning in early March, Capizzi had just dropped off his children at school and was heading into the city on Chelsea Street when Whitey pulled alongside and reached across the seat, came up with a revolver, and opened fire on Capizzi. He didn't hang around to finish the job, though, and Capizzi was able to turn off the main road and then abandon his blood-stained, bullet-riddled car a few blocks later. Blood oozing from his leg, Capizzi limped off to hail a taxi. A few minutes later, Mrs. Frank Capizzi reported the car stolen from in front of their home in Winthrop. The cops didn't buy it and arrested Capizzi after they found an unregistered handgun a witness had seen him toss across a fence near where he had left his Mercedes.

Frank Capizzi of the North End was shot by both Whitey and Johnny in 1973—and survived.

In a letter to a judge many years later, Capizzi recalled his children's reaction later that day when they saw the family car abandoned on a side street in East Boston.

“One of the most traumatic memories for my bright children was seeing the automobile they had been in ten minutes before full of bullet holes … [I was] frightened beyond words.”

The only witness to the actual shooting provided nothing of use. The driver was hatless, he told police, and “was not a kid.”

After the near-miss on Capizzi, the Angeli crew went to ground for a while. The Hill still had cars out, on the prowl, but it was days before they got another break. On the evening of March 18, everyone was hanging out in the Fire House playing cards when somebody spotted Indian Al on the waterfront. He was eating dinner at the Aquarium restaurant on Atlantic Avenue with three other guys. Two of the other guys with Indian Al were familiar to the Hill—one was Capizzi, finally out of hiding, still limping after being shot by Whitey Bulger. Also at the table was Sonny Shields, the Roxbury plug-ugly who'd been acquitted in 1969 of murdering the last of the Bennett brothers, Billy. Shields had gone mod, his hair now down to his shoulders, and that night he was sporting a hipster's long brown coat.

The fourth guy at the table was older, about fifty, a stranger to the Hill lookout who had made the others.

It was just about 7
P.M.
when the four men left the Aquarium and climbed into a 1972 Buick sedan owned by a Chelsea garage. They didn't even notice the 1971 Ford trailing behind them, and behind the Ford, a crash car driven by Whitey Bulger.

In the Ford was the usual Winter Hill first team: Sims driving, Martorano next to him in the front cradling Stevie Flemmi's grease gun, and in the back the guy from Somerville with his AR-15. The Angeli car took off down Commercial Street, obviously heading toward North Station, and Mother's, less than a mile away.

This would be a tougher hit than Milano. Commercial Street was narrower, it was earlier, and there was more traffic, which meant more potential witnesses. And they only had a couple of minutes. There were no long traffic lights, either; they would have to fire from a moving vehicle, at another one.

As they approached the coast guard station, Sims floored the stolen boiler and pulled out around, in order to get alongside the Angeli vehicle. The Hill guns were pointing out the windows, ready to fire. But just as Sims made his move, from Henchman Street another car suddenly turned left onto Commercial, pulling directly alongside the Angeli vehicle.

“Fuck,” said Sims, but he had no choice. He swung into the opposite lane and cut in front of Indian Al's vehicle, forcing it to a stop. The Somerville guy's rifle was still pointed out the side window when Johnny swung his grease gun back inside and started firing through the back window of the stolen Ford. The Somerville guy dove for the backseat floor as Johnny continued shooting into the Angeli car. For the nighttime job, he was using tracer bullets, and behind the Buick in the crash car, Whitey Bulger swerved to keep his car out of the line of fire.

At the nearby coast guard base on Commercial Street, some on-duty guardsmen had just finished watching a rerun of
The Wild Wild West.
Suddenly outside they heard what sounded like a real-life shootout at the OK Corral.

By the time the coast guardsmen ran outside, the boiler was long gone, and so was the car that had cut in front of Sims. Angeli's bullet-riddled Buick was stopped on the street, its motor still running. Inside the car, they saw the driver slumped over. He was moaning and coughing up blood, with only a few minutes to live.

Once they were sure the shooting had stopped, Capizzi and Shields scrambled to open the passenger-side doors. Almost comically, they bumped into each other as they tried to figure out which way to flee, before finally taking cover behind a parked moving truck. Then they decided to make a run for it, heading south back toward the Aquarium, stopping and turning around every few seconds to make sure no one with a gun was following them.

Then a fourth passenger opened the back driver's side door, jumped out, and took off running down the alley next to a restaurant named Giro's. That was Indian Al. He was wearing a brown scally cap.

The driver was Al “Bud” Plummer, of Andover, a forty-nine-year-old World War II veteran. He was dead on arrival at Massachusetts General Hospital. In the Andover town directory, Plummer listed himself as a “steamship clerk.” He had no police record, but the cops noted that although he hadn't worked in two years, Plummer “lives in a high-priced area of the town and owns two expensive automobiles”—a Cadillac and a Thunderbird. He was also known to play golf with “well-known professional athletes” at the Indian Ridge Golf Course from which Paulie Folino had vanished eight months earlier.

He left behind a wife and two children. Police reported that Plummer had $451 cash in his pocket when he died.

LAWYER:
Was it the right thing to do to kill Mr. Plummer?

MARTORANO:
Well, at the time I thought so. He was part of the gang that we were having a problem with.

LAWYER:
Well, what was it about him being part of the gang that gave you, allowed you, or caused you to believe it was the right thing to do, which was to kill Mr. Plummer?

MARTORANO:
Well, the guy that we were looking for is in Plummer's car.

Sonny Shields and Frank Capizzi soon turned up at the emergency room at Boston City Hospital. Capizzi's lawyer also appeared. Shields, shot in the side, got himself patched up and then promptly vanished, not to be seen again for months. Capizzi was more seriously hit, in the back, but the next day he signed himself out of BCH and likewise fled.

Thirty years later, in a letter to a federal judge, Capizzi would describe how he and his family had spent the next few months of their lives.

“[We] drove crisscrossing the U.S. and Canada for over 20,000 miles. We were without a destination. Desi and Frank [his children] had the job of cleaning festering wounds and picking out bits of lead from my back as they surfaced.”