Hitman (37 page)

The next day, the editorial-page editor from Cambridge, the editor from Lincoln, the governor from Brookline, and the judge from Wellesley all once again denounced the outrageous lawlessness among the white Roman Catholic working classes of Boston.

*   *   *

DESPITE HIS
brief foray into civil disobedience, Whitey was still more interested in settling his own personal scores. Next he wanted to get rid of Tommy King, another of the old Mullen gang. Whitey had been bad-mouthing him for years at the garage, dropping hints about how Tommy had to go, but no one else cared. He'd been in on the Donald Killeen hit in 1972, then Paulie McGonagle's murder, and a couple of other murders since then. He had set up Ralph DeMasi perfectly and had driven a crash car on the Indian Joe hit. He could get the job done and he kept his mouth shut. In other words, he was capable.

Plus, Tommy fit better with the Somerville guys than Whitey did. He was an ironworker, and he'd done time in Walpole with Jimmy Flemmi. He liked to drink. Tommy King didn't spend much time at the garage—he was a Southie guy through and through. He hung out more at Chandler's than he did at Marshall Motors. But the general consensus was that, although he might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, Tommy King was Good People.

Later on, there were stories that he'd perhaps bested Whitey in a barroom brawl in Southie, but Whitey knew that as far as his Somerville partners were concerned, getting drunk and rowdy was hardly considered a capital offense. But in the fall of 1975, with South Boston and other city neighborhoods convulsed by rampaging mobs, Tommy King was beginning to unravel. He had taken to hanging out with his own crew of drug-ravaged ex-cons, Walpole warriors as everyone in the Hill still derisively called them. King himself was drifting into drugs—mostly speed, after marijuana the most popular drug in Southie in those precocaine days. He was living on black beauties and green hearts.

Whitey finally came up with the ostensible reason he needed to convince the rest of the Hill to join him in eliminating troublesome Tommy. A student of underworld history, Whitey decided to use the same story that got Dutch Schultz killed in Newark back in 1935—that he was planning to kill a crusading prosecutor named Tom Dewey. Forty years later, Whitey inserted a different cop's name—Eddie Walsh.

The Hill had the same reaction that “the Commission” in New York had in 1935. No way could they allow such an assassination to happen. It wouldn't just be bad for business, it would be fatal.

*   *   *

THERE WAS
no love lost between Johnny and Eddie Walsh, the first cop who ever arrested him, back in 1960. But with the daily street battles across much of the city, the cops were stressed to the breaking point. A gangland hit on a BPD deputy superintendent would be the final straw.

On the other hand, the Hill's other partners knew how much Whitey hated Tommy King, so they wanted to check out his story very carefully before they moved against one of their top hands. The problem was, Whitey was the only one of the partners from Southie, which had always been a world apart, even before busing tore the Town apart.

Johnny went to another one of the Hill associates from Southie and asked him what was going on. He confirmed that Tommy had been terrorizing Southie, and added that he was certainly capable of killing a cop. Other people said the same thing. Reluctantly, at the garage, a death sentence was handed down for Tommy.

*   *   *

IT WAS
Whitey's plan. Eddie Connors's partner, Suitcase Fidler, was still out there. He, too, was capable—the Mafia had dispatched him to California in 1970 to hunt Joe Barboza. So the Hill told Tommy that they were going to have to take out Suitcase before he came looking for all of them. They said that, once again, the Bulldog would be staked out and that the next time Suitcase showed up, Tommy King would walk in and shoot him—just the way Dutch Schultz had gotten it, from a guy named Charlie the Bug, at the Palace Chophouse in October 1935, along with his guys named Abadaba and Lulu.

Alan “Suitcase” Fidler, Charlestown criminal, Eddie Connors's partner.

The other guys would be waiting in the car, just in case there was trouble.

LAWYER:
Mr. King had participated in murders with you, had he not?

MARTORANO:
And the day he got killed, he thought he was participating in another one.… Whitey had come to me many times and wanted to kill Tommy King, and I said no many times.

LAWYER:
Mr. King was a friend of yours, was he not?

MARTORANO:
I was friendly with him.

LAWYER:
You considered him a friend, did you not?

MARTORANO:
Not a big friend. I was friendly with him, yeah. You know, just not a close friend.

Tommy didn't like Whitey any more than Whitey liked him, and there was some concern that he wouldn't buy the Suitcase Fidler story, especially in his paranoid, drug-addled state of mind. Which may have been why Whitey insisted that Johnny come along—Tommy trusted Johnny. On the night of October 25, 1975, Johnny drove over to Carson Beach from the garage with another guy from Somerville. Whitey was already there, waiting in a stolen car. Johnny and the other guy from Somerville jumped into the backseat, which meant that Tommy would have to get into the front seat.

Tommy King arrived wearing a bulletproof vest. He was ready to walk into the Bulldog and shoot Suitcase. Then Stevie arrived with the guns. He handed one to each guy in the car, giving Tommy his last. Just in case, Tommy's revolver didn't have bullets, only blanks. Stevie walked away and Whitey backed the car out. He had barely turned south toward Savin Hill when Johnny leaned forward and shot Tommy in the head.

Driving back to Somerville, Johnny Martorano felt queasy. Whitey always knew the right buttons to push with Johnny, and this time the button was, we can't allow a cop to be killed.

But Johnny couldn't help thinking how Whitey first got Tommy King to kill Paulie McGonagle for him, and now he had gotten his partners to kill Tommy for him. In three years, Whitey had certainly come a long way from Duffy's Tavern. The question neither Johnny nor anyone else in the gang was quite ready to ask was, How much further was Whitey planning to go?

*   *   *

WHITEY'S EVENING
was just beginning. He had the task of disposing of King's body. They had another stolen car ready, and they dumped King's body in the trunk and then drove to the beach at the Neponset River under the bridge to Quincy. They buried King's body there.

Then they took Tommy King's car and went looking for his best friend, Francis “Buddy” Leonard, another Mullen, a small-time hoodlum from Southie. A decade younger than Whitey, he'd grown up in the same public-housing project as the Bulgers. He was a friend of King's, and would try to find out what happened when Tommy turned up missing. But he never got the chance. Whitey and his crew grabbed Leonard as he left a barroom, drunk as usual. They got him into Tommy King's car, then shot him in the head. They abandoned King's car, with his friend's body in it, in the Boston Housing Authority project where Buddy Leonard and Whitey Bulger had grown up together.

The next day, King's wife reported him missing. His car soon turned up, with Leonard's body in it. The police were supposed to think that for some reason King and Leonard had had a falling-out, and that after shooting his pal, King had fled. The cops quickly got a tip that Whitey had actually killed him, in a dispute over a hijacked truck. On the police incident report, Leonard was described as a “tailgater” by trade. In other words, no great loss, whoever killed him. The cops had more pressing matters to deal with, namely the daily antibusing street rumbles.

Francis “Buddy” Leonard, small-time Mullen gang member, murdered by Whitey the same night Tommy King was clipped in 1975.

From then on, whenever we'd drive across the bridge into Quincy, Whitey would say, “Tip your hat to Tommy.” That's how I knew where he was buried. They finally dug him up in 2000, after I decided to help the government against Whitey and Stevie.

One day in the fall of 1975, Whitey called everyone together at the garage for a big announcement. FBI agent John Connolly wanted to sit down with him. Whitey didn't mention that he'd been talking, off and on, with FBI agent Dennis Condon since 1971, or that he'd known H. Paul Rico since the early 1950s.

As usual, the Boston FBI office had been playing fast and loose with the rules. There was a new agent named John Morris. When he was transferred to Boston, he bought a house in the suburbs near Dennis Condon's home. It wasn't long before they were riding into Boston together every morning. Soon John Morris was coming up with novel ways to develop informants.

Eddie Miani—better known as Eddie Miami—was a small-time associate of Richie Castucci, the Revere hustler who had business with both the Hill and the Mafia. Morris tried to recruit him as an informant, but Eddie Miami wasn't interested. So Morris went to his house one night and planted a “bomb” under his car, then called Miami to warn him that the FBI had been tipped that the Hill was planning to blow him up. Miami didn't bite, but inside the corrupt organization, Morris got points for trying.

Unlike Eddie Miami, Whitey was a natural as an FBI informant. Zip, as Whitey would famously nickname John Connolly, still owed Whitey Bulger's brother Billy. Six years older than Connolly, Billy had provided one helping hand after another to Zip throughout his life—first helping him get into Boston College, then securing Speaker McCormack's recommendation to J. Edgar Hoover that led to Connolly's appointment to the FBI.

Whitey told us his brother Billy set it all up. Zip asked Billy how he could pay Billy back for all he'd done for him. And Billy said, “Keep my brother out of trouble.” We said go ahead and meet him, and be a good listener. Whitey meets him at Wollaston Beach in Quincy. Whitey sneaks into Zip's car and they have a discussion and Connolly tells him they're just after In Town, not us. This is what Whitey tells us anyway.

Back in Somerville, everyone gave Whitey's new relationship with the feds a thumbs-up. After all, Johnny had Trooper Schneiderhan, although nowadays he always took Howie along with him for the meetings. Two-on-ones were always preferable in maintaining control of any situation, but with a cop there was another reason as well. As long as there was a witness, no one could ever accuse Johnny—or Howie—of ratting out the gang.

Next Whitey comes back and says he wants to introduce Stevie to Connolly. I thought that was a good idea, to have two of us meeting with one of them, just like Howie and me with Schneiderhan. Obviously, none of us had any idea that Stevie had been a rat all those years. I don't even think Whitey knew, not at that point. See, when Stevie came back, in '74, and we were going to bring him in with us, Whitey asked me, “Was Stevie ever made?” I told him not as far as I knew. But the point is, if Whitey'd been in the loop with the FBI at that point, he would have known about Stevie. Later on, when we were in jail together, after he'd been disclosed as a rat, Stevie always said he'd been blackmailed by the FBI—that he didn't want to go back to work for them when he came back, but they told him if he didn't they'd rat him out to us. I never believed him, not that the FBI was above that kind of thing.

In 1998, Flemmi testified that back in 1975 Whitey approached him and said that Connolly wanted to meet him. The introduction would be handled by Dennis Condon. They met in what Stevie described as an “obscure” coffee shop in Newton. Flemmi asked about H. Paul Rico, and Condon said he was fine. Connolly listened attentively.

“It was like a transition,” Flemmi said.

At first, all the information seemed to be flowing in the direction of the Hill. Zip would tell Whitey, don't do business with this guy, or don't say anything around that guy. He was telling them, in so many words, who was an informant.