Hitman (38 page)

Soon, though, Zip inserted himself more directly in the gang's affairs.

There was this company, Melotone, that had jukeboxes and cigarette vending machines. Their warehouse was in Somerville. Howie had some machines too, and he wanted to start a route, you know, like a paperboy route. We went to this Melotone guy, Joe Levine, and he misinterpreted it. We just wanted to do business. We weren't looking for trouble. He went to the FBI, and Zip got wind of it, and he went down there to the warehouse and he told Levine, well, if you wanna go through with this, you'll have to join the Witness Protection Program, and we'll have to relocate your family, and change their names. Levine didn't want to do that, of course.

Whitey, meanwhile, comes to the garage and tells us we gotta back off. Awhile later, Joe Levine comes by the garage. We didn't know if the feds had wired him or not, but just to be on the safe side we told him we weren't interested in doing business with him anymore, period. Afterward we talked it over and we all agreed, this FBI thing is working out pretty good for us. We could have walked into a trap there.

In court in 1998, Flemmi was asked what Connolly had said to the owner of Melotone. “It was probably a threat. I don't know. I wasn't there. All I know is what the results were.”

LAWYER:
What is your recollection about any conversation that you had with either Bulger or Flemmi about giving things to John Connolly?

MARTORANO:
Any chance we got to give him something, give him something.

LAWYER:
Did Mr. Bulger and/or Mr. Flemmi ever say that they, in fact, were giving Mr. Connolly things?

MARTORANO:
At all times they said they took good care of him.

Zip's next save came in Norfolk County, where Johnny's classmate from St. Agatha's School, Bill Delahunt, had just been elected district attorney. An ex-con named Francis Green owed $175,000 to a finance company with ties to the Hill. Whitey, Stevie, and Johnny got the assignment, on spec. Whatever they could squeeze out of Green, they'd get a cut of. They tracked Green down to the Backside restaurant in Dedham.

As soon as Johnny walked in, he noticed Delahunt standing at the bar. He walked over and they exchanged pleasantries, then harsher words. New on the job, an ex–state rep from Quincy, Delahunt didn't need to be seen at a popular restaurant chatting up one of Boston's more notorious mobsters. Delahunt detested Whitey and Stevie, and the feeling was mutual. Later, Whitey would go out of his way to make up damaging stories about Delahunt, which Zip dutifully included in his 209s.

“I didn't mean to embarrass Billy that night,” says Martorano. “In retrospect, he was right about those guys, and I was wrong. I just didn't know yet how bad they were.”

Meanwhile, Whitey and Stevie had found a table, and Green had joined them. As Johnny jawed with Delahunt, Whitey was making Green the proverbial offer he couldn't refuse.

“If I don't get my money, I will kill you. I will cut your ears off. I will stuff them in your mouth, and then I will gouge your eyes out.”

The next day Green went to Delahunt, but given the circumstances, the new district attorney handed the case off to the FBI. And in what was becoming their standard MO, the feds did nothing. Dennis Condon personally handled the brush-off, describing Green in the first sentence of his report as “a convicted swindler,” and adding that Whitey was trying to collect for a woman, “a friend of theirs.” He did not mention the threats.

*   *   *

THE MAFIA
had never stopped looking for Joe Barboza. Finally, they found an ex-con he'd served time with who was now living in San Francisco. This was the opportunity In Town had been waiting for all these years. In February 1976, as the Animal left his alleged friend's apartment in San Francisco, a white van pulled up alongside him and the panel door opened. Whitey's old friend J. R. Russo stepped up with a rifle and gunned him down. A few years later, a drunk Larry Baione would be recorded by the FBI describing Russo as a “genius with a fucking carbine.” Back in Boston, Barboza's last lawyer told reporters, “With all due respect to my client, society has not suffered a great loss.”

Two months earlier, the Animal's paperback autobiography had been published. In it, he described Johnny Martorano as a great friend, but misspelled his name as “Marterano.”

For a few hours after the murder, until he turned up in Boston, Martorano had been suspected by some cops of having taken care of his former friend—another favor for In Town.

“I would have killed him if I'd known where he was,” Martorano said. “He certainly fit the criteria.”

*   *   *

PATSY FABIANO
was always the weak link in Barboza's gang. A decade earlier, when Barboza was arrested on the gun charges, he had tried to convince the cops to lock Patsy up, too, so that he wouldn't get shot.

Patsy Fabiano, Barboza associate, murdered by the Mafia a few weeks after his old boss in 1976.

Even after Barboza's murder, Fabiano remained in the Mafia's crosshairs. He'd backed up Barboza's testimony in the Deegan trial. He was trying to go straight, running a candle store, Wicks ‘n' Sticks, in the Burlington Mall. He was more than $100,000 in debt when he got a call from the North End. The boys had a business proposition they'd like to run by him—and hey, no hard feelings about the Animal, right?

On March 30, six weeks after his former boss's murder, Patsy stopped by the garage to say hello. He said he had to pick up some linguine because he was having dinner that night with some of the guys from In Town. The next morning Fabiano's body was discovered in his new Buick in a parking lot in the North End. He was in the front seat, on the passenger's side—the death seat. He'd been shot four times in the head with a .32.

Patsy's wallet still contained a large amount of cash.

*   *   *

JIMMY MARTORANO
was minding his own business. He was still running Chandler's, and he was also spending a lot of time down on the waterfront. He rented an apartment above the Rusty Scupper, a popular singles bar on Commercial Street, with a Yale-educated accountant named John Callahan. Callahan was a high-powered businessman by day. At night, though, he could usually be found either in some Irish bar or hanging out with the local element at places like the Playboy Club … or the Rusty Scupper. Brian Halloran, the hard-drinking Winter Hill associate, was another guy who ran with the Rusty Scupper crew.

Callahan had gone to work for World Jai Alai, a Boston company that ran frontons in Florida and Connecticut. When H. Paul Rico retired from the FBI in 1976, it was Callahan who got him hired as World Jai Alai's chief of security. After all, who better to keep the mob at bay than a crusading G-man?

Meanwhile, Dennis Condon was also about to retire, and would soon go to work in the administration of that new Democratic governor from the suburbs who supported busing so enthusiastically—Michael Dukakis.

Dukakis, a “card-carrying member of the ACLU,” as he would later describe himself, wanted to make it even easier for state prison inmates to get weekend furloughs. More than a decade before Willie Horton derailed Dukakis's 1998 presidential campaign, his first administration was embroiled in one disastrous weekend furlough after another.

No matter how incorrigible, any prisoner was eligible, as Jimmy Flemmi discovered one Friday in 1976 when he was released from MCI-Norfolk for a weekend on the town. The Bear immediately took off for Boston, to settle some old scores, starting with his ex-wife.

Fortunately for Mrs. Flemmi, she wasn't in her Hyde Park home when the Bear arrived, so he settled for strangling her cat and tearing the place apart. Then he vanished, not to be seen again for three years. This time, Jimmy Martorano wouldn't get arrested for helping the fugitive Jimmy the Bear. Like everyone else, he now knew enough to steer clear of the Bear.

But even though Jimmy Martorano didn't know it yet, he had another problem. The FBI was lining him up. They'd done a lot for the Hill, and now it was time to claim a scalp.

My brother was doing a little shylocking, not much, but some. He knows this guy who loaned $2,000 to his own brother, who ran a bar in Revere. Now this guy figures out his brother will never pay him back, so he asks Jimmy if he can say he got the money from Jimmy Martorano. That way maybe his deadbeat brother will get scared and pay it back.

In other words, it was a favor. Well, of course the brother still doesn't pay it back, so the guy asks Jimmy if he can send somebody over to the bar to scare his brother. Jimmy didn't want to get involved—what does he care about this one way or the other? But Brian Halloran heard the story and he decided to go up to Revere on his own. As usual, he's drunk, and he pulls a gun on the bar owner and steals $445 out of the register. The bar owner runs to the FBI, and John Morris takes over the case and they arrest Halloran and my brother.

Still, Jimmy Martorano wasn't that worried. If he was needed, his friend said he would be willing to testify he hadn't borrowed any money from Jimmy. That way, Jimmy and Brian Halloran might be facing state robbery or assault charges, but not a serious federal rap like extortion. In a Suffolk County courtroom, at worst they'd be looking at months, not years.

One morning, at the garage, Jimmy mentioned he was going into the city to confer with his attorneys. Whitey and Stevie asked if they could tag along and Jimmy said sure. They overheard the entire discussion of Jimmy Martorano's defense—including the name of his surprise witness.

The next morning, agents Morris and Connolly barged into the home of the guy who was to be Jimmy Martorano's defense witness. Panicking, he ad-libbed a different story where the $2,000 had come from. He said he got it from his wife. He mentioned nothing about asking for a favor from Jimmy Martorano.

So Jimmy's witness was out. If he told his original story under oath, Zip and Morris would be sworn as witnesses to impeach his credibility. A few months later, in June 1976, Jimmy Martorano was convicted on the federal charges. Halloran inexplicably beat the rap, although by that time he was already in prison on weapons charges.

Nobody ever put two-and-two together until everybody was in jail together years later in the late '90s. As part of discovery, the feds gave everybody an FBI letter of commendation to Zip for getting one conviction of a so-called major Winter Hill figure in 1976. Well, there was only one conviction of anyone that year—my brother, Jimmy.

I was gone by then, but after they saw the document, somebody asked Stevie, why'd you rat out Jimmy Martorano over nothing, just to allow your pal Zip to win a few Brownie points with his bosses in Washington?

You know what Stevie said? He said, “Somebody had to go, and Jimmy did good time.”

 

9

The Bubble Bursts

LAWYER:
You weren't afraid to punch somebody, right?

MARTORANO:
Not if it was called for.

EVERYTHING STARTED TO
go wrong for the Winter Hill Gang in 1976. For three years or so, ever since Tony Ciulla had started fixing horse races, they'd been in an economic bubble—their assets rising wildly, out of all proportion to reality. They were making money here, there, and everywhere. The local cops were their friends, they had total protection in Somerville, they owned an FBI agent, they were getting along with the Mafia—what could possibly go wrong?

Like all bubbles, though, this one would end badly, in ways that no one in the gang could have ever imagined.

Johnny was in charge of keeping the sports gambling books. His partners didn't like bad news, especially during football season. With an open line of credit from Jack Mace, they bet heavily. Their long-distance phone bills were astronomical. They were always calling Vegas, looking for an edge. One of the race-fixing guys out there was an old Boston hand named Mel Goldenberg. He had a handicapper known as “White-Haired Jack from Pittsburgh.” Another guy they used was Bob Martin. He was supposed to be bigger than Lefty Rosenthal, the Vegas gambler Robert DeNiro played in
Casino.

Sometimes their guys in Vegas came up with good information, and the gang collected. Sometimes.

I'd go to the garage every Monday morning, and they'd all be staring at me as I walked in. They didn't want to know, did we win this weekend? They wanted to know, how much did we win this weekend? That's the way they thought. You gotta remember, we weren't six Einsteins, we were six shylocks, gamblers, bank robbers—you know what I mean. Regular guys.

One thing that was always strange to me was how little Whitey knew about sports. It's one thing not to care about watching the games on TV, which neither he nor Stevie did. But they didn't even know what a double play was in baseball. And Whitey had no understanding of odds. I could never figure out why he wanted to get into sports gambling in the first place when he didn't understand odds. Sometimes on Fridays, Whitey would ask me, who are we rooting for this weekend? And I'd say, the Patriots. And Monday morning I'd come into the garage and he'd say, all right, the Patriots won, I saw it in the paper. So we won, right? And I'd have to explain it to him, Well no, we didn't win, because the Patriots were six-point favorites, and they only won by three, so we lost. But he never got it, no matter how many times I explained it to him.