Hitman (4 page)

Johnny's father was always a hard worker, and after graduating from high school, he became a cab driver. Soon he owned his own Boston medallion, then two. He supplemented his income by working as a small-time bookie, taking numbers and bets, mostly on horses. In 1939, he met his future wife, who was working for a dry cleaner in Somerville.

After their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Martorano moved to Bess's hometown of Somerville. They lived on the first floor of a rented two-decker off Ball Square, at 96 Pritchard Avenue. Johnny's cousins lived on the second floor. Eleven months after Johnny's birth, his only sibling, Jimmy, was born. Some of Johnny's earliest memories were of visiting his paternal grandparents, who lived on Neptune Road in East Boston.

In Somerville, just after the end of World War II, Johnny began school at St. Clement's. He was young, five years old, when he started the first grade, and the nuns decided to hold him back. From then on, he and his brother Jimmy would go through school together in the same grade.

I was Sister Patricia's pet—the teacher's pet. I used to wait every morning to carry her bag from the rectory to the school. But I got into trouble, too. I remember one day, I must have been eight or nine. My father had a big black four-door Dodge outside the house; he always had a big bankroll. Anyway, he was sleeping one morning, and I went downstairs. I put on his hat and took one of his cigars. Then I grabbed his bankroll and I went out onto the street and started giving money away. I looked like one of the Little Rascals. Finally my mother got a telephone call from one of the neighbors and she ran out of the house chasing me, trying to get the money back.

Abie Sarkis, major Boston bookie and longtime business partner of Andy Martorano.

Andy Martorano was doing well in the postwar economy. He bought another medallion, and put his brothers, Danny and Louie, to work as drivers, until Louie got a job selling cars. By then, though, Andy had gone into the restaurant business, with Abie Sarkis, a big-time Boston bookmaker who became Andy's lifelong friend. Their place was on the second floor above the Intermission Lounge at 699 Washington Street in the middle of what would someday be the Combat Zone, although in those days the city's red-light district was still a few blocks north, on Tremont Street. It was known as Scollay Square.

Abie and Andy called their restaurant Luigi's, and it did well from the start. But it did better when they opened up what they called the “backroom,” an after-hours club. They could charge more for a drink after last call, and they didn't need to keep the kitchen open. The only overhead was the weekly payoff to the cops in District 4. But in the mid-1950s, Abie Sarkis had a bad run in the numbers. He was deeply in debt, and to raise money, he sold out his half of Luigi's to Andy Martorano.

Now owning Luigi's outright, Andy Martorano soon had even more disposable income. He had a friend in Revere, Joe DeAngelis, who was trying to set himself up as a shylock on Shirley Avenue. In those days no one but the wealthy had credit cards, and for the workingman the only line of credit came from the loan shark on the corner. By the 1960s, Joe Dee had $100,000 of Andy's money out on the street, at a point or two (1 or 2 percent) a week. It was a good solid return on investment, and like municipal bonds, it was tax-free.

Soon, Andy and Bess Martorano decided that Milton, just south of the city, would be a better place to raise the boys than rough-and-tumble Somerville. Their first house was at 79 California Avenue. Later, Andy bought a vacant lot around the corner and built a new house, on 64 Lockland Street.

After he got married, my father quit as a bookie, but he still loved to gamble. And Andy liked baseball better than the track; in the summer he was always at the ballgames. This was back before the Braves moved to Milwaukee in '53, so there was a game in Boston almost every day, either at Fenway or at Braves Field, which is now Nickerson Field at BU.

My father used to take me with him to a lot of the games. One time I remember Sam Jethroe, the first black player on the Braves, was playing center field, and he misjudged a fly ball and it hit him on the head.

We used to sit with this group of guys, usually way up in the right-field grandstand, or sometimes in the bleachers—always off by themselves. They knew all the ushers, so they got in for free. There was plenty of room, and plenty of empty seats. Back then, the Red Sox didn't draw like they do now, and the Braves drew nobody. That's why they finally had to move.

My father and his friends didn't care if nobody was there. They were there to gamble. There were maybe fifty to a hundred of them, depending on the game, who the Sox or the Braves were playing. Mostly Italians in the group, but other people, too. The common denominator was betting. That's what these guys did. Some of them had businesses, like my father. There was another guy who owned a baby carriage company. I guess there were some wiseguys there, too. They'd gamble on every pitch, was it going to be a ball, or a strike? They'd bet on whether the batter was going to get a hit, strike out, ground out, or fly out. Anything, just action. Ted Williams comes up, maybe the odds were 20-1 or 30-1 that he'd hit a home run, depending on how good the pitcher was. Longer odds if the batter wasn't that good a hitter, or if the pitcher was better. Everybody kept a pad of paper and a pen on their laps so they could keep track of the bets, because they'd be making so many of them over the course of nine innings. At the end of the game, everybody would settle up.

That's how I learned to gamble, from my father. He taught me how to gamble and how to drink.

Johnny and Jimmy were now enrolled in St. Agatha's parochial school in Milton. They were in the same class as a young Quincy boy named Billy Delahunt, a lefty. Johnny was a good all-around athlete, but his best sport was football. One day on the playground he ran over Mother Superior, and she chased him down the street with her cane. Another time he kicked a football through a window in the school.

Johnny was a popular kid, a natural leader. Years later, Billy Delahunt, by then a congressman, was bragging at a party that he had never lost an election—as state rep, district attorney, or congressman. Someone else at the party, another St. Agatha's alumnus, corrected Delahunt—he had lost at least one election, for the presidency of the seventh-grade class at St. Agatha's. To Johnny Martorano.

There was a priest there, a young guy, Father Riley. A great athlete. He called me Rocky. One day I went to him, I was in the seventh or eighth grade, and I asked him, Father, can you teach me how to throw and kick a football like you do? And he said, I'll make a deal with you, Rocky, if you become an altar boy, I'll coach you. It was a deal. I think I served Mass maybe once—somewhere there's a photo of me and Billy Delahunt, in our robes, and in the middle is Cardinal Cushing.

Johnny graduated from the eighth grade at St. Agatha's, but he was becoming harder and harder for his parents to handle. Andy decided to ship him off to what was then an all-boys Catholic prep school in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Mount St. Charles Academy. Jimmy stayed behind in Milton and enrolled in the public junior high school.

As a freshman, Johnny became the starting fullback on the Mount St. Charles football team. His teammates called him “the Milkman.”

“That was because he always delivered,” his teammate Ed Bradley would explain a half century later.

It was funny how Ed Bradley and I became friends. He was black, I was white, he was on scholarship, I was from a middle-class family paying full tuition. I had a father, he didn't. I know he thought about it a lot later, and so did I: How did he end up what he became, starting with nothing, while I became … well, what I became.

He was a quiet guy, I was a quiet guy. One day after practice, we were walking back to the locker room, and he said to me, “You know, Johnny, you're white and I'm black, but one thing we got in common is the same teeth.” See, he had a space between his two upper front middle teeth, just like me. We laughed, and that's when our friendship started to develop. I called him Big Ed—that's all I ever knew him as. When he came looking for me at the prison all those years later, at first I had no idea who “Ed Bradley” was. But I remembered Big Ed, just like he remembered “the Milkman.”

I've run into a few guys from the old team since I got out. One guy, John McLaughlin, we called him “Clem,” I saw him and he reminded me how there was another kid from Boston, a little guy named Johnny August. Johnny's dead now, but Clem told me how one time he was picking on Johnny August, and I grabbed Clem and told him to lay off Johnny August.

I'd forgotten all about it, but he was bullying the kid, and I had to stop it. That's just the way I am, always have been. That's what I was always taught. All my childhood, I was around people who instilled in me the same values. Be loyal to your family and your friends. My father wanted the best for me; he didn't care whether I became a doctor, a lawyer, or if I made a lot of money. He would say, “Always be a man.” Take care of the people around you. There's an old Sicilian expression that Andy used—
Sangu du mio sangu.
It means “Blood of my blood.”

And that's what I always tried to do—protect the “blood of my blood,” not just my families and my brother, but also my friends. I always tried to make my father proud and live up to his expectations.

It's the same lesson I got from Father Riley, and later on from my coaches at Milton High. I learned from Big Ed, too. He taught me that blacks were no different than anybody else. If you're on my team, I'm with you all the way. Later on, that's how I felt about the gang. It was just another team, and we were all on the same team. Although of course I found out later that we weren't—on the same team, that is.

Another thing I always believed, even back then. If a friend asks you to do something, you try your best to do it for them, as long as it's the right thing to do and they deserve help. I always lived by that code. That's a lot of the explanation for what happened later. I was doing what people asked me to do, to help them out. You can say to me, you killed a lot of people, and you're right, I did. But I always had my reasons. I didn't kill for the hell of it, like the other guys. I was always helping somebody out, or I thought I was. When somebody gets hit, it always helps somebody else.

You know, I'm still on good terms with all the different people from the various periods of my life, even my kids' mothers. I don't have any enemies, never did. My problem was that I had a lot of friends who had enemies.

Johnny didn't last long at Mount St. Charles. One weekend he hitchhiked back to Milton, and called up one of the neighborhood girls. They arranged to meet at the old Strand Theater in Quincy. During the course of the date, it occurred to Johnny that Milton and Boston were a lot more fun than an all-male Catholic prep school in Rhode Island. He never went back. The next Monday, he joined his brother Jimmy at Cunningham Junior High School.

I always liked guns. My father had some around, because he carried a lot of cash, from the restaurant. I think the first one I shot was a .22, at an amusement park in Nantasket Beach in Hull.

Johnny, Andy, and Jimmy Martorano in the early 1960s.

When I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, somewhere in there, my brother and I would go to camp every summer in the Berkshires. I'm pretty sure that's when I bought my first gun, a .22 rifle, to take to camp.

He was still a wild and crazy kid. By the time he was fourteen, he was occasionally stealing his mother's car, a Ford, to go out joyriding. One afternoon Johnny made the mistake of taking off in the car before his father left for Luigi's. Andy saw him and jumped in his own Pontiac, a coupe, and began chasing Johnny through Milton, honking his horn. Johnny figured he could lose him down by the quarry. So he took a left, onto what he quickly realized was a dead-end street. It was a lesson for the future—always know your getaway route.