Hitman (40 page)

One after another, everyone was asked: Who could have done this? Where was the leak? Finally they got around to Zip Connolly. Zip spoke slowly, for emphasis. Already a lot of the other feds looked up to him, for his success in recruiting such high-level informants. Zip explained how he'd been working his sources. He said they'd told him that Castucci had owed the Mafia a lot of money, and In Town didn't like that he was planning to pay off his debts to the Hill first. Now he was dead and the Hill was out a lot of money. So obviously they had no reason to kill Castucci. Good old Zip, always taking care of “his Irish,” as he called them, even while he was simultaneously trying to save his own hide as well.

“It was the Mafia,” Zip explained. “Winter Hill doesn't kill like that.”

Afterward, Zip frantically told Whitey again that he had to make sure that Joe McDonald didn't let slip what had happened. Whitey asked Johnny to get in touch with Joe. Whitey and Stevie wanted a sit-down with Joe Mac, to reinforce the message of how important it was to keep his mouth shut. But Joe Mac refused to meet with them. He'd always had less use for Whitey and Stevie than anyone else in the gang, but now he was being stubborn.

“I never found out what the problem was,” Johnny said. “Maybe Joe had a premonition about them.”

*   *   *

BUT IT
wasn't over yet. The Hill found out something it hadn't been aware of. Jack Mace was with the Gambino crime family. It was now a Mafia thing, in other words, and protocol had to be observed. New York called Jerry Angiulo and asked for permission to come into Boston to handle a piece of business—namely, collecting the $150,000 the Hill owed Jack Mace.

Jerry was bullshit, 'cause he didn't like New York guys coming into his town. But he had to play along, too. So he gives it the okay, and he sets up a date for us to meet them. At first I thought of telling them, we gave Castucci the money before he got killed. But why lie? So I decided to handle it another way. I call every gangster I know and asked them to come over to the garage at a certain time, before the New York guys arrive, although I didn't put it that way.

Sonny Mercurio was the liaison between us and In Town, so Jerry told Sonny that he had to bring the New York people over. I told my people, when you see these guys coming in with Sonny, I want you to take a good look at 'em and try to remember if you've ever seen them hanging around the garage or anywhere else.

I rounded up everybody—the Campbells from Roxbury, Whitey's guys from Southie, the Charlestown longshoremen who'd been with the Hill in the war, and of course everybody from Somerville. It was a tough-looking bunch, sixty or eighty guys, and there weren't nearly enough chairs for so many of them, so they were just milling around. I thought a picture was worth a thousand words. A few theatrics could save a lot of trouble, maybe even lives.

Angelo “Sonny” Mercurio, FBI informant and the Mafia's liaison to Winter Hill.

Anyway, Sonny arrives with three guys, forty, fifty years old, dressed up. They're playing their roles—Mafia guys from New York—just like we're playing our parts. So we make them run the gauntlet, walk past our guys, who are all staring at the New York wiseguys. That got them a little spooked, even before Sonny brought them into the office. Howie's got the trapdoor next to his desk open—that sends a message, too, like we might throw their bodies down there if they get out of line, after we've shot them. It was mainly me and Whitey who did the talking.

The guy that was speaking for them was a member of the Colombo family.

He says, “We're here to collect the $150,000 you owe Jack Mace.” He says, “Maybe you didn't know he was with us.” And I says, “Maybe you didn't know that I rented a place from him in the Village for two of our guys who are on the lam,” and he told Castucci, who went to the feds.

It doesn't matter how we found out, Johnny said, all that matters is that we did. We took care of Castucci, Johnny went on, and I don't know what you're planning to do about Mace, but I'll tell you right now, if we see him, we're going to whack him.

The Colombo soldier was an up-and-comer, and he was used to being treated with respect, especially by guys who weren't “made.” But Johnny was addressing him brusquely, not at all deferentially. And as Johnny, and sometimes Whitey, spoke, they noticed how the soldier's eyes kept drifting over to that open trapdoor next to Howie's desk.

“As far as we're concerned,” Johnny told him, “the debt's cancelled.”

The Colombo soldier paused for a moment to consider how to extricate himself from this situation with his skin intact.

“Well, you know,” he finally said, “we didn't know any of this.” Now he was the one being deferential. “This kind of changes everything.”

Then he stood up and nodded at Sonny Mercurio. The sit-down was over.

LAWYER:
And the LCN representatives at this meeting agreed not to collect on the debt, isn't that right?

MARTORANO:
They couldn't collect the debt so they agreed not to collect the debt.

LAWYER:
Well, if the LCN wanted to collect a debt, even from you, they could do so, couldn't they?

MARTORANO:
No, they couldn't. They didn't.

LAWYER:
The Winter Hill organization couldn't afford a war with the LCN, isn't that right?

MARTORANO:
We told them we're not paying. You want us to take care of Jack, we'll take care of Jack, because he's still a problem for us. They said never mind. You don't owe it no more.

Later on, Sonny Mercurio tells me that once they got outside and back in the car, the top guy from New York said he was just glad to get out of the garage alive, and boy, had they ever misread that situation. Jerry was happy, too. He didn't want New York thinking they could come up here and push anybody around. It would have been bad for business—his, ours, everybody's.

I think maybe that was the pinnacle of the Winter Hill Gang. One thing's for sure. Everything was downhill from there. Everything.

Melotone had been a near disaster, but Howie Winter wasn't giving up on vending machines. His next move was pinball. The machines were in some of the clubs in Somerville, but officially they'd been illegal in the city since 1954. Howie wanted them everywhere, and to do that, he needed to get them legalized.

That was a task for Sal Sperlinga, Indian Al's old friend, who ran the numbers in Somerville. He was a smoother guy, the good cop to Howie's bad cop. That was why Indian Al had reached out to him. He was glib, almost a politician. And he was close to the pols—it was Sperlinga who in August 1977 got the Board of Aldermen to legalize the machines. The vote was 9 to 2. Later the state police investigated allegations of $10,000 cash changing hands at City Hall, but no one was ever indicted.

Once pinball was legalized in the city, the Hill realized it had a new problem. At least nominally, Somerville was now wide-open. Clubs and bars could now contract with any vending-machine company, although of course Howie didn't see it that way. He figured that since he'd made the capital investment—“spent a bundle,” as he told the owner of one rival company—then he alone should enjoy the fruits of the monopoly he had paid for.

“I'm giving you two days to get your machines out of the city,” Howie was later quoted in court as telling the manager of one vending-machine company. “I own this city. You're all done. As far as Somerville goes, you're out of business. If you don't [quit], I can get rough and I can get plenty rough.”

One of the club managers Howie tried to muscle was seventy-five years old. He worked at the Disabled American Veterans Post in Ball Square. The Hill had gotten away with so much for so long that they never considered what might happen next. The people Howie was trying to muscle started marching down to East Cambridge, to the office of the Middlesex district attorney. They apparently didn't understand that it wasn't healthy to do that; unlike most of the people the Hill had been dealing with, they were legit. They were law-abiding citizens.

Howie Winter had picked an unfortunate time to tangle with civilians. The district attorney was sixty-seven years old and afflicted with a debilitating disease that had left him unable to speak. He had a primary coming up in 1978, and younger challengers were already lining up against him. He badly needed some scalps. He also had an ambitious young first assistant named John Forbes Kerry, who understood the publicity value of bagging a big-time gangster or two.

Howie Winter under arrest in Somerville in 1977.

Howie Winter and Sal Sperlinga were arrested on October 20, 1977, and charged with extortion. Hours after the arrests—and a subsequent John Kerry press conference—the Somerville aldermen held a special meeting at City Hall and voted unanimously to halt the licensing of all pinball machines in the city.

I think Howie wasn't paying enough attention because he was more concerned about Ciulla. Fat Tony had sold the horses he owned with Howie, and then they'd let him out of prison. His brother-in-law, Eddie Ardolino, came by the garage to warn us not to talk to Tony, because the feds had wired him up. Plus Joe and Jimmy are still on the lam. So Zip tells Whitey who tells Howie the district attorney is coming after him, and that he had better go down to the DAV Post and get this straightened out, apologize or whatever. Same with the other places him and Sal tried to muscle. But I think what happened was, Howie was so preoccupied trying to keep everything else together that he just left it to Sal to patch everything up, and whatever Sal did wasn't sufficient.

The bottom line is, Howie and Sal end up getting indicted.

In November 1977, Johnny got more bad news. Deke Chandler was murdered outside his Roxbury home by a twenty-three-year-old Mattapan punk. Chandler, thirty-eight, was stabbed in the heart and shot repeatedly in the head. The slaying had nothing to do with organized crime; it was a dispute over Chandler's girlfriend.

In the newspaper accounts of his slaying, Chandler was described as a “lieutenant” in Boston underworld circles who had “strong affiliations with high-ranking organized-crime chieftains in Somerville and Boston.”

*   *   *

JOHNNY WAS
the next one to get into trouble with the law. Dick O'Brien was a major bookmaker in Quincy, one of the Hill's top earners. The state police tapped the phones in one of his South Shore offices and soon had enough evidence to run in everyone in his organization on gaming charges. They even got Johnny, taking a call from one of O'Brien's underlings about a problem, and then answering, “I'll talk to you when I see you.”

Dick O'Brien, South Shore bookie who later lived near Johnny in Florida.

They were planning to play that tape in court. They said it proved I was one of the two bosses, with Dick O'Brien. They had me on tape, so it was hard to deny. I get ordered to go to state police headquarters at 1010 Com Ave and have a voice-print made, you know, to see if I'm the same guy as the one whose voice they got on the tape.