Hitman (44 page)

“He [O'Donovan] made very disparaging and derogatory statements about the professionalism of FBI personnel. [Whitey] took great umbrage inasmuch as his association with the FBI has been nothing but the most professional in every respect.”

Ultimately, Sarhatt recommended terminating Whitey and Stevie. But the final decision was up to Jeremiah O'Sullivan, the head of the Organized Crime Strike Force, who two years earlier had cut them out of the race-fixing indictment. Once again, at Zip Connolly's behest, O'Sullivan saved Whitey and Stevie.

Johnny was still on the lam in Florida, talking to John Callahan.

*   *   *

CALLAHAN HAD
been the president of World Jai Alai until 1977, when he was observed by Connecticut State Police at the Playboy Club in Park Square in the company of “known gangsters,” one of whom was Johnny Martorano. Callahan had long since contracted what a cop would later tell the
Miami Herald
was “a bad case of gangsteritis,” but now it would come back to bite him. The state of Connecticut quickly stripped Callahan of his license to operate a pari-mutuel—a betting pool—without which he couldn't run a fronton.

Callahan was out, and soon afterward World Jai Alai's longtime owners from Boston sold out to Roger Wheeler, a fifty-five-year-old native Bostonian who had made a fortune in high tech. Wheeler, who now lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, paid $50 million, a reasonable price for a company that spun off $6 million clear each year. Wheeler got a loan from the First National Bank of Boston, where Callahan had once worked and was still well-regarded. As part of the deal, Wheeler had to bring in one of Callahan's associates to run the company. Suddenly, Callahan was dreaming of a triumphant return to World Jai Alai.

Given the nature of the business—gambling and cash—Wheeler wanted the best possible security. That was where H. Paul Rico came in. After his retirement from the FBI in 1976, Callahan had hired him as vice president of security as a favor to Rico's gangland associates. Rico quickly brought in more retired G-men, and after the ownership change, he hit it off with his new boss Wheeler. Rico was old-school FBI, and he knew how to act the part, just like Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Jimmy Stewart, and James Cagney before him.

Despite his security team's impeccable FBI credentials, Wheeler soon realized that his frontons were being skimmed. They weren't churning out nearly the $6 million annual profits that he'd been expecting, and needed, to pay off the note to the First. Wheeler started an audit, but before he could get far, a female World Jai Alai employee in Florida was brutally murdered in her apartment, along with her boyfriend. The boyfriend was killed first, hit over the head and then hanged from a shower curtain while unconscious. Then the cashier was dragged into the kitchen, to the sink. The killers looped the sash from her bathrobe around her neck and then fed it into the garbage disposal. She died of a broken neck. At the time, in December 1980, the double homicide was written off as another Miami drug deal gone bad. It remains unsolved; Miami-Dade's cold-case squad reopened the case in 2007 but got nowhere.

Meanwhile, John Callahan was hanging out at his condo in Plantation, and he decided to bounce an idea off Johnny Martorano.

I'd be out drinking with him whenever he flew down—he was one of the guys bringing down the money to me. George Kaufman managed my own money for me—I gave him 10 percent of whatever he handled, whether from the sports betting or anything Stevie and Whitey cut me in on, which was usually the deals I found out about. They'd give George my cut to get to me. Usually George would then give it to Callahan, and I'd get it the next time he flew down. Off-season, he let me stay at his condo in Plantation, and I could use his car. He didn't need them if he wasn't down there. So I was hanging with him, and he was always talking about his jai alai problems. I guess it was late '80, early '81, when he came up with a new idea.

He wanted to buy World Jai Alai, with Rico and his friend who the bank had put in as his partners. Once the deal went through, Callahan was going to cut the Hill in, for $10,000 a week, to provide protection against any of the New York families muscling in on the fronton in Hartford. They were particularly concerned about that one, because it was so close to New York. There was so much cash coming in, from the betting and parking lots, they could have skimmed it easy. The plan was to offer Wheeler good money—at least $60 million, probably more. Then they would sell off a couple of the smaller frontons and pay down the debt to a manageable level. So he asked us—meaning me, Whitey, and Stevie—if we'd be interested in handling the “protection.” Naturally they loved the idea—$10,000 a week, steady.

Subsequently, the offer was made to Wheeler, but he wasn't interested. And from then on, Wheeler seemed more interested in getting the people who were stealing from him arrested. Callahan kept saying, he's trying to get us indicted.

In early 1981, the FBI finally installed the bugs, at both the Dog House and Larry Baione's “clubhouse” on North Margin Street. Within days, the feds knew they had more than enough to put Jerry Angiulo behind bars for the rest of his life.

In addition to the incriminating tapes, the underboss turned out to be a font of unintentional humor, profanely spouting off on everything from the untimely passing of a loanshark victim (“He can't be dead—he owes me $13,000!”) to the low IQs of the next generation of hoodlums (“I don't need tough guys, I need intelligent tough guys”).

He fulminated against his own “college boy” son: “That's a fuckin' order 'cause you're a fuckin' idiot.”

Just as Zip had expected, the Hill was talked about continually. But by using Whitey and Stevie as sources for the warrant, Zip had saved his friends once more. Angiulo bragged that Whitey, among others, was one of his hitmen, which of course he was, or had been, during the Indian War. But Zip quickly inserted a report into Whitey's file, flatly stating that “source [Whitey] is not a ‘hit man' for Jerry Angiulo as has been contended.”

One night, Larry Baione listened as Jerry Angiulo discussed the breakup of the Winter Hill Gang into territories.

“Whitey's got the whole of Southie. Stevie is got the whole of the South End. Johnny's got niggers.… Howie knows this.”

In the long run, the bugged conversation most damaging to the Hill didn't even involve Angiulo. It took place at Baione's club on North Margin Street. One of his soldiers, John Cincotti, had been working with a relative of his, Jerry Matricia. It was the same Matricia who a few years earlier had disappeared from Nevada after losing $90,000 he had won for the Hill in Las Vegas betting on one of the fixed races in which Tony Ciulla had run Spread the Word.

Now Matricia had returned to Boston, and Larry and his fellow made man Ralphie Chong were concerned that if Whitey or Stevie saw Matricia, “they're going to hit him,” as Baione put it.

Late one night, Matricia was brought to North Margin Street to speak with Larry, who had been drinking heavily, as he did most evenings. Baione began with a brief history lesson for Matricia.

“If you fuck someone that's friendly with us—just so you understand me, do you know that the Hill is us? Maybe you didn't know that, did you?”

“No,” said Matricia, “I didn't.”

“Did you know Howie and Stevie, they're us? We're the fuckin' Hill with Howie.… You know that they're with us. You didn't know that?”

Matricia said he didn't know that. So Baione told him that from now on, whatever money he made with Cincotti would go directly to pay off his debt to the Hill.

“You understand?” Baione asked Matricia. “After all, you fucked them. These are nice people. These are the kind of fuckin' people that straighten a thing out. They're with us. We're together. And we cannot tolerate them getting fucked.”

*   *   *

ALL THE
Boston agents took part in the bugging operations, sitting in the cramped surveillance vans for hours on end in the dead of winter, monitoring the conversations as they were recorded. For such tedious, uncomfortable duty, most of the agents dressed casually, in sweatsuits and sneakers. But not Zip. At his retirement dinner at Joe Tecce's in 1990, another agent described Zip's daily arrival at the van, decked out in “tan slacks, Gucci loafers, velour shirt open to the chest with enough gold showing to be the envy of most members of the Gambino crime family.”

Soon Zip Connolly had a new nickname, at least among the younger, straighter agents. They called him “Cannoli.”

*   *   *

WHITEY AND
Stevie were kept apprised of the tapes' content—information they did not share with their “partner” down in Florida. One night, agent John Morris called Whitey and said he had a tape he wanted Whitey and Stevie to hear. The two gangsters rented a room at the Colonnade on Huntington Avenue and laid in a few bottles of wine for the heavy-drinking Morris. Morris arrived after business hours and played the tape for them—it was Larry Baione drunkenly threatening to kill Whitey and Stevie. Then Morris himself got drunk, so drunk that from then on Whitey and Stevie called him “Vino.” Whitey ended up driving the crapulous G-man back to Lexington, with Stevie following behind. They kept the FBI tape he'd left behind. It would come in handy, if Vino ever got out of line, not that that was likely to happen, as alcoholic and as crooked as he had become.

Zip Connolly, left, arrests Jerry Angiulo's brother, Frankie “the Cat,” in 1983.

Angiulo wouldn't know for months that he was finished. It was tedious work, transcribing all those tapes. Angiulo would remain free until September 1983. So he went about his usual business, and one of his tasks was getting the Hill to start paying back the $250,000 they still owed him. He'd frozen the vig, and in return, Whitey and Stevie had promised to start paying down the principal at the rate of $5,000 a week.

They made one payment, then stopped again.

“Jesus Christ all fuckin' mighty,” Jerry complained to one of his brothers, “why haven't these guys been in touch with me? I don't understand it. Fuck me maybe, they don't like me. They got a right not to like me. It's not a problem … but they been jerkin' me around.”

And for a very good reason. Jerry Angiulo wasn't going to be on the street much longer.

*   *   *

JOHN CALLAHAN
decided he couldn't take any more chances. Roger Wheeler had to go. After the murder of his Florida cashier, Wheeler had decided to sell the fronton in Connecticut. It was just too close to New York, and he was sick of mobsters. He stepped up the audit. Callahan flew to Florida.

I think Callahan and I were having dinner at Yesterday's. It was a fancy French restaurant on Oakland Park Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. We were up in this private dining area. The Plum Room, they called it.

He says to me, this guy won't take our money. We still have to stop him. We need to get rid of him. Can you help us?

I said no. On something like this, I'd have to check with my partners, Whitey and Stevie, but I didn't think they'd be interested because Wheeler was a legitimate guy. Killing somebody like that would bring down a whole lot of heat. Callahan says, tell them the deal, the $10,000 a week, it isn't dead. Rico says he'll propose the same deal to Wheeler's widow once he's dead. Then he starts telling me, you know this guy Wheeler cheats at golf. He knows I can't stand cheaters, that's why I never liked Castucci. So he's trying to push my buttons, only he doesn't do it nearly as effectively as Whitey and Stevie do. What do I care, some guy in Oklahoma cheats at golf?

It took a while for everything to fall into place. Despite Johnny's misgivings, Whitey and Stevie were immediately on board—in those precocaine days, $10,000 a week was awfully tempting. But there was more to whacking Wheeler than money, Johnny realized later. If the skimming investigation went forward, Rico was likely in jeopardy. And Rico was part of the original crew—the one Johnny would later come to consider the greatest criminal enterprise of all in Boston, the one that also included Whitey, Stevie, and Zip.

Once they were in, Whitey and Stevie inexplicably allowed Callahan to talk them into a terrible decision—offering the murder contract on Wheeler to Brian Halloran.

In January 1981, Callahan invited Halloran up to his apartment above the Rusty Scupper. Whitey was there, even though he didn't like Halloran, never had. He was a boozer, a cokehead. His brother was a state cop; Halloran was a complete fuck-up. And most important, he could put the finger on Whitey for the Litif hit. Whitey had taken to calling him “Balloonhead”—recycling the Mullens' old nickname for Kenny Killeen.

Despite all that, Whitey signed off on Callahan's decision to offer the contract on Wheeler to Balloonhead. After hearing the offer, Halloran immediately asked if there wasn't some other alternative. That was not the right answer. Whitey stood up and told Halloran they'd get back to him later. A couple of weeks after that, Callahan told him to come back up to the apartment. There he handed Halloran two hundred $100 bills—$20,000 in cash.