Hitman (5 page)

My father was closing in on me, so I slowed the car down to the point where I could jump out. The problem was, the Ford was still in gear, so it kept going, and slammed into a house. I took off running for the quarry, on some little path through the woods. I can hear Andy behind me, screaming, “I'm gonna kill you.” He's running after me, and he's so mad he takes off his belt, and he's trying to wave it around. The only problem is, once the belt's off, there's nothing to keep his pants up, and they fall down, and then so does he. Boy, was he pissed at me that day.

In 1956, Johnny got his first driver's license, and he quickly decided that he wanted to check out the family's new summer “cottage” in Scituate. One winter day, Johnny had a date, and they decided to enjoy a little privacy down at the beach house. But when they got there, they quickly realized there was no heat. That wasn't a problem for Johnny. He found an ax, chopped up the living room furniture, threw it into the fireplace, and started a blaze.

Things didn't work out with that girl, at least not then, but more than a decade later, they would have a memorable date in Boston.

Soon Johnny started going out with a “nice” girl from North Quincy, Nancy O'Neill, whose uncle would someday become a Boston city councilor—the colorful Albert “Dapper” O'Neil. (Different branches of the family spelled their surnames differently.)

At Milton High, Johnny was a three-sport letterman—football, basketball, and baseball. But he struggled academically. The word was unknown at the time, but thirty years later, Johnny would discover his problem—he was dyslexic. Reading was more than a chore for him, it was torture. There was no “special education,” and there was no tutoring for good athletes. Football coach Tom Brennan would simply go to Johnny's teachers and ask them to cut his star two-way player some slack. Andy couldn't understand what the problem was. Jimmy, eleven months younger, had no such academic problems, and was almost as good an athlete as Johnny. He was going to Boston College.

As for Johnny, he began going into Boston with his father. Andy got him a job as an usher at the Center Theater, across Washington Street from Luigi's. Then he arranged for Johnny to work as a shoeshine boy at the stand downtairs from Luigi's.

I started at the bottom, and was supposed to work my way up. That was the way my father wanted it. It was like the Greeks with their kids in the restaurants—you start out as a dishwasher, then a busboy, you learn every job going up the ladder, so later you can fill in anywhere you're needed.

But I didn't like working. I liked having fun. I'd rather hang out at the poolroom on Washington Street, just watch the people playing, taking action. I learned all the different games—eight ball, billiards, pocket pool. I bought a short-brimmed hat, I smoked cigars, and started hanging out with black guys. We'd go down into the subway at Essex Street and drink fortified wine—Silver Satin. No cork in Silver Satin, just a screw top.

There was an ex-boxer, Pineapple Stevens, and Johnny Mendez, another black guy. He was all scarred up, razor cuts. You didn't see guys like that in Milton.

One day, me and another guy from Milton went up to Scollay Square and got tattoos. This was before they outlawed tattoos in Massachusetts. Now they're legal again. On my right arm I got Nancy's name and on my left arm, a cross and underneath it the initials IHS. That was a Catholic thing—
In hoc signo
, you know the cross Constantine the Great was supposed to have seen in the sky before he won the big battle and converted to Christianity.
In hoc signo
—“In this sign you will conquer.” It was a message from God. I went back to Milton High and told people “IHS” stood for “I hate school.”

In the fall of 1958, both Jimmy and Johnny Martorano made the Quincy
Patriot Ledger
's South Shore All-Scholastic Football Team. Johnny was the only all-star to repeat for a second year. In addition to fullback, he played linebacker on defense for Milton High.

“To top things off,” the reporter wrote, “the 5'9", 180-lb. blockbuster is a top-flight punter, and more than once during his school career got off booming punts that carried over 70 yards.”

The story continued, “John plans to attend college next year, but has no preference yet as to which one, since he has received several applications from the local colleges and universities who are very eager to have him play for their school.”

The two schools that seemed most interested in him as a football prospect were Vanderbilt and Tennessee. Johnny doubted he could survive academically at either place, but that wasn't the kind of thing he could admit to a reporter, especially when he knew that Andy would be reading the story, and that Bess would be cutting it out and pasting it into the boys' scrapbook.

Then the writer mentioned Jimmy's plans to attend Boston College, adding, “No doubt the Heights would be landing a prize catch if they could get their hooks into Jim, and John as well.”

Something would soon have its hooks into Johnny Martorano, but it wouldn't be Boston College.

 

2

Apprentice Gangster

LAWYER:
Prior to 1999, you were a businessman of sorts, were you not?

MARTORANO:
Monkey business.

JOHNNY MARTORANO GRADUATED
from Milton High School in June 1959. His italicized quote in the high school yearbook was “Courage can be a very difficult neurosis.”

“I have no idea what it means,” he says now, “or where it came from.”

Immediately after graduation, he went to work full-time at Luigi's. Despite the football scholarships he could have had, he had no interest in college, especially any place far away from Boston. Even the nationally recognized programs, like the University of Tennessee, meant nothing to Johnny. He wasn't volunteering for the Vols, or for anybody else.

Andy Martorano wasn't happy with his son's decision not to go to college, but what could he do? Maybe after knocking around on the street for a year or so, Johnny would reconsider. In the meantime, Luigi's beckoned.

The city's old red-light district, Scollay Square, was on its last legs, and most of the action had already moved south. Nearby were clubs like the Palace, and Izzy Ott's Novelty. The Venios family, better known as the Venus brothers, controlled a couple of dives teeming with what were commonly called B-girls. Even in those early days, the Zone was a magnet for servicemen and sailors on shore leave.

At Luigi's, nineteen marble stairs led from Washington Street to the second-floor landing, and anyone who spent time at Luigi's quickly learned never to turn his back to the stairs. If a fight broke out—always a possibility—you didn't want somebody that you couldn't see punching or pulling you from behind … not unless you didn't mind tumbling down those nineteen hard stairs.

At the top of the steps were two doors. The one on the right led to the regular, legitimate restaurant and lounge that opened at 11
A.M.
and closed at 1. The door on the left was to the after-hours bar, basically a backroom clubhouse for Boston wiseguys. Every Friday, a bagman from Boston police District 4 would arrive to pick up the payoff for the local captain and lieutenant; the uniforms got taken care of only once a year, at Christmas, or when they had to answer a call—a squeal—at the club. In return for the weekly envelope, the Martoranos would get a tip when one of the BPD's “flying squads” was planning a raid, usually around election time, and often accompanied by newspaper photographers. Even in the most corrupt departments, there were always one or two cops on the job who loved busting up bookie joints and after-hours barrooms. In Boston in the early 1960s it was Captain John Slattery.

Sometimes, the squads would manage to get into the Zone undetected. The stairs, though, provided an early-warning system for Luigi's. As the cops rushed up, the doorman, usually Johnny, would flash the lights in the after-hours club. Just in case there was a problem, or an electrical short, the hatcheck girl also had a switch to flash the lights. In the after-hours joint, everything was served in plastic cups. The customers all understood that in the event of a raid they were expected to immediately throw their cups to the floor, thereby destroying the evidence of serving after hours.

John Harry Williams (real name Gugliemo), old-time Mafioso who tried to keep Johnny on the straight and narrow.

When the cops would get inside the back room and see the empty cups scattered on the floor, whoever was running the club that night would shrug and explain, they were just left over from a party earlier in the evening, during legal serving hours. If the police complained that the door was locked in violation of the fire code, Johnny or whoever would blame it on some drunk.

*   *   *

LUIGI'S WAS
the perfect training-ground for a future gangster. Working at an after-hours joint, particularly one that his father owned, meant that Johnny always had plenty of cash. He learned how to size up drunks, gangsters, and cops, as well as their propensity for sudden violence, especially after they'd been drinking. Hanging out in the Combat Zone also meant that he would meet on neutral ground most of the city's top wiseguys, the hoods who had enough cash to actually escape Boston's suffocatingly insular neighborhoods, if only for a few hours.

Before he was even out of his teens, Johnny was mixed up with a bad bunch, even by Combat Zone standards. Andy Martorano knew just how rough Johnny's crowd was—they were, after all, his customers, his clientele. But Andy thought he had just the guy to straighten out his wayward son—John Harry Williams, né Gugliemo, an old-time Mafioso who had spent much of the 1950s as Raymond L. S. Patriarca's man in Havana, Cuba. Now in semiretirement after Castro's revolution, Williams passed his days quietly in a suite at the Bostonian Hotel in the Fenway. He wasn't like the raucous younger hoods Johnny was running with—he wore a suit and a tie and spent his afternoons in the hotel lounge sipping anisette.

“Me and your father go way back,” Williams told Martorano. “Look, just behave and good things will happen to you. Stop drinking, stop fighting.”

Within a few weeks, Johnny Martorano was arrested for the first time. Despite Williams's admonitions, he had taken to carrying a pistol, like everyone he knew and looked up to in the Zone. He bought it from some local character, and of course Johnny had never inquired about its pedigree, whether it was registered, if it was hot, and if so, how hot? Those were questions for a square, not an aspiring Combat Zone wiseguy.

What could Andy say? He often carried a gun himself, a small automatic at Luigi's, and at home in Milton he had more revolvers. It was a basic precaution for anyone carrying large sums of cash in a rough neighborhood.

Johnny, on the other hand, had no particular need for a gun, except to impress his fellow wannabe wiseguys. One afternoon he was in an apartment building in the South End, across from the District 4 police station, when a Boston detective barged in, his gun drawn, responding to a call. It was Eddie Walsh, near the beginning of his long career with the BPD, a career that would intersect more than once with Johnny's life of crime. He arrested Johnny for possession of an unregistered firearm, then a state crime, but not a federal offense.

John Vincent Martorano at age 22.

Andy Martorano paid the bail and then he and Johnny went directly to the Bostonian, where Johnny Williams was sitting in the cocktail lounge sipping his liqueur.

“Johnny,” he said, “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny…”

*   *   *

NEXT ANDY
called his police bagman. This is what he paid the brass for every week, to make aggravations like this go away. When the day for Johnny's next court appearance arrived, the arresting officer Walsh wasn't there, but the bagman was. He did the talking to the judge—“This young man would like to straighten everything out, Your Honor.” In Boston courtrooms in those days, that only meant one thing—jail or the military. It worked the same way if you knocked up a girl—marriage or the marines.