Hitman (53 page)

Even by latter-day Mafia standards, Junior was not an impressive godfather. Known variously as Abe (as in Lincoln, the suburban town in which he lived) and Rubber Lips (after the most prominent feature on his face), young Patriarca spent his days listening to Rhode Island radio talk shows, which he often called under assumed names that fooled nobody.

Given the events of the past decade, his organization was obviously riddled with informants. Yet Rubber Lips somehow convinced himself that news of this formal LCN induction ceremony—the first in New England in years—would remain secret. Sonny Mercurio got the first word to the FBI, but Zip made sure that credit went to Stevie and Whitey, which was okay by Sonny, as he testified later. Some things you don't want to be taking a bow for, Sonny told the judge, and this here was one of them.

The ceremony was scheduled for a Sunday in October 1989, on Guild Street in Medford. The owners of the house were away for the weekend. The FBI arrived first, on Friday night, and quickly wired the entire house. On Sunday morning, Joe Russo and Vinnie “the Animal” Ferrara arrived with platters of food—mainly meats and pastries—from the North End.

Vinnie Federico, a North Ender serving time at MCI-Shirley for killing a black man in a dispute over a parking space, got yet another one of Governor Mike Dukakis's weekend furloughs. On his furlough application, next to “reason,” Federico wrote, “family business.”

Federico even brought a date, a twenty-nine-year-old North End woman who worked for Mayor Flynn at City Hall. She was sent downstairs to the basement to watch TV. When the guys from Rhode Island arrived, a couple of them expressed concerns that they seemed to have been followed by an airplane. They had been. A leg breaker from Brockton thought he had spotted a cop in a phone booth. He had.

Raymond “Rubber Lips” Patriarca under arrest after the taped Mafia initiation in 1989.

The FBI was everywhere. They got video and photographs of everything walking in, all of which would run in the Boston newspapers in less than two weeks. Eavesdropping in a nearby unmarked van, Zip was in his glory as the ceremony began, with Junior Patriarca dusting off the clichés from a hundred Mafia movies about how “youse come in alive and youse go out dead.”

Recording this induction ceremony would put Zip in a class all by himself. No one had ever done this—a crusading, courageous cop singlehandedly bringing down the Mafia in his hometown. At least that was how Zip was planning to pitch it. This had Hollywood blockbuster written all over it. Zip had remarried the previous year, and now his younger second wife, a former FBI secretary, was pregnant with their first child. He had his twenty years in for the federal pension and now Billy Bulger would get him a big job working for some state-regulated utility. And after this Mafia induction, he would be the most famous G-man in America.

Joe Russo under arrest in 1989.

When the ceremony was finished, Vinnie Federico yelled downstairs to his girlfriend that it was time to eat. As for Vinnie himself, he just picked at his food. He was heading back to MCI-Shirley, he explained, and they were planning their usual big Sunday-night feed. Vinnie went on, explaining that one of the Greek inmates at Shirley was a great cook. This weekend, Vinnie said, the Greek's menu included lobster, shrimp, and, for dessert, pineapple upside-down cake. The old-time goombahs from Revere, who'd done time in the hellhole that was the old Charlestown prison, couldn't believe what Federico was telling them about incarceration in the Dukakis era.

“You call dat doin' time?” one of the Revere guys said.

After everyone went home, or back to prison, Vinnie Ferrara was in a great mood as he cleaned up the house, telling one of his men what a beautiful fucking thing it had all been. The FBI bugs were still recording.

“Only the ghost knows what happened here today, by God,” said the Animal.

Only the Ghost Knows
—Zip had the title for his screenplay!

*   *   *

ZIP'S EUPHORIA
didn't last long. In August 1990, a combination of various law-enforcement agencies—pointedly excluding the FBI—began rolling up Whitey's drug rings in Southie. The arrests began before dawn on a Friday morning, when they picked up one mid-level dealer sleeping at his job at the city DPW yard. In the morning, he had been planning to punch in at his second job, at a state agency where hiring was controlled by the wife of one of Billy Bulger's loyal state senators.

In the morning, Zip was frantically working the phones to make sure Whitey hadn't been indicted. Why, didn't these people read the
Globe
? Didn't they understand, Whitey kept the drugs out of Southie.

That afternoon, the DEA held a press conference.

“For years the Bulger organization has told people there are no drugs in Southie,” said the DEA agent in charge. “These arrests show that that's not true. These arrests show the people have been had by James Whitey Bulger.”

Some of the arrested dealers were shipped down to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, where Rubber Lips Patriarca had been incarcerated since his arrest after the Guild Street induction ceremony. Rubber Lips knew who was being brought in, and when he saw one of the Southie guys, the Mafia boss of New England called him over. Without even introducing himself, Rubber Lips shook his head and began talking:

“You do know why you're here, don't you?” he asked the Southie cocaine dealer. “You got ratted out by your boy Whitey. He's been snitching for years.”

*   *   *

DOWN IN
Florida, Johnny wasn't worried about the drug dealers. He knew nothing about any of that. But he was concerned about another problem, this one in Chelsea. A number of the Jewish bookies who had been paying “rent” to Whitey and Stevie for years were starting to feel the heat from a probe begun by the U.S. attorney's office in Boston, with subsequent help from the state police (but not, of course, the FBI).

The bookies had been laundering cash out of Heller's Café, under the Mystic Tobin Bridge in Chelsea. The feds started by targeting the barroom owner, a guy named Michael London. Once they had London's books, they knew exactly who they could take down for money laundering and income-tax evasion. It was now just a question of figuring out which bookies to flip first.

It was a guy named Chico Krantz who started the stampede. He used to drive a delivery truck for the
Herald.
Now I begin to get worried a little bit. He was one of the guys Joey Y was collecting for. What I'm worried about is RICO—the Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act. That's what they got Jerry Angiulo on. They hook you on a couple of recent crimes—predicate acts, they call them. After they've established them then they can drag in anything else, even if the statute of limitations has expired on the earlier crimes.

I remember when I first went on the lam, Whitey and Stevie told me they were getting out of the bookmaking business, that all they were gonna do now was “protection.” I said to them, I don't get it. Bookmaking is a state offense, a year tops, in the House of Correction, which means three months, like I did in Plymouth in '78. “Protection” is extortion. That's a federal rap, ten years, and nowadays you gotta do 85 percent of a federal sentence. It didn't make sense to me, Whitey and Stevie exposing themselves like that, but then, I didn't know they had complete protection. Their problems with “protection” only started when their own protection began to break down.

In the fall of 1990, Zip Connolly suddenly decided to retire from the FBI. Times were changing rapidly—the Republicans had swept the statewide elections in a landslide. The cocaine busts, the dealers' state jobs, and Whitey's increasing notoriety were among the many issues that had infuriated the electorate. Nine of Billy Bulger's rubber-stamp Democratic senators were ousted from office, and the GOP came within perhaps 20,000 votes of taking over the entire state senate for the first time since 1958.

Billy Bulger's clout was definitely diminished, at least temporarily, and it was time for Zip to cash out while he still could. Although both would later deny it, at the time Zip told his friends that Billy had arranged a job for him, as chief of security at Boston Edison. He succeeded another former FBI agent, and would in turn eventually be succeeded by another G-man pal of Whitey's.

That agent, Nick Gianturco, was the host of Zip's farewell dinner at Joe Tecce's in the North End in December 1990. A camera recorded the event, and a copy of that videotape was later found in Whitey's personal effects when he became a fugitive four years later.

Among those in attendance at Zip's farewell dinner were a number of high-ranking Boston cops, including a future police commissioner and Eddie Walsh, that dear friend of Zip's who made the first pinch on Johnny. Also in attendance was a gangster named Arthur Gianelli—Zip's brother-in-law, an underworld associate of Joey Yerardi's. Zip's second wife was also there, visibly pregnant for the second time in three years. She would soon give birth to twin boys.

Everyone lauded Zip's career as a lawman and gangbuster. The number-two agent in the Boston office read the letter that the then U.S. House Speaker John McCormack had written to J. Edgar Hoover on Zip's behalf back in 1968.

The head of the Organized Crime Strike Force, a future superior court judge named Diane Kottmyer, presented Zip with a bottle of wine and said, “John, they wanted me to say that that bottle came courtesy of South Boston Liquors, but I won't say that.”

She didn't quite get the name right—it was the South Boston Liquor Mart—but Zip was ready with a quip of his own.

“No finer liquor store in the Commonwealth,” he said, to gales of laughter and applause.

Finally, it was Billy Bulger's turn to laud his pal.

“Who's the personification of friendship in our community other than John Connolly? He's a splendid human being. He's a good pal.… John Connolly is the personification of loyalty, not only to his old friends and not only to the job that he holds but also to the highest principles. He's never forgotten them.”

*   *   *

WHEN THEY
brought Chico Krantz into court to plead guilty, he had more protection than any Boston mob witness since Joe Barboza. Uniformed marshals patrolled the halls outside the courtroom with M-16s. Once Chico was in the Witness Protection Program, the feds began raiding the other bookies' bank safe-deposit boxes. Eight of the Heller's Café bookmakers were indicted on money-laundering charges. A few of them flipped immediately and went into the Witness Protection Program. They testified that they had been paying “the Hill”—Whitey and Stevie—up to $3,000 a month in “rent.”

Others, though, hung tough. Sooner or later, they figured, the laws' attention would wane, as it always had in the past, and then they could get back to business as usual. But this time it was different. At the urging of the feds, judges began denying the bookies bail, on the grounds that they were in danger, which they probably were.

Before their arrests, whenever he spoke to them, Stevie Flemmi would mention the words “Barney Bloom”—a bookie who'd been murdered in the 1970s, not by Stevie or the Hill, but by In Town. But it made Stevie's point, or so he assumed.

The bookies were not young men—most were in their sixties. It was tough on them, being shipped off to Allenwood for a few months and then brought back to Boston and given a second chance to testify. If they refused again, they'd be threatened with eighteen months for contempt of court—before their money-laundering trials even began.

“The government is turning everyone into rats,” one bookie groused to his attorney in open court. “It'll become Russia.”

A few weeks later, he flipped. Emboldened by what they were now reading in the papers, some of Whitey's extortion victims began coming forward. One guy was a Southie bar owner who had worked in a bank. Whitey had brought him to their convenience store, Rotary Variety, and demanded a “loan.” Whitey had pulled a knife out of his boot and began stabbing empty cardboard boxes and calling this latest victim a “fuckster” over and over. In the end, the man paid Whitey $35,000, but then screwed up his courage and went to the FBI. He was fitted for a wire, but then the old pattern reasserted itself. Whitey refused to meet with or even speak to the guy. As usual, Whitey had gotten a tip from one of the crooked G-men on his payroll.