Hitman (61 page)

This time Burton's first question to Billy Bulger was, What did you think your brother did for a living?

“Well, I know that he was for the most part…” Billy's voice drifted off. He started over. “I had the feeling that he was, uh, in the business of gaming and, and, uh…” He stopped again. “Whatever. It was vague to me but I didn't think, uh—for a long while he had some jobs but uh ultimately uh it was clear that he was not uh um being um uh you know he wasn't doing what I'd like him to do.”

Whitey's brother Billy testifies before a congressional committee in Washington investigating FBI corruption in 2003. Two rows back, left, is the author, Howie Carr.

Burton asked, “Did you know anything about the Winter Hill Mob?”

“The what?” Bulger said.

“The gang he was connected to.”

“No, I didn't.” Pause. “I don't think I met anybody from that.”

“You didn't know Flemmi?” Burton asked incredulously.

“I did know Steve Flemmi, yes.”

“Well, he was part of that gang. You didn't know he was part of that gang?”

“No.”

“Did you know what Steve Flemmi did for a living?”

“I thought he had a restaurant somewhere. And I thought he had a club, or something like that.”

It was the Marconi Club, in Roxbury, into which Johnny had once invested $20,000. Stevie sold the club and eventually the Boston police got a search warrant and dug up its basement, looking for more bodies.

“Any indication,” Burton said, “your brother was involved in murder?”

“Someplace,” Billy Bulger said, “I saw it in the paper.”

A lawyer for the committee finally brought up the name of Johnny Martorano. He reminded Bulger of Martorano's sworn testimony that Whitey had once told him how Billy had asked Zip for a favor—keeping Whitey out of trouble.

“He said that?” Billy asked. “And was Mr. Martorano there when I did this? Was he present?”

“He understood,” the lawyer said, “that you had done it at some point.”

“I see,” said Billy. “Well, if I ever did say something like that, uh, influence him to stay on the straight and narrow, if that's what's meant by it I could well have said it … I think it's a pretty innocent comment, if in fact I made it. I have no recollection but I don't want to quarrel with that source.”

As soon as the hearing ended, Governor Romney let it be known that he would begin appointing known enemies of Billy Bulger to the UMass board. Billy took the hint and decided to call it quits. He got a severance package of $960,000 from the state, in addition to a state pension of just under $200,000 a year.

*   *   *

IN OCTOBER
2003, a few weeks after Billy Bulger's resignation as president of UMass, Stevie Flemmi pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to ten counts of murder. The prosecutor read the agreed-upon statement of facts, listing the murders in order. As he reached the paragraph about the strangulation of Deb Davis in 1981, one of her brothers stood up in court and screamed at Stevie, “Fuck you, you fucking piece of shit!”

*   *   *

IN DECEMBER
2003, the City of Somerville began foreclosure proceedings on the old Marshall Street garage, out of which the Winter Hill Gang had operated. Howie Winter had fallen more than $11,000 behind on his tax payments.

That same month, H. Paul Rico answered a knock at his front door of his condo in Miami Shores. He was wearing a cashmere World Jai Alai cardigan sweater. When he opened the door he saw several uniformed police officers as well as Mike Huff, the Tulsa homicide detective he'd snubbed so many years earlier. They told the seventy-seven-year-old retired FBI agent that they were there to arrest him on a murder warrant from Oklahoma. They read him his Miranda rights. Then Huff took a pair of handcuffs out of his coat and asked “Mr. Rico” to put his hands in front of him.

First, Rico asked them if they were joking. They told him they were not. When they informed him that he would now be taken to the Miami/Dade jail for booking, H. Paul Rico defecated in his trousers.

In January 2004, Rico was extradited to Oklahoma to stand trial on charges of arranging the 1981 murder of his boss, World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler. He was flown from Miami in an ambulance jet. As the plane landed in Tulsa, Rico again shat in his pants. At his arraignment at the county jail, Rico pleaded not guilty from his wheelchair.

On January 16, 2004, Rico died, alone in a Tulsa hospital room, with guards standing outside his room.

*   *   *

IN JUNE
2004, Johnny Martorano was again flown back to Boston to appear before Judge Mark Wolf. Almost ten years after his arrest in the parking lot in Boca Raton, he would finally be sentenced.

That morning, columnist Mike Barnicle, forced out of the
Globe
following allegations of fabrications of quotes and plagiarism but still working occasionally for the
Herald,
dusted off the old discredited Zip Connolly story line that Johnny Martorano still hadn't admitted to all the murders he'd committed.

“For those of you keeping score at home,” Barnicle wrote, “his career record of kills far exceeds the modest number—twenty—he admitted to.”

The only difference between this and so many other pro-Whitey columns Barnicle had written over the years was that now even Barnicle had to admit that “Jimmy” and Stevie were “two total degenerates.”

The feds had asked Wolf to impose a twelve-year sentence. As prosecutor Wyshak wrote in his motion, “While the government makes no excuses for Martorano's criminal activity, the sad truth is none of the murders in which he had been involved would have ever been solved had he not confessed.”

But Judge Wolf wouldn't go for twelve years. He described Martorano as a “calculating opportunist” who had only decided to testify against Stevie Flemmi because he was concerned that Flemmi would testify against him. Nevertheless, Wolf acknowledged Johnny was no longer the killing machine he had once been.

“I'm not a prophet,” Wolf said. “But you seem to have gotten the message. You're too old to initiate this all over again.”

Before the sentencing, Martorano stood and read his own prepared statement.

“I've confessed to my family, my friends, and my priest. I've been forgiven and given a second chance. I will not embarrass anyone who stood up for me and supported me. As they say, actions speak louder than words. I'm hoping the risks I've taken to turn my life around and accept responsibility prove my sincerity.”

The survivors of the victims were likewise allowed to address the judge. Barbara Sousa, widow of James Sousa, murdered at the garage in 1974, his body never found, said, “It is very hard to understand how a man who has admitted to killing twenty people can be regarded as giving ‘valuable assistance' to anyone.”

Tim Connors, son of Eddie Connors, shot to death in a phone booth on Morrissey Boulevard in 1976, said, “He's not sincere. No, not at all. It's just something doctored up by his attorneys.”

But David Wheeler, son of Roger Wheeler, shot between the eyes in Tulsa in 1981, also wrote to Judge Wolf: “The irony that the hit man who murdered my father possesses more integrity than the FBI and the United States government will trouble me until my death.”

The survivors sat on the right side of Judge Wolf's courtroom; Johnny's family sat on the left side. After a four-hour hearing, Judge Wolf sentenced him to fourteen years. He would be eligible for parole in 2007.

*   *   *

JOHNNY WAS
sent back to Florida. With Rico dead and Flemmi having pleaded guilty, most of his work as a government witness was done. If Whitey was ever brought back to Boston, Johnny would of course be called as a witness. And in 2008, he would have to testify in Florida, when Zip Connolly went on trial for second-degree murder in the 1982 John Callahan slaying.

But basically, all Johnny Martorano was doing now was completing his sentence, his bit. Back in Boston, the old gang continued to fade away. Fat Tony Ciulla died in 2003. He'd been in the Witness Protection Program for years, living in Southern California as Tony Capra—his wife's maiden name. But near the end, he moved back to Boston and was living with a relative, still looking for a writer to tell his story. As one writer noted, Fat Tony was predeceased by most of the tracks where he'd fixed races—Hialeah, Green Mountain, Narragansett.

Alvin Campbell died in 2005, Sonny Mercurio in 2006. One by one, the Angiulo brothers passed on, and John Hurley, and Joe McDonald's older brother Leo.…

As the date of his release neared, back in Boston Frank DiMento was getting calls from reporters, wanting the first postprison interview with Johnny Martorano.

Frank called me and says another reporter had called him. I told him, “Just another guy looking for a story.” And Frank says, no, I don't think so, not this one. Frank asks me, did you ever go to a private school in Rhode Island called Mount St. Charles? Of course I did, so Frank says, well, this guy Ed Bradley called, from CBS, and he says he was your best friend on and off the football field and he'd like to do whatever he can to help you.

Now, I only remember him as “Big Ed.” I didn't even know Big Ed's last name back then. But he's been following my case, putting it all together. And he was fascinated by how strangely it had all turned out. He's black, he comes from a poverty-stricken background and ends up one of the biggest TV reporters in the country, and me, I'm white, from the suburbs, and I end up as … well, as what I ended up.

So Ed Bradley tells Frank, he wants to do a story on why and how it all happened the way it did, to both of us, him going one way and me the other. Big Ed says he figures this isn't just one segment on
60 Minutes,
this is the whole hour.

I said, “Good.” I wanted to maybe get him into the prison, do the interview there. But they wouldn't let him come in with a camera crew, so he was going to meet me as I walked out the prison door. We'd shake hands and hug and then sit down and talk it through. I never spoke to him directly, but through Frank I promised him I'd do the interview.

But it was not to be. Bradley, who enjoyed doing Boston organized-crime pieces for
60 Minutes,
did his final one in early 2006 on Kevin Weeks, whose book about his career as Whitey's gravedigger was about to be published.

Within a few months, though, Bradley was stricken with a rare blood disorder. He died about four months before Johnny was to be released. But Johnny would fulfill his promise to Ed—he gave his first postprison interview to
60 Minutes.
Steve Kroft ended up doing the story, asking all the right questions—even going back to Mount St. Charles, now a coed school, for some of the interviews. But somehow, without Big Ed, it just wasn't the same for Johnny.

*   *   *

FINALLY, ON
March 22, 2007, it was time for Johnny Martorano to go home, not to Boca Raton, but to Boston. He was offered the Witness Protection Program, but declined. Who exactly did he have to worry about back in Boston? The Hill was gone, Whitey and Stevie's successor crew scattered, and what beef did what was left of the Mafia have with Johnny? The guy the newspapers said was the new boss in Boston, Carmen DiNunzio, had been twenty years old when Johnny went on the lam. DiNunzio ran a cheese shop on Endicott Street in the North End and weighed 450 pounds. His nickname was “the Cheeseman.”

Carmen DiNunzio, aka the Cheeseman, was the alleged boss of the Boston Mafia when Johnny was released from prison in 2007.

In all factions of the Boston underworld, it seemed, no one had anything but gratitude for what Johnny had done. He'd avenged them all, living and dead. No friends of Johnny, or anyone else, were in prison because of his testimony. Only Stevie and Zip … and maybe, someday, Whitey.

Peter Limone, one of the guys who did thirty years in prison for the Deegan murder he did not commit, would soon succeed the Cheeseman as the new boss, or so the papers and TV stations said. Limone, too, had sent a letter to Judge Wolf before Johnny's sentencing in 2004, pointing out Johnny's role in finally establishing his innocence.