Hitman (8 page)

Bernie McLaughlin, the top hoodlum in Charlestown, shot to death by Buddy McLean in 1961.

But in that same year, 1961, something else changed in organized crime. On orders of the new attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, the FBI started picking sides. The target was what would soon be called La Cosa Nostra. Under pressure from the new Kennedy administration, on March 14, 1961, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover issued the following order to all of his field offices: “Infiltrate organized crime groups to the same degree that we have been able to penetrate the Communist Party and other subversive organizations.”

Bobby Kennedy loathed the Mafia. As a young Senate staffer, he had pursued Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters' Mafia-connected president. Bobby Kennedy knew full well the rumors about his father's liquor smuggling with organized crime during Prohibition. As his brother's 1960 campaign manager, he certainly understood the role of the Chicago Outfit in John F. Kennedy's razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in Illinois, and the fact that his brother the president was now sharing a girlfriend with Chicago boss Sam “Momo” Giancana. Whatever his reasons, or ulterior motives, Bobby Kennedy was determined to destroy the Mafia. And as attorney general, he could command the FBI to enforce his directives.

Corrupt ex–FBI agent H. Paul Rico, testifying before Congress in 2002.

What Hoover's order meant, in effect, was that Italian organized crime—the Mafia—would now be the primary target of the Bureau. Anyone who could inform on the Mafia—even if they themselves were gangsters—would get a pass, but only if they could provide usable information against La Cosa Nostra.

In the Boston FBI office, the new anti-Mafia assignment fell primarily to two Boston natives, H. Paul Rico, who despite his last name was of Spanish rather than Italian extraction, and Dennis Condon of Charlestown. Both had joined the Bureau within a month of each other in 1951. People who knew Rico still recall him as a cop who dressed and talked like a gangster. Only much later would it become clear that it was not an act.

*   *   *

BACK AT
Luigi's, it was business as usual—sailors until 1
A.M.
, wiseguys until 4. Andy Martorano wouldn't give up his dream of a better, squarer life for his firstborn son, his golden boy. He wanted Johnny on the straight and narrow. Still perplexed at his son's 4-F—“he's as strong as a horse,” he would tell his friends—Andy was always happiest when Johnny spent a rare evening out of the Zone, on a date with his high-school sweetheart, Nancy O'Neill.

It was the end of the 1950s, and “shacking up” was not an option, especially with an Irish-Catholic girl from North Quincy. So Johnny and Nancy decided to get married. Andy was ecstatic. Finally, he thought, Johnny might settle down. Maybe Nancy could accomplish what Johnny Williams had never been able to do: convince him to get a real job, or go to college, or perhaps even both. The wedding, in 1961, was big, and everyone from the Zone showed up to pay their respects, bearing envelopes bulging with cash. The honeymooners flew off to Miami Beach, and quickly checked into the bridal suite at one of Johnny's old Collins Avenue hangouts, the Deauville Hotel.

The fact that at least one of Johnny's old buddies, a wiseguy named Skinny, immediately began calling the bridal suite from the hotel bar downstairs was not a propitious omen for the marriage.

On their return to Boston, the newlyweds settled in Squantum, a middle-class section of Quincy. Nancy was soon pregnant with their first child, Jeannie. But Johnny had other things on his mind. His father had taken over the lease on a new club on the South End–Roxbury line.

They were going to call it Basin Street South.

LAWYER:
Did you hire prostitutes to work at your restaurants for people?

MARTORANO:
No.… Socialized with prostitutes, I've gone with prostitutes. In my life, you were either a prostitute or singer or dancer, waitress or barmaid. That's all the people I knew.

LAWYER:
And when you socialized with prostitutes, you paid them, didn't you?

MARTORANO:
I might help them. I might give them money but not for sex.

LAWYER:
They were just gifts? Is that right?

MARTORANO:
Sure. I received plenty of gifts from prostitutes and I gave them plenty of gifts.

The way Johnny Martorano would describe it decades later, Basin Street South was Boston's version of the Cotton Club, the famous gangster-owned Harlem nightspot of Prohibition days. Basin Street attracted a mixed crowd—“black and tan,” as the phrase went. It featured a scantily clad chorus line and top-of-the-line black musical acts. Basin Street tended to showcase black acts either on the way up—Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, Lou Rawls, comedian Redd Foxx—or on the way down, like Count Basie.

Basin Street South was at 1844 Washington Street. The building that housed Basin Street South, and the liquor license that went with it, were owned by an In Town wiseguy named Rocco Lamattina. Next door on Massachusetts Avenue (called Mass Ave by the locals) was Jules' Pool Room, where upstairs the crap games never ended. As one of Jules's few white patrons, Johnny quickly met another white guy, an ex-con stick-up artist named Bobby Palladino.

The next building down Mass Ave served as a rooming house for the dancers and some of the acts. There were efficiency apartments upstairs, which were often rented out to the women who worked at the club. Soon Johnny was spending fewer nights at home in Squantum, and by 1962, he was never coming home. He had a year-old baby, and Nancy was seven months pregnant with his second daughter, Lisa. But Johnny's first marriage was over.

Irreconcilable differences—which was another way of saying, Basin Street South.

Bobby Palladino, the first man Johnny Martorano would murder.

*   *   *

BY 1962,
even the Boston Red Sox had integrated. They had two black players—infielder Pumpsie Green and a promising young pitcher named Earl Wilson, who roomed together in an apartment in the Back Bay. Like most of their white Red Sox teammates, they liked to drink. Wilson especially enjoyed the nightlife, which, for black high-rollers in Boston in 1962, was largely centered at Basin Street South.

One Saturday night—June 25, 1962—Earl Wilson rolled into Basin Street, looking for a party. Separated from his wife, Johnny was swilling his drink of choice, champagne. He had nothing better to do, so he invited Wilson over to his table. After closing, Martorano rounded up some of the chorus-line dancers, as well as plenty of champagne, hard liquor, and marijuana. Everyone then headed over to Wilson's apartment in the Back Bay, where the party continued all night, into Sunday morning.

Around eleven the next morning, with most of the women and assorted hangers-on asleep or passed out around the apartment, a bleary-eyed Earl Wilson walked unsteadily up to the couch where Johnny was dozing off.

“Johnny,” he said, “can you give me a ride to the ballpark?”

“What?” Johnny said.

“I gotta get to the park,” Wilson said. “I'm pitching the first game of the doubleheader.”

“You're kidding, right?”

“No, man, I gotta go.”

Johnny and Wilson made their way unsteadily downstairs, into Johnny's car. During the short drive to Kenmore Square, Wilson nodded off a couple of times, but awoke long enough to give Johnny directions to the green door in Fenway's center-field wall that served as the players' entrance. With the street still deserted, Johnny stopped the car. Earl Wilson opened the door, tried to get out, and tumbled face first into the gutter. Johnny helped him to his feet, leaned him up against the green door, and rang the bell. Then he ran back to his car. He didn't want to have to answer any questions about the condition of the Sox's starting pitcher for the first game. He stepped on the gas, keeping his eye on the rearview mirror as the door opened and Earl Wilson fell inside.

Was it a crime in Boston to get a starting pitcher for the Red Sox drunk the night before his next turn in the rotation?

Johnny drove back to his own apartment, slowly sobering up during the ride, and realizing his opportunity. This was exactly the kind of “inside information” he'd always heard so much about in the stands at Braves Field and Fenway Park with his father. Now, if only he could take advantage of it. Back at his own apartment, he began calling every bookie he knew, getting as much money down on the Los Angeles Angels as he could. The Angels' starter was Bo Belinsky, another party animal who'd already thrown a no-hitter earlier in the year.

“I was in for everything,” Martorano said. “When you're twenty-one, twenty-two, you can't get that much money up, but I put everything down I could against Wilson. I figured it was guaranteed.”

But Wilson threw a no-hitter. He was the first black pitcher ever to throw a no-hitter, and he also hit a home run—only the third pitcher ever to do that while tossing a no-hitter. Wilson outpitched Belinsky, 2-0.

That night I'm sitting in the club, wondering what I'm going to do to come up with all the money I owe every bookie in town. I had already told everybody in the club they're not getting paid this week. And in walks Earl Wilson. He says to me, “This is the best day of my life, and it started right here, last night. Johnny, I owe it all to you!” Then he ordered champagne for the house.

Johnny said nothing to him that night, but a year or so later, on another late evening at the club, Martorano finally confessed to Wilson what he'd done, betting against him on the day he pitched his no-hitter.

“Why didn't you tell me, Johnny?” Wilson said, smiling broadly. “I'd have thrown the game for you.”

*   *   *

THE GANG
war was spiraling out of control. All the old scores were getting settled, whether they had anything to do with Charlestown and Somerville or not. A Rhode Island con wrote a letter from his prison cell to Patriarca, comparing “the Man” to Fagan in
Oliver Twist,
the boss of a gang of thieves. When the Dickens-reading con was released from prison, a Mafia hit squad tracked him to Quincy, murdered him and a friend, and stuffed their bodies in the trunk of a car at a motel. Both victims were Italians, as were their killers. The next day the papers listed them as two more victims of the “Irish Gang War.”

Another alleged victim of the war was a Roxbury loan shark named Henry Reddington. Wimpy Bennett borrowed $25,000 from Reddington, then figured out a way he wouldn't have to pay. He called one of the local McLaughlins, a guy named Spike O'Toole, and told him that Reddington had been sleeping with his girlfriend. O'Toole immediately drove to Reddington's suburban office and murdered him. The papers had another “victim” to write about, and Wimpy was off the hook for $25,000.

The police wanted to at least appear to be cracking down on the mayhem, so they started clamping down on known hoodlums, pulling their cars over, searching them for weapons, taking them in for “questioning.” Deprived of their usual sources of income, hard-up mobsters began committing crimes that would have been unthinkable in better times—robbing bookmakers, doing home invasions. Such crimes invariably led to retaliations, and yet more bodies, which meant yet heavier police crackdowns, with hoods rousted and rounded up no matter how much they'd paid off the cops in the past.

Since everyone now carried guns, and since most hoods already had criminal records, it was easy for the cops to bag anyone they wanted for being a felon in possession of an unregistered firearm. It wasn't a major crime, but it could be used to get somebody hot off the street and into the House of Correction for a few months.

Soon two of Johnny's friends—Jimmy Flemmi and Joe “the Animal” Barboza—were doing state time. And that led to more problems: they quickly discovered that every morning, there was a “pill line,” where prisoners diagnosed with psychiatric problems would be given their daily doses of antidepressants or barbiturates. The Bear and the Animal began robbing everyone as they left the line, gobbling whatever they could. Their already erratic behavior quickly deteriorated even further. Plus, they had a lot more enemies: everyone they had crossed while in prison.