by Howie Carr
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 day
s, that only meant one thing—jail or the military. It worked the same way if you knocked up a girl—marriage or the marines.
Realizing for the first time the peril that he was in, Johnny stood up and asked to address the judge.
“Your Honor,” he said, “if possible, I’d ask you to give me tonight to decide which branch of the service I’ll be enlisting in.”
As soon as he was outside the old courthouse in Pemberton Square, Johnny took off. At age nineteen, he went on the lam for the first time. He got into his old car and drove straight to his uncle’s house in Miami. In a dry run for his flight twenty years later, he spent six months in South Florida, hanging out in Miami Beach.
He hooked up with a local boxer/wiseguy known as Johnny Angel, a common moniker in those days. His father’s shylocking partner from Revere, Joe DeAngelis, flew down from Boston and handed Johnny a wad of cash at the airport, then turned around and caught the next flight back to Boston. A friend of Johnny’s from Brookline stopped by on his way to Cuba, where Johnny had vaguely heard there’d recently been trouble involving some guys with beards who’d come out of the hills wearing military fatigues.
Soon Johnny and his friend were in Havana, checking into the Capri. They knew nothing about its owner, gangster Meyer Lansky, or his front man, George Raft, the former Hollywood actor and pal of old-time New York mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Owney Madden. But when he saw some of those bearded guys in fatigues swaggering through the streets of Havana brandishing machine guns, Johnny instinctively understood that it was time to get back to Miami.
Six months later, Johnny returned to Boston. In his absence, the police bagman had made the gun charges filed by Eddie Walsh go away. Johnny went back to work at Luigi’s, staying out all night, brawling, picking up women. He was driving Andy crazy. He wanted Johnny out of his hair and into the army—it was peacetime and there was no danger. It would be good to get Johnny out of the Combat Zone and into an organization that might instill some discipline in him. Andy called a friend who was a high-ranking military officer, and within days, Johnny got a notice from his Selective Service board in Milton to report for his preinduction physical at the army recruiting center in South Boston.
Benedetto “Chubby” Oddo, who took Johnny’s army physical for him—and got Johnny the 4-F classification he wanted.
Johnny, though, had figured out a scheme. He would have someone else take his physical for him.
I know a guy from the West End, Chubby Oddo—my father and his father came over from Sicily together. He kinda looked like me, only a little older, and physically he was a wreck, flat feet, bad eyes, his insides all messed up—I think he had some shrapnel or something in him, too, from what I have no idea. The night before I had to go in for my physical, I kept him up all night, drinking, making sure he memorized my Social Security number, my D-O-B, all the stuff he’d have to know by heart. Then in the morning I had him shave real close, so he’d look younger.
In the morning, Johnny dropped Oddo off in South Boston. All morning, and into the afternoon, Johnny waited nervously by the telephone for Chubby’s call. Finally Chubby phoned to say that he’d completed the physical and that he thought it had gone okay. He hadn’t passed a single test, so he assumed that Johnny would probably be getting his 4-F notice soon.
Johnny went crazy. He couldn’t endure a week or two of tension before finding out whether or not he was going to be drafted. He ordered Chubby to go back inside and find out immediately. Chubby shuffled back up the stairs of the recruiting station to seek out the physician who’d examined him.
“Am I in?” Chubby asked.
“Kid,” said the physician, “you couldn’t get in the Boy Scouts.”
I’ve always regretted never serving in the military. In the army, if you shoot the enemy, you get a medal. Out on the street, all that happens is you either get shot yourself or if you’re lucky you get arrested. I went the wrong way, no doubt about it.
The Boston gangsters who hung out in the Combat Zone were a more diverse lot than in many other large American cities. In the years following Prohibition, the Mafia had gradually become the dominant force in urban organized crime. But in Boston, there were just too many Irish, and not enough Italians, for the Mafia to take over completely.
As far back as the 1920s, Irish and Italian gangs had been battling one another for control of the city’s rackets. During Prohibition, South Boston had been ruled by the Gustin Gang, who made their living hijacking other mobs’ booze trucks. In 1931, the Italians arranged a sit-down in the North End, then ambushed the Irish gang leader, Frankie Wallace, killing him and another Irish hood named Dodo Walsh. After that, the remaining Wallaces sank into drunken street crime, and the South Boston underworld was taken over by Dan Carroll. He was an ex–Boston cop who kept a framed photograph of President Calvin Coolidge in his office. It was a reminder of the favor the then governor Coolidge had done Carroll by firing him—as well as hundreds of other Boston cops—for taking part in the Boston police strike of 1919. The papers invariably referred to Carroll as a “sportsman,” and it didn’t hurt his underworld prospects when his brother Ed was elected to the state senate, the same body Coolidge had once been president of.
* * *
IN 1960, organized crime in Boston was in your face. The city was teeming with wiseguys of every ethnic group. As Stevie Flemmi testified in 1998, “In them days it was open. It was just a way of doing, a way of life in them days.”
The Hearst tabloid the American survived in large part because it ran the winning daily number in the city’s underworld lottery, which even the more respectable Boston newspapers openly called “nigger pool.”
Following Prohibition, the city’s various mobs had settled into a relatively peaceful coexistence. When violence did erupt, it was mostly Italians shooting Italians, Irish killing Irish. Compared with what most workingmen in the city were making, the money was good enough for most gangsters not to rock the boat. In 1946, when Dan Carroll died at age sixty-three, the papers ran a routine list of dignitaries who attended his funeral. In addition to Mayor James Michael Curley, a congressman, and more than a dozen local politicians and police captains, the papers listed one “manager Phil Buccola”—the boss of Boston’s local Mafia. Buccola was just paying his respects to a fellow “prominent sportsman.”
Buccola had been among the Italians who’d ambushed the Gustins back in 1931, and he remained on top in the North End until 1950, when an ambitious Tennessee senator named Estes Kefauver decided to hold televised hearings in major cities around the country on the threat of organized crime.
By then, Buccola and his generation of local Mafia chieftains had accumulated enough money to retire in style, either in Boston or back in the old country. So rather than take the heat, many of them stepped aside. That opened the way for an ambitious thirty-one-year-old World War II navy veteran named Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo and his five brothers.
Jerry Angiulo was less a muscle guy than a businessman, and his genius was in setting up what amounted to a profit-sharing plan in the numbers. For every four numbers his runners turned in, they got a free one. It was trickle-down economics, and it worked. The Boston numbers racket—nigger pool—took off. Kefauver’s hearings turned out to be a flash in the pan, but when the dust cleared, Jerry Angiulo was the richest gangster in Boston.
Ilario Zannino, aka Larry Baione, Jerry Angiulo’s top enforcer.
Not having any direct protection from the Mafia, Jerry was soon being shaken down by tougher Italian hoods, especially Larry Zannino, a vicious South End gangster also known as Larry Baione. Finally, Jerry decided he needed to hook up with “the Man,” Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the godfather of the New England Mafia. Angiulo drove to the Man’s headquarters on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, and handed Patriarca a brown paper bag full of cash. The loot, later estimated at as much as $100,000, was Angiulo’s ticket into the Mafia. Jerry never personally killed anyone—never made his bones, as the old-timers said. He
had Larry Baione to make them for him, and now Larry worked for him. So did Angiulo’s four brothers.
Nobody in Boston ever referred to Angiulo’s organization as the Mafia, or La Cosa Nostra, a name that would not come into common usage until years later when New York Mafioso Joe Valachi testified before Congress. In Chicago it was “the Outfit” and in Providence “the Office.” In Boston, the Mafia was known simply as “In Town.” The reason was simple: to visit Angiulo, you had to go to his headquarters in the North End—In Town.
Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the boss of the New England Mafia, never liked having his picture taken.
But “In Town” was far from the only game in town. The North End often farmed out its heavier enforcement work—up to and including murder—to other gangs. One of In Town’s favorite subcontractors was the McLaughlin Gang of Charlestown. Loan sharks to the longshoremen, the McLaughlin brothers and their gunsels dominated crime along the docks and at the Charlestown Navy Yard. Their top enforcers included the Hughes brothers, Steve and Connie.
Next door to the McLaughlins in Somerville was the crew run by Buddy McLean, a cherubic-faced blond hoodlum from the Winter Hill neighborhood. The Somerville guys were all Teamsters, members of Local 25, a totally mobbed-up union. Naturally, one of Winter Hill’s most profitable criminal enterprises was truck hijackings—most of which were inside jobs.