Hitman

by Howie Carr

  The Angiulo brothers before a grand jury appearance in Boston, 1964. Jerry is second from right.

  In Italian East Boston, where the Martoranos had first settled when they arrived from Sicily, In Town called the shots. But a young Portuguese-American psychopath from New Bedford named Joe Barboza had also established a beachhead. Like the McLaughlins, the New Bedford native handled the occasional murder contract for In Town, but he had a dream: to become the first non-Italian member of La Cosa Nostra. He didn’t know that behind his back, the Italians in the North End and Providence referred to him as “the nigger.” His better-known nickname was “the Animal.”

  Roxbury and the South End were controlled by Edward “Wimpy” Bennett, a treacherous old-time Irish thug who had been a B-29 tailgunner during World War II. His nickname came from the hamburgers that he was always munching on at the White Castle on Tremont Street. All through the fifties, he had been linked to the famous Brinks robbery of 1950. Bennett’s only vanity was a wig; whenever he appeared in court or had to have his mug shot taken, he tried to make sure he didn’t have to remove his fedora—or his rug.

  Buddy McLean, the first boss of what became the Winter Hill Gang.

  Wimpy Bennett was amazing. Behind his back, everyone called him “the fox.” He always talked with his hand to his mouth, even when he was inside, so that nobody could read his lips. He said he learned it in prison. Then he would hire lip readers to hang around other wiseguys he was lining up, so he’d know what they were talking about. He was continually looking for an edge. I always wanted to stay on Wimpy’s good side, so he wouldn’t be talking behind my back. That’s probably how Stevie learned how to be so devious, from working for Wimpy. Wimpy got along great with Patriarca, always called him “George” for some reason I never found out. Everybody figured he was the spy for “George” in Boston, which was one reason In Town hated him so much.

  Edward “Wimpy” Bennett, the Roxbury gangster, who brought the Flemmi brothers into the rackets.

  After Jerry Angiulo, Wimpy the Fox probably had more money than anybody else in Boston—he had a piece of everything in Roxbury. But he always dressed like a laborer off Dudley Street, which is what he’d been before he got into the rackets. He smoked these really cheap cigars—White Owls or something. And he was a compulsive thief; he wouldn’t pay for anything. He had overalls specially made—“booster clothes”—so he could go into a store and shoplift. Sometimes I’d be there in his garage when he’d be changing into his booster clothes, and he would literally take a roll of maybe 10,000 bucks out of his pocket before he went shoplifting. He’d look at me like he knew what I was thinking, which was how crazy is this, a guy with that kind of dough shoplifting, a kleptomaniac basically. And he’d say to me, “No way am I ever gonna pay for hamburger, or razor blades, or whatever.” That was Wimpy.

  In the late 1950s, Wimpy recruited a couple of young brothers from Roxbury. Vincent Flemmi, born in 1932, was better known as Jimmy the Bear. His brother Stevie, born in 1934, had drifted into the underworld after returning from two tours of duty in the Korean War. On his first eight-man combat patrol, his unit ran into a company of Chinese regulars, and Stevie had killed five of the enemy, hence his subsequent nickname, the Rifleman. In the early 1960s, one of the Mafia guys from Revere was quoted in an FBI report as describing the Flemmis as “a couple of bad kids”—an understatement, as it turned out.

  Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi at age 24.

  Stevie Flemmi at age 23, about to be booked, 1957.

  Johnny Martorano got to know the Bear in the early ’60s, before he ran into Stevie. Jimmy had just finished a stretch in prison for the 1957 robbery of a credit union at South Station. The Bear’s life was always tumultuous, even when he was in prison, where he ended up spending more than half his adult life. While doing time at MCI-Walpole prison in 1961, the Bear was charged with stabbing another inmate to death. But the Bear beat that charge when several potential witnesses—his fellow prisoners—refused to testify against him. That would be a recurring pattern for the rest of his life.

  Meeting Jimmy Flemmi was my downfall. I never had done anything really serious until I met the Bear. I mean, I killed people later on, but I always needed a reason, unlike those other guys I was hooked up with. Jimmy chopped people’s heads off. Then there was Barboza—they didn’t call him “the Animal” for nothing. As for Stevie—I never killed any of my girlfriends, or my daughter. And Whitey, well, this was a guy who killed Stevie’s girlfriend and daughter—for kicks. I know I was with them, but please, don’t ever put me in the same category with any of those guys.

  South Boston was a bit off the gangland radar screen, with its “organized” crime being more than somewhat disorganized. When they weren’t getting picked up for “DK”—public drunkenness—Southie hoods often made their living “tailgating”: stealing cargo off the backs of trucks, with an occasional hijacking thrown in. The top guys in “the Town,” as Southie was known, were the Killeen brothers. They ran their small-time numbers and loansharking rackets out of a barroom in the Lower End, the Transit Café.

  Charles “King” Solomon, a major Prohibition-era gangster, relaxing at the Cotton Club in 1932.

  There were smaller crews in Boston as well. Harry “Doc Jasper” Sagansky was a Tufts-educated dentist born in 1898. He handled layoff bets for all the city’s numbers operations, from Angiulo on down. During a police raid in Charlestown in 1943, “Doc Jasper” was found in possession of a life insurance policy he’d taken out on Mayor Curley—the only way Doc could be sure of being repaid what the “Purple Shamrock” had borrowed from him. Sagansky still backed various gambling rackets, paying short money to the Angiulos for protection.

  Until his fatal heart attack in 1963, an old-time Jewish mobster named Louis Fox—LF—controlled Revere, a notoriously corrupt city north of Boston. Revere was the home of Arthur’s Farm, a sprawling warehouse-type store where stolen merchandise was openly fenced to anyone with cash, including some of Boston’s top professional athletes. The owner of Arthur’s Farm was Arthur Ventola, and he eventually became so notorious that he and his well-heeled clientele were written up in a Life magazine cover story. As for LF, he’d been around since Prohibition, when he was a lieutenant to the famous bootlegger Charles “King” Solomon. In the early ’60s, LF controlled the illegal slot machines along Revere Beach and Shirley Avenue. Like Dan Carroll and Phil Buccola before him, LF was always respectfully referred to in the Boston papers as a “prominent local sportsman.”

  * * *

  IN 1961, Boston was running wide-open. But on Labor Day weekend that year in Salisbury Beach, everything changed. Georgie McLaughlin, the youngest of the three Charlestown brothers, was drunk as usual, so loaded that he tried to pick up the girlfriend of a Somerville guy connected to Buddy McLean. Georgie wouldn’t take no for an answer, so the Somerville guys finally beat him senseless, dumping him unconscious on the lawn in front of a local hospital.

  Bernie McLaughlin, the Charlestown boss, demanded that Buddy hand over the men who’d beaten his brother. McLean refused, saying Georgie had been way out of line. In retaliation, the McLaughlins tried to wire explosives under one of McLean’s cars, the one that his wife used to drive the family’s young children to school. McLean was irate at such a breach of gangland protocol. A few days later, as Bernie McLaughlin was making his daily collections at high noon in City Square in Charlestown, Buddy McLean calmly walked up behind him on the sidewalk outside the Morning Glory Cafe. Buddy McLean shot Bernie McLaughlin at point-blank range in the back of the head, in front of dozens of witnesses, none of whom saw a thing.

  Georgie McLaughlin, the youngest of the Charlestown brothers, in police custody in the 1950s.

  An off-duty Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) police officer drove the getaway car for Buddy. The war was on.

  * * *

  AT FIRST, In Town loved the bloodshed. For one thing, it was the Irish, and their non-LCN allies, many of whom happened to
be Italians, killing each other. The ongoing mayhem also gave the Mafia carte blanche to handle their own internal problems, knowing that every organized-crime hit would now be written off in the newspapers as part of the so-called Irish Gang War.

  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.”