Hitman

by Howie Carr

  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.

  Joe “the Animal” Barboza, the first gangster in the Witness Protection Program.

  Within months after his release from prison in 1963, Jimmy Flemmi had murdered two of his fellow ex-cons, Walpole warriors, as they were known on the street. One he shot to death; he then drove the body to Pembroke but ran out of gas and ended up on the side of the road after dumping the corpse in the woods. The other he shot in the head in a Dorchester bar owned by the Bennetts, using a gun Wimpy had gotten from a Boston policeman on his payroll. Not knowing whether the cop’s gun could be traced, the Bear chopped off the ex-con’s head with the bullet in it, put it in his car, and then torched the bar. That was one way to beat a ballistics test.

  Barboza, meanwhile, got married, and less than a week later murdered one of the hoods who had been in the wedding party. Another time he severely beat a teenager who he thought had refused to let him and a girlfriend cut in line for a ride at the amusement park in Revere Beach. The problem was, he beat up the wrong guy, but that didn’t matter to Barboza. He’d delivered a message to those punks at the amusement park—don’t fuck with Joe Barboza when he wants to cut in line. One day he used a baseball bat to knock out the windows of a car in East Boston whose driver had the temerity to honk at him. Oddly, though, Barboza would not tolerate anyone swearing in front of a woman. Violation of his “code” was good for a beating, at the very least.

  Jimmy the Bear was also busy. High on Seconal one night, Jimmy Flemmi stabbed a twenty-two-year-old man who had the misfortune to bump into him at a Hayes & Bickford cafeteria downtown one night after the bars closed.

  Even hoodlums began clearing out of Boston. It was safer that way. A guy from the North End became a courier for Meyer Lansky. One of Buddy McLean’s friends moved to Hollywood, lost fifty pounds, took acting lessons, and changed his name from Bobo Petricone to Alex Rocco. His agent told him he might have a future in gangster movies. Years later in The Godfather, playing the Jewish gangster based on Bugsy Siegel, Alex Rocco would tell Al Pacino: “I made my bones while you were fucking cheerleaders.”

  Bobo Petricone of Somerville, under arrest in 1961, before he went to Hollywood and became the actor Alex Rocco, who specialized in gangster roles.

  Everyone in Somerville agreed Bobo delivered his line very convincingly.

  * * *

  AS THE bodies piled up, Johnny continued to split his time between Basin Street South and Luigi’s. He was also handling stolen furs. The Bear, in one of his increasingly rare sober moments, had introduced Martorano to a bold booster, who made his living climbing up the side of the old Furriers Building on Washington Street and also hitting the high-end fur shops on Newbury Street. Johnny would stash the stolen furs at Luigi’s until he could move them out of town. The clubs were doing well, but he could always use extra money. He still had his ex-wife Nancy and the two girls to support.

  But one night in November 1964, Martorano got a telephone call that changed his life. The Boston cops were swarming into Luigi’s, searching the upstairs floors where the stolen furs were kept. They had a search warrant, based on a “tip” from the same cop whose gun the Bear had used to kill his fellow Walpole warrior a few months earlier. Supposedly the cops were looking for furs, but they quickly discovered a body wrapped up in a rug, “like it was ready for the river,” as one cop put it.

  It was Margaret “Margie” Sylvester, age thirty-five, a blond divorcée from Dorchester, a longtime friend of Andy Martorano, who had been a waitress at Luigi’s for years. She had been stabbed to death.

  Johnny was not a suspect; the night Margie vanished, he’d spent one of his rare nights at home. But his brother Jimmy had a problem. The morning after Margie’s slaying, he’d replaced a rug at Luigi’s. He told police that his mother, who did the books for Luigi’s, had noticed a section of the rug in the back room missing and had asked him to put in a new section. The cops weren’t buying his story, but they couldn’t prove anything to the contrary. Jimmy swore to Johnny he knew nothing about Margie’s murder, although he admitted to Johnny that he had noticed blood stains on the edges of the rug that remained after he had replaced the missing section.

  Jimmy Martorano mug shots from the 1960s and 1970s.

  Johnny began his own investigation. He learned it had been a slow night at Luigi’s. Bobby Palladino, the ex-con and a friend, had been hanging out in the back room. So had John Jackson, a middle-aged black ex-prizefighter who worked occasionally as a bartender at Luigi’s. Johnny quickly found a third guy who’d been there—a former Boston cop who’d been fired for loansharking. The ex-cop was able to remember one more guy who Palladino and Jackson had apparently been afraid to mention: Jimmy the Bear.

  “They were petrified of him,” Johnny said. “For obvious reasons.”

  * * *

  THE SYLVESTER murder investigation dragged on for months. Jimmy Martorano was finally indicted—but only as an accessory after the fact, for replacing the rug in the back room. Luigi’s, of course, was finished. The Boston Licensing Board had no choice but to pull its liquor license after fourteen years in business.

  Life went on for Johnny. The gang war was dragging on, but that didn’t directly concern him. He wasn’t involved, although he was “rooting for” Buddy McLean and the Flemmis to prevail, as he put it in court almost forty years later. The Roxbury crew had started out on the side of the McLaughlins—they had handled some of the hits Wimpy farmed out. In 1962, when George McLaughlin blew up a car belonging to Buddy McLean’s top hand, Howie Winter, it was Stevie Flemmi and Wimpy who drove McLaughlin over to Somerville to plant the bomb. But after a while, Wimpy the Fox realized that Somerville was gaining the upper hand. A peace meeting was brokered by a Boston police detective on the Roxbury payroll, and Buddy McLean sat down with Stevie and Wimpy at the Holiday Inn in Somerville to hask out their differences.

  Through it all, Johnny remained tight with the Bear, who was turning into the main target of the McLaughlins after Buddy McLean. In 1964, Flemmi was shot and wounded by a Charlestown hit squad in Dorchester. In May 1965, he was ambushed by two McLaughlin gunmen as he left his apartment in Dorchester. The Bear was struck by nine bullets, and the s
hooters were walking toward him to administer the coup de grâce when the wounded Bear managed to pull his .38 out of his coat and begin wildly firing in the direction of his would-be killers. They fled, and Flemmi was taken to Boston City Hospital (BCH).

  A couple of days later, against his doctors’ orders, the Bear checked himself out of BCH. Johnny Martorano was waiting for him in a car. They would drive to Vermont, where an undertaker friend of Johnny’s would rent them a cabin in which the Bear could recuperate in peace and quiet—and safety.

  In addition to guns, Martorano had stocked the car with booze, which they got into as soon as they hit the road. Once they were drunk Johnny and the Bear began talking about how much fun it would be to pull into their campground with a dead deer strapped to the hood, as they’d seen so often during hunting season in northern New England. It was dark by the time they crossed into Vermont. Suddenly the Bear screamed—he had seen glowing eyes in a field by the side of the road.

  “Turn around, Johnny,” he yelled. “It’s a fucking deer!”

  Martorano put the car in reverse and backed up until he, too, saw the eyes, peering over a fence. The deer seemed remarkably serene, but they were too drunk to notice. They stumbled out of the car, Martorano brandishing a carbine, the Bear a revolver. Both emptied their guns in the direction of the eyes, yelled in exultation, then climbed over the fence. Johnny had a flashlight, which he shined down on the carcass … of a dead cow.

  “Shit,” Johnny said, shaking his head. “I’m not putting a cow on the hood of my car.”

  At the campground, their host was not impressed by their story.

  “Don’t tell anybody else here about that,” he warned them. “You’ll get more time in Vermont for shooting a cow than for shooting a human.”

  * * *

  AS THE summer of 1965 wore on, Johnny was hanging out more and more with the Bear’s younger brother, Stevie—the Rifleman. As for the Bear, he had totally lost it—in September, he defaulted on a $25,000 bond in the Hayes & Bickford stabbing. A fugitive warrant was issued. His own lawyer said he didn’t know if the Bear was alive or dead.

  Stevie Flemmi was running a grocery store at Dearborn and Dudley streets in Roxbury, and that was where Wimpy Bennett and his gang were spending more of their time when they weren’t at the garage. Almost a year after the murder of Margie Sylvester, one afternoon Stevie and Wimpy pulled Johnny aside and took him to the back of the store. Wimpy was known to have excellent police sources, and Stevie likewise seemed to have a sixth sense about what the cops were up to.

  “Palladino and Jackson,” Wimpy said.

  “They’re saying bad things,” Stevie added. “They’re talking about what happened.”

  Johnny Martorano, age twenty-four, was hours away from committing his first murder.

  I still don’t know who killed Margie. But what I do know now is that the Bear was there in Luigi’s the night she was murdered, and that the tip to search the loft came from one of Stevie’s cops. So I have to believe that when Stevie was basically telling me I had to kill this guy, Palladino, to protect my family, the reality was, I was killing to protect his family, his brother, the Bear. But after that day, for thirty years I believed I was indebted to Stevie. That “debt”—that’s what started my killing spree.

  LAWYER: Mr. Palladino was killed because he could have been a witness?

  MARTORANO: I went to kill—went there with the intention if I had to kill him, I would, but not with the intention until I found out what he had to say.

  LAWYER: So you found out what he had to say, and then you killed him?

  MARTORANO: No. Before I found out what he had to say, he pulled a gun, and my [friend] grabbed his hand, and he shot and then I shot him.

  LAWYER: So your testimony is that was in self-defense? Is that right?

  MARTORANO: Indirectly. He might have got shot anyway, but it happened that way.

  As soon as he got the tip, Johnny Martorano picked up a friend, and a gun, and started looking for Bobby Palladino. For once, Palladino was flush—he’d just made a big score, on a home invasion. He was part of a crew that had robbed Abie Sarkis, Andy’s old partner in Luigi’s. Palladino had gotten them into Sarkis’s suburban house by dressing as a priest and talking his way inside. Once inside the Sarkis house, Palladino’s crew had threatened to use hot irons on the family’s faces if the Sarkises didn’t come up with the cash the gang had been told Abie Sarkis kept in his house. In those days, a lot of the big-time gamblers had “traps” built into the walls or floors of their houses where they would hide cash. There was a shadowy guy around Boston who made a decent living installing such hidden drops—Frank the Trapper, he was called.

  Somehow Abie Sarkis got upstairs and escaped by jumping out a window. According to the story later told in Boston underworld circles, Mrs. Sarkis then told Palladino and his friends, “You might as well just burn us now, because Abie’s never giving you any money now that he’s escaped.”

  The crew fled, not quite empty-handed, but with a lot less cash than they’d envisioned when they were planning the score. Frank the Trapper had done his work well.

  * * *

  FOR A well-planned hit, Johnny would have stolen a car. But it seemed imperative to find Palladino immediately, before he could talk, if indeed he was talking. So that night Johnny was hunting Palladino in his own brand-new car, a 1966 emerald green Cadillac El Dorado convertible with white leather upholstery.

  I know this makes me look like a pimp, which I really wasn’t, but a working girl gave me that car. She liked me. Back in those days, the higher-class hookers all had this circuit that they worked, and she’d gone off to work at a bordello in Gary, Indiana. While she was gone, she gave me the keys to her apartment in Brookline and to the Cadillac.

  Johnny and his friend went from downtown bar to bar—the Attic, the Carribe, the 1-2-3, the 4 Corners. Around 2:30 A.M., they found Palladino in a blackjack game at Footsie Pucino’s club, which he operated above a deli on Blue Hill Avenue. They asked Palladino to step outside, and he shrugged and walked out onto the sidewalk. Palladino had been drinking, but was cooperative until Johnny told him he’d been “hearing stories.” Finally, though, they reached the street and got into the Cadillac, Palladino very warily. Johnny’s friend was driving, and Palladino sat next to him in the front seat, with Johnny in the back—the first of many times over the next seventeen years that Johnny would end up in the hitman’s seat.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” Johnny said. As his friend pulled the Caddy out into traffic, heading back downtown, Palladino panicked and pulled out a revolver and fired at Johnny’s friend. He missed, instead blasting out the front window on the driver’s side. Johnny drew his revolver and fired at Palladino’s head from point-blank range. One shot was all it took.

  Johnny Martorano, age twenty-four, was a murderer.

  At first it didn’t sink in what he’d done. The body of a guy he knew well was slumped in the front seat, dead, and Johnny had killed him. Now he had to get rid of the gun, figure out what to do with the blood-soaked Cadillac, and, most important, get rid of Palladino’s corpse. He had neither the time nor the inclination to ruminate over what he had done. All Johnny and his friend could think about was how to avoid getting caught and sent to prison for the rest of their lives. Johnny’s friend kept driving north on Blue Hill Avenue toward downtown, and they began a calm discussion of where they should dump Palladino’s body.

  They quickly decided the best place would be down by the North Station. Nobody was ever around down there at this time of night.

  * * *

  THEY DRAGGED Palladino’s body out of the car and propped it up against one of the stanchions under the Central Artery, but the corpse fell over onto the pavement. Early that morning a Herald photographer got a grainy shot of the corpse from up above on the highway, with a Boston police car and a detective nearby. It was a perfect picture that Life magazine used in 1967 as the lead illustration of its four-page spread about the ca
rnage in the Boston underworld.

  Bobby Palladino’s body was dumped at North Station.

  It was almost dawn when Johnny got the Cadillac to the Inter-City Garage on Mass Ave in the South End. Waiting for him was another of his new friends—George Kaufman, a skilled mechanic and gang associate. Kaufman chopped up the Caddy, the first of many favors he would do for Johnny over the years.

  George Kaufman chopped up the Cadillac that had been used in the Palladino hit.

  The murder itself led the Boston papers’ evening editions, but Palladino’s death was quickly relegated to the back pages a few hours later when Joe Barboza and Jimmy the Bear committed one of their most atrocious crimes. They’d been looking for one of the McLaughlin Gang’s few Italian members, and had decided to take him out on a slow weeknight at the Revere Beach club where he tended bar—the Mickey Mouse Lounge. But when Barboza and Flemmi walked in, a construction worker was buying cigarettes at the bar. He was a young father of four from New Hampshire who’d been planning to move back to the White Mountains. Barboza and the Bear didn’t care—they shot the McLaughlin gangster first, then the construction worker as he begged for his life.

  For the next few days, the papers were full of pictures of the construction worker’s attractive young widow and her four adorable children. As angry editorials were written demanding an end to the underworld carnage, everybody forgot about Bobby Palladino. Everybody except In Town—specifically Jerry Angiulo. The murder might have left the police “baffled,” as the papers always put it, but Angiulo wasn’t. The next day, Johnny got the message that he and his friend were expected at Angiulo’s headquarters, the Dog House—immediately. It was an invitation they couldn’t turn down.