Hitman

by Howie Carr

  The detective saw Johnny Martorano there, too—“dressed in a black cloth coat, white shirt and a tie. I have seen Martorano in a 1967 or 1968 black Pontiac two-door H.T. [hardtop].”

  Even though snow was forecast for after midnight, Basin Street was hopping. When Johnny arrived, he spotted Smitty sitting by himself at the bar, sipping a drink. Johnny told Brucias he needed to talk to Smitty alone, so Brucias went down to the other end of the bar while Johnny parked himself on the stool next to Smitty and bought him a drink, then another, and another.

  “I said to him, ‘I heard Stevie was in here last night and he got a beating.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ I says, ‘What happened?’ And he says, ‘Stevie was way outta line.’ That’s all he said, ‘Way outta line.’ I says to him, ‘This is a friend of mine, Stevie, he comes down here and you give him a beating?’”

  What Johnny didn’t know, what Stevie hadn’t told him, was that the reason it wasn’t such a big deal to Smith was because he’d just been following orders—from Rocco Lamattina and John Cincotti, the two Mafia soldiers who at that moment ran Basin Street. When he pinned Stevie’s arms back, Smitty had just been doing what he was told to do.

  What I find out later is, Stevie’s been shylocking to Rocco’s son. Now, Rocco is a loan shark himself. Stevie shouldn’t be doing this. And now he’s down in Rocco’s own place—which is what Basin Street was at that point—looking for Rocco’s kid, over 300 bucks. I didn’t know this, but it was actually Stevie who was out of line, not Smith. Smith was a big guy, so he grabbed Stevie’s arms while Rocco and Cincotti worked him over. And of course Stevie is humiliated, but he can’t do nothing about the two Mafia guys, so he blames it all on the black guy. That’s when he calls me.

  An FBI informant later recounted the incident in vague terms, perhaps not realizing the connection to the three murders:

  Informant stated that recently STEVIE FLEMMI had been beaten up over $300. FLEMMI had tried to collect and met some fast talk. FLEMMI later went back to a bar where he was beaten up by a Negro bartender … Informant stated that STEVIE FLEMMI was in pretty bad shape; however, stated that he would take care of the matter himself.

  By calling Johnny Martorano again.

  At Basin Street that cold Friday night in January, Johnny Martorano continued pumping Smith for information, asking him the same questions over and over again. Smith either didn’t think it was that big a deal, or he believed that he shouldn’t be talking about the Lamattinas’ family business. He was observing the underworld code, and it was about to cost him his life.

  “He kept giving me all the wrong answers,” Johnny Martorano said. “He didn’t give me any respect. All he had to do was say, ‘I didn’t know he was your friend. I’m sorry.’ That’s all he needed to say. It would have been a whole different ballgame.”

  Finally Johnny drifted away, back to the other end of the bar, where the Greek had been watching them silently, drinking steadily. Over the din of the band and the drunken conversation, Johnny recounted to the Greek what Smitty had told him.

  The Greek was drunk, so his instant recommendation was to kill Smith. Johnny agreed. Now he had to figure out a way to get Smith alone so that he could kill him. A new after-hours card game had just started in Roxbury, so Johnny went back to Smith and asked him if he was going over there after last call.

  Smith nodded, sure. Johnny said he’d never been there, wasn’t sure exactly where it was. Why don’t I meet you somewhere, he said to Smith, and then we can go over together. Smith agreed, so Johnny told him he’d catch up with him on Normandy Street, but first he had to pick up some money for the game.

  Smith was okay with that, so Johnny left. But he wasn’t going to pick up some money; he was going out to get a gun.

  * * *

  JOHNNY AND Brucias drove to the Greek’s place on Dudley Street. The Greek ran upstairs and returned with an untraceable .38-caliber snub nose, five or six shots. Then they drove to Normandy Street, where they saw Smith’s 1967 Mercury station wagon. By now it was snowing heavily; there were already several inches on the ground. It was a little after 3 A.M. on the morning of January 7, 1968.

  * * *

  SMITH HAD the Mercury idling, and Johnny could see the exhaust. At the corner, he told the Greek to circle the block and come back and pick him up. Johnny got out and trudged through the snow toward the Mercury. He immediately noticed that there were three people inside, and he thought to himself, he’d better shoot fast. He had his hand on the gun as he got into the car. The first one he shot was Smith, in the driver’s seat. The other two Johnny could barely see because he’d been practically blinded by the flash of the first shot. He later told cops all of the shooting had taken no more than three seconds. He had shot all of them behind the ear.

  LAWYER: It’s not your testimony that if you saw it was a woman, you would have stopped it, is it?

  MARTORANO: If I knew it was a woman, I wouldn’t have done it. But I couldn’t stop and leave people behind.

  LAWYER: Because is it your testimony that you don’t kill women?

  MARTORANO: Positively not.

  The Mercury was full of smoke from the gunshots. There was no sound in the car, no moans. They were all dead. Johnny reached into the front seat, turned off the ignition, grabbed the keys, but left the headlights on. Then he got out of the car and started walking slowly down Normandy Street, toward Blue Hill Avenue, expecting Steve Brucias to pull up at any moment. But the Greek never returned.

  * * *

  IT WAS 3:30 in the morning. Johnny’s prospects looked bleak. He was a white guy, in Roxbury, in a snowstorm, covered with blood. He had to get away from the scene, but first he had to get rid of the gun. There was an alley just before Blue Hill Avenue, so he dumped the gun and the shells under a pile of trash and snow. He threw the car keys as far as he could, into the snow, then walked out to Blue Hill Avenue and got lucky. He hailed down a cab. He told the cabbie, stop at the first pay phone you see, and then wait. Johnny called Stevie at Marion Hussey’s house and told him he was coming over, and that it was important.

  Then he had to get directions to Marion’s place because he’d never been there. It was in Dorchester. When Johnny finally got there, he paid the cabbie and sent him away. He explained to Stevie what had happened, and Stevie gave him one of his coats, which was a little small on Martorano. Johnny handed his own bloody coat to Stevie, and he never saw it again. Then Johnny told Stevie, let’s go back and find the Greek; he’s still out there somewhere looking for me.

  They drove back to Roxbury, not getting too close to Normandy Street, but they couldn’t find the Greek anywhere. As they started making the rounds of the after-hours joints, they could hear sirens in the distance, but that was nothing out of the ordinary in Roxbury. Finally they spotted the Greek’s car outside one of the clubs, so Johnny walked in and saw Brucias sitting there, playing cards.

  Johnny asked him, what happened to you?

  “I got stuck around the corner,” the Greek said. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  Johnny shook his head. There is no tomorrow, he told Steve the Greek. It’s over. Now get outta here and go home.

  * * *

  THE THREE bodies were taken to the Southern Mortuary, where they were identified. The victim in the backseat was Douglas Barrett, age seventeen. In his pockets, police found one quarter and “a package of Tip-Top cigarette papers.” It has never been established what he was doing in the station wagon with Smith.

  In the front seat was the body of a teenaged girl who would have turned twenty on February 4—Elizabeth Frances Dixon, better known as Liz. She was unemployed, a graduate of St. Joseph’s, a parochial girls’ high school in Roxbury. She had taken up in recent weeks with Smith, despite the age difference. The papers would describe her as a “go-go dancer.”

  “She thought Smith was real nice,” a neighbor told police. “Sometimes I ask her where she is going and she would say Basin Street and I would say, ‘Do you think that is a nice
place to go to?’ And she said, ‘Mother said I will be all right.’”

  Another neighbor told the cops: “She talked about Smitty as if he was a friend. She smoked as much as I do. I think her brand was Kools.”

  According to the homicide report, Dixon’s head “was resting against the driver’s right knee. There was a cigarette case in her hand. This case fell to the floor of the car when her body was removed.”

  * * *

  IN ADDITION to his topcoat, Smith was wearing a brown tie and a white shirt when he died. The inventory of his personal effects turned up a black onyx ring on his right ring finger, two wallets that contained a total of $64 cash, and a slip of paper that said, “Smitty, Tina was in here to see you.”

  The police also recorded that he was wearing a “Timex watch, still running, indicating correct time.”

  * * *

  AFTER LEAVING the Greek, Stevie Flemmi drove Johnny to his girlfriend Barbara’s place in Quincy. On the way, neither one of them said much. It was almost dawn. Johnny slept fitfully for a couple of hours, then borrowed Barbara’s car to drive back to Boston to have breakfast in a diner on Mass Ave with Stevie and Frankie Salemme.

  By this time, I’d heard on the radio that there was a woman in the car. I was very upset with myself. Then, at the diner, Stevie and Frankie asked me, do you want us to kill the Greek for you? I said no. If they clipped him his two kids, I don’t know what would have happened to them. Their mother wasn’t around. I told them, just tell him to go to the Cape, go away, I never want to see the guy again.

  * * *

  THE POLICE investigation reached a dead end very quickly. It wasn’t until later that Johnny learned what had happened at Basin Street the night before he killed three people in the snow on Normandy Street. He never discussed the murders again with Stevie, and certainly not with the two guys from In Town who had worked over Stevie as the late Hubert Smith pinned Flemmi’s arms behind him.

  “What could they say? If they indicate to me that they know what happened, then they’ll have a problem. What are they gonna say anyway? They’re just glad they weren’t there that night, or the same thing might have happened to them.”

  * * *

  THE NEWSPAPERS’ front pages were full of Joe Barboza stories, each one more fantastic than the last. He was holed up on Thatcher’s Island in Rockport, and the feds were guarding him, the Sunday Globe reported, “against a possible intrusion by torpedoes, machine guns or aerial bombs.”

  The Record-American reported that a Chicago hitman had gotten himself arrested for public drunkenness, then used his court appearance to scout out the security measures in the Pemberton Square courthouse. His verdict on the odds of successfully killing Barboza there: “Mission: Impossible.”

  After the district attorney received death threats, the Boston police assigned their best man to the job of guarding his office—a Medal of Honor recipient from World War II. Barboza was whisked about the Boston area in helicopters and police motorcades. Newspaper readers learned the name of his dog (Zero), as well as his preference in cigarettes (English Ovals, a pack and a half a day). When he was scheduled to appear before a Suffolk County grand jury, police dogs were reportedly released the night before, to roam the darkened corridors of the sixth floor, where the grand jury met, to guard against any possible assassins from La Cosa Nostra.

  Barboza’s first court appearance came in January 1968, when he testified against Jerry Angiulo and the three hoodlums he’d allegedly convinced to murder Rocco DiSeglio, an ex-boxer with whom the other three had been sticking up Mafia-protected card games.

  On January 18, 1968, Jerry and his codefendants were all acquitted. Outside, on the courthouse steps, the Mafia underboss of Boston talked to the press, saying, “I was in the navy during World War II. Now I know what I was fighting for. I want to go home to my poor old mother.”

  Twelve days later, as Barboza’s lawyer, John Fitzgerald, was climbing into Barboza’s gold Oldsmobile in Everett, he was almost killed by a bomb that had been planted under the hood by Stevie Flemmi and Frankie Salemme.

  * * *

  THIS TIME they had gone too far. They could kill one another as much as they pleased, but Fitzgerald had a reputation, however undeserved, as a straight arrow. They’d tried to shoot him two nights earlier, driving around his neighborhood, looking for the James Bond car. They had ended up killing the wrong guy, a civilian who had the misfortune to be driving a similar Olds.

  The day his car was bombed, Fitzgerald had left his law office late in the afternoon. He was carrying two guns. Suspecting that his office phone had been tapped by the Mafia, Fitzgerald walked across the street to a drugstore and used the pay phone to make a few calls. His last one was to H. Paul Rico of the FBI. It was a rainy day and Fitzgerald hadn’t bothered to set the car alarm. As he always did, Fitzgerald kept the door open and his left leg outside the Olds while he turned the ignition and put his foot to the accelerator. When he did, two sticks of dynamite exploded.

  “The windshield began breaking into a thousand pieces,” he wrote later, “as if someone had hit it with a sledge hammer. Fragments were coming at me and there was a grinding effect. It felt like my teeth were tearing my jaw apart.”

  Windows in houses across the street were blown out. A cop on traffic detail a block away ran to Fitzgerald, who was lying on his back in a widening pool of blood. The cop bent over to listen to what might have been the lawyer’s last words.

  Maimed mob attorney John Fitzgerald is visited in the hospital by State Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Middlesex District Attorney John Droney.

  “Call Rico of the FBI,” he rasped, before losing consciousness.

  Rico and his partner Dennis Condon immediately canceled their plans for the evening—to interview a young prospect for the Bureau, a high-school teacher from South Boston named John J. Connolly. Connolly’s father was a longtime friend of U.S. House Speaker John McCormack, who was close to J. Edgar Hoover. Rico and Condon knew they would have plenty of other chances to get to know young Connolly in the years ahead.

  They drove instead to Whidden Hospital, where surgeons operated on Fitzgerald for five hours. He lost his right leg just above the knee. Politicians visited him in the hospital. As Barboza sardonically noted in his autobiography, “They had pretty much ignored the gang war all those years with the excuse it was just punks killing off punks and good riddance, but now that a lawyer had been maimed and crippled they rose up in wrath and tried to outdo each other in pious indignation.”

  It didn’t take Johnny long to figure out who had done it, or why.

  It was a favor Stevie and Frankie did for the Mafia. But there was more to it that that, at least for Stevie. Fitzgerald was Barboza’s lawyer, so he may have known how much of a role Stevie played in inventing Barboza’s lies about the Deegan hit, putting Mafia guys in the car to protect his brother Jimmy. So Stevie had a reason for wanting to get rid of Fitzgerald other than impressing Larry, which was all Frankie cared about at the time. See, once Stevie hit Fitzgerald, how could anyone ever suspect him of being in on the deal to flip Barboza, if he blew up the guy’s lawyer?

  Barboza’s next trial was in federal court in Providence. Patriarca and a couple of his henchmen were charged with conspiracy in the murder of two brothers who’d been running an unauthorized card game on Federal Hill. The Man had been urged to flee to Haiti until a deal could be worked out, but Angiulo’s acquittal had emboldened him. He would stay in Rhode Island and fight the charges. At one pretrial hearing in Providence, as Barboza left the courtroom, Patriarca looked him in the eye and silently mouthed two words: “You rat.”

  Barboza lunged for him, screaming the usual: “You fuck your dead mother in the mouth!” The marshals got to Barboza before he reached Patriarca, but nothing could save Patriarca from the Rhode Island jury. He was convicted, sentenced to five years, and shipped off to Atlanta.

  That left the Deegan murder trial. It started in Boston in July 1968. Barboza was on
the witness stand for nine days. On cross-examination, the defense lawyers punched one hole after another in his perjurious testimony. At one point Barboza was reduced to snarling at a defense attorney: “All I know is I was there and you wasn’t.”

  Sometimes it was almost as if Barboza was retelling an inside joke. He said In Town wanted Deegan dead because he’d broken into a Mafia bookie’s house and stolen $82,000 in cash—the exact figure Tash Bratsos and Tommy DePrisco supposedly had on them when they were murdered in the North End in 1966.

  On July 31, the jury brought back guilty verdicts against all six defendants, four of whom had nothing to do with Deegan’s murder. Two ended up on Death Row at MCI-Walpole. It would be another thirty years before Johnny Martorano would be able to follow through on his offer to testify on behalf of the men whom Joe Barboza and the FBI had framed.

  * * *

  A COUPLE of days after the trial ended, FBI agents Rico and Condon stopped by Wimpy Bennett’s old garage in Roxbury, which was now run by Cadillac Frank Salemme. The two G-men were elated, especially Condon. In his testimony to congressional investigators in 2003, Salemme recalled his conversation with FBI agent Condon.

  “He made the statement, I wonder how Louie Grieco likes it on death row, and he wasn’t even there. I was thinking, why was he saying that? I said, you’re a Knight of Columbus, you’re Holy Name Society.”

  Condon shrugged. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you get up on the stand and testify?”

  “Dennis, who’s going to believe me? But you won’t get by St. Peter at the gate, you can’t. You broke one of the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not bear false witness, Dennis. You can’t get by him, Dennis.”

  Dennis Condon was irate at such insolence. Frank Salemme wouldn’t be on the street much longer.

  * * *

  THE OLD Nite Lite Café on Commercial Street, where Tash Bratsos and Tommy DePrisco were murdered by the Mafia in 1966, had reopened under new management, sort of, as the 416 Lounge. In October 1968, just outside the 416, police responding to a call of men fighting found a young man bleeding, clutching his stomach.