Hitman

by Howie Carr

  It was Arthur Pearson, the Everett ex-con who had gone to jail two years earlier rather than testify against Barboza. He had been stabbed seventeen times, and was pronounced dead on arrival at Mass. General Hospital.

  Witnesses reported seeing two men in “navy uniforms” running toward the coast guard base farther up Commercial Street, but no arrests were ever made in Pearson’s murder.

  * * *

  ZIP CONNOLLY still wanted to join the FBI. At age twenty-seven, he was tired of teaching high school in Dorchester. Rico and Condon hadn’t been able to meet him the night Fitzgerald’s car was bombed, but it didn’t hurt Zip’s prospects. He still had those Southie connections to John W. McCormack, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. His father was known in South Boston as “Galway John.” How much more did the Speaker need to know about anyone?

  In August 1968, Speaker McCormack, second in line to the U.S. presidency after Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, wrote a letter to his friend J. Edgar Hoover.

  “Dear Edgar,” it began. “It has come to my attention that the son of a lifelong personal friend has applied to become a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.…”

  John J. “Zip” Connolly Jr. was appointed to the FBI in October 1968.

  LAWYER: Now, Mr. Hicks, Ronald Hicks, who I believe you testified you murdered, was going to be a witness against friends of yours, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: Against people that I hadn’t met yet. They weren’t friends until after.

  LAWYER: Well, at some point they came to you to ask for your help with an attorney for their defense?

  MARTORANO: Nope. That’s … at one point his wife came to me and asked for some help with an attorney for their defense.

  LAWYER: And at some point, you went to see Mr. Hicks to dissuade him from testifying against the woman’s—

  MARTORANO: No. I met with him. I had a few drinks with him, socialized a couple of times, and I didn’t like the guy, and I decided to take him out … I didn’t go looking for Hicks. He came to my restaurant.

  Abie Sarkis, Andy Martorano’s old business partner in Luigi’s, had a club on Columbus Avenue, the 411. It had a long bar, with bookies hanging out near the door, waiting for the daily number to come in the late afternoon, after which they’d start making their collections and payoffs. Farther back were the working girls. Johnny Martorano knew the place well, and one night a girl from the 411 came into Basin Street looking for Johnny.

  Her name was Roberta Campbell—Bert, for short. She needed a favor. She was crying. He told Bert to sit down and the waiter brought her a drink. He asked her what she needed.

  “Have you ever heard of the Campbell brothers?” she began, and Johnny’s answer was yes. Alvin and Arnold Campbell weren’t exactly household names like Joe Barboza, but they were well known enough in Roxbury. Bert was Alvin’s wife. The Campbells’ father was from the islands, but his sons had been brought up in Boston. He’d taught the boys his trade, which was robbing banks. They’d been arrested in 1957 for a $32,000 bank stickup in Canton. When the judge sentenced them, Alvin was twenty-three and Arnold twenty-five.

  Despite their race, up until the bank robbery in Canton, the brothers had somehow led a charmed existence with the law in Boston. At their sentencing, the judge angrily read their rap sheets aloud in court, describing what he called “fix after fix after fix.”

  “This is a sordid picture,” the judge said. “Never in my life have I seen such records.”

  They were good guys, the Campbells. Even Whitey liked them. He told me later he’d been working out one day in the weight room in Leavenworth, and he heard some guys talking behind him. It was pretty obvious from their accents that they were from Boston, and when Whitey turned around he couldn’t believe they were black. It was the Campbells. They used to all walk the track together at Leavenworth, around and around and around, just talking about Boston.

  Abie Sarkis liked them, too. He was always helping them out whenever they were in a jam. They were just good people.

  Guido St. Laurent, the founder of NEGRO.

  By the time the Campbells were paroled, Roxbury was awash in federal money. The War on Poverty was in full swing. The Campbells were looking to get a foothold in the rackets, but the money from Uncle Sam was just as tempting. Other local hustlers had gotten there first, though, especially another black ex-con named Guido St. Laurent. St. Laurent had lost his eyesight in an accident at Walpole, but his blindness didn’t stop him from quickly figuring out how to prime Uncle Sam’s pump. By 1968, he had set up a sardonically named antipoverty agency of his own—NEGRO, which stood for New England Grass Roots Organization. Its offices were above a sub shop on Blue Hill Avenue.

  At NEGRO, St. Laurent surrounded himself with thugs, mostly ex-cons like himself. Some of them weren’t from Boston, which seemed to bother the Campbells. In November 1968, NEGRO was on the verge of its biggest score yet, a $1.9-million federal grant to run a “manpower program” that was supposed to train 500 hard-core unemployed Roxbury residents as auto mechanics. Even the Campbells had been promised jobs—in the program management, of course. Like the characters in Tom Wolfe’s essay “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” none of the parties involved had any interest in actually learning a trade that would require them to go to work every morning.

  But St. Laurent would not live to enjoy his payday. Early on the morning of November 13, 1968, three men—later identified as the Campbell brothers and their top enforcer, Deke Chandler—burst into NEGRO headquarters.

  According to newspaper accounts, Alvin Campbell first pistol-whipped the blind ex-con, then shot him. St. Laurent’s top muscle, another ex-con, was also shot to death, as was a third man. Two other NEGRO members were wounded. The Campbells and Chandler were quickly arrested and were being held without bail at the Charles Street jail awaiting trial when Alvin’s wife showed up at Basin Street to seek Johnny Martorano’s assistance.

  The Boston police offered protection to the two survivors from NEGRO but both turned down the offer. One of them, Ronald Hicks, a thirty-one-year-old armed robber on parole, went on television and said the shooting was a result of a turf struggle between militant groups over the federal funds. It looked bleak for the Campbells.

  Bert Campbell was just looking for any kind of help she could get—money, lawyers, talking the other militant black groups in the city into supporting her husband. Johnny liked her. He wasn’t thinking about killing anyone, not until he met the main witness against the Campbells, Ronald Hicks. He was a regular at Basin Street, and after Bert’s visit, Johnny made a point of getting to know him. Johnny wanted Hicks to relax around him. He was pleased when Hicks started going out with one of the barmaids—that way he’d be around Basin Street even more often.

  What Johnny quickly learned was that Hicks was a drug dealer and a pimp. One night he casually asked Hicks about the Campbells’ trial.

  “I’m gonna get even with them motherfuckers,” Hicks said.

  Johnny began thinking about the Campbells, locked up in the Charles Street jail, awaiting trial and possibly facing the death penalty because of this guy. Even though he’d never even met the Campbells, Johnny made a decision to murder Hicks.

  Deke Chandler, Roxbury gangster, a friend of Johnny’s.

  He thought it was the right thing to do.

  He had just seen Peter Limone and the other three guys from In Town get railroaded onto Death Row because of Joe Barboza. Now it was happening again. It didn’t matter to Johnny if they had killed those guys at NEGRO. Johnny’s mind was made up. This Hicks was no damn good—he was a lying piece of shit.

  It was personal, too. Now Johnny was thinking, This could be me; I could be in this exact same situation. First Peter Limone, now Alvin Campbell—who would be next? And if he didn’t help, it would be his fault if the Campbells were put to death, because who else could step up for them?

  Johnny came to a conclusion. It was the right thing to do to kill Hicks. His c
onscience was telling him he had to do it.

  * * *

  ON THE evening of March 19, 1969, Johnny Martorano and another guy went looking for Ronald Hicks. They checked out the new hot spot in town, the Sugar Shack, where Hicks was a regular. The Boston police already had reports of “Hicks pushing H & C (heroin and cocaine) with a big fat negro male at the Sugar Shack; Hicks also recently seen in the company of a white blonde.”

  As always, Johnny knew the car his prey was driving—a 1967 Cadillac coupe, brown, with a rose-colored top. In other words, a pimpmobile. Around 1 A.M., the other guy with Martorano decided to call it a night and go home. But Johnny continued searching for Hicks by himself in the South End.

  Around 1:50 A.M., Hicks drifted into Slade’s, the joint on Tremont Street near the Taylor brothers’ old Pioneer Club. At Slade’s, Hicks ran into a woman he’d once dated. He seemed pleased to see her, she later told the police, and the two decided to go across the street to Birley’s to get a hamburger. Afterward, the BPD report continued, “He drove her home. He told her he had business and would like to come back and see her about getting together again. He said he would be back about 4 A.M.… Hicks did not appear to be worried or frightened when he was with her.”

  After dropping her off at her place, she watched as Hicks made a U-turn in his Cadillac on Huntington Avenue. That was the last she saw of Ronald Hicks.

  * * *

  JOHNNY SPOTTED him in the Fenway. He honked and waved and Hicks pulled over into Forsythe Park, near the Museum of Fine Arts. Johnny parked and came over and got in the passenger’s side. Hicks seemed glad to see him. He may have been planning to pull over anyway because he had a bag of cocaine that he got out of his pocket as soon as Johnny got in the car. Hicks cut two lines of coke right there on the car seat. Johnny was sitting next to him on the front seat when Hicks leaned over and snorted one of the lines. He still had his head down when he asked Johnny, “You want a line?”

  Those were the last words Ronald Hicks ever spoke because at that moment Johnny Martorano shot him in the head. His head snapped back against the horn on the steering wheel and it started blaring, just like in a movie. Johnny grabbed the keys but left the headlights on, just as he had at Normandy Street a year earlier. The cops made note of the similarities in the MO, but it wasn’t nearly enough evidence to pull anyone in on.

  * * *

  HEARING THE horn, a security guard at the Forsythe Dental Center ran outside and saw the car, pointed toward Mass Ave. Hicks was declared dead at 3:05 A.M. at Boston City Hospital. The district attorney, Garrett Byrne, immediately ordered the sole surviving witness of the NEGRO massacre picked up and placed in protective custody.

  “A very vital witness has been assassinated,” said the somber prosecutor. “The witness had refused protection.”

  But the police had to admit that a lot of people had wanted Hicks dead. They had no suspects, although the police report did mention that Hicks’s girlfriend who had been with him at Slade’s “stated that she [was] a waitress at the Basin Street South and that John Martorano was there all the time.”

  * * *

  JOE BARBOZA was paroled in March 1969 on one condition—that “he leave Massachusetts and never return.” After the parole board cut him loose, he was immediately driven to Logan Airport, where he caught a plane out of the state. A couple of days later Jimmy Flemmi got out of Walpole, crazier than ever.

  “He wasn’t getting into trouble daily,” Martorano recalled. “He was getting into trouble hourly.”

  By then, the FBI was tightening the screws on Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme, or at least appearing to. They had to collar someone for the Fitzgerald bombing. Like baseball scouts, Rico and Condon had gone back into the state prison system and recruited a new snitching prospect—a Roxbury hood named Bobby Daddieco. He hated Larry Baione and he was looking at serious time for a botched bank robbery in Somerville. Daddieco had been in the crash car on the Billy Bennett hit and was now ready to give up Salemme and Flemmi on both the Billy Bennett murder and the Fitzgerald bombing—a twofer.

  High as usual on Seconal and Scotch, Jimmy Flemmi started talking about killing Daddieco or anyone else who would testify against his brother. But the Bear was also open to killing just about anyone if the price was right—even his best friends.

  One night I’m up at the Bat Cove with the Bear and as I’m leaving he asks for a ride back to his car, which he’d left downtown around the corner from Jay’s Lounge, Jerry Angiulo’s place. So I’m driving him down there when all of a sudden, he drops his gun onto the floorboard of my car. I picked it up and shoved it in his pocket. I asked him, Jimmy, can you drive or do you want me to take you home? He said he’d be okay. I didn’t think anything more of it. But then thirty years later, we’re all locked up down in Plymouth, and as part of discovery for our case, they’re playing these old FBI tapes for us. They had one bug in the car of Larry Baione’s driver, Richie Gambale. And on the tape I hear Larry call Stevie over to the car and Larry says, “Your brother was supposed to kill Johnny last night but he got yellow.” You don’t hear Stevie say anything back—he probably knew the car was wired. But that was my good friend Jimmy Flemmi.

  Stevie Flemmi, meanwhile, was still keeping the FBI up-to-date on both his own brother and Johnny Martorano. “On April 14, 1969, informant advised that Jimmy Flemmi is running with Johnny Martorano and that Johnny Martorano is still ‘hustling girls’ out of Enrico’s. Informant advised Martorano has in the past purchased some stolen merchandise and he suspects that Martorano is dealing in some kind of drugs. Informant advised that Martorano can usually be reached telephonically at either 716-2091 or VI 6-1529.”

  The Bear, about the time he tried to kill Johnny for In Town.

  I couldn’t believe it when I saw that second number—it belonged to a girlfriend of mine in Winthrop who just died. Until 2009, I hadn’t thought of that phone number in close to thirty years. You know I didn’t get a chance to see a lot of the later FBI 209s as they came in because I was gone from Plymouth in 1998. Until last year, I never realized Stevie had given the feds that phone number. Nobody had that number, nobody but Stevie—my best friend. But I do remember that after I went on the lam I used to call my old girlfriend at that number every six months or so. One time she told me, the feds had started lurking around outside her house. I couldn’t figure it out—how could they possibly know she was connected to me? Now I know.

  As for that other number Stevie gave them—I have no idea now who it belonged to. Maybe you should ask Stevie.

  The feds may have been closing in on them, but Stevie and Frankie were still scheming. They were looking to take over South Boston. Donald Killeen, a regular at the old Luigi’s, was still on top of the Southie rackets, but his grip was growing shakier.

  Young Southie guys were coming back from Vietnam, and after combat in the DMZ, the Killeens didn’t seem so tough. The younger hoods called themselves the Mullens, after the square where they hung out. Donald Killeen realized he needed some new muscle, so he brought in an ex-con bank robber named Whitey Bulger, as well as Johnny’s old pal, Billy O’Sullivan. Flemmi and Salemme figured to let the two Southie mobs decimate each other, another Irish gang war in miniature. Then they would move in to pick up the pieces.

  But in September 1969, Rico called Flemmi. He told Stevie he had to speak to him and Salemme immediately. They met before dawn on Revere Beach. Rico informed them that they were about to be indicted in state court for both the Fitzgerald bombing and the Billy Bennett murder. Rico told them about Daddieco’s testimony, but added that if they got out of town before they were indicted, they could probably ride it out. “Take Poulos with you,” Rico added. “He’s the weak link.” Flemmi and Salemme knew immediately that they would have to flee. The only question was how long they would have to remain on the lam. That depended on the evidence against them, specifically, the witness Bobby Daddieco.

  “How good is Daddieco?” Stevie asked Rico.

  “He�
��s no Barboza,” replied Rico.

  * * *

  DESPITE HICKS’S murder, the district attorney went ahead with the Campbell brothers’ murder trial. But they all had alibis, and with Ronald Hicks dead there was only one witness to put them at NEGRO headquarters. The all-white jury quickly acquitted the three black hoods, and after the verdicts, they made a pilgrimage to Basin Street South to see Johnny.

  “We’re here to thank you,” Alvin Campbell told him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Johnny said. “There’s nothing to thank me for.”

  “We’re here to thank you anyway,” Campbell replied.

  The Campbells hadn’t been in Vietnam, but they were as hungry as the Mullens across the bridge in Southie. They wanted to take over drugs in the black neighborhoods, by throwing out all the “outsiders”—not so much the whites, because they had mostly abandoned Roxbury by then. The Campbells’ ire was directed at the Superfly-style black gangsters who’d been moving into the city in recent years and now dominated the Roxbury rackets. Johnny Martorano was skeptical of the Campbells’ strategy.

  They were bank robbers, not drug dealers. You don’t get rid of people if you don’t know how to take over and operate their rackets yourself. It didn’t make sense. I know what people believe, but I never took any money from the Campbells. Maybe they gave me a hundred bucks once, but I told them no. They never really made much money anyway.

  What was more valuable to me personally about the Campbells was that if anybody ever tried to make a move on me, they’d have to worry about them. On the street you need somebody behind you like that. The more the better. Stevie first had his brother, then Frankie, and then even later Whitey. Every time somebody who doesn’t like me sees a black guy walking toward him on the street, he’s thinking, is this one of Johnny’s guys? I had a lot of black friends, still do.

  What I advised the Campbells to do was to go after the barrooms and the numbers in Roxbury. Then I would have been with them. Drugs are too hot. Numbers are slower but cleaner, safer, longer-lasting. I know the state lottery was coming in, but remember, at the start it was only once a week, and then only twice a week for years after that. People in the poor neighborhoods like Roxbury have to play every day. But Alvin didn’t have the patience for that—he was an old-fashioned Black Panther–type guy.