Hitman

by Howie Carr

  Once they beat the NEGRO murder rap, the Campbells moved fast. In September 1969, the FBI sent the following report to the Boston Police Department:

  S/A Matthew Seifer received information that the Campbell Bros. had approached all the cocaine dealers in Boston making it very clear that only their “stuff” would be handled. The terms were that they would protect the dealers, that the dealers would provide their own attorney in the event of an arrest, but that the Campbells would see to it that no one would testify against them as long as it was a state violation. It was further alleged that the Campbells were associated with a white fellow …

  Pushback was to be expected—there was too much money at stake for the independents to give up Roxbury without a fight. One hot summer night, Johnny was drinking at Basin Street with Jimmy the Bear, who was out on a brief parole. Alvin Campbell and Deke Chandler came in and excitedly pulled Johnny aside. They were having some problems with the proprietor of a joint on Blue Hill Avenue—one Black Sam.

  Alvin had spotted Black Sam holding court out in front of his unlicensed bar, surrounded by a crowd of hangers-on. It was a perfect opportunity to take him out, but it would be a difficult shot.

  “How many cars you got?” Johnny asked.

  “Two,” said Alvin. Johnny nodded and told the Bear to go with Deke Chandler. They would be in the crash car, just in case. He and Alvin Campbell went out into the alley next to Basin Street, and Johnny grabbed a handful of dirt and rubbed it on his face to darken it. Then he tore apart a burlap bag and wrapped it around his head. He got into the backseat of Alvin Campbell’s car and lay down. There was a loaded carbine on the floor.

  A few minutes later, on Blue Hill Avenue, Alvin braked the car to a stop. Johnny popped up from the backseat, drew a bead on Black Sam, and fired. Black Sam fell to the sidewalk, wounded, shot in the shoulder. It would have to do—there were too many onlookers, and not enough time, to get out of the car and finish Black Sam off. This was his lucky night. The two Campbell cars then roared off north, toward downtown, toward white Boston. Black Sam’s near-death experience never made the papers.

  Alvin Campbell would be acquitted of murdering three people—after Johnny Martorano killed the main witness against him.

  * * *

  THERE WAS another holdout named Nelson Padron. He was older, a cocaine dealer who owned a bar, lived in Sharon, drove a Mercedes convertible. The Campbells told him they were in charge now and it was time to negotiate new terms—in a public place, if Padron was concerned about his safety. They agreed on Slade’s. A white fellow named Johnny Martorano came along, just in case there was a problem, which there was.

  Padron had brought a gun to the sit-down—not a good way to win friends and influence people, as the McLaughlins had learned several years earlier at the Ebb Tide. Johnny pulled back Padron’s coat, grabbed the revolver out of his belt, and began pistol-whipping him with it.

  “We thought about killing him right there,” Martorano said, “but there were too many witnesses.”

  Then Deke Chandler had an idea. While Johnny continued beating Padron, Deke ran outside, took out a switchblade, and slashed all four of Padron’s tires. That way, when Padron tried to leave, the Campbells and Johnny could follow him in their car and eventually pull up alongside his Mercedes and shoot him—with no witnesses.

  When Johnny finally tired of beating Padron and told him to screw, Padron bolted for his car. Nobody rushed after him, since Padron couldn’t get far on four flats. As they leisurely walked back out onto Tremont Street, they saw Padron tearing off in his Mercedes, throwing off a shower of sparks as he rode the rims of the sports car. Everyone started laughing, and Nelson Padron lived … to get shot by Johnny another day.

  * * *

  JOHNNY MARTORANO wouldn’t turn twenty-nine until December 1969, but already his life was changing. No nightclub lasts forever, and it was time to close Basin Street South. The city’s new hot spot was the Sugar Shack.

  One way or another, a lot of Johnny’s old friends were gone. The Roxbury gang no longer existed. Wimpy Bennett and his brothers were dead, their killers, Frank Salemme and Stevie Flemmi, on the lam. Peter Poulos, the third guy who’d left town with them, had just been murdered by Stevie in the desert outside Las Vegas. Jimmy the Bear would soon be back in prison.

  Joe Barboza was a free man, briefly, although he, too, would soon be back in stir, this time in California, for murdering an unemployed mechanic in a dispute over stolen securities. Most of Barboza’s little crew had either been wiped out or absorbed by In Town.

  Johnny found himself spending more and more time with the crew from Somerville. He’d never met Buddy McLean, but now he was hanging with his successor, Howie Winter. Like Buddy, Howie was an ex-marine born in 1929. Johnny had first met Howie in the mid-sixties at the various clubs in Boston, and the two men quickly discovered that they had a lot in common, including an avid interest in betting on pro sports, especially football games.

  Howie Winter in custody in Boston, age 28, 1957.

  Howie owned several parcels of land on Winter Hill, and George Kaufman had moved his operations to Howie’s garage at the corner of Broadway and Marshall Street. Jimmy Martorano was out of prison, and he fit well with Howie, too. They liked talking about real estate. Both had the same idea about the South End of Boston—they thought it was going to come back. If they could just get into the right locations, Howie and Jimmy agreed, they could start making some real money.

  * * *

  JOHNNY MARTORANO had a date, with a nurse.

  It was an old high-school classmate from Milton, the girl he’d once taken to Andy’s cottage in Scituate in the winter, and whom he had tried to keep warm by taking an ax to his father’s living-room set to provide some wood for the fireplace.

  He’d run into her somewhere and had noticed she still wasn’t wearing a ring, so he asked her out. The Sugar Shack seemed like a nice spot for a first date. They treated Johnny Martorano like royalty—there he truly was “Bwana Johnny,” a nickname then used only by a few close friends, as a sort of inside joke until thirty years later, when the defense lawyers for crooked FBI agent Zip Connolly tried to resurrect the old moniker to destroy his credibility.

  It was September 24, 1969. As usual at the Sugar Shack, Johnny didn’t see a lot of white faces, but that was okay. But Johnny did notice one white guy, who was scowling at him. It was a slight, bearded thirty-four-year-old pimp from Philadelphia known as “Touch.” His real name was Jack Banno, and, although Johnny Martorano didn’t know it, Touch was on the run from the Campbells.

  Early the previous Sunday morning, Deke Chandler was making what had become his usual rounds in Roxbury, looking for nonaffiliated drug dealers to muscle. Chandler spotted one of the guys on his target list, a black cocaine dealer named Rat, sitting in a car with Touch. Deke swaggered up to the passenger side of the dealer’s car, and quickly got into a beef with the pusher, as Touch sat in the middle between them.

  One of Touch’s whores later told the police, “He didn’t tell me all the words that were passed between the two of them but it had to do with cocaine, that is what Touch told me. It had to do with dope. There were threats … he couldn’t come here with any kind of cocaine without the Campbell brothers’ okay.… That is when Deke pulled out his pistol.”

  After that confrontation, Touch was terrified that the Campbells were going to kill him. He’d seen too much. He could put Deke, an ex-con, on Blue Hill Avenue with a .45. Or so he told his woman. Apparently, things had not been going well for Touch, as the police discovered after his murder. Touch had been banned from the Sugar Shack after running up a tab of $27.99 “without funds.” He also owed the owner $135. He didn’t have a car. He’d lost $3,200 in an after-hours card game. He was drunk or stoned most of the time.

  But somehow, this night Touch was back inside the Sugar Shack, staring at Johnny Martorano and his nurse. Johnny wasn’t exactly hiding—a BPD report the next day noted that “John Martorano was se
en in the Sugar Shack early 10:30 or 11:00 P.M. with a female, on Wednesday.”

  * * *

  JOHNNY AND his date were leaving around 11, through the back door, when suddenly, out in the alley, Touch jumped him, with a knife. He wasn’t big enough to take on Johnny in any kind of physical confrontation, so he was probably high on something. They struggled, rolling around in the alley, until Johnny was finally able to get his own knife out and stab him. Johnny didn’t have a gun with him that night—he was, after all, out on a date—but out of habit he was carrying a blade.

  Soon Touch was falling down, trying to get up, keeling over again, bleeding, still swearing at Johnny. Johnny gave the keys to his car to the nurse and told her to bring it around. He got Touch into the backseat and was wondering what he was going to do with him now. He was bleeding, but the wounds didn’t appear to be life-threatening.

  Johnny started driving through the South End. He saw an alley behind the Diplomat Hotel on East Berkeley Street and figured this was as good a place as any to dump Touch. He pulled the car into the alley, opened the back door, and dragged him out of the car. The plan was to leave him there in the alley until somebody could find him and call an ambulance.

  All of a sudden, though, Touch got one final burst of strength—a second wind. He started yelling “Motherfucker!” and lunged at Johnny. Johnny pulled out his knife again and stabbed him until Touch fell over. The last word Touch ever spoke was to Johnny Martorano.

  “Motherfucker!”

  * * *

  TOUCH’S BODY was discovered around 3 A.M. The dead pimp’s personal effects included $49 cash and a pawn ticket dated September 2 from Hudson Jewelers on Stuart Street for a $250 ring. According to the autopsy report, he weighed 145 pounds, and had been wearing an orange shirt with matching orange socks and a tan sports coat. His body was identified at the Southern Mortuary by “Candy, colored female,” one of his two women.

  Candy, who was twenty-three years old, turned over to police a letter she’d handwritten to Touch the night he died, complaining how badly he was treating her in his attempt to make more money. Touch was dead before she could deliver it to him.

  “Dear Daddy,” it began. “You made me your woman for three years so how can I cope with just being your whore? Do you remember when I first meet [sic] you? I thought here is a man, my man so how can I let him down? Touch when you come for me as my Man and Pimp I will be ready ready Ready. Love, Candy.”

  * * *

  IN THEIR report to the Boston police, the FBI noted that Martorano was likely involved in the slaying: “It is suspected that [REDACTED] either killed BANNO himself or took him to MARTORANO. MARTORANO was also the last person seen with Ronald HICKS, victim of a previous murder involving [REDACTED].”

  * * *

  MARTORANO NEVER went out on another date with the nurse. But he didn’t worry that she would ever go to the police.

  “She knew it was self-defense—she saw Touch come after me first. And I never heard from any cops about it, either. They don’t question you if they’re going to arrest you. And they didn’t have any witnesses. The thing is, nobody missed Touch.”

  Except maybe Candy.

  6

  The Winter Hill Gang

  LAWYER: Jimmy Sims, Howie Winter, Joseph McDonald, did any of those persons have a relationship to an entity known as “Winter Hill”?

  MARTORANO: Yes.

  LAWYER: And what was the relationship to Winter Hill?

  MARTORANO: There was a gang in Winter Hill and that was the gang.

  BILLY O’SULLIVAN WOULD be dead before he could call in the marker Johnny Martorano owed him for killing a guy in Billy O’s after-hours joint. But one of Billy O’s underworld pals would parlay the unpaid debt into the formation of a gang that would someday rival the Mafia for power in Boston’s underworld.

  When Frankie Salemme and Stevie Flemmi went on the lam in September 1969, in South Boston Donald Killeen may have thought his troubles were behind him, but they were only beginning. And it was homegrown trouble—the Mullens, that loosely knit gang of younger criminals.

  The more the Mullens saw of the Killeens, the less impressed they were. Holed up in the Transit Café in the Lower End, appearing occasionally on West Broadway, bleary-eyed, their faces splotchy, beer bellies hanging over their belts, the Killeens just looked like another crew of toothless tigers, project rats taking bets on the dogs when they weren’t sucking down dimeys and musties—half–Pickwick Ale, half–Narragansett beer drafts. Donald Killeen didn’t even live in Southie anymore. He’d moved out to the suburbs. He was pushing fifty. His two top guns were both over forty—Billy O and Whitey Bulger.

  On the other side, the Mullens were led by Paulie McGonagle, who had a twin brother, as well as another brother on the fire department who was dating a blond dental hygienist named Catherine Greig. The gang also included an Irish-born ex-marine named Pat Nee, and Buddy Roache, another hard drinker whose brother had just gotten onto the BPD. Perhaps the toughest of the Mullens was Tommy King, an ironworker and career criminal. Whenever King’s name was mentioned in the Southie underworld, someone would bring up the time he and two younger South Boston kids had been arrested in Newton in 1960 for robbing a pharmacy of a large amount of cash and drugs. Even then, Southie was a good place to deal black-market prescription pharmaceuticals. A fourth guy in the crew—Paulie McGonagle—escaped.

  Pat Nee, Irish-born member of the Mullen gang in South Boston, a friend of Johnny’s.

  Tommy King, a Mullen, murdered by Johnny, 1975.

  One of the younger Southie guys who’d been arrested had a broken jaw. In those pre-Miranda, pre-ACLU days, the Newton cops took him into a back room at headquarters. They were working the kid over, trying to beat the name of the fourth guy out of him. He was screaming out in agony every time they smacked him in the jaw. In a nearby cell, King started yelling at the cops to send in their best guy, and they’d have at it, one-on-one.

  Tommy King offered the cops a deal. If he prevailed, he said, the cops would lay off the kid. If the cop decked him, King would give up the name of the Southie guy who got away.

  As another Southie mobster recalls the story:

  So the captain figures he’s got a guy who’s never lost a fight, a sergeant. They send him into the cell with Tommy, but King takes him—can you imagine anything remotely like this happening today? Well, when it’s over, the sergeant limps out of Tommy’s cell, and now the captain is pissed, and he tells his guys to start really working over the kid with the broken jaw. But the sergeant intervenes and says to the captain, hey we had a deal with this guy, he won fair and square. So they lay off the kid, Paulie McGonagle gets clean away, and Tommy King does a couple of years. That was Tommy King. He was tough.

  There were other Mullens, too, including one who would go on to be elected president of the Boston City Council. As they grew older, other Mullens would become ward bosses, or bus drivers, or barroom owners. In short, the Mullens were a true cross-section of South Boston, but in the early 1970s the only thing that mattered to Donald Killeen was that they were young and tough and that there were too many of them.

  Killeen figured his best play was to eliminate the Mullens’ leader—Paulie McGonagle. Whitey got the assignment. He knew the make, model, and license number of Paulie’s car, a Volkswagen. On November 18, 1969, Whitey spotted the car and opened fire, killing the occupant as he pulled into a parking space outside the McGonagles’ home on East Fourth Street. It was Paulie McGonagle’s twin brother.

  Next one of the Mullens, Mickey Dwyer, had a few drinks and went over to the Transit Café. Donald Killeen’s brother, Kenny, soon stumbled out of the barroom, and Dwyer jumped him. In the ensuing struggle, Kenny Killeen bit off Dwyer’s nose. The maimed Mullen ran off screaming toward the Broadway station as Killeen spat out his nose into the West Broadway gutter and then unsteadily made his way back into the Transit Café for a celebratory round.

  The party was in full swing by the time Donald Ki
lleen returned. After he was told what had happened, his first question was: What happened to the nose? When none of his crew seemed to know, he ordered them outside to find it, which they eventually did, covered with dirt and grime in the gutter.

  They gingerly brought Dwyer’s severed nose back inside, and Donald Killeen told his bartender to wash it off in the bar sink. Then Killeen filled a Styrofoam cooler with ice, wrapped the nose in a couple of cocktail napkins, and tossed it on top of the ice. Finally Donald Killeen called a cab and told him to take the cooler down to the emergency room at Boston City Hospital, hand it to somebody, and say that “Mickey’s nose” was inside. They’ll know what to do, Killeen assured the cabbie.

  Donald Killeen went back inside the Transit and took a second gun out of the desk in his second-floor office. After this, he knew, there would be even more trouble.

  Mickey Dwyer, a Mullen whose nose was bitten off by Kenny Killeen, and then reattached at Boston City Hospital.

  * * *

  THE FBI was aware of all of this. Flemmi was gone, on the lam, but Whitey Bulger had filled in FBI agent Dennis Condon. In January 1971, J. Edgar Hoover had personally sent a memo to the FBI office instructing his Boston office to develop Whitey as an informant.

  At the time, Whitey was still legally residing with his mother in the South Boston projects. In reality, he spent most of his evenings with his girlfriend, Teresa Stanley, who had four towheaded children by a Southie street drunk. Like Billy O, Whitey had a no-show public job—he was on the Suffolk County payroll as a courthouse custodian for $76 a week. He was barely known outside the South Boston underworld. Yet J. Edgar Hoover had taken an unusual interest in Whitey. He always took personal care of any requests from House Speaker John W. McCormack, just as he had when Zip Connolly wanted to join the FBI a few years earlier.