Hitman

by Howie Carr

  MARTORANO: Possibly.

  LAWYER: They had more than five members, didn’t they?

  MARTORANO: Sure. Maybe more people. More money.

  LAWYER: More guns?

  MARTORANO: Maybe.

  LAWYER: More shooters?

  MARTORANO: Maybe.

  Jerry Angiulo gave Howie and Johnny mug shots of Indian Al—he had a beard, and favored long leather coats and flashy jewelry, including both the pinkie ring from his brother and a gold chain with a small gold horn attached. In his packet of information, Angiulo included all of Indian Al’s addresses, those of his associates and brother, and also the make and model of his car—a brown Mercedes.

  The goal was to whack Indian Al before he knew they were after him, to catch him flat-footed.

  The Hill set up a war room in Joe McDonald’s Fire House. They put shifts of surveillance cars out on the street, all equipped with Whitey’s new-model walkie-talkies, looking to spot Indian Al’s Mercedes. Everyone had their own people out on the street, working shifts. Somerville, Southie, what was left of the old crews in Charlestown and Roxbury—the Hill really had become an amalgamated gang.

  Next they would need guns, lots of guns. Before he went on the lam in 1969, Stevie Flemmi had stashed an arsenal in the basement of the Commercial Street restaurant owned by Bobby LaBella—Bobby the Greaser.

  The Mafia was likewise looking to pick up a few machine guns. So Frankie Salemme’s brother, Jackie, went down to Commercial Street. Jackie Salemme told Bobby the Greaser that Frankie was asking him to turn over Stevie’s grease guns to In Town. Bobby the Greaser shook his head.

  “Frankie didn’t give me the guns, Stevie give me the guns.”

  Johnny made the next visit to Bobby LaBella’s café.

  “Sorry, Johnny,” he said. “I gotta hear it from Stevie.” So Stevie was called in Montreal, where he was still hiding out, working nights in the print shop of the Montreal Gazette under the alias of Robert Lombruno.

  After Flemmi personally phoned the okay to Bobby the Greaser, Johnny returned to the basement and picked out a grease gun. It was a cheap but lethal World War II–era .45-caliber submachine that got its name from its resemblance to the standard garage mechanic’s tool.

  Everyone agreed that whenever they finally caught up with him, the hit on Indian Al would be handled by the Hill’s “working partners”—Sims driving, Johnny and another guy from Somerville shooting. Whitey Bulger would follow in a crash car equipped with multiple police radios.

  Then they set up their hit bags—bulky canvas mailbags with various weapons: pistols, carbines, sawed-off shotguns, even a couple of grenades, just in case something went wrong and they had to make a run for it. Johnny always took along a ski mask. Jimmy Sims preferred a plastic Halloween-type mask.

  For what they had planned, the Hill laid in a new supply of “boilers.” Mostly they were four-door Fords—they looked like police cars and their ignitions popped quicker than Chrysler or GM vehicles. They’d use a shimmy to unlock the front door, then stick a dent-puller into the ignition and pop it. After that, all you needed was a screwdriver to turn the engine over. It was a lot faster than hot-wiring a car.

  With any luck, it would be over very quickly—a one-and-done. Once they hit Indian Al, the rest of his gang would probably fade.

  LAWYER: You didn’t know Mr. Notarangeli well enough to recognize him in person, is that right?

  MARTORANO: I never met him.

  LAWYER: So you agreed to kill a man you never met?

  MARTORANO: Positively.

  LAWYER: And you were going basically on the description of other people, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: Yup.

  LAWYER: You weren’t sure enough the first couple of times that you killed people who weren’t Mr. Notarangeli, right?

  MARTORANO: Well, he was driving his car, dressed in his coat, and had long hair like him and a long beard like him. Somebody said over the radio that that’s him, so I took it to be him.

  Just after midnight on a Thursday in March 1973, the walkie-talkie crackled at the Fire House. As usual, they had Indian Al’s bar, Mother’s, staked out. It had been a slow night, and one of the spotters had noticed what he presumed to be Indian Al’s brown Mercedes out front of the bar on Causeway Street. Within minutes, a stolen Ford was heading down the McGrath/O’Brien Highway from Somerville toward the city. Sims was driving, with Johnny in the front seat and another guy from Somerville in the backseat. Johnny was cradling Flemmi’s grease gun, and the guy from Somerville had an AR-15.

  It was up to a Charlestown hood, John Hurley, to make sure that it was Indian Al getting into the Mercedes. The fingerman stood under the elevated Green Line and watched from the Causeway Street shadows as a guy in his early thirties with a beard and a long leather coat got into the driver’s seat, followed by two other people. Hurley radioed to the hit Ford that he had positively ID’d Indian Al.

  But it wasn’t Angeli. Although Johnny and the others in the boiler didn’t know it, the driver of the Mercedes was actually the head bartender at Mother’s, a thirty-year-old guy named Michael Milano. His duties included opening and closing the bar, tallying the receipts for the evening. Milano had just bought a used dark red 1966 Mercedes, of which he was very proud. In the dark it looked like Indian Al’s brown Mercedes.

  Other than taking a few bets if no one else was around the bar, and moving small amounts of stolen merchandise, Milano wasn’t in the rackets at all. He was a typical Boston bartender of the early ’70s—a few days later, police searching his apartment in Brighton would find gambling slips, small amounts of cocaine and marijuana, and a handwritten note from somebody saying “Save an oz. for me.”

  John Hurley of Charlestown served as the fingerman on the (botched) Michael Milano and Indian Joe hits in 1973.

  Another fact that the Hill shooters were unaware of: sitting in the backseat was a thirty-four-year-old friend of Milano’s whom he had just hired as a new bartender at Mother’s. The new bartender’s twenty-three-year-old girlfriend was in the front seat beside Milano. Their plan that morning was to return to Milano’s apartment in Brighton for a game of chess. Leaving the bar, they took with them three 12-ounce bottles of Schlitz beer.

  LAWYER: And he had people in the car with him, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: Yeah.

  LAWYER: And you didn’t care if you took out other people at the same time you were taking out your target, isn’t that fair to say?

  MARTORANO: Yeah, sure, we were concerned about that.

  LAWYER: Not concerned enough to stop you from doing it, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: Not—we kept going, yeah.

  LAWYER: And in fact one of the people in that car was a woman, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: Turned out to be.

  LAWYER: You didn’t care, did you?

  MARTORANO: Sure, I cared.

  Milano’s Mercedes left North Station, winding its way around to Storrow Drive, with the boiler remaining an inconspicuous distance behind. Milano got off by mistake at Kenmore Square, then headed down Brighton Avenue, around St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, and onto Sparhawk Street. He was almost home to his apartment.

  It was time for Sims to take the Mercedes, before it crossed Market Street and got too close to Brighton Center and a lot more witnesses. At the light, Sims pulled up alongside and Johnny and the guy from Somerville opened fire, Johnny spraying the front seat, the other guy the back. It was all over in a matter of seconds. Sims floored the boiler and headed back to the garage at the top of Winter Hill.

  In the Mercedes, the new bartender slumped in the backseat, unconscious, critically wounded. In the front, the woman looked over at Michael Milano, slumped against the steering wheel. The woman later told police she’d thought some of the local punks were throwing rocks at the car, but then the car windows exploded, and she was hit in the shoulder.

  “I ducked until the shots stopped and I was fine and I looked at Michael and said, �
��Are you okay?’ and he was just about breathing.”

  But not for long. Milano had four bullets in him, and less than three hours to live. He had $120 cash in his pocket when he died.

  It wasn’t until the next day that the Hill found out that they had shot up the wrong car. The Boston police quickly figured out what had happened—or at least why. The organized-crime squad informed homicide detectives that Indian Al “or his brother has been leaning on the local bookies to the extent that Angiulo has called him.”

  What the cops didn’t know was that it wasn’t In Town, but Winter Hill that had handled the hit. So it would go into the books as an unsolved Mafia murder, a case of mistaken identity.

  At the garage on Marshall Street, everyone was philosophical. Shit happens.

  * * *

  JOHNNY FOUND out listening to the news on the radio. They said there’d been a shooting in Brighton, and a bartender had been killed. His first thought was, There was another shooting last night? Then he realized what had happened. The problem was, now Indian Al would know that someone was after him. They would never catch him off guard again. This was going to be a war.

  Johnny blamed it all on Hurley. He wanted to kill him. But he knew the other guys would veto it. He’d been with them in the Charlestown war. But because Hurley blew that ID, five more people would end up dead, and even more wounded. None of it would have happened if they’d caught up with Indian Al first.

  The other guy in Milano’s car was paralyzed for life. We threw a fundraiser for him later at Chandler’s, although of course we couldn’t tell him why we felt so sorry for him and wanted to help out so bad. He’s dead now, but when the feds were trying to settle all the cases I was involved in, they had to seek him out—he had moved to California. They told him who’d shot him, and his response was that he wasn’t mad at anyone anymore. He’d gotten religion, I guess. I’m very appreciative of that.

  The next day, Johnny and Howie returned to the Dog House. Angiulo had more names, addresses, photos, and license numbers for them. One guy Jerry wanted badly was Frank Capizzi, a loudmouthed thirty-eight-year-old North End native. He was now living in Winthrop, and he, too, had a Mercedes. Every morning he dropped his two young children off at Winthrop Elementary School. Whitey Bulger began looking for him.

  One morning in early March, Capizzi had just dropped off his children at school and was heading into the city on Chelsea Street when Whitey pulled alongside and reached across the seat, came up with a revolver, and opened fire on Capizzi. He didn’t hang around to finish the job, though, and Capizzi was able to turn off the main road and then abandon his blood-stained, bullet-riddled car a few blocks later. Blood oozing from his leg, Capizzi limped off to hail a taxi. A few minutes later, Mrs. Frank Capizzi reported the car stolen from in front of their home in Winthrop. The cops didn’t buy it and arrested Capizzi after they found an unregistered handgun a witness had seen him toss across a fence near where he had left his Mercedes.

  Frank Capizzi of the North End was shot by both Whitey and Johnny in 1973—and survived.

  In a letter to a judge many years later, Capizzi recalled his children’s reaction later that day when they saw the family car abandoned on a side street in East Boston.

  “One of the most traumatic memories for my bright children was seeing the automobile they had been in ten minutes before full of bullet holes … [I was] frightened beyond words.”

  The only witness to the actual shooting provided nothing of use. The driver was hatless, he told police, and “was not a kid.”

  After the near-miss on Capizzi, the Angeli crew went to ground for a while. The Hill still had cars out, on the prowl, but it was days before they got another break. On the evening of March 18, everyone was hanging out in the Fire House playing cards when somebody spotted Indian Al on the waterfront. He was eating dinner at the Aquarium restaurant on Atlantic Avenue with three other guys. Two of the other guys with Indian Al were familiar to the Hill—one was Capizzi, finally out of hiding, still limping after being shot by Whitey Bulger. Also at the table was Sonny Shields, the Roxbury plug-ugly who’d been acquitted in 1969 of murdering the last of the Bennett brothers, Billy. Shields had gone mod, his hair now down to his shoulders, and that night he was sporting a hipster’s long brown coat.

  The fourth guy at the table was older, about fifty, a stranger to the Hill lookout who had made the others.

  It was just about 7 P.M. when the four men left the Aquarium and climbed into a 1972 Buick sedan owned by a Chelsea garage. They didn’t even notice the 1971 Ford trailing behind them, and behind the Ford, a crash car driven by Whitey Bulger.

  In the Ford was the usual Winter Hill first team: Sims driving, Martorano next to him in the front cradling Stevie Flemmi’s grease gun, and in the back the guy from Somerville with his AR-15. The Angeli car took off down Commercial Street, obviously heading toward North Station, and Mother’s, less than a mile away.

  This would be a tougher hit than Milano. Commercial Street was narrower, it was earlier, and there was more traffic, which meant more potential witnesses. And they only had a couple of minutes. There were no long traffic lights, either; they would have to fire from a moving vehicle, at another one.

  As they approached the coast guard station, Sims floored the stolen boiler and pulled out around, in order to get alongside the Angeli vehicle. The Hill guns were pointing out the windows, ready to fire. But just as Sims made his move, from Henchman Street another car suddenly turned left onto Commercial, pulling directly alongside the Angeli vehicle.

  “Fuck,” said Sims, but he had no choice. He swung into the opposite lane and cut in front of Indian Al’s vehicle, forcing it to a stop. The Somerville guy’s rifle was still pointed out the side window when Johnny swung his grease gun back inside and started firing through the back window of the stolen Ford. The Somerville guy dove for the backseat floor as Johnny continued shooting into the Angeli car. For the nighttime job, he was using tracer bullets, and behind the Buick in the crash car, Whitey Bulger swerved to keep his car out of the line of fire.

  At the nearby coast guard base on Commercial Street, some on-duty guardsmen had just finished watching a rerun of The Wild Wild West. Suddenly outside they heard what sounded like a real-life shootout at the OK Corral.

  By the time the coast guardsmen ran outside, the boiler was long gone, and so was the car that had cut in front of Sims. Angeli’s bullet-riddled Buick was stopped on the street, its motor still running. Inside the car, they saw the driver slumped over. He was moaning and coughing up blood, with only a few minutes to live.

  Once they were sure the shooting had stopped, Capizzi and Shields scrambled to open the passenger-side doors. Almost comically, they bumped into each other as they tried to figure out which way to flee, before finally taking cover behind a parked moving truck. Then they decided to make a run for it, heading south back toward the Aquarium, stopping and turning around every few seconds to make sure no one with a gun was following them.

  Then a fourth passenger opened the back driver’s side door, jumped out, and took off running down the alley next to a restaurant named Giro’s. That was Indian Al. He was wearing a brown scally cap.

  The driver was Al “Bud” Plummer, of Andover, a forty-nine-year-old World War II veteran. He was dead on arrival at Massachusetts General Hospital. In the Andover town directory, Plummer listed himself as a “steamship clerk.” He had no police record, but the cops noted that although he hadn’t worked in two years, Plummer “lives in a high-priced area of the town and owns two expensive automobiles”—a Cadillac and a Thunderbird. He was also known to play golf with “well-known professional athletes” at the Indian Ridge Golf Course from which Paulie Folino had vanished eight months earlier.

  He left behind a wife and two children. Police reported that Plummer had $451 cash in his pocket when he died.

  LAWYER: Was it the right thing to do to kill Mr. Plummer?

  MARTORANO: Well, at the time I thought so. He was pa
rt of the gang that we were having a problem with.

  LAWYER: Well, what was it about him being part of the gang that gave you, allowed you, or caused you to believe it was the right thing to do, which was to kill Mr. Plummer?

  MARTORANO: Well, the guy that we were looking for is in Plummer’s car.

  Sonny Shields and Frank Capizzi soon turned up at the emergency room at Boston City Hospital. Capizzi’s lawyer also appeared. Shields, shot in the side, got himself patched up and then promptly vanished, not to be seen again for months. Capizzi was more seriously hit, in the back, but the next day he signed himself out of BCH and likewise fled.

  Thirty years later, in a letter to a federal judge, Capizzi would describe how he and his family had spent the next few months of their lives.

  “[We] drove crisscrossing the U.S. and Canada for over 20,000 miles. We were without a destination. Desi and Frank [his children] had the job of cleaning festering wounds and picking out bits of lead from my back as they surfaced.”

  The morning after Plummer’s murder, outside his café on Commercial Street, Bobby the Greaser was sweeping up the broken glass from the previous night’s shooting off the sidewalk. As he worked, he was muttering to himself about Johnny Martorano, loud enough for anyone within earshot to hear.

  “Fuckin’ Johnny,” he was saying. “You give him a gun, and the next thing you know, he leaves you with a big fuckin’ mess to clean up. Stevie’s gonna hear about this, goddammit, whenever the fuck he gets back to town.”

  Two days later, the Chelsea Police Department got a report of an abandoned Ford behind the New Market Restaurant on Beechum Street. It didn’t take long for the cops to figure out who had left it behind—its back windows were shot out. The owner reported that missing from the brown sedan were five quarts of J&B Scotch and three yellow hard hats. The Scotch was long gone, but the hard hats were stashed in the garage at the top of Winter Hill. The Hill never knew, those hats might come in handy someday.

  * * *

  LIKE SHIELDS and Capizzi, Indian Al was now officially on the lam. He fled to Eugene, Oregon, with his family. He sent a letter to the public school his children had been attending in Winchester asking that their academic records be forwarded to Oregon.