Hitman

by Howie Carr

  “I leaned in close to Jerry and told him, ‘You deserve an Oscar for that performance.’ What I was really saying to him was, maybe Indian Al believed that bullshit, but don’t ever try anything like that on me, because I know better.

  “In the car, Howie told Indian Al to stay in touch with Sal Sperlinga. He figured Sal knew Indian Al better than we did, so he’d be more comfortable with Sal.”

  * * *

  HOWIE AND Johnny drove Indian Al to his sister-in-law’s house and then returned to the Dog House. Angiulo was sitting at a table. He’d split the $50,000 into two equal piles. One he pushed across the table.

  “Expenses,” Angiulo explained.

  That was the way they all preferred to look at it. It wasn’t really murder-for-hire, this was just settling up … for out-of-pocket costs. Jerry just wanted to show his respect and appreciation for a job well done, and the Hill couldn’t very well turn it down because that would be a slap in the face to Jerry Angiulo. Not to take the $25,000 would be showing disrespect to In Town.

  LAWYER: You certainly didn’t have $25,000 worth of expenses, did you?

  MARTORANO: We just threw it in the pot. There was a lot of expenses, a lot of equipment, a lot of walkie-talkies. There was a lot of equipment.

  LAWYER: But it had nothing to do with expenses. He just paid you to do it, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: Not at all.

  LAWYER: After expenses, the rest was just the fee for killing him, right?

  MARTORANO: It wasn’t a fee for killing him, but we took the money.

  LAWYER: And that was half of the money Mr. Angeli gave to Mr. Angiulo for not killing him, right?

  MARTORANO: Right.

  Back at 98 Prince Street, Howie Winter took the $25,000 and stuffed the wad of bills into his winter overcoat.

  “Now you can kill him for killing Paulie,” Angiulo said.

  * * *

  INDIAN AL still didn’t get it. His sister-in-law had watched out the window as he was dropped off in front of her house by a dark car with two men inside—Howie and Johnny. Once Indian Al was back inside Joe’s house, he went straight to the kitchen and started making phone calls.

  “Everything is fine,” he told someone. “I want that nightclub.”

  He was beaming as he hung up. He told his sister-in-law that everybody could come home now. Indian Al then called his wife in Oregon. He said he would be meeting someone for breakfast, but did not say who.

  Despite his apparent relief, Indian Al decided to move out of the family house and into the Holiday Inn on the Lynn-Peabody Line. After he checked in there, his sister-in-law drove him to Cambridge, where he rented a small white car. But he didn’t call the Hill.

  After a while, Jerry started calling us every day, yelling, “Where the fuck is that no good motherfuckin’ motherfucker? I want him dead! I want this over!” We told him, we aren’t even sure where he is. We also told him, this ain’t the kind of thing you can rush. You start trying to pressure a guy to set up a meet, he’s going to figure out what’s up.

  Finally, on February 21, Indian Al reached out to Sal. He wanted another sit-down with Jerry.

  Johnny went up to the garage at the top of Winter Hill to see what boilers were available. He settled on a Ford coupe.

  On the last morning of his life, Indian Al met a guy who’d been holding onto some of his late brother Joe’s effects. They drove to a warehouse in Woburn and Indian Al sadly went through a couple of his brother’s steamer trunks. They drove back to Winchester and he ran into a cop he knew. He told the cop he had straightened everything out with Angiulo and that he’d soon be opening a “diner” in Magoun Square in Somerville—in the heart of Winter Hill territory.

  Back at the Holiday Inn, Indian Al ate an early dinner of clam chowder and shish kabob, leaving a one-dollar tip. The total: $8.20. He went back to his room and at 5:21 P.M. made his final telephone call, to Jake Leary’s widow. When cops later asked her where she’d been that evening, she told them she’d just started a new program at Diet Workshop.

  A few minutes later, Indian Al was picked up again at the Northgate Shopping Center by Sal and Johnny. This time Indian Al wasn’t carrying a bag, only a Bible. Johnny got out so that Al could sit in the front seat—the death seat. Johnny climbed into the backseat.

  Johnny saw the Bible, and suddenly he remembered an old western starring the guy he’d been drinking with nights at Chandler’s—Robert Mitchum. The movie was Five Card Stud, and Mitchum played a preacher with a hollowed-out Bible in which he carried a hidden gun. Just when the villain thinks he’s got the drop on Rev. Mitchum, he opens the Bible and pulls out the gun and kills the bad guy. Johnny kept a close eye on Indian Al—and on his Bible.

  Indian Al climbed in the front seat and didn’t say much. He wasn’t acting like Robert Mitchum. He seemed like a beaten man. Once they got onto an open stretch of road, Johnny took out his gun and shot Indian Al once behind the ear, and then he fired a second time into the base of the neck. Johnny was usually a one-bullet guy, but this was too important. This was the end of the war. Neither Johnny nor Sal said anything as they drove back to the garage at the top of Winter Hill.

  As always, Whitey was in the crash car, with the scanners and a walkie-talkie. For this hit, Whitey was trailed by a second crash car, a boiler. They weren’t taking any chances now at the end.

  A bunch of guys were at the garage, waiting. They took the body out of the coupe, wrapped it in a heavy moving-company blanket, and put it into the trunk of a Ford sedan that had been stolen from a supermarket parking lot in Dorchester the previous day. Johnny told the guys to empty Al’s wallet and to strip all the jewelry off his body. It was supposed to look like a robbery. Johnny grabbed the Bible himself and opened it, just to make sure. It wasn’t hollowed out, of course. This wasn’t the Wild West, it was Winter Hill. Johnny tossed the Bible to one of the other guys.

  In the dark, the four-door with Indian Al’s body in the trunk was driven to the Bunker Hill projects in Charlestown. Everyone knew it wouldn’t take long for some project rats to steal it for a joyride. Two Townie kids, ages sixteen and fourteen, quickly noticed the popped ignition, but either failed to notice, or more likely didn’t care, that the trunk lock had also been popped. They drove the stolen Ford into the North End and back before the cops spotted them and turned on the blue lights.

  The joy-riding Townie kids hit two parked cars before they were pulled over. The cops had the car towed and eventually the popped trunk was noticed. Someone opened it and immediately saw Indian Al’s body, wrapped in the moving-company blanket. At the Northern Mortuary, the coroner ruled that he’d been dead only a few hours.

  That evening, when the Boston homicide detectives returned to headquarters on Berkeley Street from the Northern Mortuary, they found an FBI agent waiting for them—John Connolly, who’d recently been transferred back to his hometown after making a headline-grabbing arrest in New York. According to the police report, the cops “exchanged information” with Connolly.

  A couple of days later, Indian Al’s wife showed up at the Holiday Inn in Peabody with his three children, a daughter and two sons. After telling the clerk that her husband had had an accident, she paid his bill with a credit card. From his late brother Joe’s home, she called the Boston Police Department.

  “She was interested in her husband’s property. Stated he wore a ring he had been given by his brother Joseph before Joe died.…”

  The ring was gone, as was the gold chain with the small gold horn that she also inquired about. That was the last the cops heard from Mrs. Angeli.

  For a few weeks, life returned to normal at the garage. Everybody relaxed and concentrated on their own rackets. But then suddenly they got the word from Montreal—Stevie Flemmi was coming home.

  8

  Glory Days

  LAWYER: In or about May of 1974, did any other individual join the group, become another one of the principals in the Winter Hill Gang?

  MARTORANO: Y
es.

  LAWYER: Who was that?

  MARTORANO: Stevie Flemmi.

  LAWYER: And Mr. Flemmi, how was it that he joined up and became one of the principals in Winter Hill in or about May of 1974?

  MARTORANO: He was a fugitive for the four or five years before that. When he returned to Boston, he joined us right away.

  LATER, IN COURT, under oath, Stevie Flemmi would say that he never wanted to come back to Boston, that he was happy living as a fugitive in Montreal. But he never could quite explain why he kept calling H. Paul Rico, using the alias Jack from Boston, leaving a number for Rico to call him back at in Canada.

  After Salemme left the West Coast and returned to New York in late 1969, Stevie had traveled to Las Vegas with Poulos and a woman, all the while planning to murder Poulos at some point and bury him in the desert. Poulos had seen too much, knew too much, and he would fold under pressure—of that Stevie was certain. But before Stevie could eliminate him, he was almost arrested during a routine traffic stop by a Nevada state trooper.

  “He had all kinds of material in the trunk,” Salemme told the congressional investigators in 2003. “He said he had a shovel and a rope and all that shit in there. He had a gun under the seat.”

  The cops eventually let Flemmi and Poulos go, and soon after Flemmi shot him in the head, eliminating a possible witness to the murders of Wimpy and Walter Bennett. But there was a problem. When Stevie got the body into the Clark County desert, he realized it was not like the World War II movies he’d seen as a kid about the Desert Fox and El Alamein.

  “He couldn’t put him under,” Salemme recalled. “He said, the desert’s not soft. I said, what were you thinking, [that] it’s the Sahara? I said this is Nevada, this isn’t North Africa.”

  By early 1970, they were both living in Manhattan, in different hideouts. “I was living in an apartment,” Salemme said, “and The Man of La Mancha was playing right across the street. That’s the year it was.”

  Every week or so, the two fugitives would get together on a park bench in Central Park and exchange gossip from back home. They were waiting for something to break. Unbeknownst to them, so was a young FBI agent from Boston named John Connolly. He had worked his way back from San Francisco to New York, but he still wanted to return home. His father was sick. Connolly spoke to H. Paul Rico all the time, and after he retired in 1970, to Dennis Condon, who was now the “fugitive coordinator” in the Boston office. Connolly could no longer count on his political connections. Speaker McCormack had retired, and by 1972, J. Edgar Hoover would be dead. From now on, Connolly would have to advance on merit, or more likely, by figuring out a new way to put the fix in.

  Fortunately, he had Rico and Condon pushing for him. Both of them wanted Connolly back in Boston. In their new post-FBI retirement careers, they would still need eyes and ears in the Boston office, a go-to guy who operated the way they did, who could be counted upon to look the other way … for a friend … if the price was right. Who better to fill such a role than young John Connolly?

  Flemmi was also in contact with Rico, before and after his retirement from the Bureau. Stevie would call in as “Jack from Boston” and leave a message for Rico. If he wasn’t in the office, Flemmi would leave a number and Rico would return the call … as “Jack from Boston.” One nickname—it was a lot easier, only having to remember a single moniker.

  Finally, in 1972, Rico figured out a way to get Connolly back to Boston. Connolly would collar Frank Salemme—after all, as a kid, Connolly had known the older Salemme at the L Street bathhouse in Southie. They were only five or six years apart in age. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Connolly could pick him out of a crowd, even in Manhattan. The only problem was, no one wanted Flemmi caught with Salemme. Stevie was on the team. So Flemmi would have to leave New York before Zip could make his miraculous pinch.

  Salemme later explained what happened next with Flemmi: “One day he shows up in Central Park and tells me he’s leaving, he doesn’t know where he’s going but he’s leaving. He might have even said, I might go to Montreal. But he said, I’m getting out of here, it’s too hot down here.”

  Naturally Salemme wanted to know if something was up.

  “We got in kind of an argument about it … how come so sudden, what did you hear, did you hear anything? It was too spontaneous. It didn’t make sense, that two or three days before, nothing, and this day, bing, he’s going to leave.”

  Years later, when they were both jailed in the Plymouth House of Correction, as part of discovery, Salemme was given FBI documents detailing his movements in 1972. One report, filed by fugitive coordinator Condon, mentioned Flemmi and Salemme having an argument in New York.

  “There’s only one person it could be,” Salemme said. “It’s so singular.”

  Stevie left New York for Montreal. Meanwhile, fugitive coordinator Condon began sending Connolly one detailed report after another on where Salemme might be.

  Frank Salemme after his arrest in New York City in 1972.

  “It was shortly thereafter,” Salemme said, “that I was bumped into by John Connolly on Eighty-third Street and Third Avenue.”

  Almost thirty years later, Dennis Condon would be on the witness stand in federal court in Boston. Frank Salemme’s attorney would ask the now-retired fugitive coordinator if, after Salemme’s capture, he had ever sent any FBI offices anywhere any reports about the possible whereabouts of Stevie Flemmi.

  “No,” Condon replied.

  * * *

  AS RICO had predicted, Bobby Daddieco was no Barboza. But he was enough to sink Salemme. Connolly got his transfer back to Boston, and in Superior Court, Cadillac Frank got thirty years for the Fitzgerald bombing. He ended up in Walpole with Jimmy Flemmi. Joe Barboza was in solitary, talking about recanting his testimony in the Deegan murder trial, and then later recanting his recantation.

  Stevie, meanwhile, took trade-school courses in photoengraving—later, at the garage in Somerville, Flemmi told the others that he’d wanted to learn how to make counterfeit currency. He remained in contact with both the FBI and his friends in Somerville—Johnny Martorano and Howie Winter.

  Brian Halloran, murdered by Whitey in 1982.

  Everything was being taken care of back home for Stevie. But he had nobody to hang out with. However, Johnny and Howie had a connection to the Montreal underworld—a heavy boozer and drug user and all-around hard-luck hood named Brian Halloran. He was more a friend of Jimmy Martorano’s, but he was also tight with some Irish gangsters from Montreal, among them the brother of Eddie Johnson, the goalie for the Boston Bruins. They’d robbed a bank in Somerville together. They’d all gotten arrested, but they were still tight.

  So we all drove up to Montreal one night, me and Howie and Brian Halloran, to see Stevie. Must have been late ’71 or ’72. I remember I had a new Lincoln and that’s the car we took. So we introduced him to the Johnson brothers. We only spent the one night there. I don’t think Stevie ever did anything with the Johnsons, because, knowing him the way I do now, if the Johnsons had hooked up with him in anything, they would have ended up in prison, and they never did.

  Back at the garage, Whitey, one-fifth of the partners, was getting one-third of the profits. The plan had been for him to cut it up six ways, with the Mullens, but somehow the money never quite trickled down the way it was supposed to. But whatever Whitey made, it wasn’t enough. He was forty-three, the same age as Howie, and twelve years younger than Joe Mac, and he was still trying to make up for all that lost time in prison. By 1973, the Boston FBI reported that Whitey had been told by unnamed agents to back off his heavy-handed shakedowns in Southie, a warning that seemed to indicate that the Bureau still had hopes of recruiting him as an informant.

  Whitey didn’t like whacking up his proceeds with the Mullens. The first to go was Paulie McGonagle. Whitey talked Tommy King into helping him out on the hit. First Whitey went to a bank and got a number of new $20 bills. Then he and Tommy went to Paulie McGonagle and sho
wed him the cash, telling him it was counterfeit and would he like to buy some.

  Paulie, amazed at the quality of what he believed were the queer bills, immediately said he’d take as many as they could sell him. They made a date to meet early the next morning at the corner of O and Third streets. Whitey pulled up in his car, with Tommy King sitting beside him. Paulie McGonagle jumped in the backseat and King handed him back a briefcase. As Paulie opened it, King drew a gun and shot him in the head.

  Now that he was dead, Whitey wanted to make Paulie “do the Houdini,” as the Westies of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen used to say. As Whitey well knew, if the cops aren’t 100 percent certain that there’s been a murder, they seldom go all out. A missing person, at least if he’s an adult and especially if he has a long criminal record, never receives quite as much attention as a dead body. And the cops wouldn’t find McGonagle’s body until 2000. He just … disappeared.

  They buried him on Tenean Beach in Dorchester. Then Whitey dumped his car off a dock in Charlestown—a swerve to point the finger at Charlestown criminals. Finally he threw McGonagle’s wallet into the water, making sure to immediately drop an anonymous dime to the police so that they could fish out the wallet before it sank to the bottom.

  All in all, the McGonagle hit was a good piece of work. Whitey was already beginning to perfect some of the techniques that would serve him well in the years ahead—devious plotting, making the body disappear, planting evidence that pointed away from himself, and, in this case, laying the groundwork for a future hit. Throwing in with Whitey on the McGonagle hit, Tommy King had started down the path that would lead to his own murder. He had shown himself capable of shooting someone from his own crew, someone he knew well. Over the next few years, Whitey would often remind the others at the garage of Tommy’s treachery, neglecting to mention who had actually concocted the plot to eliminate Paulie McGonagle.