Hitman

by Howie Carr

  * * *

  ON THE other hand, it was a lot of work, not to mention risk, for Whitey to kill somebody basically by himself. So for his next victim, Whitey decided to bring in his Somerville partners. Spike O’Toole was one of the last important McLaughlin Gang members still at large in Boston. He’d been arrested with Georgie McLaughlin back in 1965. He was the sole survivor of the McLaughlin hit squad that had wounded Jimmy Flemmi in Dorchester.

  Spike O’Toole was given a pass when he got out of prison. Somebody spoke up for him, probably Larry Baione, who’d done time with him. But then we start hearing from Eddie Connors, down at the Bulldog Tavern on Savin Hill Avenue. He’s talking out of school, Spike is. I never liked him; he shot the Bear. Howie didn’t like him ’cause he was with the other guys during the war. So Spike starts drinking, and when he drinks, he gets to talking about retaliating. He’s gonna kill Howie. Whether he really means it, who knows, but we do know, he’s in the Bulldog night after night. He’s a dangerous kid, he shoulda got shot already, and this was an excuse to do it. I mean, we’re not going to let him kill Howie. That’s why Spike had to go. Why’d Connors tell us? He might figure he doesn’t want any trouble with us. Suitcase Fidler was his partner.

  Spike O’Toole, murdered by Johnny in 1973.

  Suitcase Fidler was an older Charlestown hood with a dodgy reputation in the underworld. During the gang war, he’d gone back and forth between Somerville and Charlestown, and had somehow managed to survive, if not thrive. One time he was in prison, and his family was broke. The Fidlers went to the veterans’ agent of the city of Boston, a guy named Birmingham, and he filed a phony welfare application for the family. This was before 1968, in the days when each city or town, not the state, was responsible for all welfare payments in the municipality.

  Somehow, it was discovered that Birmingham had falsified documents to get the Fidlers on general relief, as it was called. He was indicted and charged with welfare fraud. As his lawyer he hired a young state rep who pulled a few strings and got the charges dismissed. It was Billy Bulger, Whitey’s younger brother.

  Billy didn’t make a lot of money off such cases, but he did make friends, for himself and for Whitey. In 1968, during the race riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., several Southie youths were arrested for stabbing a black guy to death in front of his girlfriend on D Street. Their first trial ended in a hung jury, but then one of the Southie thugs, Kevin O’Neil, hired Billy as his lawyer. The charges were dropped. Like Birmingham, O’Neil owed the Bulgers.

  Kevin O’Neil, Whitey underling, acquitted on murder charges in 1969.

  * * *

  IT WAS December 1973. The decision had been made to whack Spike O’Toole. Once more they set up shop in Joe Mac’s place, the Fire House, waiting for the call from Eddie Connors. They were hanging around, playing cards, with the boiler right outside Joe’s house, ready to go. They also had cars moving around Dorchester, looking for him.

  Finally, the Hill sent somebody into the Bulldog and he spotted Spike. They drove over immediately—for a hit so close to Southie, Whitey Bulger insisted on driving.

  They watched Spike unsteadily leave the Bulldog, and he reeled down to the corner to wait for the bus. He hadn’t been out of prison that long and the fact that he didn’t even have a car yet obviously meant that he was broke. But over the years, O’Toole had proved himself a capable guy and nobody felt like taking any chances. He was standing behind a mailbox at Savin Hill and Dot Avenue when Whitey pulled up in the boiler. Johnny let him have it with a grease gun—shot Spike right through the mailbox—and O’Toole fell to the ground, perforated. He’d been dead drunk; now Spike O’Toole was just dead. But Joe Mac jumped out of the car anyway, ran up to O’Toole, stood over his body, and lifted his ski mask. Assuming that Spike was still technically alive, Joe Mac wanted Spike to know that he had been killed by Winter Hill. After showing his face to Spike, Joe Mac pulled the mask back down and fired twice into Spike’s head.

  “I just wanted to make sure he was dead,” he explained later.

  Back in the car, Whitey had other concerns. A pedestrian had heard the shots, and foolishly had started crossing the street toward the boiler. In the dark, Whitey reached for a gun, then realized he didn’t have one. He settled for pointing his index finger at the concerned citizen, enough of a warning to get the guy to keep moving, away from the car.

  Later, back at the garage, Whitey told the others he’d learned a very important lesson.

  “Never again do I go out on a hit without a gun,” he said.

  * * *

  GEORGE KAUFMAN got a call one day in the garage from Bobby Daddieco’s sister. She said her brother wanted to talk to him. George said sure, and soon Bobby was on the line. He was in the Midwest, in very loose federal custody, and he wanted everybody back in Boston to know that it was only Frankie Salemme he hated and wanted to get even with, not Stevie.

  Kaufman realized what Daddieco was getting at, and told him it would be better if he spoke directly to Howie Winter.

  Daddieco calls Howie and tells him, no way is he interested in testifying against Stevie, but he needs to get away from the feds, and he’s got no money and no wheels, and he could sure use a truck. Howie says, I think that can be worked out; we’ll get a truck for your sister, and she can get it to you. Howie tells him that if Stevie comes back, we’ll pay you every week, through your sister, to stay away for six months, until we can get the charges dropped.

  A smiling Stevie Flemmi returns to Boston in 1974.

  Up in Montreal, Stevie was ecstatic. The Hill bought the truck and came up with some cash for Daddieco’s sister. Next they got a lawyer, Bob Dinsmore, who would represent Stevie when he returned to Boston to turn himself in. Johnny called a Statie he knew from Enrico’s to handle Stevie’s surrender; they didn’t want any hero cops deciding to shoot it out with the dangerous fugitive. Then they arranged for a bail bondsman to handle Stevie’s initial court appearance, when he would be charged with both the murder of Billy Bennett and the bombing of John Fitzgerald’s car.

  I mean, we didn’t figure Stevie would even get bail. How could he, with those charges, and the fact that his partner’s already been convicted of the bombing? Plus he’s been on the lam all these years. But then he walks into the courthouse, a big smile on his face, with all the newspaper photographers taking pictures of him, and two hours later, he’s out on bail. Now, of course, what we didn’t know then was that all the time we thought we were the ones setting up the surrender, it was really the FBI that was doing the heavy lifting for Stevie. We took him back to the garage for a party, and nobody was suspicious. We all just said the same thing: “Damn, what a lucky bastard!”

  Flemmi knew that there was one guy who might wonder a little more intently than the others about Stevie’s sweetheart deal, especially since he had so much time to think about it, sitting in his cell down at MCI-Norfolk. Cadillac Frank Salemme was definitely the guy most likely to put the pieces together. After all, years earlier, down at the Office, the Man—Raymond L. S. Patriarca—had always warned Salemme to watch his back with Flemmi.

  “He went to my house and saw my first wife when he got bailed,” Salemme recalled, “and I’ll never forget this, strictly the dog-and-pony show. He’s my man, he’s this and that, he broke down crying. And there I was saying, he’ll do the right thing, L. S., and L. S. telling me Stevie’s a phony. But he did go to the house and make the appearance, because he knew it would get back to me, and I’d take the attitude well, at least he’s back, maybe he’ll do something now, but nothing.”

  * * *

  LIKE WHITEY Bulger, Stevie Flemmi was determined to make up for lost time. In Town made some overtures to him about joining the Mafia, but Stevie figured the opportunities were better in Somerville. And they were. Tony Ciulla had finally figured out how to fix horse races and not get caught.

  At the beginning of his career, Fat Tony had drugged horses. Years later, in state prison, hi
s partner Billy Barnoski wrote an essay about their early days fixing races at county fairs. He called his story “The Swinging Dick Derby.” In it, Barnoski’s first-person narrator recounts giving the favorite horse so many drugs that by the time the race went off, his penis is dragging on the track.

  There’s all kinds of ways to fix a race. You can past-post—bet after you know the winner. But with technology that got harder, plus you can get killed for that. On the dogs, they’d cut their nails, which slows ’em down. You can win a race by drugging a horse or two, but the problem is, they drug-test after the race, and then they throw out the results and usually somebody gets arrested. It’s a lot better to control the jockeys—however you can. That’s what Ciulla learned from experience. Drugs, bribes, hookers—Ciulla figured out which buttons to push with the jockeys.

  Billy Barnoski, Fat Tony Ciulla’s partner.

  How it worked was, Ciulla would get the racing forms ahead of time, and he’d determine which of his jockeys was in which race. If he had two or three jockeys in one race, the opportunity was there to make some money. If they were riding favorites, that was better, because you want to stop the favorites and then bet the long shots. Obviously, long shots are where you can make some real money.

  If you’ve got the favorites stopped, then you bet all the combinations of the horses that have a shot—quinellas, trifectas, exactas. We’d tie up the betting windows for a half hour before post-time, betting every possible combo. They call it wheeling—you “wheel” the three or four combinations that have a chance. We could wipe out the pool for $2, and win 20 grand. The problem with wheeling was, it was labor-intensive. To make it work, you need a bunch of guys at the track, because bookies don’t take that kind of action; it’s too complicated. Bookies only take win-place-show. We had to have a lot of guys at the tracks.

  Another thing you have to worry about: horse players can read the forms. They know how long a race should take, depending on the field. If you’ve got a bunch of horses that should be coming in at, say, 1:01 or 1:02, and then the winner comes in at 1:08 or 1:10, a lot of people are going to figure out that something is going on. Maybe even the steward. But hell, chances are the steward’s betting too. They’re like everybody else—they just want to know if the race is “live,” and who they should bet on. “Live” is a track word. It means your horse has a good shot, in our case a real good shot.

  The other problem was that after you win a string of races, the word goes out, “Don’t take no more horses from that guy.” The bookies shut you off, good-bye. Bookies know what’s happening. The “live” horse becomes what they call an “order” horse. “Order” means watch out, something’s going on.

  The Hill needed bookies, to bet straight up on Ciulla’s fixed races. Sometimes they used “beards”—guys who weren’t connected, or at least weren’t known to be with the Hill. Suddenly they would go on these incredible winning streaks, until the day came when the bookies refused to take any more action from them. Soon the Hill was inquiring of everyone they did business with, do you know any bookies we can bet with?

  One of the guys they approached was Richie Castucci, the Revere hustler and owner of the Ebb Tide, Joe Barboza’s old hangout on the beach. Now, in the swinging seventies, Castucci was running strip joints—the Surf and the Squire—moving a thousand cases of beer a week, pulling in above and beyond the cover charges and the hookers and the $15 “champagne cocktails.” It was serious money and the Hill had a piece of it. They were also involved with Castucci in other scams, one of which involved bootlegged 8-track rock tapes.

  Richie Castucci, Revere wiseguy, murdered by Johnny Martorano in 1976

  Castucci was another degenerate gambler, who’d been a high-roller in Las Vegas since the late 1950s. He was such a regular that he attended Sammy Davis Jr.’s wedding to Swedish actress Mae Britt there in 1960. None of Castucci’s show-biz connections meant anything to Winter Hill. They only cared about finding more bookies. Castucci told Johnny that he knew a guy in New York, Jack Mace, who could handle all the action they wanted to give him.

  So we hit this guy Jack Mace three or four times, for big money. Finally he calls me up. He says, look, if you’re going to do this to me, you gotta give me some real action too. See, he was big enough that he could lay off a lot of the “live” action we were giving him, but why should he do it if we’re not giving him a chance to make some money, too? I understood. At least he wasn’t cutting us off, period, which is what a lot of them had already done. Mace says, if you want to keep betting the horses with me, give me some sports action too. And that’s when we started getting into the heavy stuff. We thought we were playing everybody for suckers, but what we didn’t realize is that they were sucking us in, and in the end, we’re the ones who got suckered.

  But while it lasted, it would be boom times for the Hill. Their top bookmakers were bringing in big money. Sometimes during football season in the fall, the Hill would split up $75,000 in a good week, and that was just the partners’ cut.

  Soon everyone was driving a new car. They had jewelry, and so did their girlfriends and wives. Joe McDonald always had access to as much stolen jewelry as they wanted. Soon the partners were dipping into the till to buy one another jewelry or gold chains on their birthdays.

  In December 1975, the other guys presented Johnny with a five-carat diamond pinkie ring. It was beautiful, but Johnny wanted an even more ostentatious setting. He took it down to the Jewelers’ Building on Washington Street and had a guy he knew reset the diamond. From then on, Johnny never took the ring off his finger.

  They kept expanding—after killing Indian Al, they inherited his territory in the Merrimack Valley. It wasn’t long before the Lowell Police Department was noticing new people sitting down with the city’s top bookmaker, Jackie McDermott, an affable ex-pressman for the Lowell Sun. After killing Indian Al, they had ordered McDermott to a meeting at the Holiday Inn on the Somerville-Charlestown Line—the same motel where Wimpy Bennett and Stevie Flemmi had worked out a truce with Buddy McLean in early 1965 during the Irish Gang War.

  McDermott was ushered in to see the new bosses. He only had one question: Why was Indian Joe hit in such a brazen way, in Medford Square?

  “We wanted,” said Whitey, “to show everyone how easy it was.”

  Now the Hill was moving around Lowell, setting things up. One of the new guys who called himself “Nick,” the Lowell police reported, “is believed to be John V. Martorano.”

  Jackie McDermott, Lowell bookie, murdered by Billy Barnoski in 1988.

  The Lowell police knew of the reputation “Nick” had in Boston, and one night a plainclothesman approached McDermott and asked why he wasn’t carrying a gun, now that “Nick” was in town, putting things together for the Hill. Jackie McDermott waved off the cop.

  “Guys like Nick,” he said, “if they want to get you, they’re gonna get you, whether you’re carrying or not.”

  There were no problems in Lowell.

  * * *

  NEXT, EVERYONE at the garage was buying houses. Stevie purchased one in Milton for Marion Hussey and her family, which now included three of his children, although Stevie insisted that on the birth certificates, she list her ex-husband rather than him as the father. He’d known guys like the late Spike O’Toole who’d been lugged into court for nonpayment of child support. Stevie didn’t need any of that shit. After all, he was doing the right thing by his second family, moving them out of the city. None of them would have to worry about the Boston public schools anymore. Then he built a swimming pool in the backyard.

  Finally, he bought the house next door for his parents and moved them out of Mattapan, which had “tipped” a few years earlier. Once his parents were settled in, Stevie called Frank the Trapper to install a large hidden compartment in the house where he could stash some more of his weapons.

  Meanwhile, Whitey soon had a house on Silver Street in South Boston. Howie Winter got a house on Madison Street in Somerville.

&n
bsp; Johnny bought two houses, one for his second wife and her son Vincent, the other for Barbara and Johnny Jr. Nancy might have gotten one, too, except that she was remarried. It wouldn’t have looked right.

  I couldn’t put the houses in my own name. That would have been asking for trouble. So for my second wife I used Charlie Raso. It was on Main Street in Medford, a shack basically when I bought it. I think I paid 50 grand, put down 5 or 10 as a down payment, and Charlie took the mortgage, which I paid every month. Then I gutted the place, used subcontractors working under the table. That way you can launder cash and increase the value of the property and you don’t leave a paper trail, which means the IRS can’t come after you later. If they ask you, Why is the house so much more valuable now than it was when you bought it, you just say, It’s the market. Everything’s going up.

  For Barbara and Johnny, I used George Kaufman as the straw, because I bought in Chestnut Hill, his general neighborhood. I think I paid 90 grand for that place—20 down and a $70,000 mortgage.

  One day in 1974, Johnny and Stevie were driving around Brookline Village and Johnny decided to stop in at George Taylor’s jewelry store to check out the inventory.

  Inside, Johnny introduced Stevie to Taylor, and then Taylor brought over a new employee, a beautiful young blonde named Debbie Davis. Her father owned the service station across the street. After World War II he had brought back a German war bride, Olga. The Davises had a lot of kids and not much money. Before they left that day, Johnny noticed Stevie whispering something to the teenager, and that she was giggling back at him, like they were both in high school.