Hitman

by Howie Carr

  Subsequently, the offer was made to Wheeler, but he wasn’t interested. And from then on, Wheeler seemed more interested in getting the people who were stealing from him arrested. Callahan kept saying, he’s trying to get us indicted.

  In early 1981, the FBI finally installed the bugs, at both the Dog House and Larry Baione’s “clubhouse” on North Margin Street. Within days, the feds knew they had more than enough to put Jerry Angiulo behind bars for the rest of his life.

  In addition to the incriminating tapes, the underboss turned out to be a font of unintentional humor, profanely spouting off on everything from the untimely passing of a loanshark victim (“He can’t be dead—he owes me $13,000!”) to the low IQs of the next generation of hoodlums (“I don’t need tough guys, I need intelligent tough guys”).

  He fulminated against his own “college boy” son: “That’s a fuckin’ order ’cause you’re a fuckin’ idiot.”

  Just as Zip had expected, the Hill was talked about continually. But by using Whitey and Stevie as sources for the warrant, Zip had saved his friends once more. Angiulo bragged that Whitey, among others, was one of his hitmen, which of course he was, or had been, during the Indian War. But Zip quickly inserted a report into Whitey’s file, flatly stating that “source [Whitey] is not a ‘hit man’ for Jerry Angiulo as has been contended.”

  One night, Larry Baione listened as Jerry Angiulo discussed the breakup of the Winter Hill Gang into territories.

  “Whitey’s got the whole of Southie. Stevie is got the whole of the South End. Johnny’s got niggers.… Howie knows this.”

  In the long run, the bugged conversation most damaging to the Hill didn’t even involve Angiulo. It took place at Baione’s club on North Margin Street. One of his soldiers, John Cincotti, had been working with a relative of his, Jerry Matricia. It was the same Matricia who a few years earlier had disappeared from Nevada after losing $90,000 he had won for the Hill in Las Vegas betting on one of the fixed races in which Tony Ciulla had run Spread the Word.

  Now Matricia had returned to Boston, and Larry and his fellow made man Ralphie Chong were concerned that if Whitey or Stevie saw Matricia, “they’re going to hit him,” as Baione put it.

  Late one night, Matricia was brought to North Margin Street to speak with Larry, who had been drinking heavily, as he did most evenings. Baione began with a brief history lesson for Matricia.

  “If you fuck someone that’s friendly with us—just so you understand me, do you know that the Hill is us? Maybe you didn’t know that, did you?”

  “No,” said Matricia, “I didn’t.”

  “Did you know Howie and Stevie, they’re us? We’re the fuckin’ Hill with Howie.… You know that they’re with us. You didn’t know that?”

  Matricia said he didn’t know that. So Baione told him that from now on, whatever money he made with Cincotti would go directly to pay off his debt to the Hill.

  “You understand?” Baione asked Matricia. “After all, you fucked them. These are nice people. These are the kind of fuckin’ people that straighten a thing out. They’re with us. We’re together. And we cannot tolerate them getting fucked.”

  * * *

  ALL THE Boston agents took part in the bugging operations, sitting in the cramped surveillance vans for hours on end in the dead of winter, monitoring the conversations as they were recorded. For such tedious, uncomfortable duty, most of the agents dressed casually, in sweatsuits and sneakers. But not Zip. At his retirement dinner at Joe Tecce’s in 1990, another agent described Zip’s daily arrival at the van, decked out in “tan slacks, Gucci loafers, velour shirt open to the chest with enough gold showing to be the envy of most members of the Gambino crime family.”

  Soon Zip Connolly had a new nickname, at least among the younger, straighter agents. They called him “Cannoli.”

  * * *

  WHITEY AND Stevie were kept apprised of the tapes’ content—information they did not share with their “partner” down in Florida. One night, agent John Morris called Whitey and said he had a tape he wanted Whitey and Stevie to hear. The two gangsters rented a room at the Colonnade on Huntington Avenue and laid in a few bottles of wine for the heavy-drinking Morris. Morris arrived after business hours and played the tape for them—it was Larry Baione drunkenly threatening to kill Whitey and Stevie. Then Morris himself got drunk, so drunk that from then on Whitey and Stevie called him “Vino.” Whitey ended up driving the crapulous G-man back to Lexington, with Stevie following behind. They kept the FBI tape he’d left behind. It would come in handy, if Vino ever got out of line, not that that was likely to happen, as alcoholic and as crooked as he had become.

  Zip Connolly, left, arrests Jerry Angiulo’s brother, Frankie “the Cat,” in 1983.

  Angiulo wouldn’t know for months that he was finished. It was tedious work, transcribing all those tapes. Angiulo would remain free until September 1983. So he went about his usual business, and one of his tasks was getting the Hill to start paying back the $250,000 they still owed him. He’d frozen the vig, and in return, Whitey and Stevie had promised to start paying down the principal at the rate of $5,000 a week.

  They made one payment, then stopped again.

  “Jesus Christ all fuckin’ mighty,” Jerry complained to one of his brothers, “why haven’t these guys been in touch with me? I don’t understand it. Fuck me maybe, they don’t like me. They got a right not to like me. It’s not a problem … but they been jerkin’ me around.”

  And for a very good reason. Jerry Angiulo wasn’t going to be on the street much longer.

  * * *

  JOHN CALLAHAN decided he couldn’t take any more chances. Roger Wheeler had to go. After the murder of his Florida cashier, Wheeler had decided to sell the fronton in Connecticut. It was just too close to New York, and he was sick of mobsters. He stepped up the audit. Callahan flew to Florida.

  I think Callahan and I were having dinner at Yesterday’s. It was a fancy French restaurant on Oakland Park Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. We were up in this private dining area. The Plum Room, they called it.

  He says to me, this guy won’t take our money. We still have to stop him. We need to get rid of him. Can you help us?

  I said no. On something like this, I’d have to check with my partners, Whitey and Stevie, but I didn’t think they’d be interested because Wheeler was a legitimate guy. Killing somebody like that would bring down a whole lot of heat. Callahan says, tell them the deal, the $10,000 a week, it isn’t dead. Rico says he’ll propose the same deal to Wheeler’s widow once he’s dead. Then he starts telling me, you know this guy Wheeler cheats at golf. He knows I can’t stand cheaters, that’s why I never liked Castucci. So he’s trying to push my buttons, only he doesn’t do it nearly as effectively as Whitey and Stevie do. What do I care, some guy in Oklahoma cheats at golf?

  It took a while for everything to fall into place. Despite Johnny’s misgivings, Whitey and Stevie were immediately on board—in those precocaine days, $10,000 a week was awfully tempting. But there was more to whacking Wheeler than money, Johnny realized later. If the skimming investigation went forward, Rico was likely in jeopardy. And Rico was part of the original crew—the one Johnny would later come to consider the greatest criminal enterprise of all in Boston, the one that also included Whitey, Stevie, and Zip.

  Once they were in, Whitey and Stevie inexplicably allowed Callahan to talk them into a terrible decision—offering the murder contract on Wheeler to Brian Halloran.

  In January 1981, Callahan invited Halloran up to his apartment above the Rusty Scupper. Whitey was there, even though he didn’t like Halloran, never had. He was a boozer, a cokehead. His brother was a state cop; Halloran was a complete fuck-up. And most important, he could put the finger on Whitey for the Litif hit. Whitey had taken to calling him “Balloonhead”—recycling the Mullens’ old nickname for Kenny Killeen.

  Despite all that, Whitey signed off on Callahan’s decision to offer the contract on Wheeler to Balloonhead. After hearing the o
ffer, Halloran immediately asked if there wasn’t some other alternative. That was not the right answer. Whitey stood up and told Halloran they’d get back to him later. A couple of weeks after that, Callahan told him to come back up to the apartment. There he handed Halloran two hundred $100 bills—$20,000 in cash.

  “We shouldn’t have involved you to begin with,” Callahan said. Halloran then went out and bought himself a new car, parked it at Logan Airport, and flew off to Fort Lauderdale for a two-week bender.

  Callahan was also headed for Fort Lauderdale.

  He tells me he’s been talking to Whitey and Stevie, that they’re in, and they want me to handle it out in Oklahoma. Nobody tells me nothing about Halloran being offered the contract. Callahan says he’s also been talking to Rico, and Rico wants me to ask Joe McDonald to help out. That surprised me, but I called Joe, and he says, “Yeah, I do owe Rico a favor.” That’s when he tells me how Rico set up Ronnie Dermody for Buddy McLean back in ’64. So here’s Rico calling in the marker almost twenty years later, and the guy who’s paying off, Joe Mac, isn’t even the guy who ran up the original tab, he’s just doing it for his friend who’s been dead fifteen years now. But that’s how it worked back then, just like Whitey called in the favor I owed Billy O.

  So I got back to Stevie, and told him Joe’s in. Then I told him what equipment we’d need for the hit. They sent it all down on the bus. Next thing Callahan gives me a piece of paper from Rico. He’s written down all of Wheeler’s addresses, where he parks his car, everything. At the bottom there was a description of what Wheeler looks like—Rico said he had a “ruddy complexion.” A ruddy complexion—when I read that I knew a cop had written it, an FBI guy. John Callahan or anybody else would have said, “a red face.” “Ruddy complexion” is how an FBI guy talks when he’s trying to impress somebody, even another cop.

  So now we have to fly out there, to Oklahoma. I tell Patty, Why don’t you go back to Boston to see Loretta? I told her, I’m meeting one of my kids at Disney World. She doesn’t believe me, but what can I do, tell her I’m going out to Oklahoma to kill some guy? She’d go, “Yeah sure.” It got so that I’d tell her a lie and she’d believe it. You tell her the truth, she says you’re lying. I’m telling you, guys know exactly what I’m talking about.

  Richard Aucoin and John Kelly—Joe Mac’s alias—flew out to Oklahoma City on the same flight, sitting far apart. They rented a car, then drove to Tulsa, about an hour away. They changed motels every couple of days. All of Rico’s information was solid, but they had to wait for the package to arrive at the bus station—handguns, a carbine, a grease gun, silencers, bulletproof vests, ski masks, a shimmy, and a dent puller for stealing cars. It was the standard Winter Hill hit kit, minus grenades. In a bit of underworld humor, the package was addressed to “Joe Russo”—the Boston Mafia’s top hitman.

  Joe stole the boiler, popped the ignition, and we stashed it near the country club in a big apartment complex. Joe was sixty-five, but you’d think he was twenty-five. He was a ball of fire. One of his kids had gotten hurt real bad in an accident, so he wasn’t even thinking about drinking.

  Then I get an update from Callahan. Rico gave him a tee-time for Wheeler at his country club, two o’clock Saturday. We drive out to the golf course, Southern Hills Country Club. We spot his Caddy, but remember, I’ve still never seen this guy. So we park a few rows closer to the club. I’m in full disguise—we’d picked up that stuff at a theatrical store in Tulsa. Full beard, sunglasses, a baseball cap.

  The body of Roger Wheeler in his car in Tulsa in 1981. Crouching, wearing suspenders, is Tulsa police detective Mike Huff, who 22 years later would arrest H. Paul Rico in Miami for Wheeler’s murder.

  Finally I see a guy coming down the hill from the club to the parking lot, might be Wheeler. I let him walk past our car, then I fall in behind him. If he gets in the Caddy, I clip him. If he goes to another car, I just keep walking. But it’s him, he’s getting in the car. He doesn’t hear me, he’s about to close the door but I grab it to keep it open. He jumps back in the seat, startled, and I let him have it, one shot, between the eyes, .38 snub nose. But when I fired, the gun exploded. The chamber flew open, the bullets fell out—I’d wiped them down as I was loading the gun, so there were no prints. I just left the bullets there on the pavement. I closed the door to Wheeler’s car; I walked back to our car, got in, and Joe drove off.

  LAWYER: Did he say anything when he got shot?

  MARTORANO: Not that I heard.

  LAWYER: Did he seem surprised he was going to die?

  MARTORANO: I think it was too fast.

  LAWYER: Let me ask you something, when you had the gun that close to his face, did you look at his eyes?

  MARTORANO: No.

  LAWYER: Did he look at you?

  MARTORANO: I wasn’t thinking about that, no.

  LAWYER: What were you thinking about?

  MARTORANO: Getting away with this.

  They drove directly back to the apartment complex, dropped off the boiler, and got back into the rental car. Then they returned to their hotel, where Joe chopped up the .38 with a special saw that had been sent down from Boston. Johnny meanwhile was cutting up the false beard with some scissors, then flushing the pieces down the toilet. They’d driven by a marsh one day, and now they returned, Joe driving, Johnny throwing the pieces of the gun into the water.

  Then they drove back to Oklahoma City, where they stopped at the bus station to check the hit kit. It would be shipped back to Fort Lauderdale, where Joe would store it, just in case. You never knew. Then Johnny flew back to Orlando, and Joe caught the next plane back to Fort Lauderdale.

  I get home, I call Patty in Somerville, I tell her to come back home. A couple of days later, she’s back and she’s stewing, I can tell. Finally she says to me, I don’t believe you went to Disney World to see your kid. I got no way of checking up on you, she says. She figured I was with another broad. It was a question of trust, and there was none. But like I said, under the circumstances, what was I supposed to tell her?

  Callahan was pleased. He’d been afraid he was going to be indicted, but now he didn’t have to worry. His next trip to Florida, he sat down with Johnny and told him he wanted to express his gratitude.

  He said he wanted to help out on the expenses, and how did $50,000 sound? I told him it sounded good. It was like a bonus, a gesture of appreciation, like Jerry Angiulo with Indian Al. Both cases it was found money. I never discussed payment for killing with either Angiulo or Callahan. It was a favor. I mean, I took it, sure, but a hit like that—if you were doing it for money, it would have to be worth a million. I did it because Callahan was a friend. So I figured, Joe’s gotta get half of it, because he’s my partner on the deal. That leaves me $25,000, but Whitey and Stevie are my partners too, so each of them gets a third, the same as me. So I arranged for Callahan to get the money to the various parties. I think Leo McDonald got 25 grand for Joe, and then George Kaufman got the $25,000 and split it three ways. I ended up with, like, eight grand.

  After that, every once in a while I’d ask Callahan, what’s the update? Rico had said, once Wheeler’s gone, we can try to buy the place from the widow. Callahan tells me he’d made another offer, but it was turned down again. I don’t even know how hard they were trying, because once Wheeler was gone, Rico somehow won his son over, so he was back in tight with the owners.

  Back in Tulsa, the investigation into Wheeler’s murder went nowhere. The trails quickly led back to Boston and Miami, but the FBI offices in both cities were less than helpful to the Oklahoma cops. The Boston office finally agreed to send down mug shots of Whitey and Stevie—but when the photos arrived, the Tulsa police were amazed that the two gangsters were wearing suits and ties, as if the feds were trying to make them look as little like Wheeler’s killer as possible.

  The FBI report on Wheeler’s murder painted a remarkably unsympathetic portrait of Wheeler. The feds more or less described him as an unscrupulous, tax-evading sonofabitch,
a variation on Callahan’s theme with Johnny that he “cheated” at golf.

  Zip Connolly told Whitey and Stevie to dress up in suits and ties before the FBI took their mug shots in 1981 to send to the Tulsa police.

  Tulsa police detective Mike Huff flew to Miami to interview H. Paul Rico in his well-appointed chambers at the World Jai Alai fronton. Rico was obdurate, refusing to answer even the simplest questions. He didn’t even bother to hide his contempt for the Oklahoma lawman.

  “I walked out of Rico’s office in a state of disbelief,” Huff said in 2010. “I’d been expecting to talk to another cop, and instead I ran into the Godfather.”

  * * *

  AS MUCH as the Boston FBI had done for Whitey, it had done at least as much for his younger brother, Sen. Billy Bulger. In the mid-seventies, Billy was stuck in the number-three position in the leadership of the state senate, with no place to go. Then, the senate president suddenly resigned in a scandal over an old $1,000 check. Even more fortuitously for Billy, the majority leader, a younger man, also from Suffolk County, was suddenly ensnared in a bribery case involving state building contracts. His name was Joe DiCarlo.

  DiCarlo had a lot of clout, and was assured by the then U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill of Cambridge that he would not be indicted. But then the FBI abruptly reopened the investigation, flying Boston agents to Texas to interview new witnesses. DiCarlo was indicted and convicted, along with a Republican senator who served as his bagman.

  Suddenly, in 1978, Billy Bulger was the president of the state senate.

  Quickly, Billy began settling scores with his own enemies—and Whitey’s. Whitey had been fired years earlier from his no-show janitor’s job at the Suffolk County courthouse—his old boss and his top staff had their pay frozen in the state budget for five years. Jack O’Donovan, the lieutenant colonel in the state police who had complained to the FBI about Whitey’s insidious influence on their agents, was targeted in an anonymous rider to the 1981 state budget that would have forced him and three other senior MSP brass to retire. The governor vetoed the provision, and Billy Bulger said he had no idea who had inserted the outside rider designed to end O’Donovan’s career.