Hitman

by Howie Carr

Among the honest FBI agents, there was shock over what was tantamount to a death sentence for Halloran. The U.S. attorney was William Weld, a future governor of Massachusetts. In federal court in 1997, Weld recalled what he was casually told by the number-two agent in the Boston office, Robert Fitzpatrick.

  “You know, people always say there’s a danger for this snitch or that snitch,” Fitzpatrick had told Weld of Halloran’s predicament. “I’m telling you, this guy—I would not want to be standing next to this guy.”

  * * *

  THE GUY who was unfortunate enough to be standing next to Brian Halloran was named Michael Donahue. On the afternoon of May 11, 1982, Donahue was drinking with Halloran at the Pier, a barroom on Northern Avenue on the South Boston waterfront. Blocks away, Whitey was hanging out at the gang’s new appliance store at F Street and West Broadway. It was simpler, moving hijacked appliances directly without having to worry about any fences, plus without a middleman the markup was higher. There were never any complaints from the customers, several of whom were FBI agents, including Zip Connolly.

  John Hurley, the Charlestown hood who’d fingered Indian Joe—and earlier the unlucky bartender Milano—dropped into the appliance store and mentioned casually that he’d just seen Brian Halloran drinking at the Pier. Hurley apparently had no idea what he was setting in motion, but Whitey immediately snapped to attention. Within an hour, he had Kevin Weeks stationed outside Jimmy’s Harborside, across Northern Avenue from the Pier. Whitey arrived a few minutes later in a souped up blue Chevy that they called “the tow truck.”

  Among other things, the “tow truck” was outfitted with a specially built oil tank in the trunk. With the flick of a button under the steering wheel, Whitey could release enough oil from the tank onto the street to put any pursuing vehicle into a spin. Another button would release clouds of blue exhaust. The license plates were of course stolen. The hit car was usually stashed in a hidden garage in the Lower End, to be taken out only for tasks like this one.

  By the time he was in the hit car, Whitey was wearing a brown Afro wig. In it, he looked a lot like Jimmy Flynn, another Winter Hill associate who was widely known to be feuding with Halloran.

  In the backseat of the hit car was a second shooter Whitey had rounded up in Southie. Weeks later testified that the second man was wearing a ski mask, which no other witness ever mentioned, and which would have drawn attention on a sunny weekday afternoon in May. But by putting a ski mask on the second shooter, Weeks was relieved of the necessity of having to identify Whitey’s backup. Later that would make it easier for him to return to South Boston after he served his brief prison sentence.

  Whitey had given Weeks a walkie-talkie, and told him that when Balloonhead left the bar, he should radio simply that “the balloon is in the air.”

  Halloran was getting a ride from his friend Donahue, a father of three sons. They both stumbled out of the bar, and Donahue walked across the street to retrieve his blue compact car. Weeks gave the signal as Donahue stopped in front of the bar to pick up Halloran. Just as Balloonhead got into the car, Whitey pulled up alongside Donahue’s car.

  “Brian,” he yelled, and then he aimed his automatic carbine out the front window and began shooting at point-blank range. Mortally wounded, Donahue floored the car, and it lurched across the street, finally coming to a stop when it hit a building. Whitey pulled around and emptied the carbine into the car as Weeks sped off.

  By the time the police arrived, Donahue was dead, and Halloran was going fast. The cops asked him who had shot him.

  “Jimmy Flynn,” he said, and then died.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, Zip Connolly and John “Vino” Morris stopped by Whitey’s condo to question him. Their question for him was, Do you have any beer? Whitey did, and plenty of it, good imported lager—Beck’s. Weeks had already sawed up the gun and dumped the pieces off the Fore River bridge into Quincy Bay. The hit car was back in its garage. Vino mentioned that someone had gotten the number of the license plate. Whitey nodded and opened two more beers. Now he knew he’d have to get rid of the plates, and sooner rather than later.

  After a while the two crooked FBI agents staggered out of the house.

  “Thank God for Beck’s beer,” Whitey would say later. “Thank God for Beck’s.”

  * * *

  ONCE THE immediate heat died down, Whitey decided to point some more fingers in the wrong direction. First he and Zip made up a story that Charlestown wiseguys had heard that Halloran and his brother the state trooper “had met with Colonel O’Donovan”—another foe.

  The next day Whitey floated a different trial balloon—maybe it was Jimmy Flynn and one of the Mullens who’d killed Donald Killeen, Weasel Mantville. Later Whitey named more Charlestown hoods, and invented a “backup van” with three more guys inside whom he didn’t like. By July 7, it was all the fault of the state police because they “let the cat out of the bag.”

  * * *

  ABOUT A month after Halloran’s murder, John Morris flew off to an FBI drug-training seminar in Glynco, Georgia. The married agent had a girlfriend in the office, Debbie Noseworthy, and he told her how much he wanted her to fly down—they could stay in his motel room, make it their own little love nest. The only problem was, he couldn’t swing the airfare; his wife would be sure to notice an expenditure of that size.

  One morning shortly after Morris left for the conference, Zip walked up to Debbie’s desk in the FBI office and handed her an envelope he said came from her boyfriend. She opened it and saw ten $100 bills.

  “Where did John get this?” she asked. He was always complaining about being broke.

  “He’s been saving it,” Zip told her. “It was in his desk and he wanted me to give it to you to go down to visit him in Glynco.”

  John Morris was now officially on the payroll.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, STEVIE called Johnny Martorano in Florida and said he and Whitey needed to meet him in New York, face-to-face, at the usual place—the Marriott at LaGuardia. Richard Aucoin got there first, rented a room, and soon Whitey and Stevie arrived. It was a strictly business meeting. No refreshments were served. There was only one item on the agenda: John Callahan.

  Whitey did all the talking. He was in his politician mode, making the case, point by point. He said, we killed Halloran for you; he was telling the FBI that you killed Wheeler. Zip told us. What Whitey didn’t say was that Halloran had also named him and Stevie as being in on it. He also didn’t tell me that they were the ones who approached Halloran first, to kill Wheeler, not me. They didn’t tell me that Whitey was in the room when Callahan made the pitch to Halloran to kill Wheeler. Whitey also didn’t tell me that Halloran was a witness to his murder of Louie Litif, which I had nothing to do with. Whitey was very selective with the facts, you might say, but what did I know? I’m on the lam. You’re at a disadvantage in so many ways when you’re a fugitive.

  So Whitey goes on: the reason Halloran knew about how you killed Wheeler is because Callahan told him. Callahan! Your friend. Here’s a guy you killed somebody for in Oklahoma, we all helped out. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut and we wouldn’t be here today and Halloran and that other guy with him wouldn’t be dead.

  Whitey says, we told him—hell, Johnny, you told him, too—we told Callahan to stay away from that drunk asshole Halloran and keep out of those Irish pubs. Whitey was right about that, we did all warn Callahan to watch his step. Whitey was good at that kind of thing, mixing in facts with the lies. He was very effective.

  Then he tells me, Zip says the feds want to talk to Callahan, so I’m asking you, Johnny, can you guarantee he’ll stand up? I says, I don’t think he’ll talk, but I can’t guarantee anything. Whitey says, well, if he does crack, Zip says we’re all going to jail for the rest of our lives. At that point, I was convinced. It was clear Callahan had been talking, whether it was just to Halloran or to the FBI, I wasn’t sure, but he had been talking about things he had no business talking about.
<
br />   Whitey always knew what buttons to push with me, and this time he was pushing the rat button.

  Finally, he asks me if I agree with them that Callahan has to go. What can I say? Callahan’s my friend, but these guys are my partners. They’re clever, they’ve proven they know how to handle the FBI, they’re my lifeline with cash—one of my lifelines anyway. And they’ve already killed two guys to protect me, or so I think. I’m sick over the thought of my friend being killed, but I finally said okay. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  So now Whitey says we need you to handle it, Johnny, down in Florida. There’s too much heat on us right now back home. They’d already had to go in for mug shots that the FBI had sent down to Oklahoma—that was another one of those facts Whitey threw out there, which made the lies and evasions and half truths he was feeding me somewhat more believable.

  Whitey’s making the pitch, trying to close the deal, saying the cops in Boston are all over them, so it needs to be done somewhere else. Whitey tells me he’s already been feeding stuff to Zip, trying to set it up so that when he gets hit, somebody else’ll get the blame, Cubans, drug dealers. Again, he was telling the truth about that. I got a look at the reports later. But by now I am really distraught, that I actually have to kill this guy, my friend, who’s been helping me out ever since I went on the lam. I mean, I reluctantly agreed to the hit, and I very reluctantly agreed to do it myself. Once I agreed, the meeting was over. No small talk. They left and I just sat there by myself, thinking. I always liked to take in a couple of shows when I was in the city, but not that day. I was sick at heart. I checked out immediately and caught the next plane back to Florida.

  Johnny called Joe McDonald and they began planning. They’d take Callahan the next time he flew to Florida. By now there was a routine to Callahan’s visits. Johnny was living in Fort Lauderdale at the time, so he would always pick Callahan up at the airport in Fort Lauderdale and then drive him to his condo in Plantation. They were planning to leave Callahan’s body in the trunk of his own car, a Cadillac. But even though Callahan had given Johnny keys to both the car and the condo, Johnny couldn’t pick him up in the Caddy, because Callahan might realize something was wrong. Johnny always met him in his own Dodge Ram conversion van.

  So the hit would have to be done in the van. First Johnny and Joe laid down plastic rubber runners on the floor of the van. Johnny put beach towels on the captain’s chairs, to soak up the blood. Rubber would have been less messy, but it would have been too obvious a tip-off. Then Johnny put more towels on the two back captain’s chairs, and underneath the towel on the backseat on the passenger’s side he placed a loaded .22, one of the guns left over from the Wheeler hit.

  Then Johnny went to one of those downtown rent-a-stall garages in downtown Fort Lauderdale. He leased a double stall, with room for two cars. Then he drove to Callahan’s condo in Plantation, picked up the Cadillac, and backed it into the garage.

  On the day Callahan was to arrive, Johnny met Joe Mac at the garage and then they drove to the airport in separate vehicles, parking in the short-term garage. Joe Mac was watching the van while Johnny went inside the Delta terminal to meet Callahan. He’d caught the last flight of the evening out of Boston. It was about eleven o’clock on July 24, 1982.

  He came off the plane and I picked up his suitcase and carried it back to the car. He got in the passenger side—it’s my car, so I’m driving. I opened the back door to put his suitcase in, and that was when I picked up the .22 from under the blanket, reached around and shot him once, twice at the most, in the head. He slumped over, and I pushed him off the chair and onto the floor, where the rubber mat could catch any blood without it leaving a stain.

  LAWYER: You didn’t look into his eyes when you shot him in the head, did you?

  MARTORANO: No.

  LAWYER: Now sir, you just shot your friend in the head after a half-hour meeting with Mr. Bulger, who convinced you to kill your friend. How did you feel when you shot him in the head?

  MARTORANO: I felt lousy.

  LAWYER: You felt bad?

  MARTORANO: I didn’t want to kill a guy that I cared enough about to kill somebody for a year before.

  Now we have to move the body into his own car, but the problem is, the garage is closed until 7 A.M., so Joe and I have to sit on my van all night. There’s an all-night Albertson’s supermarket right near the garage, so we drop the van in the parking lot there. But we have to keep an eye on it because if it gets stolen, I’m in big trouble. See, it’s registered in my name—Richard Aucoin’s name. It’s not like the Indian Al hit, where we dumped the body in a boiler. That time it was a break for us that the car got stolen off the street. It confused everything for a while, which is usually what you want. But this time if they find the body in that car it can be traced right back to me. So Joe and I watched it all night from his car. I think we only left once, to get some coffee.

  Next morning at seven, as soon as the garage opens, we’re there. We leave Joe’s car outside the garage, and back my van into the bay and close the garage doors and lock them. And that’s when Joe thinks he hears something from Callahan, a moan or something. It was probably just some of those noises that bodies make sometimes after they’re dead, but Joe didn’t want to take any chances. He says, give me your gun, and he shoots Callahan a couple of more times, just to make sure he’s dead.

  Then we put his body in the trunk of the Cadillac. Joe took his watch and later on his way home he drove into Little Havana and stopped in a Cuban bar and left the watch in the men’s room. We were hoping it would be found by a Cuban and then end up in a pawn shop on Eighth Street there. The cops are always checking the pawn shops, and if it ends up there, it backs up Whitey’s story about Cubans. Joe also took his credit cards, and some papers from his suitcase and left everything in the bar there too, to make it look like a robbery.

  Finally, we wiped the Caddy down, getting rid of any fingerprints. After it was clean I put on flesh-colored gloves to drive it down to the airport in Miami. I drove with the gloves on, except when I went through the tolls. The toll taker might not have noticed, but you can’t take any chances. Joe followed me in his own car.

  It was Whitey’s idea for the body to be found. I wanted to make him disappear. By then I had a twenty-eight-foot boat. I was living on the Intercoastal in Fort Lauderdale, at a place called The Pilot. I had my boat out back. All I would have had to do was take a nice day trip and get out far enough to dump him in the ocean. The sharks would have taken care of everything.

  Johnny in his boat off Fort Lauderdale.

  At Miami International Airport a couple of days later, the smell from the Cadillac became overpowering. Underneath the back of the car cops noticed a puddle from a gooey substance that was dripping out of the trunk.

  Another gangland hit in the Sunshine State.

  It made the papers, both in South Florida and in Boston. Patty read the stories. All Johnny told her was that perhaps it was time to hit the road again.

  Back in Boston, Whitey and Stevie moved quickly. Callahan had been involved in a number of business deals, and they went to as many of his partners as they could find. Callahan’s business associates all got variations on the same theme: Callahan had died owing Whitey and Stevie money. In some cases, the partners turned over the keys to safe-deposit boxes. Whitey and Stevie even tried to shake down Callahan’s widow, after expressing their condolences about John’s unfortunate passing at the hands of those bloodthirsty Cubans.

  They grabbed a lot of dough. I think they may have even sent me a little, if I had any idea who they were shaking down. But if I didn’t know about it, they didn’t cut me in, and being right there in Boston, they had the ability to find out a lot more than I did.

  Later on, after I got back to Boston, I ran into one of Callahan’s business partners who I’d known casually before I left. He told me Whitey and Stevie stole a half million off him. He said he’d always regretted not standing up to them, not throwing Whitey out of his
office when Whitey came looking for dough. He said he could tell Whitey was lying, that Callahan didn’t owe Whitey and Stevie a dime. I told the guy, you absolutely did the right thing, giving up the money, not going to the cops. He would have just gotten himself killed, trying to stand up to those guys. They had all the juice back then.

  A few months later, Joe Mac called Johnny. He had one question: Was the jai-alai deal dead? He wanted Johnny to put the question directly to H. Paul Rico. Johnny had never met Rico, so he got Stevie to arrange a meeting. A few days later, Stevie flew down to Miami with one of his off-and-on girlfriends, an Italian woman named Janey. She’d been out of the picture during Stevie’s Debbie Davis period, but now she was back in the mix. Stevie left Janey at the hotel and he and Johnny drove to the fronton in Miami.

  Now, I’m not too crazy about going in there, you follow me? I mean, I know Joe isn’t sending me into a trap, but Rico’s FBI, or was, and he’s hired all these other agents to work the fronton, to keep guys like me out, supposedly. But I gotta find out from the horse’s mouth; I promised Joe. So we walk in there, me and Stevie, and we take the elevator up to this private dining room area. It’s for high rollers; they got the betting windows right there. Stevie introduces me to Rico, we shake hands, sit down, and I say, “Joe wanted to ask you, is anything happening on the deal?” And he says, “Nothing’s doing yet.” And I said, “That’s all I needed to know.” I stood up and said to Stevie, “I’ll be waiting for you outside. Take as long as you want.” And then I said, “Nice meeting you, Mr. Rico.”

  About five minutes later, Stevie comes out and we leave, walking very casually. I know he’s got all these FBI agents there, but no one’s making a move to collar me. And then I knew, I mean I really understood for the first time, that all the rumors about Rico were true.

  In Boston, Whitey and Stevie kept busy. A bold group of thieves, including several corrupt police officers, had broken in the Depositors Trust Bank in Medford on Memorial Day weekend 1980, cleaning out hundreds of safe-deposit boxes, including some that belonged to organized-crime figures, including one of the Angiulo brothers.