Hitman

by Howie Carr

  The Campbell brothers also went down in 1983, on various gun and drug charges. Inside Alvin Campbell’s suburban Boston home, cops found a veritable library of books and videotapes about organized crime. They also discovered clips about one murder in particular—that of Roger Wheeler in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1981. If the cops were still baffled by the slaying, Alvin Campbell certainly wasn’t.

  * * *

  JOHNNY HEARD about all of this secondhand, sometimes from Stevie, but more often from George Kaufman. Johnny had his own headaches, trying to support his various families. As the (absentee) father of the brides, he picked up the tabs for the weddings of Jeannie and Lisa. His son Vincent was attending a private high school in Beverly. Over four years, the tuition cost Johnny $100,000. He also had the monthly payments on the two mortgages on the houses in Medford and Chestnut Hill.

  I was in and out of the sports gambling business all those years. Basically I was bankrolling different guys. George handled most of it for me. He lived on Kent Street off Beacon in Brookline. I would call him at home and tell him to “meet” me in five minutes. That meant he would go to the phone booth by the 1200, and I’d call him there.

  I’d lend guys money, too. When Jimmy Sims got out of prison around ’87, he wanted to get back into the sports gambling business. I got him $15,000. Then he disappeared. To this day nobody knows what happened to him. That’s one murder nobody has ever confessed to.

  After the Callahan hit, Johnny and Patty had gone on the road for about six months before settling down again in Pompano Beach in 1983. Johnny had met a car dealer named Jeff Jenkins, who quickly became one of his best friends.

  But Johnny and Patty weren’t settled in their new digs in Pompano Beach long before Stevie called with an urgent message from Whitey. Johnny had been spotted in a bar, and the report had gotten back to the FBI office in Boston. Zip just wanted to make sure that Johnny knew he had to hit the road again, and that he would be needing new IDs.

  That’s one of the counts the feds got Zip on in the Boston trial, tipping me to the sighting. After that Richard Aucoin was no more. I became “Vincent Rancourt.” It was a name from a Canadian driver’s license. I think I found it on Hillsborough Beach one day, in a wallet somebody lost. There were always a lot of Canadians on that beach. The good thing about the license was, there was no photo on it, so I could switch it down to Florida no problem.

  In 1983, a city councilor from South Boston named Ray Flynn was elected mayor of Boston. Billy Bulger had briefly considered running himself, but even in the city he was distinctly unpopular, at least outside of Southie.

  After Flynn’s election, he was approached by Senate President Bulger. A former state legislator himself, Flynn knew how much he needed a powerful ally at the State House, to assure a steady stream of local aid to city coffers, and to make sure that any legislation City Hall needed would not be bottled up in committee or killed.

  Billy sat down with Flynn, whom he had never much liked, considering him a publicity hound. But Billy said he was willing to let bygones be bygones, if only for the sake of the city. All he had was one small favor to ask of the new mayor.

  Would the new mayor appoint Zip Connolly police commissioner?

  Flynn recoiled. He was, after all, from Southie. He knew who Zip was, and what he was. He turned Bulger down flat, and instead gave the coveted job to another Southie native, a guy named Mickey Roache, whose brother Whitey and Billy O’Sullivan had shot and paralyzed in the Colonial Lounge on West Broadway back in 1971.

  Billy Bulger never forgave Ray Flynn. His legislation was always hamstrung at the State House, and he became a butt of endless jokes every year at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast.

  * * *

  LEAVING POMPANO Beach, Johnny and Patty hit the road in one of Johnny’s mobile homes. In 1985 they settled down again at tennis great Rod Laver’s development in Delray Beach. Then Patty got pregnant, and Johnny figured it would be better if she went home to Somerville and stuck close to Loretta until the baby was born.

  Jimmy was born at St. Elizabeth’s in Brighton. I called Stevie and told him to ask Whitey if he’d mind being Jimmy’s godfather. Whitey said sure. Stevie and Whitey both went to the christening; it was at St. Anne’s in Somerville. They sat in the back, didn’t say anything. From then on, every Christmas Whitey would send Jimmy a $20 gold coin. He never saw Jimmy, but Whitey always sent him that gold coin every year.

  After Jimmy was born, Johnny drove his mobile home north to New Jersey. There was a trailer park on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel where he always stayed when he came to the city. He told Patty to fly down to New York with the baby. He’d pick her up, and then they’d drive back to Florida together.

  But when I picked them up and drove back to Jersey, Jimmy was just crying and crying and crying. He wouldn’t stop. It got so bad we figured something had to be wrong. We finally took him to a hospital in Jersey City. They knew right away—they did a spinal tap. It was spinal meningitis. But they didn’t have a trauma unit, so they wanted to send him to a bigger hospital, Bergen something-or-other.

  Thank God I had a lot of cash with me, because of course I didn’t have any health insurance. I had to pay cash for the ambulance, and then when we get to the hospital, we realize it’s in a tough, tough neighborhood. The hospital staff told us, don’t wear any gold in here or somebody might stick you up in the stairwells. That was a problem because you had to use the stairs. The elevators weren’t going all the way up, and they had Jimmy on the eleventh floor. The security was so bad I was concerned Jimmy might get snatched.

  I talked to this Indian doctor who ran the unit, and I convinced him to combine two single rooms, so Patty and I could stay with Jimmy, on shifts, just to make sure nothing happened to him. Plus I was paying nurses cash—$100 per shift.

  It was tough, watching a little baby that sick. And I was concerned about Patty, too. She was frantic. I was afraid she’d climb up on the roof and just jump off.

  We were there in that hospital for a couple of weeks, and I’m telling you, the whole experience made me realize what I’d missed with my other kids. That’s when I turned into “Mr. Mom.” When I was sentenced, that’s what some of my neighbors in Boca called me in their letters to the judge. Mr. Mom. After Jimmy almost died, I wanted to spend as much time with the kids as possible.

  Johnny with his son Jimmy at Disney World, late 1980s.

  Back in Florida, Johnny and Patty decided to settle down as best they could, considering their circumstances. Johnny asked Jeff Jenkins if he knew of any houses for sale. Jenkins told him that one of his neighbors in Boca Raton had a brand-new house that he was looking to unload.

  But of course there was that old problem—I couldn’t own anything in my own name. I’d always told Jenkins I was a gambler. That’s what I always told people I met in Florida if they asked me. Later on, I started saying that I was “retired.” Hey, it was true in both cases, wasn’t it? I also said I had ex-wives coming after me, looking to put attachments on anything I owned. So I asked Jenkins if he would mind holding the title to the house in his name. We were “partners.”

  In Boston, Whitey was becoming a legend. Gullible columnists for the Globe chronicled his supposed selfless exploits, giving money to priests, reducing street crime, and, most important, “keeping the drugs out of Southie,” a phrase that was repeated over and over again. At the Globe, it became practically verboten to say anything negative about the gangster with the alleged heart of gold.

  Always tight with a buck—Frankie Salemme referred to him as a “squirrel”—suddenly Whitey was flush with his new drug money. Whitey began smuggling cash out of the country. One time, he was stopped at the security gate at Logan Airport’s international terminal as he tried to slip $100,000 cash through security onto a Montreal flight.

  Whitey grabbed the satchel, took off running, and threw it to a guy he called “Kevin”—probably Kevin Weeks—who escaped. Whitey then found himself in a loud confrontation
with a state trooper named Billy Johnson, a Vietnam vet. Johnson wrote up a report and forgot about it until the next day, when the executive director of the airport, a Dukakis appointee named Dave Davis, showed up at F Troop barracks and demanded that Johnson hand over any and all copies of the embarrassing report about the senate president’s brother.

  Johnson refused, and within days was stripped of his coveted Logan airport assignment. He would later commit suicide.

  * * *

  WHITEY’S LIQUOR store, the South Boston Liquor Mart, wasn’t far from the Globe building on Morrissey Boulevard with the plate-glass windows that Whitey had once shot out during busing.

  One morning a Globe photographer was driving north toward downtown when he noticed a city work crew outside Whitey’s liquor store. They were installing parking curbs. Amazed, the photographer doubled back around, parked his car on a side street, and then shot a series of damning photographs showing city workers on city time doing a job for … Whitey Bulger.

  Excited, the photographer returned to the Globe, quickly developed the shots, and turned the prints in to the photo desk. He expected them to run in the next day’s paper—probably on the front page. But nothing happened. The blue-bloods at the Globe had their own code of omerta when it came to Whitey. The days went by and the photos never appeared.

  A few weeks later, the photographer bumped into an honest FBI agent he knew. He gave him an extra set of the South Boston Liquor Mart photos that he had in his car, and the agent, as excited as the photographer had been, quickly returned to the FBI offices and showed off the photos … to John Morris. Morris quickly summoned Zip Connolly for a crisis meeting.

  The next morning, the Globe photographer was again driving by the South Boston Liquor Mart when he noticed a new work crew in the parking lot. It was from a private company, and it was removing the curbs that the city crew had installed a few weeks earlier.

  During one of the later trials, Kevin Weeks was asked how it was possible that for twenty years someone like Whitey Bulger could get away with committing so many crimes, up to and including murder? How, the prosecutor inquired, could such a scandal ever occur in America?

  “We weren’t in America,” Weeks replied. “We were in Boston.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS just too much money in drugs, especially cocaine, to settle for a mere “protection” racket. Soon Whitey and Stevie were setting up their own networks of dealers. Eventually there would be four “rings” in Southie, all controlled by Whitey, at arm’s length of course. If he wouldn’t talk to Johnny Martorano, he certainly wasn’t going to issue orders directly to some junkie out of the projects.

  Almost all of Whitey’s dealers ended up on some public payroll or another. Some had two public-sector jobs, one on the day shift, where they were never seen except on pay day, and another on the overnight shift, which they would sleep through. Jobs on the MBTA were particularly prized—and costly to obtain. Not only did a T job mean you had a reason to be in various stations, where dealing drugs was easy, but the perks of a T job also included retirement on a full pension with full health benefits after only twenty-three years. Or you could just buy a job and immediately “take a fall” and go out on full disability. That only provided 72 percent of an employee’s final salary, but it was tax free.

  Soon, on federal wiretaps, agents would hear Whitey’s cocaine dealers calmly discussing which option was preferable, the immediate phony disability pension at 72 percent, or a twenty-three-year no-show job with 80 percent at the end. The feds soon noticed the astonishing numbers of able-bodied younger and middle-aged men loitering on Castle Island in Southie during the warm-weather months. Why weren’t they working? the agents would ask one another, until they realized most of them were “retired” from hack public-sector jobs.

  Shocked by the sudden rise in cocaine use in Southie, in 1987 the DEA made a run at Whitey. They put a bug into the driver’s-side door of his new Chevrolet Caprice. The quality of the audio wasn’t great, but they did pick up snippets of him dismissing his old mob—“there is no Winter Hill Gang,” he said.

  It was the same thing Whitey was telling Zip. Howie Winter had just been paroled, and Whitey dismissed his old partner as “strictly a leftfielder” who expected to be paid for “protection” he couldn’t deliver—a complaint many of Whitey’s drug dealers would later make about their boss, not too loudly of course. On the DEA tapes, Whitey also complained about having to continue to send money south to Johnny Martorano.

  LAWYER: Do you remember about how much money it was that you would receive every month?

  MARTORANO: It was always different. Whatever I needed.

  LAWYER: Was it like $500 a month or $700 a month?

  MARTORANO: Probably ten thousand a month.

  LAWYER: And did it remain a constant amount or did it fluctuate?

  MARTORANO: It kept going down.

  I had no control over anything. It was tough still being on the lam. The other guys had done their time and were out. Even Joe Mac didn’t get a long sentence. See, my theory was proven correct—if you stay out for a while, they’ll always cut you a deal for less time. But for me, something was always coming up; I was still out there. I always said, I did sixteen years, one year at a time. I couldn’t afford to go to prison, even for a couple of years, because I had all my families to support. Sometimes I’d want to turn myself in, and Whitey and Stevie would say, oh no, it’s a bad time. Bad time for them, they meant—they needed me out there, to keep the Mafia at bay. Then they’d say, maybe you can come in—that’s when they were tired of sending me money. But I’d have all these bills to keep paying, so I just stayed out. They were getting rich, and I was getting poor.

  I never really understood how much money they were making in drugs until one time Stevie was down in Florida on vacation. We went to the Boca Mall, and we were in this specialty shop where they had these ceramic bulls by the Mexican artist Sergio Bustamante. It was the kind of thing Stevie liked, and it was his birthday or something, so I pointed at one of the smaller Bustamante bulls, it was worth about a grand or $1,500. I was thinking of getting it for him, so I asked him if he liked it. He said yeah, it’s okay, but there’s a much bigger one, which goes for about 10 grand. He said Whitey had given that big one to him—the one that went for 10 grand. At first I was kind of embarrassed, that I’d been thinking of getting him the smaller one. But then I started thinking—10 grand? For a ceramic bull? For a guy?

  LAWYER: Later you learned that their business kept growing and growing, isn’t that right? You learned they cheated you, in effect, right?

  MARTORANO: Sure, but that’s not my reason for being here because I could care less. I was happy with whatever I was getting.

  LAWYER: Whatever you got, you still were upset with Mr. Flemmi for getting you less than you thought you should get, right?

  MARTORANO: I was a fugitive. Whatever I got I was thankful for.

  LAWYER: Well, didn’t you have an agreement with Mr. Flemmi that he would share a certain amount of profits, correct?

  MARTORANO: Yeah, but those agreements don’t usually last after you’re a fugitive.

  LAWYER: You were never told by Mr. Flemmi that the Winter Hill Group was collecting money from extortions, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: He told me that they were ripping off drug dealers, not setting them up.

  In Boston, the DEA was still trying to figure out how to improve the reception on their $50,000 state-of-the-art bug in Whitey’s car when they suddenly heard him and some of the others trying to rip it out of the car. The agents quickly rushed down to the South Boston Liquor Mart to retrieve it.

  Whitey and Stevie were very gracious to the cops. Stevie suggested if they needed information from anyone, just let them know “and we can wrap a rope around their necks.” He didn’t mention their expertise in wrapping ropes around people’s necks, especially girlfriends.

  “We’re all good guys here,” Whitey amiably explained to the DEA agen
ts. “You’re the good good guys and we’re the good bad guys.”

  Every Christmas, the payoffs to the local constabulary escalated. Looking the other way for Whitey and Stevie was turning into a cottage industry for bent cops in Boston. One Christmas Eve, Whitey was sitting at a table in the back of the South Boston Liquor Mart, counting out cash from a huge wad and placing the large bills into envelopes that would be going out that evening.

  He looked up at one of his gunsels and smiled.

  “Christmas is for cops and kids.”

  * * *

  GEORGE KAUFMAN told Johnny about a younger guy, a kid from “the Lake” in Newton named Joe Yerardi—Joey Y, they called him. A tough kid, George said, good with his hands. He was doing some collection work for Chico Krantz, one of the Jewish bookies who paid “protection” to Whitey and Stevie. George was the liaison to the Jewish crowd, which was how he met Joey Y. Joey Y had another link to Johnny—he was working with the ex–Medford cop that Johnny had rented an apartment from when he first went on the lam.

  George said to me that if I had 50 grand I could spare that Joey could use it. He’d been borrowing money from Stevie, and from George, so they just took my 50, settled up with him, and from then on Joey Y was my guy. I just kept giving him more and more—he could always keep up the vig, a point a week. At the end he owed me $365,000—that’s almost $4,000 a week in interest he was paying me. Of course by then he couldn’t pay. He wasn’t a bad guy, just a lousy businessman. If you’re gonna be a shylock, you have to have an instinct about who you can lend money to, and who to stay away from. It’s not that much different than a bank, except the interest rates are higher.

  Joey Yerardi, Newton hoodlum, borrowed $365,000 from Johnny.

  At one point, I spoke to Stevie, and I told him, I didn’t mean to steal your guy. If you ever want any of this action, just let me know. But he wasn’t interested. I wonder now if he knew even then that the feds were keeping an eye on Joey Y.