Hitman

by Howie Carr

  Anyway, I did get to know Joey Y fairly well as time went by, and I invited him and his family down to Orlando to meet me and Patty and Jimmy at Disney World. We used to stay at the Contemporary. And I meet his wife, this Iranian woman who acts like she’s a princess, and I immediately notice she’s wearing a seven-carat diamond ring. And then he starts telling me how he’s living at the Four Seasons. And I said to him, “Joe, she’s got a seven-carat diamond ring, you live at the Four Seasons, and you owe me 300 grand. There is no way this is going to end well.”

  By 1988, the two Bulger brothers were on top of their respective games. With Governor Mike Dukakis running for president, Senate President Bulger had become the de facto governor of Massachusetts. In 1988, four presidential candidates, of both parties, attended his St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in South Boston.

  During the presidential campaign, Billy Bulger’s imperious control of state government began to be noticed. A reporter interviewed the judge whose court was gutted after he refused to hire one of Billy’s cronies. Asked what kind of president he thought Dukakis might be, the judge replied, “How can he stand up to the Russians if he can’t stand up to a corrupt midget?”

  He was referring to Billy Bulger. Unlike Whitey, Billy did not use lifts in his shoes. He was five feet, five inches tall.

  Joe Murray, the Charlestown drug dealer, was now in federal prison in Connecticut, convicted of gunrunning in the Valhalla case. In early 1988, he began calling Bill Weld, the former U.S. attorney who would be elected governor as a Republican in 1990. Weld was working in Washington as an assistant attorney general when Murray began calling him. Murray would leave him cryptic messages, always accurate, about who was doing what to whom in the Boston underworld. One day he named Brian Halloran’s killers. He even mentioned a witness to the Halloran murder “who sits in a bar all day drinking and talking about it.” Weld would pass the information along to the FBI, and back in Boston there would be no follow-up.

  Finally, though, the Boston FBI office felt compelled to interview Murray. He was brought to Boston from Danbury for a debriefing. But at the direction of Connolly and Morris, the agents dismissed Murray’s information as “unsubstantial and unspecific allegations.” They did, however, put into the record Murray’s description of the situation in Boston:

  MURRAY said that WHITEY BULGER and STEVIE FLEMMI have a machine and the Boston Police and the FBI have a machine and he cannot survive against these machines.

  The Mafia was still reeling. The Angiulos and Larry Baione were gone, sentenced to long prison terms. Now In Town’s mantle of leadership, such as it was, had fallen to a younger generation. They set up shop in a bakery in the Prudential Center called Vanessa’s and Stevie Flemmi telephoned Zip Connolly. It had gotten almost too easy. Joe Russo was one of the wiseguys who used the bakery as a base of operations, but his old friend Whitey didn’t think of giving him a heads-up. Business, after all, was business.

  The feds bugged the back room of Vanessa’s and soon they overheard the arrival of Doc Sagansky, the ancient bookie, and his seventy-five-year-old bodyguard of sorts, Moe Weinstein. The younger Mafia guys, with names like Vinny the Animal and Champagne Dennis, told Doc the days of paying a token $1,500 a month to Jerry Angiulo were over. So Doc Sagansky patiently tried to explain to them how the state lottery had destroyed the old numbers racket.

  Ancient Boston gambling czar Doc Sagansky (left) paid the Mafia $250,000 for the release of his diminutive associative, Moe Weinstein.

  “Kid, I’m eighty-nine years old,” he told the Animal. “Listen, take the business, will you please, and forget about everything.”

  The Mafia insisted Doc come up with some cash, and that until he did, they’d be keeping Moe Weinstein as a hostage. Then they left the two old men alone in the back room, with the FBI bug still recording everything.

  “Moe,” said Doc, “what am I gonna do now?”

  “I guess you’re gonna have to pay, Doc.”

  And the next day he did—$250,000 cash in the lobby of the Parker House. It would now be only a matter of time before the Mafia’s next generation would join their elders in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Doc Sagansky was called to testify before the grand jury, but he refused to talk. The habits of a lifetime eventually bought him six months in prison at the age of ninety-two. He did it, as they say, standing on his head, and finally died a free man, at the age of 101.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, DOWN in Florida, Johnny Martorano was having his own problems with the Mafia.

  At the time, I’m in a sports-betting business with Bobby G. in Somerville and Richie Shea down on the South Shore. And we’re getting a lot of help out in Vegas from this guy Joe Schneider—we called him Joe Schnitz. He was handling the “service” for us—he’d get us the lines before they came out in the papers, and make sure there were no surprises in the handicapping. He was valuable.

  So these wiseguys out in Vegas threatened him and his family, said if he doesn’t come up with 300 grand they’re going to kill his family. It’s two hoods from Vegas and this guy from Providence, the Saint they call him. Anthony St. Laurent, another rat for the FBI as we later find out. Anyway, Richie Shea calls me up and tells me Joe Schnitz is being shaken down, and can we do anything? I asked Richie, is he with us? And Richie says, yeah, so I told him I’ll handle this. I called up Stevie and said, talk to Sonny Mercurio—he was our liaison to the Mafia. I told Stevie, you tell Sonny to tell the Saint to leave Joe Schnitz alone, he’s with me. Tell the Saint if anything happens to Joe Schnitz or his family, the same thing’ll happen to him or whoever did it.

  Anthony “the Saint” St. Laurent, Rhode Island Mafia member derided as “Public Enema Number One.”

  Stevie for some reason puts it out to Sonny that I’m on my way to Providence to kill the Saint. I never said anything of the sort. But that’s how it came out in all those FBI reports I read ten years later. Nothing happened to Joe Schnitz, of course. I guess I was still the Mafia’s “boogey-man,” as Stevie put it.

  Finally, the Globe had to do something. It had become an embarrassment, this continuous gushing about the Bulger brothers, especially Whitey. A team of reporters was assigned the task of compiling a no-holds-barred biography of the brothers, including Whitey’s remarkable ability to avoid indictment while almost every other major figure in the Boston underworld was going down.

  The Globe reporters sat down with John Morris, who had long since been completely compromised. Whitey and Stevie had paid him at least $8,000 in cash bribes. As if that wasn’t enough to hold over his head, they also still had the old tape from the Dog House that he’d drunkenly left behind in the room at the Colonnade Hotel. They knew where he lived; one night they even had dinner with Dennis Condon at Morris’s house in Lexington. At the end of the evening they’d given Morris $5,000 cash. In short, they owned John Morris, and he didn’t much like his life anymore.

  The Globe reporters bought Morris lunch and started asking questions about Whitey. Morris quickly blurted out: “You have no idea how dangerous he is.”

  Not for attribution, Morris gave them the whole story—with his own sorry role in it naturally downplayed. Meanwhile, the rest of the Boston FBI office went into the usual lockdown mode it assumed whenever Whitey was threatened. Another Globe reporter, who lived in South Boston, was approached by an FBI agent who said he was delivering a message from Fat Tony Ciulla. The message: Be very careful what you write about Whitey, because he knows where you live and may very well decide to kill you.

  It was a chilling message, but also somewhat suspect, because Fat Tony had long since vanished into the Witness Protection Program. There was no way of tracking him down to ask him if he’d ever said such a thing, and years later, when he did finally turn up, Fat Tony adamantly denied ever passing on such a warning.

  The reporter and his family were temporarily relocated, and the Globe pressed ahead with the story. Billy Bulger reluctantly agreed to an interview, in which he
said of his murderous, cocaine-dealing brother, “There is much to admire.”

  But the Globe was most interested in pursuing Whitey’s connections to the FBI. When the story finally appeared in the fall of 1988, the Globe hadn’t quite managed to nail down the official nature of the alliance, at least on the record. But the newspaper felt sure enough of its sources, namely Morris, to describe Whitey’s ties to the FBI as a “special relationship.”

  It was a well-turned phrase. Special relationship. Everyone got it.

  I heard about the Globe series, I think George or one of the bookmakers told me about it, that they were accusing Whitey of being a rat. I said no fucking way. But I called Stevie anyway and asked him what it was all about. He told me, Billy’s up for reelection this year, and they’re looking to smear him by smearing Whitey. Guilt by association. It was another button they were pushing that they knew would work with me—the smear button.

  The DEA had never bought into Whitey’s line that he was one of the good bad guys. So in 1989 they began another investigation, and this time they made sure that Zip Connolly’s brother and Zip’s old roommate, both of whom worked for the DEA, were kept far out of the loop. Instead, the DEA would work with the district attorney of Suffolk County, Newman Flanagan, and his crew of state police investigators. At the 1989 St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, Billy made several disparaging remarks about Flanagan, in addition to the usual respectful recognition of Zip Connolly and a few stale jokes about Somerville—“Why don’t they just build a wall around the place and give everybody inside three to five?”

  The DEA began tapping dealers’ phones in Southie, and soon had overwhelming evidence of a massive drug cartel in the Town, although they couldn’t yet directly tie Whitey and Stevie to the rings. Still, the taps were full of references to “the white man,” no-show state jobs, and the politicians who were selling them.

  The DEA quickly figured out that all but one of the rings were run by old-style Southie strong-arms who more closely resembled traditional gangsters than they did modern cocaine dealers. They theorized that these ringleaders reported directly, if not to Whitey himself, then to someone close to him. The feds got a court order to tap Whitey’s new cell phone, but almost as soon as the warrant was issued, Whitey stopped using his new toy for everything except the most cryptic messages. Like every other attempt to bring Whitey down, that cell-phone tap was somehow “compromised,” as a federal prosecutor delicately put it later.

  * * *

  JOHNNY HAD by now become a fixture in his neighborhood in Boca Raton. He still had a driver’s license in the name of Vincent Rancourt, but everyone knew him as “John.” He used Patty’s last name. He was just another middle-class family guy, very accommodating to everyone, always ready to drive the kids, his own and everyone else’s, anywhere they needed to go. His widowed mother Bess came for visits, and Patty would take Kodachromes of Johnny and Bess in the driveway under a palm tree. Every month he gave Jeff Jenkins cash to make the payment on the mortgage. Jenkins and Johnny liked to hang out together, with their wives. Jenkins took things as they came and he didn’t ask a lot of questions—until he had no choice.

  Johnny and his mother Bess in Boca Raton, early 1990s.

  One of the mechanics who worked for Jenkins came up to him one day at the dealership and said to him, You know that guy who’s always hanging around here, I just saw him on Unsolved Mysteries. They described me as a “person of interest.” Jenkins finally asked me who I really was, and I told him the truth—that I was wanted for racketeering and race fixing. Period. He said okay. Nothing changed.

  Whitey was wheeling and dealing like always. Pat Nee had done a four-year bit in the Valhalla gunrunning case. When he got out of prison he was looking for new opportunities, so in 1990 Whitey set him up with a tough armored-car robbing crew out of the Lower End. They’d had a good run—until Nee threw in with them. On their final job, in Abington, the FBI was waiting for them. What made it even worse was that Whitey had given Nee a machine gun that he had used in the commission of a felony. Under the new federal sentencing guidelines, that meant another thirty years, on and after.

  Pat Nee was going away for a very long time.

  Billy Barnoski, Fat Tony Ciulla’s muscle, had turned himself in in 1983, after four years on the lam. He was released from prison in 1987, and went to Triple O’s, looking for work. Whitey took one look at his wild eyes, remembered his fuck-ups in the race-fixing days, and told him he would now be partners with Jackie McDermott, the Lowell bookie whom Johnny had brought into the fold after the Indian War.

  Barnoski got deeply into cocaine, and early one morning in May 1988, he showed up at Jackie McDermott’s house in Lowell and allegedly shot both McDermott and his son in the head. Jackie died, but the son survived to testify. Barnoski hired Johnny’s lawyer, Richie Egbert, but a Lowell jury convicted him and he was sentenced to life in prison.

  * * *

  THE MAFIA in Boston was trying yet again to regroup. After serving seventeen years in state prison, Cadillac Frank Salemme had been released. He began moving around again, meeting with various organized-crime figures including Johnny’s younger brother, Jimmy. Salemme also sat down with his old partner, Stevie Flemmi.

  Whitey was not happy about Salemme’s overtures to Stevie. Whitey trusted Stevie as much as he trusted anyone except his brother Billy. But just in case, he soon decided that he needed a second stash of guns besides the arsenal on the Flemmis’ sunporch across the courtyard from his brother.

  After all these years, down in Providence the Office finally decided to grant the half-Irish Salemme his fondest wish—he would be officially inducted into the Mafia. But like Whitey, much of what remained of Angiulo’s organization didn’t think much of Salemme, never had, going all the way back to his Roxbury days with Wimpy Bennett.

  As usual, it fell to Zip to stir things up, to keep the Italians at each other’s throats. On June 19, 1989, he planted a front-page story in the Herald about how Cadillac Frank was preparing to crack down on dissident crews in the Boston Mafia.

  Three days later, Salemme arrived—in a Mercedes, not a Cadillac—at the International House of Pancakes in Saugus. He had a meeting scheduled with some of his East Boston rivals. As he walked unarmed across the IHOP parking lot, a rental car roared toward him.

  “Hey, Frankie!” someone yelled out the window, and then opened fire with a machine gun. Clutching his stomach, blood oozing from between his fingers, Salemme staggered into the IHOP and fell into a booth. Diners began screaming and running. A waitress warily approached Salemme as he grimaced in pain. She asked him if she could do anything for him.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking down at the blood on his hands and pants. “You could bring me some more napkins.”

  * * *

  SALEMME RECOVERED, but not before several more bodies turned up. Eventually, what remained of the Office—namely, the Man’s son, Junior Patriarca—decided that the only way to stop the fighting would be to hold a formal induction ceremony, bringing the various factions together in a traditional ceremony of Mafia mumbo-jumbo with a few burning Mass cards thrown in for good measure.

  Even by latter-day Mafia standards, Junior was not an impressive godfather. Known variously as Abe (as in Lincoln, the suburban town in which he lived) and Rubber Lips (after the most prominent feature on his face), young Patriarca spent his days listening to Rhode Island radio talk shows, which he often called under assumed names that fooled nobody.

  Given the events of the past decade, his organization was obviously riddled with informants. Yet Rubber Lips somehow convinced himself that news of this formal LCN induction ceremony—the first in New England in years—would remain secret. Sonny Mercurio got the first word to the FBI, but Zip made sure that credit went to Stevie and Whitey, which was okay by Sonny, as he testified later. Some things you don’t want to be taking a bow for, Sonny told the judge, and this here was one of them.

  The ceremony was scheduled for a Sunday in October
1989, on Guild Street in Medford. The owners of the house were away for the weekend. The FBI arrived first, on Friday night, and quickly wired the entire house. On Sunday morning, Joe Russo and Vinnie “the Animal” Ferrara arrived with platters of food—mainly meats and pastries—from the North End.

  Vinnie Federico, a North Ender serving time at MCI-Shirley for killing a black man in a dispute over a parking space, got yet another one of Governor Mike Dukakis’s weekend furloughs. On his furlough application, next to “reason,” Federico wrote, “family business.”

  Federico even brought a date, a twenty-nine-year-old North End woman who worked for Mayor Flynn at City Hall. She was sent downstairs to the basement to watch TV. When the guys from Rhode Island arrived, a couple of them expressed concerns that they seemed to have been followed by an airplane. They had been. A leg breaker from Brockton thought he had spotted a cop in a phone booth. He had.

  Raymond “Rubber Lips” Patriarca under arrest after the taped Mafia initiation in 1989.

  The FBI was everywhere. They got video and photographs of everything walking in, all of which would run in the Boston newspapers in less than two weeks. Eavesdropping in a nearby unmarked van, Zip was in his glory as the ceremony began, with Junior Patriarca dusting off the clichés from a hundred Mafia movies about how “youse come in alive and youse go out dead.”

  Recording this induction ceremony would put Zip in a class all by himself. No one had ever done this—a crusading, courageous cop singlehandedly bringing down the Mafia in his hometown. At least that was how Zip was planning to pitch it. This had Hollywood blockbuster written all over it. Zip had remarried the previous year, and now his younger second wife, a former FBI secretary, was pregnant with their first child. He had his twenty years in for the federal pension and now Billy Bulger would get him a big job working for some state-regulated utility. And after this Mafia induction, he would be the most famous G-man in America.