Hitman

by Howie Carr

  * * *

  AT NIGHTS now, in his apartment in Quincy, with the bulletproof steel plate on what had originally been a sliding plate-glass door to his back patio, Whitey would sit at his kitchen table. In his neat Palmer-style longhand, he would write in his journals about the LSD experiments he had taken part in as a federal prisoner in Atlanta. He had written to Emory University in Georgia seeking copies of the medical records. It was clear that if he was arrested, this was going to be one of his defenses—that the feds had made him what he was today, with all their drugs.

  “We were recruited by deception,” Whitey wrote. “We were encouraged to volunteer to be human guinea pigs in a noble humanitarian cause—searching for a cure for schizophrenia … I was a believer in the government to the degree they would never take advantage of us.…”

  The poor, innocent Whitey. He thought everything was on the level, or so he would have everyone believe now.

  “It’s 3 A.M. and years later, I’m still effected [sic] by L-S-D in that I fear sleep—the horrible nightmares that I fight to escape by waking, the taste of adrenaline, gasping for breath. Often I’m woken [sic] by a scream and find it’s me screaming.”

  * * *

  DESPITE THE ominous turns the investigation was taking, Stevie seemed strangely unconcerned. He stashed some money offshore in the Grand Caymans, but he basically stuck to his usual routine, taking his annual summer trip to Montreal, knocking up a teenager, and helping one of his sons by Marion Hussey open a bar downtown.

  * * *

  IN THE fall of 1994, Whitey showed up unannounced in Pompano Beach. Whatever the reason for his trip, it wasn’t a social call. Johnny only found out about his visit when the father of a woman he knew bumped into Whitey on a staircase at a beachfront motel. He introduced himself as “Whitey from Boston.” Johnny was perplexed that his partner hadn’t called ahead to say he was coming down. So he phoned Stevie in Boston and asked him why his old pal was giving him the swerve.

  Stevie said, “Whitey doesn’t want to bring any heat down on you.” What heat? I said he’s never seen his godson, this might be a good time. But Whitey wasn’t interested. I wondered later if he was afraid I might try to kill him. Not then I wouldn’t have, I didn’t really know anything at that point.

  Now would be a different story. Wouldn’t matter what the weapon was. I’d use anything that was in front of me, and if there wasn’t anything, I’d strangle him with my bare hands.

  Zip was earning a six-figure salary as a vice president of Boston Edison. His only headache was that his secretary didn’t seem to like typing up the revisions he was constantly making to his screenplay. He and his growing family lived in a new mansion on a cul-de-sac in Lynnfield that he shared with his gangster brother-in-law. Summer weekends Zip spent at his second home on the Cape.

  One day he ran into Frank Salemme on the street, again, and invited him up to his office in the Prudential Center. Sitting across a desk from the gangster he’d arrested on the east side of Manhattan back in 1972, Zip promised to warn Salemme as soon as the indictments came down, just as H. Paul Rico had done a quarter century earlier, so that Cadillac Frank could flee once more.

  Among the first charged was Joey Yerardi. It wasn’t part of the larger indictment; he’d just been named by some of the Jewish bookies as their collector. Before the cops could arrest him on extortion charges, Yerardi called Johnny in Florida and told him he was flying down.

  By now, Joey Y owes me $365,000. He was panicking; he’d been calling people who owed him money from ten years earlier, that’s how desperate he was. He’d told me he might be going on the lam, and sure enough, he does, and of course he comes to me for help. What can I do? I feel sorry for him. He told me he was broke, and at that time I was a little short myself. So I just took off my diamond pinkie ring and gave it to him. He didn’t know anybody down there, so he had to take it to a jeweler and he got ripped off. I think he told me the guy gave him 10 grand for it. But what are you gonna do?

  When you’re on the lam, you always need an ace in the hole. And that’s what that ring was for me all those years. That’s what diamonds are for. You can always get cash for them when you’re in a jam. So what the hell, the ring served its purpose.

  Next I take Joey Y to Jeff Jenkins, and we get him a car, and then I set him up in a place in Hillsborough Beach, about ten miles away from my place in Boca. And then I make my big mistake—we go to this cell-phone guy I know and I buy Joey Y a cell phone. He’s only supposed to use it to call me. So I’m filling out the paperwork, and I ask him, whose name do you want it in? He gives me one of his aliases.

  That night, I start thinking to myself, am I out of my mind, giving this fucking guy a cell phone, what the hell was I thinking? Next day I took it back from him, but I’ve already paid for it, got a year’s contract or something. So I decide, it’ll be my second phone, I’ll just use it to call Patty at the house.

  Zip Connolly got the word on December 23, 1994, that the indictments were coming down after New Year’s. Whitey fled immediately, with Teresa Stanley. They spent New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, where Whitey registered under his own name. Kevin Weeks tipped off Stevie, who drove down to Randolph to tell Salemme. Cadillac Frank immediately screwed to West Palm Beach.

  Stevie, meanwhile, remained in Boston, moving around the city openly. By January 5, 1995, Whitey was beginning to wonder if maybe Zip had jumped the gun. What he didn’t know was that the feds had already arrested Jimmy Martorano and Bobby DeLuca, a Rhode Island mobster who, like Jimmy, had been spending too much time with Salemme. Whitey was driving back to Boston from New York when he heard a bulletin on the all-news radio station in Boston. Stevie Flemmi had just been arrested in Quincy Market. Whitey immediately called Kevin Weeks on a cell phone.

  “I’m turning around,” he said.

  I got my own bad news—Joey Y has been picked up in Boca. Now I’m in a real jam. I call up Dick O’Brien and say, “I’m coming by to pick you up, you gotta help me clear out Joey Y’s house before the cops get there.” So we rush over and we’re running through the house, grabbing his records, betting slips, everything. Actually, though, I’m more concerned about his car. If the cops get the car, they’ll trace it back to Jenkins, and I’m done for.

  So we get the car and drive away, and I think to myself, maybe I got lucky again. But I forgot one thing: the cell phone. When the cops arrest Joey, they start running checks on anything in his name, or his aliases. And of course I’d used one of his aliases when I bought him the phone. So the cops get the call records on the phone I bought him, and all the calls are going to my house.

  The cops told me later, when they went out to my house, the first thing that caught their attention was the fact that I was driving a car with dealer plates. Then they noticed that it was backed into the driveway. For easy getaway, in other words. Then they see me come out of the house, and one of ’em says to the other one, “Is that who I think it is?”

  LAWYER: Fair to say that you weren’t expecting that arrest, correct?

  MARTORANO: I was expecting it for a long time, but it just happened at that time.

  It was January 10, 1995, five days after the arrests in Boston. Patty had an evening class at the local community college. So her devoted “husband” decided after dinner to take young Jimmy and one of his neighborhood playmates down to the local Morrison’s Cafeteria for some pie. John parked the van and stepped out with the two kids when he suddenly heard a voice behind him. It was Steve Johnson, he found out later, then a sergeant, now a lieutenant in the Massachusetts State Police.

  “John?” said Sergeant Johnson.

  “Johnny Martorano?” said another cop.

  “I think you’ve got the wrong man,” Johnny Martorano said.

  “Really?” Johnson, backed by uniformed Boca Raton police, began advancing on him. “Let’s check your arms, John.”

  They grabbed his arms and rolled up his sleeves and saw the tattoos he’d gotten all those years
ago in Scollay Square. On his right forearm was a blue jay, and underneath it, the word NANCY. On his left forearm, a cross and underneath it the initials IHS—In hoc signo.

  In hoc signo they had Johnny Martorano cold.

  “Looks like you, John,” one of them said. “You’re under arrest.”

  They take me down to the stationhouse with the kids, and I’ve got my one call. Patty’s in occupational-therapy class, so I call the mother of the other kid, Gail Silverman is her name. She comes in the station, shocked. I’m in handcuffs. I say to her, “I’m sorry about this Gail.” Then I lean forward and whisper in her ear, “Tell Patty there’s 40,000 cash under the floorboards in the bedroom.”

  12

  “You Can’t Rat on a Rat”

  LAWYER: So you don’t consider yourself a rat?

  MARTORANO: Nope.

  LAWYER: What is your definition of “rat”? Maybe you can tell the—

  MARTORANO: Well, I am here to try to stop the people I perceived as rats from testifying against other friends of mine, including myself and my brother.

  LAWYER: Okay, but the question is, What is your understanding of what a rat is, what you claim not to be?

  MARTORANO: A rat is somebody that tells on somebody on things that they shouldn’t tell on.… I know you can’t rat on a rat.

  LAWYER: When you say Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi are rats, what do you believe they did to make them rats?

  MARTORANO: They turned a lot of people in.… They were informants, period. They were Top Echelon informants and they had a number, just like a cop has a number on his badge.

  LAWYER: You were offended by that, weren’t you?

  MARTORANO: A lot of things about them, yes.

  AT THE BEGINNING of this final chapter, Johnny Martorano wanted to explain, in his own words, how he reached the decisions he had to make for himself and others during his years in prison.

  “You Can’t Rat on a Rat”—that’s the title of this chapter, because that’s what my twelve years in prison were all about, grappling with the question of how to stop these four rats—Whitey, Stevie, Zip, and Paul Rico. But at the same time I was determined to remain true to my own personal code, which tells me that an honorable man never informs on another man. I finally came to the conclusion that I had to speak up, and that by doing so, I wasn’t violating the precepts that I have always lived my life by, because you can’t rat on a rat.

  To me, these people—Whitey, Stevie, Zip, and Paul Rico—they were the bottom of the barrel. You can be a gangster, or you can be a cop, but you can’t be both.

  My father used to say, a liar is worse than a thief. A thief just wants your possessions, which you can always replace. But a liar is trying to hurt you, personally, deliberately. To me an informant is the same as a liar—they just tell shit out of school, whispering behind your back. Sometimes what they say may be true, but if they got nothing new that day to pass on, a rat will just make it up. Believe me, when I was in jail, reading the old 209s that Whitey dictated to Zip, I saw that over and over again. A lot of the so-called incidents in those files about me and the other guys never happened. And it wasn’t just gangsters that Whitey and Stevie lied about—they lied about honest cops, who by the way they hated more than gangsters, or anyone else. They lied about politicians, lawyers, businessmen—everybody who crossed them.

  I always felt an informant should be stopped at any opportunity. As an honest man, it’s your duty, your obligation, to stop them.

  My whole life, I never ratted on anybody. That’s what I mean when I keep saying that you can’t rat on a rat. I said that under oath in Miami, at Zip’s murder trial. I wasn’t “ratting” on anybody, I was trying to stop these four rats from hurting anybody else—me, my family, my friends, anybody. And you know what? Since I started helping the government, none of these guys have hurt anybody else, have they?

  I’m sure some people will say, Johnny’s just trying to rationalize what he did, testifying for the government. I’m no angel, most people consider me a bad guy. I understand that. But with me, everything is up front. What you see is what you get. I’m not pretending to be anything I’m not. It’s my belief that good men can do bad things. Take that as you will.

  Whatever else I’ve done in my life, I think I played a pivotal role in ending this terrible evil in Boston, this rat partnership between my two ex-friends and those corrupt FBI agents.

  People who don’t like me will say, Johnny claims he’s a stand-up guy, but he worked for the government. My answer to that is, this was a war. You know the old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” In this case, I had the same goals as the honest cops, the guys in the state police and the DEA and the Justice Department. We were all trying to weed out this cancer that was infecting the whole system.

  Look, there are bad apples in any group. Who rooted out the bad priests in the Archdiocese of Boston? A lot of it was done by the good priests, who were appalled by what the bad priests were doing to those kids.

  I feel like I was rooting out the worst apples. Again, I’m not trying to whitewash what I did. I’m coming clean here, just like I did in court. I regret an awful lot of what I did, but remember, a lot of the guys I killed were rats. A lot of the guys I killed had killed a lot of other guys, and probably would have gone on killing if I hadn’t killed them first.

  You may not believe this, but I’m a religious person. I’ve confessed my sins, and I believe I’ve been forgiven, by God if not by everybody else.

  That’s all I wanted to say.

  * * *

  IN JANUARY 1995, Johnny Martorano was moved to a new home—the Palm Beach County jail. By prison standards, it wasn’t bad. He made his first court appearance in front of U.S. District Court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s sister. Among those in the courtroom was an FBI agent from Boston named Buckley, who had been Zip Connolly’s last partner before Zip retired in 1990.

  Buckley comes up to me and says, you were indicted in 1979. I said, “I don’t know anything about that.” He shows me the indictment and says, “There’s your name, and your brother’s name, and Howie Winter’s name, and you’re telling me you didn’t know you were indicted?”

  Donald Trump’s sister asks me the same question, and I say, “Your Honor, I’m really not sure you have the right person here.” She says, Okay, why don’t you go back to your cell for two weeks and think it over? In two weeks, I came back in and I told her, “Your Honor, I’ve checked the indictment, and it’s me. I didn’t know it was me they were looking for.” I had to hold out for those two weeks, in order to avoid any new charges against myself and anyone who’d helped me—aiding and abetting a fugitive, that kind of thing. I had to at least try to act surprised. That way, I could back up my story, that I never told Patty anything except that I couldn’t have any contact with anyone in Boston because I had all these marital problems, which of course I did have.

  Next stop was the Miami/Dade jail, which wasn’t nearly as posh as the Palm Beach lockup. Then he boarded the federal airbus—ConAir as they called it in the Nicolas Cage movie—for the flight back to Boston. Federal prisoners were housed at the Plymouth House of Correction—a new jail built since Johnny’s three-month stay at the old one in 1978. He was still chained to his seat as the plane landed in Boston, when suddenly he heard someone yelling, “Johnny! Johnny Martorano!” He looked up and saw Pat Nee, shackled, shuffling through the airbus.

  Nee had just gotten a break. A judge had thrown out the additional thirty-year on-and-after sentence he’d been facing for using a machine gun in the botched armored-car robbery in Abington. The gun had been given to Nee by Whitey, and subsequent testing had proved that the firing pin had been removed before Nee and his codefendants had taken possession of it. Nee’s argument, which the judge had bought, was that if the gun couldn’t fire, it wasn’t really a machine gun.

  Nee had slowly come around to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t an innocent mishap that the gun was missing its firin
g pin. What if Whitey had wanted to make sure that the gang wouldn’t be able to use it to escape? After all, mere possession of it should have ensured a virtual life sentence for his old rival Nee, in addition to the other Southie wiseguys in the gang, none of whom were shrinking violets themselves.

  Now, Nee was being returned to prison to finish out his much-reduced sentence, just as Johnny was arriving back in Boston to stand trial. As Pat made his way down the ConAir aisle, he yelled back at Johnny Martorano.

  “I left you all my toiletries. You can have my sneakers, too.”

  He wasn’t kidding. I inherited Pat’s sneakers. A good pair of sneakers is a big deal at Plymouth—you couldn’t buy ’em at the commissary, only junk food.

  I get down there, and the first person I see is my brother, and my heart sank. I told him, this is the one thing I always wanted to avoid—both of us in jail together. That’s why I’d kept him out of the sports-gambling business, so he could stay clean. I told him back then, in ’72, I don’t need you in a boiler beside me, I need you right here, at Chandler’s. Somebody has to be here to take care of our families in case something happens to me.

  Then I meet Robert DeLuca, from Rhode Island, Mafia, who was also in the indictment. There were a lot of Charlestown guys in for various things. And then I saw Stevie. At that point, he’s still my friend and my partner. I was in a separate case, I was facing none of the counts the other guys were indicted for, illegal extension of credit, all that stuff. They hadn’t added me to the larger indictment. Only thing they had on me was the horse case.

  After turning around and driving back to New York the night Stevie Flemmi was arrested, Whitey Bulger hit the road with Teresa Stanley. They drove aimlessly around the country for a couple of weeks before Whitey called Kevin Weeks and told him to bring Catherine Greig to a Chinese restaurant in Weymouth. He was switching molls. Not only was Catherine twenty years younger, she had no kids or grandchildren, no one to miss, nothing to get homesick about. Catherine’s closest relative was her twin sister, with whom she left her two black poodles, Nikki and Gigi. Whitey had made it clear to Catherine that the dogs were not included in his invitation.