by Howie Carr
Maybe Wolf knew something that he couldn’t come right out and say. So finally, in early 1997, Frankie Salemme’s lawyer filed a motion listing a number of names, asking the government to acknowledge whether any of them had been used as informants. The most important name on the list was Whitey Bulger. How could the government allow one of its own informants—one of its own employees—to take part in crimes with impunity, while arresting others who were involved in the same conspiracies? It was one of the lawyers who first mentioned the Fourteenth Amendment, but pretty soon everyone in Cellblock H couldn’t stop talking about the Constitution’s equal-protection clause.
At this point, Judge Wolf called everyone back into his courtroom and asked whether they were asking if just the names on their list were informants, or if they would prefer to have the names of all the informants the FBI had used in building its case? Now he was dropping an even broader hint.
The defendants immediately asked for all the names.
It was right about this time that the feds offered us a blanket deal. It could be they knew what was going to come out, or maybe they just figured it would be easier this way, for everybody. The way one of these deals works is, everybody in the indictment has to agree to plead guilty. The guys at the top end of the indictment, who are looking at the longest sentences, get a few years cut off. And the guys at the bottom get some time added on. But at least it’s done, and you can get down to just doing your time and getting it over with.
So we all sat down, among ourselves, and everybody agreed to the blanket deal. Everybody except Stevie. He was adamant. He said, “I’m not going to prison.” I said to him, “Where exactly do you think you are now, Stevie?” But I guess he knew he couldn’t go into the federal system, because of all the people he’d be running into that he’d ratted out over the years.
So in the end there was no deal. It looked like we were going to trial.
As part of discovery, the FBI was already providing some ancient 209s and 302s to the defendants. With little else to do in Cellblock H, Johnny Martorano and Frankie Salemme in particular pored over the old documents. After all, they had both lived through the events described.
Frankie noticed one particular 209 from 1967. Rico had written it. It contained a lot of “information of a singular nature,” which was what the FBI always stamped on the bottom of the reports back in those days. They’d redacted the informant’s name—blacked it out—but Frankie could put it together, because he was there back when it happened. So he says to Stevie, “You’re the only one who could have known this, and that’s your name that’s blacked out up top as the informant.” And Stevie goes, no no no, that ain’t my name, that’s Wimpy’s. You know Wimpy was a rat, Frankie, that’s why we killed him. And Frankie gives him this look and he says, Stevie, look at the date on this 209. It’s April 1967. We killed Wimpy in January. Stevie just kinda hung his head.
Johnny Martorano’s mother Bess was going downhill fast. One day in early 1997, he and his brother Jimmy were shackled together and driven to a nursing home in Quincy. She had Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s. She looked at Johnny and smiled and said, “You’re still the quiet one.”
Two weeks later she was dead. Johnny asked to be allowed to attend her funeral, but was told that prisoners only got to see their dying parents once—either before or after they passed on. He hadn’t known he had a choice.
Joe McDonald was the next to go. He died a free man, in his own bed, in Somerville, at age eighty. When he was released from prison, he’d tried to find out what happened to his partner, Jimmy Sims, who had vanished in 1987. Joe Mac never did solve that final mystery, nor has anyone else. Jimmy Kearns, ratted out by Whitey Bulger when he was a fugitive in Las Vegas in 1979, died in federal prison.
The old In Town crew was dying off as well. Larry Baione passed away at age seventy-five from an intestinal disorder in 1996 at the federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Two years later, at the same hospital, Joe Russo died of throat cancer at the age of sixty-seven.
Johnny, meanwhile, sent a message to Patty in Florida, asking her to come up to Plymouth some visiting day soon, because he had something to tell her, and he wanted to say it to her in person, face-to-face.
I told her, you’ve been a great girl all these years, but it looks like I’m gonna be here for a while. You gotta get on with your life. She started dating a guy, married him, a good guy, he took wonderful care of her and Jimmy. She still lives in Florida, never left. It was tough, I loved her. I still do.
Patty still comes up to Boston every summer to visit her family. After I got out of prison, that summer she and her husband and Jimmy were staying at the Long Wharf Marriott. I asked Jimmy, “Can you bring your stepfather down to the lobby tomorrow, because I want to meet him.”
See, when he started dating Patty, I don’t think he knew about my … reputation. So it meant a lot to me for him to understand that I’m not Jack the Ripper. We met and shook hands and I thanked him for taking such good care of both Jimmy and Patty. Jimmy was really happy.
One day in 1997, they all filed back into Judge Wolf’s courtroom for another day of hearings. The defendants—Johnny and Jimmy Martorano, Stevie Flemmi, Frankie Salemme, and Robert DeLuca—all sat together in the jury box.
This day, Wolf announced he would like to see Flemmi and his lawyer, Kenny Fishman, alone in his chambers. In private, the judge told Stevie that the next day he was going to release his name—as well as those of Whitey and Sonny Mercurio—as informants. Wolf told him that this would be his final opportunity to work something out with the government, that is, to agree to testify.
That night, everyone climbed wearily onto the bus back to Plymouth—everybody except Stevie. They all thought he was gone for good. But after dinner, Flemmi bounded back into Cellblock H and announced that he needed to get everyone together because he had an announcement to make. They filed into a small room next to the visitors’ area.
“I was an informant for over thirty years,” Stevie said. “And so was Whitey. Wolf’s going to tell you that in court tomorrow. But I wanted you to hear it from me first, because it’s not what you think it is. Me and Whitey gave them shit and got back gold in return.”
I was crushed. I mean, I loved that guy. Now I wanted to kill him and at the same time I was heartbroken. I know “mixed emotions” is a cliché but that’s what I felt. Stevie said he gave them “shit”? We had the diagrams he gave the FBI of the Dog House so they’d know where to place the bugs. That wasn’t shit. Neither was setting up Barboza to perjure himself about innocent guys—the ones who hadn’t died in prison were still in the can at that point, thirty years later. It wasn’t shit to get himself and Whitey cut out of the race-fixing indictment when all the rest of us went down.
Yeah, he and Whitey gave ’em shit all right—and I was the shit. Me and my brother and Howie and all the rest. And these two guys were the godfathers of my sons!
Stevie just kept trying to talk his way out of it. He’d come up with one lie after another. He started saying, well, I never hurt nobody but the Italians. I said, what about them fifty drug dealers in Southie? Remember, we were getting more 209s every day, I still haven’t seen all of them, but these two guys were ratting out everybody, and not just gangsters either. And if Whitey didn’t have anything on you, he’d just make something up, something bad, like he saw you snorting coke. And Zip would write it all down.
Stevie was dancing, but it just wouldn’t fly no more, not after we started getting the 209s. He hurt everybody. At one point Stevie was complaining, he was supposed to get paid for all these reports, but Rico was stealing the money. And then a few minutes later he’s saying he’s not a rat. Him and Whitey, they were men without a country now. Billy Bulger’s probably the only friend Stevie’s got left.
It was killing me, thinking about what they’d done. Then on top of everything else, I started feeling guilty. This was all my fault. It was me who brought them both into the gang. Whitey came t
o me; I’m the one who introduced him to Howie. If I don’t help him out ’cause I owed Billy O a favor, maybe the Mullens would have killed him and none of this happens. And then Stevie—sure, Howie helped him come back from Montreal, too, but I was the one who was pushing Howie to do it, whispering in his ear every day. If I’m not so hot to get Stevie back, the FBI wouldn’t have been able to make it look like they had nothing to do with it. They’re the ones who really brought him back, and that would have been obvious if Howie and I hadn’t been hiring lawyers and bail bondsmen and arranging which cops he’d surrender to. I provided the cover for the FBI to bring him back to destroy us. It’s all my fault, that’s what I was thinking.
I says, well, fuck it, this is just too embarrassing. I don’t want people to think I’m involved in this. I’m in tears. I loved this guy at one point but fuck it, I’ll just kill him.
LAWYER: So it was at that point that you realized that Mr. Flemmi, Mr. Bulger were pretty much handing you up?
MARTORANO: They were handing everybody up.
LAWYER: Including you, right?
MARTORANO: Including me … I knew they were informants. That was enough.
LAWYER: And you knew these informants had been around you for twenty-five years of your life while you were committing murders, right?
MARTORANO: Right.… Now I know they could possibly implicate me, my brother, all my friends. That’s why I came forward, not to save myself, because I took 10 extra years, but I tried to save a pack of people.
LAWYER: You did it for your friends?
MARTORANO: I did a lot for them, yeah.
LAWYER: So you did the right thing?
MARTORANO: I still believe I did. I mean, I didn’t think anybody else got hurt by Flemmi or Bulger after the fact.
On May 22, 1997, after more than a decade of denials, the FBI officially admitted that Whitey Bulger had been an informant. Judge Wolf had already granted the defendants’ motion for open pretrial hearings. In outing Whitey as a rat, the government cited “unique and rare circumstances.”
The hearings began with a parade of FBI agents, including Zip Connolly. But he took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify. Outside the courtroom, he denounced the rumors now swirling around him, issuing almost daily denials of the stories that were appearing in both Boston newspapers. He knew nothing about the FBI office buying all the booze for its Christmas parties at the South Boston Liquor Mart. When it was reported in the Herald that he had accepted free stoves and refrigerators from Whitey’s appliance store at F and West Broadway, Zip denounced the front-page story as “an abject lie.”
After the FBI agents came the gangsters. Anthony St. Laurent, the Saint, who had had the run-in with Johnny over his attempted shakedown of Joe Schnitz, complained to the judge that he was in ill health and had to take “40, 50 enemas a day.”
Suddenly the Saint had a new nickname: “Public Enema Number One.”
The Saint was asked directly if he was an FBI informant.
“I take the Fifth,” he replied.
It all made good copy in the newspapers, but it was clear that all this was just a warm-up for the main attraction—Stevie Flemmi. If, that is, he lived long enough to get to the witness stand.
I think I could have killed him and gotten away with it. I planned it out for a while. Even if they got me for it, so what? I’m facing one murder charge instead of twenty. Plus, if I don’t kill him, for the rest of my life—my life in prison—people who Stevie put in jail will be asking me, “Why didn’t you stop him when you had the chance?” It was like with the Campbell brothers. If I don’t do something, other people are going to get fucked.
My plan was simple. I was three doors down from him. The doors are locked at 9 P.M., and at 6 A.M. they press a master button, and all the cells are unlocked. There were cameras everywhere, but that time of day, before dawn, it was real dark, too dark for the camera to catch anything but a shadow. What I would do is, I would go into his cell and either strangle or stab him, then pull the blanket over his head, and close the cell door behind me, locking it. Then I’d go down to the mess hall and get in line.
See, Plymouth was a boring place. They didn’t have jobs there. They might find his body right afterward, but chances are they don’t discover he’s dead for twelve hours—until the first lockdown of the night, at 6:30. We talked about it, and one of the other guys offered to help me out if I needed any assistance.
But ultimately, I decided not to do it. Lotta people get stabbed in jail, you know, so they’ve gotten pretty good at saving guys who’ve been shanked. And they can bring back people you think you’ve strangled. If I’d had a gun I could have made sure, but that wasn’t an option. It was too dangerous, if I tried to kill him and he survived. Then he’s out the door for sure, and we’re all done for.
It was a difficult situation for us to be in. Stevie’s real scared by this point. We tell him, you’re not our friend no more, but you’re in this case with us, and maybe we can still win it. We showed him the decisions from the Scarpa case in New York, the Colombo crime family—it was the same deal, an FBI informant in the conspiracy. Did we have a good chance of succeeding? No. It was a long shot, and we know he’s a rat, but we can’t treat him like one, number one because he might get us out, and number two, because he might turn on us.
Remember, he’s got other problems in jail besides being a rat. There’s also a lot of guys from Southie locked up in Plymouth, and they know what Stevie and Whitey were doing with those young girls all those years. They hated the guy. We hated him too, wanted to kill him as much as the guys from Southie did, maybe more, but on the other hand we had to protect him, for our own case.
This is a guy who I know now has been ratting on me since I was twenty-four years old, and now I’m fifty-six, and I’m concerned that he’s going to get me and everyone else I know one last time. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that if he starts talking about all the murders, he could walk out of Plymouth, no murder raps, no forfeitures, no nothing. And what if they bring Whitey back to corroborate his testimony against the rest of us? Stevie and Whitey could end getting away with everything, with all their money, living somewhere warm, and we’re locked up forever.
Johnny had a childhood friend from Milton who was in the Secret Service. He asked him to come in for a visit—as an attorney, so that Johnny could invoke the attorney-client privilege if something went wrong. Johnny wanted his old friend’s opinion of the cops’ organized-crime strike force. Could he trust Dan Doherty, the DEA agent? And how about the state police—Tom Foley, Dan Duffy, and Steve Johnson? Obviously, going to the FBI was out of the question. The Secret Service agent vouched for the strike force. They’re stand-up guys, he told Johnny. That was good enough for Martorano.
Next he needed a lawyer. Dick O’Brien was using Frank DiMento, who’d been around forever. He went back at least as far as Buddy McLean, and he’d even represented Whitey Bulger a time or two.
Johnny knew and respected DiMento, and of course O’Brien was a good friend, so nobody thought anything of it when Johnny started hanging around the visiting room talking to DiMento, even if Dick O’Brien wasn’t around. Finally Johnny told Frank to call the strike force.
I knew Frank was friendly with Fred Wyshak, the prosecutor who was handling the case. Frank vouched for Wyshak’s integrity. Frank spoke to Wyshak and then got a message back to me at the jail from Wyshak: “Tell Johnny if he helps us I’ll do anything I can for him.”
Frank told me, “If Fred says it, he means it.” He was right. Wyshak was telling the truth.
Johnny couldn’t say anything to anybody. But he’d gotten to like Robert “Bobby” DeLuca, the Mafia soldier from Rhode Island. Never having done anything with Flemmi, DeLuca had never been betrayed by him. So he became an intermediary, a go-between of sorts, between Stevie and the Boston guys he’d fucked.
It wasn’t an easy assignment for DeLuca, having to commiserate daily with Stevie Flemmi. DeLuca detested him a
s much as everybody else. But for months DeLuca kept Stevie talking, fantasizing about winning the case and getting out. It was enough to keep Stevie from flipping. Under adverse conditions, DeLuca performed a real service for his fellow wiseguys. So one morning Johnny stopped by Robert’s cell to give him a heads-up.
“Robert,” he said. “I am going out that door before Stevie does. I am going to destroy him before he destroys us.”
They called me in for a phony hearing or something like that, and that was it, I was gone from Plymouth. The state police had a little two-man jail set up at the academy in New Braintree. That’s where they put me. They made a back room and I’d talk to them there every day—Doherty, and from the state police Tom Foley, Dan Duffy, and Steve Johnson. Some days Fred Wyshak and Brian Kelly from the U.S. attorney’s office.
Frank DiMento was involved in everything, either in person or on the phone. He protected my position, totally. I never considered lawyers as having balls, but I ended up with two guys who did—Frank DiMento and Marty Weinberg.
So I’m in there talking to the strike force every day. I tell them what happened; I give them everything except the names. This is a proffer—if we can’t reach an agreement, they can’t use any of what I’ve told them against me. They made it clear from the beginning, you have to tell us everything, if you lie you get thrown out, sent back to prison, and prosecuted for perjury, the way Frankie Salemme did later on. Plus they can then use the evidence in the confessions of murder against me.
From day one, I told them I would testify against Stevie and Whitey. I also told ’em, those are the only two I’ll testify against. Because they’re the rats.
Foley would say to me, at trial you would have to tell the truth, who was with you on all the hits. I said okay, but other than Whitey and Stevie all the names in these murders stay blank until the day I make the agreement, and the agreement has to be that I don’t have to testify against anybody but those two. The only way I’m naming any of my friends is if I have a deal, in writing, that I don’t have to testify against them, ever. And I told them, if you don’t like my terms, then just send me back, because I’m almost done anyway.