Hitman

by Howie Carr

  Salemme pleaded guilty in 1999 to the racketeering charges against him. Now he could testify how Zip told him he, too, would be tipped off, and how the actual message was delivered by Stevie Flemmi at Salemme’s home in Sharon. His wife had been there at the time—another potential witness.

  As the original defendants were being packed off to prison, new ones were entering the federal pipeline. On November 17, 1999, Kevin Weeks and Whitey’s money launderer Kevin O’Neil were both arrested and shipped off to a different federal holding pen, in Central Falls, Rhode Island. The newspapers immediately began speculating which Kevin would flip first. It was Kevin Weeks, after less than a month behind bars. Overnight his nickname in Southie went from Kevin Squeaks to Two Weeks, which was about how long he stood up. Now there was one more witness against Zip.

  Zip Connolly, charged with murder, at a court hearing in Miami.

  On December 12, 1999, Zip Connolly was finally arrested on racketeering and obstruction of justice charges. A few weeks later, at Weeks’s direction, the state police began digging up the first of Whitey’s death pits, at Florian Hall, where they found the bodies of Deb Hussey, Bucky Barrett, and the Valhalla crewman John McIntyre. Weeks had re-interred them there after the East Third Street house in which they were originally buried was sold in the Southie real estate boom to some rich squares from out of state.

  * * *

  IN THE fall of 2000, Billy Bulger was still hanging on as president of the University of Massachusetts. And he devised what he thought was a perfect way to shore up his increasingly shaky position. He would bring the first presidential debate of the 2000 campaign to his school. He was tight with both the Bush family and Senator Ted Kennedy, so Kennedy asked Vice President Al Gore to do a favor for him by agreeing to debate his GOP opponent at the UMass-Boston campus on Columbia Point. It was quite a feather in Billy Bulger’s cap, lining up that first debate.

  But Johnny Martorano had a surprise in store for Billy. He’d remembered something else during his debriefings.

  They were always asking me different questions, to get me to recall things I’d forgotten. And one day it suddenly occurred to me, whenever we drove over the bridge from Quincy into Dorchester, Whitey would say, “Tip your hat to Tommy.” Because that’s where they’d buried him, under the bridge, on the banks of the Neponset River. Public land, like all the other places Whitey and Stevie buried bodies.

  It was the same place they’d buried Deb Davis. So they started digging with backhoes, on the day of the presidential debate at UMass. I heard they had to pull all the curtains because you could see the backhoes out the windows in the hall where the debate was taking place. Billy is the first guy on TV as the debate begins. Millions of people are watching on TV. It’s his big moment, and a couple of hundred yards down the beach, the cops are digging up more bodies of people his brother murdered.

  LAWYER: Did you know the location because you actually put the bodies there?

  MARTORANO: No.

  LAWYER: Did you know that because someone told you?

  MARTORANO: Yes.

  LAWYER: Who told you?

  MARTORANO: Whitey Bulger.

  After all of his guilty pleas, and his testimony before the grand jury in Boston, Johnny spent most of the next six years in a federal penitentiary in North Florida. He did, however, have a date in a federal courtroom in South Boston on Northern Avenue, the same street where Whitey Bulger had gunned down Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue twenty years earlier.

  Zip’s federal racketeering trial was front-page news in Boston. He was still conducting himself like a “hero cop.” His brother, the now-retired DEA agent, met him at the front door of the courthouse every morning and acted as his security, keeping the scruffy reporters and camera crews at bay. Zip originally retained a high-profile Boston defense attorney, who had successfully defended several corrupt politicians, including Billy Bulger.

  As the evidence mounted against Zip, Billy Bulger’s old lawyer suddenly bowed out of the case and was replaced by one of his junior partners.

  When the trial began, Zip asked to be allowed to sit not at the defense table with his lawyers, but in the first row of the gallery, with his wife, as if he were a spectator at his own trial rather than the defendant. That was unusual enough, but on the first day of the trial, he walked into the courthouse with his three young sons, the oldest of whom was now thirteen.

  Special prosecutor Durham built his case methodically. He played an FBI training video in which Zip had starred during his heyday as a gangbusting G-man. In it, Zip had lectured the new agents, “Never try to out-gangster a gangster,” advice he himself had obviously never heeded.

  One of the first witnesses was Zip’s ex-wife—spousal immunity doesn’t apply after a divorce. She told of receiving the diamond ring Johnny Martorano had given to Whitey. John Morris testified under a grant of immunity. So did his ex-girlfriend and now wife, about how Zip had given her cash from Whitey and Stevie for her airline ticket to the Georgia love nest. They produced Zip’s phone records, showing his calls to Stevie’s lawyer, Kenny Fishman.

  Johnny Martorano was flown north from Florida in a Learjet. But the strike force was nervous.

  They started asking me, am I sure I told them about all the murders? Of course I’m sure—I had immunity, as long as I told the truth. If I lied about anything, I blow up the deal. Why would I lie? So they tell me, Zip’s lawyer is making noises that I supposedly killed some girlfriend of Billy Kearns, a Roxbury guy, after I raped her. It’s just more bullshit from Flemmi, and Zip believed it. You look at those 209s, and Zip believed everything they told him. All he knew was what Whitey told him, and he couldn’t even keep that straight. He was always mixing up names and titles. Skinny Kazonis was “Slim” Kazonis. He never could remember the names of any politicians in Somerville. And now he’s mixed up again, on this murder, or maybe Stevie Flemmi is feeding it to him, and he figures it’s the only way he’s got to dust me up. But I’m ready for it.

  LAWYER: Is it your testimony that you don’t kill women?

  MARTORANO: Positively not.

  LAWYER: But sometimes you have to, right?

  MARTORANO: I never run across that situation.

  LAWYER: How about Kathleen Murphy? Do you recall her?

  MARTORANO: Don’t know her.

  Zip’s lawyer then tried to spin a story about Martorano picking up Kathleen Murphy and taking her somewhere and raping her, before taking her home.

  LAWYER: Is it also possible that when she got out of the car, she said she was going to tell her uncle about what you had forced her to do?

  MARTORANO: Nope.

  LAWYER: Are you testifying that you did not kill this woman?

  MARTORANO: I don’t even know the name … I would remember killing her.

  LAWYER: Even if it were in the ’60s?

  MARTORANO: Even if it were in the ’30s.

  LAWYER: Because you keep track of all your victims, is that right?

  MARTORANO: A single girl and killed her alone for a bad reason, I would remember.

  LAWYER: But you wouldn’t want to admit it, would you?

  MARTORANO: I would admit it or lose my life if I don’t.

  The jury convicted Connolly on most of the counts; he was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Johnny was flown back to prison in Florida.

  Now time was running out for Billy Bulger. He had stacked the UMass board with his friends and cronies, and hired many of their relatives, or given lucrative contracts to their spouses. His annual pay was up to $359,000 a year.

  As long as he controlled the governor—or at least had a good relationship with him or her—he could survive. But the acting governor, Jane Swift, a bumbling former Republican state senator, was forced out of the 2002 Republican primary by Mitt Romney, a GOP golden boy and venture capitalist who had just guided the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City out of near-bankruptcy.

  Romney won in November over another female former state senator, a De
mocrat. Bulger sought a meeting with the governor-elect; perhaps he could charm Romney, the way he had the last three Republican governors. But Mitt’s new aides, State House veterans, nixed any sit-down. This was one governor Billy Bulger wouldn’t own, and he knew it. In the waning days of her administration, the lame-duck Swift decided to appoint Kenny Fishman, Stevie’s lawyer, to the superior court bench. Then she picked the brother of Billy Bulger’s top aide at UMass for a district-court judgeship on Nantucket. It looked like a going-out-of-business sale.

  By December 2002, Billy was on the ropes. The House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight was investigating FBI corruption in Boston. The surviving victims of Joe Barboza’s perjury had finally been freed from prison after wrongfully serving more than thirty years. Like Billy Bulger a decade earlier, they had been featured on 60 Minutes. Now they were suing the federal government for over $100 million, and with their elderly wives, they had made quite an impression before the congressional committee.

  H. Paul Rico, now in his late seventies, was called before the committee and asked why he had allowed—in fact, had instigated—such a gross miscarriage of justice.

  “What do you want from me?” he snarled. “Tears?”

  Whitey Bulger hadn’t even been released from prison at the time of the murder that had led to the wrongful imprisonment. But the committee chairman, Dan Burton of Indiana, decided he needed to hear from Billy Bulger. Billy was subpoenaed to testify before the committee in Boston. There would be one witness, Billy Bulger. Through his six-figure university flacks, Billy floated the suggestion that he might defy the subpoena and blow off the entire appearance.

  As soon as that story broke, governor-elect Mitt Romney called a press conference to publicly tell Bulger that he had better be there for the committee hearing. And so he was, on a Friday morning in December 2002, at the John W. McCormack Courthouse in Post Office Square, named after the former Speaker whose name Whitey had dropped all those years ago in the air force, the same building where Johnny Martorano once ran down eleven flights of stairs to escape the U.S. marshals.

  Billy’s lawyer first asked that the hearing be closed to the press and public. Burton took a vote of his members. It was unanimous to keep it open. Among those voting against Bulger’s request was the new congressman from South Boston, Steve Lynch, who had defeated Billy’s son for his old state senate seat six years earlier. Now he had succeeded Billy’s pal, the late Joe Moakley, as Southie’s congressman. Steve Lynch—yet another Gypo Nolan, at least as far as Billy was concerned.

  With the cameras rolling, Billy began by reading a statement in which he quoted from a nineteenth-century Ohio court decision about men of good character who sometimes find themselves in “ambiguous circumstances.”

  Chairman Burton listened politely. Then he asked the first question.

  “Mr. Bulger, do you know where your brother Whitey is?”

  Billy took the Fifth.

  * * *

  SIX MONTHS later, in Washington, Billy appeared before the committee once more. This time he had to answer their questions. He had been given a grant of immunity. As long as he told the truth, he couldn’t be prosecuted. Billy Bulger had cut the same deal as Martorano, Weeks, Salemme, and the rest of them. The irony escaped his rumpswabs in the media.

  In the basement of the Rayburn Office Building, Billy was trying to save not only his own job but also those of all his otherwise-unemployable payroll patriots in the university system. The C-SPAN feed was being carried live by every major television station in Boston. Billy seemed almost contrite as he began by reading from a prepared statement about his fugitive brother.

  “I now recognize that I didn’t fully grasp the dimensions of his life. I am particularly sorry to think that he may have been guilty of some of the terrible things of which he is accused. I do still live in the hope that the worst of the charges against him will prove groundless. It is my hope.”

  This time Burton’s first question to Billy Bulger was, What did you think your brother did for a living?

  “Well, I know that he was for the most part…” Billy’s voice drifted off. He started over. “I had the feeling that he was, uh, in the business of gaming and, and, uh…” He stopped again. “Whatever. It was vague to me but I didn’t think, uh—for a long while he had some jobs but uh ultimately uh it was clear that he was not uh um being um uh you know he wasn’t doing what I’d like him to do.”

  Whitey’s brother Billy testifies before a congressional committee in Washington investigating FBI corruption in 2003. Two rows back, left, is the author, Howie Carr.

  Burton asked, “Did you know anything about the Winter Hill Mob?”

  “The what?” Bulger said.

  “The gang he was connected to.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Pause. “I don’t think I met anybody from that.”

  “You didn’t know Flemmi?” Burton asked incredulously.

  “I did know Steve Flemmi, yes.”

  “Well, he was part of that gang. You didn’t know he was part of that gang?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know what Steve Flemmi did for a living?”

  “I thought he had a restaurant somewhere. And I thought he had a club, or something like that.”

  It was the Marconi Club, in Roxbury, into which Johnny had once invested $20,000. Stevie sold the club and eventually the Boston police got a search warrant and dug up its basement, looking for more bodies.

  “Any indication,” Burton said, “your brother was involved in murder?”

  “Someplace,” Billy Bulger said, “I saw it in the paper.”

  A lawyer for the committee finally brought up the name of Johnny Martorano. He reminded Bulger of Martorano’s sworn testimony that Whitey had once told him how Billy had asked Zip for a favor—keeping Whitey out of trouble.

  “He said that?” Billy asked. “And was Mr. Martorano there when I did this? Was he present?”

  “He understood,” the lawyer said, “that you had done it at some point.”

  “I see,” said Billy. “Well, if I ever did say something like that, uh, influence him to stay on the straight and narrow, if that’s what’s meant by it I could well have said it … I think it’s a pretty innocent comment, if in fact I made it. I have no recollection but I don’t want to quarrel with that source.”

  As soon as the hearing ended, Governor Romney let it be known that he would begin appointing known enemies of Billy Bulger to the UMass board. Billy took the hint and decided to call it quits. He got a severance package of $960,000 from the state, in addition to a state pension of just under $200,000 a year.

  * * *

  IN OCTOBER 2003, a few weeks after Billy Bulger’s resignation as president of UMass, Stevie Flemmi pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to ten counts of murder. The prosecutor read the agreed-upon statement of facts, listing the murders in order. As he reached the paragraph about the strangulation of Deb Davis in 1981, one of her brothers stood up in court and screamed at Stevie, “Fuck you, you fucking piece of shit!”

  * * *

  IN DECEMBER 2003, the City of Somerville began foreclosure proceedings on the old Marshall Street garage, out of which the Winter Hill Gang had operated. Howie Winter had fallen more than $11,000 behind on his tax payments.

  That same month, H. Paul Rico answered a knock at his front door of his condo in Miami Shores. He was wearing a cashmere World Jai Alai cardigan sweater. When he opened the door he saw several uniformed police officers as well as Mike Huff, the Tulsa homicide detective he’d snubbed so many years earlier. They told the seventy-seven-year-old retired FBI agent that they were there to arrest him on a murder warrant from Oklahoma. They read him his Miranda rights. Then Huff took a pair of handcuffs out of his coat and asked “Mr. Rico” to put his hands in front of him.

  First, Rico asked them if they were joking. They told him they were not. When they informed him that he would now be taken to the Miami/Dade jail for booking, H. Paul Rico defeca
ted in his trousers.

  In January 2004, Rico was extradited to Oklahoma to stand trial on charges of arranging the 1981 murder of his boss, World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler. He was flown from Miami in an ambulance jet. As the plane landed in Tulsa, Rico again shat in his pants. At his arraignment at the county jail, Rico pleaded not guilty from his wheelchair.

  On January 16, 2004, Rico died, alone in a Tulsa hospital room, with guards standing outside his room.

  * * *

  IN JUNE 2004, Johnny Martorano was again flown back to Boston to appear before Judge Mark Wolf. Almost ten years after his arrest in the parking lot in Boca Raton, he would finally be sentenced.

  That morning, columnist Mike Barnicle, forced out of the Globe following allegations of fabrications of quotes and plagiarism but still working occasionally for the Herald, dusted off the old discredited Zip Connolly story line that Johnny Martorano still hadn’t admitted to all the murders he’d committed.

  “For those of you keeping score at home,” Barnicle wrote, “his career record of kills far exceeds the modest number—twenty—he admitted to.”

  The only difference between this and so many other pro-Whitey columns Barnicle had written over the years was that now even Barnicle had to admit that “Jimmy” and Stevie were “two total degenerates.”

  The feds had asked Wolf to impose a twelve-year sentence. As prosecutor Wyshak wrote in his motion, “While the government makes no excuses for Martorano’s criminal activity, the sad truth is none of the murders in which he had been involved would have ever been solved had he not confessed.”

  But Judge Wolf wouldn’t go for twelve years. He described Martorano as a “calculating opportunist” who had only decided to testify against Stevie Flemmi because he was concerned that Flemmi would testify against him. Nevertheless, Wolf acknowledged Johnny was no longer the killing machine he had once been.

  “I’m not a prophet,” Wolf said. “But you seem to have gotten the message. You’re too old to initiate this all over again.”