Howie Carr

by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century

  Callahan laid out the deal to Halloran, who listened, and then asked if there was any alternative. Whitey didn’t like questions like that. They told Halloran they would get back to him later.

  A few weeks later, Callahan called Halloran and told him to stop by the apartment again. Callahan was there by himself. He handed Halloran a bag, and when Halloran looked inside, he found $20,000 in cash, two hundred $100 bills.

  “We shouldn’t have involved you to begin with,” Callahan said.

  Halloran bought himself a new car, parked it at Logan Airport, and then flew off to Fort Lauderdale, where he went on a bender.

  Stevie Flemmi also headed for Florida. But Stevie’s destination was Miami, to meet his old FBI contact, H. Paul Rico. Rico’s task was to set up his boss, just as he’d set up Ronnie Dermody and Punchy McLaughlin more than fifteen years earlier. It would be an easy hit—Wheeler was a square, a creature of habit, who often played golf at the Southern Hills Country Club, an exclusive club that had hosted the U.S. Open.

  This time, Whitey and Stevie called in a pro—Johnny Martorano, the fugitive they had taken to calling “the cook.” Flemmi got the details from Rico in Miami and passed them on to Martorano, who was living in Boca Raton with a teenage girl. Johnny called in Joe McDonald, another Winter Hill fugitive. They flew to Tulsa and scouted out the city and the getaway routes from the golf course. Via bus, Whitey shipped down several untraceable .38-caliber Police Specials.

  On the afternoon of May 27, 1981, after finishing his weekly round of golf, Roger Wheeler walked out into the parking lot of his country club and climbed into his Cadillac. Johnny Martorano, wearing a fake beard and sunglasses, was waiting for him. With Joe McDonald behind the wheel of a rented Pontiac, Martorano hopped out of the car, hurried across the parking lot, and shot Wheeler through the window right between the eyes, killing him instantly. Seconds later, the Pontiac was gone. Witnesses later recalled hearing tires squeal.

  The cover-up began almost immediately. The Tulsa Police Department got cooperation from the local office of the FBI, but was stonewalled by the bureaus in Boston and Miami. Relying heavily on information from H. Paul Rico, the FBI went into its blame-the-victim mode.

  “Roger M. Wheeler was a self-made millionaire several times over,” read an FBI memo sent to its field offices, “with a very aggressive, abrasive personality who usually made money at the expense of others. He had a strong dislike of paying taxes. He was best known as a trader rather than as a business operator and would sell anything he owed for the right profit…He was often involved in lawsuits, many [of ] which he initiated.”

  As for any eyewitnesses to the murder at the golf club coming forward, the FBI office in Tulsa was not optimistic.

  “[They] are black, uncooperative and do not want to become involved in rich ‘white man’ affairs.”

  Brian Halloran was next. He knew too much. In the fall of 1981, someone fired an errant shot at him outside his Quincy apartment. A few weeks later, drunk and stoned as always, Halloran found himself in a Chinatown restaurant after last call, sitting in a booth with Frank Salemme’s younger brother, Jackie, and across the table from a drug dealer named George Pappas.

  When Pappas got up to take a phone call, Halloran rose from his side of the table, pulled out a gun, and shot him in the head, killing him instantly. Then, as a dozen witnesses watched, and Jackie Salemme cowered under the table, Halloran ran from the restaurant, leaving behind his car keys and his trademark scally cap.

  It was the work of a junkie, which is what Brian Halloran had become. But it was a lucky break for Whitey, because Halloran, in killing Pappas, had put the Mafia in a very awkward position. Jackie Salemme was one of their guys, and if Halloran went on trial, Salemme might end up on the witness stand. That alone was reason enough for the Mafia to want Halloran dead. So now Whitey could point the finger at the Mafia when he did what he had to do.

  Halloran stayed on the run for a month, then turned himself in to the Boston police and made bail. By then, Whitey had already begun dictating Halloran’s obituary, in Zip Connolly’s FBI files. On October 2, 1981, Connolly filed the first of many reports on who was going to kill Halloran.

  “Source advised that the Mafia want Brian Halloran ‘hit in the head’ to shut him up as a potential witness.”

  Halloran knew that without protection, he was a dead man. He also knew he was fresh out of friends in the Boston underworld. He started talking to the FBI.

  In the fall of 1981, Whitey had other concerns beyond World Jai Alai. One was a girlfriend of Stevie’s named Debbie Davis. She was now twenty-six, a beautiful blonde, and Stevie had been with her, off and on, almost since he had returned to Boston in 1974 after his years as a fugitive in Montreal.

  By age twenty-six, she was fed up with her life as a moll in Stevie’s harem. As Frank Salemme later described Flemmi, “He was a womanizer. That was his MO all along, his money and his women, not necessarily in that order.” Debbie had watched Stevie eyeing her dark-haired thirteen-year-old sister, Michelle, whom he took to calling “Ava Gardner.” Looking for a change, Debbie had started dating a Mexican on the side, a dangerous proposition, considering that one young man who had flirted with her had already ended up dead, shot in the back of the head in the Blue Hills Reservation. There was no way she could break up with Stevie, simply because she knew too much.

  She would have to go.

  One morning in September 1981, with Stevie’s parents gone for the day, Stevie brought Debbie Davis back to the Flemmis’ house in South Boston. Whitey was waiting for her. He jumped Davis and strangled her, as Stevie watched. Then they stripped her body, cut off her fingers and toes to prevent identification, and wrapped her corpse in a plastic sheet. After dark, they drove down to the same marshes by the Neponset River where they’d buried Tommy King back in 1975.

  When he decided to go to the FBI, Halloran had known enough to steer clear of Connolly and Morris and the rest of the organized crime squad. He’d instead approached an agent he knew who was assigned to the labor racketeering squad. In the weeks that followed, Halloran was shifted from safe house to safe house, three in all.

  The decision to formally protect him as a federal witness was up to Jeremiah O’Sullivan, the head of the organized crime strike force, who was by then preparing the indictments of the Angiulos. Preoccupied with the Mafia, O’Sullivan probably dismissed Halloran as a drunk and a druggie, a minor hood with a first-degree murder charge hanging over his head who wanted to roll over in return for uncorroborated testimony.

  Others, though, including the agents who’d brought him in, thought Halloran could be a valuable tool against Winter Hill. With the law enforcement debate over Halloran continuing, Whitey dictated another FBI report, this one to Morris, on April 23, saying “that the ‘outfit’ continues to be interested in having Brian Halloran killed. Source advised that the ‘outfit’ consider Halloran to be a weak person and are concerned that he may make a deal with the DA’s office to give up Salemme.”

  This was the classic Whitey swerve: attribute his own motives to someone else. When he hit Halloran, there’d already be a paper trail leading back to the Mafia.

  In the end, O’Sullivan cut Halloran loose, refusing to okay his entrance into the Witness Protection Program. The new number-two FBI agent in the Boston office, Robert Fitzpatrick, was so stunned by the decision that he approached Bill Weld, the U.S. attorney. In court in 1997, Weld recalled the FBI agent’s premonition.

  “You know,” Fitzpatrick said, “people always say there’s a danger for this snitch or that snitch. I’m telling you, this guy—I would not want to be standing next to this guy.”

  Whitey had opened up an appliance store at F Street and West Broadway, out of which his top money-launderer Kevin O’Neil could deal hijacked stoves and refrigerators. On the afternoon of May 11, 1982, Whitey was hanging around the store, along with one of the younger gang members—Kevin Weeks, twenty-five years old, a project rat who had gotten his start
as a bouncer at Triple O’s. Weeks now had a job at the MBTA, and he supplemented his income doing the store’s “bull work”—delivering the appliances.

  That afternoon, an older hood from Charlestown stopped by and mentioned casually that he had just seen Brian Halloran drinking at the Pier, a bar on Northern Avenue. Whitey suddenly snapped to attention and immediately pulled Weeks aside.

  “Meet me down the club,” Whitey said, referring to the City Point Athletic Association, on O Street between Second and Third. When Weeks arrived, Whitey was pacing the floor. Whitey had Weeks drive him to Theresa Stanley’s house and then told him to go back to the club and wait for him.

  Fifteen minutes later, Whitey pulled up in what Weeks described as “the blue Chevy,” a hit car with a souped-up engine. With the push of a button, the vehicle would emit a billowing cloud of blue exhaust. Another button opened a specially built tank, allowing Whitey to dump gallons of oil onto the street, causing any pursuing vehicle to spin out.

  Whitey had donned a light brown wig and a floppy mustache. He looked a lot like Jimmy Flynn, another member of the Winter Hill Gang with whom Halloran had been feuding. It was a perfect disguise.

  Whitey told Weeks to drive down to Jimmy’s Harborside, a well-known restaurant on Northern Avenue across the street from the Pier, where Halloran was still pounding them down, and wait for him. A few minutes later, Whitey arrived in the blue Chevy. In the back seat was another man, wearing what Weeks later described as a ski mask. No one else recalled anyone in a ski mask, but it meant Weeks could claim he couldn’t identify the man Whitey had recruited as a backup shooter.

  “He handed me a police scanner and a walkie-talkie,” Weeks later testified. When Halloran left the bar, Weeks was to radio a brief message to Whitey: “The balloon is in the air.”

  A few minutes later, Halloran exited the Pier with a casual friend, Michael Donahue, who had offered him a ride home. As Halloran waited for Donahue to bring his small blue car around to the bar’s front door, Weeks gave the signal.

  “The balloon is in the air,” Weeks said. With a roar of the engine and a squeal of tires, Whitey pulled alongside the blue car.

  “Brian,” he yelled, and Halloran, bleary from an afternoon of drinking, looked up just as Whitey opened fire with a full automatic carbine. Donahue’s car lurched forward, then began drifting across Northern Avenue until it finally crashed into a building. Whitey circled around, trapping the car, and continued firing his carbine into it as Weeks sped away.

  When the police arrived, Donahue was dead, but Halloran was hanging on, drifting in and out of consciousness. The cops asked who had shot him.

  “Jimmy Flynn,” he said, and then died.

  Whitey’s luck held throughout the evening. He got the hit car back into one of the gang’s garages in the Lower End, and Weeks retrieved the guns from the vehicle and sawed them up before tossing the pieces into the ocean in Quincy.

  A couple of hours later, some friendly feds, including Zip and John “Vino” Morris, showed up at Whitey’s apartment. They didn’t want answers, they wanted beer. And Whitey was only too happy to serve them as much as they wanted. As usual, Vino was soon drunk, and once he was, he casually mentioned to Whitey that they had gotten the license plate number of the hit car. As soon as they left, Whitey called Weeks and told him to leave the hit car in the garage where it was. It, and the garage, were untraceable.

  “Thank God for Beck’s beer,” Whitey said. “Thank God for Beck’s.”

  As the murder investigation unfolded, Zip quickly laid down a trail of false leads back to people who had either crossed Whitey, or might represent some threat in the future. On the day after the Halloran-Donahue murders, Whitey tried the same ploy he’d first used eight years earlier, after murdering Paulie McGonagle. He blamed Charlestown, advising Zip that “the wiseguys in Charlestown supposedly heard that Brian Halloran and his brother, who is a MA State Trooper, had met with Colonel O’Donovan of the MA State Police and that Halloran was going to cooperate with the law.”

  The next day Whitey advanced a new theory: the killers were Flynn and a guy named Weasel Manville, from the old Mullens gang, who used to run the O Street Club for them.

  On May 21, Whitey fingered a guy from Charlestown as Flynn’s wheelman and then, for good measure, invented a “backup van” with three more other Townie thugs. And Whitey put the State Police and Lieutenant Colonel O’Donovan back in the mix, because, he said, Halloran was cooperating with them, this time not on drugs, but on bank robberies, which would have put him in the crosshairs of the Charlestown crews.

  Finally, on July 7, with the heat starting to die down, Whitey, through his amanuensis Zip Connolly, took one more run at the State Police, saying that Halloran was dead because the Staties “let the cat out of the bag.” This time it was the FBI using the Whitey swerve, blaming someone else for what they had done.

  Now there was only one person left to kill.

  In June 1982 Johnny Martorano was summoned to a meeting with Whitey and Stevie in a hotel near La Guardia Airport in New York. The topic of the meeting was John Callahan. He had to go. His name was all over the papers, linked to Halloran. They’d been seen drinking together too many nights, by too many cops and reporters, at the Rusty Scupper. Everyone, including the press, knew that Callahan had run World Jai Alai, and after Halloran was hit, Callahan’s name was mentioned in several of the sidebars about Halloran’s criminal career. It was only a matter of time until the feds would have to pick up Callahan for questioning. And when push came to shove, Callahan was a civilian, not a wiseguy, and civilians flipped, always.

  Whitey patiently pointed all this out to Johnny Martorano, and told him that they had no choice but to kill Callahan. Johnny Martorano shook his head and refused to accept the contract. Callahan had done the right thing by him, more than once. And Callahan was perhaps his imprisoned brother Jimmy’s best friend.

  “Well,” said Whitey, “so then tell me something. Is he going to do ten years? Is he going to do twenty years?”

  Johnny Martorano, not the smartest guy in the world, thought about it for a moment.

  “No, he’s not,” Martorano said. “He’s gotta go.”

  As in Tulsa a year earlier, the guns would be shipped down via bus. Callahan would be picked up at the airport in Fort Lauderdale by Johnny Martorano and Joe McDonald and from there it would be up to them how to handle it, although Whitey did have a couple of suggestions.

  Even before the hit, Whitey had Connolly begin sending law enforcement off in the wrong direction. On July 7, Zip reported that Callahan had stopped going to Florida so often because of “a Cuban group who he was impressed with as being very bad.”

  Whitey added that “lately Callahan’s relationship with this group has cooled and Callahan is supposed to be avoiding them.”

  On July 31, Callahan flew to Fort Lauderdale and was met by Martorano and McDonald, who drove off with him in a van. A day later, a garage attendant at the Miami International Airport noticed blood dripping out of the trunk of a silver Fleet-wood Cadillac. When the police opened the trunk, they found Callahan’s supine corpse, two bullet holes in his head, a dime on his chest. It was a Hollywood touch—a message, supposedly, for snitches.

  The only personal effect missing from Callahan’s body was a distinctive ring, and as soon as the body was found, Miami-Dade police received an anonymous phone tip about a strange ring that had been dropped in a small trash receptacle on Eighth Street—the heart of Miami’s Little Havana district. The cops—Miami-Dade, FBI, even the Tulsa police still investigating the Wheeler hit—all scrambled to follow up on the Little Havana clue.

  “We spent weeks chasing our tails on that ring,” Tulsa police detective Mike Huff said later. “We thought it was Cubans for sure.”

  Whitey’s only criticism of the hit was that he thought Martorano and McDonald should have disposed of Callahan’s corpse before dropping the ring off on Calle Ocho for the cops to find. A missing body would have
added even more mystery to the case.

  Zip Connolly had come through, big time. And so had his supervisor, John Morris. Without their aid, Halloran might have survived to become a witness. The hit car might have been found. Whitey decided to do something nice for Morris.

  At the time Morris was sleeping with one of the secretaries at the office. Her name was Debbie Noseworthy. About a month after Halloran’s murder, Morris flew to Glencoe, Georgia, for drug training. He had told Debbie how much he wanted to take her with him, how they could have set up a little love nest at his motel on the FBI’s tab, and how no one ever would have been the wiser. But the airfare—Morris said he just couldn’t swing it. His wife would know for sure.

  The next morning, Debbie was sitting at her desk, watching Zip Connolly talk on the phone. She could tell by his mannerisms that he was talking to Morris in Georgia. When he hung up, he walked over to her desk and handed her an envelope.

  “John wanted you to have this,” Zip said.

  She opened it, and out tumbled ten $100 bills.

  “Where did John get this?” she said. He was always complaining about being short.

  “He’s been saving it,” he said. “It was in his desk and he wanted me to give it to you, and it’s for you to go down to visit him in Glencoe.”

  It was the first payoff Morris took from Whitey. It would not be the last.

  Joe McDonald had just turned sixty-five, and he was tired of being on the lam. So he decided to return to Boston, by train. He informed only his closest associates in the gang.

  On the afternoon of August 16, 1982, as the Amtrak train pulled into Penn Station in New York, the FBI was waiting. They burst into McDonald’s compartment and arrested him. He was still on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for robbing a coin dealer back in 1973.

  Less than seven years earlier, Richie Castucci had been murdered by Johnny Martorano for daring to speak to the FBI about Joe McDonald’s whereabouts. As Whitey saw it, though, his betrayal of McDonald to Zip wasn’t the same thing at all. It wasn’t personal. It was strictly business. McDonald’s usefulness to Whitey was at an end, and Whitey knew McDonald would never roll over on him. He was a Winter Hill guy, and everyone knew Winter Hill hoods never ratted out anybody.