As with many people who have spent social time with Martorano, I came away from that dinner charmed and beguiled. So I rewatched an interview that I had seen with Martorano on 60 Minutes, originally broadcast on January 6, 2008, and also read Howie Carr’s book.
The level of murder and mayhem perpetrated by Martorano in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s was staggering. He had stabbed people, shot people, and spent an inordinate amount of time in his life cleaning up after murders and figuring out ways to dispose of a dead body. Though the majority of the twenty murders he admitted to having carried out were professional hits—planned murders that had been thought out and executed with calm precision, as opposed to spontaneous crimes of passion—it was hard to imagine that he was not haunted in some way. My own impression was that for a person whose life was steeped in such bloodshed and horrific violence, there would be psychological consequences. A man would find himself tormented, if not by pangs of guilt or remorse, then at least by disturbing imagery—bad dreams—from a lifetime of bad deeds.
I asked Pat Nee about it: “You think Johnny is haunted in any way by all the killings and dead bodies from over the years?”
Pat chuckled at the question. It was not a frivolous laugh. He had undoubtedly been asked this question before; it is the obvious question someone would ask after meeting Martorano, who seems so unaffected by his crimes.
“You know,” answered Pat, “I’ve known Johnny a long time, and I don’t think he’s lost a minute’s sleep over the murders. I don’t think it bothers him one bit.”
That was Johnny. The original title he had wanted to use for his book with Howie Carr was What We Did. The world according to Johnny, in unvarnished detail. What happened happened, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it now, so why lose sleep over it?
The most disconcerting thing about Johnny Martorano was that, after a lifetime of mayhem and killing, he didn’t seem the least bit disconcerted at all.
HANK BRENNAN HAD been waiting his entire professional life for an opportunity like this. One of the most notorious gangsters in the city’s history was sitting on the witness stand with no gun, knife, or gangland protection of any kind. He was defenseless. And Brennan had been entrusted with the power of cross-examination. He stood at the podium and, with the directness of a firm overhand right to the nose, delivered his first question: “Mr. Martorano, you are a mass murderer, are you not?”
Martorano did not flinch. “I don’t think so,” he said.
Before he got to the details of Martorano’s crimes, Brennan was determined to explore the mind-set of a mass murderer. If he could get Martorano to talk about himself beyond the clipped and unrevealing answers of a professional witness, he could get him to discredit himself in the eyes of the jury. “You don’t like the term ‘hit man,’ do you, Mr. Martorano?”
“Not especially.”
“You don’t like the term ‘hit man’ because you think it undermines your credibility, sir?”
“No, I wouldn’t accept money to kill somebody.”
“So there’s a difference between what you did and someone who’s a hit man?”
“I would think so.”
The fact that Martorano had cooperated in the writing of a book about his life did not need to be restated; it was a fact already on the table. The book was called Hitman, and Martorano had profited from its publication.
“Were you a serial killer?” Brennan asked.
“No.”
“You don’t like that word?”
“Serial killers kill until they get caught or stopped. I wasn’t a serial killer. I could stop to confess my problems.”
Brennan had the witness on his heels, leaning back against the ropes. “You went on 60 Minutes and you didn’t like that term ‘serial killer,’ either, did you?”
“No.”
“Well, what is a serial killer to you?”
“I don’t know what you would think a serial killer is. A serial murderer kills for fun. They like it. I don’t like it. I never did like it.”
“The twenty murders you admitted to, you didn’t like any of them, sir?”
“No, I didn’t like doing any of it. I don’t like risking my life, either.”
“Well, put aside risking your life for right now. Let’s talk about the joy that you had.”
“I never had any joy. I never had any joy at all.”
For the next hour, Brennan picked at the scab. There was much to cover with Martorano, but the defense lawyer was determined that there be a full airing of Martorano’s character, that he be made to wallow in the dubious self-justifications for his actions that he’d been peddling in TV interviews, a book, and in previous trials. “Did you just wake up learning how to kill somebody when you were a kid? Is it something you learned?”
“Nobody taught me. It just happened.”
“You just woke up one day and started killing people?”
“No. I was always taught to take care of my family and my friends. The first situation that I had was somebody was going to hurt my brother, and I defended it. . . . Family and friends come first.”
“Who told you that if it comes down to family and friends, you can murder somebody?”
“I don’t know who told me that. I told myself that.”
“So you had your own code?”
“My family, my father always taught me that. The priests and the nuns that I grew up with taught me that.”
Brennan’s eyes lit up, and he cocked his head. “The priests and nuns taught you that?”
Martorano squirmed a bit; he was being made to put forth a personal theology to a greater degree than he would have liked. “They always talked about Judas and stuff like that. And I always believed that—that Judas is the worst person in the world.”
With a quizzical look, Brennan asked, “So with [these early murders—Palladino, Jackson]—did Judas come to you and tell you to do these things?”
“Did Judas come to me? I just thought of Judas. [They] represented Judas to me.”
“I see. So when you saw these people, before you took their lives, you looked at them and you saw Judas?”
“I saw my family in trouble and a guy trying to hurt them.”
Brennan smiled. He seemed to be enjoying himself. He noted that in Martorano’s highly touted interview on 60 Minutes, the word he had chosen to describe himself was “vigilante.” “What does ‘vigilante’ mean to you?” Brennan asked the witness.
“It’s somebody that would hurt somebody who is doing wrong.”
“Okay. So what you’re saying is that all the murders were because you hurt somebody who was doing something wrong to somebody else. . . . And that makes you a vigilante like Batman, sir?”
There were titters in the spectators’ gallery. Even Martorano seemed amused. “I don’t know about Batman,” he answered.
Brennan could have gone on with this all day. Listening to Martorano delineate the differences between a hit man, mass murderer, serial killer, and vigilante was like a Boston underworld version of Tuesdays with Morrie. But the defense had much work to do with Martorano on the stand, a lifetime of bloodshed to go over. Of particular interest were seven murders that Martorano claimed he committed in cahoots with Bulger. And of those seven, five were killings aided and abetted from deep within the criminal justice system:
Richie Castucci—In the late 1960s, Castucci was a loan shark and occasional bookmaker affiliated with the Patriarca family. He owned a popular bar overlooking Revere Beach, the Ebb Tide, which had become a mobster clubhouse where many infamous criminal schemes were hatched, including, in 1965, the murder of Teddy Deegan by Barboza and company. Castucci also owned numerous strip clubs and was rumored to have killed a “made man” he believed was having an affair with his wife.
By 1970, Castucci was up to his neck in debt and in need of protection for having killed a made man without authorization. And so he became a secret FBI informant. Initially, his handler as a Top Echelon Informant was Specia
l Agent Thomas J. Daly, but later John Connolly took over.
Castucci functioned as a rat for six years, until 1976. That year, two key Winter Hill mobsters—Joseph “Joe Mac” McDonald and Jimmy Sims—were forced to go into hiding after being indicted for the theft of a million-dollar rare stamp collection. Joe Mac and Sims were among the founding fathers of the Winter Hill gang, close associates of Howie Winter, and beneficiaries of everything the gang had to offer. At the Marshall Motors headquarters, Bulger, Martorano, and the others helped devise a scheme for their two associates to go on the lam. Martorano went to New York City and found an apartment in Greenwich Village. He paid one year’s rent—fourteen thousand dollars—in advance, and gave Joe Mac the address and keys to the apartment.
Castucci was a regular at Marshall Motors, where he dropped off and picked up cash for his loan-shark business, which was partially bankrolled by the Winter Hill Mob. Castucci heard about McDonald and Sims’s secret hideout in New York and passed the information on to his new FBI handler, John Connolly. Connolly went to Bulger and Flemmi and told them they had a snitch in their midst: Richie Castucci.
On a night in December 1976, Castucci showed up at Marshall Motors feeling chipper. He was there to collect a sizable wad of cash, his stake in the gang’s sports betting operation. From the stand, Martorano explained: “I told him I didn’t have all the money together. I gave him a bag of money and said, Go down to the apartment we had down the street, count this up, and I’ll give you the difference when I get there. . . . I told Whitey to take him down there. . . . I waited for them to get down there and start counting the money. Then I walked down there. . . . [Castucci] was sitting at the kitchen table counting the money with Whitey. I walked around to the side of Castucci and shot him . . . in the temple, here.” Martorano put a finger to his right temple.
In his book, Hitman, Martorano described the messy cleanup. Richie bled all over the money, the table, and the floor. They put his body in a sleeping bag, rolled it up, dragged it downstairs, and stuffed it in the trunk of Richie’s Cadillac Deville. With Whitey following, Johnny drove the Cadillac over to Revere, Richie’s home turf, and, with Castucci’s dead body in the trunk, left it behind an apartment building in the middle of a snowstorm. Martorano and Whitey drove back to Somerville.
After that, all the gang members were greatly impressed with John Connolly, who had functioned as if he were a member of the gang.
Bulger told Martorano that Connolly had a wedding anniversary coming up, a good opportunity to show their appreciation. So Johnny kicked in a two-carat diamond. After that, more money was pooled to pay Connolly on a semiregular basis.
Roger Wheeler—In the early 1980s, while Martorano was living on the lam in Florida, the Winter Hill gang became embroiled with World Jai Lai, a professional sports league. Jai lai is a sport of Spanish origin, played on an indoor court called a fronton, with a rubber ball that is hurled off a wall with a scoop-shaped racket. The sport is especially popular among Portuguese and Spanish immigrants living in the United States, and was at the time a major source of betting among gamblers on the East Coast.
The president of World Jai Lai was a businessman named John Callahan, who also happened to be a good buddy of the Martorano brothers. Callahan was what was known in the underworld as a “wannabe gangster,” or, as Martorano put it, “He was a high-priced accountant during the day and put on a leather jacket and wanted to hang out with rogues at night.” Callahan had a problem: he had recently been forcibly removed as president of World Jai Lai by the company’s CEO, Roger Wheeler. Callahan came to the conclusion that if he could make Roger Wheeler disappear, he could talk Wheeler’s widow into allowing him to reassume his position as president.
In Boston, there was a series of meetings between Callahan and Bulger and Flemmi. Callahan was asking them to authorize a hit on Wheeler. He noted that there was immediate money to be made through the parking and vending machine concessions at World Jai Lai events, to the tune of ten thousand dollars per week, and untold millions to be made if he were reinstalled as president. Callahan even had a hit man in mind, whom he brought along to two of his meetings with Bulger and Flemmi.
Brian Halloran was a midlevel cog in the Winter Hill Mob’s gangster machinery, known for being not too bright but willing to do hits for money. The Wheeler hit had an added logic in that a key player in the hit would be none other than H. Paul Rico, long since retired from the FBI. Since the late 1970s, Rico had been working as head of security for World Jai Lai, based out of their corporate headquarters in Miami. The Wheeler hit would be like a Winter Hill Mob family reunion, with veteran players from the gang’s beginnings going back in the mid-1960s.
Bulger and Flemmi were open to the idea of a hit on Wheeler, but they didn’t want Brian Halloran as the triggerman. They felt Halloran was unreliable, and so they booted him from the plan. Instead they turned to Johnny Martorano, living in South Florida, to carry out the hit. Martorano chose as his accomplice another old-time Winter Hill associate—“Joe Mac” McDonald—who was also hiding out in Florida at the time.
The problem for the two hit men was that their target didn’t live in Florida or in Boston; he lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This meant that Martorano and McDonald would have to travel to Tulsa, track down Roger Wheeler, kill him, and get out of town. It was a surgical reconnaissance mission that required more than just blowing a guy away in a bar filled with witnesses, or whacking somebody in the friendly confines of the Marshall Motors garage. Considerable advance planning was required, starting with input from Paul Rico, who gave to the two hit men a detailed physical description of Wheeler and also addresses for work, home, and socializing locations in Tulsa where they might track down their target. Without Rico’s input, the hit never could have happened.
Martorano and Joe Mac flew to Oklahoma City, rented a car at the airport, and drove to Tulsa. Their first stop was a Greyhound bus station, where they picked up a suitcase that had been sent to them by Steve Flemmi. Inside the suitcase were a machine gun, a carbine, a couple of pistols, and masks and wigs. The two hit men checked into a hotel and, over the next five days, tracked Roger Wheeler. They decided that the best place to take him out was at the Southern Hills Country Club, where Wheeler routinely played golf.
First, Martorano and McDonald needed to steal a car, a “boiler,” which they could use to do the hit and discard immediately. That taken care of, on the afternoon of May 27, 1981, they drove to the country club and found a Cadillac they knew to be Wheeler’s, with a license plate number that matched. They sat in the parking lot and waited until they spotted Wheeler walking toward his car. As Martorano explained during his direct testimony: “I saw a guy come over the hill, carrying a briefcase, and it looked like his description. And he was heading towards his car. So I headed towards the car, also.”
Martorano was wearing a disguise of a fake beard, sunglasses, and a baseball cap. He waited until Wheeler unlocked the front door of his car, then he snuck up from behind. “I pulled open the door and shot him.”
“Where did you shoot him?” Martorano was asked.
“Between the eyes.”
Martorano explained how the gun virtually exploded in his hands after he opened fire. McDonald was waiting for him in the boiler. They drove to a parking lot, ditched the boiler, and retrieved their rental car. They drove back to their motel. Martorano stripped off his clothes and cut everything into pieces, to be discarded. They then loaded their guns back in the suitcase.
“What did you do with the [suitcase] that Mr. Flemmi had sent you?”
“Bus.”
“Put it back on a bus?”
“Hm-hmm.”
“And then what did you do?”
“Got out of Oklahoma.”
“How?”
“We flew.”
“Flew back to Florida.”
“Yes.”
For a while, the Wheeler murder looked like a clean hit. But, in fact, it set off a chain reaction of events that wo
uld bring about the end of the Winter Hill Mob.
Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue—John Martorano did not have any direct involvement in the killings of these two men, but it was a hit that would serve as a bridge between the Wheeler murder and another that Martorano would do a year later.
Once Wheeler was killed, Bulger and Flemmi began to worry that Brian Halloran knew too much. Halloran had become a disaster in the making. He was believed to have committed a cold-blooded murder in Boston’s Chinatown, and the heat from that crime, the gangsters believed, made Halloran a likely candidate to cut a deal with investigators to save his own neck. Which is exactly what happened: Halloran reached out to and began cooperating with two FBI agents from the Boston field office. Unbeknownst to those agents, behind their back John Connolly passed the information along to Bulger and Flemmi that Halloran was an active snitch.
The two agents who were handling Halloran knew he was not safe out on the street. They tried to get Halloran into the witness protection program, but they were rebuffed by Jeremiah O’Sullivan, chief of the New England Organized Crime Strike Force. Halloran was determined by O’Sullivan to be an unreliable source—a drunk, drug user, and all-around desperate man—who was not worth the budgetary expenditures it would require to provide government-sponsored witness protection. In making this call, O’Sullivan, in essence, signed Halloran’s death warrant.
Early on the evening of May 11, 1982, Halloran was spotted at a bar on Pier 61, near where the Moakley Courthouse now stands in Boston. Word got back to Bulger, who took matters into his own hands. With a second unidentified gunman, Bulger put on a curly blond wig, and the two men drove over to Pier 61.
Where the Bodies Were Buried Page 17