Hitman

by Howie Carr

  Once they sat down, Jerry Angiulo got right to the point. They’d dumped the body too close to 98 Prince Street, maybe five blocks away.

  “The fuck is it with youse guys!” he yelled. “Ya leave a fuckin’ stiff in my fuckin’ backyard! What the fuck was ya thinking?”

  “Jerry,” said Johnny, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  3

  Gang War

  LAWYER: Were you ever known as Bwana Johnny?

  MARTORANO: No.

  LAWYER: Machine Gun Johnny?

  MARTORANO: No.

  LAWYER: You don’t recall that being your nickname when you were running with Barboza?

  MARTORANO: No. I never had a machine gun when I knew Barboza.

  LAWYER: You just got those later?

  MARTORANO: Wasn’t when I was with Barboza.

  FBI AGENT H. PAUL Rico’s assigned task was to destroy the Mafia in Boston. His hobby—his obsession—was wiping out the McLaughlin Gang. With La Cosa Nostra, it was just business, another assignment from “the Director,” J. Edgar Hoover. With the McLaughlins, it was personal. They were barroom brawlers, up from the docks. Two of their brothers had been killed in World War II. They were old-line shanty Irish. When somebody died, they didn’t have the wake at a funeral home. They’d put the casket in the front parlor, passing beers back and forth across the bier. They didn’t like cops, and they hated homosexuals, which they assumed Rico was.

  Rico knew this because Hoover had instructed his agents to install “gypsy” wires—illegal taps on phones as well as hidden recording devices, known as bugs—anywhere hoodlums did business. Having no warrant, the FBI couldn’t directly use any of the information they obtained from the gypsy bugs as evidence in court, but that did not prove to be an insurmountable problem. All the G-men had to do was attribute the information to an anonymous “source,” and then they could go to a judge and obtain a legal search warrant.

  The feds put a gypsy wire on a phone in some McLaughlin hangout, right around the time Rico made his occasional pilgrimage to D.C. to pick up a crime-fighting award and token cash bonus from the Director. Every year, the Record-American would dutifully run the photo of Rico at FBI headquarters, shaking hands with J. Edgar as Hoover’s top deputy, while another confirmed bachelor named Clyde Tolson looked on.

  Punchy McLaughlin, murdered by Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme in 1965.

  On the day the Record was carrying its annual story about Rico’s visit to Hoover to pick up his latest commendation, the agents were listening. And they heard Punchy McLaughlin sneering to another gangster about the Boston FBI office.

  In his 2003 testimony, the mobster Frank Salemme recounted for a congressional committee what Rico had once told him about this one bugged conversation between the McLaughlins.

  “They were always on the phone, according to him, and … the feds would pick up the McLaughlins and the Hugheses casting aspersions on Paul’s manhood and his relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, and J. Edgar Hoover was, excuse me again, a fag, and that Paul used to go down there and have a relationship with Colson. They had a ménage à trois with a guy by the name of Colson, I think—”

  The prosecutor interrupted: “I believe the name was Tolson.”

  “So Paul naturally didn’t like that,” Salemme continued. “He was always on their case, Paul was.”

  Rico often hung out down at the Roxbury gang’s two garages, on Dudley Street in Roxbury and on Hancock Street in Dorchester. Wimpy Bennett stopped by daily, as did Stevie Flemmi and Salemme. George Kaufman ran the actual business, with some help from Salemme, a tall hoodlum from Jamaica Plain who had had some vocational training as both an auto mechanic and an electrician. Despite the fact that Salemme was half-Irish—his middle name was Patrick—like Barboza he dreamed of someday being inducted into La Cosa Nostra. Because of his taste in automobiles, everyone called Salemme “Cadillac Frank.”

  When Rico declared war on the McLaughlins, he swore that if he ever got the right opportunity—that is, no witnesses—he would shoot Punchy or anyone else from Charlestown in cold blood. He regarded them all as his “archenemies,” as Salemme put it. They had called him a fag.

  Rico often spent his weekday afternoons at Suffolk Downs in East Boston. One day his official FBI vehicle was sideswiped in the horse track’s parking lot. There was no way Rico could explain such an accident to his superiors. So he called Salemme, and Kaufman sent over a tow truck. They brought the fed’s car back to the garage, where they worked all night completing the repair job so that Rico could drive the car to work in the morning as if nothing had happened.

  An early mug shot of Francis Patrick Salemme, aka Cadillac Frank.

  The Roxbury gang’s charge to its FBI friend: nothing.

  Rico, of course, returned whatever favors he could. Back in the 1950s, as a young agent, he’d been involved in breaking up an interstate bank-robbing gang that had included a young career criminal from Southie named Jimmy Bulger, as well as Ronnie Dermody, a hard-luck Cambridge hood whose father had died in prison, and whose brother soon would.

  By 1964, everyone in Whitey Bulger’s old gang was finishing their federal sentences, and Dermody got out first. He quickly fell for the wife of yet another member of the old gang. During her husband’s prison sentence, this woman had taken up with another local hoodlum.

  Head over heels in love, Dermody bumped into some of the McLaughlins. He told them how much he’d like to be rid of his new girlfriend’s ex-beau, who was now himself serving a state prison sentence. The McLaughlins quickly suggested a deal: if Dermody, who wasn’t known on Winter Hill, could get close enough to Buddy McLean to shoot him, then one of the several McLaughlin Gang members serving state time would eliminate Dermody’s rival for the affections of the well-traveled moll.

  Ronnie Dermody made a fatal mistake—he trusted H. Paul Rico.

  Dermody instantly accepted the offer, but the problem was that he had no idea what Buddy looked like. Still, Dermody gamely drove over to Winter Hill, quickly spotted a wiry blond guy walking down Broadway, and opened fire. It wasn’t Buddy, and Dermody only wounded his mistaken target. Worse, as he fled, Dermody was identified, not by cops but by people connected to Buddy McLean, which in Somerville was almost everyone. Soon Winter Hill gunmen were tracking Dermody in Cambridge.

  Dermody was frantic. He didn’t know who to call for help, so he finally turned to the one cop he figured had to be straight, the guy who had once arrested him—Rico of the FBI. Rico, who lived in Belmont, gave Dermody directions to a secluded street on the Watertown-Belmont line. He told Dermody he’d meet him there, just after dark. Rico’s final instructions to him: Come alone, unarmed. And don’t tell anyone where you’re going.

  Then Rico called McLean. He told him that the guy who’d just tried to shoot him would be waiting there, by himself, in a car. Then he asked Buddy if he needed a lift to Watertown. An hour or so later, Dermody was shot to death in his car. Nobody in the neighborhood could identify the shooter, or the car he’d been in. It had been too dark.

  The next morning, all the newspapers carried ominous front-page headlines. The gang war, confined so long to the city and its grittier neighborhoods, had finally spread to the suburbs. Yet Rico did not file a report. Buddy McLean, meanwhile, vanished until the heat died down. His hideout was the Belmont basement of his getaway driver, H. Paul Rico.

  * * *

  JIMMY FLEMMI and Joe Barboza were still killing anyone who got in their way. In the fall of 1964, Barboza was reined in by the Office in Providence. He was told that from now on, whenever he wanted to kill somebody, he would have to get a personal sign-off from “the Man.”

  One FBI informant was listening in Patriarca’s Federal Hill headquarters in 1965 as Barboza tried to convince “the Man” to let him kill a guy who lived in a three-decker with his mother. Barboza planned to start a fire in the basement and then shoot the guy as he fled the burning building. He was going to bring with him three other shooters,
to cover every side of the building. Barboza would cut all the phone lines to the neighbors’ homes so that they couldn’t call in a fire alarm. Just in case, Barboza also planned to phone in false alarms around the city to tie up all the fire companies. Patriarca listened in silence before he finally spoke. He’d been thinking about the would-be victim’s mother.

  “What happens when his mother runs out?” Patriarca asked. “You’re going to kill his mother, too?”

  “It ain’t my fault she lives there.”

  Patriarca vetoed the hit.

  * * *

  SINCE THE Bear was from Boston, Jerry Angiulo was told to handle him. The feds had put another one of their illegal bugs in Angiulo’s Tremont Street bar, Jay’s Lounge. One night the FBI agents were listening as Jerry personally delivered the news to Jimmy that from now on he was under the same rules as Barboza: Patriarca had to personally okay every hit.

  “The Man says that you don’t use common sense when it comes to killing people,” Angiulo said quietly. “Jimmy, you don’t kill somebody just because you have an argument with him.”

  But in fact that was exactly what the Bear did. Soon he was bragging that he was through robbing banks, that being a hitman was a much better job. Meanwhile, he and Johnny Martorano were still hanging out together.

  One morning at dawn, as they stumbled out of an after-hours joint in Roxbury, Jimmy looked up and noticed that the streetlights were still on.

  He pulled out his gun and started shooting at the lights. Then Johnny joined him in the fun. They only stopped shooting to reload. It wasn’t long before a Boston police car pulled up, and the two cops inside prepared to confront the shooters. But when they saw who was doing the shooting, they looked at one another, shook their heads, and drove off.

  Another night, Jimmy and Johnny were sitting at the bar at the 4 Corners, the club downstairs from the Attic. The Bear was in the throes of one of his periodic crushes, this one on the manager of the 4 Corners, a good-looking blonde named Elaine. This night Elaine was tending bar and the Bear just kept staring at her, stupefied on booze and Seconals. Sitting next to them at the bar were two big, tough-looking black guys.

  One of the black guys leaned over the bar, trying to get Elaine’s attention. This deeply offended the Bear. He turned to Johnny.

  “You got a knife on ya?”

  Johnny nodded, reached into his coat, and pulled out a blade, which he handed to Flemmi. In a single motion, Flemmi grabbed the knife and then turned on his barstool toward the black guy, who had his back turned to the Bear as he continued trying to catch Elaine’s eye. Without a word, the Bear stabbed him in the ass.

  The black guy turned, in horror, looking down at the blood gushing out of his wound. He and his friend immediately took off running, as Flemmi yelled after them.

  “You got what you deserved, motherfucker! You had it coming!”

  Then he turned back around, handed the knife back to Johnny, picked up his glass, and shook the ice cubes to get Elaine’s attention. The Bear needed a refill.

  * * *

  RICO WAS trying to recruit informants. In December 1964, he signed up a forty-one-year-old ex-con from Somerville named George Ash. He had a criminal record dating back to World War II, had just gotten out of prison, knew every wiseguy in the city, and he wasn’t Mafia. He was just what the FBI was looking for.

  But on the night he was officially approved by Washington and given his own informant’s identification number, Ash decided to go out for a few drinks. He ran into the Bear. A few hours later, they were both sitting in the South End in a Corvair that belonged to Ash’s sister. Suddenly the Bear decided to stab and shoot his old friend. After finishing Ash off, the Bear climbed unsteadily out of the car and wandered off, unaware that two uniformed Boston cops were watching him from across the street.

  The cops knew what to do. They immediately drove to Stevie’s store, told him what had happened, and demanded $1,000 to keep their mouths shut. Stevie paid them off and, according to a later federal report that named the two officers, “then chastised his brother Jimmy the Bear and reminded Jimmy how lucky he was that he ran into two police officers who were his friends.”

  Ash’s murder was a tough break for Rico, but a few months later, Rico decided to reel in Jimmy the Bear. Guys like George Ash were useful, up to a point, but Jimmy the Bear would be a spectacular catch—he did hits for In Town. In fact, even as Rico recruited him, the Bear was planning a murder in Chelsea. A burglar named Teddy Deegan had been breaking into houses that belonged to Mafia bookies. And he was tight with the McLaughlins. Either fact alone would have been enough to put Deegan at the top of what the hoods called the Hit Parade, after the old Saturday-night network radio show. Later, other reports surfaced that Deegan’s death may have had nothing to do with the Mafia, that the Bear had just been drunkenly ranting about him as a “treacherous sneak.” Whatever the real reasons, Deegan was on his way out.

  Teddy Deegan a few weeks before he was shot to death in 1965.

  An elaborate plot was hatched at the Ebb Tide, a new bar at the end of Revere Beach where Joe Barboza had set up shop. It was run by a local wiseguy named Richie Castucci, the nephew of Revere’s top fence, Arthur Ventola. Deegan was told that a finance company in downtown Chelsea would be a soft touch after hours. Deegan immediately declared that he was in.

  Two days before Deegan’s murder, on March 10, 1965, Rico sent a report to Washington stating flatly that the Bear was about to kill Deegan—“a dry run has already been made and a close associate of Deegan’s has agreed to set him up.”

  Apparently no one in either the Boston FBI office or headquarters in Washington ever considered warning Deegan that he was in mortal peril. That might have irritated the Bureau’s new star snitch.

  On March 12, 1965, the Bear was officially approved as an FBI informant. That evening he and Joe Barboza and several other gangsters met Deegan at the Ebb Tide and then drove to Chelsea in one car to burgle the safe. They got Deegan into an alley behind the finance company and then opened fire. The driver, correctly suspecting that he, too, was on the Hit Parade, took off. Within an hour, the shooters were back at the Ebb Tide, celebrating.

  The next day, Rico sent a memo to J. Edgar Hoover correctly identifying by name the “prominent local hoodlums” who had murdered Teddy Deegan. Stevie asked his brother if he knew who had helped rob the Deegan bookies. It was me, Jimmy told him. What if they’d given you the contract to hit me? Stevie asked his brother. Jimmy just shrugged.

  Whitey Bulger, age 23, under arrest shortly after his discharge from the air force.

  A day or so later, Barboza bragged to Johnny Martorano that he and the Bear had murdered Deegan. He told the same story to at least one other member of his East Boston crew, a young bookie named Dido Vaccari. Barboza named all the shooters—the real killers, the same ones whose names Rico had put into his report, not the four innocent men his false testimony a few years later would send to prison for thirty years, as the FBI agents who knew the truth sat silently in the courtroom.

  More than three decades later, it would be Deegan’s murder, and the subsequent framing of the four innocent men, that would bring down the entire corrupt conspiracy between the Boston FBI office and its underworld allies. But no one could have foreseen that in 1965.

  In fact, on the night Deegan was murdered, the gangster who came to eventually symbolize the two generations of collusion between the FBI and the Boston underworld was still in prison, only days from being released from Leavenworth after serving nine years for bank robbery.

  His name was James J. “Whitey” Bulger.

  * * *

  GROWING UP in the public-housing projects of South Boston, Whitey Bulger had always been a bad kid. In his teens, after dropping out of high school, he turned tricks as a male prostitute in the bars of the neighborhood later known as Bay Village. Until he disappeared after his 1994 indictment, virtually no one in his future life would ever know this side of Whitey. “If all that w
as true—and I’m still saying if—it was a well-kept secret,” Martorano says, “just like his being a rat.”

  Whitey rolled drunks, and committed various other petty crimes before enlisting in the air force in 1949. In 1950, he was charged with raping a woman in Montana. That charge was dropped, but he continued to be a disciplinary problem. One of Bulger’s superior officers eventually warned him that if he got a dishonorable discharge he wouldn’t be able to find a job in civilian life. Whitey just laughed and, according to his military records, replied, “I could go back to the work I used to do, no matter what kind of discharge I get.”

  In 1952, Whitey Bulger was honorably discharged from the air force. He returned to Boston and quickly went back to hustling in the gay clubs. There he met a young FBI agent named H. Paul Rico, who trolled the bars at night claiming he was cultivating “sources.” Even then, as he turned tricks, Whitey was determined that someday he would be a big shot. Shortly after being arrested for trying to steal a beer truck in the Back Bay, Whitey fell in with an older crew that was planning to rob some banks.

  In May 1955, Whitey’s new gang stuck up a bank in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, taking $42,000. Whitey’s one-third cut financed a long vacation to Florida with his new girlfriend—his evenings of rolling gays outside the Punch Bowl and the Sail Aweigh were finally behind him. In October 1955, the gang hit a bank in Hammond, Indiana, but this time the take was less than $13,000.

  On January 4, 1956, a federal warrant was issued for Whitey’s arrest. He fled to California, then returned to Delaware to pick up his girlfriend, after which he took off again, driving across the country. Eventually the woman became homesick, and after less than two months on the lam, Whitey returned to Boston.

  “To avoid apprehension,” his FBI presentencing report later stated, “BULGER dyed his hair black, adopted the wearing of horn-rimmed glasses, changed the style and color of his clothing, and assumed the practice of carrying a cigar in his mouth to distort his facial features.”