by Howie Carr
None of Whitey’s ruses did him any good. In March 1956, Rico got a tip that his old acquaintance had been hanging out at a nightclub in Revere with an ex-con named DeFeo. Rico volunteered to handle the stakeout, and a couple of nights later, after a brief scuffle, Rico arrested Whitey as he left the club. It was a typical Hoover-era FBI public-relations extravaganza: newspaper photographers had been invited along to record the pinch of the black-haired Whitey.
The next morning, in federal court, the prosecutor asked for high bail, describing Whitey as “a vicious person, known to carry guns, and [who] by his own admission has an intense dislike for police and law enforcement officers.”
Bail was set at $50,000, and, after a brief trial in June 1956, Whitey was convicted. In his presentencing report, Rico wrote that the Boston FBI office knew Whitey well “because of his suspected implication in tailgate thefts. We knew of his extremely dangerous character, his remarkable agility, his reckless daring in driving vehicles, and his unstable, vicious characteristics.”
Whitey Bulger, his hair dyed black, resisting arrest by the FBI in Revere, 1956.
The judge sentenced him to twenty years. Whitey Bulger would not set foot in Boston again for nine years—until March 1965, a few days after Teddy Deegan’s murder in Chelsea.
* * *
THE GANG war was not going well for the McLaughlins. Unlike Buddy McLean’s crew in Somerville, the Charlestown outfit was not a diversified criminal organization. They were no longer getting paid for murder contracts, since in the ongoing anarchy every mob was handling its own work. It was likewise tough for the McLaughlins to make their loan-shark collections, since any barroom or dock where they were known was now likely to be staked out by hit squads from Winter Hill. The longshoremen had no loyalty to the McLaughlins for many reasons, not the least of which was that in the underworld, death almost always cancels a debt.
Hard up for cash, the McLaughlins began robbing bookies, many of whom were protected by Jerry Angiulo or other mobs. Then they started doing home invasions like the one that possibly cost Teddy Deegan his life. The McLaughlins’ enemies multiplied.
Their other problem was a familiar one—alcohol. In March 1964, Georgie McLaughlin turned up drunk again, this time at a christening in a Roxbury housing project. For no apparent reason he shot and killed a twenty-one-year-old bank teller as he left the party.
Georgie took it on the lam. Suddenly, at the age of forty-eight, Punchy McLaughlin was the head of the gang. And it was a mob ever more desperate for cash, as Georgie learned what Johnny Martorano would one day discover: that everything costs at least twice as much when you’re a fugitive. It’s hard to haggle over price when there’s a bounty on your head.
In the summer of 1964, the Hill got a tip that two McLaughlins were holed up in an apartment in Bowdoin Street in Dorchester, way outside their territory. So a five-man Hill squad broke into the apartment and awaited the return of the McLaughlins. Once captured, the two hoods, a fifty-four-year-old hitman and a twenty-seven-year-old rapist from South Boston, were driven back to Somerville. One of them was stripped, and then the Hill executioners took an acetylene torch to his testicles. No quarter was given, or expected. Finally the Somerville crew strangled the McLaughlins and threw their bodies into the harbor.
A couple of months later, in November 1964, an old-time Roxbury hoodlum named Earl Smith arranged to meet Punchy in a parking lot at Beth Israel Hospital. A future score had been mentioned, an easy payday to relieve some of the pressure of Georgie’s enormous on-the-lam overhead.
Punchy trusted Smith. They’d done at least one hit together, back in 1962, clipping yet another shylock who’d made the mistake of loaning Wimpy Bennett $25,000. For the price of $5,000 to Smith and McLaughlin, Wimpy permanently erased another debt—and another loan shark.
Two years later, Punchy was waiting in his car for Smith when suddenly he saw two men dressed as Hasidic rabbis walking rapidly toward him. It was Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme, one armed with a revolver, the other with a shotgun. A blast from the shotgun shattered Punchy’s jaw, but they couldn’t finish the job. There were too many people around. The rabbis were last seen fleeing in a car with Rhode Island plates. After Punchy was brought into the hospital, police searched his car. In the backseat they found a paperback book: Mafia.
Earl Smith set up his old pal Punchy McLaughlin in 1964.
* * *
BY EARLY 1965, In Town had had enough. The war had gone on too long. Nobody was making any money. A summit was called for the Ebb Tide in Revere Beach, where the Deegan hit would soon be planned. Both the McLeans and the McLaughlins were expected for a sit-down, at which Henry Tameleo, Patriarca’s personal representative in Boston, would mediate the dispute. There was only one precondition: no guns. Speaking for the Office, Tameleo guaranteed everyone’s safety. The Somerville crew arrived first—unarmed. A few minutes later, the McLaughlins arrived, carrying paper bags. They didn’t trust In Town, or the Office. Tameleo started screaming and threw them out. From that moment on it was the McLaughlins against the entire Boston underworld.
By March 1965, the FBI was closing in on Georgie McLaughlin. Rico showed up at the garage and said he needed a throwdown—an untraceable handgun. Stevie asked why. Rico smiled and said, “Because we know where Georgie is, and when we bust in, we’re going to shoot him, but we need a throwdown that we can say he drew on us first.” Stevie nodded, and an hour or so later, Rico picked up his gun.
The Hughes brothers of Charlestown, Connie and Steve.
The next day, Georgie McLaughlin was finally captured, alive, hiding in a Mattapan apartment with another gang member, Spike O’Toole, the guy who’d killed Henry Reddington after believing a false rumor from Wimpy Bennett. The Record-American reported that Georgie had been traveling the country as a woman, in drag, “with tight slacks, kerchiefs and the ever present lipstick and makeup.” But the shootout Rico had envisioned never occurred.
A day or so later, Stevie asked Rico why his G-man raiding party hadn’t shot McLaughlin. Rico shook his head sadly and explained that of the five agents, four had been on board with the plan, but that they hadn’t been sure about the fifth fed, so they decided not to take the chance. Georgie was quickly indicted for murder, and the McLaughlins were down to three capable men: Punchy and the two Hughes brothers, Steve and Connie.
By now even his home base of Charlestown was too hot for Punchy. He fled to Canton, where he shacked up with his girlfriend. The various hit squads from Winter Hill, Roxbury, and In Town continued searching for him, but could never quite nail down his girlfriend’s address. Finally, in August 1965, Flemmi and Salemme decided to ambush him in Westwood as he drove along what was then a rural road. Flemmi was perched in a tree when he opened fire on Punchy’s car with his trademark rifle. Many of the bullets from Flemmi’s high-powered rifle ricocheted, hitting a couple of nearby farmhouses. Punchy again survived the assassination attempt, but this time he was shot in the right hand, which doctors in the emergency room were forced to amputate.
The next morning, FBI agent H. Paul Rico showed up at the garage in Roxbury and struck up a conversation with Salemme. In his testimony before congressional investigators in 2003, Salemme recalled how Rico brought up the botched hit: “Paul was a very shrewd individual … he’d have the papers and say, ‘Boy, what a sloppy piece of work that was, other people could have got hurt.’”
After some small talk, Salemme came clean with Rico about why they couldn’t seem to finish Punchy off: “The bottom line is, Paul, I don’t have his address, he’s a tough guy to pin down, but I don’t know where his starting point is.”
Rico nodded and left. A couple of days later, Rico returned to the garage.
“He’d just be patting my shoulder like he usually does, and he hit my hand … he kept walking, and [I saw] there was a piece of paper with an address, and I didn’t have to ask anymore. I knew who it was. It was Helen Kronis, Punchy’s girlfriend or common-law wife or whatever. So I went
out and started to work on that.”
Georgie McLaughlin’s trial for the murder of the bank teller in Roxbury got underway in Pemberton Square in October 1965. No longer able to drive, the one-handed Punchy would get a ride every morning from his girlfriend to the Spring Street bus turnaround in West Roxbury. There he would catch a bus to the Orange Line station in Forest Hills, where he’d board the subway that would take him downtown to the courthouse. In his one remaining hand, he carried a plain, brown lunch bag with a loaded revolver inside.
In his final days, Punchy was depressed. He couldn’t believe what had happened, how many of his friends, not to mention his brother, had been killed.
“All this,” he told one fellow hoodlum, “over a broad.”
On October 20, 1965, Punchy was boarding the bus in West Roxbury for Georgie’s trial downtown when two men in suits suddenly approached on foot, drew guns, and began firing at him. Stevie was wearing a wig and makeup applied by one of his second-string girlfriends; he was carrying a .38-caliber, long-barrelled Webbley handgun. Punchy had no time to remove his own weapon from the bag, so he began running, pausing only long enough to hand his paper bag to a mother of five. The two men continued firing at Punchy until he fell. Witnesses later described them as having “olive complexions”—newspaper code for Italian. For Stevie and Frankie, the third time was indeed the charm. Punchy was pronounced dead at the Faulkner Hospital in Dorchester at 8:34 A.M. The cause of death was “multiple gunshot wounds of the heart, lungs, spleen, liver and intestines,” as the coroner put it.
The housewife to whom Punchy handed the bag took it home where she opened it, saw the gun, and promptly fainted.
Rico had conveniently taken that day off to play a round of golf. But the next morning he showed up back at the garage. “Nice shooting,” he told Flemmi and Salemme.
* * *
TEN DAYS later, Buddy McLean and two bodyguards were leaving the Peppermint Lounge on Winter Hill at midnight. Suddenly, on the sidewalk just outside the shuttered Capitol Theater across Broadway, Steve Hughes stepped from the shadows, raised an automatic rifle, and fired at Buddy, hitting him in the head. McLean died a few hours later. Both his bodyguards survived their wounds, but were returned to prison for parole violations.
The gang war continued.
* * *
JIMMY THE Bear was still on the lam. And just as Punchy McLaughlin had struggled to support Georgie, Stevie was likewise hard-pressed to keep his fugitive brother in money. Stevie also needed cash for his estranged wife, and their two daughters. And now Stevie was living with another woman, the hot-tempered Marion Hussey, who had already borne him two illegitimate children. Stevie was paying all the bills for the Hussey household, which also included Marion’s three children by her former husband. Stevie always had to be hustling, looking for new customers for his shylocking racket. He was continually starting up new businesses—a grocery store, a funeral home, a barroom. If they didn’t pan out, Flemmi would just torch them for the insurance money. For Stevie, every day was a financial struggle.
Johnny Martorano wanted to help out the Flemmis, and he thought he had just the right place for the Bear to hide out in—the Brookline apartment that had been left to him by the working girl who’d also given him the Cadillac in which he’d murdered Bobby Palladino. Johnny had been staying there off and on for months, depending on how he was getting along with his various women.
One day in November 1965, Jimmy Martorano called the Brookline apartment looking for his brother. Jimmy the Bear picked up the phone, and after overcoming his surprise, Jimmy Martorano asked the Bear if he needed anything.
“Can you bring me a sandwich?” Flemmi said.
A couple of hours later, Jimmy Martorano arrived at his brother’s apartment. A few seconds after he got inside, a posse of state and Brookline police burst through the door, accompanied by reporters and photographers from every paper in town. The cops claimed they had the apartment staked out and had seen someone raise a blind.
I never believed that. There were only two people who knew the Bear was there—me and his brother, Stevie. I know I didn’t tell the cops. The Bear had become a pain in the ass for everybody, but especially for his brother. I think Stevie tipped the cops to save himself some money.
Johnny Martorano was spending more time with Joe Barboza and his East Boston crew. At nights they could be found at the Ebb Tide, and they usually spent their days at Champi’s Bar at the corner of Brooks and Bennington streets. They also rented the rooms upstairs, where they stored their guns and ammunition in a refrigerator, and generally terrorized the owner of the bar and everyone else in the neighborhood.
Nicky Femia, one of Joe Barboza’s top hands, later worked for Whitey.
Like the Bear, the Animal was certifiably insane. But he liked a good time, and with his East Boston roots Johnny fit in well with the Barboza gang. The crew included Chico Amico, a former short-order cook in Malden whom Barboza treated like a younger brother, and Nicky Femia, a hulking thug who likewise never strayed far from Barboza’s side. He’d been the driver on the Mickey Mouse Lounge hit. There was Dido Vaccari, to whom Barboza had confessed his role in the Deegan hit. Barboza also had a younger guy named Patsy Fabiano, who was a sort of mascot, comic relief, for the rest of the gang.
The crew also included Jimmy Kearns, Tommy DePrisco, and Arthur “Tash” Bratsos. Like so many Boston hoods of the era, including Stevie Flemmi, Bratsos had a brother in the Boston Police Department. Tash also had an older brother, who had been a gangster in the South End, and who, back in 1954, had gotten into a beef with Larry Baione. Shortly thereafter, the older Bratsos brother disappeared. He had “gone to California,” as they said in the underworld. Baione had murdered the older Bratsos and then disposed of his body.
Whenever Tash got drunk, which was often, he would loudly proclaim his intention to kill Baione. Word had long since gotten back to Larry, and he looked askance not only at Tash, but at everyone who hung with him, and that now meant Johnny Martorano.
* * *
LAST CALL at Basin Street South was usually only the beginning of Johnny’s nightly prowls through the city. There were always women, either working girls or girlfriends or both. One night, he was in bed with a married woman when her estranged husband burst into the bedroom, brandishing a pistol. He pulled the trigger, but the gun misfired. Johnny picked up a bottle and hurled it at the husband. The husband threw down the misfiring gun and ran out of the apartment.
One night at Basin Street Johnny met a girl named Barbara who’d just gotten into town from Florida. Somehow she’d hooked up with a wiseguy from the North End, a guy who years later would set up another girlfriend for a gangland hit by telling her to wear a cowboy hat to a bar. He told her the hat turned him on. That night, as she waited for her gangster boyfriend in the bar, two guys she’d never seen before walked in, looked for the woman wearing a cowboy hat, then headed straight for her and shot her in the head.
Johnny and Barbara hit it off immediately, and soon the hood from In Town was history. And Barbara was pregnant with Johnny’s first son, John. He was born in 1965. Jimmy the Bear sobered up long enough to appear at his godson’s christening.
Despite his increasing familial responsibilities, Johnny never let it affect his social life. Another night he and Jimmy Kearns were drinking at the Attic when they noticed a new working girl, a teenager, sitting alone at a table, weeping.
I went over and asked her what the problem was. She said she couldn’t go home without at least a couple of hundred dollars for her pimp. She’d just had a baby and she’d fallen in with the pimp, and now she was living in his apartment in the Back Bay and he’d put her out on the street. She said that he just sat around the apartment, smoking pot, and blowing the smoke in the baby’s face to keep him quiet. I was furious when I heard that.
Jimmy Kearns, a friend of Johnny’s, died in federal prison.
I asked her if she wanted to get out and she said yes. I went back to our t
able and asked Jimmy Kearns if he was doing anything and he said no. Then I said, “Jimmy, let’s go take a ride.”
We drove over to the apartment with the girl and went in. I told the pimp the girl and the baby were going with us, and when he objected, I pistol-whipped him. I was hitting him so hard that somehow the trigger cut my middle finger at the bottom joint. To this day I still can’t move it. Anyway, I ended up throwing the pimp out the window—his place was on the second floor.
We got the girl and her baby into the car and start driving away and Jimmy asked me, “Where are we going now?” And I said I have no idea. Jimmy smiled and said, “I see you have not thought this thing through.” So we considered where we could take her, especially with a baby and all. Finally we remembered this pharmacist in East Boston, on Pembroke Street, near where Barboza and Jimmy and the rest of them hung out. This guy’s wife had just died recently, so we knew he had room, and we figured maybe he’d take her and the baby in as a favor to us.
And he did, and shortly afterward, they were married. She was supposed to stay there for a couple of weeks and she ended up living with the guy ’til he died. I bring this up only because sometimes I really did help people back in those days.
A lot of nights in the mid-sixties, Johnny would eventually drift into Roxbury and its flourishing after-hours clubs. Roxbury was changing. Blacks had been moving into the neighborhood since the 1950s, but now the pace of migration was quickening. So was white flight, and the resentment of the departing white working classes was growing.
The increasing crime in the neighborhood bothered even the white gangsters from Roxbury, like the Flemmis. Soon the FBI’s informants were reporting that the Flemmis’ mother had been mugged near Boston City Hospital “by a couple of colored fellows.” The Flemmis quickly moved out of Roxbury, to Mattapan, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood that, like Roxbury, would soon be devastated by a white exodus.
