by Howie Carr
Johnny Martorano had no such worries. His Basin Street South was one of the few integrated nightspots in the city. But as time went on, the white presence in Roxbury began to fade, especially after midnight. In the after-hours joints in Roxbury, often Johnny would find only one other white man—a fellow gangster named Billy O’Sullivan. Billy O, as he was called, was a hard-nosed loan shark from Southie who had moved to Savin Hill in Dorchester. With six kids, he needed health insurance, so he’d finagled himself a no-show state job. He was a heavy drinker—at least six arrests for public drunkenness, and one for driving under. When Billy O drank, he’d sometimes start muttering about “the niggers.” More than once, Johnny had to sidle up to Billy O in some crowded after-hours barroom in Roxbury to whisper, “I don’t know how many guns you got on you, Billy, but you and me are gonna need ’em all to shoot our way out of here if you don’t calm down and shut the fuck up.”
At which point Billy O would laugh and then shut the fuck up.
One night in April 1966, Johnny bumped into Billy O. O’Sullivan told him he was opening a new after-hours club above the TV store on Dudley Street in Roxbury that was owned by Wimpy Bennett’s older brother Walter. Directly across the street from Walter’s Lounge, it was a good location for an after-hours spot, and Billy O invited Johnny to stop by on opening night. Martorano, always looking for a new place to party, said he’d be there.
Billy O’Sullivan, a friend of Johnny’s—and Whitey’s.
The night before the opening, Barboza gang member Tommy DePrisco had stopped by a bar in South Boston with another friend of Johnny’s. DePrisco had been trying to collect a loansharking debt from Tony Veranis, a twenty-seven-year-old ex-boxer who had been undefeated in twenty-six bouts until a head injury prematurely ended his pugilistic career in 1958. After that Veranis had drifted into petty crime, and since completing a stretch in state prison he’d been working construction. Looking for money Veranis owed him, DePrisco made a foolhardy move—walking into a strange bar in somebody else’s neighborhood.
“There were twenty or thirty guys in the bar,” Martorano recalled, “and they forced him to leave. He probably got a couple of whacks, and he got embarrassed.”
After being roughly thrown out of the bar, DePrisco and the other guy waited around outside the barroom for Veranis to leave, but they never saw him. So they gave up and drove back across the bridge. Guys like Veranis, they knew, you always run into again.
Tony Veranis, shot to death by Johnny Martorano in 1966.
The next night Johnny and Tash and their dates showed up at Billy O’s new place around 3 A.M. The joint was packed. Everyone was standing around when a short, wiry young guy suddenly got in Johnny’s face and began yelling at him. He was loaded, blind drunk.
“I’m Tony Veranis,” he began, slurring his words. “You know who I am. I just had a beef with your friend. I kicked him outta Southie with his tail between his legs. Fuck him and fuck you, too.”
He reached for his gun but Johnny beat him to it with his .38. Taller than Veranis, he fired down, into the ex-boxer’s skull. Dozens of after-hours partygoers instantly vanished. Within seconds, the only ones left in the room were Johnny, Tash, their dates, and the proprietor, Billy O. Johnny handed some bills to the girls and told them to grab a cab home and keep their mouths shut. Then the three gangsters looked down at Tony Veranis’s body. He was lying on his back, mouth open, arms outstretched, his dead eyes wide open, an ever-larger pool of blood seeping out of his gaping head wound.
Arthur “Tash” Bratsos, one of two brothers murdered by Larry Baione.
Billy O shook his head sadly. Opening night was going to be closing night. He glanced over at Johnny Martorano.
“Thanks, pal,” he said.
Tash went down the stairs to get the car, while Billy O started cleaning up Tony Veranis’s blood and brains. Johnny knew that after this, he owed Billy O—big time. When Tash came back, he and Johnny dragged the body downstairs, leaving Billy O to finish cleaning up. They put Veranis’s body in the trunk of Tash’s black Cadillac.
Johnny decided to dispose of the body in the woods, in Norfolk County. They drove through Milton into the Blue Hills, eventually dumping the corpse down a twenty-five-foot embankment. Then Tash noticed he needed gas, so they headed to an all-night service station on Route 128. It was almost dawn when Tash reached into his coat pocket and realized his wallet was gone.
They hurriedly drove back to where they had dumped the body. After parking the car, they scrambled down the embankment and saw Tash’s wallet next to Veranis’s corpse. Less than half an hour later, the body would be discovered by an early-morning jogger. The cops surveyed his pockets, finding $2.83 in change and two keys. On Veranis’s fingers were tattooed the letters “l-u-c-k” and “T-o-n-y.”
The Record-American reported, accurately, that the dead man was “in the toils of loan sharks.” The Globe ran a sob story by sports columnist Bud Collins, who had known Veranis a decade earlier as a teenage welterweight.
“Nothing Tony Veranis ever did warranted his vicious killing,” Collins wrote. “He was a good kid, as nice as I’ve met in sports. Confused, I guess, but trying to find the right way. But he did something to offend the animals that killed him.…”
So the cops couldn’t totally write off Veranis’s murder. A year later, one of the witnesses, a small-time hood himself, was asked by a Suffolk County grand jury if he had witnessed the killing. He refused to answer, was found guilty of contempt, and was sent to prison for several months.
Meanwhile, a South Boston man in jail awaiting trial for another killing bragged to his fellow inmates that he had killed Veranis. That was enough for the prosecutors—they indicted him, although he was acquitted after a trial.
A couple of days after killing Veranis, Johnny was leaving a joint in the Combat Zone when one of the guys from In Town asked him for a ride home. Johnny said sure, and as they were driving to the Mafia soldier’s home, the made man lowered his voice.
“We heard your crew had some problems with that kid Veranis,” the Mafia guy said. “So we took care of him for you.”
“You did?” Johnny said. “Good work. Thank you.”
* * *
IN 2002, in Boston, Zip Connolly’s lawyer asked Martorano about killing Veranis.
“He’s another one reaching for a gun now,” she asked. “Is that right?”
“Right, and another time I was faster than the other guy.”
4
The Animal Flips
LAWYER: People can be killed for so much as talking to another associate in a bar, isn’t that right?
MARTORANO: It happens.
LAWYER: Happened a lot, didn’t it?
MARTORANO: The seventies and sixties were tough times.
BY 1966, THE FBI was keeping tabs on Johnny Martorano. The source of their information was his good pal, Stevie “the Rifleman” Flemmi. FBI agent H. Paul Rico had hoped to make Stevie’s older brother, Jimmy, his informant, but that just hadn’t worked out, what with Jimmy’s drug habit, his indiscriminate murders, and his increasingly frequent trips to jail.
But Stevie, from the earliest days of his twenty-five-year career as a “Top Echelon” informant, was an endless font of information about the Boston underworld. The Bear’s younger brother tried to keep his hand in every racket in the city. The more wiseguys he talked to, the more gangland gossip he could pass on to Rico, and the more protection Rico could provide for him. Plus there was the occasional $20 or $25 in cash Stevie would collect as an informant’s fee, although decades later he would claim Rico had been pocketing the government money for himself.
Stevie Flemmi officially became an FBI informant, complete with identification number, in November 1965. In the first report on his latest catch, Rico conceded that Stevie “probably is the individual” who murdered Punchy McLaughlin, which in fact he was. That justified Rico’s description of Stevie as “a very capable individual,” if capable meant the ability to murder someo
ne in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses at a busy bus station and get away with it.
Still, Rico pointed out that even very capable individuals have problems, which was why Flemmi “has no permanent residence at this time due to the fact that he realizes that if he established a permanent residence and the residence becomes known, an attempt would probably be made on his life.”
* * *
STEVIE FLEMMI quickly became one of the FBI’s main sources of information about the Boston underworld—a hoodlum, as Rico pointed out, “known to have contacts in the criminal elements in Somerville, East Boston, South Boston and Roxbury, Mass.”
The only missing link was In Town. Stevie never really got along that well with Jerry Angiulo and Larry Baione. He later claimed that when he was a young gangster back in the 1950s, In Town had declined to pay off on a $3,000 numbers hit, leaving him holding the bag. As he later explained it in court, “The only common denominator with them was crime. I certainly didn’t play whist with them.”
* * *
JOHNNY MARTORANO had already killed at least one person for Stevie Flemmi: Bobby Palladino. But Stevie had much greater plans in store for Johnny Martorano. In June 1966, Flemmi discussed with Rico his plans to do away with Larry Baione. Johnny Martorano had been assigned an important role in the plot—as the fall guy. The first part of the plan was to invent a false story that would give Johnny a reason for wanting to murder Baione. Stevie concocted a story to involve the Martoranos in the murder he was planning, and then fed it to Rico, who dutifully put it into his next report:
Informant advised that BAIONE definitely has “got to go.” The only thing is that suspicion has to be thrown on to some other group. Informant advised that it is for this reason there was a story being manufactured now that indicates it is partially based on fact that the MARTORANO brothers are very disturbed over LARRY BAIONE and over the way one of BAIONE’s associates slapped their [MARTORANOS] father around in Basin Street South.
Informant advised that he is hopeful that if BAIONE is killed that suspicion will go to one of the MARTORANOS.
Johnny Martorano was, as usual, hustling. Basin Street South was a nice place to own, to hang out in, but profits were spotty. Overhead—with musical acts, a chorus line, and rent, among other expenses—was high. Bad weather, or a weak act, and the club could lose thousands in a weekend.
Johnny didn’t spend all his time at Basin Street. Sometimes he would head into the North End. One of his regular after-hours haunts was Bobby the Greaser’s joint on Commercial Street. Bobby the Greaser’s real name was Bobby LaBella. He was a friend of Wimpy Bennett’s, and he and Johnny hit it off well.
“If you ever need me to drive on a hit, I’m glad to help out,” Bobby the Greaser would tell him. “Just don’t ever ask me to lend you money. That is the one thing I will never do. That’s bad business between friends.”
Most often, though, if Johnny wasn’t hanging at Basin Street, he could now be found at Enrico’s, a little Italian dive on LaGrange Street, on the edge of the Combat Zone. It was owned by an in-law of Ralphie Chong, whose real name was Lamattina. Ralphie Chong was In Town through-and-through, on Larry Baione’s crew, and a member of the mobbed-up family that rented Basin Street South to Johnny. Enrico’s was a popular hangout for working girls between tricks, and that naturally attracted a certain male clientele that Johnny was all too happy to get acquainted with.
The state attorney general had his investigative offices nearby, and soon Johnny was hobnobbing with various plainclothes state police, among them Dick Schneiderhan. One night in Enrico’s, when Schneiderhan was jumped by bikers, Martorano came to his defense, and a fast friendship formed. It was cemented when Johnny began wordlessly leaving him envelopes of cash in return for, say, the telephone numbers of bookie parlors that the staties or Boston police were tapping in preparation for raids. Even though Johnny didn’t yet have any bookmaking operations of his own, having lists of targeted phone numbers made him a very valuable person for other wiseguys to know, and guys with access to that kind of inside police information were a lot less likely to get knocked off.
Massachusetts State Trooper Richard Schneiderhan, one of Johnny’s police sources.
Another valuable acquaintance that Johnny made in Enrico’s was a banker from Mission Hill named Donald B. Wallace. He’d stroll into Enrico’s for the same reason most of the customers did.
He’d look around and say to me, “Say, Johnny, do you see that girl that was in here last week? You know, the blonde.” So I’d look around, and if she was there, I’d pull her aside and get her a “date” with Wallace. I mean, I wouldn’t pay her off right there in front of him. That would have been crass. But if the girl he wanted wasn’t there, there was always somebody else I could send him out with. He wasn’t exactly particular when he was out on the prowl after a few drinks. Do you follow me?
As far back as Luigi’s, Johnny had always dealt in stolen goods he bought from “boosters”—burglars, most of whom took out stores downtown. Now Johnny was expanding his roster of burglars to include the more numerous gangs that specialized in robbing homes. Well into the sixties, millions of Americans still retained their old World War II–era habit of buying low-interest U.S. savings bonds, and then stashing them at home under a mattress, or in an antique strongbox.
“I used to have guys bringing me huge stacks of those E bonds, so thick they’d choke a horse. I wouldn’t even bother to count ’em there’d be so many, I’d just throw the guy a few hundred. Pennies on the dollar. Take it or leave it. Nobody wanted those kinds of bonds.”
But then of course Johnny had to unload them, at not that much of a markup. It was a minor racket, a low-return business. Until Johnny met Donald B. Wallace of the Lincoln Savings Bank, Roxbury, Massachusetts.
“He would pay me off on the face value—never saw anything like it, before or since. I still have no idea how he unloaded all those stolen bonds, but he did.”
Wallace soon introduced Johnny to another scam: $1,000 no-collateral cash loans.
“Don was a good guy, always trying to help. All I had to do was come up with a real name, I guess so they could check the credit ratings. Not somebody famous—not Bobby Orr or Carl Yastrzemski. Just somebody real. He told me, as long as I made one payment on the loan—say, twenty bucks—then it was legal, and he could keep it on the books forever.”
Pretty soon a lot of Johnny’s friends were getting their car loans from Lincoln Savings. A notation in one of Rico’s FBI reports from Stevie Flemmi noted that the mob had “married” him.
There were other ways for wiseguys to make money off their cars. Especially since one of Johnny’s good friends, George Kaufman, always owned a garage. Whenever Martorano figured he’d waited long enough since his last “accident,” he’d drive his car in to wherever Kaufman was operating his garage that year. (Kaufman tended to change locations fairly often, because when his regular customers noticed the type of people who had taken to hanging out in his waiting room, business had a way of dropping off.)
The Hughes brothers are taken into Boston police headquarters, 1965.
Kaufman would put a dent in Johnny’s car, then call one of his claims adjusters. Sometimes it took a small bribe to get the guy to inflate the value of the dent enough to make insurance fraud worth everyone’s while. Other times, the adjuster would do it on the arm, especially if he owed money to one or another of the shylocks loitering in Georgie’s waiting room.
* * *
TIME WAS running out for the Hughes brothers of Charlestown. In March 1966, they drove into an ambush outside Connie Hughes’s little bungalow-style home in Malden. Just before shots rang out, neighbors heard a male voice scream: “How do you like that, you motherfuckers?” Connie ran, but Steve was hit, and spent a month recuperating in Malden Hospital.
“They shot me like a dog,” Steve Hughes told a relative. Connie, meanwhile, disappeared for a week before resurfacing at police headquarters in Malden with a lawyer.
On May 24, 1966, Connie and another of the lesser McLaughlins were hunting Howie Winter, who had taken over the Winter Hill gang since Buddy McLean’s murder the previous fall. Connie Hughes took his investigation to a barroom on the Charlestown-Somerville line known as the Stork Club. Thirsty as usual, Connie lingered a bit too long in the shebeen. He was spotted by a young kid named Brian Halloran, who quickly called the Hill. By the time Hughes stumbled out of the bar long after last call, a dark sedan was ready to pick up his trail as he drove home to Malden.
Inebriated as he was, Connie still caught the play, and tried to escape on the Northeast Expressway near the Chelsea-Revere line. But his Nova was no match for the hit car, and when it pulled alongside, a gunner opened up with an M-1 army rifle. Between six and eight armor-piercing slugs struck the car. Two of them hit Connie in the head, killing him instantly. A few hours later, Steve Hughes identified his brother’s body at the Northern Mortuary.
Steve Hughes was now the only “capable” McLaughlin still breathing, and on the street.
The end of the road for Connie Hughes, 1966.
A week later, Stevie Flemmi reported in to Rico of the FBI. Flemmi, whom Rico identified interchangeably either by his own name or as “informant,” reported that Connie “had previously been around Dearborn Square, Roxbury, Mass., obviously in an effort to set him up for a ‘hit.’ The fact that CONNIE is now deceased is not displeasing to him. Informant was asked if he had an idea who committed the murder, and he advised that ‘he had an excellent idea who committed the murder’ but it would be better if he did not say anything about the murder.”
* * *
BY THE fall of 1966, both Johnny Martorano and Stevie Flemmi were lining up their next hits. Johnny was concerned about John Jackson, the black bartender who had been at Luigi’s the night Margie Sylvester was murdered in 1964. After Palladino’s killing the previous year, Jackson had wisely disappeared, but months later he reappeared in Boston as if everything had blown over. It hadn’t.
