Hitman

by Howie Carr

  Meanwhile, Stevie Flemmi and Frankie Salemme were setting up Steve Hughes. Hughes had gotten tight with Sammy Lindenbaum, a mob jack-of-all-trades from Revere; he was an abortionist and a shylock, among other things. The ex-con Lindenbaum had been born in Russia in 1899, and as a youth had boxed under the name of “Young Leonard.” Every Friday he made collections from his agents in the Lawrence area, and Steve Hughes started accompanying him every week.

  Sammy Lindenbaum, murdered with Steve Hughes in Middleton in 1966.

  Lindenbaum was repeatedly warned by the Office to stay away from Hughes, but he didn’t take the hint. Down in Providence, the Man finally shrugged and okayed the hit. On the last day of his life, September 23, 1966, Lindenbaum seemed remarkably serene, considering how hot Steve Hughes was. They enjoyed a long, leisurely lunch at Blinn’s Clam Stand in Bradford Hills, where the paunchy Lindenbaum ordered his usual Friday feast: two lobster rolls, french fries, and a side of fried clams. Then they headed east on 125 to pick up 114. Lindenbaum’s two Chihuahuas scampered around the backseat of his Pontiac Tempest.

  Suddenly a car described as a black Lincoln or Mercury with four occupants approached Lindenbaum’s vehicle at high speed, pulling alongside.

  “What appeared to be a pole protruded from the right passenger side of the front seat,” the state police report said. “A series of sounds like the backfiring of a car was heard. The Pontiac car went out of control and tore away nine cement guardrail posts and came to rest about fifteen feet off the right shoulder of the highway in a swamp area.”

  No one got the license number of the black sedan. On Lindenbaum’s body police found $1,060 in cash. Hughes was carrying $55. The cops also found a large number of betting slips. Inside Hughes’s coat pocket was a fully loaded .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with the serial number filed off.

  Outside the wrecked, bullet-riddled car, in the tall swamp grass, Lindenbaum’s two Chihuahuas were playfully scampering around. They had apparently climbed out of the shattered backseat window after the crash.

  During the autopsy, in addition to the four bullets that had killed Hughes, the coroner discovered in his body another older bullet, left over from the shooting earlier that year in Malden.

  Stevie Flemmi provided the underworld take on Hughes’s death to Rico.

  “On 10/10/66, informant advised that since STEVE HUGHES was murdered that the entire city is much more at ease.”

  * * *

  NOT JOHNNY Martorano, though. By late September 1966, another grand jury was looking into the Margie Sylvester murder. Since John Jackson’s return to Boston, he had been tending bar at a waterfront saloon called the Yankee Fisherman. Johnny started hunting for Jackson, prowling through the city at night, looking for his car—an easy-to-spot red convertible.

  Jackson had moved back into his girlfriend’s apartment at 102 Queensberry Street in the Fenway. That was where Johnny decided to take him, using a few of Barboza’s guys as backup. In the early morning of September 28, 1966, they drove to the Fenway in Tash’s black Cadillac, which had been used a few months earlier to dispose of Tony Veranis’s body.

  Tash and Jimmy Kearns would remain in the car, while Johnny and Tommy DePrisco would handle the hit.

  Just after 3 A.M. they watched as his red convertible pulled into the parking lot of the apartment building. Armed with a shotgun, Martorano waited with DePrisco on the other side of the chain-link fence that enclosed the lot. Jackson got out of his car, and Martorano immediately fired, dropping the bartender. Tommy DePrisco’s job was to get over the chain-link fence and, if necessary, finish off Jackson with a head shot. Revolver in hand, DePrisco climbed onto a wooden barrel next to the fence, figuring to use it to jump over the fence. But when he put all his weight on top of the barrel, it gave way, and he fell through the rotting wood into the barrel, which was full of fetid water.

  John W. Jackson, potential grand-jury witness, murdered, by Johnny, 1966.

  DePrisco began swearing loudly, which witnesses remembered when they were interviewed by the police later that morning. The newspapers reported that Jackson had recognized his killer, and had cursed him as he bled to death. Actually, Jackson had died instantly, without saying a word. The only guy screaming “Motherfucker!” that night was Tommy DePrisco.

  * * *

  A DAY later, the Record-American reported that Jackson “had a hunch that his days were running out.” The reporters tracked down his mother in Cambridge, who told them, “My son wasn’t a gangster.” The cops found the shotgun, with two shells still in it, on the lawn outside the Russian Orthodox Church on Park Drive. It was a 12-gauge Remington, and it was quickly traced back to the Sears Roebuck in Cambridge, where the trail went cold. Someone had bought the weapon under an assumed name.

  As always when he spoke to Rico, Stevie Flemmi dropped broad hints:

  Informant advised that JOHNNY MARTORANO has been hanging around with JIMMY KEARNS and TOMMY DE PRISCO and that these individuals were the type that could have murdered Jackson.

  The information regarding JACKSON was disseminated to Lt. SHERRY of the Boston PD on 9/28/66, and Lt. SHERRY advised that they do suspect MARTORANO as being responsible for this shotgun killing.

  MARTORANO: I tried to talk to Bobby Palladino to find out the truth, but I never got to the truth. Jackson I killed because I didn’t want to take a chance.

  LAWYER: Did you ask Mr. Barboza to help you kill him?

  MARTORANO: I don’t recall that. It’s possible, though, because we were all hanging around together at this time.

  LAWYER: And he would have helped you, right?

  MARTORANO: If I asked him.

  LAWYER: There were no discussions with Mr. Jackson, right? It was purely a preventative measure?

  MARTORANO: Purely preventative.

  Wimpy Bennett and Joe Barboza seemed well positioned to cash in big in the new post-gang-war order in the Boston underworld. They’d both been closely allied with the winning side, doing yeoman’s work in tracking down the McLaughlins. Like the Mafia, Wimpy had also taken advantage of the cover provided by the gang war to rid himself of several longstanding rivals in the South End. Barboza had done likewise in East Boston. Both had handled contracts for In Town as well.

  But neither Barboza nor Bennett really got along with the Mafia. At age forty-six, Wimpy was a throwback to the days when the Irish ran everything in Boston crime.

  Wimpy’s older brother, Walter, was more of a businessman. He owned at least two barrooms, and had been partners in various rackets with Larry Baione’s brother, Petey. The oldest Bennett brother, Billy, was a bartender at Walter’s Lounge in Uphams Corner. Wimpy got a cut of everything in Roxbury, including numbers, but his big racket was shylocking. Wimpy would loan, say, Stevie Flemmi cash at 1.5 percent a week, and Stevie would then put it out on the street at 5 percent.

  After Steve Hughes’s murder, it was easier for everyone to move around the city again at night. They didn’t have to worry about being ambushed from the shadows, the way Buddy McLean and Jimmy Flemmi had been. Soon Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme were hanging out nightly with the North End crowd at the Bat Cove, Peter Limone’s club on Friend Street, where Larry Baione was a fixture.

  Flemmi reported to Rico that he never drank heavily at the Bat Cove, because he didn’t trust anyone from In Town. But Salemme lapped up the Mafia talk, and soon his friends were noticing that he was even starting to mimic Baione’s vocal mannerisms. That did not bode well for Wimpy Bennett.

  * * *

  BOTH IN Town and the police wanted to rid themselves of Joe Barboza. A killing machine, he was useful in wartime, but now the war was over. The Mafia’s own soldiers could handle the occasional housekeeping hit—the freelancer sticking up protected card games, the numbers runner skimming the week’s football-card receipts. Anyone could handle such routine rubouts—that was how Jerry Angiulo saw it.

  At the end of his life, in his 1976 ghostwritten autobiography, Barboza would brag that he was ext
orting vast sums of money from clubs in Boston. In reality, he was broke. He paid his top two guys, Chico Amico and Nicky Femia, $100 a week. Everyone else got $75.

  Larry Baione was still concerned about Tash Bratsos trying to avenge his brother’s murder. Night after night, Tash would sit at Enrico’s in the Combat Zone, spinning out his fantasies about what he was going to do to Larry. Tash didn’t seem to care about the owner’s familial ties to In Town.

  “I used to tell Tash,” Martorano recalled, “if you’re gonna kill somebody, either do it or shut the fuck up about it. Because the walls have ears, especially the walls in Enrico’s.”

  The cops nurtured any number of grudges against Barboza. They didn’t like his “James Bond car”—a 1965 gold Oldsmobile, a 360-horsepower whitewalled fuck-you to the police. Unbeknownst to the cops, Barboza had had a specially built panel installed in the front door on the driver’s side. It held three revolvers. The cops hated that car so much that when Barboza finally passed it on to gang associate Dido Vaccari, the cops quickly pulled Dido over. Unable to find any guns in the car—they never did discover the panel—they came up with an archaic statute to use against Vaccari. They charged him with “being abroad in the night.” Later the police added a second charge of possession of a dangerous weapon, a bowling pin they’d found in the backseat.

  Barboza had a big mouth, and when he was pulled over—which happened most nights—he would invariably start popping off and acting like he was the one with the badge. Despite his professed aversion to swearing around women, he had an off-putting habit of telling anyone who pissed him off that “you fuck your dead mother in the mouth!”

  But somehow nothing ever stuck to Barboza. In July 1966, the cops thought they had him cold when he was arrested in the parking lot of the Tiger Tail nightclub on Revere Beach along with Nicky Femia and Chico Amico. They were all charged with stabbing a twenty-three-year-old ex-con named Arthur Pearson in the stomach. In the hospital emergency room, Pearson identified mug shots of all three gangsters. But after a visit from his two connected friends, Pearson recanted, saying he was “in a fog” when he fingered the three killers.

  Brought before a judge, Pearson first took the Fifth Amendment—and then threw in the First, Fourth, and Sixth amendments for good measure. The judge found Pearson guilty of contempt and sentenced him to a year in jail. Pearson kept his mouth tightly shut until his release twelve months later.

  “I knew if I talked I would be killed,” he said later. “And my family would be killed.”

  * * *

  EVENTUALLY, LAW enforcement made a collective decision that the best way to get Barboza off the street once and for all would be to catch him with an unregistered handgun. Then the cops could lock him up for violating his parole, after which they would hang the habitual-offender tag on him. Barboza was already a convicted felon, and if they could make the habitual-offender tag stick, they could pack him off to Walpole more or less permanently.

  Both the Boston and state police took runs at rousting Barboza with a gun, but his luck held until November 5, 1966. Barboza and the boys were driving around the Combat Zone in Tash Bratsos’s black Cadillac when the cops pulled them over. They were laughing until Tash suddenly remembered: he’d left an unregistered .45 in the glove compartment.

  Finally, they had Barboza. His bail was set at $100,000, and $50,000 for Nicky Femia. Tash got out on a lower bond and went to work with DePrisco, shaking down whoever they could to raise the bail money for their boss.

  The Mafia sensed an opening. Tash was approached, and was told that after he and DePrisco raised whatever cash they could, In Town would make up the difference to get them to $100,000—the amount Barboza needed to make bail. It was explained to Tash as a goodwill gesture of sorts, for services rendered in the recent conflict.

  “One night Tash came into Enrico’s,” Martorano said, “and all of a sudden he’s talking about how the North End’s not so bad after all. I thought to myself, Uh-oh. They’re lulling him to sleep.”

  On the last afternoon of his life, Tash was showing off at Champi’s in East Boston, counting out seventy $1,000 bills onto the bar. He and DePrisco had $82,000 cash that evening by the time they arrived at the Nite Lite, a Mafia after-hours joint just down Commercial Street from Bobby the Greaser’s. Larry Baione had told them to bring all the cash they’d collected, so that In Town would know that their money was really going to pay Barboza’s bail, and not for some scam. Patsy Fabiano was supposed to come in with them, but he begged off at the last moment, which saved his life. More than a dozen hoods from In Town were waiting for Tash and DePrisco. Barboza’s two guys were beaten, shot, and stabbed to death. His bail money was whacked up among the killers.

  Detective looks at the body of Tash Bratsos in the backseat of his Cadillac, which was used in four murders in 1966, the last of which was Tash’s own.

  The Mafia crew then dumped the bodies into the backseat of Tash’s black Cadillac, which in the past seven months had also been used in the murders of Tony Veranis and John Jackson. The jinxed Cadillac was driven into Southie and left in the Lower End—a feeble attempt to make the cops think the murders had been committed by gangsters from Southie.

  Wimpy Bennett was driving home from Bobby the Greaser’s when he spotted Tash’s Cadillac. He quickly put two and two together and tipped the Boston police. Just after dawn, when the cops arrived at the Nite Lite, they found John Cincotti, one of the sometime-owners of Basin Street South, trying to scrub the blood off the floor. Ralphie Chong, the owner of record, ended up getting a four- to five-year sentence as an accessory after the fact—the same charge that had landed Jimmy Martorano his first prison sentence.

  In the Charles Street jail, Barboza went wild and ordered revenge.

  * * *

  WIMPY BENNETT was on the phone to Johnny Martorano.

  “I just got a call from George,” he said, using his code name for Raymond Patriarca. “He wants to see all of us.”

  Patriarca was trying to head off a new gang war in Boston before it could start. So he’d told Wimpy to round up the Martorano brothers and Frank Salemme. Wimpy was to bring everyone down to the Office, Patriarca’s headquarters in the back of a vending-machine company on Atwells Avenue in the Italian neighborhood of Federal Hill in Providence.

  “First and only time I ever went down there,” Martorano recalled, “he just wanted to know our intentions, where we stood. I talked more than the other guys. I said I liked Tash and Tommy a lot. Tommy was just a kid from Hyde Park, an ironworker. Tash bought him a suit and made him a shy. But I told Raymond, it was really stupid what Tash had been doing, threatening Larry like that all the time. I said you really can’t blame Larry for finally killing him, and I’m not going to pick up the gun to avenge that. I guess he heard what he wanted to hear, because that was the end of it.”

  Joseph “Chico” Amico, Joe Barboza’s best friend …

  But not for Joe Barboza.

  * * *

  HE WAS locked up, but Barboza still had a few guys out on the street—including Chico Amico and Jimmy Kearns. Despite everything, Amico and Kearns were still hanging out at Enrico’s. One night Amico spotted a Mafia soldier there and slapped him around, saying, “That’s for Larry.” Then he mentioned that he and Kearns were going up to Alphonse’s Broken-Hearts Lounge in Revere, another Mafia hangout.

  They got there, had a couple of drinks, and then stood up to leave. One of the guys they’d been drinking with walked over to the window and rapped on it, loud enough to be heard by several guys with rifles in a car with stolen Wisconsin license plates. The Wisconsin car followed Chico Amico’s car out of Alphonse’s parking lot. Kearns was driving. They hadn’t gotten far when J. R. “Joe” Russo, a young East Boston Mafioso, opened fire with a carbine.

  … and the East Boston Mafioso who killed him, J. R. “Joe” Russo.

  The first shot went through the back window and into the back of Amico’s head, killing him instantly. They kept firing, but ev
en though he was shot in the back, Kearns was able to continue swerving until he finally ran off the road, down an embankment, and into a ditch. He survived. A few hours later, just before Kearns was brought into the Charles Street jail, all bandaged up, detectives arrived at Barboza’s cell to break the news to him about Chico.

  “I just sat stunned,” the Animal recalled in his 1976 book. “No matter who died it affected me, but Chico’s death affected me the worst. He was like my son, my brother, my partner.”

  Joe Barboza would have his revenge, but now it wouldn’t be on the street, it would be in a courtroom.

  * * *

  WIMPY BENNETT never saw it coming. He got it in the garage in January 1967. Stevie Flemmi had accused Peter Poulos, the gang’s bookkeeper, of stealing money from their numbers racket. He pulled a gun and put it to Poulos’s head. Poulos denied stealing the money, and said he’d given it to Wimpy. According to Salemme’s sworn testimony in 2003, he stepped in and told Stevie that he needed to ask Wimpy directly.

  Peter Poulos, taken for a ride in the Nevada desert by Stevie Flemmi.

  So we got Wimpy up there either that night or the next night at six o’clock. There was a meeting with everyone there. And the next thing you know, Peter put it right on him, I gave the money to you, and you did it before. Bennett couldn’t even explain himself, and so Flemmi took the pistol out and shot him in the head.

  They buried Wimpy out in Hopkinton, at a shooting range they’d used for target practice during the recent gang war. The next morning, George Kaufman sold Wimpy’s car to someone for $6,000—or so Stevie later told the feds. But there was more to Wimpy’s murder than just money, as important as money was to Stevie. As Johnny Martorano saw it, there was also underworld status involved.