Hitman

by Howie Carr

  “They wanted to impress Larry. Killing Wimpy makes ’em big shots down at the Bat Cove. It was a two-birds-with-one-stone thing. Same with Larry. He had two reasons for wanting Wimpy dead. Number one, Wimpy was Irish, which he didn’t like, and number two, Wimpy was too sneaky for Larry.”

  Soon the newspapers were reporting that Wimpy the Fox had vanished—“missing from usual haunts … foul play suspected…” “rubout victim?” Flemmi assured the FBI that there was “absolutely no hope of finding BENNETT alive,” as if Rico didn’t know.

  Walter was the next Bennett brother to go, in April. He’d been noticed lurking around Larry Baione’s neighborhood in Jamaica Plain. Bennett had figured out the Mafia angle, Salemme said.

  “The word got out that Stevie Flemmi did it for the Italians, for lack of a better—the guineas is what he [Walter] said.”

  Walter, however, still trusted Salemme and Poulos. As Salemme explained, that was Walter Bennett’s fatal mistake.

  We lured Walter to the garage to a meeting with me at six o’clock one night. Peter Poulos drove him to the garage, and I had a big door that you press a button to open. It was a huge garage, and he drove in and walked up the stairs to the office. Stevie was waiting at the end of the stairs, shot him, and he took him out to the car.

  They buried him next to Wimpy in Hopkinton. Two Bennetts down, one to go.

  * * *

  BARBOZA WAS shipped off to MCI-Walpole in January 1967. He was doing four-to-five. The Bear had also ended up there, on a parole violation, and Nicky Femia was also doing time at Walpole, on the same gun charge they’d used to take Barboza off the street. It looked like they’d all be gone for a good long time. The owner of Champi’s even screwed up his courage long enough to appear at a Boston Licensing Board hearing to beg the city not to revoke his liquor license. The man had been living in abject fear, an East Boston detective testified on his behalf. Why, Nicky Femia, the tenant of record, hadn’t even been paying rent on the upstairs apartment where they stashed their arsenal in an old Frigidaire.

  “I’m a victim of circumstance,” the owner of Champi’s told the board. “That’s all I can say.”

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, STEVIE started driving down to visit his brother more often after murdering Wimpy. Johnny Martorano would often go along for the ride. Johnny would talk with Barboza while Jimmy Flemmi would huddle with his brother. A couple of times the Flemmis got into fistfights in the visiting room. After the brothers finished their private conversations, they’d switch off—Stevie would sit down with Barboza and Johnny with the Bear.

  The FBI, in the persons of H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condon, would soon be paying Barboza a recruiting visit, and Martorano thinks he knows now what Stevie was discussing in hushed tones with Barboza and his brother.

  If one of them was going to flip, which one would be the better witness, Barboza or the Bear? Barboza was looking at serious time, while Jimmy was about to get out. Plus, if Jimmy flips, it’s all over for Stevie too. So you’d want Barboza to do it, but then you’ve got the Deegan problem. The Bear was in on that hit, you’ve got witnesses in Chelsea who remember seeing a bald guy in the front seat. Who else can that be but the Bear? They had to get that whole Deegan thing straightened out, one way or the other.

  More than thirty years later, as they all sat in the Plymouth House of Correction, awaiting their trial on federal racketeering charges, Salemme put it directly to Flemmi. He asked his old partner if he had gone down to Walpole to broker the deal for the FBI, arranging to turn Barboza into a rat, in order to protect his brother the Bear.

  “He didn’t deny it,” Salemme told the prosecutors in 2003. “He said, what could I do? You know, he’s my brother.… He said, I had to protect my brother. I accused him right out, you went up there for this guy, Rico. He just put his head down and was nodding his head yes.”

  It didn’t take long for Barboza to agree to all of the FBI’s demands—that he put the finger on everyone in the top hierarchy of the New England Mafia. He tied Patriarca to a contract hit on two brothers in Providence who had started a card game on Federal Hill that was not “protected.” He fingered Jerry Angiulo for setting up the murder of an ex-boxer who’d been sticking up Mafia-protected dice games known as barbooth. As an added personal bonus on that one, Barboza named as the shooters several of the same hoodlums who had killed Chico Amico.

  Finally, Barboza accused three made LCN members—Henry Tameleo, Peter Limone, and Louie Grieco—of having taken part in the 1965 Deegan slaying.

  To explain away the bald man in the front seat the night Deegan was murdered, Barboza replaced his bald friend the Bear with the doorman at the Colosseum nightclub, Joe “the Horse” Salvati. Barboza swore that Salvati had donned a “bald wig” before going into the alley to shoot Deegan.

  The Federal Witness Protection Program had just been started. Barboza was a one-man pilot program, an experiment of sorts. Now the feds would find out if they could protect a witness from Mafia retribution. They moved Barboza from safehouse to safehouse, including jails and islands owned by the Coast Guard, as well as gated compounds they rented north of Boston in Essex County along the coast.

  Three of the men framed by the FBI for the murder of Teddy Deegan: (top left) Peter Limone, (top right) Henry Tameleo, and Joe “the Horse” Salvati.

  One day in early 1968, Johnny Martorano got a call from his old pal Barboza, whom the newspapers had taken to calling “the Canary” or “the Turncoat.”

  “I was living in Lynn with some girl, and he tracks me down somehow. I don’t know where they had him stashed at the time. He says to me, listen, I consider you a friend, I’m not going to bother you. But I gotta do this and I’m not concerned with who’s guilty or innocent. I just don’t want you coming in and calling me a liar.”

  Johnny had of course followed Barboza’s story as it unfolded in the papers. But to actually hear Barboza calmly explain how he planned to lie, under oath, in a capital murder case, was still a shock. Barboza obviously remembered that he’d told Johnny who had really killed Deegan.

  “I think you’re wrong, Joe,” Martorano told him. “I don’t think this is the right thing to do.”

  “That’s it,” Barboza said. “This is what I’m gonna do.” Then he hung up. They never spoke again.

  * * *

  JOHNNY STILL didn’t care much for Jerry Angiulo or Larry Baione. But he couldn’t stand by as Barboza railroaded guys who’d had nothing to do with the murder of Teddy Deegan. He called the Dog House, and asked for a sit-down with Jerry Angiulo.

  Dido Vaccari had already stopped by 98 Prince Street to tell Jerry’s brother Danny Angiulo what Barboza had told him about the Deegan hit. If necessary, Dido was ready to take the witness stand to impeach Barboza’s testimony. Now it was Johnny’s turn to lay it all out to the underboss. Johnny said he was also willing to testify if it came to that, to recount under oath what Barboza had told him about the murder itself, and his plans to commit perjury.

  For once, Jerry Angiulo was polite, gracious. It’s a generous offer, he told Johnny, but it’s not necessary. It’s all bullshit. Everybody knows it’s bullshit. Why, Louie Grieco was in Florida when Deegan got hit, and he can prove it. Plus he’s a World War II hero—decorated veteran, combat, European theater. As for Joe the Horse, he owed Barboza a couple of hundred bucks, and when Barboza was in the can and sent somebody over to get the dough, the Horse told Barboza’s guy to go fuck himself. If the Horse had just ponied up fifty bucks, Jerry went on, he wouldn’t be in this jam, but what are you gonna do now? Plus, Barboza’s admitted killing like twenty-six people. Who’s gonna believe him?

  As he left 98 Prince Street, Johnny was reassured. No way a jury would ever believe Barboza, right?

  * * *

  THE MAFIA, though, was a lot more worried than Jerry Angiulo was letting on. They put out a $300,000 contract on Barboza. And then they decided to whack Barboza’s new lawyer, John Fitzgerald.

  He was the son of a
minister, with five children, but despite the squeaky-clean image he acquired later, Fitzgerald was in fact a rather shady character, even by the standards of mob lawyers. He was running around with a gangland groupie, and he had taken over the payments on Joe Barboza’s gold Oldsmobile. Earlier he had represented Georgie McLaughlin—enough in itself to make him persona non grata with much of Boston’s underworld. Now he was Joe Barboza’s mouthpiece.

  Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme drew the assignment from their new Mafia friends at the Bat Cove: hit Fitzgerald. But first Stevie needed to handle one more pressing piece of personal business in Roxbury: clipping the last of the Bennett brothers, Billy.

  On December 22, 1967, after speaking to Flemmi, Rico filed this report:

  STEVIE FLEMMI indicated that they are going to have to do something about Wimpy Bennett’s brother … as he has accused them of being responsible for the murder of his brothers and he has indicated that he is going to kill him.

  As he sometimes did when writing about Flemmi, Rico quoted Stevie as “informant” as he described his own plans.

  Informant advised that FLEMMI and SALEMME will probably take out Bennett because they have much better connections and information on Billy’s activities than he has on their activities.

  Stevie and Frankie had an ace in the hole. After the murders of his two brothers, Billy trusted almost no one in the underworld, but he remained close to two hoods named Richard Grasso and Hugh “Sonny” Shields, whom he recruited for his mission of revenge. In a section of an FBI report that was later heavily redacted, Rico wrote that one of them, probably Grasso, “has made a mistake and is out to ‘clear himself.’”

  Hugh “Sonny” Shields did not age well during the gang wars of the 1960s.

  Namely, by setting up Billy Bennett. Which Grasso did on the day after Rico filed his report about Billy Bennett’s imminent murder. It was almost Christmas, and Billy was seldom venturing outside his modest Mattapan home, but this snowy evening, Grasso picked him up in his car. Wearing a shoulder holster with a loaded .38, Billy hopped in the front seat. Sonny Shields sat in the back. Following behind at a discreet distance was another car, with Flemmi and Salemme. They had a plan—they would let Grasso and Shields shoot Bennett and then they’d all head out to Hopkinton for yet another unceremonious burial. That way, they used to joke, the Bennetts could all play bid whist together.

  They were also planning to kill Grasso and Shields. What better way than for Grasso to “clear himself” of whatever he’d done than by being shot to death?

  According to testimony in a later murder trial, the plan went awry as Grasso was driving Billy Bennett through Mattapan. Bennett spotted Shields pulling a gun out of his coat, and tried to jump out of the car. According to prosecutors, as Bennett opened the door, Shields fired, killing him. The force of the bullet pushed Bennett’s body out of the car, into the street, and up against a snowbank. A cab was coming in the other direction, which left Grasso no choice but to drive off, leaving Bennett’s body in the street. There would be no third Bennett brother for that ghostly bid-whist game out in Hopkinton.

  In that same state murder trial, a witness would testify that while Bennett’s body was still lying in the street, Stevie Flemmi called a Boston cop, the same one who five years earlier had gotten the warrant to go into the attic at Luigi’s to find Margie Sylvester’s body. The witness said Stevie wanted the cop to confirm for them that Billy Bennett was dead.

  But the cop would later be acquitted, as would Sonny Shields. Grasso didn’t live long enough to stand trial. Grasso ended up shot twice in the head, his body then thrown into the trunk of his car—the Billy Bennett death car. Grasso’s car was then dropped off in Brookline, in Norfolk County—a clever ploy designed to ensure minimum police interest in the murder.

  From experience, the gangsters understood that if possible, it was always a good idea to dump any corpse in a different police district in Boston than where the murder had actually been committed. It was even better to unload the stiff in a different city or town, and best of all to leave the body in a different county—that really created a jurisdictional nightmare for law enforcement, trying to figure out where the murder had been committed, which determined who would be stuck handling the dead-end investigation. It could get messy, and the last thing cops and prosecutors want is a mess, especially in an organized-crime murder case.

  Once Grasso’s body was found in Brookline, the Boston cops pretty much washed their hands of the murder. Stevie Flemmi had expected nothing less. This was what he paid them for.

  * * *

  WITH BILLY Bennett dead, only one piece of unfinished business remained with the Bennetts. Stevie Flemmi wanted the brothers’ shylocking records. If Stevie had the ledger books, that would prove that he, and not the Bennetts, was the loan shark of record. He could continue collecting in Wimpy’s name. It would be a score worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stevie knew that Billy had gotten the books from Walter before either of them had been murdered, but the question now was, how could Stevie spirit them out of Billy’s house?

  Billy’s wife, Louise, stricken with multiple sclerosis, would never open the door to Stevie, or Frankie. It would take someone above reproach to get inside to grab the ledgers.

  It would take H. Paul Rico of the FBI.

  Rico showed up on Louise Bennett’s doorstep in Mattapan, immaculately dressed as always, offering his condolences to the grieving widow. It was imperative, he told her, that she immediately hand over any records that could be used to implicate her in the nefarious criminal enterprises of her late brothers-in-law, not to mention the fact that it just wasn’t safe to keep such records around with the likes of such a notorious killer as Stevie Flemmi still at large.

  But Billy had carefully instructed his wife: trust no one, especially cops, even the FBI. Especially the FBI. So she told Rico that she had nothing to turn over, that she had no idea what he was talking about. Rico worked it from every possible angle, until he finally gave up and left, without leaving behind a business card. No paper trails for Rico.

  It was one of the few times Rico ever failed his friends in the underworld. But by now he had more pressing matters to attend to. His new star witness, Joe Barboza, was about to begin his career as a mob canary. First he could testify against Raymond Patriarca down in Providence, then against Jerry Angiulo in Boston, and finally, in the Teddy Deegan murder case.

  But before the Deegan trial could even start, Stevie Flemmi got himself beaten up at Basin Street South.

  5

  Bwana Johnny

  LAWYER: When you met [Hubert] Smith and killed him, you got into a car with him. Is that right?

  MARTORANO: Yes, I did.

  LAWYER: There were two teenagers with him, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: When I met him in Roxbury, there was three people in the car, and I took it to be three guys. It was the middle of a snowstorm at two in the morning.

  LAWYER: How far away were you from Mr. Smith when you shot him?

  MARTORANO: A foot.

  LAWYER: And people in the car were right next to him, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: Was the middle of winter. They were dressed in winter clothes, and I just got in the car and started shooting.… He was supposed to be alone. I saw three—what I took—what I believed was three men, and I said to myself I better shoot fast because they may have the same thing on their mind for me as I have for them.

  LAWYER: And you didn’t look to see if the people—

  MARTORANO: I just shot three times. After the first flash, it was just shadows.

  WHEN STEVIE FLEMMI got excited, he would stutter. His speech would dissolve into sentence fragments, as if he were too angry to put together a coherent thought. On the morning of January 6, 1968—early in the day for Stevie to be up—he was stuttering and spitting out his words.

  He was talking on the phone to Johnny Martorano, and he was in a rage.

  “Basin Street … down there looking
for you … got a beating … that big nigger Smith … motherfucking nigger … your fuckin’ place, Johnny … they held me down … what the fuck.…”

  At first Johnny couldn’t believe such a thing could happen at Basin Street. All through the ’60s, the club kept changing hands, going back and forth between the Martoranos and the Lamattinas. In early 1968, it was the Lamattinas’ club. But as far as everybody in the city was concerned, Basin Street would always be Johnny Martorano’s place. He still hung there, it was where you went first if you were looking for him. And Johnny still owed Stevie—at least that was the way Johnny figured it, and that was how Stevie saw it, too. Stevie had tipped Johnny that Palladino and Jackson were going to testify against his brother Jimmy. Of course it wasn’t true, but Johnny Martorano wouldn’t know that for another thirty years.

  “Motherfucker held me from behind, Johnny … give me a beating … sapped on the head … Johnny, your place.”

  Johnny told Stevie he would take care of it. All day, he could think of nothing else. He didn’t really know this Smith. Smitty, everybody at Basin Street called him. Lived in Dorchester, about forty-seven years old. Johnny would have to figure out what had happened, and there was only one way to do that. He would seek out Smitty and ask him directly. That night, a Friday, Johnny met up with another of his buddies, Steve Brucias—Steve the Greek. The Greek lived on Dudley Street with his two teenaged kids, whom he was raising alone. He owned a piece of a bar out in Hyde Park. Johnny filled him in on what had happened the previous night.

  The next day, a detective from the BPD vice squad would file a report about the scene at Basin Street South a few hours before the murders: “I see Smitty in Basin Street every night. I get there between 1:15 and 1:30 A.M. He was drinking Friday night which is very unusual. He is usually on the door but Friday night two young colored kids were on the door, dressed in sport jackets like the band.”