Hitman

by Howie Carr

  “It was the Mafia,” Zip explained. “Winter Hill doesn’t kill like that.”

  Afterward, Zip frantically told Whitey again that he had to make sure that Joe McDonald didn’t let slip what had happened. Whitey asked Johnny to get in touch with Joe. Whitey and Stevie wanted a sit-down with Joe Mac, to reinforce the message of how important it was to keep his mouth shut. But Joe Mac refused to meet with them. He’d always had less use for Whitey and Stevie than anyone else in the gang, but now he was being stubborn.

  “I never found out what the problem was,” Johnny said. “Maybe Joe had a premonition about them.”

  * * *

  BUT IT wasn’t over yet. The Hill found out something it hadn’t been aware of. Jack Mace was with the Gambino crime family. It was now a Mafia thing, in other words, and protocol had to be observed. New York called Jerry Angiulo and asked for permission to come into Boston to handle a piece of business—namely, collecting the $150,000 the Hill owed Jack Mace.

  Jerry was bullshit, ’cause he didn’t like New York guys coming into his town. But he had to play along, too. So he gives it the okay, and he sets up a date for us to meet them. At first I thought of telling them, we gave Castucci the money before he got killed. But why lie? So I decided to handle it another way. I call every gangster I know and asked them to come over to the garage at a certain time, before the New York guys arrive, although I didn’t put it that way.

  Sonny Mercurio was the liaison between us and In Town, so Jerry told Sonny that he had to bring the New York people over. I told my people, when you see these guys coming in with Sonny, I want you to take a good look at ’em and try to remember if you’ve ever seen them hanging around the garage or anywhere else.

  I rounded up everybody—the Campbells from Roxbury, Whitey’s guys from Southie, the Charlestown longshoremen who’d been with the Hill in the war, and of course everybody from Somerville. It was a tough-looking bunch, sixty or eighty guys, and there weren’t nearly enough chairs for so many of them, so they were just milling around. I thought a picture was worth a thousand words. A few theatrics could save a lot of trouble, maybe even lives.

  Angelo “Sonny” Mercurio, FBI informant and the Mafia’s liaison to Winter Hill.

  Anyway, Sonny arrives with three guys, forty, fifty years old, dressed up. They’re playing their roles—Mafia guys from New York—just like we’re playing our parts. So we make them run the gauntlet, walk past our guys, who are all staring at the New York wiseguys. That got them a little spooked, even before Sonny brought them into the office. Howie’s got the trapdoor next to his desk open—that sends a message, too, like we might throw their bodies down there if they get out of line, after we’ve shot them. It was mainly me and Whitey who did the talking.

  The guy that was speaking for them was a member of the Colombo family.

  He says, “We’re here to collect the $150,000 you owe Jack Mace.” He says, “Maybe you didn’t know he was with us.” And I says, “Maybe you didn’t know that I rented a place from him in the Village for two of our guys who are on the lam,” and he told Castucci, who went to the feds.

  It doesn’t matter how we found out, Johnny said, all that matters is that we did. We took care of Castucci, Johnny went on, and I don’t know what you’re planning to do about Mace, but I’ll tell you right now, if we see him, we’re going to whack him.

  The Colombo soldier was an up-and-comer, and he was used to being treated with respect, especially by guys who weren’t “made.” But Johnny was addressing him brusquely, not at all deferentially. And as Johnny, and sometimes Whitey, spoke, they noticed how the soldier’s eyes kept drifting over to that open trapdoor next to Howie’s desk.

  “As far as we’re concerned,” Johnny told him, “the debt’s cancelled.”

  The Colombo soldier paused for a moment to consider how to extricate himself from this situation with his skin intact.

  “Well, you know,” he finally said, “we didn’t know any of this.” Now he was the one being deferential. “This kind of changes everything.”

  Then he stood up and nodded at Sonny Mercurio. The sit-down was over.

  LAWYER: And the LCN representatives at this meeting agreed not to collect on the debt, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: They couldn’t collect the debt so they agreed not to collect the debt.

  LAWYER: Well, if the LCN wanted to collect a debt, even from you, they could do so, couldn’t they?

  MARTORANO: No, they couldn’t. They didn’t.

  LAWYER: The Winter Hill organization couldn’t afford a war with the LCN, isn’t that right?

  MARTORANO: We told them we’re not paying. You want us to take care of Jack, we’ll take care of Jack, because he’s still a problem for us. They said never mind. You don’t owe it no more.

  Later on, Sonny Mercurio tells me that once they got outside and back in the car, the top guy from New York said he was just glad to get out of the garage alive, and boy, had they ever misread that situation. Jerry was happy, too. He didn’t want New York thinking they could come up here and push anybody around. It would have been bad for business—his, ours, everybody’s.

  I think maybe that was the pinnacle of the Winter Hill Gang. One thing’s for sure. Everything was downhill from there. Everything.

  Melotone had been a near disaster, but Howie Winter wasn’t giving up on vending machines. His next move was pinball. The machines were in some of the clubs in Somerville, but officially they’d been illegal in the city since 1954. Howie wanted them everywhere, and to do that, he needed to get them legalized.

  That was a task for Sal Sperlinga, Indian Al’s old friend, who ran the numbers in Somerville. He was a smoother guy, the good cop to Howie’s bad cop. That was why Indian Al had reached out to him. He was glib, almost a politician. And he was close to the pols—it was Sperlinga who in August 1977 got the Board of Aldermen to legalize the machines. The vote was 9 to 2. Later the state police investigated allegations of $10,000 cash changing hands at City Hall, but no one was ever indicted.

  Once pinball was legalized in the city, the Hill realized it had a new problem. At least nominally, Somerville was now wide-open. Clubs and bars could now contract with any vending-machine company, although of course Howie didn’t see it that way. He figured that since he’d made the capital investment—“spent a bundle,” as he told the owner of one rival company—then he alone should enjoy the fruits of the monopoly he had paid for.

  “I’m giving you two days to get your machines out of the city,” Howie was later quoted in court as telling the manager of one vending-machine company. “I own this city. You’re all done. As far as Somerville goes, you’re out of business. If you don’t [quit], I can get rough and I can get plenty rough.”

  One of the club managers Howie tried to muscle was seventy-five years old. He worked at the Disabled American Veterans Post in Ball Square. The Hill had gotten away with so much for so long that they never considered what might happen next. The people Howie was trying to muscle started marching down to East Cambridge, to the office of the Middlesex district attorney. They apparently didn’t understand that it wasn’t healthy to do that; unlike most of the people the Hill had been dealing with, they were legit. They were law-abiding citizens.

  Howie Winter had picked an unfortunate time to tangle with civilians. The district attorney was sixty-seven years old and afflicted with a debilitating disease that had left him unable to speak. He had a primary coming up in 1978, and younger challengers were already lining up against him. He badly needed some scalps. He also had an ambitious young first assistant named John Forbes Kerry, who understood the publicity value of bagging a big-time gangster or two.

  Howie Winter under arrest in Somerville in 1977.

  Howie Winter and Sal Sperlinga were arrested on October 20, 1977, and charged with extortion. Hours after the arrests—and a subsequent John Kerry press conference—the Somerville aldermen held a special meeting at City Hall and voted unanimously to halt the licensi
ng of all pinball machines in the city.

  I think Howie wasn’t paying enough attention because he was more concerned about Ciulla. Fat Tony had sold the horses he owned with Howie, and then they’d let him out of prison. His brother-in-law, Eddie Ardolino, came by the garage to warn us not to talk to Tony, because the feds had wired him up. Plus Joe and Jimmy are still on the lam. So Zip tells Whitey who tells Howie the district attorney is coming after him, and that he had better go down to the DAV Post and get this straightened out, apologize or whatever. Same with the other places him and Sal tried to muscle. But I think what happened was, Howie was so preoccupied trying to keep everything else together that he just left it to Sal to patch everything up, and whatever Sal did wasn’t sufficient.

  The bottom line is, Howie and Sal end up getting indicted.

  In November 1977, Johnny got more bad news. Deke Chandler was murdered outside his Roxbury home by a twenty-three-year-old Mattapan punk. Chandler, thirty-eight, was stabbed in the heart and shot repeatedly in the head. The slaying had nothing to do with organized crime; it was a dispute over Chandler’s girlfriend.

  In the newspaper accounts of his slaying, Chandler was described as a “lieutenant” in Boston underworld circles who had “strong affiliations with high-ranking organized-crime chieftains in Somerville and Boston.”

  * * *

  JOHNNY WAS the next one to get into trouble with the law. Dick O’Brien was a major bookmaker in Quincy, one of the Hill’s top earners. The state police tapped the phones in one of his South Shore offices and soon had enough evidence to run in everyone in his organization on gaming charges. They even got Johnny, taking a call from one of O’Brien’s underlings about a problem, and then answering, “I’ll talk to you when I see you.”

  Dick O’Brien, South Shore bookie who later lived near Johnny in Florida.

  They were planning to play that tape in court. They said it proved I was one of the two bosses, with Dick O’Brien. They had me on tape, so it was hard to deny. I get ordered to go to state police headquarters at 1010 Com Ave and have a voice-print made, you know, to see if I’m the same guy as the one whose voice they got on the tape.

  I call Schneiderhan and that’s when I get lucky. He’s still in the AG’s office on Boylston Street, and he’s going to be doing the voice-print. But he tells me he can’t just fix the case, he’s got to have the documentation that it’s not me. So I asked him, “What do I do?” He tells me I have to go to my dentist and have a bridge made that I can stick in my mouth when he’s giving me the test. The bridge changes the oscillation or something like that in your voice. So I wrote down what Schneiderhan told me, and then I go to my dentist and tell him what I want. He does it and then when he’s finished he’s washing his hands and he says, “I don’t even want to know what you’re going to do with that bridge but just let me know if it works.”

  It worked; my voice sounded totally different with the bridge, so now they have no evidence against me, and I’m the only one they really care about, not Dick O’Brien and his guys. Another problem, the Staties only had a warrant to record business on Dick’s phones during bookie business hours, 12 to 2 and 6 to 8. But one of the cops, who got into worse trouble later, was taping everything. So their evidence was tainted. But after all this time, and effort, they still needed a scalp, so they offer me a deal—everyone gets four months, and I have to pay a $30,000 fine. So I took one for the team. With everything falling apart around me, I couldn’t afford to be off the street for that long, but what else could I do?

  Johnny Martorano ended up doing three months at the Plymouth House of Correction in 1978. When he got out, he found the underworld landscape shifting even more. Joe McDonald and Jimmy Sims were still fugitives, hiding out in Florida—Sims in the Keys, Joe Mac in Daytona Beach. Jimmy Martorano was in prison. Howie Winter and Sal Sperlinga were looking at serious time in the state pinball case.

  Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi were still free men.

  * * *

  ONE MORNING at the garage, Johnny arrived to find a telephone message. Fat Tony was out on bail, and just as his brother-in-law had predicted, he was reaching out to Johnny, to get him on tape. Fat Tony wanted to call Johnny at Pal Joey’s, around the corner on Broadway from Marshall Street. Johnny called his attorney, Marty Weinberg, and Weinberg said he wanted to be there when the call came in. Massachusetts was a “two-party” state—it was against the law to record a phone conversation without permission of both parties—but there was no reason Johnny couldn’t tape his half of the conversation.

  Tony calls me in the bar, and he keeps bringing up “the stuff we did.” It was obvious he was trying to get me to admit that we’d fixed all those races. I wouldn’t bite; I’d known for months not to talk to him about anything important. He just kept saying, “You remember what we did.” I told him, “Tony, I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. I thought you were calling because you had something that would help get my brother out of prison. I don’t know about any of this other stuff you’re talking about.”

  Finally Tony gave up.

  They were all running around with much younger women now. At age forty-three, Stevie Flemmi had a veritable harem—in addition to the endless string of pickups and one-night stands, he had his common-law wife, Marion, and his now sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Deb Hussey. He was also supporting Debbie Davis, age twenty-two.

  Whitey Bulger had Teresa Stanley, in addition to whatever teenaged girls he could lure from Cardinal Cushing, an all-girls parochial high school on West Broadway. One of them was fifteen years old. Her name was Tammy. Whitey was also sleeping with a dental hygienist, Catherine Greig, who happened to be the ex-sister-in-law of two of his murder victims, Paulie McGonagle and his twin brother.

  As for Howie and Johnny, they were involved in much more serious relationships with younger women. At the age of forty-eight, Howie now had a twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, Ellen Brogna, who was brought in before the pinball grand jury in East Cambridge. She took the Fifth Amendment. How could Howie not love a girl like that?

  Johnny, now thirty-eight, had taken up with an eighteen-year-old girl named Patty. She was from Ball Square, the Somerville neighborhood where Johnny had spent the first eleven years of his life.

  I think I met her when I was with Howie’s son, Gary. Yeah, I was twenty years older than she was, but her parents always liked me. I went to see her mother, because she was the one who called the shots in that family. Her mother’s name was Loretta. She was Sicilian. Patty’s father was, I think, English. I told Loretta, Patty and I might be going on a vacation soon, six months tops. Patty had been running with a bad crowd, she’d dropped out of high school, so I told her mother, I think it’ll be better if she gets out of Somerville for a while. Her mother said, okay, as long as Patty’s with you, I know she’ll be safe.

  We were together for the next twenty years. And we’re still friends.

  The pinball trial started in Cambridge in January 1978. Howie never had a chance. The seventy-five-year-old veterans’ club manager testified that one of his employees told him, “Winter and Sperlinga said for him to get out of the business or they would break his legs and other things.”

  Faced with near-certain conviction, Howie decided to roll the dice and take the witness stand himself. It was a fiasco. On cross-examination, Winter said he was in the real-estate business, but was forced to admit that he had no office and had made only one sale in 1977, of a condominium in Medford, to someone whose name he couldn’t seem to remember.

  “I’d have to check with my lawyer,” he said.

  Then there was the question of all his various addresses. The prosecutor asked him about the Somerville address he’d given the state police when they arrested him. He said it was his daughter’s house. Then he said he voted out of a second Somerville address, but actually lived in Medford and had a driver’s license issued to his brother’s home in Billerica. His wife, he said, lived in Lexington.

  “Do you li
ve in Somerville, Mr. Winter?” the prosecutor asked him.

  “Sometimes,” he replied.

  “Did you live there last night?”

  “No,” said Howie, “I did not.”

  * * *

  BOTH HOWIE and Sal were convicted on all counts. The judge sentenced Howie to two nine-to-ten-year terms, to run consecutively. Sal got the same nine-to-ten-year sentences, but the judge stipulated that Sperlinga’s terms would run concurrently because he was “only a follower.” Sal would be eligible for parole in three years, Howie in six.

  The judge was apparently swayed by a handwritten note Howie had passed the judge before sentencing, asking for mercy for Sal: “I respectfully request that in considering sentence for Mr. Sperlinga, Your Honor keep in mind that he never had much to say and that he never raised his voice and also that he is the sole support of his eighty-two-year-old mother.”

  The judge told Howie, “I respect you, Mr. Winter, for the motion you filed.”

  * * *

  THE RACE-FIXING trial would be next. The feds had records of all the phone calls Ciulla had made from the hotels he’d stayed in at the tracks where he’d been fixing races. The phone records included dozens of calls to Johnny’s various addresses. For witnesses, they would have Ciulla and jockeys who’d been threatened by various members of the gang. Everyone was going to be indicted, from Howie Winter to the transplanted Boston gamblers in Vegas who’d placed bets for them to the actual runners, guys like Sid Tildsley, the owner of El Sid’s nightclub on Winter Hill.