by Howie Carr
As of 2010, Moran was still serving a life sentence at Souza Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts.
* * *
BACK IN Boston, Zip Connolly continued to watch over Whitey. After Johnny’s flight, the Winter Hill Gang was basically down to the two guys who weren’t from Somerville. They decided to move their headquarters into Boston. George Kaufman had a new garage, in the West End, on Lancaster Street near North Station.
The animosities from the Irish Gang War lingered, and Georgie McLaughlin, another beneficiary of those Dukakis weekend prison furloughs, was moving around Charlestown, talking to the younger hoods, among them the son of the late Steve Hughes, murdered in 1966 by Stevie Flemmi and Frankie Salemme.
In early 1980, Whitey and Stevie decided on a housekeeping hit. Steve Hughes Jr., a paroled bank robber, had just pulled his car into a Charlestown public-housing project with his girlfriend and their child when he was shot and killed with a high-powered rifle—Stevie’s trademark—from the roof of a nearby building.
An FBI informant reported the next day that young Hughes’s killers were Whitey and Stevie, and that they had driven to Charlestown in a boiler they’d taken from George Kaufman’s new garage on Lancaster Street in the West End. The FBI did nothing with the information, even though the garage was within five minutes’ walking distance of their offices in the JFK building in Government Center.
Months later, two undercover state police were driving through the West End when they spotted a couple of organized-crime types lurking outside the garage. Intrigued, they staked out the garage and soon noticed a steady stream of underworld figures—both Mafia- and Hill-affiliated—paying their respects to Whitey and Stevie and their newest muscle, Nicky Femia, Joe Barboza’s old driver and sidekick. One regular visitor from In Town was Phil Waggenheim, a veteran hitman.
The Staties got a warrant and put a bug in the garage. Across Lancaster Street, above a gay bar—the Boston Rifleman, an ironic name given Stevie’s nickname—they set up surveillance. They were soon picking up conversations among the remaining Hill hoods. Unlike his bosses, Femia enjoyed junk food (as well as cocaine), and one day the bugs captured Whitey screaming at him when he returned to the garage from the nearby McDonald’s on Causeway Street. Whitey even pelted Femia with french fries as he warned Femia never to bring such “shit” into the garage again.
Phil Waggenheim, shown here in a 1960 photo, was one of Jerry Angiulo’s highest-ranking non-Italian associates.
Femia had been a suspect in the unsolved slaying of five people at the Blackfriars nightclub on Summer Street during the cocaine and cash rip-off in the summer of 1978 that Whitey had parlayed into a profitable score of his own. When Femia went onto Whitey’s payroll, Connolly filed several 209s absolving him of the Blackfriars murders. Later, after Whitey fired Femia, Connolly filed a new report, naming Femia as a prime suspect in the Blackfriars massacre.
The Staties were optimistic about their garage bug. It appeared they were on the verge of taking out what remained of the Winter Hill Gang. But in the summer of 1980, they noticed a sudden change in Whitey’s demeanor at the garage. He began congratulating the state police on the efficiency of their speed traps on the Mass Pike. Whenever any gangster or drug dealer of any consequence showed up, they would leave the anteroom the Staties had bugged and go outside, onto the sidewalk. Finally Whitey stopped coming to the garage altogether. He began using the phones at the HoJo’s on the Southeast Expressway in Dorchester. Whitey would show up, with Nicky Femia standing beside him, a small handgun tucked into his belt.
The Staties got a warrant to bug the HoJo’s phones. Whitey suddenly stopped using them.
* * *
THE KILLINGS continued in South Boston. Louis Litif was an “independent,” a bookie, a hustler. He was also one of Zip Connolly’s handball partners at the Boston Athletic Club, and Litif realized early that drugs, not bookmaking, were the future of organized crime. He dressed flamboyantly, spending thousands of dollars on then-fashionable leisure suits, including, it was rumored, color-coordinated underwear. He began moving cocaine, starting small but quickly graduating to larger and larger amounts. He wasn’t fucking around, either. At his barroom, he met a recalcitrant drug dealer and took him downstairs. As the dealer followed Litif into the basement, he yelled back at the bartender, “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, come looking for me, ’cause I’m probably dead.”
South Boston drug dealer Louis Litif got heavily into the disco scene before Whitey murdered him in 1980.
He was. Soon thereafter, the bartender, too, disappeared. His daughter went to the FBI, looking for answers. Zip Connolly was quite blunt.
“Honey, your father’s dead. But don’t worry. They got him drunk first.”
The problem was, the bartender’s family was destitute, and they couldn’t collect on his life insurance policy without a death certificate, which they couldn’t get without a body. Connolly told her that going to the Boston police might jeopardize some very important informants of his. He offered to handle the insurance company, which he did, with a single letter. Before his trial twenty years later on racketeering charges, Zip would deny ever writing such a letter, until the bartender’s family produced a letter from the insurance company crediting “agent Connolly” with resolving the case.
I sometimes wonder what my body count would have been if I’d stayed in Boston all those years. I can tell you, I wouldn’t have minded killing Litif. I never had any use for that guy—he was just a jerk who wore a lot of gold. But some of the others that they killed.… I’d like to think that I could have stopped some of the later murders, especially of the women.
Whitey didn’t need Johnny to handle Litif. This one was personal. Whitey was the boss of Southie, and Litif hadn’t been authorized to kill anybody, let alone two people. Zip had been able to handle the bartender’s daughter, but then Litif was arrested for the Matera murder. After making bail, the frightened Litif sought out a high-ranking Boston cop and offered to testify against Whitey and Stevie in return for leniency. Unfortunately for Litif, according to what Flemmi later told police, a second cop was present to hear the conversation—Litif’s FBI handler, Zip Connolly. Louie Litif rocketed to the top of the Hit Parade.
Brian Halloran was out of prison, hanging around, snorting coke, drinking too much. On April 12, 1980, Whitey put him to work. Louie Litif asked his wife if he could borrow her car—“he said he had a bad stomach and wanted to get some Maalox tablets,” was how Anna Litif explained it to a judge in 2009. He told her nothing about being summoned to South Boston, or that he was told to pick up Brian Halloran on the way to the Lower End. Their destination was Triple O’s, which was the new name of what had been the Killeens’ old Transit Café. Whitey had taken it over through a straw, Kevin O’Neil, the tubby, acne-scarred plug-ugly who had beaten a murder rap in 1969 after hiring Billy Bulger as his attorney.
Once they got to Triple O’s, Halloran took Litif upstairs, to Whitey’s “office.” Whitey shot Litif in the head. Then he and Halloran wrapped a blanket around his body, brought Mrs. Litif’s car around back, and put the corpse in the trunk. Halloran drove the car over to the South End and left it in front of Larry Baione’s Laundromat on Shawmut Avenue. It was either a message, or a coincidence.
As for Halloran, he walked back to Triple O’s and had a double. He owed it to himself.
* * *
THE STATIES were irate that their bugs kept getting blown. It has never been officially determined who tipped Whitey to the Lancaster Street surveillance, but the state police pointed the finger at the FBI. Lieutenant Colonel Jack O’Donovan, who had personally arrested Jimmy the Bear three times, was adamant in his demands for a meeting with the FBI brass. The feds were chagrined, probably because they realized that O’Donovan was correct. The state police were insisting that the FBI sever ties with the two mobsters who were now so palpably pulling the feds’ strings. The FBI brass in Boston appeared on the verge of terminating W
hitey and Stevie as informants.
So in late 1980, Zip Connolly and his ostensible boss, John Morris, swung into action. They wrote memo after memo to their superiors, lionizing Whitey. For Zip, it was already a matter of dollars and cents. Connolly had quickly grown accustomed to the cash payoffs he took from Whitey—in 2003, a secretary at the Boston FBI office would testify that in the late ’70s, long before the advent of direct deposit, she once opened one of the lower drawers in Zip’s desk and found “ten to twelve” uncashed FBI paychecks.
After discarding his first wife, Zip bought a condo in Southie from a convicted Bulger-affiliated arsonist known as Frankie Flame. To help defray costs, Zip took in a roommate—a DEA agent who worked with his brother. Zip furnished his new pad with stolen appliances from a store Whitey controlled, and even the deliveries were made by gangsters. He bought a boat. Later, he would purchase a second home on the Cape. Finally, Whitey had to warn him to stop spreading around so much cash in such a flashy manner.
Increasingly dependent on Whitey for both his professional and financial well-being, by late 1980 Zip was using his 209s to defend Whitey in ever more histrionic tones. In one, he dusted off an urban myth about Whitey doing a favor for a white Quincy cop, rescuing his wayward daughter from the clutches of an evil black pimp. Sometimes, he told the truth: he pointed out that Whitey had ratted out one of Johnny’s old friends, Jimmy Kearns, when he was on the lam in Las Vegas after taking a contract from an El Paso cocaine dealer to shoot an assistant U.S. attorney.
On October 15, 1980, Zip and John Morris actually met with their gangland boss and then wrote a memo quoting Whitey as saying he was less concerned about being revealed as an informant than he was with the Mafia possibly killing him to take over his rackets. A business hit, in other words. Nothing personal. Besides, Whitey added, no one would ever believe he was a rat. Certainly John Martorano never did.
The FBI always knew where I was, all those years. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. Whitey and Stevie told them. They kept tabs on me for the FBI. But they needed me to be free, so they could drop my name with Jerry. The Mafia understood what I was capable of, so whenever Jerry Angiulo tried to get Whitey and Stevie to agree to anything, they’d always say, we’ll have to get back to you on that. We have to check in with Johnny first. They never told me what was going on. But they loved to drop my name.
LAWYER: You were a ruthless guy, weren’t you, Mr. Martorano?
MARTORANO: I don’t know.
LAWYER: You don’t know?
MARTORANO: You don’t act like I am.
LAWYER: Let’s go back to reality here, Mr. Martorano. Your reputation for ruthlessness was well-deserved, was it not?
MARTORANO: Probably.
LAWYER: And when you say “probably,” are you being modest.
MARTORANO: I’m not the person—it has to be the other person to decide that, not me.
Zip was desperate to protect his source—his source of income. Next he wrote a memo saying that there was speculation that he himself had tipped Billy Bulger to the Lancaster Street garage bug, and that Billy had informed Whitey. That was an indication of the seriousness of the threat to terminate them, that Zip would reveal the name of his real mentor, the senate president. But he had to move quickly. The FBI was about to install bugs at the Dog House, and the names of Stevie and Whitey would surely be mentioned.
The only way to protect them from indictment would be if they were listed as informants on the federal wiretapping warrant. So in December 1980 both Whitey and Stevie paid an unscheduled visit to the Dog House, so that they could be listed as informants on the warrant, even though in fact the most significant information was provided by a Chelsea bookmaker who in return for his services would later be pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.
After their visit to Prince Street, Zip wrote up a report, summarizing the mundane information about In Town that Stevie and Whitey had provided—“revenue was down,” an unsurprising development, considering the recession that was gripping the nation. It just wasn’t enough. The FBI brass was ready to cut Whitey and Stevie loose, so on November 25, 1980, Zip took his final shot. He brought Whitey to a hotel room at Logan Airport, where he met for four hours with the new head of the Boston FBI office, Lawrence Sarhatt. Without ever mentioning his days as a gay hustler in Bay Village, Whitey went on at length about his deep respect for H. Paul Rico.
“SA RICO,” Sarhatt wrote, “was such a gentleman and was so helpful that he, Informant, changed his mind about his hate for all law enforcement. Additionally, he has a close feeling toward SA JOHN CONNOLLY because they both grew up in the same neighborhood in Boston and had the mutual childhood problems, as well as his deep hatred for La Cosa Nostra.”
Whitey denied that anyone in the Bureau had tipped him to the Lancaster Street bug, saying the leak came from the state police, although he refused to name the trooper “because this source is not doing it for monetary benefit but as a favor to him.”
Just for good measure, Whitey “also related that he is not in the drug business and personally hates anyone who does [sell drugs]. Therefore, he and any of his associates do not deal in drugs.”
Sarhatt was new to Boston, but he instinctively understood that he was a fed being fed a line. In his report, he noted that he was “not certain” if Whitey was “telling the full story of his involvement.”
As usual, Whitey was keenly aware of the bureaucratic turf wars among various law-enforcement agencies. So he took the opportunity to unload on Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Colonel O’Donovan. Whitey said he’d met several times with O’D, as he was known, and that O’D had repeatedly expressed his disdain for the G-men for whom Whitey claimed to have such respect.
“He [O’Donovan] made very disparaging and derogatory statements about the professionalism of FBI personnel. [Whitey] took great umbrage inasmuch as his association with the FBI has been nothing but the most professional in every respect.”
Ultimately, Sarhatt recommended terminating Whitey and Stevie. But the final decision was up to Jeremiah O’Sullivan, the head of the Organized Crime Strike Force, who two years earlier had cut them out of the race-fixing indictment. Once again, at Zip Connolly’s behest, O’Sullivan saved Whitey and Stevie.
Johnny was still on the lam in Florida, talking to John Callahan.
* * *
CALLAHAN HAD been the president of World Jai Alai until 1977, when he was observed by Connecticut State Police at the Playboy Club in Park Square in the company of “known gangsters,” one of whom was Johnny Martorano. Callahan had long since contracted what a cop would later tell the Miami Herald was “a bad case of gangsteritis,” but now it would come back to bite him. The state of Connecticut quickly stripped Callahan of his license to operate a pari-mutuel—a betting pool—without which he couldn’t run a fronton.
Callahan was out, and soon afterward World Jai Alai’s longtime owners from Boston sold out to Roger Wheeler, a fifty-five-year-old native Bostonian who had made a fortune in high tech. Wheeler, who now lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, paid $50 million, a reasonable price for a company that spun off $6 million clear each year. Wheeler got a loan from the First National Bank of Boston, where Callahan had once worked and was still well-regarded. As part of the deal, Wheeler had to bring in one of Callahan’s associates to run the company. Suddenly, Callahan was dreaming of a triumphant return to World Jai Alai.
Given the nature of the business—gambling and cash—Wheeler wanted the best possible security. That was where H. Paul Rico came in. After his retirement from the FBI in 1976, Callahan had hired him as vice president of security as a favor to Rico’s gangland associates. Rico quickly brought in more retired G-men, and after the ownership change, he hit it off with his new boss Wheeler. Rico was old-school FBI, and he knew how to act the part, just like Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Jimmy Stewart, and James Cagney before him.
Despite his security team’s impeccable FBI credentials, Wheeler soon realized that his frontons were
being skimmed. They weren’t churning out nearly the $6 million annual profits that he’d been expecting, and needed, to pay off the note to the First. Wheeler started an audit, but before he could get far, a female World Jai Alai employee in Florida was brutally murdered in her apartment, along with her boyfriend. The boyfriend was killed first, hit over the head and then hanged from a shower curtain while unconscious. Then the cashier was dragged into the kitchen, to the sink. The killers looped the sash from her bathrobe around her neck and then fed it into the garbage disposal. She died of a broken neck. At the time, in December 1980, the double homicide was written off as another Miami drug deal gone bad. It remains unsolved; Miami-Dade’s cold-case squad reopened the case in 2007 but got nowhere.
Meanwhile, John Callahan was hanging out at his condo in Plantation, and he decided to bounce an idea off Johnny Martorano.
I’d be out drinking with him whenever he flew down—he was one of the guys bringing down the money to me. George Kaufman managed my own money for me—I gave him 10 percent of whatever he handled, whether from the sports betting or anything Stevie and Whitey cut me in on, which was usually the deals I found out about. They’d give George my cut to get to me. Usually George would then give it to Callahan, and I’d get it the next time he flew down. Off-season, he let me stay at his condo in Plantation, and I could use his car. He didn’t need them if he wasn’t down there. So I was hanging with him, and he was always talking about his jai alai problems. I guess it was late ’80, early ’81, when he came up with a new idea.
He wanted to buy World Jai Alai, with Rico and his friend who the bank had put in as his partners. Once the deal went through, Callahan was going to cut the Hill in, for $10,000 a week, to provide protection against any of the New York families muscling in on the fronton in Hartford. They were particularly concerned about that one, because it was so close to New York. There was so much cash coming in, from the betting and parking lots, they could have skimmed it easy. The plan was to offer Wheeler good money—at least $60 million, probably more. Then they would sell off a couple of the smaller frontons and pay down the debt to a manageable level. So he asked us—meaning me, Whitey, and Stevie—if we’d be interested in handling the “protection.” Naturally they loved the idea—$10,000 a week, steady.
