Hitman

by Howie Carr

  Meanwhile, Judge Wolf’s hearings are going on without me. Marty Weinberg is still there every day for me, because I don’t know if I’m going to make a deal or not. Finally the feds got tired of haggling with me, so they sent me back, but not to Plymouth. I got shipped out to Otisville, a federal prison in New York, and they threw me in the hole.

  In “the hole,” Johnny Martorano only got out of his cell twice a week, for showers. It was solitary confinement. There was a hole in the cell door, and twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, he would stick his hands through the hole. The guards would then handcuff him, open the cell door, and take him down to the shower room.

  Once he was inside, the guards would lock the shower-room door, and Johnny would stick his hands back through the hole in that door, and the handcuffs would be unlocked and removed. He would shower, after which he would stick his hands through the shower door and be handcuffed for the trip back to his cell.

  I was in a good position, if you can ever call being in the hole a good position. They needed me to solve all these murders. They wanted to make a deal with me, but there was all kinds of pressure. The FBI was knuckling the U.S. attorney, they wanted to make the deal with Stevie, and then probably Whitey would have come back to corroborate everything.

  But by then they were just too dirty for anybody to deal with, except maybe the FBI. The strike force finally went to Janet Reno—she was the attorney general then—and what they decided in Washington was, offer him twelve to fifteen years. Remember I’m still only looking at four-to-five, and by now I’ve been in almost four. They never thought I’d agree to it.

  But I surprised them by accepting the deal. Because that’s the only way I could stop Whitey and Stevie from going on ratting people out, myself included, but also everybody else I knew. In a lot of these murders, there weren’t a lot of witnesses, so it’s either gonna be Stevie or me who makes the deal. And if it’s not me, and he ends up testifying against me and all my friends, what do I say to my brother? Or Howie? Or Pat? Or even Frankie?

  They told me, well, you’re gonna have to agree to also testify against any “corrupt officials.” Meaning cops. I said I got no problem with going up against Connolly and Rico, but I would prefer not to go against Schneiderhan. He never hurt me. And I never did testify against him. They got him, but not through me.

  But they knew how bad it would look, if I admitted to twenty murders, and I only had to testify against four people. So they came up with a specific target list. I had nothing to do with drawing up that list. It was a bunch of Whitey’s guys from Southie that I would have to testify against. Sure, I said. I loved that list, because I’d never known any of those guys, let alone committed any crimes with them. So I was glad to say I’d tell the government the truth about anything I did with them, which was nothing.

  The real list to me was still the same guys—Whitey, Stevie, and Zip, and, before he died, Rico. At Zip’s trial in Miami, they tried to make a big thing out of all these guys that I didn’t know.

  LAWYER: The people that you agreed to testify against included George Hogan, correct?

  MARTORANO: Never met him.

  LAWYER: Patrick Linskey?

  MARTORANO: Never met him.

  LAWYER: John Curran?

  MARTORANO: I knew him because he drove Whitey Bulger around. That’s all I knew.

  LAWYER: Why did you agree to testify against somebody you didn’t know?

  MARTORANO: That’s the best way to agree.

  LAWYER: You put one over on the government?

  MARTORANO: No, they wrote the list. I didn’t write the list. That was the South Boston crew in the ’80s and ’70s. I don’t know nothing about them. I was gone.

  LAWYER: So you did put one over?

  MARTORANO: I didn’t put one over. My lawyers made a good deal.

  Johnny signed the agreement and was shipped off to Texas, to a special federal penitentiary with a wing called “the Valachi suite.” Johnny hated the name, because he didn’t consider his decision at all similar to the one made by Joe Valachi, the first Mafia soldier to turn rat, and testify before Congress. Back in the early ’60s, Valachi had been trying to save his own skin, period, and had informed on everyone he ever knew.

  It was going to take the feds awhile to put the whole package of plea agreements together. They had to get prosecutors in three states to sign off on the unsolved murders, many of them high-profile. In Massachusetts, they had to deal with elected prosecutors in two different counties, one a Republican, the other a Democrat.

  In the meantime, Martorano’s debriefings continued. He was questioned by cops from three states, in addition to the various feds. He told them how Joe Barboza had confessed to him that he was planning to frame the four innocent men who would be convicted of the 1965 murder of Teddy Deegan. One of them, Joe the Horse Salvati, had been freed pending a new trial, but he hadn’t yet been cleared.

  Wyshak wrote a memo to John Durham, the new special prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate FBI corruption in Boston. Using Johnny’s testimony, Durham asked a judge to release all the FBI files on the Deegan case. The smoking gun turned up quickly—a memo from H. Paul Rico to J. Edgar Hoover on the day after the Deegan murder, correctly naming the real killers.

  The two surviving innocent men—Joe the Horse and Peter Limone—were finally exonerated, after thirty years in prison.

  Down in Texas, the strike force would give Johnny names dating all the way back to the ’60s. The feds wanted to know who was with which gang—In Town, the Hill, Roxbury, etc. If they’d been murdered, they would ask Martorano if he knew who had done it, and why.

  MARTORANO: They pulled a list out of eighty people that I knew, and there was only five left by the time they showed me the list. Everybody else had been killed. And I was one of the few that survived, so we started going through that list to see how many people I knew anything about, what the situation was.

  LAWYER: And this is a list that the government is interested in, if you can give any information on their deaths, right?

  MARTORANO: Do you know this person or that person, whose side they were on. Most of the people were dead, just to show you the context, there was a lot of people that got killed them days.

  It took over a year, there was so much stuff to settle. Different counties, different states, and nobody ever wants to make a deal with the hitman. Like I always said in court, I had good lawyers.

  When word got out about Johnny’s deal, Zip Connolly was frantic. Stevie Flemmi was about to take the stand, and Zip began conferring on an almost daily basis with Stevie’s attorney, Kenny Fishman. Zip understood that he was in serious jeopardy because of what Johnny Martorano knew. Now it wasn’t just his FBI pension or his Boston Edison job at stake. He suddenly realized that he could end up in prison. So Zip didn’t need Stevie digging him an even deeper hole with his testimony. It was important, for instance, that Stevie dummy up about how Zip had tipped them to their impending indictments four years earlier.

  When Zip was down on the Cape at his summer home in Dennis, he’d never call Fishman from his house. He’d drive around the corner to a pay phone to call. But then he’d charge the call to his Edison credit card, establishing the very paper trail he was trying to avoid.

  Next, one of the longtime Bulger sycophants at the Globe decided to make a run at Martorano’s credibility. Mike Barnicle, who referred to Whitey as “Jimmy” as though they were close friends, wrote a piece in which he quoted Eddie Walsh, one of Connolly’s closest friends, as saying that Martorano used blacks in Roxbury for “target practice.”

  This accusation was so over-the-top that the U.S. attorney later denounced the statement as “made up” and “fantasy.” It turned out to be Barnicle’s last regular column in the Globe. His career at the Globe came to an end soon after when he was forced to resign in disgrace over earlier transgressions and suggestions of plagiarism and outright fabrication.

  * * *

  AS THE months d
ragged on with no sightings of him in the United States, people who had known Whitey began coming forward, anonymously at first, then more openly as they realized that he wasn’t coming back. And stories began to leak out—that Whitey was gay, or at least bisexual. By the time his mug shot was featured on America’s Most Wanted for the twelfth or fifteenth time, it was practically gospel.

  Whitey in Provincetown in the late 1980s during his Village People phase.

  The strike force released a photo it had found in Whitey’s personal effects. It was taken in the late 1980s, in Provincetown, where Whitey spent a lot of time, sometimes with a woman, other times by himself, or with Zip. In the photo, Whitey was wearing a cowboy hat, and was bare-chested except for a leather vest. In his hands he cradled a long-barrelled rifle. Zip apparently understood how it would look to his superiors, his alleged he-man hoodlum supersource hanging out in the gay mecca of P-town. In one 209 report, absolving Whitey of any possible connection to a gangland hit, Zip mentioned that at the time of the murder, Whitey had been in Provincetown—“with a woman,” Zip hastily added.

  More stories came out. Gays began to remember how he used to hang around Jacques in Bay Village, the oldest transvestite bar in the city. An old tale that no one had ever dared recount when Whitey was around began to spread through the underworld. According to the story, shortly after he got out of prison in 1965, Whitey had started hanging out with Hank Garrity, the gay owner of the Pen Tavern who used to visit him at Leavenworth.

  In those days in Southie, there was a dinner club called Blinstrub’s. Occasionally Blinstrub’s would book a fading show-biz act into the main room, and one weekend in 1965, the main attraction was Sal Mineo, who would later be murdered by a gay hustler in Hollywood. Between shows, the talent hung out upstairs. According to Southie legend, one night during Mineo’s stand at Blinstrub’s, someone had stumbled into the upstairs green room without knocking and had seen Whitey and Hank Garrity double-teaming the fading teen heartthrob.

  Then everyone recalled Whitey’s old Native American friend from Alcatraz, Clarence Carnes, the Choctaw Kid. When the Kid died penniless in prison in Missouri in the 1980s, Whitey paid to have his body exhumed from a pauper’s grave at the prison. Whitey then had the Kid’s body brought back to the Cookson Hills of Oklahoma for a proper Indian burial, which Whitey paid for and attended, also bailing the Kid’s nephew out of jail as a sort of bonus goodwill gesture. The Choctaw Kid had died of AIDS.

  Then there was Catherine Greig’s younger brother. In the 1980s, David Greig sometimes accompanied Whitey around the Town. Hooked on Percosets, he would often nod off. But Whitey, who knew nothing about drugs except how much money they could generate, was clueless as to Greig’s problems. He told his younger associates, “I think David has a vitamin deficiency.” Whitey wanted to bring the kid into the gang, a sort of Kevin Weeks for Kevin Weeks. For once, everybody rose up in unison and told Whitey he was out of his mind. A short time later, David would be found shot in the head on Cape Cod in what was eventually ruled a suicide.

  With Whitey gone, the rumors took on a life of their own. Even the cops started spreading them. The police in Tulsa, where Roger Wheeler had been murdered in 1981, finally put out a wanted poster in 2002.

  “Subject said to have extreme bad breath,” the Tulsa police warned. “Subject is traveling with female companion but may be found in homosexual communities/resorts or nudist facilities.”

  Look, I know what my brother and Pat Nee and a lot of other guys say about Whitey now. It’s not a big deal to me now one way or the other, but you guys never did like Whitey, he did shit to you, and you have no way of knowing whether these stories are true or not, because everybody except Whitey is dead now.

  All I can tell you is, I’ve heard the same stories, but in all those years I never saw it. He was weird, but not in that way. You think he would have been my partner if I’d thought he was gay? You think I would have shot people with him? Like Seinfeld says, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but.…

  Flemmi finally took the stand in August 1998. Jimmy Martorano had wisely pleaded guilty earlier, so the only other two defendants left in the courtroom were Frankie Salemme and Robert DeLuca.

  By then, prosecutor Fred Wyshak had copious notes of Johnny’s debriefings, and he started going down the list of murders Stevie and Johnny, among others, had committed together. Wyshak would inquire of Flemmi, Did you murder Eddie Connors? James Sousa? Richie Castucci?

  Flemmi would look over at Fishman, who would hold out his right hand, all five digits pointing outward. Five as in Fifth Amendment.

  “Assert the Fifth on that,” Flemmi would reply to Wyshak.

  Through Fishman, Zip was trying to protect not only himself, but also his hero Billy Bulger. Morris had testified weeks earlier that he had seen Billy at one of those Sunday-afternoon crime confabs at the Flemmis’ house. Stevie brought up Morris’s testimony himself, without any questions from either side, in order to deny that it ever happened.

  “Just wanted to clarify that,” he said.

  When asked how he had learned of his pending indictment, he lied again. He didn’t mention Kevin Weeks passing on the tip from Zip. Instead, he said Whitey had called him at his mother’s house. No, he didn’t know where Whitey was calling from. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask.

  In the jury box, Salemme fumed. Stevie was lying—obviously lying—to protect Zip Connolly and Billy Bulger. At the next break, back in the courthouse holding pen, Salemme grabbed the smaller Flemmi by the throat and began throttling him, screaming: “You piece of shit! You fucked me all my life and now you’re screwing everyone around you! Fucking scum!”

  The marshals had to pull Salemme off Flemmi in order to prevent yet another murder.

  * * *

  WYSHAK ASKED Flemmi about how he must have realized at some point that Whitey Bulger wasn’t going to ride to the rescue.

  “I can’t say that,” Flemmi replied.

  “You can’t say that?” Wyshak said. “Well, he hasn’t rescued you so far, has he?”

  “He must be working on it.”

  Stevie Flemmi’s mother died in 1999, leaving the home on East Third Street vacant. Two of Stevie’s illegitimate sons by Marion Hussey got into the gang’s “clubhouse” and found a hidden cache of $500,000 in cash. They blew through it in six months of nonstop partying, one of them would later testify.

  The feds started tightening the screws on the families. Michael Flemmi, Stevie’s cop brother, was convicted of obstructing justice on the testimony of his nephew, one of the Hussey boys, who, after learning that his father had murdered his half sister, decided to change his last name to St. Croix. Whitey’s youngest brother, Jackie Bulger, was convicted of perjury after lying to a grand jury about visiting his brother’s safe-deposit box in Clearwater, Florida. Catherine Greig’s twin sister was also convicted of perjury and sentenced to six months’ house arrest, after which she put down Catherine’s two French poodles, Nikki and Gigi.

  Down in Plymouth, in memory of the dogs, Robert DeLuca wrote a poem, “Who’s Minding the Puppies?”

  LAWYER: You were aware that both Florida and Oklahoma were death penalty states, were you not?

  MARTORANO: I’m not sure if I was aware, but I am now.

  LAWYER: Is it your testimony that you weren’t aware at the time that you entered into this plea agreement?

  MARTORANO: When I shot those people, I wasn’t aware. It didn’t matter.

  In September 1999, Johnny Martorano pleaded guilty to ten murders in three different states. After the guilty plea in Oklahoma in the murder of Roger Wheeler, Tulsa police detective Mike Huff flew to Boston to reinterview Zip Connolly. He was ushered into Zip’s office by the taciturn secretary who spent much of her time typing and retyping his still-unsold screenplay about the Mafia induction on Guild Street—Only the Ghost Knows.

  “What do you know about Bulger and Flemmi?” Huff asked Zip, who ignored the question and changed the subject.
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  “Did you know that HBO is going to make a movie about me?”

  Now it was Huff’s turn to ignore Zip. “I know they set it up,” he said, “but nobody here will help me.”

  “Do you understand what I did?” Zip continued, talking as much to himself as Huff. “I took down LCN. I took down twenty-eight guys, man. I’m proud of what I did. You guys, you just don’t know what it’s like. That’s why I have to write the screenplay myself. I’m the only one who can do it.”

  * * *

  JOHN DURHAM, the special federal prosecutor appointed to investigate FBI corruption in Boston, was closing in on Zip. Durham and his squad of out-of-town FBI agents worked out of Worcester, rather than Boston, to avoid even the appearance of association—and impropriety—with the Boston office. Durham obtained a warrant to search Zip Connolly’s office in the Prudential Center, where his agents seized the hard drive from his computer. On it they found drafts of an anonymous letter that Zip had written to Judge Wolf three years earlier, questioning the credibility of several honest Boston police officers who were potential witnesses against both Zip and his gangland bosses. Zip had printed his scurrilous screed on BPD stationery, to make it look like an inside job from police headquarters.

  In Zip’s office, Durham’s FBI agents found reams of blank stationery from both the BPD and the Globe, which Zip also apparently used when sending out his anonymous hit pieces. Then the feds located several witnesses who were willing to testify that Zip had shown them early drafts of the anti-BPD letter he’d sent to Judge Wolf.

  Now the feds had Zip cold on at least one obstruction of justice count. He was going to prison, even if he didn’t realize it quite yet. At this point, it was just a question of gathering up even more evidence, and witnesses to testify against Zip. Johnny Martorano and John Morris, among many others, were already in the fold, and the next to join them would be Mafia boss Frankie Salemme.