by Howie Carr
Before the sentencing, Martorano stood and read his own prepared statement.
“I’ve confessed to my family, my friends, and my priest. I’ve been forgiven and given a second chance. I will not embarrass anyone who stood up for me and supported me. As they say, actions speak louder than words. I’m hoping the risks I’ve taken to turn my life around and accept responsibility prove my sincerity.”
The survivors of the victims were likewise allowed to address the judge. Barbara Sousa, widow of James Sousa, murdered at the garage in 1974, his body never found, said, “It is very hard to understand how a man who has admitted to killing twenty people can be regarded as giving ‘valuable assistance’ to anyone.”
Tim Connors, son of Eddie Connors, shot to death in a phone booth on Morrissey Boulevard in 1976, said, “He’s not sincere. No, not at all. It’s just something doctored up by his attorneys.”
But David Wheeler, son of Roger Wheeler, shot between the eyes in Tulsa in 1981, also wrote to Judge Wolf: “The irony that the hit man who murdered my father possesses more integrity than the FBI and the United States government will trouble me until my death.”
The survivors sat on the right side of Judge Wolf’s courtroom; Johnny’s family sat on the left side. After a four-hour hearing, Judge Wolf sentenced him to fourteen years. He would be eligible for parole in 2007.
* * *
JOHNNY WAS sent back to Florida. With Rico dead and Flemmi having pleaded guilty, most of his work as a government witness was done. If Whitey was ever brought back to Boston, Johnny would of course be called as a witness. And in 2008, he would have to testify in Florida, when Zip Connolly went on trial for second-degree murder in the 1982 John Callahan slaying.
But basically, all Johnny Martorano was doing now was completing his sentence, his bit. Back in Boston, the old gang continued to fade away. Fat Tony Ciulla died in 2003. He’d been in the Witness Protection Program for years, living in Southern California as Tony Capra—his wife’s maiden name. But near the end, he moved back to Boston and was living with a relative, still looking for a writer to tell his story. As one writer noted, Fat Tony was predeceased by most of the tracks where he’d fixed races—Hialeah, Green Mountain, Narragansett.
Alvin Campbell died in 2005, Sonny Mercurio in 2006. One by one, the Angiulo brothers passed on, and John Hurley, and Joe McDonald’s older brother Leo.…
As the date of his release neared, back in Boston Frank DiMento was getting calls from reporters, wanting the first postprison interview with Johnny Martorano.
Frank called me and says another reporter had called him. I told him, “Just another guy looking for a story.” And Frank says, no, I don’t think so, not this one. Frank asks me, did you ever go to a private school in Rhode Island called Mount St. Charles? Of course I did, so Frank says, well, this guy Ed Bradley called, from CBS, and he says he was your best friend on and off the football field and he’d like to do whatever he can to help you.
Now, I only remember him as “Big Ed.” I didn’t even know Big Ed’s last name back then. But he’s been following my case, putting it all together. And he was fascinated by how strangely it had all turned out. He’s black, he comes from a poverty-stricken background and ends up one of the biggest TV reporters in the country, and me, I’m white, from the suburbs, and I end up as … well, as what I ended up.
So Ed Bradley tells Frank, he wants to do a story on why and how it all happened the way it did, to both of us, him going one way and me the other. Big Ed says he figures this isn’t just one segment on 60 Minutes, this is the whole hour.
I said, “Good.” I wanted to maybe get him into the prison, do the interview there. But they wouldn’t let him come in with a camera crew, so he was going to meet me as I walked out the prison door. We’d shake hands and hug and then sit down and talk it through. I never spoke to him directly, but through Frank I promised him I’d do the interview.
But it was not to be. Bradley, who enjoyed doing Boston organized-crime pieces for 60 Minutes, did his final one in early 2006 on Kevin Weeks, whose book about his career as Whitey’s gravedigger was about to be published.
Within a few months, though, Bradley was stricken with a rare blood disorder. He died about four months before Johnny was to be released. But Johnny would fulfill his promise to Ed—he gave his first postprison interview to 60 Minutes. Steve Kroft ended up doing the story, asking all the right questions—even going back to Mount St. Charles, now a coed school, for some of the interviews. But somehow, without Big Ed, it just wasn’t the same for Johnny.
* * *
FINALLY, ON March 22, 2007, it was time for Johnny Martorano to go home, not to Boca Raton, but to Boston. He was offered the Witness Protection Program, but declined. Who exactly did he have to worry about back in Boston? The Hill was gone, Whitey and Stevie’s successor crew scattered, and what beef did what was left of the Mafia have with Johnny? The guy the newspapers said was the new boss in Boston, Carmen DiNunzio, had been twenty years old when Johnny went on the lam. DiNunzio ran a cheese shop on Endicott Street in the North End and weighed 450 pounds. His nickname was “the Cheeseman.”
Carmen DiNunzio, aka the Cheeseman, was the alleged boss of the Boston Mafia when Johnny was released from prison in 2007.
In all factions of the Boston underworld, it seemed, no one had anything but gratitude for what Johnny had done. He’d avenged them all, living and dead. No friends of Johnny, or anyone else, were in prison because of his testimony. Only Stevie and Zip … and maybe, someday, Whitey.
Peter Limone, one of the guys who did thirty years in prison for the Deegan murder he did not commit, would soon succeed the Cheeseman as the new boss, or so the papers and TV stations said. Limone, too, had sent a letter to Judge Wolf before Johnny’s sentencing in 2004, pointing out Johnny’s role in finally establishing his innocence.
No, Johnny would have no problems in Boston. At his sentencing in 2004, Eddie Connors’s son had mentioned something about “street justice,” but Johnny was not concerned. He just wanted to get to Boston, see his children, and try to do something he’d never done before—live a normal, straight life.
I had a friend, a guy I met on the lam in Orlando. John Pierce. He had a nightclub, then a redneck bar in Tampa, then a steakhouse in north Georgia. He used to visit me at the prison, so the day I got out, he drove down to pick me up. I walked out the door and got in his car and we drove 400 miles straight, to Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta. No stops. I just wanted to get home.
We get to the airport. John says, do you want me to come in with you? And I said, nah, I can handle it. So I go in there, and everything is different. I haven’t been on a commercial airliner except as a prisoner since 9/11. I have no driver’s license, only a prison ID. The guy looks at it and says, that’s not good enough. I said, hey, what do you want from me? I just got out of prison, that’s all I got. Finally they let me on the plane. JetBlue.
Johnny Martorano’s favorite photograph of himself.
At Logan, my brother and my cousin Joe picked me up. If you’ve never been in prison, it’s hard to explain what it’s like, getting out. It’s like coming out of a spaceship, everything seems a little off.
They took me to Santarpio’s Pizza, right near the airport there in East Boston. I had pizza and lamb. Must have been cheese pizza—Jimmy’s a vegetarian. We finished dinner, and then they drove me to Woburn. I was staying with my cousin. I was tired, I got a good night’s sleep, and the next morning I started making phone calls. I told everybody the same thing. I’m back.
Where Are They Now—2010
JOHNNY MARTORANO: Age seventy, retired, living in Boston; is spending all his time with family and friends and says that he has found a good woman and has finally settled down.
JIMMY MARTORANO: Age sixty-nine, living in Quincy, working as the winemaker at the Boston Winery in Dorchester.
HOWIE WINTER: Age eighty-one, retired, living in Millbury, Massachusetts, married to the former Ellen Brogna.
JOHN “ZIP” CONNOLLY: Age sixty-nine, currently serving a racketeering sentence in federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, until June 2011, after which he will begin serving a life sentence in the state of Florida for second-degree murder conviction in the death of John Callahan. Appeals continue in the Florida case. Screenplay, Only the Ghost Knows, remains unsold in Hollywood.
GENNARO “JERRY” ANGIULO: Former Mafia boss of Boston, died a free man in August 2009 at age ninety. Buried out of St. Leonard’s in the North End with a full U.S. Navy honor guard, Hells Angels pallbearers, and a lengthy funeral procession led by a flat-bed truck carrying 190 floral bouquets. His son finished his eulogy to his father by saying, “In the words of Frank Sinatra, Jerry did it his way.”
WILLIAM M. BULGER: Age seventy-six, younger brother of Whitey, continues to receive a state pension of $16,517.16 a month.
PAT NEE: Age sixty-five, former member of both the Mullens and the Winter Hill Gang; still living and working in South Boston.
DENNIS CONDON: FBI agent, partner of H. Paul Rico, died at age eighty-five in 2009. Paid obituary referred to his “illustrious career in law enforcement.”
JEREMIAH O’SULLIVAN: Longtime federal prosecutor and former head of the Organized Crime Strike Force, who never publicly answered why he treated both Bulger brothers with such kid gloves over the years, died at age sixty-six in February 2009. The Globe described him as a “brilliant … straight arrow.”
MICHAEL FLEMMI: Stevie’s youngest brother, former Boston police officer, now serving his sentence in a federal penitentiary in Elkton, Indiana. Scheduled to be released in September 2011, when he will be seventy-four.
JOHN BULGER: Whitey’s youngest brother, paroled in April 2004, now seventy-two, continues court appeals to regain his $3,500-a-month state pension, arguing his crime of lying to a federal grand jury had nothing to do with his duties as clerk of what was then called the Boston Juvenile Court.
BILLY BARNOSKI: Winter Hill associate, now serving life sentence at MCI-Shirley medium security facility for the murder of Jackie McDermott. Continues to maintain innocence, and is appealing.
KENNY FISHMAN: Stevie Flemmi’s attorney, now a Massachusetts Superior Court judge. Testified by videotape in the murder trial of Zip Connolly in 2008.
DIANE KOTTMYER: Former federal prosecutor, joked with Zip Connolly at his retirement dinner in 1990 about Whitey Bulger’s South Boston Liquor Mart. Now a Massachusetts Superior Court judge.
CARMEN “THE CHEESEMAN” DINUNZIO: One-time Mafia boss of Boston, pleaded guilty to state and federal racketeering charges in 2009, currently serving his sentence in Morgantown, West Virginia. Scheduled release date: January 2015, when he will be fifty-seven years old.
JOEY YERARDI: Associate of Johnny Martorano, now serving federal sentence for racketeering at penitentiary in Otisville, New York. Is scheduled for release in 2012, when he will be fifty-eight years old.
ARNOLD CAMPBELL: Now seventy-five; only surviving member of the Campbell gang, retired in Phoenix, Arizona. Lives with daughter, collects Social Security pension of $920 a month, and another $120 a month from the state of Arizona, for which he once worked. Says, “I love Johnny and Jimmy. Johnny’s my brother—100 percent.”
PETER LIMONE: Now seventy-six; one of four men framed by the FBI for a murder he did not commit, was released in 2001 after thirty-three years in prison. In 2007, a federal judge awarded Limone and the others (or their estates) a total of $101.7 million for wrongful imprisonment. Arrested in December 2008 on state charges of extortion, loansharking, and gambling.
GEORGE MCLAUGHLIN: Now eighty-one, last of the McLaughlin brothers of Charlestown, imprisoned for murder since 1964; serving his life sentence at Bay State Correctional Center in Norfolk, Massachusetts.
FRANK SALEMME: Now seventy-six, reportedly released from federal prison in 2009 and living on Cape Cod.
ANTHONY “THE SAINT” ST. LAURENT: Now sixty-nine, as of 2010, imprisoned at Devens Medical Facility in Ayer, Massachusetts. According to authorities, has twice tried to hire hitmen to murder his Rhode Island Mafia rival, Robert DeLuca, telling one wired wiseguy: “Shoot him in the fucking head. Say, ‘This is from the Saint.’” Most recently charged in February 2010 with attempting to shake down bookies in Taunton, Massachusetts. His seventy-three-year-old wife, Dorothy, pleaded guilty in September 2010 to being the Saint’s “primary collection agent.”
WILLIAM DELAHUNT: Age sixty-nine, former classmate of the Martorano brothers at St. Agatha’s School in Milton, retired from the U.S. House of Representatives after completing his seventh two-year term in 2010.
JAMES J. “WHITEY” BULGER: A federal fugitive since 1995, remains on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, with a $2 million bounty on his head. He turned eighty on September 3, 2009—the same day Jerry Angiulo was buried. Still believed to be traveling with Catherine Greig. There have been no credible recent sightings of Bulger.
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
America’s Most Wanted
Amico, Joseph (“Chico”)
mug shot of
murder of
Angel, Johnny
Angeli, Al (“Indian Al”)
Angiulo, G., and
attacks on
background of
Folino against
as fugitive
headquarters of
last activities of
money from
murder by
murder of
Raso and
Sperlinga and
wife of
Winter and
Angiulo, Frankie (“the Cat”)
Angiulo, Gennaro (“Jerry”)
acquittal of
advice from
Angeli and
arrest of
FBI against
Flemmi, V., and
loan from
Mafia and
money from
mug shot of
murders and
profit-sharing for
RICO and
sit-downs with
surveillance of
in 2010
Ardolino, Eddie
mug shot of
Ash, George
August, Johnny
Baione, Larry (Ilario Zannino)
the Bear and
Bratsos and
death of
gambling for
mug shot of
murder plan for
murders by
surveillance of
Wimpy and
Baione, Petey
Ballou, Tommy
mug shot of
Banno, Jack (“Touch”)
Barboza, Joe (“the Animal”)
Amico’s death and
arrest of
crimes by
Deegan murder trial and
Fabiano and
false information from
gang war and
as informant
lies from
Mafia contract on
Mafia vs.
murder of
murders by
parole for
Patriarca, R., against
police against
in prison
recanting for
security measures for
sentence of
testimony of
Vaccari and
in Witness Protection Program
Barnicle, Mike
against Johnny
Barnoski, Billy
on fixing horse races
murder by
S
ousa, J., and
in 2010
Barrett, Bucky
murder of
Salemme, F., and
Barrett, Douglas
Barry, Maryanne Trump
baseball
Boston Red Sox
gambling on
Basin Street South (club)
beating at
features of
purchase of
the Bear. See Flemmi, Vincent
Belinsky, Bo
Bennett, Billy
murder of
Bennett, Edward (“Wimpy”)
Baione, L., and
gang war and
loans from
murder of
murders and
murders by
Patriarca, R., and
as shoplifter
Bennett, Louise
Bennett, Walter
murder of
Birmingham, Tom
Black Sam, attack on
Bobby G. See Gallinareo, Bobby
bookmakers
backing for
Crane as
fixing horse races and
Flemmi, S., and
football and
gambling vs.
independent
Jewish bookies
Johnny and
lotteries and
Mace for
O’Brien, D., as
probe on
protection and
Sagansky and
in Witness Protection Program
Boston Red Sox
boxers
Bradley, Ed
story for
Weeks and
Bratsos, Arthur (“Tash”)
arrest of
Baione, L., and
death and
Mafia and
mug shot of
murder and
murder of
Brogna, Ellen
Brucias, Steve (“Steve the Greek”)
life of
murder and
Bryne, Garrett
Buccola, Phil
Bulger, James J. (“Whitey”). See also Flemmi, Stevie
alleged homosexuality
arrest of
background of
Blackfriars and
boots of
bugging
Carnes and
children and
Condon and
Corsetti and
DEA and
disguise for
