Killers

by Howie Carr

  Sally asked, “You find out anything yet, Bench?”

  “Only thing I got is what kind of gun they used on your nephew,” I said. “A Walther PPK.”

  “What the fuck—ain’t that James Bond’s gun?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Point being, it’s not exactly a Saturday Night Special. Whoever used it probably didn’t get rid of it, like we would. Chances are, it’s going to show up again sometime. Then—”

  “By then we may all be fuckin’ dead!” Sally was yelling again. “If they can get to Hole in the Head, they can get to anybody. These ain’t amateurs, obviously.”

  “Maybe, Sally, but these days most everybody’s an amateur, one way or another. Maybe this guy learned how to build bombs in the service, but I can’t see anybody we know capable of doing something like this.”

  Nobody except maybe me, but I didn’t want to say that. Sally was skittish enough as it was and I didn’t want to put any ideas into his head. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is how wiseguys usually get clipped by their friends. Sally was my friend.

  “This may take a while,” I told Sally.

  “Bench, I ain’t got that kind of time. They come out of the box, they hit my barbooth game and now they bomb my street boss, in less than twenty-four hours.”

  “They’ll make a mistake. They always make a mistake. Then we’ll get ’em.”

  “You sound like the fuckin’ cops.”

  “Sometimes the cops can be right, Sally. Anything you got going right now, I’d double up the security. They seem to have your crews pretty well reconnoitered.”

  Blinky remained silent, his arms crossed, but he was frowning. He obviously thought Sally should be conferring with him, not me. Sally lit a new cigarette, again off the butt of the old one. I hadn’t seen him chain-smoking like this in years. “Yeah, that’s one thing I been meaning to ask you, Bench. How come they’re hitting me, but not you?”

  Here we go. I’d been waiting for this. He didn’t want to hear the truth, that his guys were easier to reach than mine, because we’d been through that Irish gang war thing just a few years back. My crews weren’t as sharp as they used to be, as I’d reconfirmed today, but they were mostly veterans. If they hadn’t shot somebody, they’d at least been shot at. Either way, you tend to pick up certain habits. You drive home a different way every night, you don’t drink in strange bars. If you’re smart, you don’t drink in bars, period. Real basic training-type stuff. But Sally was working with a peacetime army, draftees.

  “Sally,” I said, “I’ll put some of my best guys on it. I’m gonna call in Salt ’n’ Peppa.”

  Sally didn’t care much for Peppa, and now he shook his head and looked over at Blinky.

  “Relying on a guy named Peppa,” he said, more to Blinky than to me. “What the fuck is this world coming to?”

  I looked over at Blinky and asked him, “How’s it goin’ with Vinny and Fat Vinny?” It was a rhetorical question, and when he shrugged I turned back to Sally and stared at him. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” Sally said. “Listen, I’ll take anybody you can spare. Couple more of these things, every punk in the city is gonna figure it’s open season on me.”

  He mentioned three of his places—a club in Kenmore Square, a café on Tremont Street in the South End on the Roxbury line, and a bookie clearinghouse in Brookline. I told him I’d have two of my guys stationed at each place, but I didn’t want any of his “soldiers” pulling rank and ordering my people around. Any bullshit, I said, and my guys walk. I glanced over at Blinky as I said it, to let him know this went for him too.

  “No problem,” Sally said. “We’re partners. But you gotta find these guys.”

  4

  A CAPABLE GUY

  Kevin Caulfield reached out to me through a small-time lobbyist that I’d worked with at City Hall. Caulfield was the biggest lobbyist on Beacon Hill, with a suite of offices on the fifth floor of the building at the corner of Park and Beacon Streets, directly across the street from the State House. Last time I checked the secretary of state’s records, he was reporting $800,000 a year in gross revenues. Key word: reporting.

  Caulfield’s go-between didn’t want to tell me over the phone what the old man needed, but I finally pried it out of him. Caulfield and his clients were concerned about the two murders, although I didn’t quite understand why. But I had enough time to make a few phone calls before I walked up to Beacon Hill.

  It was 5:30 when the meeting convened. Caulfield’s son, Terry, who used to work for the old mayor in City Hall, answered the door and escorted me into his father’s outer office. We bantered about the old days; he was a decent enough guy and we’d always hit it off. His father, though, was a different kettle of fish. In his mid-70’s now, Kevin Caulfield was one of these harps who’d made so much money he’d convinced himself his family had come over on the Mayflower.

  Terry handed me some brown water over ice in a heavy crystal rocks glass. Veddy tasteful. Then he introduced me to a trim well-spoken Southerner in his late thirties, Clay Westridge. His business card identified him as “vice president, governmental relations” for the casino company that had spent $2 million this legislative session to push the bill through the legislature. A final vote was scheduled in the State Senate any day now. Also present was the casino company’s “New England Director of Security,” a former Boston FBI agent named Tom Taylor.

  FBI—Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity. Or, as we called them in the BPD, Famous But Incompetent.

  The office was all mahogany and leather and windows facing out over Park Street to the Common. Well-appointed, as they used to say. The old man had bought the building for peanuts back in the down-and-out seventies; it had to be worth at least $4 million now. The Caulfields even had their booze in decanters. Everything about the layout said: high fees.

  Once everyone had shaken hands and sat down, Kevin Caulfield got right to the point.

  He said to me, “You know who Mr. Westridge represents, and we represent him. Until today, we thought we had all the votes we needed in the Senate. Now this … gang war, or whatever you call it, breaks out. You know what this means? Every goo-goo in the legislature who was just looking for an excuse to vote against us now has one. They’re claiming that if this is what we get before casinos even come to a vote, what will happen when we have casinos in the state, and especially one in the city? We’ve heard both papers are running editorials tomorrow, and it’s already all over the radio talk shows. The quote-unquote reformers in the House are even threatening to move some kind of reconsideration vote to overturn the initial approval we got last week—that we bought, I should say, to be perfectly frank. All these years we’ve been laying the foundation for this moment, and now it’s slipping out of our grasp again.”

  I said nothing. I sensed I might be looking at the kind of payday that could keep me going for at least a year. I could forget all about the Boston City Council off-year races next year. I could take a vacation to Florida. Maybe I could even play a round of golf at Woodland instead of lurking in the rough with my cell phone camera.

  The old man, Kevin Caulfield, clipped off the top of a five-dollar cigar and then moistened it with his lips before he spoke again.

  “What does the Herald call the legislative rank and file now? Sheeple, I believe it is. The phrase has caught on because it’s so accurate. This current crop are afraid of their own shadows. They’re simple, in the old meaning of the word. Simpletons. I see them at Anthony’s, and I worry that some of them are going to wander away and fall off the pier into the harbor, and that’s before they get drunk.”

  From his smooth cadence and perfectly timed pauses, I could tell this wasn’t the first time he’d delivered this monologue. He hadn’t even changed the name of the restaurant, even though Anthony’s was going out of business in less than a month. His little spiel absolved him of his inability to deliver votes in the way he once could, while simultaneously placing the blame
for his dwindling clout on somebody else, namely, the dumb-as-a-rock reps.

  Not that there wasn’t some truth to what he was saying. But nobody wants to hear from Alibi Ike. Personally, I would have thought it would be easier to do business now, when you only had to pay off the one or two guys who controlled the “sheeple.” In this new top-down system, not even the committee chairmen had any clout. You didn’t have to pay them off to move a bill out of their committees onto the floor. A whole layer of greedy middlemen with their hands out had been eliminated.

  The fewer people you have to pay, the fewer potential witnesses. Plus, the five or six guys who ran the show had totally insulated themselves. Everybody used bagmen. One of the majority whips even had two bagmen, one Irish, one Jewish. That way, the marks got to deal with someone from their own tribe. It was all very cozy.

  The casino vice president interrupted the garrulous old man. “What Mr. Caulfield is getting at, I believe, is that every time there’s another shooting or bombing like this afternoon in—Swampscott, is it?—we lose another five votes in the legislature. With the editorials and the liberals and the archdiocese, the politicians just can’t take the heat. And we didn’t have that much of a margin to start with, even after spreading a lot of money around, and I do mean plenty—and that’s off the record. If they really stampede off the reservation, even the Speaker can’t stop reconsideration, isn’t that correct? You gentlemen live here, I don’t, thank God, no offense intended.”

  Westridge looked over at the ex-FBI agent, who rolled his eyes and smirked. Taylor used to chase people like these state-rep-bribing lobbyists. Now he worked for them. He seemed to find the irony amusing, like the prosecutors who become high-priced defense attorneys in middle age. Private-school tuitions will do that to you. Clay Westridge had no doubt signed off on the invoices, so he knew how much Tom Taylor was costing his company for his supposed law enforcement expertise, and he wanted some answers.

  “What I’m asking you, Tom, is why this is happening now?” He had just the slightest Southwestern drawl. “And to get right to the point, how can we stop it, right now?”

  Taylor hesitated, so I decided to put my two cents in.

  “It’s pretty hard to stop a gang war once it gets going,” I said. “Plus, Sally Curto’s nephew and now his top gun just got clipped. That makes it personal.” I paused. “I know the leadership has the skids greased on this casino deal, but is there anybody in the legislature who might have reason to try to deep-six the bill, maybe surreptitiously?”

  Caulfield shrugged. “Nobody on the House side—the Speaker’s going nowhere, so there’s no point for anybody over there to try to kill it until next year so they can make a bigger score.”

  “Good Lord, I certainly hope not,” said Westridge, “after all we’ve done for the House, especially the Speaker.”

  All the more reason for him to screw you, I thought to myself. We have a saying around here: no good deed goes unpunished. I guess it’s not in general circulation in Texas.

  Caulfield scratched his chin. “The Senate though—the president’s gone one way or the other, so—”

  “Who’s next in line?” I asked. Once upon a time I would have known the name of the next Senate president as well as my own. Now it was inside baseball.

  “Denis Donahue,” said Caulfield, caustically. “A very cute operator. Too cute by half. ‘Donuts,’ they call him. He’s from Worcester, thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.”

  “In Worcester he probably is,” I said.

  “But I don’t think he has the wherewithal to pull something like this off. He doesn’t strike me as the type to have organized crime connections. And why would one faction go to war with the other to help … Donuts Donahue?” This time he said the name with even more distaste. Caulfield made his living kissing pols’ asses. If he couldn’t stand Denis Donahue, that was good enough for me. He had to be a real asshole. Donuts must have double-crossed Caulfield more than once.

  Clay Westridge leaned forward. “Why now? That’s the bigger question. From what I’ve been told, up until today, everything in the Boston underworld here has been comparatively peaceful for several years now. Sally Curto has more or less made this Irish fellow from Somerville, I forget his name—”

  “Bench McCarthy,” I said, “pronounced McCar-tee, like the old-time Irish.”

  “He’s basically the number-two guy from what I understand. I’ve heard he was essentially a hit man in his younger days. Is that correct?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by his younger days,” I said, glancing over at Taylor for confirmation. “He’s only in his early forties now.”

  Kevin Caulfield harrumphed. “I’m very close to someone high up in the Boston Police Department—you fellows would know his name if I mentioned it. He told me, strictly on the q.t., that they have this McCarthy fellow for over twenty murders. Is that possible, Jack?”

  Now I was the expert instead of the fed, and I wasn’t even officially on the payroll yet. Things were definitely looking up.

  “I don’t know for sure, but twenty sounds like it’s in the ballpark,” I said. “He’s from Somerville, so he got an early start.”

  Some guys love bullshitting their way through a subject they know next to nothing about, especially when they’re trying to close a deal. That’s not my style. For sure I wanted this job, but I didn’t want to leave them with the impression that I was capable of accomplishing more than I actually could. That would lead to hard feelings and recriminations down the road, not to mention no future business from the Caulfields. I still have to live in this town, as much as I’d prefer not to, especially during the eight months we call winter, and I don’t need any more enemies. Most of what I knew about Bench McCarthy I had read in the newspapers.

  “I had McCarthy’s jacket pulled for me this afternoon,” said Taylor, the ex-FBI agent, who obviously enjoyed playing Mr. Big with all the connections. He was, after all, a G-man. “It seems that he was convicted of a truck hijacking at age seventeen, and he ended up in MCI-Norfolk. That’s where he met Sally Curto, and while he was in there, McCarthy did some sort of favor for him.”

  “It’s coming back to me now,” I said. “There was some racial unrest or maybe a contract, and a black guy jumped Sally in the showers. Sally was about to get shanked when Bench—”

  Westridge interrupted: “Why do they call him Bench, by the way?”

  “The way I understand it,” I said, “whenever he’s indicted, he asks for a jury-waived trial—a bench trial, in front of a judge.”

  Westridge was leaning forward, paying close attention to what I was saying.

  “See, Mr. Westridge, most wiseguys figure they got a better chance with a jury. With twelve people, maybe they can get to one, if you know what I mean.”

  “But if you ask for a jury-waived trial,” Westridge said, “then you must have the judge in your pocket, right?”

  “One would think so,” I said, “and I can tell you that except for fourteen months he and Sally did for contempt of a federal grand jury about five years ago, Bench has never been convicted of anything since he first got out of prison.”

  Westridge shook his head. “Are the judges in this state really that corrupt?”

  Before answering, I glanced over at Kevin Caulfield for guidance. He frowned. As far as he was concerned, judicial corruption was some kind of dirty little family secret, as if nobody in Massachusetts knows that in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls. As my friend Slip Crowley always says, it’s that ninety-eight percent of the judges who give the honest two percent such a bad rap.

  I said, “All I can tell you, Mr. Westridge, is that Bench is in many respects a very formidable character.”

  “How did he happen to throw in with the Mafia?” Westridge asked. Again, I deferred, this time to the ex-fed. I wasn’t on the payroll yet. But Taylor motioned for me to continue.

  “When Bench takes out the black guy in prison, Sally knows he’s ‘c
apable.’ After they both get out, Bench starts handling ‘a piece of business’ here and there for Sally, and it isn’t long before he’s kind of thinned out the Italians, if you follow me. Plus, Bench is building up his own crew at the same time—in Somerville, Southie, all the neighborhoods where there’s still a lot of Irish, or were fifteen, twenty years ago. Neighborhoods, towns not controlled by the Mafia, that’s probably a better way to put it. Then Bench had his own little war, against Beezo Watson’s gang in Charlestown. McCarthy wiped them out too; several of them just ‘disappeared,’ including Beezo. My understanding is, a few years back he goes to Sally and makes Sally an offer he can’t refuse—”

  “Ah,” said Clay Westridge with a smile, “a movie reference.”

  I nodded at the FBI guy and went on: “Just jump in if I get anything wrong, Tom, but the way I heard it is, Bench tells Sally, the city’s teeming with bookies and drug dealers who aren’t paying either of us ‘rent’ so why don’t we just split ’em up? The ones Bench grabs first belong to him, and the ones Sally grabs first, he keeps. Sally figures, that seems fair enough, especially considering most of his top guns are either dead or in the can, plus he’s like twenty-five years older than Bench so he’s had plenty of time to set himself up. If he cuts in Bench, he doesn’t have to worry about a war, plus he’s got Bench with him if anybody comes after him. Lotta reasons to make the deal, so he does.”

  Clay Westridge furrowed his brow. He seemed brighter than your average vice president of governmental affairs. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought most of the gambling now was online, off-shore.”

  “It absolutely is,” I said. “As I said, this entire arrangement dates back at least a decade.”

  “So how does Bench make his money now?”