Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  Weinberg approached the feds and said, My client can give you John Connolly, and, by extension, Bulger, if he should ever be apprehended. In exchange, you will give him a reduced sentence on the race-fixing charges, to which he will plead guilty. Martorano had one other condition: he would not testify against his brother or against Howie Winter, who had been arrested and incarcerated back in 1979 on the same horse-race-fixing indictment that had forced Martorano to go on the lam.

  The government was interested. They showed Martorano a list of seven people they were proposing that he would likely be called on to testify against. Four of the names on the list were people he hardly knew. The others—Bulger, Connolly, and Flemmi—were the exact names Martorano had expected to see on that list. He agreed that he would testify against all three.

  To the feds: so far, so good. But there was more: Wyshak and Kelly had a list of ten murders they believed Martorano was involved in. To strike a deal, he would have to be willing to plead guilty to them.

  Through Weinberg, Martorano gave notice that, yes, he would be willing to plead guilty to the murders, but once he signed an agreement and began to be debriefed by investigators, he would have to have immunity from any and all other crimes that he might reveal he had committed.

  The feds thought it over: Well, he’s admitting to ten murders. How much more could there be? The prosecutors agreed to Martorano’s terms. The deal was signed in April 1999.

  That deal had taken more than a year to negotiate. Martorano’s lawyer had taken a hard line. His client was content to waste away in the infamous La Tuna federal prison, where he was being held, near El Paso, Texas, along the U.S. border with Mexico. Once the two sides had reached a deal, and Martorano signed a plea agreement, the feds were in for their biggest surprise.

  Now that Martorano had a sweet deal by which he could not be prosecuted for any other crimes he might admit to, he let the floodgates open, admitting to ten additional murders he had committed back in the 1970s.

  One of the investigators who interrogated Martorano was state police colonel Tom Foley. Decades later, in his memoir, Most Wanted, Foley described how hearing about all the murders almost made him physically ill:

  At a certain point . . . all the killing got to me. Not the killing itself, but the way [Martorano] talked about it, so flat and factual. As if the victims weren’t people to him. Somebody lives, somebody dies. It was no big deal which was which. It was as if he was describing the best route to Providence, Interstate 95 or Route 24. You could go either way.1

  By the time of the Bulger trial, Martorano had gone over the murders numerous times. They had been stripped of all emotional content. Wyshak had to run through each and every murder. To get to the killings that implicated Bulger, he had no choice but to reveal the numerous other killings on which Martorano built his reputation as one of Boston’s most proficient executioners.

  There was Bobby Palladino, Johnny’s first body, in 1964. That came about after a waitress at Luigi’s, an after-hours club owned by the Martorano brothers, was killed on the premises during a dispute with a customer. The Martoranos did not commit the murder, but they helped hide the body in an upstairs attic. They heard that two fellows—Bobby Palladino and John Jackson—were cooperating with the police in an investigation of the murder. So Johnny and Jimmy went and found Bobby Palladino. “He was playing cards in an after-hours joint,” remembered Johnny.

  Their intention was to talk some sense into Palladino. “Hey, what’s the matter with you? We don’t cooperate with police.” They would negotiate a deal, make it worth his while to keep his mouth shut. Said Martorano, “[Palladino] came downstairs with me and my brother and got in the car. We went to talk to him, and he pulled a gun.”

  “What did you do?” asked Wyshak.

  “He got off a shot, and then I shot him.”

  “What did you do with the body?”

  “We dumped it down at North Station.”

  Martorano then explained how, years later, he went and found the other guy, John Jackson, and shot him dead also.

  Then there was Tony Veranis, a professional boxer from Southie. Veranis had borrowed money from a loan shark associated with the Martoranos, and he hadn’t paid them back. So Jim Martorano and an associate had gone to see Veranis at a club in Southie. Not only would Veranis not pay his debt, but the professional pugilist roughed up Jimmy Martorano.

  When Johnny Martorano heard what happened, he went looking for Veranis. He found him in an after-hours club in Roxbury. “Veranis came over with some girls . . . and started mouthing off about he just gave my brother a beating, some stuff like that, and ‘F’ him, ‘F’ you, and went to pull a gun. So I shot him.”

  “Were there people in the bar at the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Thirty or forty.”

  “Were you ever charged with that crime?”

  “No.”

  With hardly enough time to digest that Martorano was talking about the actual killings of actual human beings, Wyshak was on to the next atrocity. “I would like to direct your attention to January of 1968. Did you know a man named Herbert Smith?”

  Here was a slaughter worth noting, because it was a trifecta. Martorano killed three people in one fell swoop.

  On this night, Johnny was approached by Stevie Flemmi. The two had become associates, of sorts. Martorano knew that Flemmi had connections with the Mafia, which provided potential business opportunities. This was the late 1960s, before the Martoranos, Flemmi, and Bulger officially became partners and began to coalesce as the Winter Hill Mob, but Johnny and Steve Flemmi did already consider themselves partners. So Johnny was concerned when Flemmi told him that, on the previous night, he had gone to a club called Basin Street to look for Martorano. There he ran into Herbert Smith, who was a bouncer at the club. Smith and two other bouncers gave Flemmi a beating.

  “As a result of learning this from Stephen Flemmi,” asked Wyshak, “what did you do?”

  “I went down to see what happened. . . . I had a conversation with Herbert Smith.”

  “What did he say to you and what did you say to him?”

  “He started laughing about giving Stevie a beating. And that was it.”

  “When you say ‘that was it,’ what does that mean?”

  “That’s when I decided to shoot him.”

  By now, Martorano had learned that you don’t shoot somebody dead in a crowded club, with multiple witnesses present. Martorano showed no anger. In fact, he became friendly with Smith. They agreed to meet later at an after-hours gambling club in Roxbury, near where Martorano was living at the time. “I told him, ‘I will meet you at the corner near the place, and we’ll go in. I got to stop and pick up some money to play with.’”

  “What did you pick up?”

  “A .38.”

  There was a raging snowstorm that early morning in Roxbury. Martorano arrived at the location on foot. He saw Smith sitting in his car near the corner where they had agreed to meet. As Martorano approached the car, he noticed that there were two other people inside it with Smith. “I saw the shadows of three silhouettes, three people in the car.” Alarm bells went off in Johnny’s head: this was some kind of setup. He would have to act fast.

  “What did you do?” asked Wyshak.

  “Well,” said Martorano, “he was supposed to be there alone to meet me. But he was with two other people. So I thought they might have the same idea of doing to me [as I had with Smith]. So when I got in the car, I just shot three times.”

  “You killed three people.”

  “Yes.”

  Martorano then stumbled out of the car. He had arranged for an associate to serve as a getaway driver, but the person never showed. “I had to walk out of there in the snow and wash up in the snow.”

  “Did you later learn that one of the people in the car was a female?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And the other person was a teenager?”

>   “Yes.”

  “How did you feel after you learned that?”

  “I felt terrible. My first initial—I wanted to shoot myself. But you can’t change it.”

  Wyshak whizzed through the other murders, a cavalcade of shootings, stabbings, dead bodies rolled up in tarps, postmortem cleanups of blood and brain matter. The testimony was like a montage from a crime movie, the implications of each and every act too horrid to dwell on in detail, too overwhelming, so that they must be presented as one big bloodstained blur.

  Wyshak asked the witness about his relationship with Bulger and Flemmi.

  “They were my partners in crime. They were my best friends. They were my children’s godfathers.”

  “And what motivated you to cooperate against them?”

  “Well, after I heard they were informants, it sort of broke my heart. They broke all trust that we had, all loyalties, and I was just beside myself with it.”

  On this point, Martorano’s testimony was especially pungent: he may have had in mind the famous line from The Godfather: Part II: “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.” In a fantasy universe, this was the point where Johnny would have given Whitey the Sicilian kiss of death. Instead, he cut a deal with the government and became a federal witness. Thanks to Marty Weinberg (“the best”), it was a good deal: eight short years and Johnny was back out on the golf course.

  Then there was the money: since being released from prison in 2007, how had Martorano lived? Turns out that upon his release, as part of his agreement he received a payment of $20,000 from the U.S. government. There was also the memoir he published, cowritten by noted Boston Herald columnist and local radio personality Howie Carr. Martorano and Carr split an advance payment from Forge Books, the publisher, of $110,000—that was $55,000 for the hit man. Since the book’s release, Martorano had received another $20,000 in royalties. And then came the big payday: Johnny had sold the rights to his life story to a movie company for $250,000, with much more to come if a movie actually gets made.

  In the six years since his release, Martorano had done well for himself.

  I HAD MET John Martorano one year earlier, over dinner at Abe & Louie’s, an upscale steak house on Boylston Street in Boston’s Back Bay. The meeting was arranged through a mutual acquaintance who had known Martorano for many years.

  A couple of years earlier, via Pat Nee, I had also met John Martorano’s younger brother, James, known to friends as Jimmy. The two Martoranos had been among the earliest members of the Winter Hill Mob, going back to the early 1960s. The children of an immigrant father from Riesi, Sicily, and a partly Irish American mother, the Martoranos were eleven months apart in age. They had both gone to the Mount St. Charles Academy in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a private middle school, and then graduated from Milton High School in 1959. Both were star athletes on the football team, where they played alongside a kid named Ed Bradley, who in later years would go on to become the first African American co-anchor on the popular TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes.

  Both Martoranos were offered athletic scholarships to attend college. Jimmy accepted an offer from Boston College and eventually received a bachelor of arts degree. Brother Johnny went on to become one of the most proficient killers in the history of the Boston underworld.

  When I was first introduced to Jimmy Martorano in 2004, I had a hard time picturing him as an underworld figure. By then I had met and interviewed many gangsters of differing ethnicities, and by any standard Jimmy Martorano did not fit the mold. With his wire-rimmed glasses and gentlemanly manner, he had the demeanor of a kindly Italian uncle—friendly, solicitous, and affectionate. He was an intelligent man, astute and thoughtful in ways I did not associate with the typical street mentality. He was manly without being macho. Brother John had a nickname for Jimmy, “the Cardinal,” which seemed to fit. Jimmy was the kind of guy who liked to settle disputes; he listened to all sides and dispensed judgments from on high.

  On the back porch of a classic triple-decker in Southie, I sat with Jim Martorano and Pat Nee listening as they related old war stories from the Boston underworld. At the time, John Martorano was still in prison serving his sentence as part of his plea deal with the government, and Whitey was on the run.

  Jimmy had read my book The Westies, or at least knew of it. He was complimentary about how, as he put it, the book had captured the organized crime lifestyle without attempting “to get moralistic about it.” Technically, I was not interviewing Martorano or, on that occasion, Pat Nee, so both men were forthcoming with stories and opinions they might have been more cautious about had it been for publication. As with other conversations I’ve had with professional criminals in Boston, these two former gangsters—decades removed from their lives “on the street”—seemed compelled to explain what the criminal underworld in Boston was all about. Since the details of Whitey Bulger and Steve Flemmi’s reign had been catapulted into the media, in their view the Boston rackets had been given a bad name. Despite what I might have heard, they wanted me to know that there could be such a thing as honor among thieves.

  Eight years later, I met Johnny Martorano at Abe & Louie’s. I had been told about Johnny by Pat Nee, who had great affection for Martorano. To Nee and others who circulated in the Boston underworld, Martorano was Dr. Feelgood, the kind of guy who made being a gangster seem like an entertaining pursuit. According to Pat, “Johnny would pull up in a black Cadillac, tinted windows, with a driver. He’d be in the back. The door would swing open and, first thing, a cloud of marijuana smoke would come wafting out. Then Johnny would appear, with a black babe on one arm and a beautiful Asian woman on the other. That was Johnny. He was always looking for a good time.”

  At Abe & Louie’s restaurant, I caught glimpses of this Johnny Martorano, though he was now decades past his prime. He wasn’t yet as hulking and obese as he would appear at the Bulger trial, but he was definitely overweight, a man of large appetites who did not hesitate to indulge those appetites whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  I had not yet read Hitman: The Untold Story of John Martorano, Whitey Bulger’s Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld, by Howie Carr. Martorano had cooperated in the writing of the book, which was published in April 2011. Carr, well-known for his animus toward the Bulgers, both Whitey and Billy, had been handpicked by Martorano as his collaborator.

  My knowledge of the totality of Martorano’s murders was vague, which was just as well, because had I known the full extent of his many killings, I would have had a hard time reconciling those crimes with the person I was having dinner with.

  Having written about criminals of Martorano’s vintage for more than two decades, I had adopted a loose philosophical creed. Generally, I come into the relationship out of a sense of professional curiosity. I am attempting to write about their world—to the extent that I can—from the inside out. This requires that I not bring with me the baggage of moral judgment. It is essential that the person who is talking to me feels as though I am at least attempting to see the world from their point of view—assuming that what they are telling me is sincere and not a pack of lies. In an interviewer/interviewee situation, this can sometime become a dance, as they are in a process of assessing your motives, and vice versa. As an interviewer, it is a basic premise that you are more likely to get candor and honesty from someone if they feel comfortable that you are not motivated by a hidden agenda.

  At Abe & Louie’s, I was not interviewing John Martorano. He had agreed to meet based on respect he had for a book that I had written, and—more important—on the fact that Nee and his brother Jimmy had given me the “okay” as someone who could be trusted.

  At the restaurant, it seemed as though John Martorano was known by everyone—the maître d’, the waiters, even one of the owners came over to our table to say hello. Johnny was a different personality type than his brother Jimmy—more fun loving, less bookish. He was dressed in a nice silk suit with an open collar and had what I suspected was a perpet
ual suntan. Clearly, Johnny reveled in the sensual pleasures of life. At our table, he ordered the wine and took charge of placing the food orders—the shrimp and lobster appetizer, a meal in itself; porterhouse steak, however you liked it; a dessert sampler of cheesecake, cannolis, etc.; and cognac as an after-dinner drink.

  During the meal, Johnny told stories. He was a great raconteur, with an eye for color and detail. He was also a good listener. Both of the Martoranos were “people persons”; their involvement in the criminal life was, in many ways, an extension of their innate sociability. They had started out in the bar and nightclub businesses not only as financiers, but as management, people who valued interaction with the differing characters who populated their mostly working-class community.

  Martorano was especially interested in Cuba. Since I had recently published a book about the years of the Mob in Havana in the 1950s, Johnny wanted to compare notes. In 1960, as a nineteen-year-old gangster’s apprentice, he had lived for six months in Havana.

  Following his first-ever arrest on a gun possession charge, he’d gone on the lam for the first time. It was while staying in Miami with an uncle that it was suggested he hide out for a while in Cuba, a well-worn path for U.S. mobsters on the lam. Only now, with the fall of Mafia-friendly President Fulgencio Batista and the rise of Fidel Castro, things weren’t so friendly anymore.

  It was all hazy to Martorano now, but what he did remember vividly was the revolutionary police, soldiers not much older than he was at the time, with beards and a victor’s swagger. Martorano was barely there long enough to have a mojito and a cigar. Back in the States, his mob benefactors had made the gun charge go away, and he was free to return to Beantown.

  At Abe & Louie’s, Martorano insisted on picking up the check, which I’m guessing topped out at somewhere around five hundred dollars. As we were saying our goodbyes, he introduced me to a woman Pat Nee had told me was Johnny’s girlfriend, though he introduced her as a business associate. A Chinese American in her midforties, she was starting her own business, and Johnny was helping her out. While Johnny went to the men’s room and retrieved his coat, I spoke briefly with the woman, who was intelligent and well spoken. She was not a bimbo. I asked her if she was aware of Johnny’s reputation. She said that she was but it didn’t concern her. The Johnny Martorano of legend, a notorious hit man for the Mob, was not the man she knew.