Hitman (2 page)

When the Hill decided to kill Castucci, they had owed a New York bookie $150,000 in lost football bets. Castucci was collecting for the New York bookmaker.

Just after Christmas 1976, the Hill called Castucci and told him to come over to the mob's headquarters in a garage on Winter Hill to pick up a down payment of the money they owed the bookie in New York. It was a two-birds-with-one-stone deal: by killing the informant, they were also canceling the six-figure debt to the Mafia-protected bookie in New York.

If Casabielle was going to undercut Martorano's testimony, the Castucci murder was as good a place as any to start. Casabielle's strategy was to keep hammering that one word to the jury:
honest
.

“When you lured any of the victims that you shot and killed,” he asked Martorano, “were you being honest with them?”

“Well, I didn't think so at the time.”

“I see. When you told Mr. Castucci to go to an apartment with the $60,000—”

“I thought you were talking about here,” Martorano interrupted. “I'm telling you that's true.”

Casabielle shook his head. “But your statement is, you are an honest man. You didn't qualify that by saying, ‘I am an honest man today.' You qualified it by saying, ‘I am an honest man.' So let's explore that.”

“Yes,” said Martorano, warily.

“When Mr. Castucci met with you at the garage to pick up his money, did you tell him you were going to shoot him in the head?”

“No, I lied to him and then shot him in the head.”

“So you weren't honest then?”

“No, I was honest to someone else.”

“So it's okay to lie to somebody, shoot them in the head, and you can justify that by being honest to some other person?”

“Usually if somebody gets killed,” Martorano explained, “somebody gets helped.”

“Who was helped by killing Castucci?”

“Joe McDonald felt better. I felt better. I felt better at the time. Whitey and Stevie felt better. Everybody felt better.”

“So you helped them by making them feel better?”

“I killed a rat.”

“So the only reason that you killed someone you know, like Mr. Castucci, is because it made you feel good.”

“No, it was because he was an FBI informant.”

The unmentioned irony, of course, was that two of the Winter Hill mobsters who “felt good” about Castucci's murder, Whitey and Stevie, were themselves FBI informants—“Top Echelon,” as the feds described them. The third Winter Hill gangster who felt good, Joe McDonald, had already become so suspicious of Whitey and Stevie that he refused to meet with them while he was on the lam.

And there was another, larger irony—Johnny Martorano, lifelong hater and exterminator of any rats that he came across, real or imaginary, was now himself a witness for the government. But whenever Martorano was asked now about how he could hate rats and yet testify against his former partners in crime, he always had the same answer. He would mention Judas, the faithless apostle, and how the nuns at St. Agatha's parochial school in Milton back in the early 1950s had drummed into him that there was no worse person in the Bible, Old Testament or New, than Judas Iscariot, who sold out his Savior for forty pieces of silver.

Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi—what were they in their own way but Judases who had sold out their friends, and for considerably more than forty pieces of silver? Johnny Martorano knew better than anyone that he was no saint, but he felt comfortable describing Whitey and Stevie as Judases. It wasn't a hard decision to turn on them—it was his obligation, dammit. Sure, sometimes when he suggested that he was doing something noble now by testifying against the crooked FBI agent, he'd get ripped in the Boston newspapers, or by Zip's lawyers, but Johnny Martorano knew one thing.

The nuns at St. Agatha's would have understood.

“You can't rat on a rat. That's the way I see it.”

*   *   *

JOHNNY MARTORANO
looked dapper on the witness stand. He was wearing one of his trademark double-breasted pinstripe suits. After his arrest in Boca Raton in 1995, his common-law wife had put all his clothes into storage for him, and after his release from prison in 2007, he'd had them shipped north to Boston.

The jury couldn't see them, but Martorano was wearing the most expensive shoes in the courtroom: $700 alligator loafers, custom-made, imported from Italy. In the old days, Johnny would drive across the state to Sarasota, to buy them from a high-end haberdasher, a friend of his. He always paid cash.

Johnny had always tried to dress appropriately—in the gang's garage in Somerville, he had favored leather jackets, like Whitey and Stevie. But in his nightclubs in Boston, Johnny wore suits—the police reports sometimes mentioned his meticulous taste in clothes. Cashmere in the winter, silk during the warmer months. His suits he'd buy wherever he could—Filene's Basement or the swanky Louis of Boston, it didn't matter to him, off the rack was fine as long as they were properly tailored.

It was in the accoutrements and the accessories where Johnny Martorano tried to make his fashion statements. For close to twenty years, he'd worn a five-carat diamond pinkie ring, a gift from “the boys” in the gang. But shortly before his arrest in Boca Raton, he impulsively took the ring off his finger and handed it to a fellow fugitive from Boston who was short of cash. Johnny told him to pawn it.

“I liked the kid,” Johnny Martorano would explain later.

It was all about the lifestyle. Johnny understood that the Miami and Boston reporters covering his testimony would routinely if imprecisely identify him as a “hitman,” as if any other kind of person could have survived—let alone flourished—in the treacherous Boston underworld of the 1960s and 1970s. But even in those bloody years, there had been another Johnny Martorano—the affable nightclubber, the connected businessman whose first wedding the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts had attended.

Martorano's trade—the rackets—bankrolled a lavish lifestyle. He went to Vegas every other month to gamble. Staying at the top hotels and watching the best floor shows, Johnny Martorano was a high-roller, and the casinos comped everything. In the winter, he would fly to Miami to enjoy the beaches and to bet on the horses at Hialeah. He was a ladies' man. Everyone in his circle knew he had shady business connections, but he was loyal, friendly, quick to pick up a check, and invariably left a big tip. He was fun to be around.

Back then, on his left wrist he'd worn a Presidential Rolex watch, featuring emerald-cut diamonds around the face, inlaid with authentic mahogany that matched the dashboard of his black Mercedes 560 SEL, which he parked next to his thirty-three-foot Holiday Rambler RV.

Everything was of course long gone now—sold off to pay his legal fees.

*   *   *

THE UNSEEN
presence in the Miami courtroom, day after day, was Whitey Bulger. He was the Winter Hill hoodlum who had captured the imagination of the general public, at least until the cops started digging up the bodies he'd buried around Boston over the years.

Unlike Martorano and the rest of the Hill, Whitey and Stevie had enjoyed police protection for more than twenty years. FBI agent Connolly, now sitting at the defense table, was their go-to guy in law enforcement. Growing up in South Boston, Zip had always worshipped Whitey's younger brother, Billy Bulger, who with the assistance of the FBI had become the president of the state senate, the most powerful politician in Massachusetts.

After fortuitously timed federal investigations had eliminated Billy Bulger's rivals in the legislature, Billy Bulger had asked Zip for one last favor. “Mr. President,” as Billy preferred to be called, wanted Zip to keep Whitey “out of trouble”—or so Whitey had told Martorano. At the time it had seemed a reasonable enough story. But now Casabielle was asking Martorano why he never got suspicious as everyone in the Winter Hill Gang kept getting arrested, except for two guys.

Whitey and Stevie.

*   *   *

IN FEBRUARY
1979, the entire hierarchy of Winter Hill was indicted for running a multistate conspiracy to fix hundreds of horse races. Everybody was charged except Whitey and Stevie. On cross-examination, Martorano told Zip's lawyer that he was “happy” when Whitey told him that he'd managed to avoid the federal indictment.

“Did you not wonder why [Whitey and Stevie weren't arrested]?”

“They told me why. Whitey said because John Connolly was able to keep him out of it.”

“Did you wonder why John Connolly would do such a thing for Mr. Bulger?”

“Because one of his promises was to help Billy Bulger maintain his position by keeping his brother out of the trouble.”

“Today, do you still believe the same thing?”

“I sort of believe it still, but I think there was more to it than that.”

“But you are not so clear, are you?”

Martorano thought for a moment about his old friend Whitey. “There was a lot of truths that he said to me, not just all lies.”

“You didn't really know who Mr. Bulger was, did you?”

“Well, I felt I knew him. We were partners. I mean, we had a lot of crimes we committed together. I felt he was a stand-up guy.”

*   *   *

IN MIAMI,
Johnny Martorano was back in familiar territory, where he'd spent sixteen years. After he fled Boston in 1979, just before he was indicted in the race-fixing case, he lived mostly in South Florida until his arrest in January 1995. Then he'd been shipped back to Massachusetts. At the Plymouth County House of Correction, he'd lived for more than two years with his codefendants—all except Whitey, of course, who had already vanished.

The rest of them had been charged in a racketeering indictment—nothing about any of the dozens of murders they'd committed collectively, and individually. But Johnny Martorano had only been arrested on the old race-fixing charges. He was looking at four to five years, tops. So he just sat tight in the jail as the lawyers wrangled over the usual arcane pretrial legal issues in court. Every day he spent in the Plymouth County House of Correction before the trial would count as part of his eventual sentence.

But in 1997, Stevie and Whitey were disclosed as informants. As part of pretrial discovery, the FBI began turning over its informant files to the defendants. Johnny Martorano suddenly learned that for all those years he and Whitey and Stevie had been committing crimes together, they'd been informing on him, and on the rest of the gang, to the FBI. Whitey and Stevie—his sons' godfathers—even had their own personal informant numbers, just like the numbers the cops had on their badges. That fact alone bothered Martorano enough to mention it, unsolicited, during the cross.

“I never believed they were informants,” Martorano told Casabielle, “when we were out shooting people.”

“Obviously they were with you when you were out shooting people?”

“Obviously.”

“So they know you had shot people. Can you tell how many people they were present for that you had shot?”

“I don't know.”

As far back as the 1960s, Johnny Martorano learned from the yellowing FBI reports, his friend Stevie Flemmi was calling him a pimp behind his back, and trying to frame him for murders Stevie himself was planning to commit. It was all right there in the FBI reports—the 209s and 302s, many of them written by agents who were being paid off by the gang, including Martorano himself. But neither Whitey nor Stevie had ever mentioned any of the murders to their G-man handlers. So Stevie still had one card left to play against Johnny: he could rat him out for all the murders they'd committed together. After living large all these decades, with his immunity from prosecution, now Stevie Flemmi could betray Johnny one final time.

But this time Johnny Martorano understood what was happening, and he was determined to stop the rat. He had to act quickly, though, before Flemmi could move against him.

“I was concerned,” Martorano was telling Zip's lawyer. “Now I know they could possibly implicate me, my brother, all my friends.”

“You did it for your friends?”

“I did it for a lot of them, yeah.”

“So you did the right thing?”

“I still believe I did. I mean, I didn't think anybody else got hurt by Flemmi or Bulger after the fact.”

“You did the right thing, Mr. Martorano?”

“Yes.”

“Did you always do the right thing?”

“I tried. But I don't think I always did the right thing.”

*   *   *

JOHNNY'S NEGOTIATIONS
with the feds took more than a year, part of which he spent in the hole at the federal prison in Otisville, New York, but in the end Johnny Martorano was finally offered a sweet deal by the feds. As Casabielle told him, “They wanted you really bad.” Because Johnny Martorano had the goods on Stevie and Whitey and Zip Connolly, and because he knew just how solid his information was, he held out.

For forty years, even when he was a fugitive, Martorano had moved easily among all the crews and factions in the Boston underworld, Irish and Italian, black and white, Mafia and independents. He was the one fish the feds couldn't afford to let slip through the net. And so eventually they cut him exactly the plea bargain he had held out for: he would testify, but only against Whitey, Stevie, and Zip. For appearance's sake, the Justice Department lawyers added the names of a few more minor wiseguys, mainly from Whitey's South Boston crew. But they were just filler: How could Martorano testify against hoodlums he'd never even met, let alone committed crimes with? Under the terms his lawyers painstakingly hammered out, Johnny would not have to testify against his brother Jimmy or against his fellow Winter Hill gang leader, Howie Winter. And Johnny Martorano would end up doing twelve years, for twenty murders.