Hitman (6 page)

Realizing for the first time the peril that he was in, Johnny stood up and asked to address the judge.

“Your Honor,” he said, “if possible, I'd ask you to give me tonight to decide which branch of the service I'll be enlisting in.”

As soon as he was outside the old courthouse in Pemberton Square, Johnny took off. At age nineteen, he went on the lam for the first time. He got into his old car and drove straight to his uncle's house in Miami. In a dry run for his flight twenty years later, he spent six months in South Florida, hanging out in Miami Beach.

He hooked up with a local boxer/wiseguy known as Johnny Angel, a common moniker in those days. His father's shylocking partner from Revere, Joe DeAngelis, flew down from Boston and handed Johnny a wad of cash at the airport, then turned around and caught the next flight back to Boston. A friend of Johnny's from Brookline stopped by on his way to Cuba, where Johnny had vaguely heard there'd recently been trouble involving some guys with beards who'd come out of the hills wearing military fatigues.

Soon Johnny and his friend were in Havana, checking into the Capri. They knew nothing about its owner, gangster Meyer Lansky, or his front man, George Raft, the former Hollywood actor and pal of old-time New York mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Owney Madden. But when he saw some of those bearded guys in fatigues swaggering through the streets of Havana brandishing machine guns, Johnny instinctively understood that it was time to get back to Miami.

Six months later, Johnny returned to Boston. In his absence, the police bagman had made the gun charges filed by Eddie Walsh go away. Johnny went back to work at Luigi's, staying out all night, brawling, picking up women. He was driving Andy crazy. He wanted Johnny out of his hair and into the army—it was peacetime and there was no danger. It would be good to get Johnny out of the Combat Zone and into an organization that might instill some discipline in him. Andy called a friend who was a high-ranking military officer, and within days, Johnny got a notice from his Selective Service board in Milton to report for his preinduction physical at the army recruiting center in South Boston.

Benedetto “Chubby” Oddo, who took Johnny's army physical for him—and got Johnny the 4-F classification he wanted.

Johnny, though, had figured out a scheme. He would have someone else take his physical for him.

I know a guy from the West End, Chubby Oddo—my father and his father came over from Sicily together. He kinda looked like me, only a little older, and physically he was a wreck, flat feet, bad eyes, his insides all messed up—I think he had some shrapnel or something in him, too, from what I have no idea. The night before I had to go in for my physical, I kept him up all night, drinking, making sure he memorized my Social Security number, my D-O-B, all the stuff he'd have to know by heart. Then in the morning I had him shave real close, so he'd look younger.

In the morning, Johnny dropped Oddo off in South Boston. All morning, and into the afternoon, Johnny waited nervously by the telephone for Chubby's call. Finally Chubby phoned to say that he'd completed the physical and that he thought it had gone okay. He hadn't passed a single test, so he assumed that Johnny would probably be getting his 4-F notice soon.

Johnny went crazy. He couldn't endure a week or two of tension before finding out whether or not he was going to be drafted. He ordered Chubby to go back inside and find out immediately. Chubby shuffled back up the stairs of the recruiting station to seek out the physician who'd examined him.

“Am I in?” Chubby asked.

“Kid,” said the physician, “you couldn't get in the Boy Scouts.”

I've always regretted never serving in the military. In the army, if you shoot the enemy, you get a medal. Out on the street, all that happens is you either get shot yourself or if you're lucky you get arrested. I went the wrong way, no doubt about it.

The Boston gangsters who hung out in the Combat Zone were a more diverse lot than in many other large American cities. In the years following Prohibition, the Mafia had gradually become the dominant force in urban organized crime. But in Boston, there were just too many Irish, and not enough Italians, for the Mafia to take over completely.

As far back as the 1920s, Irish and Italian gangs had been battling one another for control of the city's rackets. During Prohibition, South Boston had been ruled by the Gustin Gang, who made their living hijacking other mobs' booze trucks. In 1931, the Italians arranged a sit-down in the North End, then ambushed the Irish gang leader, Frankie Wallace, killing him and another Irish hood named Dodo Walsh. After that, the remaining Wallaces sank into drunken street crime, and the South Boston underworld was taken over by Dan Carroll. He was an ex–Boston cop who kept a framed photograph of President Calvin Coolidge in his office. It was a reminder of the favor the then governor Coolidge had done Carroll by firing him—as well as hundreds of other Boston cops—for taking part in the Boston police strike of 1919. The papers invariably referred to Carroll as a “sportsman,” and it didn't hurt his underworld prospects when his brother Ed was elected to the state senate, the same body Coolidge had once been president of.

*   *   *

IN 1960,
organized crime in Boston was in your face. The city was teeming with wiseguys of every ethnic group. As Stevie Flemmi testified in 1998, “In them days it was open. It was just a way of doing, a way of life in them days.”

The Hearst tabloid the
American
survived in large part because it ran the winning daily number in the city's underworld lottery, which even the more respectable Boston newspapers openly called “nigger pool.”

Following Prohibition, the city's various mobs had settled into a relatively peaceful coexistence. When violence did erupt, it was mostly Italians shooting Italians, Irish killing Irish. Compared with what most workingmen in the city were making, the money was good enough for most gangsters not to rock the boat. In 1946, when Dan Carroll died at age sixty-three, the papers ran a routine list of dignitaries who attended his funeral. In addition to Mayor James Michael Curley, a congressman, and more than a dozen local politicians and police captains, the papers listed one “manager Phil Buccola”—the boss of Boston's local Mafia. Buccola was just paying his respects to a fellow “prominent sportsman.”

Buccola had been among the Italians who'd ambushed the Gustins back in 1931, and he remained on top in the North End until 1950, when an ambitious Tennessee senator named Estes Kefauver decided to hold televised hearings in major cities around the country on the threat of organized crime.

By then, Buccola and his generation of local Mafia chieftains had accumulated enough money to retire in style, either in Boston or back in the old country. So rather than take the heat, many of them stepped aside. That opened the way for an ambitious thirty-one-year-old World War II navy veteran named Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo and his five brothers.

Jerry Angiulo was less a muscle guy than a businessman, and his genius was in setting up what amounted to a profit-sharing plan in the numbers. For every four numbers his runners turned in, they got a free one. It was trickle-down economics, and it worked. The Boston numbers racket—nigger pool—took off. Kefauver's hearings turned out to be a flash in the pan, but when the dust cleared, Jerry Angiulo was the richest gangster in Boston.

Ilario Zannino, aka Larry Baione, Jerry Angiulo's top enforcer.

Not having any direct protection from the Mafia, Jerry was soon being shaken down by tougher Italian hoods, especially Larry Zannino, a vicious South End gangster also known as Larry Baione. Finally, Jerry decided he needed to hook up with “the Man,” Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the godfather of the New England Mafia. Angiulo drove to the Man's headquarters on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, and handed Patriarca a brown paper bag full of cash. The loot, later estimated at as much as $100,000, was Angiulo's ticket into the Mafia. Jerry never personally killed anyone—never made his bones, as the old-timers said. He had Larry Baione to make them for him, and now Larry worked for him. So did Angiulo's four brothers.

Nobody in Boston ever referred to Angiulo's organization as the Mafia, or La Cosa Nostra, a name that would not come into common usage until years later when New York Mafioso Joe Valachi testified before Congress. In Chicago it was “the Outfit” and in Providence “the Office.” In Boston, the Mafia was known simply as “In Town.” The reason was simple: to visit Angiulo, you had to go to his headquarters in the North End—In Town.

Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the boss of the New England Mafia, never liked having his picture taken.

But “In Town” was far from the only game in town. The North End often farmed out its heavier enforcement work—up to and including murder—to other gangs. One of In Town's favorite subcontractors was the McLaughlin Gang of Charlestown. Loan sharks to the longshoremen, the McLaughlin brothers and their gunsels dominated crime along the docks and at the Charlestown Navy Yard. Their top enforcers included the Hughes brothers, Steve and Connie.

Next door to the McLaughlins in Somerville was the crew run by Buddy McLean, a cherubic-faced blond hoodlum from the Winter Hill neighborhood. The Somerville guys were all Teamsters, members of Local 25, a totally mobbed-up union. Naturally, one of Winter Hill's most profitable criminal enterprises was truck hijackings—most of which were inside jobs.

The Angiulo brothers before a grand jury appearance in Boston, 1964. Jerry is second from right.

In Italian East Boston, where the Martoranos had first settled when they arrived from Sicily, In Town called the shots. But a young Portuguese-American psychopath from New Bedford named Joe Barboza had also established a beachhead. Like the McLaughlins, the New Bedford native handled the occasional murder contract for In Town, but he had a dream: to become the first non-Italian member of La Cosa Nostra. He didn't know that behind his back, the Italians in the North End and Providence referred to him as “the nigger.” His better-known nickname was “the Animal.”