Howie Carr (12 page)

Sitting in a black car on a Saturday night in December 1973, Johnny Martorano waited for Spike to stagger out of the Bulldog, then machine-gunned him in front of the Avenue Laundry. Hit at least ten times, O’Toole stumbled out onto Dorchester Avenue, knocking over a mailbox as he toppled over. The black car then sped off, in the direction of South Boston.

O’Toole’s murder put Paulie McGonagle at the top of what they all called the Hit Parade. Whitey handled that one himself, with help from a tough local barfly named Tommy King. Whitey buried McGonagle on Tenean Beach—it was the first interment in one of the three death pits where five more of Whitey’s victims would be interred over the next decade. Whitey drove McGonagle’s car to Charlestown, pushed it off a pier, and then threw Paulie’s wallet into the water. Whitey liked to make his victims “do the Houdini,” as his acquaintances from New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, the Westies, used to say. Everyone might have a pretty good idea what had happened, but they could never really be sure. And with any luck, McGonagle’s remaining friends might decide he’d been done in by Charlestown hoods and take misguided revenge against the Townies, thereby thinning the herd of Whitey’s rivals even further.

Next to go was Eddie Connors, the owner of the Bulldog Tavern, who’d fingered Spike O’Toole a year or so earlier. By 1975, Connors had been arrested in a botched robbery, which was bad enough, but he had also taken to bragging about his role in setting up O’Toole for Howie Winter. It was a dangerous sort of name-dropping, and Howie Winter coldly told Eddie to give him the number of a “safe” telephone where he could call Connors to discuss the matter. Once Howie got the number, he turned it over to Johnny Martorano, who from his sources at the telephone company discovered that it came back to a pay phone at a gas station on Morrissey Boulevard.

On June 12, 1975, Connors was to appear at the station at 9:00 p.m. to receive the call from Howie. One hundred yards away, 150 cops were enjoying a banquet. All would later report that they hadn’t heard a thing. The only problem was a Metropolitan District Commission police traffic detail, almost directly across the boulevard from the phone booth. Whitey quickly found another phone booth and called in a false accident report to the MDC police. The traffic detail immediately left to answer the alarm, and moments later Connors pulled up in his Cadillac to await the call. When the phone rang and he stepped into the booth, Johnny Martorano, Whitey Bulger, and Stevie Flemmi pulled up next to the booth in a stolen car. Whitey and Stevie jumped out and riddled the telephone booth with bullets. Connors died at the scene.

It was Whitey’s and Stevie’s first hit together. It would not be their last.

All the murders were planned at Howie Winter’s garage. The only legitimate business operating there was a body shop jointly owned by Stevie, Johnny Martorano’s younger brother, Jimmy, and George Kaufman, Frank Salemme’s old partner in the auto repair business on Massachusetts Avenue.

Kaufman always had an auto body shop or used car lot of some kind where the non-Mafia crews hung out; he was also a jack-of-all-trades for the Mob—a liaison to both the Jewish bookies they shook down and whatever gang members happened to be in prison at the time. He never made much money, though, because after a while, Kaufman’s regular customers would realize who they were rubbing elbows with, and business would fall off and Kaufman would have to pack up and move again, and then Stevie and Whitey would show up once more and the same scene would play out all over again.

Inside the Marshall Street complex, the first office belonged to the guys who actually operated a garage. Further back in the building was the real inner sanctum of the crew—where Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano held court. No one who owed money ever wanted to be escorted into that part of the building. On the wall hung a poster of two vultures perched on a cactus overlooking a desert, with one vulture saying to the other: “Patience, hell. I want to kill somebody.”

There were often females at the garage—wives, girlfriends, and neighborhood women who brought over food for the guys. Most of the crew enjoyed having them around, but not Whitey. He asked them inappropriate questions, and he glared at them, giving the women the you-don’t-belong-here looks that any black teenager outside Southie High on H Street would have understood only too well.

Since so many underworld characters had their cars worked on by Kaufman, they would often stop by the office just to chat, with their keys in hand. If anyone of whatever status in organized crime ever twirled their key chains, Whitey would immediately demand that they stop.

“I can’t stand that twirling,” Whitey would say, in great agitation. “It reminds me of the screws at Alcatraz.”

Still, Whitey had his strengths. He was handy with a machine gun, and he had those high-ranking police sources in Boston. One night, after everyone else had gone home, Stevie Flemmi and Jimmy Martorano were closing up the garage when a task force of cops raided the garage and began rifling through the desks. In Whitey’s desk, one of the plainclothes cops discovered a list of undercover state cops, descriptions of their cars, and the untraceable license plates on the vehicles.

“Where’d he get this list?” one of them asked Stevie. “That list?” Stevie said. “I thought everybody had one of those.”

The cops left in a huff. No crimes had been committed.

Everyone kept their separate rackets—Whitey had the bars in Southie, Stevie had loansharking and prostitution in Roxbury—but they also had deals going together. At its height, the gang’s most prominent members included Howie Winter and his bookkeeper, Sal Sperlinga, the Martorano brothers, and Whitey and Stevie. Also around were George Kaufman, and two other Irish guys from Somerville—Jimmy Sims and Joe McDonald, the oldest of the crew, born in 1917.

McDonald was typical of the gang. He was a skilled killer— he’d gotten a lot of experience during the Irish Gang War— but not nearly as effective at more routine criminal enterprises. The Hill was quite proficient at killing rival mobsters to take over their rackets, but once they gained control, they had no idea how to run them. That was the lesson of Winter Hill’s disastrous foray into gambling after wiping out Indian Joe’s crew. In what should have been a fabulously profitable enterprise, Winter Hill lost its shirt.

One problem for the Winter Hill gangsters is that they enjoyed partaking in their own vices. Both Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano were themselves degenerate gamblers. Like their marks, they spent Sunday afternoons in the fall drinking beer and watching pro football on TV, often doubling up on the late West Coast games as they tried desperately to get even.

Whitey and Stevie learned from their mistakes.

“They didn’t drink,” said Salemme. “They didn’t gamble.” As the years went by, Whitey and Stevie lost interest in running any kind of gambling operation. They would eventually only provide one service—protection. Bookies, drug dealers, truck hijackers—they all needed “protection,” and Whitey and Stevie were only too happy to oblige them. “Protection” became one of their favorite words; they’d learned it from the FBI.

Meanwhile, Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano were going broke. Eventually they had to go to Gerry Angiulo to borrow money. To make the weekly payments, they began going into business with people they didn’t know, and couldn’t trust.

And that was where Fat Tony Ciulla came in. The son of an East Boston fish merchant, Fat Tony Ciulla was six foot three, weighed 350 pounds, and at age thirty-five had been fixing horse races for almost half his life, mostly at smaller East Coast tracks. He had also worked as a driver for Joe Barboza.

In 1973, Fat Tony began laying off bets on fixed races with a bookie connected to Winter Hill. Somehow, Howie Winter found out the races were fixed, and Fat Tony was summoned to a meeting at Chandler’s. Fat Tony owed Howie $6,000, and six months after he paid it off, he started showing up at the garage.

Very soon Fat Tony was partners with Winter Hill. They supplied the cash and the mules to lay down bets across the country, and Fat Tony provided the doped-up horses and the bribed jockeys. Gerry Angiulo warned Howie Winter to steer clear of Fat Tony, but Howie and Johnny—and Stevie and Whitey and everyone else at the garage—didn’t care.

The money was too good.

In November 1975, Whitey eliminated the final holdouts in the South Boston underworld. One of the guys he’d always liked least was Tommy King. Tommy wasn’t terribly bright, but he was absolutely fearless. Tommy had tried to get with the new program in Southie, even assisting Whitey in the murder of Paulie McGonagle a year earlier. Now he was a potential witness against Whitey. Then he got the best of Whitey in a barroom brawl, and that rocketed him to the top of the Hit Parade.

Whitey began “lobbying,” as Stevie later put it, for the elimination of Tommy King. As the top guy in the non-Mafia underworld, Howie Winter had to sign off on every hit, just as Raymond Patriarca did on Mafia assassinations. By 1975, Howie had enough headaches without having to worry about the Byzantine intricacies of the Southie underworld, so he finally gave Whitey the okay.

Once he had the green light, Whitey began lulling King into a fatal complacency. Like Don Corleone in
The Godfather
, Whitey was keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. After a while, Whitey told King he needed some help on a hit. Eddie Connors had a partner, and he was making noises about avenging his late pal. The guy that was to be hit, Whitey said, was named Suitcase Fidler.

So the boys would get together, and whack Suitcase. Everyone would show up at Carson Beach on the night of November 5, 1975. Stevie would pass out guns, and then they’d drive over to wherever Suitcase was and whack him.

It was a moonless night, and one by one they climbed into the car—Whitey and Tommy in the front seat, Stevie and Johnny Martorano in the back. Stevie had a paper bag with the .38s, and he handed them out. All were loaded except the one he gave to Tommy King.

Johnny Martorano leaned forward and shot King in the back of the head. They took his car keys, and then they buried him on the banks of the Neponset River on the Quincy-Dorchester line. For years afterward, whenever he drove past the spot, Whitey would tell whoever was with him: “Tip your hat to Tommy.”

Once Tommy was gone, they went after his best friend, Buddy Leonard, one of Whitey’s old neighbors in the projects. He had to go, for two reasons. First, he might try to settle the score for his old pal when Tommy turned up missing. Second, killing him would muddy the waters. Buddy was a heavy drinker, and Whitey knew he’d be drunk and therefore easy to take after closing, and he was. Just a few hours after killing Tommy King, they snatched Buddy Leonard outside a Southie bar and pushed him into a car—Tommy King’s, of course— and then they shot him in the head. Whitey ditched the car in the projects and Stevie, who’d followed him in a second car, gave Whitey a lift home.

The next day, in the evening editions, police were described as “baffled” by the murder of Leonard in the automobile belonging to his best friend, who was now himself missing. But the cops suspected the two incidents might somehow be related.

Frank Capizzi had been on the run for years after being shot by Whitey on Commercial Street in the North End in the spring of 1973. Finally, though, he decided the heat had died down enough that he could return to Boston. But something had changed in the time Capizzi had been away. Whitey was now officially an FBI informant. He had friends in high places, and Frank Capizzi didn’t.

When word got out that Capizzi was back in town, three cops showed up at his home in Winthrop for a pro forma interview—FBI agent Dennis Condon, Boston police detective Eddie Walsh, and the new kid in town, Zip Connolly.

In a letter he wrote to the federal court before Connolly’s sentencing in 2003, Capizzi recalled his meeting with the cops.

“I looked directly into John Connolly’s Machiavellian eyes and told [him], Mr. Connolly, James Bulger shot me three times!!!... Dennis Condon listened attentively, writing it all down.”

Despite Capizzi’s positive identification, Whitey was not arrested. Nor would he be, ever again. As a Top Echelon informant, Whitey was headed for the top of the rackets.

CHAPTER 6

S
ENATE
P
RESIDENT
K
EVIN
Harrington and Billy Bulger, his number-three man, made an odd pair walking through the marble State House corridors—Harrington was six foot nine, almost a foot and a half taller than Billy. Billy was soon joking that he was spending so much time with Harrington that he had begun ducking whenever he went through a doorway.

But Harrington’s closest ally was his majority leader, Joe DiCarlo of Revere. Billy had a four-year head start on him in the legislature, but DiCarlo had more than made up for lost time. A former teacher, he’d become a chairman in his first term in the House, in 1965, and three years later he knocked off a twelve-term Senate incumbent in the primary. Billy, of course, had never run against an incumbent, nor would he ever.

Another ambitious young senator, a former state rep and accountant from Oxford, was James Kelly (not the Jimmy Kelly who was a minor South Boston hoodlum who eventually became president of the Boston City Council). After winning the Senate presidency in 1971, Harrington had appointed Kelly chairman of Ways and Means. Kelly wrote the Senate’s version of the state budget, and it wasn’t long before Kelly was referred to in the press as “D-Ritz,” for his table in the Ritz Café, where he held court. With Kelly it was pay to play, strictly cash ’n’ carry, no reasonable offer refused. According to State House lore, he employed two bagmen.

A decade later, Billy would be blamed in the press for a trend begun by Jimmy “D-Ritz” Kelly that centralized even more budgetary power in the hands of the legislative leadership—the use of “outside sections” to surreptitiously enact legislation in the state budget. In the years to come, Billy would be suspected of using outside sections to settle scores with Whitey’s foes. They would be filed anonymously, with no fingerprints, by the legislative leadership, and would become law without ever having been publicly filed, or heard in committee, or debated on the floor, passed by both branches, reconciled in conference committee and then signed into law. For instance, a major contributor to a legislative leader might need a parcel of state-owned land for a development that was opposed by the community in which the land was located. Under normal legislative rules, the affected municipality could block such a project. But by using an “outside section,” the leadership could deliver the land, or any other favor, to anybody who hired the properly connected lobbyists, with no chance for any opponents of the measure, however odious it might be, to complain. Or a connected state worker recently convicted of a crime might need to add a few more years of government “service” to bolster his pension. A single vaguely worded paragraph, buried in hundreds of pages of innocuous boilerplate, would often get the job done.