Howie Carr (19 page)

The problem with Zip’s plan was that neither Whitey nor Stevie was keen on the idea of dropping in on their Mafia counterparts. Neither totally trusted the Angiulos, for good reason. But they both knew it had to be done, to protect their status as informants. And so, on November 20, 1980, Whitey and Stevie dropped in at 98 Prince Street. During a mundane discussion with three of the Angiulo brothers, they learned from Donato “Danny” Angiulo they had “concern that revenue was down.” Then a young mobster walked in and they all talked about collecting a $65,000 blackjack debt owed to Larry Baione. Then Whitey and Stevie left.

And this, Connolly wrote in a memo to his superiors, was the sort of incredible inside Mob stuff they’d lose forever if they dumped Whitey and Stevie because of the controversy over the blown bug on Lancaster Street.

But the visit to the Dog House didn’t close the deal. It still appeared that the top feds were leaning toward terminating Whitey as an informant. So on November 25, Connolly and Morris decided that the only way to save their guy was to have him sit down with Lawrence Sarhatt, the new FBI boss in Boston. That day Whitey spent four hours with the Boston SAC in a hotel at Logan Airport. Whitey laid it on thick, probably as thick as he ever laid it on.

His love for the FBI, he said, stemmed from his early relationship with H. Paul Rico. He did not mention the gay bars of Bay Village.

“SA RICO,” Sarhatt wrote, “was such a gentleman and was so helpful that he, Informant, changed his mind about his hate for all law enforcement. Additionally, he has a close feeling towards SA JOHN CONNOLLY because they both grew up in the same neighborhood in Boston and had the mutual childhood problems, as well as his deep hatred for La Cosa Nostra.”

Whitey vehemently denied that the FBI had tipped him to the bug in the Lancaster Street garage. The tip came from a state trooper, he said. Asked by Sarhatt to name the state cop, Whitey refused “because this source is not doing it for monetary benefit but as a favor to him because of his close association with him.”

On another subject, “Informant also related that he is not in the drug business and personally hates anyone who does [sell drugs],” Sarhatt wrote. “Therefore, he and any of his associates do not deal in drugs.”

It was nonsense, and Sarhatt knew it, writing in his post-meeting memo that he was “not certain” if Whitey was “telling the full story of his involvement.”

Whitey had one final point to make to Sarhatt before the meeting broke up. On the subject of Lieutenant Colonel John O’Donovan, the much-decorated state trooper most adamant in his assertions that the FBI was in bed with Winter Hill, Whitey said he had sat through several meetings with the legendary O’D, and had been shocked by O’D’s disdain for the FBI.

“He [O’Donovan] made very disparaging and derogatory statements about the professionalism of FBI personnel,” Sarhatt wrote of Whitey’s recollection of his meeting with O’Donovan. “He [Whitey] took great umbrage inasmuch as his association with the FBI has been nothing but the most professional in every respect.”

How exactly a criminal can have a “professional” relationship with a cop was not explained. And how could Whitey, a gangster, ask the FBI to take his word over that of their brother law enforcement officer?

O’Donovan had been a thorn in all their sides for far too long. He had arrested Jimmy the Bear three times, in addition to both Martoranos, and now he had tried to hang Whitey and Stevie out to dry. Myles Connor, another career hoodlum, had once shot O’D and still survived. Nobody, it seemed, could rid them of that pain-in-the-ass honest cop once and for all.

After spending four hours with Whitey, Sarhatt wanted to terminate him as an informant. Unlike so many other FBI agents, he had not been charmed by Whitey’s banter about Alcatraz and his Cagneyesque childhood. But the final call had to be made by the prosecutor running the federal organized crime strike force, Jeremiah O’Sullivan. It was O’Sullivan who would be handling any prosecutions that arose out of the bugs that would soon be installed in the Dog House.

Four years earlier, Connolly had convinced O’Sullivan’s office to rewrite the Winter Hill race-fixing indictment to make Whitey and Stevie, who had been in the middle of the conspiracy, merely “unindicted co-conspirators.”

Now Connolly was once again able to convince O’Sullivan’s office that there was, as the prosecutors noted in a report, “sufficient justification for continuing him [as an informant] regardless of his current activities to be able to eventually prosecute LCN [La Cosa Nostra] members.”

With another assist from O’Sullivan, Connolly had recorded one more “save” for Whitey. In return Whitey was taking care of him with cash, free appliances, and below-market-value deals on condominiums in Southie, but Zip would have been a bargain at twice the price. Whitey was still getting gold in return for shit.

CHAPTER 10

A
S
1980
DREW TO A CLOSE
, Whitey knew that if he were to survive, either he and Stevie or the FBI was going to have to eliminate the Angiulos and their crew at the Dog House on Prince Street. With the flashier Somerville guys now scattered, the Mafia was constantly head-counting, trying to figure out just what remained of the old Winter Hill Gang. Again and again they arrived at the same number: two. Whitey and Stevie. Others might come and go—George Kaufman, Nick Femia, various younger Southie thugs—but in the end it all came down to Whitey and Stevie.

They enjoyed being the only game on their side of town. They didn’t have to split up the money with anybody else. But now it was making them a target of opportunity.

John Morris called Whitey around Christmas that year and said he had to talk to both him and Stevie right away. He suggested the sprawling Lechmere’s parking lot in East Cambridge. Whitey called Stevie, and after meeting in Southie they drove over to East Cambridge and climbed into Morris’s FBI car. Morris had a tape recorder with him. He wanted them to listen to something the FBI had just picked up off a wire—a fifteen-minute conversation between Angiulo’s top enforcer, Larry Baione, the Mafia hoodlum reporter Paul Corsetti had sought out, and Baione’s driver.

“Graphic detail,” Flemmi recalled of the conversation in 1997. “They said that they were looking for the right opportunity to eliminate Jim Bulger and myself... John Martorano [and] Joe McDonald, they were both on the lam at the time. Howie Winter was in prison. There was just myself and Jim Bulger, and they figured...we would be vulnerable. They wanted to make sure that we were completely eliminated and disappeared.”

Whitey and Stevie understood. That was their modus operandi as well—unless they were trying to deliver a message, as with Louis Litif or Indian Joe, they too preferred their enemies to vanish enigmatically. Better to pick up the newspaper and see an old mug shot of their victim over a caption that said, “Missing from usual haunts” or “Foul play suspected,” than a series of gory front-page photographs of machine-gunned cars and bullet-riddled bodies on the side of the Revere Beach Parkway.

Two months earlier, another FBI agent had filed a 209 report that confirmed much the same information, but also included one additional fact: that the Mafia figured that if they could kill Whitey and Stevie, the “remaining Winter Hill people [Martorano and McDonald] would be fugitives; the Mafia would have the FBI and the police as allies against the fugitives.”

The Mafia was plotting to do to Winter Hill what Winter Hill, or at least Whitey, was plotting to do to them. They planned to use cops as their enforcers.

As thin as Winter Hill’s ranks were, the Italians weren’t in much better shape. Their top hitman, Joe Russo, was on the lam after murdering Joe Barboza in San Francisco. His half-brother in East Boston was such a half-wit that Gerry Angiulo had forbidden him, on pain of death, to ever enter the city proper.

Even by Mob standards, Gerry Angiulo was an unlikable sort. He was an egomaniac—his boat was named the
Gennaro
. He had a habit of referring to cops as “Irish pieces of shit,” and he was even more obsessed than most mobsters with money. When he heard that one of his loansharking victims had died, he began screaming, “He can’t be dead! He owes me $13,000!”

The FBI had been after him since the early 1960s, when they planted an illegal bug in a bar he owned on Tremont Street. In 1976, FBI agent Bob Sheehan, shortly before he retired to the state payroll, had approached Sonny Shields, the hoodlum Whitey had shot and wounded in 1973. Sheehan offered Shields the keys to the Angiulos’ Prince Street headquarters, and a machine gun, and pleaded with him to wipe out the Angiulo brothers.

Shields politely turned him down.

The Angiulos seemed ready to be taken. Although they preferred, for safety’s sake, to stay out of the North End, Whitey and Stevie were familiar enough with the security at 98 Prince Street to be able to advise the feds on possible weaknesses that could be exploited. This information was better than Whitey’s usual “shit,” perhaps because if the feds could put it to good use, they would no longer have to worry about the Mafia: “The brothers communicate by walkie-talkie. GERRY ANGIULO is known as ‘Silver Fox’; DANNY ANGIULO is known as ‘Laughing Fox’ or ‘Smiling Fox’; and NICK ANGIULO is known as ‘Harry Fox.’”

Whitey, who was fascinated by the newer forms of technology, even advised the feds what equipment they would need to monitor the Mafia—a “Bearcat 210 Automatic Scanner... Source [Whitey] will attempt to ascertain the frequency number for the C.B. units.”

Instead, the feds planted bugs, and not just at the Dog House. In January 1981, they also installed one at 51 North Margin Street, near Regina’s Pizza, where Larry Baione maintained both a clubhouse and a high-stakes poker game. Unlike the bugs they’d planted at Patriarca’s headquarters in Providence back in the 1960s, these were court-authorized, which meant everything would be admissible as evidence in court.

The Prince Street bug captured all of Gerry’s megalomaniacal boasts. He lorded it over everyone, even his son, Jason, whom he derisively called “the college boy.”

Jason had been given an entry-level Mob job, running Las Vegas nights for local charities. One night, when Gerry found out that his son had been trying to cut expenses by using old decks of cards, he exploded and ordered him to change decks every few hands.

“That’s a fuckin’ order,” he said, “ ’cause you’re a fuckin’ idiot.”

Another time he ordered one of his soldiers to murder a loanshark victim who was thought to be a target of the grand jury.

“Strangle him!” Angiulo said. “And get rid of him. Hit him in the fucking head....You stomp him. Bing!... Just hit him in the fuckin’ head and stab him, okay. You understand American?”

When the mobster didn’t answer Angiulo’s questions about his preparations quickly enough, Gerry exploded.

“You ain’t got a hot car. You ain’t got nothing. You think I need tough guys? I need intelligent tough guys.”

The audiotapes the FBI recorded from January until April 1981 were better than anyone could have hoped for. Late one evening, for example, Gerry Angiulo and Baione were discussing the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute, and Gerry argued that it didn’t apply to them because it only covered the infiltration of legitimate business.

“I wouldn’t be in a legitimate business for all the fuckin’ money in the world to begin with,” Angiulo said.

“That’s right,” chimed in Baione.

“Our argument is, we’re illegitimate business.” At this point, Baione and Angiulo become a kind of alternating chorus.

Baione: “We’re a shylock.”

Angiulo. “We’re a shylock.”

Baione: “Yeah.”

Angiulo: “We’re a fucking bookmaker.”

Baione: “Bookmaker.”

Angiulo: “We’re selling marijuana.”

Baione: “We’re not infiltrating.”

Angiulo: “We’re, we’re, we’re illegal here, illegal there, arsonists? We’re every fucking thing.”

Baione: “Pimps!”

Angiulo: “So what?”

Baione: “Prostitutes.”

Almost as soon as the FBI agents began recording the Angiulos’ screeds, it was clear that they were finished. But now Whitey and Stevie had a new concern. Their informant status might protect them from indictment, but once prosecutor O’Sullivan and his crew began playing the tapes, it would be almost impossible for them to remain in the underworld shadows where they had flourished for so long.

The fact was, Whitey and Stevie were never far from the thoughts of Gerry and Larry. One night, Angiulo and Baione even discussed the way the Hill had split up its territories after the race-fixing convictions had decimated the gang two years earlier.

“Whitey’s got the whole of Southie,” he says. “Stevie is [
sic
] got the whole of the South End. Johnny’s got niggers....

Howie knows this.”

Larry Baione in particular was obsessed with them. When he was sober, as he was when he was recorded on the tape Morris played for Whitey, he plotted to kill them. When he was drunk—which he was most nights—he would sometimes grow sentimental about Whitey and Stevie. To him they were “kids,” who, he inexplicably, and incorrectly, claimed, “are not big money guys.”

More importantly, Baione knew they would have no qualms about murdering anyone in the Mafia who got in their way. One night a small-time hustler named Jerry Metricia was called to North Margin Street. According to Baione, he was “stealin’ with” one of Baione’s crew, a politically wired made man named John Cincotti, whose state senator, Mike LoPresti, had been feverishly lobbying the Boston police to issue the felon Cincotti a permit to carry a gun. What concerned Baione was that Metricia, during the race-fixing days, had been given $50,000 cash by Whitey and Stevie to bet in Las Vegas on a fixed horse race. Instead, he’d blown the dough at a casino, and had never settled up with the Hill.

Baione was now concerned about the fact that his unarmed man Cincotti was spending so much time with a guy who he knew was now marked for death.

“I know,” said another of Baione’s mobsters, “if Stevie or Whitey sees him—”

“They’re going to hit him,” said Baione.