Howie Carr (22 page)

She would have to go.

One morning in September 1981, with Stevie’s parents gone for the day, Stevie brought Debbie Davis back to the Flemmis’ house in South Boston. Whitey was waiting for her. He jumped Davis and strangled her, as Stevie watched. Then they stripped her body, cut off her fingers and toes to prevent identification, and wrapped her corpse in a plastic sheet. After dark, they drove down to the same marshes by the Neponset River where they’d buried Tommy King back in 1975.

When he decided to go to the FBI, Halloran had known enough to steer clear of Connolly and Morris and the rest of the organized crime squad. He’d instead approached an agent he knew who was assigned to the labor racketeering squad. In the weeks that followed, Halloran was shifted from safe house to safe house, three in all.

The decision to formally protect him as a federal witness was up to Jeremiah O’Sullivan, the head of the organized crime strike force, who was by then preparing the indictments of the Angiulos. Preoccupied with the Mafia, O’Sullivan probably dismissed Halloran as a drunk and a druggie, a minor hood with a first-degree murder charge hanging over his head who wanted to roll over in return for uncorroborated testimony.

Others, though, including the agents who’d brought him in, thought Halloran could be a valuable tool against Winter Hill. With the law enforcement debate over Halloran continuing, Whitey dictated another FBI report, this one to Morris, on April 23, saying “that the ‘outfit’ continues to be interested in having Brian Halloran killed. Source advised that the ‘outfit’ consider Halloran to be a weak person and are concerned that he may make a deal with the DA’s office to give up Salemme.”

This was the classic Whitey swerve: attribute his own motives to someone else. When he hit Halloran, there’d already be a paper trail leading back to the Mafia.

In the end, O’Sullivan cut Halloran loose, refusing to okay his entrance into the Witness Protection Program. The new number-two FBI agent in the Boston office, Robert Fitzpatrick, was so stunned by the decision that he approached Bill Weld, the U.S. attorney. In court in 1997, Weld recalled the FBI agent’s premonition.

“You know,” Fitzpatrick said, “people always say there’s a danger for this snitch or that snitch. I’m telling you, this guy—I would not want to be standing next to this guy.”

Whitey had opened up an appliance store at F Street and West Broadway, out of which his top money-launderer Kevin O’Neil could deal hijacked stoves and refrigerators. On the afternoon of May 11, 1982, Whitey was hanging around the store, along with one of the younger gang members—Kevin Weeks, twenty-five years old, a project rat who had gotten his start as a bouncer at Triple O’s. Weeks now had a job at the MBTA, and he supplemented his income doing the store’s “bull work”—delivering the appliances.

That afternoon, an older hood from Charlestown stopped by and mentioned casually that he had just seen Brian Halloran drinking at the Pier, a bar on Northern Avenue. Whitey suddenly snapped to attention and immediately pulled Weeks aside.

“Meet me down the club,” Whitey said, referring to the City Point Athletic Association, on O Street between Second and Third. When Weeks arrived, Whitey was pacing the floor. Whitey had Weeks drive him to Theresa Stanley’s house and then told him to go back to the club and wait for him.

Fifteen minutes later, Whitey pulled up in what Weeks described as “the blue Chevy,” a hit car with a souped-up engine. With the push of a button, the vehicle would emit a billowing cloud of blue exhaust. Another button opened a specially built tank, allowing Whitey to dump gallons of oil onto the street, causing any pursuing vehicle to spin out.

Whitey had donned a light brown wig and a floppy mustache. He looked a lot like Jimmy Flynn, another member of the Winter Hill Gang with whom Halloran had been feuding. It was a perfect disguise.

Whitey told Weeks to drive down to Jimmy’s Harborside, a well-known restaurant on Northern Avenue across the street from the Pier, where Halloran was still pounding them down, and wait for him. A few minutes later, Whitey arrived in the blue Chevy. In the back seat was another man, wearing what Weeks later described as a ski mask. No one else recalled anyone in a ski mask, but it meant Weeks could claim he couldn’t identify the man Whitey had recruited as a backup shooter.

“He handed me a police scanner and a walkie-talkie,” Weeks later testified. When Halloran left the bar, Weeks was to radio a brief message to Whitey: “The balloon is in the air.”

A few minutes later, Halloran exited the Pier with a casual friend, Michael Donahue, who had offered him a ride home. As Halloran waited for Donahue to bring his small blue car around to the bar’s front door, Weeks gave the signal.

“The balloon is in the air,” Weeks said. With a roar of the engine and a squeal of tires, Whitey pulled alongside the blue car.

“Brian,” he yelled, and Halloran, bleary from an afternoon of drinking, looked up just as Whitey opened fire with a full automatic carbine. Donahue’s car lurched forward, then began drifting across Northern Avenue until it finally crashed into a building. Whitey circled around, trapping the car, and continued firing his carbine into it as Weeks sped away.

When the police arrived, Donahue was dead, but Halloran was hanging on, drifting in and out of consciousness. The cops asked who had shot him.

“Jimmy Flynn,” he said, and then died.

Whitey’s luck held throughout the evening. He got the hit car back into one of the gang’s garages in the Lower End, and Weeks retrieved the guns from the vehicle and sawed them up before tossing the pieces into the ocean in Quincy.

A couple of hours later, some friendly feds, including Zip and John “Vino” Morris, showed up at Whitey’s apartment. They didn’t want answers, they wanted beer. And Whitey was only too happy to serve them as much as they wanted. As usual, Vino was soon drunk, and once he was, he casually mentioned to Whitey that they had gotten the license plate number of the hit car. As soon as they left, Whitey called Weeks and told him to leave the hit car in the garage where it was. It, and the garage, were untraceable.

“Thank God for Beck’s beer,” Whitey said. “Thank God for Beck’s.”

As the murder investigation unfolded, Zip quickly laid down a trail of false leads back to people who had either crossed Whitey, or might represent some threat in the future. On the day after the Halloran-Donahue murders, Whitey tried the same ploy he’d first used eight years earlier, after murdering Paulie McGonagle. He blamed Charlestown, advising Zip that “the wiseguys in Charlestown supposedly heard that Brian Halloran and his brother, who is a MA State Trooper, had met with Colonel O’Donovan of the MA State Police and that Halloran was going to cooperate with the law.”

The next day Whitey advanced a new theory: the killers were Flynn and a guy named Weasel Manville, from the old Mullens gang, who used to run the O Street Club for them.

On May 21, Whitey fingered a guy from Charlestown as Flynn’s wheelman and then, for good measure, invented a “backup van” with three more other Townie thugs. And Whitey put the State Police and Lieutenant Colonel O’Donovan back in the mix, because, he said, Halloran was cooperating with them, this time not on drugs, but on bank robberies, which would have put him in the crosshairs of the Charlestown crews.

Finally, on July 7, with the heat starting to die down, Whitey, through his amanuensis Zip Connolly, took one more run at the State Police, saying that Halloran was dead because the Staties “let the cat out of the bag.” This time it was the FBI using the Whitey swerve, blaming someone else for what they had done.

Now there was only one person left to kill.

In June 1982 Johnny Martorano was summoned to a meeting with Whitey and Stevie in a hotel near La Guardia Airport in New York. The topic of the meeting was John Callahan. He had to go. His name was all over the papers, linked to Halloran. They’d been seen drinking together too many nights, by too many cops and reporters, at the Rusty Scupper. Everyone, including the press, knew that Callahan had run World Jai Alai, and after Halloran was hit, Callahan’s name was mentioned in several of the sidebars about Halloran’s criminal career. It was only a matter of time until the feds would have to pick up Callahan for questioning. And when push came to shove, Callahan was a civilian, not a wiseguy, and civilians flipped, always.

Whitey patiently pointed all this out to Johnny Martorano, and told him that they had no choice but to kill Callahan. Johnny Martorano shook his head and refused to accept the contract. Callahan had done the right thing by him, more than once. And Callahan was perhaps his imprisoned brother Jimmy’s best friend.

“Well,” said Whitey, “so then tell me something. Is he going to do ten years? Is he going to do twenty years?”

Johnny Martorano, not the smartest guy in the world, thought about it for a moment.

“No, he’s not,” Martorano said. “He’s gotta go.”

As in Tulsa a year earlier, the guns would be shipped down via bus. Callahan would be picked up at the airport in Fort Lauderdale by Johnny Martorano and Joe McDonald and from there it would be up to them how to handle it, although Whitey did have a couple of suggestions.

Even before the hit, Whitey had Connolly begin sending law enforcement off in the wrong direction. On July 7, Zip reported that Callahan had stopped going to Florida so often because of “a Cuban group who he was impressed with as being very bad.”

Whitey added that “lately Callahan’s relationship with this group has cooled and Callahan is supposed to be avoiding them.”

On July 31, Callahan flew to Fort Lauderdale and was met by Martorano and McDonald, who drove off with him in a van. A day later, a garage attendant at the Miami International Airport noticed blood dripping out of the trunk of a silver Fleet-wood Cadillac. When the police opened the trunk, they found Callahan’s supine corpse, two bullet holes in his head, a dime on his chest. It was a Hollywood touch—a message, supposedly, for snitches.

The only personal effect missing from Callahan’s body was a distinctive ring, and as soon as the body was found, Miami-Dade police received an anonymous phone tip about a strange ring that had been dropped in a small trash receptacle on Eighth Street—the heart of Miami’s Little Havana district. The cops—Miami-Dade, FBI, even the Tulsa police still investigating the Wheeler hit—all scrambled to follow up on the Little Havana clue.

“We spent weeks chasing our tails on that ring,” Tulsa police detective Mike Huff said later. “We thought it was Cubans for sure.”

Whitey’s only criticism of the hit was that he thought Martorano and McDonald should have disposed of Callahan’s corpse before dropping the ring off on Calle Ocho for the cops to find. A missing body would have added even more mystery to the case.

Zip Connolly had come through, big time. And so had his supervisor, John Morris. Without their aid, Halloran might have survived to become a witness. The hit car might have been found. Whitey decided to do something nice for Morris.

At the time Morris was sleeping with one of the secretaries at the office. Her name was Debbie Noseworthy. About a month after Halloran’s murder, Morris flew to Glencoe, Georgia, for drug training. He had told Debbie how much he wanted to take her with him, how they could have set up a little love nest at his motel on the FBI’s tab, and how no one ever would have been the wiser. But the airfare—Morris said he just couldn’t swing it. His wife would know for sure.

The next morning, Debbie was sitting at her desk, watching Zip Connolly talk on the phone. She could tell by his mannerisms that he was talking to Morris in Georgia. When he hung up, he walked over to her desk and handed her an envelope.

“John wanted you to have this,” Zip said.

She opened it, and out tumbled ten $100 bills.

“Where did John get this?” she said. He was always complaining about being short.

“He’s been saving it,” he said. “It was in his desk and he wanted me to give it to you, and it’s for you to go down to visit him in Glencoe.”

It was the first payoff Morris took from Whitey. It would not be the last.

Joe McDonald had just turned sixty-five, and he was tired of being on the lam. So he decided to return to Boston, by train. He informed only his closest associates in the gang.

On the afternoon of August 16, 1982, as the Amtrak train pulled into Penn Station in New York, the FBI was waiting. They burst into McDonald’s compartment and arrested him. He was still on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for robbing a coin dealer back in 1973.

Less than seven years earlier, Richie Castucci had been murdered by Johnny Martorano for daring to speak to the FBI about Joe McDonald’s whereabouts. As Whitey saw it, though, his betrayal of McDonald to Zip wasn’t the same thing at all. It wasn’t personal. It was strictly business. McDonald’s usefulness to Whitey was at an end, and Whitey knew McDonald would never roll over on him. He was a Winter Hill guy, and everyone knew Winter Hill hoods never ratted out anybody.

Callahan might be dead, but there was one more score to make off him. At the time of his murder, he had been a partner with several other local businessmen in the development of an office building on High Street. Flemmi brought one of Callahan’s partners to a bar in Southie, where Whitey pointed a machine gun at the businessman’s crotch and told him that Callahan had died owing the gangsters “a lot of money.”

Callahan’s partner was also told that he shouldn’t even think about going to the FBI, because Whitey would find out. Within weeks of Callahan’s murder, Whitey and Flemmi collected $500,000 from the High Street partners and a Swiss bank account controlled by Callahan’s associates.

Meanwhile, back in Southie, the crisis seemed to have passed. The $10,000-a-week skim was over, but all the potential witnesses were dead. Sometimes, though, Whitey wondered if it was really over. He used to tell Kevin Weeks about how difficult it was to get away with murdering anyone with serious clout.

“His words were, Roger Wheeler’s family was a zillionaire and politically connected and it will go on forever.”

As usual, in the years to come, Whitey would be proven correct.