Hitman (41 page)

I call Schneiderhan and that's when I get lucky. He's still in the AG's office on Boylston Street, and he's going to be doing the voice-print. But he tells me he can't just fix the case, he's got to have the documentation that it's not me. So I asked him, “What do I do?” He tells me I have to go to my dentist and have a bridge made that I can stick in my mouth when he's giving me the test. The bridge changes the oscillation or something like that in your voice. So I wrote down what Schneiderhan told me, and then I go to my dentist and tell him what I want. He does it and then when he's finished he's washing his hands and he says, “I don't even want to know what you're going to do with that bridge but just let me know if it works.”

It worked; my voice sounded totally different with the bridge, so now they have no evidence against me, and I'm the only one they really care about, not Dick O'Brien and his guys. Another problem, the Staties only had a warrant to record business on Dick's phones during bookie business hours, 12 to 2 and 6 to 8. But one of the cops, who got into worse trouble later, was taping everything. So their evidence was tainted. But after all this time, and effort, they still needed a scalp, so they offer me a deal—everyone gets four months, and I have to pay a $30,000 fine. So I took one for the team. With everything falling apart around me, I couldn't afford to be off the street for that long, but what else could I do?

Johnny Martorano ended up doing three months at the Plymouth House of Correction in 1978. When he got out, he found the underworld landscape shifting even more. Joe McDonald and Jimmy Sims were still fugitives, hiding out in Florida—Sims in the Keys, Joe Mac in Daytona Beach. Jimmy Martorano was in prison. Howie Winter and Sal Sperlinga were looking at serious time in the state pinball case.

Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi were still free men.

*   *   *

ONE MORNING
at the garage, Johnny arrived to find a telephone message. Fat Tony was out on bail, and just as his brother-in-law had predicted, he was reaching out to Johnny, to get him on tape. Fat Tony wanted to call Johnny at Pal Joey's, around the corner on Broadway from Marshall Street. Johnny called his attorney, Marty Weinberg, and Weinberg said he wanted to be there when the call came in. Massachusetts was a “two-party” state—it was against the law to record a phone conversation without permission of both parties—but there was no reason Johnny couldn't tape his half of the conversation.

Tony calls me in the bar, and he keeps bringing up “the stuff we did.” It was obvious he was trying to get me to admit that we'd fixed all those races. I wouldn't bite; I'd known for months not to talk to him about anything important. He just kept saying, “You remember what we did.” I told him, “Tony, I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. I thought you were calling because you had something that would help get my brother out of prison. I don't know about any of this other stuff you're talking about.”

Finally Tony gave up.

They were all running around with much younger women now. At age forty-three, Stevie Flemmi had a veritable harem—in addition to the endless string of pickups and one-night stands, he had his common-law wife, Marion, and his now sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Deb Hussey. He was also supporting Debbie Davis, age twenty-two.

Whitey Bulger had Teresa Stanley, in addition to whatever teenaged girls he could lure from Cardinal Cushing, an all-girls parochial high school on West Broadway. One of them was fifteen years old. Her name was Tammy. Whitey was also sleeping with a dental hygienist, Catherine Greig, who happened to be the ex-sister-in-law of two of his murder victims, Paulie McGonagle and his twin brother.

As for Howie and Johnny, they were involved in much more serious relationships with younger women. At the age of forty-eight, Howie now had a twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, Ellen Brogna, who was brought in before the pinball grand jury in East Cambridge. She took the Fifth Amendment. How could Howie not love a girl like that?

Johnny, now thirty-eight, had taken up with an eighteen-year-old girl named Patty. She was from Ball Square, the Somerville neighborhood where Johnny had spent the first eleven years of his life.

I think I met her when I was with Howie's son, Gary. Yeah, I was twenty years older than she was, but her parents always liked me. I went to see her mother, because she was the one who called the shots in that family. Her mother's name was Loretta. She was Sicilian. Patty's father was, I think, English. I told Loretta, Patty and I might be going on a vacation soon, six months tops. Patty had been running with a bad crowd, she'd dropped out of high school, so I told her mother, I think it'll be better if she gets out of Somerville for a while. Her mother said, okay, as long as Patty's with you, I know she'll be safe.

We were together for the next twenty years. And we're still friends.

The pinball trial started in Cambridge in January 1978. Howie never had a chance. The seventy-five-year-old veterans' club manager testified that one of his employees told him, “Winter and Sperlinga said for him to get out of the business or they would break his legs and other things.”

Faced with near-certain conviction, Howie decided to roll the dice and take the witness stand himself. It was a fiasco. On cross-examination, Winter said he was in the real-estate business, but was forced to admit that he had no office and had made only one sale in 1977, of a condominium in Medford, to someone whose name he couldn't seem to remember.

“I'd have to check with my lawyer,” he said.

Then there was the question of all his various addresses. The prosecutor asked him about the Somerville address he'd given the state police when they arrested him. He said it was his daughter's house. Then he said he voted out of a second Somerville address, but actually lived in Medford and had a driver's license issued to his brother's home in Billerica. His wife, he said, lived in Lexington.

“Do you live in Somerville, Mr. Winter?” the prosecutor asked him.

“Sometimes,” he replied.

“Did you live there last night?”

“No,” said Howie, “I did not.”

*   *   *

BOTH HOWIE
and Sal were convicted on all counts. The judge sentenced Howie to two nine-to-ten-year terms, to run consecutively. Sal got the same nine-to-ten-year sentences, but the judge stipulated that Sperlinga's terms would run concurrently because he was “only a follower.” Sal would be eligible for parole in three years, Howie in six.

The judge was apparently swayed by a handwritten note Howie had passed the judge before sentencing, asking for mercy for Sal: “I respectfully request that in considering sentence for Mr. Sperlinga, Your Honor keep in mind that he never had much to say and that he never raised his voice and also that he is the sole support of his eighty-two-year-old mother.”

The judge told Howie, “I respect you, Mr. Winter, for the motion you filed.”

*   *   *

THE RACE-FIXING
trial would be next. The feds had records of all the phone calls Ciulla had made from the hotels he'd stayed in at the tracks where he'd been fixing races. The phone records included dozens of calls to Johnny's various addresses. For witnesses, they would have Ciulla and jockeys who'd been threatened by various members of the gang. Everyone was going to be indicted, from Howie Winter to the transplanted Boston gamblers in Vegas who'd placed bets for them to the actual runners, guys like Sid Tildsley, the owner of El Sid's nightclub on Winter Hill.

Even Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi were jammed up. They'd helped Johnny find bookies to take bets on the fixed races. But they had an out—the FBI. Zip was now on their payroll. John Morris was his supervisor, and he, too, would soon be on Whitey and Stevie's pad. Morris would later recall being introduced to both of Zip's prize informants at the same time—in itself a violation of FBI policy, which required that informants always be interviewed separately, so that they would not know who the other informants were, or what stories they were telling. There was one additional problem with Whitey and Stevie, Morris testified.

“I wasn't sure,” he said, “if they knew they were informants.”

Now Whitey and Stevie needed a favor—a big favor. And Zip came through. He and Morris went to the head of the organized-crime strike force, Jeremiah O'Sullivan, and told him that it was absolutely imperative for Bulger and Flemmi to remain free. The feds were planning an ambitious strike against In Town. They were going to wire Jerry Angiulo's headquarters, the Dog House, and they needed informants who could tell them how to get inside, and where to plant the bugs.

Of course Whitey had never once set foot inside 98 Prince Street, and he still owed a big favor to one of Angiulo's top enforcers, J. R. Russo. Stevie by his own admission had no use for Angiulo and his crew and avoided them whenever possible. But Zip made the pitch to O'Sullivan that only they could provide the inside information needed for the bugging to go forward. And he added that Whitey and Stevie hadn't really been involved in the race-fixing scheme. That was only the other guys, the Somerville crew. Zip had their word on that. Zip didn't mention Ciulla's testimony that they had shared in the profits. That would have been off-message.

O'Sullivan finally agreed to cut Whitey and Stevie out of the indictment. They would be listed, but only as “unindicted coconspirators.” Zip hurried back to Southie with the good news. Then it was up to Whitey and Stevie to break the news to Johnny Martorano.

Remember, other than them, by then I'm the only Hill partner left in Boston. I wasn't suspicious at all when they told me Zip had kept them out of the indictment. I was happy for them, and I was happy for me. I needed somebody back here to keep an eye on things—and to keep the money coming to me. By then, I knew I would have to go on the lam. You get tried with a bunch of other guys, chances are everybody's going to get convicted. I figured, I'll go to Florida and hang out maybe six months, like I told Patty's mother, until the trial is over, and then I'll come back. If they're acquitted, which I doubt but you never know, I can probably get the charges dismissed. If everyone else is convicted, I'll plea bargain for less time. I wasn't thinking it was the end. You figure, if you're a gangster, sooner or later you go to jail. Everybody does.

Going on the lam was, and still is, standard operating procedure. The reason was succinctly summed up by Sonny Mercurio when he was called as a witness during the 1997–98 hearings before Judge Wolf. Sonny was asked why he always left town when he was about to be indicted.

“Power of the lam means you get a lesser sentence,” he said. “I advocate everybody run away.”

*   *   *

THERE WAS
a lot to do to get ready to run away. First of all, Johnny needed new IDs. There was a guy who had a connection in the Framingham branch of the Registry of Motor Vehicles—Framingham John, they called him. On his new driver's license, Johnny became “Richard Aucoin.”

Next he set up a couple of safe houses, where he could hide out if he ever had to come back to Boston. One was an apartment in Medford that belonged to an ex-cop. Then, from an old girlfriend, he rented a room in Winthrop. That would be his main safe house. He bought furniture and dropped off a full wardrobe. He gave Stevie Flemmi his Winthrop phone number, the number Stevie passed on to Zip, who put it in the FBI report that Johnny wouldn't read until 2009.

Then Johnny drove to Florida with Patty, who would be accompanying him when he finally began the six-month “vacation.” They scouted out motels. Returning to Boston, Johnny introduced Stevie to Trooper Schneiderhan. That was what you did when you took it on the lam. When Stevie was a fugitive, he'd turned over his grease gun to Johnny, for use in the Indian war. Now Johnny was returning the favor, giving Stevie a Statie. Next Johnny worked out a system with Stevie so that he could stay in touch with everyone using pay phones.

We'd first set up a system of codes when Stevie was on the lam in Montreal. Here's how it worked. I would write down
KING JM LEAR
—ten letters, get it? Like there's ten numbers, including zero. So 1 is K, 2 is I, 3 is N, and so forth. If I want Stevie or anyone else to call me, I give 'em the number of a pay phone near wherever I'm staying, only with letters as the code for the phone number. All of South Florida back then was in the 305 area code. So I'd say, I'll be at N-R-J, and then give the rest of the number. Only instead of giving the phone number in ten digits, I use the letters that correspond to the numbers. Stevie was
KING SF LEAR
. It's the way I communicated with everybody—my parents, my kids, George Kaufman. As it turned out, I was the one calling out 99 percent of the time. I'd always have rolls of quarters in the car, so I could always make a call whenever I wanted.

Zip was still proving to be a valuable addition to the gang—or at least to Whitey and Stevie. In the summer of 1978, unknown gunmen invaded a Summer Street nightclub known as Blackfriars. In an after-hours drug-and-cash rip-off, they shot five men to death, including one of the owners and a former TV-news reporter. The shooters have never been positively identified.

Whitey read the stories in the papers and got an idea how he could make a score off the five murders. He called Zip and asked him if he could get the Boston Police Department to turn over to the FBI copies of their photos of the crime scene. Whitey was particularly interested in obtaining a few pictures of the murdered co-owner of Blackfriars.

Zip had the photos to Whitey within hours, and Whitey and Stevie quickly paid a visit to another local businessman, who they knew had owed $60,000 to the dead owner of Blackfriars. Whitey was his usual brusque self, informing the guy that he now owed Whitey sixty grand. Whitey, whose reputation by now preceded him, left the impression that he had murdered the five men, and didn't mind adding a sixth victim. “And if you think this is just a shakedown,” Whitey added with a sneer, “here are some pictures we took of the guy after we killed him, before we left.”