Hitman (45 page)

“We shouldn't have involved you to begin with,” Callahan said. Halloran then went out and bought himself a new car, parked it at Logan Airport, and flew off to Fort Lauderdale for a two-week bender.

Callahan was also headed for Fort Lauderdale.

He tells me he's been talking to Whitey and Stevie, that they're in, and they want me to handle it out in Oklahoma. Nobody tells me nothing about Halloran being offered the contract. Callahan says he's also been talking to Rico, and Rico wants me to ask Joe McDonald to help out. That surprised me, but I called Joe, and he says, “Yeah, I do owe Rico a favor.” That's when he tells me how Rico set up Ronnie Dermody for Buddy McLean back in '64. So here's Rico calling in the marker almost twenty years later, and the guy who's paying off, Joe Mac, isn't even the guy who ran up the original tab, he's just doing it for his friend who's been dead fifteen years now. But that's how it worked back then, just like Whitey called in the favor I owed Billy O.

So I got back to Stevie, and told him Joe's in. Then I told him what equipment we'd need for the hit. They sent it all down on the bus. Next thing Callahan gives me a piece of paper from Rico. He's written down all of Wheeler's addresses, where he parks his car, everything. At the bottom there was a description of what Wheeler looks like—Rico said he had a “ruddy complexion.” A ruddy complexion—when I read that I knew a cop had written it, an FBI guy. John Callahan or anybody else would have said, “a red face.” “Ruddy complexion” is how an FBI guy talks when he's trying to impress somebody, even another cop.

So now we have to fly out there, to Oklahoma. I tell Patty, Why don't you go back to Boston to see Loretta? I told her, I'm meeting one of my kids at Disney World. She doesn't believe me, but what can I do, tell her I'm going out to Oklahoma to kill some guy? She'd go, “Yeah sure.” It got so that I'd tell her a lie and she'd believe it. You tell her the truth, she says you're lying. I'm telling you, guys know exactly what I'm talking about.

Richard Aucoin and John Kelly—Joe Mac's alias—flew out to Oklahoma City on the same flight, sitting far apart. They rented a car, then drove to Tulsa, about an hour away. They changed motels every couple of days. All of Rico's information was solid, but they had to wait for the package to arrive at the bus station—handguns, a carbine, a grease gun, silencers, bulletproof vests, ski masks, a shimmy, and a dent puller for stealing cars. It was the standard Winter Hill hit kit, minus grenades. In a bit of underworld humor, the package was addressed to “Joe Russo”—the Boston Mafia's top hitman.

Joe stole the boiler, popped the ignition, and we stashed it near the country club in a big apartment complex. Joe was sixty-five, but you'd think he was twenty-five. He was a ball of fire. One of his kids had gotten hurt real bad in an accident, so he wasn't even thinking about drinking.

Then I get an update from Callahan. Rico gave him a tee-time for Wheeler at his country club, two o'clock Saturday. We drive out to the golf course, Southern Hills Country Club. We spot his Caddy, but remember, I've still never seen this guy. So we park a few rows closer to the club. I'm in full disguise—we'd picked up that stuff at a theatrical store in Tulsa. Full beard, sunglasses, a baseball cap.

The body of Roger Wheeler in his car in Tulsa in 1981. Crouching, wearing suspenders, is Tulsa police detective Mike Huff, who 22 years later would arrest H. Paul Rico in Miami for Wheeler's murder.

Finally I see a guy coming down the hill from the club to the parking lot, might be Wheeler. I let him walk past our car, then I fall in behind him. If he gets in the Caddy, I clip him. If he goes to another car, I just keep walking. But it's him, he's getting in the car. He doesn't hear me, he's about to close the door but I grab it to keep it open. He jumps back in the seat, startled, and I let him have it, one shot, between the eyes, .38 snub nose. But when I fired, the gun exploded. The chamber flew open, the bullets fell out—I'd wiped them down as I was loading the gun, so there were no prints. I just left the bullets there on the pavement. I closed the door to Wheeler's car; I walked back to our car, got in, and Joe drove off.

LAWYER:
Did he say anything when he got shot?

MARTORANO:
Not that I heard.

LAWYER:
Did he seem surprised he was going to die?

MARTORANO:
I think it was too fast.

LAWYER:
Let me ask you something, when you had the gun that close to his face, did you look at his eyes?

MARTORANO:
No.

LAWYER:
Did he look at you?

MARTORANO:
I wasn't thinking about that, no.

LAWYER:
What were you thinking about?

MARTORANO:
Getting away with this.

They drove directly back to the apartment complex, dropped off the boiler, and got back into the rental car. Then they returned to their hotel, where Joe chopped up the .38 with a special saw that had been sent down from Boston. Johnny meanwhile was cutting up the false beard with some scissors, then flushing the pieces down the toilet. They'd driven by a marsh one day, and now they returned, Joe driving, Johnny throwing the pieces of the gun into the water.

Then they drove back to Oklahoma City, where they stopped at the bus station to check the hit kit. It would be shipped back to Fort Lauderdale, where Joe would store it, just in case. You never knew. Then Johnny flew back to Orlando, and Joe caught the next plane back to Fort Lauderdale.

I get home, I call Patty in Somerville, I tell her to come back home. A couple of days later, she's back and she's stewing, I can tell. Finally she says to me, I don't believe you went to Disney World to see your kid. I got no way of checking up on you, she says. She figured I was with another broad. It was a question of trust, and there was none. But like I said, under the circumstances, what was I supposed to tell her?

Callahan was pleased. He'd been afraid he was going to be indicted, but now he didn't have to worry. His next trip to Florida, he sat down with Johnny and told him he wanted to express his gratitude.

He said he wanted to help out on the expenses, and how did $50,000 sound? I told him it sounded good. It was like a bonus, a gesture of appreciation, like Jerry Angiulo with Indian Al. Both cases it was found money. I never discussed payment for killing with either Angiulo or Callahan. It was a favor. I mean, I took it, sure, but a hit like that—if you were doing it for money, it would have to be worth a million. I did it because Callahan was a friend. So I figured, Joe's gotta get half of it, because he's my partner on the deal. That leaves me $25,000, but Whitey and Stevie are my partners too, so each of them gets a third, the same as me. So I arranged for Callahan to get the money to the various parties. I think Leo McDonald got 25 grand for Joe, and then George Kaufman got the $25,000 and split it three ways. I ended up with, like, eight grand.

After that, every once in a while I'd ask Callahan, what's the update? Rico had said, once Wheeler's gone, we can try to buy the place from the widow. Callahan tells me he'd made another offer, but it was turned down again. I don't even know how hard they were trying, because once Wheeler was gone, Rico somehow won his son over, so he was back in tight with the owners.

Back in Tulsa, the investigation into Wheeler's murder went nowhere. The trails quickly led back to Boston and Miami, but the FBI offices in both cities were less than helpful to the Oklahoma cops. The Boston office finally agreed to send down mug shots of Whitey and Stevie—but when the photos arrived, the Tulsa police were amazed that the two gangsters were wearing suits and ties, as if the feds were trying to make them look as little like Wheeler's killer as possible.

The FBI report on Wheeler's murder painted a remarkably unsympathetic portrait of Wheeler. The feds more or less described him as an unscrupulous, tax-evading sonofabitch, a variation on Callahan's theme with Johnny that he “cheated” at golf.

Zip Connolly told Whitey and Stevie to dress up in suits and ties before the FBI took their mug shots in 1981 to send to the Tulsa police.

Tulsa police detective Mike Huff flew to Miami to interview H. Paul Rico in his well-appointed chambers at the World Jai Alai fronton. Rico was obdurate, refusing to answer even the simplest questions. He didn't even bother to hide his contempt for the Oklahoma lawman.

“I walked out of Rico's office in a state of disbelief,” Huff said in 2010. “I'd been expecting to talk to another cop, and instead I ran into the Godfather.”

*   *   *

AS MUCH
as the Boston FBI had done for Whitey, it had done at least as much for his younger brother, Sen. Billy Bulger. In the mid-seventies, Billy was stuck in the number-three position in the leadership of the state senate, with no place to go. Then, the senate president suddenly resigned in a scandal over an old $1,000 check. Even more fortuitously for Billy, the majority leader, a younger man, also from Suffolk County, was suddenly ensnared in a bribery case involving state building contracts. His name was Joe DiCarlo.

DiCarlo had a lot of clout, and was assured by the then U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill of Cambridge that he would not be indicted. But then the FBI abruptly reopened the investigation, flying Boston agents to Texas to interview new witnesses. DiCarlo was indicted and convicted, along with a Republican senator who served as his bagman.

Suddenly, in 1978, Billy Bulger was the president of the state senate.

Quickly, Billy began settling scores with his own enemies—and Whitey's. Whitey had been fired years earlier from his no-show janitor's job at the Suffolk County courthouse—his old boss and his top staff had their pay frozen in the state budget for five years. Jack O'Donovan, the lieutenant colonel in the state police who had complained to the FBI about Whitey's insidious influence on their agents, was targeted in an anonymous rider to the 1981 state budget that would have forced him and three other senior MSP brass to retire. The governor vetoed the provision, and Billy Bulger said he had no idea who had inserted the outside rider designed to end O'Donovan's career.

A Boston judge who refused to hire another crony of Bulger's had his staff slashed and “is now holding court in a Winnebago,” as one of Billy's senate stooges joked, openly, at Billy's televised St. Patrick's Day breakfast.

The politically connected audience cracked up.

Jackie Bulger was the youngest Bulger brother. He'd graduated from high school and gone to work at a fish market in Roslindale. Eventually Billy got him a job at the courthouse, but the clerk's job Jackie wanted was occupied. No problem—the clerk was appointed to a judgeship, and Jackie became the clerk of the Boston Juvenile Court.

Jackie's ex-wife, too, got a job in the courts. His daughter went to work for her uncle Billy at the State House. Both Jackie's son and son-in-law got jobs with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. It was the same for everyone in the Bulger family. They all had state jobs—everyone except Whitey.

Soon Whitey, too, was feeling his oats. After the murder of Louie Litif, a reporter for the
Herald American
named Paul Corsetti began poking around, looking for a story. Whitey called the reporter anonymously, leading him on with tidbits of information. He offered Corsetti the whole story of Litif's slaying if he would meet him in a bar at Quincy Market. Whitey was waiting when Corsetti arrived. He introduced himself by saying, “I'm Jimmy Bulger, motherfucker.” Then Whitey read the reporter a list of addresses where he lived and worked and where his young daughter attended day care. Finally he told the reporter the makes, models, and license plates of the cars he and his wife drove. Then Whitey abruptly got off his barstool and walked out without a word.

The next day Corsetti arrived in the city room wearing a holster on his hip, with a .38. Word traveled fast. Suddenly there was a lot less coverage of organized crime—in the
Globe
as well as the
Herald American.