Hitman (27 page)

“There's $2,000 in there,” Eddie Ardolino told Howie. “That's all he's got and he borrowed this from his mother.” He shook his head. “I'm telling you, Howie, don't ever do nothing with this guy. He's a big piece of shit.”

Within a couple of weeks, though, Howie was often huddling in a back booth with Fat Tony. Like Ciulla, Howie loved the horses, and both owned a few. Tony had been fixing races, or at least trying to, ever since he was a kid. He'd done time for race fixing in Rhode Island, and he'd also been arrested at least once at Suffolk Downs. But now he claimed to have worked out a system. Johnny was wary; he trusted the judgment of both Jerry Angiulo and Eddie Ardolino. But they all needed money.

Eddie Ardolino, Ciulla's brother-in-law, who warned Howie Winter against doing business with Fat Tony.

*   *   *

JOHNNY MIGHT
be hanging out in a slightly more upscale neighborhood now, but sometimes he had to deal with an issue from out of the past—like Nelson Padron, the Roxbury drug dealer he'd pistol-whipped at Slade's for the Campbells.

In February 1973, when Padron was about to go away on an income-tax-evasion rap, he got into his head that he was going to settle a few old scores before he left, starting with Johnny Martorano.

One Saturday night, a woman Martorano knew came running into Chandler's and told Johnny that Nelson was in Roxbury telling people he was going to get Martorano. It wasn't the first time Johnny had heard that Nelson was shooting his mouth off, so all night he kept a close eye on the traffic outside on Dartmouth Street. Finally, after midnight, he saw Padron's silver Mercedes convertible glide past Chandler's.

Johnny wordlessly nodded at Nicky Femia, one of Barboza's old crew who happened to be drinking at Chandler's that evening. They hurriedly left the bar and got into Johnny's car, Femia at the wheel, Johnny in the back with a carbine.

When Nelson comes back around down Columbus and turns right onto Dartmouth Street, we pull up beside him and I let go with the carbine. The next day it was in the papers that the cops said they'd found six bullet holes in the car. But I know I only had time to shoot twice, before Nelson stopped the car. We had to keep driving.

Poor Nelson, he was hit pretty bad but somehow he managed to drive all the way to Mass. General, and then he crashed the Mercedes into an abutment. He was on the danger list for a while, and with all the bullet holes, the cops had probable cause to search his car. They found a bag of coke, an unregistered handgun, and $2,400 cash in the car. I still remember the headline in the
Herald
: “He's riddled by bullets, is arrested.”

From then on, whenever I saw Nelson, he was on a cane.

In the daytime, the gang still congregated at Howie Winter's garage—Marshall Motors. Chandler's was a nicer place to hang, but it couldn't accommodate that many wiseguys. It would have been too obvious. So the garage in Somerville was the most logical place for the gang to have its headquarters, and its location soon gave the new mob its name—the Winter Hill Gang. The fact that Howie Winter was one of the bosses of the gang was nothing more than coincidence.

In the front of the building, there was an actual garage, run by Johnny's brother Jimmy and Johnny's old friend George Kaufman. Yet another hood born in 1929, the mild-mannered Kaufman first served as a liaison to the gang members in prison or on the lam, and later to the Jewish bookies from whom “the Hill” would extract tribute.

In the back of the building were the “offices” of Howie and Johnny. Nobody who owed money ever wanted to be taken back there. On the wall was a poster of two vultures perched on a dead tree in the middle of a desert, with one vulture saying to the other,
PATIENCE
,
HELL
,
I WANT TO KILL SOMEBODY
.

Next to his desk Howie had a trapdoor built into the floor, leading to the unfinished basement. What the trapdoor was used for was left to the imaginations of his visitors, most of whom owed the Hill money, and all of whom had heard chilling stories about the gang.

Farther down Marshall Street, Winter owned a house. He lived upstairs and for a nominal rent allowed the other gang members to use the ground floor as a more informal clubhouse than the garage—the Pad, they called it. Joe McDonald's Fire House was a few doors south.

With so many known hoodlums congregating in the area, even the Somerville police couldn't totally ignore the comings and goings. Occasionally they or the state police would raid the garage. So all the mob's hardware—guns, silencers, stolen cars, etc.—had to be stashed elsewhere. For that purpose, the gang rented a bank of garages a few hundred yards away, at the top of Winter Hill. The garages were particularly useful because the stolen cars—the ones that would be used on hits—could be brought into the garages through a back alley that was not visible from the street. The Hill called the stolen cars “boilers” because they were so hot.

The garages were also where shotguns could be sawed off, and bodies occasionally dismembered.

*   *   *

WHITEY BULGER
was the only original partner who didn't have some ties to Somerville, but he, too, quickly began spending at least a few hours at the garage every weekday. From the start, though, he was a man apart. Everyone else parked at the garage, but Whitey would always get out across Broadway from the garage in the supermarket parking lot. He always insisted on driving himself, but he brought with him one of his older Southie guys, Jack Curran, who would then drive Whitey's car back to Southie.

After getting out of his car, Whitey would pull down his hat and wrap his coat collar up around his neck before walking across the street, in case any cops who had the place under surveillance hadn't figured out that he showed up there every morning at the same time. He'd leave the garage the same way around 3
P.M.
, crossing Broadway and getting back into the driver's seat, while Curran slid across the seat to the passenger's side.

Jack Curran drove Whitey's car back to Southie each day after Bulger arrived at the garage.

As time went on, more and more hoods frequented the garage. As the old saying went, if you were indicted, you were invited. Now that the gang war against the McLaughlins was a fading memory, Charlestown guys started stopping by, as well as Teamsters from Local 25, and ocassionally Whitey Bulger's still-uneasy Mullen allies. Black guys from Roxbury occasionally came by to pay their respects to Johnny. The garage was also a good place to get their cars fixed. George Kaufman didn't ask any questions about bullet holes, or dark, sticky stains on the floorboards.

The Hill had long been home to many of Boston's more colorful gangsters. One of Howie's closest associates from Charlestown was a guy named Tommy Ballou. Ballou always carried two personal possessions: a $100 bill and a longshoreman's grappling hook.

Tommy Ballou, a colorful Charlestown hoodlum murdered in 1970.

If he ever got in a barroom brawl, Ballou would try to get face-to-face with the guy he was taking on. Before his foe could jump him, Ballou would pull out his C-note and throw it up in the air. Usually, the other brawler would be at least half drunk, and would pause just long enough to watch the bill float to the floor, then lean over to pick it up. Which was Tommy Ballou's cue to grab his grappling hook and sink it into the other guy's back, thereby ending the fight.

Ballou had been shot to death in Charlestown a couple of years earlier, but other colorful characters remained on the scene. One of the Local 25 wiseguys had once decided on the spur of the moment to rob the bank on Winter Hill where he had his own accounts, and where, much like the
Cheers
bar, everyone knew his name.

After the robbery, the hood quickly realized the extent of his folly. He drove straight to a drug-addled physician who'd been stripped of his license to practice, and who had lately been working under the table, including supplying the drugs that Fat Tony Ciulla sometimes used to fix horse races. The hood ordered the quack to break his leg, then set it, and forge a set of medical documents indicating that he'd been wearing the cast for weeks. That way he could “prove” he couldn't have robbed the bank, despite what all the eyewitnesses said. He beat the rap, although he would later be indicted in Local 25 shakedowns.

LAWYER:
What was Mr. Bulger's role in the gang?

MARTORANO:
Intimidating people, mostly.

Many of the hoods, even Mafia members, stayed around the garage to socialize while having their cars serviced by the garage crews who worked for Kaufman and Jimmy Martorano. Sometimes the other mobsters would wander back into the gang's offices, jangling their car keys. If they were too loud, Whitey would jump up and order them to stop shaking the keys. He couldn't take it, he said. It reminded him of the “screws” at Alcatraz.

Local women—some wannabe molls, others just salt-of-the-earth neighborhood types—would regularly stop by with home-cooked food for the boys. Whitey seethed whenever any female wandered into the garage. He talked even more about women than he did about Alcatraz, or about taking massive doses of LSD in CIA-sponsored experiments while he was in prison in Atlanta in the late 1950s.

“Women should be subservient,” Whitey would say, over and over again. “He who controls the purse strings controls everything.”

At which point, the Somerville guys would surreptitiously steal glances at one another, trying not to let Whitey see their smirks. This guy had obviously never met their broads. They figured he was just running around with project girls from Southie who didn't know any better. Like Teresa Stanley, his longtime girlfriend. When they were out for dinner, Whitey never allowed her to have more than two drinks, so the other guys in the gang would wait until Whitey went to the men's room, and then they'd let her gulp down a couple of quick ones. Once Teresa was half in the bag, she'd start mouthing off to Whitey, and that would really drive him over the edge.

When it came to women, Whitey tried to practice what he preached. One time, a couple of the Mullens were over at his apartment in Quincy. They were all sitting at the kitchen table when suddenly Whitey yelled at one of his girlfriends to bring him his slippers.

She obediently complied with his order, bringing him the slippers and offering them to him as he sat at the table with his men. Whitey glared at her.

“I want you to put them on for me,” he said, barely controlling his rage. The woman knew better than to talk back to him. She immediately dropped to her knees and crawled under the table. Then, after struggling to remove the tight-fitting boots he always wore outside, she gently placed the slippers on his feet.

Later on, I heard he told people he was afraid to have kids because of all the LSD he'd taken in those CIA prison experiments in Atlanta back in the 1950s. Remember all those scare stories they put out in the '60s about LSD causing chromosome damage?