Hitman (48 page)

Then Johnny went to one of those downtown rent-a-stall garages in downtown Fort Lauderdale. He leased a double stall, with room for two cars. Then he drove to Callahan's condo in Plantation, picked up the Cadillac, and backed it into the garage.

On the day Callahan was to arrive, Johnny met Joe Mac at the garage and then they drove to the airport in separate vehicles, parking in the short-term garage. Joe Mac was watching the van while Johnny went inside the Delta terminal to meet Callahan. He'd caught the last flight of the evening out of Boston. It was about eleven o'clock on July 24, 1982.

He came off the plane and I picked up his suitcase and carried it back to the car. He got in the passenger side—it's my car, so I'm driving. I opened the back door to put his suitcase in, and that was when I picked up the .22 from under the blanket, reached around and shot him once, twice at the most, in the head. He slumped over, and I pushed him off the chair and onto the floor, where the rubber mat could catch any blood without it leaving a stain.

LAWYER:
You didn't look into his eyes when you shot him in the head, did you?

MARTORANO:
No.

LAWYER:
Now sir, you just shot your friend in the head after a half-hour meeting with Mr. Bulger, who convinced you to kill your friend. How did you feel when you shot him in the head?

MARTORANO:
I felt lousy.

LAWYER:
You felt bad?

MARTORANO:
I didn't want to kill a guy that I cared enough about to kill somebody for a year before.

Now we have to move the body into his own car, but the problem is, the garage is closed until 7
A.M.
, so Joe and I have to sit on my van all night. There's an all-night Albertson's supermarket right near the garage, so we drop the van in the parking lot there. But we have to keep an eye on it because if it gets stolen, I'm in big trouble. See, it's registered in my name—Richard Aucoin's name. It's not like the Indian Al hit, where we dumped the body in a boiler. That time it was a break for us that the car got stolen off the street. It confused everything for a while, which is usually what you want. But this time if they find the body in that car it can be traced right back to me. So Joe and I watched it all night from his car. I think we only left once, to get some coffee.

Next morning at seven, as soon as the garage opens, we're there. We leave Joe's car outside the garage, and back my van into the bay and close the garage doors and lock them. And that's when Joe thinks he hears something from Callahan, a moan or something. It was probably just some of those noises that bodies make sometimes after they're dead, but Joe didn't want to take any chances. He says, give me your gun, and he shoots Callahan a couple of more times, just to make sure he's dead.

Then we put his body in the trunk of the Cadillac. Joe took his watch and later on his way home he drove into Little Havana and stopped in a Cuban bar and left the watch in the men's room. We were hoping it would be found by a Cuban and then end up in a pawn shop on Eighth Street there. The cops are always checking the pawn shops, and if it ends up there, it backs up Whitey's story about Cubans. Joe also took his credit cards, and some papers from his suitcase and left everything in the bar there too, to make it look like a robbery.

Finally, we wiped the Caddy down, getting rid of any fingerprints. After it was clean I put on flesh-colored gloves to drive it down to the airport in Miami. I drove with the gloves on, except when I went through the tolls. The toll taker might not have noticed, but you can't take any chances. Joe followed me in his own car.

It was Whitey's idea for the body to be found. I wanted to make him disappear. By then I had a twenty-eight-foot boat. I was living on the Intercoastal in Fort Lauderdale, at a place called The Pilot. I had my boat out back. All I would have had to do was take a nice day trip and get out far enough to dump him in the ocean. The sharks would have taken care of everything.

Johnny in his boat off Fort Lauderdale.

At Miami International Airport a couple of days later, the smell from the Cadillac became overpowering. Underneath the back of the car cops noticed a puddle from a gooey substance that was dripping out of the trunk.

Another gangland hit in the Sunshine State.

It made the papers, both in South Florida and in Boston. Patty read the stories. All Johnny told her was that perhaps it was time to hit the road again.

Back in Boston, Whitey and Stevie moved quickly. Callahan had been involved in a number of business deals, and they went to as many of his partners as they could find. Callahan's business associates all got variations on the same theme: Callahan had died owing Whitey and Stevie money. In some cases, the partners turned over the keys to safe-deposit boxes. Whitey and Stevie even tried to shake down Callahan's widow, after expressing their condolences about John's unfortunate passing at the hands of those bloodthirsty Cubans.

They grabbed a lot of dough. I think they may have even sent me a little, if I had any idea who they were shaking down. But if I didn't know about it, they didn't cut me in, and being right there in Boston, they had the ability to find out a lot more than I did.

Later on, after I got back to Boston, I ran into one of Callahan's business partners who I'd known casually before I left. He told me Whitey and Stevie stole a half million off him. He said he'd always regretted not standing up to them, not throwing Whitey out of his office when Whitey came looking for dough. He said he could tell Whitey was lying, that Callahan didn't owe Whitey and Stevie a dime. I told the guy, you absolutely did the right thing, giving up the money, not going to the cops. He would have just gotten himself killed, trying to stand up to those guys. They had all the juice back then.

A few months later, Joe Mac called Johnny. He had one question: Was the jai-alai deal dead? He wanted Johnny to put the question directly to H. Paul Rico. Johnny had never met Rico, so he got Stevie to arrange a meeting. A few days later, Stevie flew down to Miami with one of his off-and-on girlfriends, an Italian woman named Janey. She'd been out of the picture during Stevie's Debbie Davis period, but now she was back in the mix. Stevie left Janey at the hotel and he and Johnny drove to the fronton in Miami.

Now, I'm not too crazy about going in there, you follow me? I mean, I know Joe isn't sending me into a trap, but Rico's FBI, or was, and he's hired all these other agents to work the fronton, to keep guys like me out, supposedly. But I gotta find out from the horse's mouth; I promised Joe. So we walk in there, me and Stevie, and we take the elevator up to this private dining room area. It's for high rollers; they got the betting windows right there. Stevie introduces me to Rico, we shake hands, sit down, and I say, “Joe wanted to ask you, is anything happening on the deal?” And he says, “Nothing's doing yet.” And I said, “That's all I needed to know.” I stood up and said to Stevie, “I'll be waiting for you outside. Take as long as you want.” And then I said, “Nice meeting you, Mr. Rico.”

About five minutes later, Stevie comes out and we leave, walking very casually. I know he's got all these FBI agents there, but no one's making a move to collar me. And then I knew, I mean I really understood for the first time, that all the rumors about Rico were true.

In Boston, Whitey and Stevie kept busy. A bold group of thieves, including several corrupt police officers, had broken in the Depositors Trust Bank in Medford on Memorial Day weekend 1980, cleaning out hundreds of safe-deposit boxes, including some that belonged to organized-crime figures, including one of the Angiulo brothers.

Whitey and Stevie began an investigation of their own, by kidnapping a guy out of a Charlestown bar whom they suspected of being involved. He quickly gave up the name of the architect of the multimillion-dollar burglary—a criminal jack-of-all-trades named Bucky Barrett. But the Depositors Trust crew also had clout—Bucky was tight with Frankie Salemme, who was still in state prison for the Fitzgerald bombing. When Salemme told him that he'd ripped off some guys from In Town, Bucky did the right thing and returned their loot. Cadillac Frank told Barrett not to worry about Whitey and Stevie.

“Jackals,” he said, when Barrett visited him at MCI-Norfolk. “That's all those two are—jackals.”

Whitey and Stevie had to lay off for a while, but they had long memories. In 1983, they had one of their minions dangle the lure of cheap, stolen diamonds in front of Bucky, and he walked into a trap in Southie. Soon Whitey and Stevie had him tied to a chair in the kitchen of a house belonging to a relative of one of the gang members.

They wanted all of the Depositors Trust loot, but Bucky told them a lot of it had been returned to the Angiulos. He offered them $60,000 that he had hidden under the refrigerator in his home. They gave him a phone and he told his wife to turn off the burglar alarm and to then leave the house. Whitey then sent a guy to Bucky's house to get the cash. Meanwhile, Barrett called a bar in Quincy Market and told somebody that he was sending a guy down in a cab to pick up $10,000 cash. Then he phoned a couple of other Charlestown hoodlums and asked them if they could help him out. They turned him down flat. Finally, Whitey told Bucky Barrett it was time to go into the basement.

Bucky Barrett, murdered by Whitey in 1983.

He walked slowly down the stairs, Whitey following him, holding in his hand a Mac10 machine gun equipped with a silencer. Whitey put it to Bucky's head and pulled the trigger. Stevie then used his new dental kit to pull most of Bucky's teeth.

Some of the gang members dug a grave in the basement, and then Stevie's man, Phil Costa, arrived with quicklime, to make the body decompose faster. They spread a layer at the bottom of the grave, threw the body in, and then poured what was left of the quicklime on top of the body.

Phil Costa, the Flemmi associate who provided quicklime to hasten the decomposition of Barrett's body.

The Barrett family never recovered from Bucky's disappearance. Over the next decade, two of his sons would commit suicide in the exact same way—by hurling themselves in front of Red Line trains.

*   *   *

STEVIE WAS
having more girlfriend problems, this time with Marion Hussey's daughter, Deborah, with whom Stevie had been having sex since she was thirteen. As she grew older, Deb Hussey had become a drug addict. Stevie got her a job as a bar waitress in a rough organized-crime hangout on Geneva Avenue in Dorchester, and soon she was turning tricks.

In yet another wrongful-death lawsuit against the federal government in 2009, Marion Hussey testified how one day in 1982, she returned home from her job at a bank to find Stevie beating up Deborah. As Flemmi put it in a 2005 deposition, “She was doing a lot of things I didn't approve of.” Marion Hussey described what happened next.

“I said to him, ‘You've got to get her out of here.' That's when she said something about blowing him. She said, ‘I've been doing it for years.'”