Hitman (50 page)

One day in January 1983, he pleaded guilty in federal court to the race-fixing counts. The next morning, he was in Suffolk Superior Court to take the fall on various gambling and gun charges and even a few minor traffic violations, including running a red light on Columbus Avenue in the South End. He got four years total, to be served in state prison.

As Sims was taken from the courtroom in handcuffs, he asked the guards, “Do they have televisions in Walpole?”

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JERRY ANGIULO
was having dinner at Francesco's on North Washington Street on September 19, 1983, when FBI agents arrived to arrest him. As he was led away in handcuffs, he shouted back at the other patrons, “I'll be back before my pork chops get cold.”

He wouldn't see the street again until 2007. In Town was on its way out. As for “the Man,” Raymond L. S. Patriarca, he died of a heart attack in 1983 at age seventy-five while getting a blow job, at least according to underworld lore.

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H. PAUL RICO
was staying busy. Alcee Hastings was the first black federal judge in Florida, appointed by President Jimmy Carter. It quickly became apparent that he was utterly corrupt, and soon the FBI realized they had a perfect opportunity to take him down.

Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss of Tampa, was coming up for sentencing in front of Hastings. What if the FBI could get an undercover agent masquerading as a mobster close enough to Hastings, or his bagman, to obtain enough evidence to indict him?

The only question was, did the FBI have an agent who could pass himself off as a top-level gangster? It didn't take long for the feds to come up with a perfect match—retired agent H. Paul Rico. Rico “pretended” to be a gangster, an emissary from Trafficante, and soon had more than enough evidence to end Hastings's squalid career on the bench.

Hastings was indicted, but a predominantly black jury in Miami refused to convict. However, he was then impeached in the U.S. House and convicted in a Senate trial. Hastings was removed from the federal bench, but in 1992 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from a majority-black district in South Florida. According to his Congressional website, Hastings is still known to many as ‘Judge.'”

Special Agent Rico, meanwhile, was flown to Washington to testify before a Senate committee, which presented him with a commendation for his years of selfless service to the people of the United States of America.

*   *   *

COCAINE WAS
extracting a fearful toll on Johnny's old friends back in Boston. Nicky Femia had been in the old Barboza crew. After the breakup of the old Winter Hill Gang, Whitey had brought him aboard as hired muscle. But Whitey couldn't abide his drug use, and later fired him.

By October 1983, Femia had graduated to heroin, and he tried to hold up an auto-body shop, of all things, in East Boston. Holding a gun on the owner, he was staring off into the distance, yelling at someone who wasn't there. That gave the shop owner long enough to grab his own gun and kill Nicky Femia.

Sid Tildsley was a Somerville associate of the old gang. He ran the Broadway barroom around the corner from the Marshall Street garage, known over the years by various names, among them the Peppermint Lounge, Pal Joey's, and finally El Sid's. Tildsley was a runner for the gang during the race-fixing days, as was another Somerville guy named Bobby Duda. Both of them pleaded guilty and did short bits.

After Duda was released from prison, he got heavily into cocaine. One night he and Tildsley were drinking in a bar in Union Square when suddenly Duda pulled out a gun and shot Tildsley between the eyes. A few days later, Duda's body was found in a cheap motel room outside New York City. He had hanged himself.

Weasel Mantville, the old Mullen gang member whom Whitey had tried to blame for the Halloran hit, followed Femia's footsteps in graduating from cocaine to heroin. Soon he, too, was dead. Now Whitey could blame Weasel for anything.

The Campbell brothers also went down in 1983, on various gun and drug charges. Inside Alvin Campbell's suburban Boston home, cops found a veritable library of books and videotapes about organized crime. They also discovered clips about one murder in particular—that of Roger Wheeler in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1981. If the cops were still baffled by the slaying, Alvin Campbell certainly wasn't.

*   *   *

JOHNNY HEARD
about all of this secondhand, sometimes from Stevie, but more often from George Kaufman. Johnny had his own headaches, trying to support his various families. As the (absentee) father of the brides, he picked up the tabs for the weddings of Jeannie and Lisa. His son Vincent was attending a private high school in Beverly. Over four years, the tuition cost Johnny $100,000. He also had the monthly payments on the two mortgages on the houses in Medford and Chestnut Hill.

I was in and out of the sports gambling business all those years. Basically I was bankrolling different guys. George handled most of it for me. He lived on Kent Street off Beacon in Brookline. I would call him at home and tell him to “meet” me in five minutes. That meant he would go to the phone booth by the 1200, and I'd call him there.

I'd lend guys money, too. When Jimmy Sims got out of prison around '87, he wanted to get back into the sports gambling business. I got him $15,000. Then he disappeared. To this day nobody knows what happened to him. That's one murder nobody has ever confessed to.

After the Callahan hit, Johnny and Patty had gone on the road for about six months before settling down again in Pompano Beach in 1983. Johnny had met a car dealer named Jeff Jenkins, who quickly became one of his best friends.

But Johnny and Patty weren't settled in their new digs in Pompano Beach long before Stevie called with an urgent message from Whitey. Johnny had been spotted in a bar, and the report had gotten back to the FBI office in Boston. Zip just wanted to make sure that Johnny knew he had to hit the road again, and that he would be needing new IDs.

That's one of the counts the feds got Zip on in the Boston trial, tipping me to the sighting. After that Richard Aucoin was no more. I became “Vincent Rancourt.” It was a name from a Canadian driver's license. I think I found it on Hillsborough Beach one day, in a wallet somebody lost. There were always a lot of Canadians on that beach. The good thing about the license was, there was no photo on it, so I could switch it down to Florida no problem.

In 1983, a city councilor from South Boston named Ray Flynn was elected mayor of Boston. Billy Bulger had briefly considered running himself, but even in the city he was distinctly unpopular, at least outside of Southie.

After Flynn's election, he was approached by Senate President Bulger. A former state legislator himself, Flynn knew how much he needed a powerful ally at the State House, to assure a steady stream of local aid to city coffers, and to make sure that any legislation City Hall needed would not be bottled up in committee or killed.

Billy sat down with Flynn, whom he had never much liked, considering him a publicity hound. But Billy said he was willing to let bygones be bygones, if only for the sake of the city. All he had was one small favor to ask of the new mayor.

Would the new mayor appoint Zip Connolly police commissioner?

Flynn recoiled. He was, after all, from Southie. He knew who Zip was, and what he was. He turned Bulger down flat, and instead gave the coveted job to another Southie native, a guy named Mickey Roache, whose brother Whitey and Billy O'Sullivan had shot and paralyzed in the Colonial Lounge on West Broadway back in 1971.

Billy Bulger never forgave Ray Flynn. His legislation was always hamstrung at the State House, and he became a butt of endless jokes every year at the St. Patrick's Day breakfast.

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LEAVING POMPANO
Beach, Johnny and Patty hit the road in one of Johnny's mobile homes. In 1985 they settled down again at tennis great Rod Laver's development in Delray Beach. Then Patty got pregnant, and Johnny figured it would be better if she went home to Somerville and stuck close to Loretta until the baby was born.

Jimmy was born at St. Elizabeth's in Brighton. I called Stevie and told him to ask Whitey if he'd mind being Jimmy's godfather. Whitey said sure. Stevie and Whitey both went to the christening; it was at St. Anne's in Somerville. They sat in the back, didn't say anything. From then on, every Christmas Whitey would send Jimmy a $20 gold coin. He never saw Jimmy, but Whitey always sent him that gold coin every year.

After Jimmy was born, Johnny drove his mobile home north to New Jersey. There was a trailer park on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel where he always stayed when he came to the city. He told Patty to fly down to New York with the baby. He'd pick her up, and then they'd drive back to Florida together.

But when I picked them up and drove back to Jersey, Jimmy was just crying and crying and crying. He wouldn't stop. It got so bad we figured something had to be wrong. We finally took him to a hospital in Jersey City. They knew right away—they did a spinal tap. It was spinal meningitis. But they didn't have a trauma unit, so they wanted to send him to a bigger hospital, Bergen something-or-other.

Thank God I had a lot of cash with me, because of course I didn't have any health insurance. I had to pay cash for the ambulance, and then when we get to the hospital, we realize it's in a tough, tough neighborhood. The hospital staff told us, don't wear any gold in here or somebody might stick you up in the stairwells. That was a problem because you had to use the stairs. The elevators weren't going all the way up, and they had Jimmy on the eleventh floor. The security was so bad I was concerned Jimmy might get snatched.

I talked to this Indian doctor who ran the unit, and I convinced him to combine two single rooms, so Patty and I could stay with Jimmy, on shifts, just to make sure nothing happened to him. Plus I was paying nurses cash—$100 per shift.

It was tough, watching a little baby that sick. And I was concerned about Patty, too. She was frantic. I was afraid she'd climb up on the roof and just jump off.

We were there in that hospital for a couple of weeks, and I'm telling you, the whole experience made me realize what I'd missed with my other kids. That's when I turned into “Mr. Mom.” When I was sentenced, that's what some of my neighbors in Boca called me in their letters to the judge. Mr. Mom. After Jimmy almost died, I wanted to spend as much time with the kids as possible.

Johnny with his son Jimmy at Disney World, late 1980s.

Back in Florida, Johnny and Patty decided to settle down as best they could, considering their circumstances. Johnny asked Jeff Jenkins if he knew of any houses for sale. Jenkins told him that one of his neighbors in Boca Raton had a brand-new house that he was looking to unload.

But of course there was that old problem—I couldn't own anything in my own name. I'd always told Jenkins I was a gambler. That's what I always told people I met in Florida if they asked me. Later on, I started saying that I was “retired.” Hey, it was true in both cases, wasn't it? I also said I had ex-wives coming after me, looking to put attachments on anything I owned. So I asked Jenkins if he would mind holding the title to the house in his name. We were “partners.”

In Boston, Whitey was becoming a legend. Gullible columnists for the
Globe
chronicled his supposed selfless exploits, giving money to priests, reducing street crime, and, most important, “keeping the drugs out of Southie,” a phrase that was repeated over and over again. At the
Globe,
it became practically verboten to say anything negative about the gangster with the alleged heart of gold.

Always tight with a buck—Frankie Salemme referred to him as a “squirrel”—suddenly Whitey was flush with his new drug money. Whitey began smuggling cash out of the country. One time, he was stopped at the security gate at Logan Airport's international terminal as he tried to slip $100,000 cash through security onto a Montreal flight.

Whitey grabbed the satchel, took off running, and threw it to a guy he called “Kevin”—probably Kevin Weeks—who escaped. Whitey then found himself in a loud confrontation with a state trooper named Billy Johnson, a Vietnam vet. Johnson wrote up a report and forgot about it until the next day, when the executive director of the airport, a Dukakis appointee named Dave Davis, showed up at F Troop barracks and demanded that Johnson hand over any and all copies of the embarrassing report about the senate president's brother.

Johnson refused, and within days was stripped of his coveted Logan airport assignment. He would later commit suicide.

*   *   *

WHITEY'S LIQUOR
store, the South Boston Liquor Mart, wasn't far from the
Globe
building on Morrissey Boulevard with the plate-glass windows that Whitey had once shot out during busing.

One morning a
Globe
photographer was driving north toward downtown when he noticed a city work crew outside Whitey's liquor store. They were installing parking curbs. Amazed, the photographer doubled back around, parked his car on a side street, and then shot a series of damning photographs showing city workers on city time doing a job for … Whitey Bulger.