Hitman (9 page)

Joe “the Animal” Barboza, the first gangster in the Witness Protection Program.

Within months after his release from prison in 1963, Jimmy Flemmi had murdered two of his fellow ex-cons, Walpole warriors, as they were known on the street. One he shot to death; he then drove the body to Pembroke but ran out of gas and ended up on the side of the road after dumping the corpse in the woods. The other he shot in the head in a Dorchester bar owned by the Bennetts, using a gun Wimpy had gotten from a Boston policeman on his payroll. Not knowing whether the cop's gun could be traced, the Bear chopped off the ex-con's head with the bullet in it, put it in his car, and then torched the bar. That was one way to beat a ballistics test.

Barboza, meanwhile, got married, and less than a week later murdered one of the hoods who had been in the wedding party. Another time he severely beat a teenager who he thought had refused to let him and a girlfriend cut in line for a ride at the amusement park in Revere Beach. The problem was, he beat up the wrong guy, but that didn't matter to Barboza. He'd delivered a message to those punks at the amusement park—don't fuck with Joe Barboza when he wants to cut in line. One day he used a baseball bat to knock out the windows of a car in East Boston whose driver had the temerity to honk at him. Oddly, though, Barboza would not tolerate anyone swearing in front of a woman. Violation of his “code” was good for a beating, at the very least.

Jimmy the Bear was also busy. High on Seconal one night, Jimmy Flemmi stabbed a twenty-two-year-old man who had the misfortune to bump into him at a Hayes & Bickford cafeteria downtown one night after the bars closed.

Even hoodlums began clearing out of Boston. It was safer that way. A guy from the North End became a courier for Meyer Lansky. One of Buddy McLean's friends moved to Hollywood, lost fifty pounds, took acting lessons, and changed his name from Bobo Petricone to Alex Rocco. His agent told him he might have a future in gangster movies. Years later in
The Godfather,
playing the Jewish gangster based on Bugsy Siegel, Alex Rocco would tell Al Pacino: “I made my bones while you were fucking cheerleaders.”

Bobo Petricone of Somerville, under arrest in 1961, before he went to Hollywood and became the actor Alex Rocco, who specialized in gangster roles.

Everyone in Somerville agreed Bobo delivered his line very convincingly.

*   *   *

AS THE
bodies piled up, Johnny continued to split his time between Basin Street South and Luigi's. He was also handling stolen furs. The Bear, in one of his increasingly rare sober moments, had introduced Martorano to a bold booster, who made his living climbing up the side of the old Furriers Building on Washington Street and also hitting the high-end fur shops on Newbury Street. Johnny would stash the stolen furs at Luigi's until he could move them out of town. The clubs were doing well, but he could always use extra money. He still had his ex-wife Nancy and the two girls to support.

But one night in November 1964, Martorano got a telephone call that changed his life. The Boston cops were swarming into Luigi's, searching the upstairs floors where the stolen furs were kept. They had a search warrant, based on a “tip” from the same cop whose gun the Bear had used to kill his fellow Walpole warrior a few months earlier. Supposedly the cops were looking for furs, but they quickly discovered a body wrapped up in a rug, “like it was ready for the river,” as one cop put it.

It was Margaret “Margie” Sylvester, age thirty-five, a blond divorcée from Dorchester, a longtime friend of Andy Martorano, who had been a waitress at Luigi's for years. She had been stabbed to death.

Johnny was not a suspect; the night Margie vanished, he'd spent one of his rare nights at home. But his brother Jimmy had a problem. The morning after Margie's slaying, he'd replaced a rug at Luigi's. He told police that his mother, who did the books for Luigi's, had noticed a section of the rug in the back room missing and had asked him to put in a new section. The cops weren't buying his story, but they couldn't prove anything to the contrary. Jimmy swore to Johnny he knew nothing about Margie's murder, although he admitted to Johnny that he had noticed blood stains on the edges of the rug that remained after he had replaced the missing section.

Jimmy Martorano mug shots from the 1960s and 1970s.

Johnny began his own investigation. He learned it had been a slow night at Luigi's. Bobby Palladino, the ex-con and a friend, had been hanging out in the back room. So had John Jackson, a middle-aged black ex-prizefighter who worked occasionally as a bartender at Luigi's. Johnny quickly found a third guy who'd been there—a former Boston cop who'd been fired for loansharking. The ex-cop was able to remember one more guy who Palladino and Jackson had apparently been afraid to mention: Jimmy the Bear.

“They were petrified of him,” Johnny said. “For obvious reasons.”

*   *   *

THE SYLVESTER
murder investigation dragged on for months. Jimmy Martorano was finally indicted—but only as an accessory after the fact, for replacing the rug in the back room. Luigi's, of course, was finished. The Boston Licensing Board had no choice but to pull its liquor license after fourteen years in business.

Life went on for Johnny. The gang war was dragging on, but that didn't directly concern him. He wasn't involved, although he was “rooting for” Buddy McLean and the Flemmis to prevail, as he put it in court almost forty years later. The Roxbury crew had started out on the side of the McLaughlins—they had handled some of the hits Wimpy farmed out. In 1962, when George McLaughlin blew up a car belonging to Buddy McLean's top hand, Howie Winter, it was Stevie Flemmi and Wimpy who drove McLaughlin over to Somerville to plant the bomb. But after a while, Wimpy the Fox realized that Somerville was gaining the upper hand. A peace meeting was brokered by a Boston police detective on the Roxbury payroll, and Buddy McLean sat down with Stevie and Wimpy at the Holiday Inn in Somerville to hask out their differences.

Through it all, Johnny remained tight with the Bear, who was turning into the main target of the McLaughlins after Buddy McLean. In 1964, Flemmi was shot and wounded by a Charlestown hit squad in Dorchester. In May 1965, he was ambushed by two McLaughlin gunmen as he left his apartment in Dorchester. The Bear was struck by nine bullets, and the shooters were walking toward him to administer the coup de grâce when the wounded Bear managed to pull his .38 out of his coat and begin wildly firing in the direction of his would-be killers. They fled, and Flemmi was taken to Boston City Hospital (BCH).

A couple of days later, against his doctors' orders, the Bear checked himself out of BCH. Johnny Martorano was waiting for him in a car. They would drive to Vermont, where an undertaker friend of Johnny's would rent them a cabin in which the Bear could recuperate in peace and quiet—and safety.

In addition to guns, Martorano had stocked the car with booze, which they got into as soon as they hit the road. Once they were drunk Johnny and the Bear began talking about how much fun it would be to pull into their campground with a dead deer strapped to the hood, as they'd seen so often during hunting season in northern New England. It was dark by the time they crossed into Vermont. Suddenly the Bear screamed—he had seen glowing eyes in a field by the side of the road.

“Turn around, Johnny,” he yelled. “It's a fucking deer!”

Martorano put the car in reverse and backed up until he, too, saw the eyes, peering over a fence. The deer seemed remarkably serene, but they were too drunk to notice. They stumbled out of the car, Martorano brandishing a carbine, the Bear a revolver. Both emptied their guns in the direction of the eyes, yelled in exultation, then climbed over the fence. Johnny had a flashlight, which he shined down on the carcass … of a dead cow.

“Shit,” Johnny said, shaking his head. “I'm not putting a cow on the hood of my car.”

At the campground, their host was not impressed by their story.

“Don't tell anybody else here about that,” he warned them. “You'll get more time in Vermont for shooting a cow than for shooting a human.”

*   *   *

AS THE
summer of 1965 wore on, Johnny was hanging out more and more with the Bear's younger brother, Stevie—the Rifleman. As for the Bear, he had totally lost it—in September, he defaulted on a $25,000 bond in the Hayes & Bickford stabbing. A fugitive warrant was issued. His own lawyer said he didn't know if the Bear was alive or dead.

Stevie Flemmi was running a grocery store at Dearborn and Dudley streets in Roxbury, and that was where Wimpy Bennett and his gang were spending more of their time when they weren't at the garage. Almost a year after the murder of Margie Sylvester, one afternoon Stevie and Wimpy pulled Johnny aside and took him to the back of the store. Wimpy was known to have excellent police sources, and Stevie likewise seemed to have a sixth sense about what the cops were up to.

“Palladino and Jackson,” Wimpy said.

“They're saying bad things,” Stevie added. “They're talking about what happened.”

Johnny Martorano, age twenty-four, was hours away from committing his first murder.

I still don't know who killed Margie. But what I do know now is that the Bear was there in Luigi's the night she was murdered, and that the tip to search the loft came from one of Stevie's cops. So I have to believe that when Stevie was basically telling me I had to kill this guy, Palladino, to protect my family, the reality was, I was killing to protect his family, his brother, the Bear. But after that day, for thirty years I believed I was indebted to Stevie. That “debt”—that's what started my killing spree.

LAWYER:
Mr. Palladino was killed because he could have been a witness?

MARTORANO:
I went to kill—went there with the intention if I had to kill him, I would, but not with the intention until I found out what he had to say.

LAWYER:
So you found out what he had to say, and then you killed him?

MARTORANO:
No. Before I found out what he had to say, he pulled a gun, and my [friend] grabbed his hand, and he shot and then I shot him.

LAWYER:
So your testimony is that was in self-defense? Is that right?

MARTORANO:
Indirectly. He might have got shot anyway, but it happened that way.

As soon as he got the tip, Johnny Martorano picked up a friend, and a gun, and started looking for Bobby Palladino. For once, Palladino was flush—he'd just made a big score, on a home invasion. He was part of a crew that had robbed Abie Sarkis, Andy's old partner in Luigi's. Palladino had gotten them into Sarkis's suburban house by dressing as a priest and talking his way inside. Once inside the Sarkis house, Palladino's crew had threatened to use hot irons on the family's faces if the Sarkises didn't come up with the cash the gang had been told Abie Sarkis kept in his house. In those days, a lot of the big-time gamblers had “traps” built into the walls or floors of their houses where they would hide cash. There was a shadowy guy around Boston who made a decent living installing such hidden drops—Frank the Trapper, he was called.