Howie Carr (21 page)

CHAPTER 12

J
AI ALAI IS NOT A SPORT EVER
likely to be featured on ESPN. It’s a handball-like game, played primarily by men from the Iberian Peninsula who have long curved wicker baskets strapped to their hands.

Like dog racing, it exists, despite what its fans may say, for one reason only: gambling. Played in arenas called frontons, the sport has always been plagued by scandals. Opponents of legalized betting on professional major league sports sometimes cite jai alai as an example of what happens when gambling on human beings is legalized—sooner or later, the contests inevitably begin to be fixed. Still, despite the Winter Hill Gang’s disastrous foray into horse racing, by 1980 Whitey and Stevie couldn’t resist another shot at a gambling enterprise. But this time, in line with their emerging new philosophy, they would merely provide protection.

The company they would protect, World Jai Alai, dated back to the 1920s, and had always been owned and controlled by Bostonians. It was World Jai Alai’s founders who had actually paid for the legislative campaign to legalize the sport in Florida. By 1980, the company owned frontons in Tampa and Miami, in addition to one it had recently purchased in Hartford, Connecticut.

It was through Hartford that Whitey became involved in a string of at least four and possibly as many as six murders, two of which remain officially on the books as unsolved, too gruesome for anyone ever to have taken responsibility for.

Whitey was brought into the organization by a Boston businessman, John Callahan, an overweight, Yale-educated certified public accountant for Arthur Andersen who liked hanging around wiseguys. He had, as a Boston police detective later put it to the
Miami Herald
, “a bad case of gangsteritis.” For a while, he even shared an apartment in Boston with Jimmy Martorano above the Rusty Scupper, a popular 1970s-era waterfront singles bar. In the mid-1970s, the descendants of the original owners of World Jai Alai hired Callahan to run their very profitable, privately held corporation. He would only control the company for two years, but that was more than enough time to allow its thorough infiltration by organized crime.

Soon after Callahan’s hiring, H. Paul Rico retired from the FBI’s Miami office, where he had worked since 1970. Callahan, at the suggestion of his Winter Hill drinking buddies, had a job waiting for Rico, as vice president of security for World Jai Alai. Rico was the perfect man for Florida, that sunny place for shady people, as Graham Greene would say. He knew the players on both sides of the law, and he knew how to keep them happy, especially those on the FBI side. He quickly hired the wife of one of his former Miami colleagues as his secretary, and was soon squiring her FBI agent husband and at least one other Miami agent on all-expenses-paid trips to the Bahamas.

After World Jai Alai took control of the fronton in Hartford, Callahan began fretting that with the fronton’s proximity to New York, one or more of the city’s five Mafia families would try to muscle in. But Rico had just the pair to handle any problems—his old friends Whitey and Stevie.

In those days before cocaine became the focus of Whitey’s criminal empire, World Jai Alai was his steadiest, greatest source of income: $10,000 a week, skimmed from World Jai Alai’s parking revenues in Connecticut and delivered every week to South Boston. In return, he and Stevie protected the Hartford fronton from Mafia shakedowns and infiltration.

Everything at World Jai Alai was running smoothly until the late 1970s, when the descendants of the original owners decided to cash out. The State Police in Connecticut had always been wary of Callahan’s ties to organized crime back in Boston, and shortly after he brought in Whitey and Stevie, Callahan was spotted at the Playboy Club in Park Square in the company of several known mobsters. Connecticut authorities pulled his license to run a pari-mutuel, that is, a pooled betting operation. Without a license, Callahan was unable to manage the fronton, and in 1977, he was out as president.

Soon afterward, the owners of World Jai Alai sold out to a fifty-five-year-old Massachusetts native named Roger Wheeler. Wheeler, who now lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had heard all the stories about jai alai and organized crime, but he figured he could handle it. He’d made a fortune in electronics and cashed out some of his profits, and now he wanted a good return on his investment. What really made up his mind to buy World Jai Alai was the impeccable reputation of his vice president for security, H. Paul Rico.

If there were any problems with the Mob, Wheeler decided,

H. Paul Rico would know how to deal with them. Plus, he was hiring other newly retired FBI agents from the Miami office to work at World Jai Alai. Some of them, like Rico, had even known J. Edgar Hoover.

For $50 million, World Jai Alai looked like a steal. With annual profits of $6 million, Wheeler could quickly pay off his loans. But he should have recognized some warning signs. The First National Bank of Boston, where Callahan was well known from his days as a bank consultant, gave him good terms on the loan, except on one point. The bank insisted that Wheeler hire an associate of Callahan’s as his president.

In addition, much of Callahan’s old crew remained in place at World Jai Alai and so the skimming deal with Winter Hill remained in effect, if off the books. Wheeler suspected there was a problem, but Callahan had been a skilled enough accountant to paper it over. The new owner proceeded cautiously, auditing the books, trying to figure out just how much money was being skimmed, and how serious the theft problem was.

Peggy Westcoat was a cashier at the Miami fronton. She knew all the players in all the World Jai Alai frontons. So Wheeler approached her first. Did she know what was going on in Hartford? Callahan still had his own sources inside the company, and once he learned about Wheeler’s investigation, he made sure to tell Whitey, who began an investigation of his own. He had to find out what Westcoat had told Wheeler, and how much he now knew about the Connecticut skim.

She lived with her boyfriend in a single-family home in southwest Dade. In December 1980, two men broke into her house and hanged her boyfriend near the front door. Then the killers dragged Westcoat into the kitchen, looped a rope around her neck, and pushed her up against the sink. One man turned on the garbage disposal, and began feeding the rope into the grinder. Then they turned off the disposal, and, with the rope still wrapped tightly around her neck, they questioned her about the new management. When she’d told them everything they wanted to know, they turned the garbage disposal back on.

When the cops found the two bodies the next day, they chalked it up as another Miami drug deal gone bad.

In December 1980, Wheeler’s phone rang in Tulsa and one of his Florida managers told him the news. Peggy Westcoat had been murdered in Florida, but World Jai Alai’s most immediate problem was Connecticut. Two months later, Wheeler put the Hartford fronton on the block. There were too many mobsters, and Wheeler felt that by selling the Hartford fronton, he would break World Jai Alai’s long-standing ties with both the Mafia and Callahan’s gangster crew in Boston.

But selling Hartford was not an acceptable solution to Whitey, Stevie, H. Paul Rico, or John Callahan, who still dreamed of regaining formal control of World Jai Alai. No one could afford any serious investigations of the skimming—it would mean the end of the $10,000 a week for the Hill, and exposure of both Callahan’s role in setting up the skim and Rico’s acquiescence in the scheme.

There was only one way to avoid exposure. They would have to murder Wheeler.

It was at this point that Whitey made an uncharacteristic tactical error. For the Wheeler hit, Callahan wanted to use Brian Halloran, the Winter Hill hanger-on whose ham-handed attempt in 1974 to collect a loansharking debt for Jimmy Martorano had landed Johnny’s brother in prison (after an assist from Whitey and Stevie to the FBI). Halloran’s own rap sheet was dotted with similar screw-ups; once he and Jimmy had been arrested in possession of several unregistered firearms after he crashed their vehicle into a telephone pole while trying to outrace a police car.

He was, in short, a notorious fuck-up, and the idea of using him on an out-of-state contract assassination was simply unthinkable, except that Callahan made the suggestion. Callahan was not only an “earner,” he had also helped out Johnny Martorano when he went on the lam, lending him both his car and his apartment in Florida until he got on his feet. Callahan was the mule for the cash that Whitey and Stevie were sending south to Johnny.

In January 1981, a month after Peggy Westcoat’s murder, Callahan invited Halloran up to his waterfront apartment in Boston. Halloran arrived to find Whitey glaring at him.

Whitey didn’t like Halloran for any number of reasons. He was a drunk, he snorted coke, his brother was a state cop, he was a link to the old crew—he was tight with Howie Winter and Joe McDonald. Whitey called him “Ballonhead.” But his biggest problem was that he had driven Louie Litif to Triple O’s a year earlier. He was a potential witness against Whitey in a murder case.

Callahan laid out the deal to Halloran, who listened, and then asked if there was any alternative. Whitey didn’t like questions like that. They told Halloran they would get back to him later.

A few weeks later, Callahan called Halloran and told him to stop by the apartment again. Callahan was there by himself. He handed Halloran a bag, and when Halloran looked inside, he found $20,000 in cash, two hundred $100 bills.

“We shouldn’t have involved you to begin with,” Callahan said.

Halloran bought himself a new car, parked it at Logan Airport, and then flew off to Fort Lauderdale, where he went on a bender.

Stevie Flemmi also headed for Florida. But Stevie’s destination was Miami, to meet his old FBI contact, H. Paul Rico. Rico’s task was to set up his boss, just as he’d set up Ronnie Dermody and Punchy McLaughlin more than fifteen years earlier. It would be an easy hit—Wheeler was a square, a creature of habit, who often played golf at the Southern Hills Country Club, an exclusive club that had hosted the U.S. Open.

This time, Whitey and Stevie called in a pro—Johnny Martorano, the fugitive they had taken to calling “the cook.” Flemmi got the details from Rico in Miami and passed them on to Martorano, who was living in Boca Raton with a teenage girl. Johnny called in Joe McDonald, another Winter Hill fugitive. They flew to Tulsa and scouted out the city and the getaway routes from the golf course. Via bus, Whitey shipped down several untraceable .38-caliber Police Specials.

On the afternoon of May 27, 1981, after finishing his weekly round of golf, Roger Wheeler walked out into the parking lot of his country club and climbed into his Cadillac. Johnny Martorano, wearing a fake beard and sunglasses, was waiting for him. With Joe McDonald behind the wheel of a rented Pontiac, Martorano hopped out of the car, hurried across the parking lot, and shot Wheeler through the window right between the eyes, killing him instantly. Seconds later, the Pontiac was gone. Witnesses later recalled hearing tires squeal.

The cover-up began almost immediately. The Tulsa Police Department got cooperation from the local office of the FBI, but was stonewalled by the bureaus in Boston and Miami. Relying heavily on information from H. Paul Rico, the FBI went into its blame-the-victim mode.

“Roger M. Wheeler was a self-made millionaire several times over,” read an FBI memo sent to its field offices, “with a very aggressive, abrasive personality who usually made money at the expense of others. He had a strong dislike of paying taxes. He was best known as a trader rather than as a business operator and would sell anything he owed for the right profit...He was often involved in lawsuits, many [of ] which he initiated.”

As for any eyewitnesses to the murder at the golf club coming forward, the FBI office in Tulsa was not optimistic.

“[They] are black, uncooperative and do not want to become involved in rich ‘white man’ affairs.”

Brian Halloran was next. He knew too much. In the fall of 1981, someone fired an errant shot at him outside his Quincy apartment. A few weeks later, drunk and stoned as always, Halloran found himself in a Chinatown restaurant after last call, sitting in a booth with Frank Salemme’s younger brother, Jackie, and across the table from a drug dealer named George Pappas.

When Pappas got up to take a phone call, Halloran rose from his side of the table, pulled out a gun, and shot him in the head, killing him instantly. Then, as a dozen witnesses watched, and Jackie Salemme cowered under the table, Halloran ran from the restaurant, leaving behind his car keys and his trademark scally cap.

It was the work of a junkie, which is what Brian Halloran had become. But it was a lucky break for Whitey, because Halloran, in killing Pappas, had put the Mafia in a very awkward position. Jackie Salemme was one of their guys, and if Halloran went on trial, Salemme might end up on the witness stand. That alone was reason enough for the Mafia to want Halloran dead. So now Whitey could point the finger at the Mafia when he did what he had to do.

Halloran stayed on the run for a month, then turned himself in to the Boston police and made bail. By then, Whitey had already begun dictating Halloran’s obituary, in Zip Connolly’s FBI files. On October 2, 1981, Connolly filed the first of many reports on who was going to kill Halloran.

“Source advised that the Mafia want Brian Halloran ‘hit in the head’ to shut him up as a potential witness.”

Halloran knew that without protection, he was a dead man. He also knew he was fresh out of friends in the Boston underworld. He started talking to the FBI.

In the fall of 1981, Whitey had other concerns beyond World Jai Alai. One was a girlfriend of Stevie’s named Debbie Davis. She was now twenty-six, a beautiful blonde, and Stevie had been with her, off and on, almost since he had returned to Boston in 1974 after his years as a fugitive in Montreal.

By age twenty-six, she was fed up with her life as a moll in Stevie’s harem. As Frank Salemme later described Flemmi, “He was a womanizer. That was his MO all along, his money and his women, not necessarily in that order.” Debbie had watched Stevie eyeing her dark-haired thirteen-year-old sister, Michelle, whom he took to calling “Ava Gardner.” Looking for a change, Debbie had started dating a Mexican on the side, a dangerous proposition, considering that one young man who had flirted with her had already ended up dead, shot in the back of the head in the Blue Hills Reservation. There was no way she could break up with Stevie, simply because she knew too much.