Last Rites (8 page)

Gigi was held on a gun charge in Plymouth, where he shared a cell with Capo Vinnie Ferrara, who had given him the contract on Salemme. Ferrara is a Boston College graduate who, according to one affidavit, was involved in a dozen killings. Prosecutors felt that they didn't have enough evidence to charge the four men with attempted murder. However, Gigi was convicted on weapons possession and served thirty months in Leavenworth Federal Prison. Whenever Gigi was asked what Frank Salemme looked like, he would answer, “I don't know what he looks like but I sure know what he looks like running.” A sense of humor and a deadly lifestyle—these are two of the traits that made up the life of Gigi Portalla.

C
HAPTER
5

I
RISH
G
ANG
W
AR

As in other major cities, the Boston underworld was not always solely ruled by the Italian mob. The Irish had staked out a piece of the proverbial pie early on and had managed to hang on even while the Italian mob grew in power. The Irish stronghold was in the part of Boston known as Southie. This area was highly segregated and held true to its Irish Catholic heritage. Southie was one of the poorest sections of Boston and had an extremely high unemployment rate right up until the beginning of World War II. The families who lived in this tightknit community held closely to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Most of the men in Southie worked on the docks, while their wives cleaned offices in the financial district just over the bridge. Southie considered itself a closed community to everyone except the Irish. This cohesive mentality was forged when the Irish first came to Boston in large numbers and were faced with NINA (No Irish Need Apply) signs. These signs limited opportunities for Irish immigrants and only helped to reinforce the separatist attitude of this section of Boston.

Southie was under the total control of renowned gangster James “Whitey” Bulger. He arrived in Southie in 1938 with his parents and siblings. They moved into the projects, and Whitey quickly adapted to the gang life as a young man. He joined the Shamrocks, a Southie group that succeeded the former Gustins gang. The Gustins should have been the dominant gang during the Prohibition era. However, in 1931, they attempted to gain total control of Boston by taking over bootlegging operations along the waterfront. When two members of the ill-fated Gustins went to dictate the new terms to the mafia in the North End, they were gunned down behind the door of the C&F Importing Company. This single act of violence realigned the demarcation point of Boston's underworld. The Italian mafia would survive and flourish in the Italian neighborhoods, and the Irish gangs would retreat to the safety of Southie. The Irish gangs managed to survive and coexist with the Italian mafia by putting mafia loan shark money out on the streets of Irish neighborhoods.

Whitey Bulger, the kingpin of the Irish mob, who is still on the run.
Courtesy of the FBI
.

Whitey moved quickly through the ranks of the gang by first selling swag out of the back of trucks and committing bank robbery. Eventually, Whitey was sentenced to a federal prison term. While he was incarcerated, he was moved from Atlanta to the maximum-security prison known as the “Rock.” During his tenure in Alcatraz, he spent some time in solitary for fighting and organizing a work stoppage. Eventually, he quieted down and became a model inmate. When Bulger went to prison, Eisenhower was newly elected; when he was released, Lyndon Johnson was in office. While Whitey was incarcerated, his father passed away. When Whitey was released, he returned to Boston, where his brother Billy was serving a term in the Massachusetts legislature. Billy Bulger would stay in Massachusetts politics, eventually serving as the longest-running president of the chamber. Bulger later served as president of the University of Massachusetts. The post-Alcatraz Bulger quickly realized that his brother Billy's newly elected position could only benefit his climb to power.

In 1972, Whitey Bulger was working as a bodyguard for Southie bookie Donald Killeen. Bulger began to have misgivings about Killeen. He decided that he would either enter into an alliance with the Italian mob, which he distrusted and hated, or forge an alliance with the Winter Hill Gang of Somerville. Bulger knew that if he did not ally himself, he may end up dead due to Killeen's rival, the Mullin gang. Therefore, with his pride set aside, Bulger set off to see Howard “Howie” Winter. His gang was operated out of Marshall Motors in Somerville, a nondescript garage. Howie Winter associated with people like Fat Al Samenza at the Suffolk Downs Racetrack. Samenza worked in the Spit Box, which was the area of the track that tested the winning racehorse's urine. The mob would often drug horses with speed, thus the testing requirement. Samenza would switch the dirty urine with clean urine, for a price. Sometimes the mob would also pay a jockey to run interference and box other horses out as added insurance. Shortly after Bulger sided with Howie Winter, a contract killer completed a hit on Donald Killeen outside of his home. Bulger would now have South Boston, and Winter would have Whitey.

The Winter Hill Gang was started by Irishman James Buddy McLean. He was born in 1929 out of wedlock to a wealthy land speculator and onetime heir to the
Washington Post
newspaper, James McLean, in Somerville, Massachusetts. McLean was orphaned at an early age and adopted by a Portuguese family. He worked as a longshoreman on the docks of East Boston and Charlestown as a teenager. Due to his position as a longshoreman, he became a close friend of William J. McCarthy, who would later become president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In 1955, McLean married a Portuguese girl and began to slowly amass a formidable criminal organization. McLean was considered one of the toughest street fighters in Boston and was well known in underworld circles. A close friend once said, “He looks like a choir boy but fights like the devil.” Over the years, all his fighting took a toll on his body; he had several scars on his neck and a badly damaged left eye.

A milestone in New England gang violence began with a moment of lustful misjudgment. This lapse in judgment sparked a shooting and stabbing war among the gangs that lasted for years and strongly contributed to the eventual crippling of organized crime in the Boston area. In September 1961, two Winter Hill associates and their friend, twenty-two-year-old Charlestown mobster George McLaughlin, rented a cottage on Salisbury Beach for a Labor Day party. McLaughlin was drinking heavily throughout the day. In the evening, he attempted to grope the girlfriend of Alexander “Bobo” Petricone, who later went by the name Alex Rocco when he became an actor having a bit part in the film
The Godfather
. This single action and lapse in judgment was the catalyst that set off one of the biggest mob wars in Boston history. The two men confronted McLaughlin and gave him a savage beating. Unsure whether he was still alive, they dumped him at a nearby hospital and left to tell their boss McLean what had transpired. McLean absolved them from any wrongdoing and informed the men that he would smooth things over with George's brother, Bernie.

This was not to be; Bernie wanted revenge for what had happened to his brother, and he wanted McLean to help set up the two men responsible for the near-fatal beating. McLean was outraged and told Bernie that his brother had been out of line and had the beating coming to him. McLean stormed out of the sit-down refusing to comply with the request. Later that night, McLean awoke to the sound of his dogs being aroused and barking. As he walked to his window to see what the commotion was, he saw two men under his car. McLean, who was known for his volatile temper, ran outside firing his .38 revolver wildly at the men. The men escaped, but he found plastique explosives wired to the ignition of his car. Immediately, he suspected the McLaughlin brothers, a gang from Charlestown, and he began stalking Bernie McLaughlin throughout that neighborhood.

Bernie McLaughlin had been a loan shark and enforcer for Angiulo before breaking away and forming his own gang. With the help of his brothers, George and Edward—whom they called Punchy because of his past experiences as a boxer—he was successful in taking over the rackets in and around Charlestown. As their reputation grew, so did the requests for their assistance in contract killings. They were hired various times to perform freelance work for the Winter Hill Gang and the Patriarca family.

McLean decided to finally hit Bernie McLaughlin on his home turf: City Square, Charlestown. In broad daylight in front of one hundred witnesses, on October 31, 1961, Bernie was gunned down. Also at the scene, McLean was in a car with passenger Alexander “Bobo” Petricone, driven by Russell Nicholson. Nicholson was a member of the Winter Hill Gang and a former MDC (Metropolitan District Commission) police officer. Locals used to say that MDC stood for “more dumb cops.” McLean was arrested and tried for the murder of Bernie; however, the prosecution could not find a single witness to testify as to what had occurred in Charlestown that day. McLean was acquitted of the murder charge but was convicted for illegal possession of a firearm and sentenced to two years in prison. Russell Nicholson was kidnapped and killed in 1964 by George and Punchy McLaughlin as retribution for participating in the killing of their brother Bernie. The Winter Hill Gang had attempted several botched hits on Punchy's life. During these attempts, he had lost a hand and half his jaw. After surviving the many assassination attempts, he was finally shot dead at a bus station in West Roxbury on the way to his brother George's murder trial.

Around this time, the Boston newspapers were speculating that the war between the gangs was really over the unfound Brinks Building robbery money. It was believed that some of the money may have been on ice in a warehouse near the docks of Charlestown, but this was never confirmed.

The Brinks robbery was committed on January 15, 1950, in the North End of Boston. Brinks had a garage on the corner of Prince Street, right down the street from where Angiulo would be setting up his headquarters in a few years. The garage was the central location for Brinks to bring and distribute all the money it had collected from the Boston area. About 7:30 p.m. on that January day, several men entered the building and, with precise movement, tied up the few employees who were there and proceeded to empty the vault and make their escape onto the streets of Boston. The men were all dressed as longshoremen, in knit caps and navy peacoats. The only evidence that remained was the rope used to tie up the employees and a chauffeur's cap. The police immediately began rounding up and questioning the local ex-cons and thugs, but it was to no avail. In February, several guns that were taken from Brinks employees during the robbery were found on the banks of the Mystic River in Somerville by some kids. The total haul was $1,218,211.19 in cash and another $1.5 million in checks, money orders and other securities. The press billed the heist as the crime of the century. At the time, it was the largest heist in United States history. Later, it was discovered that the men had cased the garage over the course of several years, since 1948 in fact, and had made keys to every door they needed to open. Not to mention they had gone in and out of the building several times to learn the layout.

In June 1954, one of the top suspects, Specs O'Keefe, was driving in Dorchester, Massachusetts, when a car pulled alongside his and sprayed his car with bullets. He was able to escape unscathed. Nine days later, there was another incident when O'Keefe got into a shootout with Henry Baker, another suspect in the robbery. Then, Elmer “Trigger” Burke, a professional hit man, was given the assignment to get rid of O'Keefe. The fact that Burke was hired implies a possible mob connection. His attempt went a little better: he hit O'Keefe in the wrist and chest. Burke was arrested later that day with a machine gun that ballistics was able to match to the attempted assassination of O'Keefe.

By 1956, O'Keefe cracked and told the FBI everything. Another unexpected break in the case came in June 1956. The Baltimore Police Department came across a Boston man whom they originally suspected of passing counterfeit bills. The man was registered under a fake name at a hotel. A search of his room revealed $3,780 of the Brinks money. Further conversations with the man revealed that he had a lengthy rap sheet and had recently been released from a federal prison camp. The FBI also discovered that the man was a mob associate. The man then explained that the money had been given to him by an acquaintance with whom he shared office space in Boston, a man he knew only by the name Fat John. Secret Service and the Boston Police helped to find this man. A search warrant was obtained and executed on the office, located on Tremont Street in Boston. The FBI found a partial wall, and once the partition was removed, they discovered a picnic cooler within the wall. Once they opened it, they discovered more than $57,700 in Brinks money wrapped in plastic wrap and newspaper. Further investigation revealed that the carpenter who installed the partial wall had done the work only a few weeks earlier and the cooler wasn't there at the time. The money was found to be in various stages of decomposition, which made counting the money difficult. Fat John took a plea agreement for the Brinks money that was found in his office. He served two years under the agreement.