Where the Bodies Were Buried (20 page)

“What did you pick up?”

“A .38.”

There was a raging snowstorm that early morning in Roxbury. Martorano arrived at the location on foot. He saw Smith sitting in his car near the corner where they had agreed to meet. As Martorano approached the car, he noticed that there were two other people inside it with Smith. “I saw the shadows of three silhouettes, three people in the car.” Alarm bells went off in Johnny's head: this was some kind of setup. He would have to act fast.

“What did you do?” asked Wyshak.

“Well,” said Martorano, “he was supposed to be there alone to meet me. But he was with two other people. So I thought they might have the same idea of doing to me [as I had with Smith]. So when I got in the car, I just shot three times.”

“You killed three people.”

“Yes.”

Martorano then stumbled out of the car. He had arranged for an associate to serve as a getaway driver, but the person never showed. “I had to walk out of there in the snow and wash up in the snow.”

“Did you later learn that one of the people in the car was a female?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And the other person was a teenager?”

“Yes.”

“How did you feel after you learned that?”

“I felt terrible. My first initial—I wanted to shoot myself. But you can't change it.”

Wyshak whizzed through the other murders, a cavalcade of shootings, stabbings, dead bodies rolled up in tarps, postmortem cleanups of blood and brain matter. The testimony was like a montage from a crime movie, the implications of each and every act too horrid to dwell
on in detail, too overwhelming, so that they must be presented as one big bloodstained blur.

Wyshak asked the witness about his relationship with Bulger and Flemmi.

“They were my partners in crime. They were my best friends. They were my children's godfathers.”

“And what motivated you to cooperate against them?”

“Well, after I heard they were informants, it sort of broke my heart. They broke all trust that we had, all loyalties, and I was just beside myself with it.”

On this point, Martorano's testimony was especially pungent: he may have had in mind the famous line from
The Godfather: Part II:
“I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.” In a fantasy universe, this was the point where Johnny would have given Whitey the Sicilian kiss of death. Instead, he cut a deal with the government and became a federal witness. Thanks to Marty Weinberg (“the best”), it was a good deal: eight short years and Johnny was back out on the golf course.

Then there was the money: since being released from prison in 2007, how had Martorano lived? Turns out that upon his release, as part of his agreement he received a payment of $20,000 from the U.S. government. There was also the memoir he published, cowritten by noted
Boston Herald
columnist and local radio personality Howie Carr. Martorano and Carr split an advance payment from Forge Books, the publisher, of $110,000—that was $55,000 for the hit man. Since the book's release, Martorano had received another $20,000 in royalties. And then came the big payday: Johnny had sold the rights to his life story to a movie company for $250,000, with much more to come if a movie actually gets made.

In the six years since his release, Martorano had done well for himself.

I HAD MET
John Martorano one year earlier, over dinner at Abe & Louie's, an upscale steak house on Boylston Street in Boston's Back Bay. The meeting was arranged through a mutual acquaintance who had known Martorano for many years.

A couple of years earlier, via Pat Nee, I had also met John Martorano's
younger brother, James, known to friends as Jimmy. The two Martoranos had been among the earliest members of the Winter Hill Mob, going back to the early 1960s. The children of an immigrant father from Riesi, Sicily, and a partly Irish American mother, the Martoranos were eleven months apart in age. They had both gone to the Mount St. Charles Academy in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a private middle school, and then graduated from Milton High School in 1959. Both were star athletes on the football team, where they played alongside a kid named Ed Bradley, who in later years would go on to become the first African American co-anchor on the popular TV newsmagazine
60 Minutes
.

Both Martoranos were offered athletic scholarships to attend college. Jimmy accepted an offer from Boston College and eventually received a bachelor of arts degree. Brother Johnny went on to become one of the most proficient killers in the history of the Boston underworld.

When I was first introduced to Jimmy Martorano in 2004, I had a hard time picturing him as an underworld figure. By then I had met and interviewed many gangsters of differing ethnicities, and by any standard Jimmy Martorano did not fit the mold. With his wire-rimmed glasses and gentlemanly manner, he had the demeanor of a kindly Italian uncle—friendly, solicitous, and affectionate. He was an intelligent man, astute and thoughtful in ways I did not associate with the typical street mentality. He was manly without being macho. Brother John had a nickname for Jimmy, “the Cardinal,” which seemed to fit. Jimmy was the kind of guy who liked to settle disputes; he listened to all sides and dispensed judgments from on high.

On the back porch of a classic triple-decker in Southie, I sat with Jim Martorano and Pat Nee listening as they related old war stories from the Boston underworld. At the time, John Martorano was still in prison serving his sentence as part of his plea deal with the government, and Whitey was on the run.

Jimmy had read my book
The Westies,
or at least knew of it. He was complimentary about how, as he put it, the book had captured the organized crime lifestyle without attempting “to get moralistic about it.” Technically, I was not interviewing Martorano or, on that occasion, Pat Nee, so both men were forthcoming with stories and opinions they might have been more cautious about had it been for publication. As with other
conversations I've had with professional criminals in Boston, these two former gangsters—decades removed from their lives “on the street”—seemed compelled to explain what the criminal underworld in Boston was all about. Since the details of Whitey Bulger and Steve Flemmi's reign had been catapulted into the media, in their view the Boston rackets had been given a bad name. Despite what I might have heard, they wanted me to know that there could be such a thing as honor among thieves.

Eight years later, I met Johnny Martorano at Abe & Louie's. I had been told about Johnny by Pat Nee, who had great affection for Martorano. To Nee and others who circulated in the Boston underworld, Martorano was Dr. Feelgood, the kind of guy who made being a gangster seem like an entertaining pursuit. According to Pat, “Johnny would pull up in a black Cadillac, tinted windows, with a driver. He'd be in the back. The door would swing open and, first thing, a cloud of marijuana smoke would come wafting out. Then Johnny would appear, with a black babe on one arm and a beautiful Asian woman on the other. That was Johnny. He was always looking for a good time.”

At Abe & Louie's restaurant, I caught glimpses of this Johnny Martorano, though he was now decades past his prime. He wasn't yet as hulking and obese as he would appear at the Bulger trial, but he was definitely overweight, a man of large appetites who did not hesitate to indulge those appetites whenever the opportunity presented itself.

I had not yet read
Hitman: The Untold Story of John Martorano, Whitey Bulger's Enforcer and the Most Feared Gangster in the Underworld,
by Howie Carr. Martorano had cooperated in the writing of the book, which was published in April 2011. Carr, well-known for his animus toward the Bulgers, both Whitey and Billy, had been handpicked by Martorano as his collaborator.

My knowledge of the totality of Martorano's murders was vague, which was just as well, because had I known the full extent of his many killings, I would have had a hard time reconciling those crimes with the person I was having dinner with.

Having written about criminals of Martorano's vintage for more than two decades, I had adopted a loose philosophical creed. Generally, I come into the relationship out of a sense of professional curiosity. I am attempting
to write about their world—to the extent that I can—from the inside out. This requires that I not bring with me the baggage of moral judgment. It is essential that the person who is talking to me feels as though I am at least attempting to see the world from their point of view—assuming that what they are telling me is sincere and not a pack of lies. In an interviewer/interviewee situation, this can sometime become a dance, as they are in a process of assessing your motives, and vice versa. As an interviewer, it is a basic premise that you are more likely to get candor and honesty from someone if they feel comfortable that you are not motivated by a hidden agenda.

At Abe & Louie's, I was not interviewing John Martorano. He had agreed to meet based on respect he had for a book that I had written, and—more important—on the fact that Nee and his brother Jimmy had given me the “okay” as someone who could be trusted.

At the restaurant, it seemed as though John Martorano was known by everyone—the maître d', the waiters, even one of the owners came over to our table to say hello. Johnny was a different personality type than his brother Jimmy—more fun loving, less bookish. He was dressed in a nice silk suit with an open collar and had what I suspected was a perpetual suntan. Clearly, Johnny reveled in the sensual pleasures of life. At our table, he ordered the wine and took charge of placing the food orders—the shrimp and lobster appetizer, a meal in itself; porterhouse steak, however you liked it; a dessert sampler of cheesecake, cannolis, etc.; and cognac as an after-dinner drink.

During the meal, Johnny told stories. He was a great raconteur, with an eye for color and detail. He was also a good listener. Both of the Martoranos were “people persons”; their involvement in the criminal life was, in many ways, an extension of their innate sociability. They had started out in the bar and nightclub businesses not only as financiers, but as management, people who valued interaction with the differing characters who populated their mostly working-class community.

Martorano was especially interested in Cuba. Since I had recently published a book about the years of the Mob in Havana in the 1950s, Johnny wanted to compare notes. In 1960, as a nineteen-year-old gangster's apprentice, he had lived for six months in Havana.

Following his first-ever arrest on a gun possession charge, he'd gone on
the lam for the first time. It was while staying in Miami with an uncle that it was suggested he hide out for a while in Cuba, a well-worn path for U.S. mobsters on the lam. Only now, with the fall of Mafia-friendly President Fulgencio Batista and the rise of Fidel Castro, things weren't so friendly anymore.

It was all hazy to Martorano now, but what he did remember vividly was the revolutionary police, soldiers not much older than he was at the time, with beards and a victor's swagger. Martorano was barely there long enough to have a mojito and a cigar. Back in the States, his mob benefactors had made the gun charge go away, and he was free to return to Beantown.

At Abe & Louie's, Martorano insisted on picking up the check, which I'm guessing topped out at somewhere around five hundred dollars. As we were saying our goodbyes, he introduced me to a woman Pat Nee had told me was Johnny's girlfriend, though he introduced her as a business associate. A Chinese American in her midforties, she was starting her own business, and Johnny was helping her out. While Johnny went to the men's room and retrieved his coat, I spoke briefly with the woman, who was intelligent and well spoken. She was not a bimbo. I asked her if she was aware of Johnny's reputation. She said that she was but it didn't concern her. The Johnny Martorano of legend, a notorious hit man for the Mob, was not the man she knew.

As with many people who have spent social time with Martorano, I came away from that dinner charmed and beguiled. So I rewatched an interview that I had seen with Martorano on
60 Minutes,
originally broadcast on January 6, 2008, and also read Howie Carr's book.

The level of murder and mayhem perpetrated by Martorano in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s was staggering. He had stabbed people, shot people, and spent an inordinate amount of time in his life cleaning up after murders and figuring out ways to dispose of a dead body. Though the majority of the twenty murders he admitted to having carried out were professional hits—planned murders that had been thought out and executed with calm precision, as opposed to spontaneous crimes of passion—it was hard to imagine that he was not haunted in some way. My own impression was that for a person whose life was steeped in such bloodshed and horrific violence, there would be psychological consequences. A man would find himself
tormented, if not by pangs of guilt or remorse, then at least by disturbing imagery—bad dreams—from a lifetime of bad deeds.

I asked Pat Nee about it: “You think Johnny is haunted in any way by all the killings and dead bodies from over the years?”

Pat chuckled at the question. It was not a frivolous laugh. He had undoubtedly been asked this question before; it is the obvious question someone would ask after meeting Martorano, who seems so unaffected by his crimes.

“You know,” answered Pat, “I've known Johnny a long time, and I don't think he's lost a minute's sleep over the murders. I don't think it bothers him one bit.”

That was Johnny. The original title he had wanted to use for his book with Howie Carr was
What We Did
. The world according to Johnny, in unvarnished detail. What happened happened, and there ain't nothing you can do about it now, so why lose sleep over it?

The most disconcerting thing about Johnny Martorano was that, after a lifetime of mayhem and killing, he didn't seem the least bit disconcerted at all.