Where the Bodies Were Buried (22 page)

“Put it back on a bus?”

“Hm-hmm.”

“And then what did you do?”

“Got out of Oklahoma.”

“How?”

“We flew.”

“Flew back to Florida.”

“Yes.”

For a while, the Wheeler murder looked like a clean hit. But, in fact, it set off a chain reaction of events that would bring about the end of the Winter Hill Mob.

Brian Halloran
and
Michael Donahue
—John Martorano did not have any direct involvement in the killings of these two men, but it was a hit that would serve as a bridge between the Wheeler murder and another that Martorano would do a year later.

Once Wheeler was killed, Bulger and Flemmi began to worry that Brian Halloran knew too much. Halloran had become a disaster in the making. He was believed to have committed a cold-blooded murder in Boston's Chinatown, and the heat from that crime, the gangsters believed, made Halloran a likely candidate to cut a deal with investigators to save his own neck. Which is exactly what happened: Halloran reached out to and began cooperating with two FBI agents from the Boston field office. Unbeknownst to those agents, behind their back John Connolly passed the information along to Bulger and Flemmi that Halloran was an active snitch.

The two agents who were handling Halloran knew he was not safe out on the street. They tried to get Halloran into the witness protection program, but they were rebuffed by Jeremiah O'Sullivan, chief of the New England Organized Crime Strike Force. Halloran was determined by O'Sullivan to be an unreliable source—a drunk, drug user, and all-around desperate man—who was not worth the budgetary expenditures it would require to provide government-sponsored witness protection. In making this call, O'Sullivan, in essence, signed Halloran's death warrant.

Early on the evening of May 11, 1982, Halloran was spotted at a bar on Pier 61, near where the Moakley Courthouse now stands in Boston. Word got back to Bulger, who took matters into his own hands. With a second unidentified gunman, Bulger put on a curly blond wig, and the two men drove over to Pier 61.

That evening, Halloran hitched a ride home with a longtime friend named Michael Donahue, a laborer who was married with four kids. It was a devastating choice by Michael Donahue. As he and the doomed Brian Halloran drove out of the parking lot at Pier 61, in another car Whitey
Bulger and a masked gunman drove up and opened fire with a machine gun. Both Halloran and Donahue were killed.

John Callahan
—John Martorano first heard about the killings of Halloran and Donahue directly from Bulger and Flemmi. Not long after the Halloran murder, he was called to meet his two Winter Hill associates at the Marriott hotel in New York City near LaGuardia Airport. It was an unusual meeting. Martorano had seen Flemmi a few times since moving to Florida, but he had not seen Bulger since he first went on the lam in 1979. They all arrived in New York on separate flights and checked into a room that had been booked for the occasion by Martorano, under the alias Richard Aucoin.

In his direct testimony, Martorano detailed how Bulger told him at the Marriott that they'd had to kill Halloran. The reason, said Whitey, was that he had gone to the FBI and told them that he, Martorano, had killed Roger Wheeler.

“What else did [Bulger] tell you?” Martorano was asked.

“He said that because of that, you know, there would be a big investigation and they're going to call Callahan in. I guess Callahan was already out of the country, he's hiding. But Whitey said they're going to put so much pressure on Callahan. He said that Zip [Bulger's nickname for John Connolly] told him that Callahan is going to get so much pressure on him, he's going to fold, in their opinion. And if he does fold, we're all going to jail for the rest of our life.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“That they wanted to take him out. I objected. You know, Callahan was a friend of mine, and you know, I just killed a guy for him, risked my life. I didn't want to kill Callahan. So they're saying, Well, he ratted on you by telling Brian Halloran that you killed Wheeler. Can I guarantee that he's not going to fold? I said, I can't guarantee he's not going to fold. He said, Well then, we're going to all go away [to prison]. So, eventually, they convinced me. Okay, if that's the case, it was two against one. . . . I agreed. If it has to be done, it has to be done.”

They all agreed that the murder would take place in Florida, away from Boston. Martorano wasn't crazy about that, either, but he agreed.

There was discussion about how they would try to pin the murder on
some Cubans in Miami. Already, they had told Connolly, their FBI partner, to plant information in the FBI files that Callahan was rumored to be in business with drug dealers in Miami. Callahan owned a condo in Miami and lived there part of the year. If they dumped his dead body in Little Havana, Miami's Cuban neighborhood, the conjecture in law enforcement would be that he got into trouble with some Cuban
narcotraficante
s.

The meeting at the airport Marriott in New York lasted one hour. “How did you feel after that?” Martorano was asked.

“I felt lousy, but, you know, these were my partners. It was sort of dictated to me. We were up to our necks in murders already. This is what they wanted, I have to do it.”

On cross-examination, Hank Brennan spent lots of time on the Callahan murder, because it represented a diabolical level of personal treachery. It had been established that Callahan was Martorano's close friend. Martorano often stayed at Callahan's condo in Miami when Callahan was out of town. The Boston businessman let him use his Cadillac. Not only that: Callahan took care of Martorano. After the Wheeler murder, Callahan was so pleased with the result that he paid Martorano and McDonald fifty thousand dollars for the hit. Martorano characterized this money not as a payment, but as a gift—a gratuity—for a job well done. The two hit men split the money with Bulger, Flemmi, and H. Paul Rico.

So Martorano called John Callahan and told him he needed to see him in Florida. They needed to discuss the latest developments, and it wasn't safe to do it over the phone. Callahan trusted Martorano. He got on a plane and flew to the airport in Fort Lauderdale, near Miami. Martorano would meet Callahan at the airport, with Joe Mac secretly waiting in the wings to help carry out the murder.

Perhaps John Callahan might have given some thought to the fact that he was in trouble with the Winter Hill Mob. But the successful businessman was guileless. He was a Harvard graduate with an MBA and an impressive resume, though he also had a secret life where he hung out with gangsters and ordered hits. In his mind, he was a member of the gang.

Brennan asked Martorano, “When [your friend] got off the plane, you went and took his luggage for him, didn't you?”

“I grabbed his bag and said hi.”

The defense lawyer paused; he was going to milk this series of questions for all it was worth. The witness had been claiming that he was some kind of noble avenger, a man with a code who killed people on behalf of his friends and family. But here he was methodically lying to and luring a good friend to his death. “When you said hi to your friend before you murdered him, did you look him in the eye?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And then you walked him to the car where you were going to kill him?”

“Yes.”

“And when you put him in the car, you had him take the front seat, sir?”

“Yes.”

“So where you were going to murder your friend, you wanted to do it from behind, didn't you?”

“Well, I'd put the gun in the backseat, so that's how I arranged it.”

The car was Martorano's Dodge Ram conversion van, with bucket seats. Brennan had the witness explain how he'd covered the front seat with plastic and towels so that his best friend, after being shot, would not spill all over the interior of the car. Callahan, apparently, did not notice the seat coverings.

Said Brennan, “You were going to keep the car after you murdered your best friend in it, so you wanted it to be clean, didn't you?”

“Well,” said Martorano, “I didn't want it to cause an arrest.” That was the old-school hit man schooling the prosecutor on the practicalities of a hit.

As Martorano described it, he was loading Callahan's suitcase in the backseat when he grabbed the gun and shot his friend in the back of the head.

“Did you shoot him once or twice in the back of the head?” asked Brennan.

“I believe it was once.”

The shooting occurred around midnight. With Joe Mac following in his car, Johnny drove the van to a garage in Miami, where they had parked Callahan's Cadillac. The idea was to take the body from the van and stuff it in the trunk of Callahan's Caddy, then abandon the car somewhere in Little Havana. But when Martorano and Joe Mac arrived at the garage, they
discovered that it did not open up until seven in the morning. Martorano and Joe Mac had five hours to wait and a dead body on their hands.

“We went for a coffee to kill some time,” said Martorano.

At 7
A.M
., they finally prepared to move the body from the van to the trunk of the Cadillac. Joe Mac thought he heard a groaning sound coming from Callahan, and so he fired a couple more shots into the body.

Said Brennan, “Before Joe shot him a couple more times, when you heard your friend groan, when you were moving him from the van to the trunk of his car, did you have any second thoughts that maybe you could take him out of the wrapper and try to help your friend?”

“I didn't think he was alive.”

“Did you hear the groan?”

“Yeah, but I didn't think he was alive.”

“Was there anybody else in the trunk other than Mr. Callahan?”

“No, but bodies can make noise and be dead.”

Brennan seemed ready to make a comment but left it at that. If dead bodies make noises after they are dead, Martorano would know. He was the expert.

The hit man's cross-examination continued to the end of that day and well into the next, followed by re-direct testimony presented by Wyshak, and re-cross by Brennan. By the time John Martorano was off the stand, the Bulger trial seemed to have entered a new realm of savagery and depravity. But it had not yet reached its nadir, its true heart of darkness.

JUROR NUMBER TWELVE
, Janet Uhlar, had begun to leave the courtroom each day with a sinking feeling in her gut. Her mood started to shift somewhere around day seven, after the Martorano testimony was finally complete.

Martorano's three days on the stand had been stomach churning, to say the least. For a woman who had little interest in the world of organized crime or serial killers or the differences between a hit man and a vigilante, it was a master's course in Boston gangland psychopathology. Martorano talked about his various murders as if they were akin to swatting a mosquito on his forearm. The lack of emotion, or remorse, was chilling.

But that was not what had begun Janet Uhlar's downward spiral. That began with the witness that followed the hit man, an unassuming sixty-three-year-old woman named Diane Sussman de Tennen. The woman had been subpoenaed to take the stand at the Bulger trial because, forty years earlier, on a fateful night in March 1973, she found herself in the middle of a shooting that had nothing to do with her but changed the direction of her life.

Uhlar and the other jurors had heard about the shooting already, during Martorano's direct testimony and again on cross-examination. The hit man had described a series of gangland shootings and killings intended to eliminate a renegade gangster named Al “Indian Al” Notarangeli.

It all started back in late 1972, not long after Bulger, Howie Winter, Pat Nee, and others had their mobster summit meeting at Chandler's bar in the South End. That was the meeting that ended the gang wars that had been raging since the mid-1960s and brought together Bulger and the Winter Hill Mob under one umbrella. One of the first initiatives of this new confederation of gangsters was to hunt down and take out Indian Al.

According to Martorano, he, Howie Winter, Bulger, and others took on this task as an assignment from Jerry Angiulo, the mafia boss of Boston. Al Notarangeli and his crew had made it known that they were going to take over the Angiulos' sports betting book. They had already murdered one of Angiulo's bookmakers, a Mafioso named Paulie Folino. Afterward, Jerry Angiulo had a meeting with John Martorano and Howie Winter. Angiulo explained that Indian Al was out of control, and his war on the Italians was going to lead to death and destruction throughout the Boston underworld. The Winter Hill crew took the hint. They offered to take out Indian Al.

A Winter Hill crew led by Howie Winter, Martorano, Jimmy Sims, and Whitey Bulger began hunting for the doomed gangster. Since none of them were close to Notarangeli, they first had to develop information on his daily routine—what he looked like, where he lived, and what kind of car he drove. They learned that Indian Al drove a brown Mercedes and often frequented a bar called Mother's Cafe, located near Boston Garden, where the Bruins played hockey and the Celtics had won a string of basketball championships.

On the night of March 8, the Winter Hill crew received word that Notarangeli was at Mother's drinking with friends. Martorano, Bulger, and the others swung into action. They arrived in two cars, with Winter, Martorano, and Sims in a boiler car, one of a dozen stolen vehicles that Howie Winter kept in garages all around Somerville. In this car were two machine guns. In a backup car was Bulger—a crash car but also a radio car. Bulger had a police scanner so that he could track police whereabouts in the area. Also, all of the gangsters had walkie-talkies and were in communication. They even had a lookout inside Mother's to notify them when Indian Al was leaving the premises.

They received that message around two in the morning. The person identified as Al Notarangeli, their target, exited the bar with a couple of friends—a woman and another male. The target got into the brown Mercedes, in the front seat behind the wheel, with the woman in the front passenger seat and the other guy in the back. The Winter Hill hit team followed. A couple of blocks away, the car with Martorano and Winter inside drove up alongside the Mercedes. “We gave it what you'd call a broadside,” Martorano explained. Two machine guns blasting away. Later, after the
assault, Bulger told Martorano that from where he was in the crash car, it looked as though the entire Mercedes had exploded.

It was an outrageous gangland “drive-by.” The problem was that it was not Al Notarangeli in the car. Their spotter had identified the wrong person. The gangsters had killed a kid named Michael Milano, a bartender at Mother's, a completely innocent twenty-three-year-old with no criminal affiliations.

Since the Milano murder was one of twenty that Martorano testified about, many jurors—including Janet Uhlar—remembered the crime in the swirl of testimony surrounding the attempted murder of Indian Al. There were other cases of mistaken identity killings. The mobsters wound up killing four separate men—including Notarangeli's brother—before they got their man. The jurors could be forgiven for having a blurred remembrance of the killing of Michael Milano. But then Diane Sussman de Tennen took the stand.

In 1973, she was in Boston serving an internship as a dietitian at Beth Israel Hospital. She was twenty-three years old and had met and fallen in love with a young man named Louis Lapiana. Louis had recently started working as a bartender at Mother's Cafe, where Michael Milano, his good friend and fellow bartender, had helped him land the job.

Early on the morning of March 8, Diane Sussman de Tennen waited as Michael and Louis closed up the bar. Afterward, they headed outside to Michael's Mercedes. Milano had offered to give both Louis and Diane a ride home.

Milano was very proud of his new car. It was identical to a brown Mercedes owned by Indian Al Notarangeli. At Mother's, it was well known that Michael Milano worshipped Al Notarangeli. He admired his look and his tough-guy swagger. Though Notarangeli was fifteen years older, Milano slightly resembled Indian Al, a fact that he heightened by wearing his hair like the notorious hoodlum. He'd bought a leather coat that was identical to one owned by Notarangeli. The pièce d' résistance was when he bought the brown Mercedes. Milano had no way of knowing it, but it was his copycat fascination with Indian Al—and especially his buying an identical car—that would lead to his death that night.

Diane Sussman de Tennen recalled the night as if it were a sense
memory, deeply embedded in her soul: “I got the honor of sitting in the front passenger side, getting to play with all the newness of the car. . . . Michael was driving; Louis was in the back. They played chess together, and they were giving each other a hard time about who was going to win the next game and, you know, egging each other on.”

With some witnesses, prosecutor Brian Kelly had a tendency to rush through the direct examination, but not with Diane Sussman de Tennen. He took his time and let the jury ruminate upon her evident decency and goodness, thankful, perhaps, that here was a noncriminal witness—an average person—during a trial overstocked with depraved and cynical denizens of the criminal class.

“Now,” said Kelly, “after a while with this drive, did something highly unusual happen?”

“Yes. Close to the apartment, we were at a stoplight, and all of a sudden there was this noise, a continuous stream of noise of, you know, gunfire, and it was just nonstop. There were dozens and dozens of rounds, or whatever. In retrospect, it was a machine gun, but whatever I heard was going on and on. The car was hit with machine gun bullets. . . . When I heard the sound, I ducked. I don't know why or what, but I will tell you I come from California, and we have earthquakes. You grow up knowing certain survival skills. Not that you duck in an earthquake, but the minute you hear any rattling or something unusual, there's a procedure. And I think out of training, I ducked. That's probably the only reason I'm here today.

“After the shooting stopped, I got up. Michael was forward on the steering wheel. I looked at him and asked if he was okay, and I got no response.

“I turned around to ask Louis how he was, and he was slumped forward, his eyes were glazed, and he barely shook his head. I heard a very low noise of, ‘No.' Having been trained in a hospital, I knew I couldn't do anything. So I put my hand on the horn and just figured someone would hear it.”

Sirens sounded, and cop cars and medical vehicles arrived. Diane realized that she also had been hit. She was covered in shards of glass. She took off her coat; her arm was drenched in blood. But she did not want to leave her boyfriend. “I remember fighting with the police because they wouldn't let me get in the ambulance with Louis. I didn't want to be separated from him. I didn't know his status, and I was afraid to leave him.”

At the hospital, Diane was treated for a gunshot wound to the arm. Later, she was informed that Michael Milano had died.

They wouldn't let Diane see Louis the first day, but at some time on the second or third day she was allowed into his room. “When I finally saw him, he could not speak. They had to shave his head because he had bullet wounds all over him. They saved his mustache, and that was, like, the only recognizable thing about Louis at that point. He could not move, and he was on a breathing apparatus.”

“So he was paralyzed?”

“He was paralyzed.”

Up to this point, Sussman de Tennen's testimony was riveting enough, but then she described the aftermath. “I had a fellowship [in Seattle], and I was supposed to leave Boston in two weeks. I really didn't want to leave not knowing the status of Louis. I had friends who offered me a place to stay. But at that point the police told me that they were concerned for my safety, because they thought I might be a target because the people who machine-gunned down the car probably did not want me as a witness. I wasn't concerned for myself, but they said whoever I stayed with I was putting in jeopardy, and so I left Boston.”

Diane Sussman de Tennen moved to Seattle and went on with her life, but she did not forget Louis Lapiana. “It was a real long recovery. For twenty-eight years he was a quadriplegic on a respirator. But the first eight to twelve months were very difficult. He couldn't speak at all. The nurses were really nice; they got used to my calls. They would put the phone by Louis's head. I could talk to Louis. Since he couldn't talk, it was a one-way stream. But the nurses helped out by saying he's smiling or [responding] in some way.”

After her internship was complete, Diane returned to Boston for two years. She saw Louis almost every day. Eventually he got to a point where he could sit up and talk through a respirator. He was as good as someone could be under the circumstances. Eventually, Diane and Louis had a heart-to-heart conversation. He told her that she was not responsible for his life and that she needed to move on. Diane moved back to the state of her upbringing: California. She married and had three children.

“Did you stay in touch with [Louis]?” asked Kelly.

“Louis was part of my life for the next twenty-eight years. He moved to Long Beach VA hospital. I lived in Los Angeles. My children grew up from infancy with Louis. Louis's parents were like a second set of grandparents to my children. I was to this day emotionally connected to Louis. And, yes, I was married and my children are not Louis's, but part of the deal was Louis would always be part of my life, and we did things together. We would go out, have lunch, have dinner, in the wheelchair. I was trained how to suction him on the respirator, how to handle the wheelchair, what to do if the batteries went low. And so, you know, I developed with him over the twenty-eight years [we had together].”

“Did he eventually pass away?”

“Yeah, he passed away in 2001.”

By the time Sussman de Tennen was finished, there was hardly a dry eye in the courtroom or the media overflow room. The testimony touched trial observers who had been numbed by Martorano's litany of murders so devoid of emotion. Here was someone speaking from the other side—a victim of a horrible crime whose life had been changed forever.

Like many on the jury, Janet Uhlar choked up, and she noticed one of the other female jurors with her head lowered in tears.

The emotion that Janet felt toward this witness started out as empathy, but as the day went on, with other witnesses taking the stand, she felt her emotions transitioning into something else. What Janet began to feel was anger. Initially, that anger was focused on the man who had first described the killing of Michael Milano and the shooting of Louis Lapiana as if it meant nothing to him: John Martorano. Clearly, the man was a monster. But as Janet processed her feelings of repulsion toward Martorano, a question arose:

How the hell can this man be out on the street today? What kind of justice system makes a deal with a person who has killed twenty people—some of them completely innocent—a man with no feeling or remorse?

Martorano's deal with the government shocked Janet Uhlar, and for the first time she found herself questioning the government's case.

And it didn't end there.

Throughout most of the trial, Uhlar had been staying at her mother's house in Quincy.

On train rides to and from the courthouse, her head brimming with images and details from the trial, there were other imponderables:
Why Whitey Bulger? What was it about Bulger that made the government feel they needed to make unconscionable deals with men who were as bad—or worse—than he was?

As the trial headed into its third week of testimony, juror number twelve developed the earliest inklings of a troubling realization: she was leaving and arriving at the courtroom each day with more questions than answers.

RALPH DEMASI WAS
a character. He took the stand on a Friday morning, a stooped old man in his seventies. He did not want to be there. That morning, he had refused to talk with the prosecutors in the hallway. He had been given full immunity to testify; nothing he said in court could be used against him. But Ralph, a former hoodlum and ex-con, was not the kind of guy who talked openly about criminal matters to anyone, much less during a public proceeding.