Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (27 page)

Whitey and Flemmi had prepared the hit kit: a .38 revolver, a machine gun with a silencer, a slim jim to pop a car lock, a dent puller to yank out the ignition of the stolen car that would be used for the hit. They’d wrapped the kit up and put it in a suitcase, surrounded by clothes, and sent it on a Greyhound bus to Tulsa. Martorano and McDonald, meanwhile, spent their days assessing the best place to kill Roger Wheeler. They cased his mansion on East Forty-first Street and decided it was too wide-open. By the looks of it, the property had security cameras. They drove to the Telex Corporation’s office building and saw a camera on the building pointed right at Wheeler’s parking space.
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Martorano told Callahan that they were having trouble finding an advantageous spot for the hit. Callahan quickly sent along a note with some new information he’d obtained, courtesy of Rico. Wheeler played golf every Wednesday at the Southern Hills Country Club. As Martorano unfolded the piece of paper, he marveled at Rico. The retired FBI agent was crooked, but he was, as ever, meticulous. Besides the address of the country club, Rico had sent Wheeler’s usual Wednesday tee time: Assuming a round would take about four hours, Wheeler would be off the course sometime around four in the afternoon.
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As his weekly golf game suggested, Roger Wheeler was a man of routines. At fifty-five, he ran three and a half miles every day. He was fit and trim, still the same weight he had been in his twenties. After his Wednesday game, he would shower, have a Scotch, then wash that down with a chocolate chip milk shake. Wheeler lost a friendly golf wager on May 27, 1981, and lamented, as he left the club locker room, that his 12-handicap was too low. He was giving away too many strokes and kept losing bets. “See you Saturday,” he called out to the manager at the club’s golf shop as he left. “Be sure to get my handicap up. These boys are killing me.”
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It was after 4:00 p.m. when Martorano spotted a man who resembled Wheeler walking across the parking lot. Martorano got out of a Pontiac that McDonald had stolen earlier that day and walked briskly in back of Wheeler. He wanted to make sure the guy was going for Wheeler’s Cadillac. Wheeler opened the driver’s-side door and tossed his leather gym bag onto the passenger seat. He climbed behind the wheel and tried to pull the door shut.

Two little girls were standing on the diving board of the country club’s pool next to the parking lot. They saw a heavyset man wearing a baseball cap and what turned out to be a fake beard walk quickly up to the Cadillac and hold the door open. The man in the cap, Johnny Martorano, dropped a white towel that had been draped over a snub-nose revolver in his hand and pulled the trigger. The gun exploded and five bullets fell to the pavement, but the one shot Martorano managed to get off went straight into Wheeler’s forehead and killed him. McDonald slid the Pontiac to a halt just long enough for Martorano to climb into the passenger’s seat and they were gone in seconds, out the back gate. The little girls on the diving board couldn’t make out the license plate.
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When the news of Wheeler’s murder reached Boston, John Connolly, nervous about the possible fallout for his No. 1 informant, called Whitey at Teresa Stanley’s house. Connolly knew he’d be there because it was just after dinnertime. “If anybody asks, you were talking to me when this happened,” Connolly said.
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Whitey had been right to be wary and wrong to go along. Wheeler’s murder caused more consternation within law enforcement than the average gangland hit. A millionaire businessman getting gunned down in the parking lot of a country clubs attracts a sort of attention that doesn’t easily dissipate. Callahan had given Johnny Martorano fifty thousand dollars for the hit, a little more than usual given the risks of the out-of-state assignment. Martorano split the money with McDonald and then gave Whitey and Flemmi a cut of his share. Whitey pocketed the money, knowing it was more trouble than it was worth.

Back in Tulsa, Mike Huff, the detective who first leaned over Wheeler’s body, had some good leads right away. It was, he found, common knowledge inside World Jai Alai that John Callahan had been angling to take the company over and that he was thick with the Winter Hill Gang. But when, at Huff’s request, the Tulsa FBI asked the Boston FBI office for help, they received a terse reply that Boston had ruled out a Winter Hill connection. It was a scam, of course. Morris had dispatched Connolly to interview Callahan, who obligingly said that he had nothing to do with those Winter Hill characters. Connolly reported that his informants, Whitey and Flemmi, had had no role in Roger Wheeler’s demise and that they, too, vouched for Callahan.

It was the kind of circle of lies that had, in the past, so often and easily fended off trouble. And it seemed like it would do so again, even though Callahan and Rico had badly misjudged Wheeler’s widow. She refused to sell the jai alai company, and Wheeler’s sons, Larry and David, were convinced that their father’s murder had something to do with Callahan and his underworld connections. They were absolutely right, but with the FBI in Boston actively undermining the investigation, Mike Huff and the Tulsa cops got nowhere. Huff was so frustrated he overstepped protocol and went right to Connolly, asking for help. He was unaware that Whitey and Flemmi were informants and that Connolly was their handler. Huff’s appeal ran into a wall. He said that Connolly told him “that his job was to ‘take down the [Mafia]’ and not investigate ‘his Irish.’”
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Whitey and Flemmi, thankful for the support, sent a case of fine wine to Morris.
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When Connolly delivered the gift in the garage of the FBI’s Boston office, Morris urged him to return it. “You need to take this,” Connolly insisted. “If you don’t take it, they’re going to think you don’t trust them.”
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Morris nodded in understanding and took the wine.

For Whitey, an unsettling chapter appeared to be over at last. But it would have a sequel.

Only the extremely intoxicated
or the uninitiated went to the Four Seas in Boston’s Chinatown for the food. The menu was outdated, the spareribs greasy, the chicken fingers greasier. The laughing porcelain Buddha in the restaurant’s ground-level window presided over a subterranean, garishly lit Chinese speakeasy. The Four Seas didn’t have a liquor license but it had liquor, and it was open until four in the morning, attracting an eclectic mix: politicians from Beacon Hill, cops from headquarters, strippers from the nearby Combat Zone, gangsters from all over.

It was October 1981, and there were three men sitting at a round table inside the otherwise deserted restaurant. George Pappas, a cocaine dealer, sat between Brian Halloran, John Callahan’s friend and a fringe player in the Winter Hill Gang, and Jackie Salemme, a Mafioso. Pappas was about to report to prison to begin a five-year sentence for dealing cocaine. A judge had given him a month to get his affairs in order. Part of that, in his line of work, was meeting Jackie Salemme and Brian Halloran at the Four Seas at four in the morning.

Jerry Angiulo, the Mafia leader, had accused Pappas of holding back on tribute he owed the mob and had dispatched Salemme to sort it out. Salemme brought the hulking Halloran along for some muscle.
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The waiter, Soon Yen Chin, served Halloran and Salemme cans of Sprite. Pappas ordered a steak to go. The three men were chatting amiably. Chin put the takeout order in front of Pappas and left a check. Then, from the kitchen, Chin heard a single gunshot. He ran upstairs and hid with two cooks. By the time the police arrived, Halloran and Salemme were gone. George Pappas was facedown on the table. Blood poured from the hole above his right eye, congealing around the brown paper bag that contained his cooling steak.
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Salemme ran to his Mafia friends, who had a plan for him to go underground for a while—to go, as the wiseguys called it, to the mattress. Halloran wasn’t so lucky. He was on his own, or thought he was. He didn’t know it, but for the previous seven weeks he had been under surveillance by a federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent named Bill Murphy, who was checking out a tip that Halloran had been carrying a weapon without a license. Murphy had been sitting for hours in his beat-up Chevy Impala, drinking bad coffee, following Halloran from one dive bar to the next. The radio was broken so he’d had no distractions. On Columbus Day weekend, he followed Halloran back to his apartment in Quincy around 2:00 a.m. and then finally called it a night. It was bad luck for Murphy, because not long after he ended the surveillance Halloran jumped into his car and went back out, arriving at the Four Seas shortly after 3:00 a.m.

When Murphy walked into the office the next morning, another ATF agent said, “Hey, did you hear about that hit in Chinatown?” Murphy had a feeling. He called the Boston police homicide unit and the detective on the case got on the phone and explained what they had: a dead body at the table, a set of keys underneath. The car key was matched to a white Buick Regal, rented from National Car Rental, that the cops had found parked near the restaurant. “It was Brian Halloran,” Bill Murphy told the stunned detective, Steve Murphy. “That was the car I was following. There’s a kid’s car seat in the back, isn’t there?”

A short time later, the two Murphys and a prosecutor were standing outside the Quincy apartment Bill Murphy had been sitting on for weeks. They had a search warrant that said that if the key fit the apartment door they could get an arrest warrant for Brian Halloran. Steve Murphy inserted one of the keys found under the table where George Pappas had ordered his last meal and the lock turned.
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Seventeen days after Pappas was shot, Halloran turned himself in. He made bail, but all that did was release him to the wild. He had put the target on his own back—he couldn’t really count on Jackie Salemme’s friends to believe he would keep his mouth shut. A few months after Pappas was shot dead, and three days after Halloran’s wife gave birth to their second son, on Christmas Day, Halloran reached out to FBI agent Leo Brunnick and said he wanted to talk. He wanted to trade information for protection. “I know who killed Roger Wheeler,” Halloran told Brunnick and his partner, Gerry Montanari.

And so the aftershocks of Whitey’s overreach continued.

Halloran told an intriguing story, recalling the day he went to Callahan’s apartment, above Callahan’s office, on a wharf overlooking Boston Harbor, and found Whitey and Flemmi there. They talked about taking out Wheeler, to ward off his audit of the jai alai company, which was sure to turn up the skim. Halloran said Callahan asked him, right there in front of Whitey and Flemmi, to kill Wheeler.

He had a reputation as a tough guy, but Halloran told the agents that he’d asked if there was some other way to get rid of Wheeler short of killing him, and that Whitey had sneered. Whitey didn’t like Halloran, and the feeling was mutual. Callahan asked Halloran to think it over and said he’d be back in touch. Two weeks later, Callahan asked Halloran to meet him at his office. When he arrived he handed him twenty thousand dollars in cash, saying he wasn’t needed on Wheeler anymore. “I shouldn’t have involved you in the first place,” Callahan said.
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After Wheeler was murdered, Halloran told the agents, he had met Callahan for drinks at the Pier, a restaurant and bar on the Southie waterfront, and Callahan had told him how it had gone down: that Johnny Martorano had done the shooting, Steve Flemmi had driven the getaway car, and Whitey Bulger had driven a backup car. Montanari and Brunnick were skeptical of his account and were right to be. It was a blend of fact—Martorano’s role—and embellishment, bringing Whitey and Flemmi directly into the hit. And while Halloran had a reputation as a heavy, a leg breaker who collected debts, he wasn’t known as a shooter. Why would Callahan and the Winter Hill boys ever have turned to him for such a complicated, risky job? Still, they thought, Halloran knew too much about the Wheeler hit to just brush him off; Callahan must have told him something. And here he was, implicating not just Whitey and Flemmi but his good friend John Callahan in a contract killing.

Halloran had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by giving up Whitey and Flemmi. He knew the Mafia wouldn’t think twice about taking him out to protect a made guy like Salemme. But it wasn’t just the Mafia. Halloran could barely keep track of everybody who wanted to kill him. He told Brunnick and Montanari that he would testify but that he wanted to go into the Witness Protection Program. He had survived two assassination attempts in the months before he was charged with the Pappas murder. His wife was nursing a newborn and he had to get off the street before he made her a widow. He assumed the FBI would jump at the chance to take out the two biggest gangsters in town. What he couldn’t know is that the guys he was shopping to the FBI were two of its most valued informants.

Brunnick and Montanari were working the labor racketeering side of organized crime, so they went to the office of the organized crime squad supervisor, John Morris, and asked him if he thought Halloran was telling the truth. “He’s a coke head,” Morris told them. “Unstable.”
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But, even as he fended off their query, Morris was worried. Brunnick and Montanari were not with the program. They were working their own cases. They weren’t invested in Whitey and Flemmi in the least. Morris walked down the hallway to Connolly’s office. “Would Bulger and Flemmi trust Halloran to do something for them?” he asked John Connolly.

“No,” Connolly replied. “You know better than that. They don’t trust him at all.”
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Connolly eyed Morris suspiciously.

“What’s going on?” Connolly asked. “If someone’s saying something about my informants, I have a right to know.”
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Morris explained and Connolly was concerned. Halloran might be a liar and a lowlife, but even a liar and a lowlife could tell a story that might be believed. Connolly went to see Whitey and Flemmi to tell them that Halloran was shopping them for Wheeler’s murder. When he got back to the office, Connolly lied to Morris. “They already know,” he told him.
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