Hitman (15 page)

Massachusetts State Trooper Richard Schneiderhan, one of Johnny's police sources.

Another valuable acquaintance that Johnny made in Enrico's was a banker from Mission Hill named Donald B. Wallace. He'd stroll into Enrico's for the same reason most of the customers did.

He'd look around and say to me, “Say, Johnny, do you see that girl that was in here last week? You know, the blonde.” So I'd look around, and if she was there, I'd pull her aside and get her a “date” with Wallace. I mean, I wouldn't pay her off right there in front of him. That would have been crass. But if the girl he wanted wasn't there, there was always somebody else I could send him out with. He wasn't exactly particular when he was out on the prowl after a few drinks. Do you follow me?

As far back as Luigi's, Johnny had always dealt in stolen goods he bought from “boosters”—burglars, most of whom took out stores downtown. Now Johnny was expanding his roster of burglars to include the more numerous gangs that specialized in robbing homes. Well into the sixties, millions of Americans still retained their old World War II–era habit of buying low-interest U.S. savings bonds, and then stashing them at home under a mattress, or in an antique strongbox.

“I used to have guys bringing me huge stacks of those E bonds, so thick they'd choke a horse. I wouldn't even bother to count 'em there'd be so many, I'd just throw the guy a few hundred. Pennies on the dollar. Take it or leave it. Nobody wanted those kinds of bonds.”

But then of course Johnny had to unload them, at not that much of a markup. It was a minor racket, a low-return business. Until Johnny met Donald B. Wallace of the Lincoln Savings Bank, Roxbury, Massachusetts.

“He would pay me off on the face value—never saw anything like it, before or since. I still have no idea how he unloaded all those stolen bonds, but he did.”

Wallace soon introduced Johnny to another scam: $1,000 no-collateral cash loans.

“Don was a good guy, always trying to help. All I had to do was come up with a real name, I guess so they could check the credit ratings. Not somebody famous—not Bobby Orr or Carl Yastrzemski. Just somebody real. He told me, as long as I made one payment on the loan—say, twenty bucks—then it was legal, and he could keep it on the books forever.”

Pretty soon a lot of Johnny's friends were getting their car loans from Lincoln Savings. A notation in one of Rico's FBI reports from Stevie Flemmi noted that the mob had “married” him.

There were other ways for wiseguys to make money off their cars. Especially since one of Johnny's good friends, George Kaufman, always owned a garage. Whenever Martorano figured he'd waited long enough since his last “accident,” he'd drive his car in to wherever Kaufman was operating his garage that year. (Kaufman tended to change locations fairly often, because when his regular customers noticed the type of people who had taken to hanging out in his waiting room, business had a way of dropping off.)

The Hughes brothers are taken into Boston police headquarters, 1965.

Kaufman would put a dent in Johnny's car, then call one of his claims adjusters. Sometimes it took a small bribe to get the guy to inflate the value of the dent enough to make insurance fraud worth everyone's while. Other times, the adjuster would do it on the arm, especially if he owed money to one or another of the shylocks loitering in Georgie's waiting room.

*   *   *

TIME WAS
running out for the Hughes brothers of Charlestown. In March 1966, they drove into an ambush outside Connie Hughes's little bungalow-style home in Malden. Just before shots rang out, neighbors heard a male voice scream: “How do you like that, you motherfuckers?” Connie ran, but Steve was hit, and spent a month recuperating in Malden Hospital.

“They shot me like a dog,” Steve Hughes told a relative. Connie, meanwhile, disappeared for a week before resurfacing at police headquarters in Malden with a lawyer.

On May 24, 1966, Connie and another of the lesser McLaughlins were hunting Howie Winter, who had taken over the Winter Hill gang since Buddy McLean's murder the previous fall. Connie Hughes took his investigation to a barroom on the Charlestown-Somerville line known as the Stork Club. Thirsty as usual, Connie lingered a bit too long in the shebeen. He was spotted by a young kid named Brian Halloran, who quickly called the Hill. By the time Hughes stumbled out of the bar long after last call, a dark sedan was ready to pick up his trail as he drove home to Malden.

Inebriated as he was, Connie still caught the play, and tried to escape on the Northeast Expressway near the Chelsea-Revere line. But his Nova was no match for the hit car, and when it pulled alongside, a gunner opened up with an M-1 army rifle. Between six and eight armor-piercing slugs struck the car. Two of them hit Connie in the head, killing him instantly. A few hours later, Steve Hughes identified his brother's body at the Northern Mortuary.

Steve Hughes was now the only “capable” McLaughlin still breathing, and on the street.

The end of the road for Connie Hughes, 1966.

A week later, Stevie Flemmi reported in to Rico of the FBI. Flemmi, whom Rico identified interchangeably either by his own name or as “informant,” reported that Connie “had previously been around Dearborn Square, Roxbury, Mass., obviously in an effort to set him up for a ‘hit.' The fact that CONNIE is now deceased is not displeasing to him. Informant was asked if he had an idea who committed the murder, and he advised that ‘he had an excellent idea who committed the murder' but it would be better if he did not say anything about the murder.”

*   *   *

BY THE
fall of 1966, both Johnny Martorano and Stevie Flemmi were lining up their next hits. Johnny was concerned about John Jackson, the black bartender who had been at Luigi's the night Margie Sylvester was murdered in 1964. After Palladino's killing the previous year, Jackson had wisely disappeared, but months later he reappeared in Boston as if everything had blown over. It hadn't.

Meanwhile, Stevie Flemmi and Frankie Salemme were setting up Steve Hughes. Hughes had gotten tight with Sammy Lindenbaum, a mob jack-of-all-trades from Revere; he was an abortionist and a shylock, among other things. The ex-con Lindenbaum had been born in Russia in 1899, and as a youth had boxed under the name of “Young Leonard.” Every Friday he made collections from his agents in the Lawrence area, and Steve Hughes started accompanying him every week.

Sammy Lindenbaum, murdered with Steve Hughes in Middleton in 1966.

Lindenbaum was repeatedly warned by the Office to stay away from Hughes, but he didn't take the hint. Down in Providence, the Man finally shrugged and okayed the hit. On the last day of his life, September 23, 1966, Lindenbaum seemed remarkably serene, considering how hot Steve Hughes was. They enjoyed a long, leisurely lunch at Blinn's Clam Stand in Bradford Hills, where the paunchy Lindenbaum ordered his usual Friday feast: two lobster rolls, french fries, and a side of fried clams. Then they headed east on 125 to pick up 114. Lindenbaum's two Chihuahuas scampered around the backseat of his Pontiac Tempest.

Suddenly a car described as a black Lincoln or Mercury with four occupants approached Lindenbaum's vehicle at high speed, pulling alongside.

“What appeared to be a pole protruded from the right passenger side of the front seat,” the state police report said. “A series of sounds like the backfiring of a car was heard. The Pontiac car went out of control and tore away nine cement guardrail posts and came to rest about fifteen feet off the right shoulder of the highway in a swamp area.”

No one got the license number of the black sedan. On Lindenbaum's body police found $1,060 in cash. Hughes was carrying $55. The cops also found a large number of betting slips. Inside Hughes's coat pocket was a fully loaded .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with the serial number filed off.

Outside the wrecked, bullet-riddled car, in the tall swamp grass, Lindenbaum's two Chihuahuas were playfully scampering around. They had apparently climbed out of the shattered backseat window after the crash.

During the autopsy, in addition to the four bullets that had killed Hughes, the coroner discovered in his body another older bullet, left over from the shooting earlier that year in Malden.

Stevie Flemmi provided the underworld take on Hughes's death to Rico.

“On 10/10/66, informant advised that since STEVE HUGHES was murdered that the entire city is much more at ease.”

*   *   *

NOT JOHNNY
Martorano, though. By late September 1966, another grand jury was looking into the Margie Sylvester murder. Since John Jackson's return to Boston, he had been tending bar at a waterfront saloon called the Yankee Fisherman. Johnny started hunting for Jackson, prowling through the city at night, looking for his car—an easy-to-spot red convertible.

Jackson had moved back into his girlfriend's apartment at 102 Queensberry Street in the Fenway. That was where Johnny decided to take him, using a few of Barboza's guys as backup. In the early morning of September 28, 1966, they drove to the Fenway in Tash's black Cadillac, which had been used a few months earlier to dispose of Tony Veranis's body.

Tash and Jimmy Kearns would remain in the car, while Johnny and Tommy DePrisco would handle the hit.

Just after 3
A.M.
they watched as his red convertible pulled into the parking lot of the apartment building. Armed with a shotgun, Martorano waited with DePrisco on the other side of the chain-link fence that enclosed the lot. Jackson got out of his car, and Martorano immediately fired, dropping the bartender. Tommy DePrisco's job was to get over the chain-link fence and, if necessary, finish off Jackson with a head shot. Revolver in hand, DePrisco climbed onto a wooden barrel next to the fence, figuring to use it to jump over the fence. But when he put all his weight on top of the barrel, it gave way, and he fell through the rotting wood into the barrel, which was full of fetid water.

John W. Jackson, potential grand-jury witness, murdered, by Johnny, 1966.