Hitman (29 page)

Jerry Angiulo, age 55, near the height of his power.

Indian Al was an experienced torch, although he botched a 1970 firebombing of a ski resort in Vermont and ended up with a three-year sentence. But Vermont allowed Indian Al to serve out his sentence closer to home, at MCI-Walpole, which is always a good place to recruit shooters for any pending gang war in Boston. As he finished his sentence in 1972, Indian Al was trying to hang onto his betting business until he could get back on the street. But one of Angiulo's bookies, Paulie Folino, a forty-seven-year-old gambler from Watertown, had taken advantage of Indian Al's incarceration to peel off several of his best customers.

Indian Al's crew started threatening Folino, telling him to lay off their customers. Folino reported everything back to Angiulo, along with editorial comment: Wasn't this one of the reasons he paid In Town for “protection,” so that he wouldn't have to worry about being shaken down by two-bit wiseguys like Indian Al? And where the hell did a guy in prison get off, telling Paulie he couldn't take bets from people who were desperate for someone to cover their action—someone who would pay off if they won?

In the North End, Jerry fumed, but he wasn't prepared to go to war. He had a lot of headaches, starting with the fact that the first tell-all book about In Town was about to come out—
My Life in the Mafia,
by the aptly named Fat Vinnie Teresa, a rotund rat who wasn't really in the Mafia, not that that had stopped him from selling his story to the highest bidder. More important, Larry Baione was about to begin a short jail sentence of his own, and Joe Russo, his other top gun, was already behind bars. But Angiulo still wasn't that concerned. After all, how much trouble could Indian Al really stir up while he was still in the can?

Fat Vinnie Teresa wrote the first Boston mob tell-all book in 1973,
My Life in the Mafia.

Plenty, as it turned out. In August 1972, the state Department of Correction was just beginning an experimental new program—weekend furloughs for convicts. It was one of those liberal reforms so popular at the time in Massachusetts. It was supposed to reintegrate criminals back into society, thereby reducing recidivism. Indian Al got one of the first weekend furloughs and used it to hook up with an ex-con, a guy from the old Wimpy Bennett–Stevie Flemmi Roxbury crew. They grabbed Paulie Folino off the Indian Ridge Golf Course in Andover and killed him. Folino may have been the first, but he was certainly not the last victim of Massachusetts's weekend furlough program.

A few days later, with Indian Al back in prison, Folino's brand-new white Cadillac El Dorado showed up at Logan Airport, but the body wasn't in the trunk. His corpse didn't turn up until October, in Boxford, about 150 yards off a main road. Indian Al hadn't even shown Paulie Folino the respect of properly burying him. Angeli had strangled Folino by wrapping a rope around his neck and then tying it to his hands and feet, which were pushed up underneath his body. For a while, Folino would have been able to keep his legs underneath, but slowly he would have tired. As he let go, the rope would tighten, slowly and painfully garroting him. It was an old-style hit. They had tortured Paulie Folino. As one state cop told reporters, “He died the hard way.”

Indian Al was sending a message, and now it was Jerry Angiulo's turn to respond in kind. Indian Al was released from MCI-Walpole on the day after Christmas in 1972, and now he was moving around Boston again.

“He killed my guy,” Angiulo explained to Howie and Johnny.

Jerry was looking for a sympathetic ear. He said Al would be gaining momentum now that he was out, and that if he'd come after him, he'd come after us, too. Mainly, Jerry was looking for us to do something for him without him having to ask directly. We told him we'd check around and get back to him. So we did. We talked to our guys, we asked Sal Sperlinga, who knew Indian Al, and Charlie Raso, who'd been doing some work for him. Charlie said he was staying out of whatever happened, but he confirmed that Angeli was out of his mind. It was insane what he did—if you whacked somebody who was with In Town, you had to expect they're going to come after you. And just killing Paulie scared Al's own bookies, too, because they have to figure, the Indian is willing to kill them too. None of it made any sense.

Sal Sperlinga, the Hill's connection to Somerville City Hall, murdered in Magoun Square in 1979.

Howie and Johnny went back to the North End a couple more times and finally agreed with Jerry that Indian Al would have to go. The Mafia still wasn't their cup of tea, but they figured Indian Al had it coming. He'd started it, after all, by killing Paulie Folino. And now the Hill would finish it, by doing a favor for their new partners.

Both the Hill and the Mafia would have crews out looking for him, but it was tacitly understood that the heavy lifting would be done out of Somerville. In Town under Angiulo had become a one-trick pony: if anyone crossed them, they would demand that the guy come down to the North End, and then they would kill him. It had worked for decades, from the ambush of South Boston hoodlum Frankie Gustin in 1931 right up to the time when they murdered Joe Barboza's bail collectors in the Nite Lite in 1967. But Indian Al knew Jerry Angiulo too well to fall for that old trick.

He would stay out of the North End, and In Town wasn't much good beyond their own turf. As Frankie Salemme put it later, “They couldn't find their way off Hanover Street.”

LAWYER:
The Mafia was a much more powerful criminal group, if you will, than the Winter Group, right?

MARTORANO:
Possibly.

LAWYER:
They had more than five members, didn't they?

MARTORANO:
Sure. Maybe more people. More money.

LAWYER:
More guns?

MARTORANO:
Maybe.

LAWYER:
More shooters?

MARTORANO:
Maybe.

Jerry Angiulo gave Howie and Johnny mug shots of Indian Al—he had a beard, and favored long leather coats and flashy jewelry, including both the pinkie ring from his brother and a gold chain with a small gold horn attached. In his packet of information, Angiulo included all of Indian Al's addresses, those of his associates and brother, and also the make and model of his car—a brown Mercedes.

The goal was to whack Indian Al before he knew they were after him, to catch him flat-footed.

The Hill set up a war room in Joe McDonald's Fire House. They put shifts of surveillance cars out on the street, all equipped with Whitey's new-model walkie-talkies, looking to spot Indian Al's Mercedes. Everyone had their own people out on the street, working shifts. Somerville, Southie, what was left of the old crews in Charlestown and Roxbury—the Hill really had become an amalgamated gang.

Next they would need guns, lots of guns. Before he went on the lam in 1969, Stevie Flemmi had stashed an arsenal in the basement of the Commercial Street restaurant owned by Bobby LaBella—Bobby the Greaser.

The Mafia was likewise looking to pick up a few machine guns. So Frankie Salemme's brother, Jackie, went down to Commercial Street. Jackie Salemme told Bobby the Greaser that Frankie was asking him to turn over Stevie's grease guns to In Town. Bobby the Greaser shook his head.

“Frankie didn't give me the guns, Stevie give me the guns.”

Johnny made the next visit to Bobby LaBella's café.

“Sorry, Johnny,” he said. “I gotta hear it from Stevie.” So Stevie was called in Montreal, where he was still hiding out, working nights in the print shop of the
Montreal Gazette
under the alias of Robert Lombruno.

After Flemmi personally phoned the okay to Bobby the Greaser, Johnny returned to the basement and picked out a grease gun. It was a cheap but lethal World War II–era .45-caliber submachine that got its name from its resemblance to the standard garage mechanic's tool.

Everyone agreed that whenever they finally caught up with him, the hit on Indian Al would be handled by the Hill's “working partners”—Sims driving, Johnny and another guy from Somerville shooting. Whitey Bulger would follow in a crash car equipped with multiple police radios.

Then they set up their hit bags—bulky canvas mailbags with various weapons: pistols, carbines, sawed-off shotguns, even a couple of grenades, just in case something went wrong and they had to make a run for it. Johnny always took along a ski mask. Jimmy Sims preferred a plastic Halloween-type mask.

For what they had planned, the Hill laid in a new supply of “boilers.” Mostly they were four-door Fords—they looked like police cars and their ignitions popped quicker than Chrysler or GM vehicles. They'd use a shimmy to unlock the front door, then stick a dent-puller into the ignition and pop it. After that, all you needed was a screwdriver to turn the engine over. It was a lot faster than hot-wiring a car.

With any luck, it would be over very quickly—a one-and-done. Once they hit Indian Al, the rest of his gang would probably fade.

LAWYER:
You didn't know Mr. Notarangeli well enough to recognize him in person, is that right?

MARTORANO:
I never met him.

LAWYER:
So you agreed to kill a man you never met?

MARTORANO:
Positively.

LAWYER:
And you were going basically on the description of other people, isn't that right?

MARTORANO:
Yup.

LAWYER:
You weren't sure enough the first couple of times that you killed people who weren't Mr. Notarangeli, right?

MARTORANO:
Well, he was driving his car, dressed in his coat, and had long hair like him and a long beard like him. Somebody said over the radio that that's him, so I took it to be him.

Just after midnight on a Thursday in March 1973, the walkie-talkie crackled at the Fire House. As usual, they had Indian Al's bar, Mother's, staked out. It had been a slow night, and one of the spotters had noticed what he presumed to be Indian Al's brown Mercedes out front of the bar on Causeway Street. Within minutes, a stolen Ford was heading down the McGrath/O'Brien Highway from Somerville toward the city. Sims was driving, with Johnny in the front seat and another guy from Somerville in the backseat. Johnny was cradling Flemmi's grease gun, and the guy from Somerville had an AR-15.

It was up to a Charlestown hood, John Hurley, to make sure that it was Indian Al getting into the Mercedes. The fingerman stood under the elevated Green Line and watched from the Causeway Street shadows as a guy in his early thirties with a beard and a long leather coat got into the driver's seat, followed by two other people. Hurley radioed to the hit Ford that he had positively ID'd Indian Al.

But it wasn't Angeli. Although Johnny and the others in the boiler didn't know it, the driver of the Mercedes was actually the head bartender at Mother's, a thirty-year-old guy named Michael Milano. His duties included opening and closing the bar, tallying the receipts for the evening. Milano had just bought a used dark red 1966 Mercedes, of which he was very proud. In the dark it looked like Indian Al's brown Mercedes.