Hitman (35 page)

The other problem was that after you win a string of races, the word goes out, “Don't take no more horses from that guy.” The bookies shut you off, good-bye. Bookies know what's happening. The “live” horse becomes what they call an “order” horse. “Order” means watch out, something's going on.

The Hill needed bookies, to bet straight up on Ciulla's fixed races. Sometimes they used “beards”—guys who weren't connected, or at least weren't known to be with the Hill. Suddenly they would go on these incredible winning streaks, until the day came when the bookies refused to take any more action from them. Soon the Hill was inquiring of everyone they did business with, do you know any bookies we can bet with?

One of the guys they approached was Richie Castucci, the Revere hustler and owner of the Ebb Tide, Joe Barboza's old hangout on the beach. Now, in the swinging seventies, Castucci was running strip joints—the Surf and the Squire—moving a thousand cases of beer a week, pulling in above and beyond the cover charges and the hookers and the $15 “champagne cocktails.” It was serious money and the Hill had a piece of it. They were also involved with Castucci in other scams, one of which involved bootlegged 8-track rock tapes.

Richie Castucci, Revere wiseguy, murdered by Johnny Martorano in 1976

Castucci was another degenerate gambler, who'd been a high-roller in Las Vegas since the late 1950s. He was such a regular that he attended Sammy Davis Jr.'s wedding to Swedish actress Mae Britt there in 1960. None of Castucci's show-biz connections meant anything to Winter Hill. They only cared about finding more bookies. Castucci told Johnny that he knew a guy in New York, Jack Mace, who could handle all the action they wanted to give him.

So we hit this guy Jack Mace three or four times, for big money. Finally he calls me up. He says, look, if you're going to do this to me, you gotta give me some real action too. See, he was big enough that he could lay off a lot of the “live” action we were giving him, but why should he do it if we're not giving him a chance to make some money, too? I understood. At least he wasn't cutting us off, period, which is what a lot of them had already done. Mace says, if you want to keep betting the horses with me, give me some sports action too. And that's when we started getting into the heavy stuff. We thought we were playing everybody for suckers, but what we didn't realize is that they were sucking us in, and in the end, we're the ones who got suckered.

But while it lasted, it would be boom times for the Hill. Their top bookmakers were bringing in big money. Sometimes during football season in the fall, the Hill would split up $75,000 in a good week, and that was just the partners' cut.

Soon everyone was driving a new car. They had jewelry, and so did their girlfriends and wives. Joe McDonald always had access to as much stolen jewelry as they wanted. Soon the partners were dipping into the till to buy one another jewelry or gold chains on their birthdays.

In December 1975, the other guys presented Johnny with a five-carat diamond pinkie ring. It was beautiful, but Johnny wanted an even more ostentatious setting. He took it down to the Jewelers' Building on Washington Street and had a guy he knew reset the diamond. From then on, Johnny never took the ring off his finger.

They kept expanding—after killing Indian Al, they inherited his territory in the Merrimack Valley. It wasn't long before the Lowell Police Department was noticing new people sitting down with the city's top bookmaker, Jackie McDermott, an affable ex-pressman for the
Lowell Sun.
After killing Indian Al, they had ordered McDermott to a meeting at the Holiday Inn on the Somerville-Charlestown Line—the same motel where Wimpy Bennett and Stevie Flemmi had worked out a truce with Buddy McLean in early 1965 during the Irish Gang War.

McDermott was ushered in to see the new bosses. He only had one question: Why was Indian Joe hit in such a brazen way, in Medford Square?

“We wanted,” said Whitey, “to show everyone how easy it was.”

Now the Hill was moving around Lowell, setting things up. One of the new guys who called himself “Nick,” the Lowell police reported, “is believed to be John V. Martorano.”

Jackie McDermott, Lowell bookie, murdered by Billy Barnoski in 1988.

The Lowell police knew of the reputation “Nick” had in Boston, and one night a plainclothesman approached McDermott and asked why he wasn't carrying a gun, now that “Nick” was in town, putting things together for the Hill. Jackie McDermott waved off the cop.

“Guys like Nick,” he said, “if they want to get you, they're gonna get you, whether you're carrying or not.”

There were no problems in Lowell.

*   *   *

NEXT, EVERYONE
at the garage was buying houses. Stevie purchased one in Milton for Marion Hussey and her family, which now included three of his children, although Stevie insisted that on the birth certificates, she list her ex-husband rather than him as the father. He'd known guys like the late Spike O'Toole who'd been lugged into court for nonpayment of child support. Stevie didn't need any of that shit. After all, he was doing the right thing by his second family, moving them out of the city. None of them would have to worry about the Boston public schools anymore. Then he built a swimming pool in the backyard.

Finally, he bought the house next door for his parents and moved them out of Mattapan, which had “tipped” a few years earlier. Once his parents were settled in, Stevie called Frank the Trapper to install a large hidden compartment in the house where he could stash some more of his weapons.

Meanwhile, Whitey soon had a house on Silver Street in South Boston. Howie Winter got a house on Madison Street in Somerville.

Johnny bought two houses, one for his second wife and her son Vincent, the other for Barbara and Johnny Jr. Nancy might have gotten one, too, except that she was remarried. It wouldn't have looked right.

I couldn't put the houses in my own name. That would have been asking for trouble. So for my second wife I used Charlie Raso. It was on Main Street in Medford, a shack basically when I bought it. I think I paid 50 grand, put down 5 or 10 as a down payment, and Charlie took the mortgage, which I paid every month. Then I gutted the place, used subcontractors working under the table. That way you can launder cash and increase the value of the property and you don't leave a paper trail, which means the IRS can't come after you later. If they ask you, Why is the house so much more valuable now than it was when you bought it, you just say, It's the market. Everything's going up.

For Barbara and Johnny, I used George Kaufman as the straw, because I bought in Chestnut Hill, his general neighborhood. I think I paid 90 grand for that place—20 down and a $70,000 mortgage.

One day in 1974, Johnny and Stevie were driving around Brookline Village and Johnny decided to stop in at George Taylor's jewelry store to check out the inventory.

Inside, Johnny introduced Stevie to Taylor, and then Taylor brought over a new employee, a beautiful young blonde named Debbie Davis. Her father owned the service station across the street. After World War II he had brought back a German war bride, Olga. The Davises had a lot of kids and not much money. Before they left that day, Johnny noticed Stevie whispering something to the teenager, and that she was giggling back at him, like they were both in high school.

“So I'm the one introduced Debbie Davis to Stevie Flemmi. Not one of my better matchmaking efforts.”

*   *   *

ANOTHER OF
Johnny's interventions on behalf of romance proved more successful, and long-lasting. One night one of the regulars at Chandler's, a successful businessman whom Johnny looked up to, walked in frowning, a dejected look on his face. Johnny invited him over to his table for a drink and asked him what the problem was.

He said he was just thinking about this girl who lived down the street, and how she was going out with another guy. And she had told him, if she wasn't tied up, she'd love to go out with him. I think she was afraid of this guy she had been dating. Now, this guy I'm sitting with is not just a customer of mine, he's my friend, you follow me? So I told him, maybe I can do something for you. Give me a day or two.

He left and I saw Alvin Campbell sitting at the bar. So I said to Alvin, do me a favor, go see this guy—the girl's boyfriend—and tell him to pack his bags and get outta town. I think the guy knew Alvin's reputation, which didn't hurt the situation. After Alvin had a chat with him, he ran away. I was surprised. I didn't think he'd leave, it was strictly a bluff on our part.

A couple of days later, my friend comes back into Chandler's, and now he's got a big smile on his face. He says he's got a date with this girl, now that the boyfriend is gone. As of 2010, they are still married.

Call me Cupid.

Tony Ciulla would follow the race circuit—living in hotels near wherever the meet was. A couple of times a week, he'd call Johnny from the hotels and give him the next batch of races that he'd fixed, and how they should bet them.

Eventually, Ciulla started buying thoroughbreds with Howie. This put him even deeper into the gang. Through straws, Ciulla eventually purchased a horse named Spread the Word.

It was a $30,000 horse that Fat Tony had somehow figured out how to run in $10,000 races. So we could win some really big money on Spread the Word. But we could only do it a few times before the tracks figured it out, so we had to make the races count. We had guys out everywhere when Spread the Word was running. This one guy, Jerry Matricia, he was from Boston but he'd moved to Vegas. We had him bet on Spread the Word—told him to just bet as much as he could, and then call us before the race, so we'd know how much we owed him if he lost. Spread the Word won, and so did Matricia—$90,000.

The problem was, before we could get somebody out to Vegas to collect, he went into the casinos, figuring he could use our money to win a few grand more for himself. You can imagine what happened next—he gets down 5 or 10 thousand, panics, tries to get it all back and loses everything, the whole 90 grand. Then he starts running, because he's afraid. That's the kind of problem you're going to get when you have as many guys handling cash as we did.

Another time Ciulla paid off a jockey to lose and he won. Double-crossed us. We lost a bundle. Joe Mac went crazy, he wanted to hit the guy and bury him in the back stretch at Suffolk, as a lesson to all the other jockeys. I think Ciulla even testified to that in court. But it ended up Howie and Barnoski went out and gave the guy a slap and told him, “If we ever pay you again to lose a race and it looks like you're gonna win it, then you just better make sure you don't, even if you have to jump off the fucking horse.”

The Hill was making big money with Fat Tony, but Ciulla was addicted to gambling. It didn't matter how much he made fixing races, he was always in the hole, because he couldn't stop wagering. Winning just gave him more money to lose on the races and the games he couldn't fix. It was the thrill of the action that turned him on. Through the Hill, he could finally place bets on his fixed races, but he was still losing everything he made and more, betting on sports with Hill bookies like Bobby Gallinaro. So Ciulla went back to working his old scams, upgrading his old diamond-ring bait-and-switch. Now he was using bars of gold.

Fat Tony knew a guy named James Sousa, and Sousa knew a dentist who had a lot of cash he was looking to invest. Ciulla gave Sousa some gold samples to show the dentist. Just as in the diamond grift, the gold was of high quality, and the dentist went for it.

Sousa arranged to meet the dentist in the parking lot of what was by now the Star Market on Winter Hill, across Broadway from the garage. The dentist would bring cash, which Sousa would take in exchange for a crate full of what was supposed to be gold, but was in fact bricks. But that wouldn't be a problem, because after the transaction Barnoski was supposed to arrive, gun drawn. According to Ciulla's plan, Barnoski would rob the dentist and steal the crate of “gold,” so that the dentist would never know he'd been scammed.