Hitman (58 page)

I says, well, fuck it, this is just too embarrassing. I don't want people to think I'm involved in this. I'm in tears. I loved this guy at one point but fuck it, I'll just kill him.

LAWYER:
So it was at that point that you realized that Mr. Flemmi, Mr. Bulger were pretty much handing you up?

MARTORANO:
They were handing everybody up.

LAWYER:
Including you, right?

MARTORANO:
Including me … I knew they were informants. That was enough.

LAWYER:
And you knew these informants had been around you for twenty-five years of your life while you were committing murders, right?

MARTORANO:
Right.… Now I know they could possibly implicate me, my brother, all my friends. That's why I came forward, not to save myself, because I took 10 extra years, but I tried to save a pack of people.

LAWYER:
You did it for your friends?

MARTORANO:
I did a lot for them, yeah.

LAWYER:
So you did the right thing?

MARTORANO:
I still believe I did. I mean, I didn't think anybody else got hurt by Flemmi or Bulger after the fact.

On May 22, 1997, after more than a decade of denials, the FBI officially admitted that Whitey Bulger had been an informant. Judge Wolf had already granted the defendants' motion for open pretrial hearings. In outing Whitey as a rat, the government cited “unique and rare circumstances.”

The hearings began with a parade of FBI agents, including Zip Connolly. But he took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify. Outside the courtroom, he denounced the rumors now swirling around him, issuing almost daily denials of the stories that were appearing in both Boston newspapers. He knew nothing about the FBI office buying all the booze for its Christmas parties at the South Boston Liquor Mart. When it was reported in the
Herald
that he had accepted free stoves and refrigerators from Whitey's appliance store at F and West Broadway, Zip denounced the front-page story as “an abject lie.”

After the FBI agents came the gangsters. Anthony St. Laurent, the Saint, who had had the run-in with Johnny over his attempted shakedown of Joe Schnitz, complained to the judge that he was in ill health and had to take “40, 50 enemas a day.”

Suddenly the Saint had a new nickname: “Public Enema Number One.”

The Saint was asked directly if he was an FBI informant.

“I take the Fifth,” he replied.

It all made good copy in the newspapers, but it was clear that all this was just a warm-up for the main attraction—Stevie Flemmi. If, that is, he lived long enough to get to the witness stand.

I think I could have killed him and gotten away with it. I planned it out for a while. Even if they got me for it, so what? I'm facing one murder charge instead of twenty. Plus, if I don't kill him, for the rest of my life—my life in prison—people who Stevie put in jail will be asking me, “Why didn't you stop him when you had the chance?” It was like with the Campbell brothers. If I don't do something, other people are going to get fucked.

My plan was simple. I was three doors down from him. The doors are locked at 9
P.M.
, and at 6
A.M.
they press a master button, and all the cells are unlocked. There were cameras everywhere, but that time of day, before dawn, it was real dark, too dark for the camera to catch anything but a shadow. What I would do is, I would go into his cell and either strangle or stab him, then pull the blanket over his head, and close the cell door behind me, locking it. Then I'd go down to the mess hall and get in line.

See, Plymouth was a boring place. They didn't have jobs there. They might find his body right afterward, but chances are they don't discover he's dead for twelve hours—until the first lockdown of the night, at 6:30. We talked about it, and one of the other guys offered to help me out if I needed any assistance.

But ultimately, I decided not to do it. Lotta people get stabbed in jail, you know, so they've gotten pretty good at saving guys who've been shanked. And they can bring back people you think you've strangled. If I'd had a gun I could have made sure, but that wasn't an option. It was too dangerous, if I tried to kill him and he survived. Then he's out the door for sure, and we're all done for.

It was a difficult situation for us to be in. Stevie's real scared by this point. We tell him, you're not our friend no more, but you're in this case with us, and maybe we can still win it. We showed him the decisions from the Scarpa case in New York, the Colombo crime family—it was the same deal, an FBI informant in the conspiracy. Did we have a good chance of succeeding? No. It was a long shot, and we know he's a rat, but we can't treat him like one, number one because he might get us out, and number two, because he might turn on us.

Remember, he's got other problems in jail besides being a rat. There's also a lot of guys from Southie locked up in Plymouth, and they know what Stevie and Whitey were doing with those young girls all those years. They hated the guy. We hated him too, wanted to kill him as much as the guys from Southie did, maybe more, but on the other hand we had to protect him, for our own case.

This is a guy who I know now has been ratting on me since I was twenty-four years old, and now I'm fifty-six, and I'm concerned that he's going to get me and everyone else I know one last time. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that if he starts talking about all the murders, he could walk out of Plymouth, no murder raps, no forfeitures, no nothing. And what if they bring Whitey back to corroborate his testimony against the rest of us? Stevie and Whitey could end getting away with everything, with all their money, living somewhere warm, and we're locked up forever.

Johnny had a childhood friend from Milton who was in the Secret Service. He asked him to come in for a visit—as an attorney, so that Johnny could invoke the attorney-client privilege if something went wrong. Johnny wanted his old friend's opinion of the cops' organized-crime strike force. Could he trust Dan Doherty, the DEA agent? And how about the state police—Tom Foley, Dan Duffy, and Steve Johnson? Obviously, going to the FBI was out of the question. The Secret Service agent vouched for the strike force. They're stand-up guys, he told Johnny. That was good enough for Martorano.

Next he needed a lawyer. Dick O'Brien was using Frank DiMento, who'd been around forever. He went back at least as far as Buddy McLean, and he'd even represented Whitey Bulger a time or two.

Johnny knew and respected DiMento, and of course O'Brien was a good friend, so nobody thought anything of it when Johnny started hanging around the visiting room talking to DiMento, even if Dick O'Brien wasn't around. Finally Johnny told Frank to call the strike force.

I knew Frank was friendly with Fred Wyshak, the prosecutor who was handling the case. Frank vouched for Wyshak's integrity. Frank spoke to Wyshak and then got a message back to me at the jail from Wyshak: “Tell Johnny if he helps us I'll do anything I can for him.”

Frank told me, “If Fred says it, he means it.” He was right. Wyshak was telling the truth.

Johnny couldn't say anything to anybody. But he'd gotten to like Robert “Bobby” DeLuca, the Mafia soldier from Rhode Island. Never having done anything with Flemmi, DeLuca had never been betrayed by him. So he became an intermediary, a go-between of sorts, between Stevie and the Boston guys he'd fucked.

It wasn't an easy assignment for DeLuca, having to commiserate daily with Stevie Flemmi. DeLuca detested him as much as everybody else. But for months DeLuca kept Stevie talking, fantasizing about winning the case and getting out. It was enough to keep Stevie from flipping. Under adverse conditions, DeLuca performed a real service for his fellow wiseguys. So one morning Johnny stopped by Robert's cell to give him a heads-up.

“Robert,” he said. “I am going out that door before Stevie does. I am going to destroy him before he destroys us.”

They called me in for a phony hearing or something like that, and that was it, I was gone from Plymouth. The state police had a little two-man jail set up at the academy in New Braintree. That's where they put me. They made a back room and I'd talk to them there every day—Doherty, and from the state police Tom Foley, Dan Duffy, and Steve Johnson. Some days Fred Wyshak and Brian Kelly from the U.S. attorney's office.

Frank DiMento was involved in everything, either in person or on the phone. He protected my position, totally. I never considered lawyers as having balls, but I ended up with two guys who did—Frank DiMento and Marty Weinberg.

So I'm in there talking to the strike force every day. I tell them what happened; I give them everything except the names. This is a proffer—if we can't reach an agreement, they can't use any of what I've told them against me. They made it clear from the beginning, you have to tell us everything, if you lie you get thrown out, sent back to prison, and prosecuted for perjury, the way Frankie Salemme did later on. Plus they can then use the evidence in the confessions of murder against me.

From day one, I told them I would testify against Stevie and Whitey. I also told 'em, those are the only two I'll testify against. Because they're the rats.

Foley would say to me, at trial you would have to tell the truth, who was with you on all the hits. I said okay, but other than Whitey and Stevie all the names in these murders stay blank until the day I make the agreement, and the agreement has to be that I don't have to testify against anybody but those two. The only way I'm naming any of my friends is if I have a deal, in writing, that I don't have to testify against them, ever. And I told them, if you don't like my terms, then just send me back, because I'm almost done anyway.

Meanwhile, Judge Wolf's hearings are going on without me. Marty Weinberg is still there every day for me, because I don't know if I'm going to make a deal or not. Finally the feds got tired of haggling with me, so they sent me back, but not to Plymouth. I got shipped out to Otisville, a federal prison in New York, and they threw me in the hole.

In “the hole,” Johnny Martorano only got out of his cell twice a week, for showers. It was solitary confinement. There was a hole in the cell door, and twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, he would stick his hands through the hole. The guards would then handcuff him, open the cell door, and take him down to the shower room.

Once he was inside, the guards would lock the shower-room door, and Johnny would stick his hands back through the hole in that door, and the handcuffs would be unlocked and removed. He would shower, after which he would stick his hands through the shower door and be handcuffed for the trip back to his cell.

I was in a good position, if you can ever call being in the hole a good position. They needed me to solve all these murders. They wanted to make a deal with me, but there was all kinds of pressure. The FBI was knuckling the U.S. attorney, they wanted to make the deal with Stevie, and then probably Whitey would have come back to corroborate everything.

But by then they were just too dirty for anybody to deal with, except maybe the FBI. The strike force finally went to Janet Reno—she was the attorney general then—and what they decided in Washington was, offer him twelve to fifteen years. Remember I'm still only looking at four-to-five, and by now I've been in almost four. They never thought I'd agree to it.

But I surprised them by accepting the deal. Because that's the only way I could stop Whitey and Stevie from going on ratting people out, myself included, but also everybody else I knew. In a lot of these murders, there weren't a lot of witnesses, so it's either gonna be Stevie or me who makes the deal. And if it's not me, and he ends up testifying against me and all my friends, what do I say to my brother? Or Howie? Or Pat? Or even Frankie?

They told me, well, you're gonna have to agree to also testify against any “corrupt officials.” Meaning cops. I said I got no problem with going up against Connolly and Rico, but I would prefer not to go against Schneiderhan. He never hurt me. And I never did testify against him. They got him, but not through me.

But they knew how bad it would look, if I admitted to twenty murders, and I only had to testify against four people. So they came up with a specific target list. I had nothing to do with drawing up that list. It was a bunch of Whitey's guys from Southie that I would have to testify against. Sure, I said. I loved that list, because I'd never known any of those guys, let alone committed any crimes with them. So I was glad to say I'd tell the government the truth about anything I did with them, which was nothing.

The real list to me was still the same guys—Whitey, Stevie, and Zip, and, before he died, Rico. At Zip's trial in Miami, they tried to make a big thing out of all these guys that I didn't know.

LAWYER:
The people that you agreed to testify against included George Hogan, correct?

MARTORANO:
Never met him.

LAWYER:
Patrick Linskey?

MARTORANO:
Never met him.

LAWYER:
John Curran?

MARTORANO:
I knew him because he drove Whitey Bulger around. That's all I knew.

LAWYER:
Why did you agree to testify against somebody you didn't know?

MARTORANO:
That's the best way to agree.

LAWYER:
You put one over on the government?

MARTORANO:
No, they wrote the list. I didn't write the list. That was the South Boston crew in the '80s and '70s. I don't know nothing about them. I was gone.

LAWYER:
So you did put one over?

MARTORANO:
I didn't put one over. My lawyers made a good deal.

Johnny signed the agreement and was shipped off to Texas, to a special federal penitentiary with a wing called “the Valachi suite.” Johnny hated the name, because he didn't consider his decision at all similar to the one made by Joe Valachi, the first Mafia soldier to turn rat, and testify before Congress. Back in the early '60s, Valachi had been trying to save his own skin, period, and had informed on everyone he ever knew.