Whitey and Salemme may have slipped away, but we still had that intel on Johnny Martorano, living under a false identity in Florida. I’d sent Johnson and Scanlan to bring him in. I’d had to take them off Salemme to do it, but Martorano was that important. Back in the day, he’d been second only to Whitey as the biggest mobster in Boston. I knew about him from my earliest days in OC. His was one of the fat files. He was a hit man for Winter Hill back when he and Whitey and Flemmi were all vying for the top spot occupied by Howie Winter. As a killer, he was up with Whitey as one of the most proficient ever. By now, we had him for twenty murders, officially, to Whitey’s nineteen. Newspaper accounts tried to put Martorano at fifty.
Unlike Whitey, Martorano didn’t kill to send a message; he killed to get someone dead. If Whitey sprayed his victim’s face with machine-gun fire, Martorano used a single bullet, fired from a snub-nosed thirty-eight into the back of the head while his victim sipped coffee in a coffee shop or idled at a red light. No one ever saw it coming. Nothing flashy or traceable. Just done. After hours, Johnny himself always stood out. He had all the charm of gunmetal, but he could dress. He loved the glittery nightclubs, where he played the old-school hood in the Italian double-breasted suit and alligator shoes, his fingers bright with jeweled rings, chasing some pretty girl half his age.
Martorano was as street-savvy as they come, but he had some blind spots. When Howie Winter came up with a cockamamie racing scheme to make some quick money when he was in a pinch, Martorano went in with him. And when Winter slipped up and got arrested for it, Martorano did, too.
At the time, Martorano had no idea, but as things turned out, this was not just bad luck. Rather, it was some bad luck that was visited on him by Whitey and Stevie as top-echelon informants. Martorano considered them his two best friends in the world; each was a godfather to one of Martorano’s two sons. Martorano had risked his life to save those guys, and thought nothing of it. But they sold him down the river. They’d used the FBI to take Martorano and Winter down, in order to clear the way for themselves to take over as the undisputed rulers of the Irish mob. Winter Hill had been Howie’s; now it was Whitey’s. For Whitey, it was a move out of a military manual. Surprise strike, high-value target, minimum risk. So the big boys went down: one to prison, the other to a life on the lam.
Or maybe they thought they were nice to Martorano. After they sicced the feds on the two, Whitey and Stevie did Martorano the favor of warning him that the feds were coming. “Maybe you should go away for six months or so, treat it like a vacation,” Bulger had told him. But there never seemed to be a good time to come back. Bulger and Flemmi started sending him money through George Kaufman, but never very much. Martorano had had a nice bookmaking business going, but it fell apart when he left. Meanwhile Bulger and Flemmi’s expanded. Still, Martorano had been grateful that his friends had looked out for him, and that gratitude didn’t wear out even as his fugitive years reached fifteen. If it weren’t for Whitey’s flight, people would be asking, “Where’s Johnny?” Then again, the two fugitives had something else in common: a suspicion that the FBI might think it was better off leaving them wherever they were.
To us, Martorano was key, since he was a serious player, a contract killer, who knew about Whitey from way back and had been a fugitive for fifteen years.
And so we sat up when we first heard, back in the fall, that Martorano was in Florida, and that he was back in the loan-sharking business with Steve Flemmi. Our source was Jack Kelly, a sometime mobster, full-time deadbeat, and occasional informant. He was the son of John “Snooks” Kelly, the famous coach of the Boston College hockey team who led the Eagles to their first national championship in 1949. Jack was a lifetime junkie who’d do anything to support his habit. Robbery won him serious jail time, and then he fell in with Flemmi to do some loan-sharking and leg breaking and other rough stuff. He never cleaned himself up, though, and by the time we got to him he was wasting away from the liver disease that would eventually kill him.
The mob provides no health benefits, needless to say, so we won him over with an offer to help pay for his health care if he helped us. Sensing that he was on the way out, Kelly claimed that, after a life of crime and deception, he wanted a chance to make things right, but this didn’t make him any easier to work with. No informant is a picnic, but Kelly was a real rattlesnake.
I put Tom Duffy on him. Duff had taken some serious nut jobs before. Eventually Kelly’s snappishness and mood swings wore him out. But not before he’d given us the word about Martorano—not as a killer, but as a loan shark. Kelly didn’t know where Martorano was based, or how he got the funds, but he was putting serious dough out on the street through Flemmi’s bookie manager, Joey Yerardi. That was Kelly’s line, anyway. We’d been keeping tabs on Yerardi but had gotten no hint of Martorano’s operation. At first we didn’t believe it. We couldn’t imagine that Martorano would reconnect with Flemmi after all these years, or that a loser like Kelly would know about it. When informants need something from you the way Kelly did, they’ll tell you anything you want to hear.
“He talks to Yerardi,” Kelly insisted. “He does, goddamit.”
“You’re shitting us,” Duffy told him.
Kelly got squirmy. “They talk, man. Yerardi and Martorano talk on the phone. They do. I know they do.”
“Prove it,” Duff said. “Call him. Or get him to call you. Go on, get him on the phone.” Somehow Kelly worked it out with Yerardi. Martorano did get on the phone with Kelly.
When we listened to the tape of the call, it seemed to us like it might be Martorano, although none of us had actually ever heard his voice. He had a tough-guy Boston accent. He was definitely talking about street money. But even if it was Martorano, the call didn’t bring us any closer to locating him, since he was using a cell phone of Yerardi’s.
This was back in December, when things were heating up on Whitey and the others, and we were in front of the grand jury every day, first recording evidence and then reading it into the record. Everyone was going full out. But then, I’d had Steve Johnson with me for a couple of years. He’d been an undercover cop working on drug investigations in Worcester. One tough guy—you could not wear him out. Summer could not get too hot for him, or winter too cold.
So I turned to him to find out Martorano’s whereabouts from all the Whitey tapes. These were the ones of all the bookies, loan sharks, extortionists, and other high-level mobsters—hundreds of hours, easily. I had a good idea that the information was in there, but it was worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack, because at least you know what a needle looks like. We couldn’t tell what a clue might be, or what it might be a clue to. For something like this, people were not going to come out and use Martorano’s name, or their own; they’d use code words for him, like Ice Man or Fingers, and just be cryptic about the whole thing. Just about everybody assumes their phone is being tapped. “That place,” “The guy we know”—these were the expressions they used. So which one was the clue?
There were hundreds of hours of tapes, and practically all the calls were scratchy, hard to hear, and herky-jerky because of those minimization rules, so the conversations were almost impossible to follow. But somewhere in there I was pretty sure there were clues to what Martorano was up to, and where.
Most people would have said: Forget it. Or put in a half-assed effort. Not Stevie. He went through all the tapes, listening and listening for some reference to a place where Martorano might be holed up. A head-splitting effort, and it took weeks, but God love him, somehow he pulled out that Martorano was down in Palm Beach County, Florida, living under the name Vincent Rancourt. Incredible.
When I heard the alias, I knew it was right. Rancourt. Ran from court. That was Martorano. Clever, and in your face. Or so we thought.
This was the very beginning of January, and we were closing in on the arrests. I’d decided to pull Johnson and Sly Scanlan off the Salemme tail and fly them down to Florida on Martorano instead. They arrived Wednesday, January 4, the day we finally got the arrest warrants up here and started scouring the city for Flemmi. Looking back, I’m convinced that if I’d had those two on Salemme, he never would have gotten away. But life isn’t lived looking back.
Once they had the name Rancourt, Johnson and Scanlan went to the Registry of Motor Vehicles down there and got an address. No problem. It was in Deerfield Beach, just south of Boca Raton. The registry also kicked out the photograph shown on his license. A lot of state registries didn’t do that then. This one showed Martorano, no question. The face of a killer—blank and mean. They watched the house for a couple of days before they saw someone they thought was Martorano.
In the meantime I had approached Ed Quinn at the FBI and told him. “I think we’ve located Martorano. He’s in Florida.”
Quinn snickered at that and said that we were wasting our time on this one. “If he’s there, he looks nothing like he used to. I doubt your people will recognize him.”
A few years back, I might have listened. Not now.
“Well, we’re going ahead with it,” I told him. “I’ve got a couple of my guys down there already. We’ll need the warrant from the race-fixing case.” I gave him the details, even though he said he had them already. It was a federal case and a federal warrant, so I had to go to Quinn to get the warrant.
“No problem, Tommy,” he said. “If you need it, you’ll have it.” He didn’t sound too enthusiastic.
By then, Johnson and Scanlan had made contact with the police in Palm Beach County. Local police usually help out on a collar like this, and they agreed to send out a couple of deputies. Along with the Broward deputies, my guys staked out the Rancourt address. It was a ranch-style house on a quiet street of a bedroom community, like Martorano was just another commuter.
That afternoon Stevie Johnson called me from his car. It was Thursday, January 5, the day I was racing around trying to find Flemmi. “We’ve got the house. I’ll let you know what we find.”
“Do that.”
I didn’t hear back from him until the next day. I’d had Flemmi to deal with, plus a ton of media.
“He’s here, Tommy,” Stevie told me, a little breathless. “Or at least somebody who looks a helluva lot like him. A real bear. We’re at his house. We can see him moving around inside. We should grab him.”
“Well, you can’t move yet,” I told him. “I’m still waiting on the warrant from the FBI.”
It was a frustrating situation, no question, and I felt for the guys out there, waiting. “Just hang on.”
I called Quinn again and asked what was happening with the warrant. “We need it now,” I told him, an edge in my voice.
Quinn was all oil. “Let me get back to you.” It was like he’d forgotten all about it.
“Ed, come on! We’re ready to make an arrest. Let’s go. We need that warrant.”
“I’ll call you back.”
He rang me maybe an hour later.
“Sorry, there’s no warrant.”
“What do you mean, no warrant?”
“We can’t find it.”
“Of course you can. It’s in your computer. For chrissake, dig it out for us, all right? Now. We need it right away. We’re all set to grab him, and we need to move now.”
It was getting to me, this pseudo calm of Quinn’s, like I was going wild asking for a warrant for Martorano’s arrest when my investigators were outside his house right then.
I called Wyshak and asked him to help us out. He got in touch with the assistant U.S. attorney who was on the race-fixing case. He was no friend of the Bulger investigation, but he was able to produce the warrant for us. Shortly after Wyshak called to let me know, Quinn called back. “Oh, by the way, there’s something else.” With the FBI, that’s never good. He said an agent, Mike Buckley, was going to be down in Florida for a conference and would be arriving Sunday noon. “Could you hold off on the Martorano arrest until Monday anyway so Mike can get in on it? He can bring the warrant down with him.”
That time, I said nothing, afraid of what I might say if I said something. I knew what was up. This whole thing with the warrant was Quinn’s way of making sure the FBI would be in on the arrest.
“That work for you, Tommy?” Quinn asked.
Every part of me screamed No! But he had us. “I guess it’ll have to,” I said.
I called Johnson to let him and Scanlan know. They sure weren’t happy about it, but there wasn’t much anyone could do. It was a frantic weekend for me anyway, since I was dashing around trying to pick up Whitey’s and Salemme’s trail. But the wait nearly killed all of us. I didn’t sleep too well, either night, thinking that Martorano might slip away just like Bulger. How much of this were we going to have to take?
The warrant came down with Buckley, and it was the original federal one that was supposedly lost. Having Buckley there would make it look like an FBI arrest, not one of ours, but what the hell. We work with the FBI; they don’t work with us. What else is new? I just wanted Martorano taken into custody. I didn’t care how.
Johnson and Scanlan, along with the two deputies, had kept tabs on the house over the weekend, checking for any signs of unusual activity. Worried that Martorano—if Rancourt was Martorano—might notice the same car going by the house, Johnson asked Buckley to rent another car when he came to help with the surveillance, and give Martorano a different look. “Sorry, I’m not authorized to do that,” he told my guys.
“You can’t rent a car to pick up a fugitive, a guy with like a million murders?” Johnson asked.
Buckley had no answer to that one.
So on Monday morning, Buckley was picked up at his hotel, and he jumped into the backseat. Johnson and Scanlan were up front. They returned to the house for the grab. They parked a short way down the street and watched the house through their rearviews.
Before long, they saw a severe-looking man emerge from the house with a teenage boy.
The driver and the boy climbed into a tan minivan and pulled out of the drive. The arrest team revved up and, starting from their spot up the road, followed the van at a safe distance. The van went only a short way down the highway and then turned in at a strip mall. The minivan pulled into a parking space. In a moment, the driver stepped down from the van, and our guys were on him.
“John?” Stevie shouted out. “John Martorano?” He needed to be sure.
Martorano glanced toward him. “I think you have the wrong man,” he said casually.
Johnson and Scanlan pushed closer. “Up against the van, John.”
“You have the wrong man,” the driver insisted.
“Well, let me check your arms then.” The man was wearing a polo shirt in the Florida heat, and he brought his arms in tight to his body.
We knew all about his tattoos, and when he turned the inside of his right arm toward us, we could see the name plain as day. NANCY, in big block letters, for the wife he’d left behind back in Boston.
Scanlan showed Martorano his Massachusetts State Police badge. “Recognize that John?” the Palm Beach County deputy asked him. “John Martorano, you’re under arrest,” Stevie told him, and cuffed his wrists behind his back.
Martorano didn’t resist. It was hopeless. He had his son there, staring, and he’d probably reached the screw-it point that all fugitives get to eventually, where they’re more relieved than anything else when their number finally comes up. Our guys took him to federal court down there with Buckley, and a couple of days later the U.S. Marshals flew him up to Boston to be arraigned.
We had him.
It couldn’t have done good things to Flemmi’s peace of mind to learn that John Martorano was coming to Plymouth, too. Just for him to be in the same city, knowing what he knew, and what he was bound to find out, was frightening. But to be in the same lockup?