Hitman Read Online Free Page A

believe they helped a lot of people over time.”
    â€œAnd they hurt a lot of people as well?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAre you saying to this group of people that when Mr. Angiulo gave you $25,000 for those murders, that was also a contribution to the Winter Hill charity?”
    â€œCorrect. He was giving us money because we killed a guy who killed his friends.”
    â€œAnd your testimony, sir, is that you don’t kill for money?”
    â€œNo.”
    As the lawyer continued this line of questioning, Johnny Martorano was thinking to himself, Does this guy really believe I’d kill somebody for $8,000? For a million maybe, but eight grand? Nobody risks his life for eight grand—a junkie possibly, but nobody else. Jerry Angiulo understood that—it was just a nice gesture he’d made, splitting up the fifty large like that. He was cutting up a score with his partners, which is what the Winter Hill Gang was with the Mafia—partners.
    *   *   *
    IN THE end, though, everything always seemed to come back to Whitey. After all the books and movies and FBI press conferences, after all the “age-enhanced” mug shots and all the dozen-plus segments about him on America’s Most Wanted, most people still didn’t get it. In the Boston underworld, until rather late in his career, Whitey had always been a small-timer, a ham-and-egger. He was from Southie, where a gang war was cowboys biting off one another’s noses outside barrooms in the Lower End, driving around and shooting point-blank at each other—and missing.
    Now that he had disappeared, though, Whitey had become a legend, a criminal mastermind, when all he really was was a rat. Zip Connolly’s lawyer was trying to draw that bitterness out of Martorano, asking him what he thought now of his youngest son’s godfather.
    Casabielle: “He was dishonest with you for how many years, twenty-five, thirty years?”
    Martorano: “From ’72.”
    When Johnny first got to know Whitey Bulger, Whitey was already forty-three, a late bloomer in criminal terms. Whitey had been shipped off to prison for bank robbery at the age of twenty-six in 1956, when Johnny was fifteen. Whitey didn’t return to Boston until 1965. Johnny was running bars in Roxbury while Whitey was on the Rock—Alcatraz.
    The first time Johnny actually sat down with Whitey, in early 1972, Whitey was up to his eyeballs in one of those slapstick Southie gang wars. He was being hunted all over town by younger, quicker hoods. Which was why he’d shown up at Johnny’s bar in the South End, dressed in a suit. Whitey needed a favor—he asked Johnny to introduce him to Howie Winter over in Somerville.
    He wanted Howie to use his muscle to settle the war over in Southie, even if it meant that Whitey’s boss would have to be killed, not by Whitey of course, but by some of the guys in the other gang, the ones who had been chasing Whitey. No wonder Johnny’s pal Joe McDonald had never trusted Whitey as far as he could throw him.
    So Johnny and Whitey didn’t go way back, the way Martorano did with Stevie Flemmi. Stevie he’d known since he was practically a kid. He’d killed guys for Stevie—well, he’d killed at least one guy in Southie for Whitey, too, but by then it wasn’t personal, it was business, a Winter Hill rubout. But after all the favors, when Johnny Martorano went on the lam in 1979, Whitey told him that from now on he should do all his talking on the phone to Stevie. Whitey didn’t do phones. Phones could be tapped.
    Now Casabielle was again asking about Johnny Martorano’s relationship with the two rats in his gang.
    â€œMr. Flemmi and Mr. Bulger were dishonest with you, correct?”
    â€œTechnically,” Martorano replied.
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘technically’?”
    â€œWith that [being informants]. But they were honest about a lot of things.