Hitman Read Online Free Page B

You can’t be dishonest without showing some honesty.”
    â€œThat’s part of the charade, isn’t it?” Casabielle said.
    â€œYeah,” Martorano said, with a slight sigh, “I guess.”
    *   *   *
    BY 1988, Johnny Martorano had been on the lam for almost a decade. During that time, he’d killed two more guys for Whitey and Stevie. But his monthly cut from the Winter Hill rackets back in Boston continued to dwindle, and what could Johnny Martorano do about it from Florida? Whitey was the big shot now, and Martorano the supplicant. And Whitey was tiring of his responsibilities to his one-time partner, the guy who had once saved his life.
    In 1987, Whitey had been recorded on a DEA bug saying, “Fuck Howie” and “There is no Winter Hill Gang.” But even as they were writing off their old Somerville partners, Whitey and Stevie were rolling in drug money. They were making more money than the old gang from Winter Hill had ever dreamed of—$5 million “protection money” from one marijuana dealer alone, Stevie would later brag.
    And yet … the cops left Whitey and Stevie alone. If any police ever did make a move against them, they were slapped down, transferred, demoted, or forced to retire. The FBI, the Massachusetts State Police, the Boston PD—nobody could ever seem to build a case against “the two guys,” as they had become known on the street. After a while, few cops even tried.
    Eventually, the inevitable question began to be asked: Was Whitey a rat?
    â€œDid you ever ask Mr. Bulger,” Casabielle asked, “whether or not he was a rat?”
    â€œNo,” Martorano said. “There was one incident, though. There was an article in the Globe, 1988, accusing him of being a rat, and I asked him about it. He said, ‘They just put that in the paper every time my brother runs for reelection.’”
    â€œSo you actually asked him if he was a rat?”
    â€œI asked him what the article meant.”
    â€œWhat was his response?” Casabielle asked.
    â€œHe said, ‘It was something to cause my brother trouble.’”
    â€œSo he denied being a rat, correct?”
    â€œI only asked him because of the article.”
    â€œSo he was lying to you at that time?”
    â€œYeah,” said Martorano. “I don’t blame him.”
    â€œWhy, sir? If you had found out he was a rat, what would you have done?”
    â€œWell, I wouldn’t have stayed friends with him.”
    â€œYou would have killed him, wouldn’t you?” Casabielle asked.
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œPossibly?”
    â€œPossibly.”
    â€œProbably?”
    â€œProbably,” Martorano said. “You’re using my words.”
    â€œI guess after a few hours of hearing, you use them,” Casabielle conceded. “They kind of stick.”

 
    1
    â€œAlways Be a Man”
    FROM HIS BIRTH at Cambridge City Hospital on December 13, 1940, John Vincent Martorano was an unlikely gangster. He had only one sibling, and he grew up in a stable middle-class household with both parents present. After the age of eleven he lived in the suburbs.
    His father owned a profitable business and no one in the family ever lacked for money. In the somnabulent 1950s, young Johnny Martorano served as an altar boy and later went to both parochial and prep schools where his friends included, among others, a future congressman and a future CBS news reporter. Summers he and his brother Jimmy went to camp in the Berkshires. His parents owned a second home on the South Shore. At age sixteen, as soon as he got his driver’s license, his father bought him a blue 1949 Plymouth sedan.
    And yet somehow, Johnny Martorano was always fascinated by the city. He was always drawn back to the mean streets of Boston, where his father ran a restaurant and after-hours club in what would soon become known as the Combat Zone.
    Both his