The Italian government called in the army on Tuesday to clean up the mounting piles of waste in the city of Naples. Residents blame the authorities for not doing more to stop the Camorra, the region's Mafia group, which controls garbage collection and has caused the city's constant waste problem for more than a decade. Organized crime appears to have a hand in trash collection all over the world, from Naples to Tony Soprano's northern New Jersey. Why are gangsters always hauling garbage?
It's Mob Economics 101: Find a business that's easy to enter and lucrative to control. Criminal organizations make lots of money from drugs, human trafficking, and counterfeit goods, but creating a monopoly on garbage collection is attractive because the business itself is legal, and public contracts return big profits. Compared with something like running a casino or grocery store, the logistics of taking trash from Point A to Point B are a no-brainer. Anyone with a truck and a couple of strong guys can make good money, and there's always a demand for the service.
Here's how it works: The mob organizes the trash-hauling businesses in a given city to prevent competition from driving down prices. They fix prices, rig bids, and allocate territories in such a way that customers can't choose who picks up their garbage. The Camorra, a larger and older group than the Sicilian Mafia, have controlled the industry in Naples for about 25 years. The mob harasses non-Camorra garbage collectors and extorts money from them; meanwhile, its own companies do a shoddy job. The country's Mafia groups have also illegally dumped toxic, industrial waste in Naples and other parts of the country.
Criminal organizations elsewhere in the world also find profit in trash schemes. In parts of Taiwan, gangs dig into the riverbank for gravel and sell it to construction companies. Then, they fill up the holes with waste they've collected. Georgian crime bosses swooped in when the city of Tbilisi privatized waste transport. In New York City, La Cosa Nostra more or less dominated trash collection from the 1950s until Rudy Giuliani seized control of the industry as mayor in the 1990s. It all started when members worked their way into the Teamsters union, which included garbage truck drivers; this allowed the mob to dictate which companies the drivers would work for, effectively pushing out non-Mafia operations. (The Mafia also controlled the construction sector through unions.)
For a large crime organization, the garbage racket provides relatively little in the way of revenue compared with traditional criminal enterprises like gambling, loan-sharking, and narcotics. This is especially true in Italy, where the mob operates in many industries. The Camorra is thought to make $70 billion a year, much of it from drugs, contraband cigarettes, and DVDs, as well as public sector contracts in construction and cleaning. Another Italian group, the 'Ndrangheta, traffics 80 percent of Europe's cocaine. The Mafia is so pervasive in Italy that, according to a large trade association, it controls one out of every five businesses in the country.
Thanks to Michelle Tsai
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Monday, January 07, 2008
Beating by Reputed Mob Killer Caught on Tape
Reputed mob killer Anthony Calabrese was upset with his alleged partner in crime, Edmond Frank. The hulking Calabrese wondered if Frank was ratting him out to the cops.
So Calabrese and another man allegedly began beating Frank. And all of it was captured on a secret audio recording made by the FBI.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Frank pleaded as he was beaten at Calabrese's car detailing shop in the south suburbs, according to a 17-page government transcript of the conversation obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
"C-------er," Calabrese swore at Frank.
"F---ing did everything for you, you're gonna act like that to me," Calabrese said.
"I'm sorry, Tony," Frank replied.
The beating began after Frank enraged Calabrese by refusing to say what hotel he was staying at, according to the transcript of the January 2002 conversation. Frank said he didn't feel safe giving Calabrese that information.
Calabrese had Frank strip-searched but didn't find any hidden recording devices.
"The recording device worn by Frank was in fact secreted elsewhere," a government filing notes, without specifying where the device was.
Calabrese allegedly threatened to kill Frank's wife and child and suggested his wife could be gang-raped, according to the transcript.
Frank walked out of the confrontation alive, but FBI agents took him to a hospital, where he was treated for his injuries from the beating.
Even after Frank left Calabrese's shop, the secret recorder was still running, and Frank could be heard complaining about his injuries.
"My head's killing me," Frank said.
"Are you dizzy?" an FBI agent asked him.
"My head hurts; it's numb over here," Frank complained.
Federal prosecutors T. Markus Funk and Joel Hammerman want to introduce the secretly recorded conversation at Calabrese's trial next month on charges he took part in the armed robberies of three suburban businesses.
The prosecutors argue the beating and intimidation shows Calabrese's guilty state of mind.
Calabrese's attorney, Steven Hunter, is fighting introduction of the tape, saying it has nothing to do with the armed robberies and will prejudice the jury against his client.
Calabrese, 47, is no relation to Frank Calabrese Sr., who was found responsible for seven Outfit murders in the recent Family Secrets mob trial in Chicago.
Still, Anthony Calabrese is a suspected gunman in the Outfit murder of Anthony "The Hatch" Chiaramonti, a top mobster slain in 2001 at a Brown's Chicken & Pasta in south suburban Lyons, according to a federal court filing.
He is also a suspect in the 1997 attempted murder of the ex-wife of his friend, Randall Re, in west suburban Naperville, authorities said. Re is also a suspect in the case, which Naperville police continue to investigate.
Calabrese has not been charged with either crime. But he effectively faces life in prison if convicted on the armed robbery charges under federal sentencing guidelines. Federal authorities hope to use that leverage to find out from Calabrese who allegedly hired him for the Chiaramonti murder and the Re shooting, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Calabrese has ties to the Chicago Outfit and a motorcycle gang, sources said.
"I know him as a businessman," said attorney Joseph Lopez, who represented Calabrese in a case in which Calabrese was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for his role in a baseball-bat attack on a man in Florida.
Thanks to Steve Warmbir
So Calabrese and another man allegedly began beating Frank. And all of it was captured on a secret audio recording made by the FBI.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Frank pleaded as he was beaten at Calabrese's car detailing shop in the south suburbs, according to a 17-page government transcript of the conversation obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
"C-------er," Calabrese swore at Frank.
"F---ing did everything for you, you're gonna act like that to me," Calabrese said.
"I'm sorry, Tony," Frank replied.
The beating began after Frank enraged Calabrese by refusing to say what hotel he was staying at, according to the transcript of the January 2002 conversation. Frank said he didn't feel safe giving Calabrese that information.
Calabrese had Frank strip-searched but didn't find any hidden recording devices.
"The recording device worn by Frank was in fact secreted elsewhere," a government filing notes, without specifying where the device was.
Calabrese allegedly threatened to kill Frank's wife and child and suggested his wife could be gang-raped, according to the transcript.
Frank walked out of the confrontation alive, but FBI agents took him to a hospital, where he was treated for his injuries from the beating.
Even after Frank left Calabrese's shop, the secret recorder was still running, and Frank could be heard complaining about his injuries.
"My head's killing me," Frank said.
"Are you dizzy?" an FBI agent asked him.
"My head hurts; it's numb over here," Frank complained.
Federal prosecutors T. Markus Funk and Joel Hammerman want to introduce the secretly recorded conversation at Calabrese's trial next month on charges he took part in the armed robberies of three suburban businesses.
The prosecutors argue the beating and intimidation shows Calabrese's guilty state of mind.
Calabrese's attorney, Steven Hunter, is fighting introduction of the tape, saying it has nothing to do with the armed robberies and will prejudice the jury against his client.
Calabrese, 47, is no relation to Frank Calabrese Sr., who was found responsible for seven Outfit murders in the recent Family Secrets mob trial in Chicago.
Still, Anthony Calabrese is a suspected gunman in the Outfit murder of Anthony "The Hatch" Chiaramonti, a top mobster slain in 2001 at a Brown's Chicken & Pasta in south suburban Lyons, according to a federal court filing.
He is also a suspect in the 1997 attempted murder of the ex-wife of his friend, Randall Re, in west suburban Naperville, authorities said. Re is also a suspect in the case, which Naperville police continue to investigate.
Calabrese has not been charged with either crime. But he effectively faces life in prison if convicted on the armed robbery charges under federal sentencing guidelines. Federal authorities hope to use that leverage to find out from Calabrese who allegedly hired him for the Chiaramonti murder and the Re shooting, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Calabrese has ties to the Chicago Outfit and a motorcycle gang, sources said.
"I know him as a businessman," said attorney Joseph Lopez, who represented Calabrese in a case in which Calabrese was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for his role in a baseball-bat attack on a man in Florida.
Thanks to Steve Warmbir
NBA Ref Went Undercover to Fight the Mob, Put 30 Gangsters Behind Bars
In my two decades as an NBA scribe (scribe, incidentally, being the gently derisive term that Steve Nash uses to describe ink-stained wretches), I've always felt a kinship with the referees. We are both a peripheral part of a game dominated by millionaires (though the zebras are less peripheral) and we both attract attention mainly when we do something wrong (though they get more attention).
I was closer to the older generation of retired refs (Jake O'Donnell, Eddie T. Rush, Bernie Fryer and the late Earl Strom to name a few) and remain closer to the more senior members of the current crew, especially Joey Crawford, Steve Javie and Dick Bavetta. There is a reason for this beyond the obvious fact that we are chronological contemporaries: The league has gradually discouraged contact between refs and the media, preferring that the striped-shirts be just that -- background scenery to the main event. That's a shame because many of these guys are fascinating personalities who bring unique life experiences to the job.
In the case of Bob Delaney, a 20-year veteran, that is a vast understatement. In fact, few personalities in the world of sports, or the world in general, have a more captivating back story than Delaney, whose league-desired anonymity will diminish -- if not disappear entirely -- with the Feb. 4 release of his autobiography, Covert: My Years Infiltrating The Mob.
With the help of co-author Dave Scheiber, a fine Florida-based journalist, Delaney, a former New Jersey state trooper, tells his tale lucidly and, best of all, understatedly. Delaney/Scheiber followed a cardinal rule of writing: The better the material, the more it should speak for itself. The writerly touches belong, I suspect, to Scheiber, but the blood-chilling drama about his time spent undercover with New Jersey Mafia types comes from Delaney's soul, his memory and, to be sure, a mountain of audio tapes that helped bring down the jaw-breakers and law-breakers who formed his social circle during three years of undercover work in the mid-1970s.
Delaney resists what would've been the simplistic notion of tying his current occupation to his previous one. Well, dear reader, after dealing with guys who would put a slug in my chest as easy as they'd say hello, I'm here to tell you that calling a technical on Rasheed Wallace isn't so difficult. Delaney is an excellent official but others are just as good, and they didn't spend three years wearing a wire around stone-cold killers. But it's beyond obvious that you learn quite a bit about composure and demonstrating grace under pressure when your every waking breath is spent wondering if your next breath is your last one.
"The development of your off-court personality is a reflection of your on-court personality," Delaney said on Thursday when we chatted by phone about the book. "I'm sure the situations I dealt with during my undercover years help me as an official because I understand how to function when I'm under pressure."
No ref is immune from criticism -- Delaney describes an incident in Madison Square Garden when his own mother hooted at him for blowing a foul call Patrick Ewing, her favorite player -- but his street cred with players and coaches is demonstrably apparent.
"I used to argue with Bob a lot," Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. "Then I found out what he used to do and thought, 'I don't think he's going to be too affected by what I'm saying over here on the sideline.' "
A few years ago, Grant Hill, then with the Orlando Magic, jokingly patted down Delaney during a timeout and asked, "You still wired, Delaney?" The ref answered, "Yeah, I'm wired, and the last time I wore a wire, 50 people went to jail."
Several years ago during a TNT game Delaney was working, the announcers spotted Kobe Bryant talking to the referee after a foul call and theorized that the Los Angeles Lakers' star was giving Delaney "an earful" about the call. "In reality," Delaney said, "Kobe was asking what it was like wearing a wire all the time, and saying, 'That had to be wild.' "
It was wild. Kobe should read the book.
Before getting the whole story in Covert (the title comes from the surname that Delaney adopted during the joint state police-FBI sting operation), I knew a little bit about his background and that informed my observations of him as a referee. I couldn't help but wonder what Delaney was thinking when, say, the fifth guard on a bad team would berate him for making a traveling call. After what he had been through -- facing the prospect of death and, almost as bad, starting to "lose sight of the line where Bob Delaney ended and Bobby Covert began," as he writes in the book -- how can he take a call in a basketball game seriously?
But he does, and that is one of the messages (I'm not going to call them lessons) of Covert: that sports is an endless proving ground where professionalism matters. Delaney describes a moment early in his officiating career when he made an end-of-the-game call that, hours later, upon further review in his lonely hotel room, he found to be wrong. The fact that he blew a "gamer," the officials' term for a call that decides an outcome, put a knot in his stomach and cost him a night of sleep.
"In my profession," Delaney writes, "there's no worse feeling in the world."
Delaney's undercover life was spent in that same agitated state, wondering if he'd be found out the next day, worrying that he was losing what he describes as "the tug of war within," trying to ingratiate himself to the very people he was trying to bring down, thereby experiencing some form of the Stockholm syndrome. I can't imagine what a life it was, but it's all laid out in Covert.
And when I put it down, I was glad that the same era that gave us Tim Donaghy, a weasel of a law-breaker, has also given us Bob Delaney, a stand-up guy in a difficult profession.
Thanks to Jack McCallum
I was closer to the older generation of retired refs (Jake O'Donnell, Eddie T. Rush, Bernie Fryer and the late Earl Strom to name a few) and remain closer to the more senior members of the current crew, especially Joey Crawford, Steve Javie and Dick Bavetta. There is a reason for this beyond the obvious fact that we are chronological contemporaries: The league has gradually discouraged contact between refs and the media, preferring that the striped-shirts be just that -- background scenery to the main event. That's a shame because many of these guys are fascinating personalities who bring unique life experiences to the job.
In the case of Bob Delaney, a 20-year veteran, that is a vast understatement. In fact, few personalities in the world of sports, or the world in general, have a more captivating back story than Delaney, whose league-desired anonymity will diminish -- if not disappear entirely -- with the Feb. 4 release of his autobiography, Covert: My Years Infiltrating The Mob.
With the help of co-author Dave Scheiber, a fine Florida-based journalist, Delaney, a former New Jersey state trooper, tells his tale lucidly and, best of all, understatedly. Delaney/Scheiber followed a cardinal rule of writing: The better the material, the more it should speak for itself. The writerly touches belong, I suspect, to Scheiber, but the blood-chilling drama about his time spent undercover with New Jersey Mafia types comes from Delaney's soul, his memory and, to be sure, a mountain of audio tapes that helped bring down the jaw-breakers and law-breakers who formed his social circle during three years of undercover work in the mid-1970s.
Delaney resists what would've been the simplistic notion of tying his current occupation to his previous one. Well, dear reader, after dealing with guys who would put a slug in my chest as easy as they'd say hello, I'm here to tell you that calling a technical on Rasheed Wallace isn't so difficult. Delaney is an excellent official but others are just as good, and they didn't spend three years wearing a wire around stone-cold killers. But it's beyond obvious that you learn quite a bit about composure and demonstrating grace under pressure when your every waking breath is spent wondering if your next breath is your last one.
"The development of your off-court personality is a reflection of your on-court personality," Delaney said on Thursday when we chatted by phone about the book. "I'm sure the situations I dealt with during my undercover years help me as an official because I understand how to function when I'm under pressure."
No ref is immune from criticism -- Delaney describes an incident in Madison Square Garden when his own mother hooted at him for blowing a foul call Patrick Ewing, her favorite player -- but his street cred with players and coaches is demonstrably apparent.
"I used to argue with Bob a lot," Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. "Then I found out what he used to do and thought, 'I don't think he's going to be too affected by what I'm saying over here on the sideline.' "
A few years ago, Grant Hill, then with the Orlando Magic, jokingly patted down Delaney during a timeout and asked, "You still wired, Delaney?" The ref answered, "Yeah, I'm wired, and the last time I wore a wire, 50 people went to jail."
Several years ago during a TNT game Delaney was working, the announcers spotted Kobe Bryant talking to the referee after a foul call and theorized that the Los Angeles Lakers' star was giving Delaney "an earful" about the call. "In reality," Delaney said, "Kobe was asking what it was like wearing a wire all the time, and saying, 'That had to be wild.' "
It was wild. Kobe should read the book.
Before getting the whole story in Covert (the title comes from the surname that Delaney adopted during the joint state police-FBI sting operation), I knew a little bit about his background and that informed my observations of him as a referee. I couldn't help but wonder what Delaney was thinking when, say, the fifth guard on a bad team would berate him for making a traveling call. After what he had been through -- facing the prospect of death and, almost as bad, starting to "lose sight of the line where Bob Delaney ended and Bobby Covert began," as he writes in the book -- how can he take a call in a basketball game seriously?
But he does, and that is one of the messages (I'm not going to call them lessons) of Covert: that sports is an endless proving ground where professionalism matters. Delaney describes a moment early in his officiating career when he made an end-of-the-game call that, hours later, upon further review in his lonely hotel room, he found to be wrong. The fact that he blew a "gamer," the officials' term for a call that decides an outcome, put a knot in his stomach and cost him a night of sleep.
"In my profession," Delaney writes, "there's no worse feeling in the world."
Delaney's undercover life was spent in that same agitated state, wondering if he'd be found out the next day, worrying that he was losing what he describes as "the tug of war within," trying to ingratiate himself to the very people he was trying to bring down, thereby experiencing some form of the Stockholm syndrome. I can't imagine what a life it was, but it's all laid out in Covert.
And when I put it down, I was glad that the same era that gave us Tim Donaghy, a weasel of a law-breaker, has also given us Bob Delaney, a stand-up guy in a difficult profession.
Thanks to Jack McCallum
How the Mafia Dealt with J. Edgar Hoover?
Exerpt from Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
, by Anthony Summers
To Costello, and to his associate Meyer Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. It was Lansky's expertise in such corruption that made him the nearest there ever was to a true national godfather of organized crime.
Another Mafia boss, Joseph Bonanno, articulated the principles of the game. It was a strict underworld rule, he said, never to use violent means against a law enforcement officer. "Ways could be found," he said in his memoirs, "so that he would not interfere with us and we wouldn't interfere with him." The way the Mafia found to deal with Edgar, according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality.
The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar's compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year's Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell's guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde. At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by Costello's associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello. Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Costello's, and Costello was said to be the club's real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals.
Seymour Pollack, a close friend of Meyer Lansky, said in 1990 that Edgar's homosexuality was "common knowledge" and that he had seen evidence of it for himself. "I used to meet him at the racetrack every once in a while with lover boy Clyde, in the late forties and fifties. I was in the next box once. And when you see two guys holding hands, well come on! ... They were surreptitious, but there was no question about it."
Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno, the highest-ranking mobster ever to have "turned" and testified against his former associates, was at the track in 1948 when Frank Bompensiero, a notorious West Coast mafioso, taunted Edgar to his face. "I pointed at this fella sitting in the box in front," Fratianno recalled, "and said, 'Hey, Bomp, lookit there, it's J. Edgar Hoover.' And Bomp says right out loud, so everyone can hear, 'Ah, that J. Edgar's a punk, he's a fuckin' degenerate queer.'"
Later, when Bompensiero ran into Edgar in the men's room, the FBI Director was astonishingly meek. "Frank," he told the mobster, "that's not a nice way to talk about me, especially when I have people with me." It was clear to Fratianno that Bompensiero had met Edgar before and that he had absolutely no fear of Edgar.
Fratianno knew numerous other top mobsters, including Jack and Louis Dragna of Los Angeles and Johnny Roselli, the West Coast representative of the Chicago mob. All spoke of "proof" that Edgar was homosexual. Roselli spoke specifically of the occasion in the late twenties when Edgar had been arrested on charges of homosexuality in New Orleans. Edgar could hardly have chosen a worse city in which to be compromised. New Orleans police and city officials were notoriously corrupt, puppets of an organized crime network run by Mafia boss Carlos Marcello and heavily influenced by Meyer Lansky. If the homosexual arrest occurred, it is likely the local mobsters quickly learned of it.
Other information suggests Meyer Lansky obtained hard proof of Edgar's homosexuality and used it to neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations. The first hint came from Irving "Ash" Resnick, the Nevada representative of the Patriarca family from New England, and an original owner-builder of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. As a high-level mob courier, he traveled extensively. In Miami Beach, his Christmas destination in the fifties, he stayed at the Gulfstream, in a bungalow next to one used by Edgar and Clyde. "I'd sit with him on the beach every day," Resnick remembered. "We were friendly."
In 1971, Resnick and an associate talked with the writer Pete Hamill in the Galeria Bar at Caesars Palace. They spoke of Meyer Lansky as a genius, the man who "put everything together" -- and as the man who "nailed J. Edgar Hoover." "When I asked what they meant," Hamill recalled, "they told me Lansky had some pictures -- pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tolson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures, and he had made his deal with Hoover -- to lay off. That was the reason, they said, that for a long time they had nothing to fear from the FBI."
Seymour Pollack, the criminal who saw Edgar and Clyde holding hands at the races, knew both Resnick and Lansky well. When Lansky's daughter had marital problems, it was Pollack who dealt with her husband. He and Lansky went back to the old days in pre-revolutionary Cuba, when Havana was as important to the syndicate as Las Vegas. "Meyer," said Pollack in 1990, "was closemouthed. I don't think he even discussed the details of the Hoover thing with his brother. But Ash was absolutely right. Lansky had more than information on Hoover. He had page, chapter and verse. One night, when we were sitting around in his apartment at the Rosita de Hornedo, we were talking about Hoover, and Meyer laughed and said, 'I fixed that son of a bitch, didn't I?'" Lansky's fix, according to Pollack, also involved bribery -- not of Edgar himself, but men close to him.
Lansky and Edgar frequented the same watering holes in Florida. Staff at Gatti's restaurant in Miami Beach recall that the mobster would sometimes be in the restaurant, at another table, at the same time as Edgar and Clyde. One evening in the late sixties, they were seated at adjoining tables. "But they just looked at one another," recalled Edidio Crolla, the captain at Gatti's. "They never talked, not here."
If Edgar's eyes met Lansky's, though, there was surely an involuntary flicker of fear. "The homosexual thing," said Pollack, "was Hoover's Achilles' heel. Meyer found it, and it was like he pulled strings with Hoover. He never bothered any of Meyer's people.... Let me go way back. The time Nevada opened up, Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo. I understand Hoover helped get the okay for him to do it. Meyer Lansky was one of the partners. Hoover knew who the guys were that whacked Bugsy Siegel, but nothing was done." (Siegel was killed, reportedly on Lansky's orders, in 1947.)
According to Pollack, Lansky and Edgar cooperated in the mid-fifties, when Las Vegas casino operator Wilbur Clark moved to Cuba. "Meyer brought Clark down to Havana," Pollack said. "I was against him coming. But I understand Hoover asked Meyer to bring Clark down. He owed Clark something. I don't know what.... There was no serious pressure on Meyer until the Kennedys came in. And even then Hoover never hurt Meyer's people, not for a long time."
Like Frank Costello, Lansky did seem to be untouchable -- a phenomenon that triggered suspicions even within the Bureau. "In 1966," noted Hank Messick, one of Lansky's biographers, "a young G-Man assigned to go through the motions of watching Meyer Lansky began to take his job seriously and develop good informers. He was abruptly transferred to a rural area in Georgia. His successor on the Lansky assignment was an older man who knew the score. When he retired a few years later, he accepted a job with a Bahamian gambling casino originally developed by Lansky."
Also in the sixties a wiretap picked up a conversation between two mobsters in which, curiously, Lansky was referred to as "a stool pigeon for the FBI." The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, taping a conversation between a criminal in Canada and Lansky in the United States, were amazed to hear the mob chieftain reading from an FBI report that had been written the previous day.
There was no serious federal effort to indict Lansky until 1970, just two years before Edgar died. Then, it was the IRS rather than the FBI that spearheaded the investigation. Even the tax evasion charges collapsed, and Lansky lived on at liberty until his own death in 1983.
New information indicates that Lansky was not the only person in possession of compromising photographs of Edgar. John Weitz, a former officer in the OSS, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, recalled a curious episode at a dinner party in the fifties. "After a conversation about Hoover," he said, "our host went to another room and came back with a photograph. It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson...."
Since first publication of this book, Weitz has revealed that his host was James Angleton, a fellow OSS veteran and -- in the fifties -- a top CIA officer. A source who has been linked to the CIA, electronics expert Gordon Novel, has said Angleton showed him, too, compromising pictures of Edgar.
"What I saw was a picture of him giving Clyde Tolson a blowjob," said Novel. "There was more than one shot, but the startling one was a close shot of Hoover's head. He was totally recognizable. You could not see the face of the man he was with, but Angleton said it was Tolson. I asked him if they were fakes, but he said they were real, that they'd been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me...."
Novel said Angleton showed him the pictures in 1967, when he was CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief and when Novel was involved in the furor swirling around the probe into the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. "I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I'd been told I would incur Hoover's wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I'd seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food. Hoover told me something like, 'Get the hell out of here!' And I did...."
With Angleton dead, there is no way to follow up this bizarre allegation. While Novel is a controversial figure, his account of seeing compromising pictures must be considered in light of other such references -- not least that of former OSS officer John Weitz. For Novel added one other significant detail, that "Angleton told me the photographs had been taken around 1946, at the time they were fighting over foreign intelligence, which Hoover wanted but never got."
During his feud with OSS chief William Donovan, dating back to 1941, Edgar had searched for compromising information, sexual lapses included, that could be used against his rival.
His effort was in vain, but Donovan -- who thought Edgar a "moralistic bastard" -- reportedly retaliated in kind by ordering a secret investigation of Edgar's relationship with Clyde. The sex photograph in OSS hands may have been one of the results.
It may be significant, too, that compromising pictures are reported as having been in the hands of both the OSS and Meyer Lansky. The OSS and Naval Intelligence had extensive contacts with the Mafia during World War II, enlisting the help of criminals in projects including the hiring of burglars and assassins, experimentation with drugs, the protection of American ports from Nazi agents and the invasion of Sicily. Lansky helped personally with the latter two operations, meeting with Murray Gurfein, a New York Assistant District Attorney who later became one of Donovan's most trusted OSS officers.
At least once, Lansky worked alongside U.S. intelligence officers on exactly the sort of operation likely to turn up smear material on prominent public men. In 1942, he arranged for the surveillance of a homosexual brothel Brooklyn suspected of being the target of German agents. "Clients came from all over New York and Washington, Lansky recalled, "and there were some important government people among them .... If you got hold of the names of the patrons you could blackmail them to death... some pictures through a hole in the wall or a trick mirror and then squeeze the victim for money or information."
There is no knowing, today, whether the OSS obtained sex photographs of Edgar from Lansky, or vice versa, or whether the mobster obtained them on his own initiative. A scenario in which Lansky obtained pictures thanks to the OSS connection would suggest an irony: that Edgar had tried and failed to find smear material on General Donovan, that Donovan in turn found smear material on him and that the material found its way to a top mobster, to be used against Edgar for the rest of his life.
, by Anthony SummersTo Costello, and to his associate Meyer Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. It was Lansky's expertise in such corruption that made him the nearest there ever was to a true national godfather of organized crime.
Another Mafia boss, Joseph Bonanno, articulated the principles of the game. It was a strict underworld rule, he said, never to use violent means against a law enforcement officer. "Ways could be found," he said in his memoirs, "so that he would not interfere with us and we wouldn't interfere with him." The way the Mafia found to deal with Edgar, according to several mob sources, involved his homosexuality.
The mob bosses had been well placed to find out about Edgar's compromising secret, and at a significant time and place. It was on New Year's Eve 1936, after dinner at the Stork Club, that Edgar was seen by two of Walter Winchell's guests holding hands with his lover, Clyde. At the Stork, where he was a regular, Edgar was immensely vulnerable to observation by mobsters. The heavyweight champion Jim Braddock, who also dined with Edgar and Clyde that evening, was controlled by Costello's associate Owney Madden. Winchell, as compulsive a gossip in private as he was in his column, constantly cultivated Costello. Sherman Billingsley, the former bootlegger who ran the Stork, reportedly installed two-way mirrors in the toilets and hidden microphones at tables used by celebrities. Billingsley was a pawn of Costello's, and Costello was said to be the club's real owner. He would have had no compunction about persecuting Edgar, and he loathed homosexuals.
Seymour Pollack, a close friend of Meyer Lansky, said in 1990 that Edgar's homosexuality was "common knowledge" and that he had seen evidence of it for himself. "I used to meet him at the racetrack every once in a while with lover boy Clyde, in the late forties and fifties. I was in the next box once. And when you see two guys holding hands, well come on! ... They were surreptitious, but there was no question about it."
Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno, the highest-ranking mobster ever to have "turned" and testified against his former associates, was at the track in 1948 when Frank Bompensiero, a notorious West Coast mafioso, taunted Edgar to his face. "I pointed at this fella sitting in the box in front," Fratianno recalled, "and said, 'Hey, Bomp, lookit there, it's J. Edgar Hoover.' And Bomp says right out loud, so everyone can hear, 'Ah, that J. Edgar's a punk, he's a fuckin' degenerate queer.'"
Later, when Bompensiero ran into Edgar in the men's room, the FBI Director was astonishingly meek. "Frank," he told the mobster, "that's not a nice way to talk about me, especially when I have people with me." It was clear to Fratianno that Bompensiero had met Edgar before and that he had absolutely no fear of Edgar.
Fratianno knew numerous other top mobsters, including Jack and Louis Dragna of Los Angeles and Johnny Roselli, the West Coast representative of the Chicago mob. All spoke of "proof" that Edgar was homosexual. Roselli spoke specifically of the occasion in the late twenties when Edgar had been arrested on charges of homosexuality in New Orleans. Edgar could hardly have chosen a worse city in which to be compromised. New Orleans police and city officials were notoriously corrupt, puppets of an organized crime network run by Mafia boss Carlos Marcello and heavily influenced by Meyer Lansky. If the homosexual arrest occurred, it is likely the local mobsters quickly learned of it.
Other information suggests Meyer Lansky obtained hard proof of Edgar's homosexuality and used it to neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations. The first hint came from Irving "Ash" Resnick, the Nevada representative of the Patriarca family from New England, and an original owner-builder of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. As a high-level mob courier, he traveled extensively. In Miami Beach, his Christmas destination in the fifties, he stayed at the Gulfstream, in a bungalow next to one used by Edgar and Clyde. "I'd sit with him on the beach every day," Resnick remembered. "We were friendly."
In 1971, Resnick and an associate talked with the writer Pete Hamill in the Galeria Bar at Caesars Palace. They spoke of Meyer Lansky as a genius, the man who "put everything together" -- and as the man who "nailed J. Edgar Hoover." "When I asked what they meant," Hamill recalled, "they told me Lansky had some pictures -- pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation with Clyde Tolson. Lansky was the guy who controlled the pictures, and he had made his deal with Hoover -- to lay off. That was the reason, they said, that for a long time they had nothing to fear from the FBI."
Seymour Pollack, the criminal who saw Edgar and Clyde holding hands at the races, knew both Resnick and Lansky well. When Lansky's daughter had marital problems, it was Pollack who dealt with her husband. He and Lansky went back to the old days in pre-revolutionary Cuba, when Havana was as important to the syndicate as Las Vegas. "Meyer," said Pollack in 1990, "was closemouthed. I don't think he even discussed the details of the Hoover thing with his brother. But Ash was absolutely right. Lansky had more than information on Hoover. He had page, chapter and verse. One night, when we were sitting around in his apartment at the Rosita de Hornedo, we were talking about Hoover, and Meyer laughed and said, 'I fixed that son of a bitch, didn't I?'" Lansky's fix, according to Pollack, also involved bribery -- not of Edgar himself, but men close to him.
Lansky and Edgar frequented the same watering holes in Florida. Staff at Gatti's restaurant in Miami Beach recall that the mobster would sometimes be in the restaurant, at another table, at the same time as Edgar and Clyde. One evening in the late sixties, they were seated at adjoining tables. "But they just looked at one another," recalled Edidio Crolla, the captain at Gatti's. "They never talked, not here."
If Edgar's eyes met Lansky's, though, there was surely an involuntary flicker of fear. "The homosexual thing," said Pollack, "was Hoover's Achilles' heel. Meyer found it, and it was like he pulled strings with Hoover. He never bothered any of Meyer's people.... Let me go way back. The time Nevada opened up, Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo. I understand Hoover helped get the okay for him to do it. Meyer Lansky was one of the partners. Hoover knew who the guys were that whacked Bugsy Siegel, but nothing was done." (Siegel was killed, reportedly on Lansky's orders, in 1947.)
According to Pollack, Lansky and Edgar cooperated in the mid-fifties, when Las Vegas casino operator Wilbur Clark moved to Cuba. "Meyer brought Clark down to Havana," Pollack said. "I was against him coming. But I understand Hoover asked Meyer to bring Clark down. He owed Clark something. I don't know what.... There was no serious pressure on Meyer until the Kennedys came in. And even then Hoover never hurt Meyer's people, not for a long time."
Like Frank Costello, Lansky did seem to be untouchable -- a phenomenon that triggered suspicions even within the Bureau. "In 1966," noted Hank Messick, one of Lansky's biographers, "a young G-Man assigned to go through the motions of watching Meyer Lansky began to take his job seriously and develop good informers. He was abruptly transferred to a rural area in Georgia. His successor on the Lansky assignment was an older man who knew the score. When he retired a few years later, he accepted a job with a Bahamian gambling casino originally developed by Lansky."
Also in the sixties a wiretap picked up a conversation between two mobsters in which, curiously, Lansky was referred to as "a stool pigeon for the FBI." The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, taping a conversation between a criminal in Canada and Lansky in the United States, were amazed to hear the mob chieftain reading from an FBI report that had been written the previous day.
There was no serious federal effort to indict Lansky until 1970, just two years before Edgar died. Then, it was the IRS rather than the FBI that spearheaded the investigation. Even the tax evasion charges collapsed, and Lansky lived on at liberty until his own death in 1983.
New information indicates that Lansky was not the only person in possession of compromising photographs of Edgar. John Weitz, a former officer in the OSS, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, recalled a curious episode at a dinner party in the fifties. "After a conversation about Hoover," he said, "our host went to another room and came back with a photograph. It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson...."
Since first publication of this book, Weitz has revealed that his host was James Angleton, a fellow OSS veteran and -- in the fifties -- a top CIA officer. A source who has been linked to the CIA, electronics expert Gordon Novel, has said Angleton showed him, too, compromising pictures of Edgar.
"What I saw was a picture of him giving Clyde Tolson a blowjob," said Novel. "There was more than one shot, but the startling one was a close shot of Hoover's head. He was totally recognizable. You could not see the face of the man he was with, but Angleton said it was Tolson. I asked him if they were fakes, but he said they were real, that they'd been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me...."
Novel said Angleton showed him the pictures in 1967, when he was CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief and when Novel was involved in the furor swirling around the probe into the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. "I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I'd been told I would incur Hoover's wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I'd seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food. Hoover told me something like, 'Get the hell out of here!' And I did...."
With Angleton dead, there is no way to follow up this bizarre allegation. While Novel is a controversial figure, his account of seeing compromising pictures must be considered in light of other such references -- not least that of former OSS officer John Weitz. For Novel added one other significant detail, that "Angleton told me the photographs had been taken around 1946, at the time they were fighting over foreign intelligence, which Hoover wanted but never got."
During his feud with OSS chief William Donovan, dating back to 1941, Edgar had searched for compromising information, sexual lapses included, that could be used against his rival.
His effort was in vain, but Donovan -- who thought Edgar a "moralistic bastard" -- reportedly retaliated in kind by ordering a secret investigation of Edgar's relationship with Clyde. The sex photograph in OSS hands may have been one of the results.
It may be significant, too, that compromising pictures are reported as having been in the hands of both the OSS and Meyer Lansky. The OSS and Naval Intelligence had extensive contacts with the Mafia during World War II, enlisting the help of criminals in projects including the hiring of burglars and assassins, experimentation with drugs, the protection of American ports from Nazi agents and the invasion of Sicily. Lansky helped personally with the latter two operations, meeting with Murray Gurfein, a New York Assistant District Attorney who later became one of Donovan's most trusted OSS officers.
At least once, Lansky worked alongside U.S. intelligence officers on exactly the sort of operation likely to turn up smear material on prominent public men. In 1942, he arranged for the surveillance of a homosexual brothel Brooklyn suspected of being the target of German agents. "Clients came from all over New York and Washington, Lansky recalled, "and there were some important government people among them .... If you got hold of the names of the patrons you could blackmail them to death... some pictures through a hole in the wall or a trick mirror and then squeeze the victim for money or information."
There is no knowing, today, whether the OSS obtained sex photographs of Edgar from Lansky, or vice versa, or whether the mobster obtained them on his own initiative. A scenario in which Lansky obtained pictures thanks to the OSS connection would suggest an irony: that Edgar had tried and failed to find smear material on General Donovan, that Donovan in turn found smear material on him and that the material found its way to a top mobster, to be used against Edgar for the rest of his life.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
The Executioner, John Martorano
There are few men alive today with the underworld credentials of John Martorano, and even fewer who are out of prison and walking the streets. For more than a decade, Martorano was the chief executioner for Boston's Winter Hill Gang, a loose confederation of Irish and Italian-American gangsters run by James "Whitey" Bulger.
Martorano, a former Catholic altar boy and high school football star, became a cool and calculating killer. But as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, he is perhaps best known as the government witness who helped expose a web of corruption and collusion involving the mob and the Boston office of the FBI.
For years, he was one of the most feared men in Boston, and this is why: Martorano says he never kept count of how many people he killed. "Until in the end, I never realized it was that many," he tells Kroft.
Asked how many, Martorano says, "A lot. Too many."
"Do you have a number?" Kroft asks.
"I confessed to 20 in court," Martorano replies.
"You sure you remembered 'em all?" Kroft asks.
"I hope so," Martorano says,
Martorano had to remember them all. It was part of a deal he cut with the federal government that put him back on the streets of Boston after only 12 years in prison -- a little more than seven months served for each of the 20 people he killed, many of them fellow gangsters, and many of them at close range after looking into their eyes.
Asked if he always killed people by shooting them, Martorano tells Kroft, "I think I stabbed one guy."
"But you like guns," Kroft remarks.
"Well, it's the easiest way I think," Martorano says.
Martorano says he did not get any satisfaction out of the fact that people were afraid of him. "But everybody likes to be respected for one thing or another," he admits.
His manner is unemotional and detached, and he speaks with the brevity of a professional witness, which he has become. His testimony helped wipe out one of the largest criminal enterprises in New England, for which he served as chief executioner. But Martorano is no psychopath, and he doesn't much like the term "hit man."
"The hit man is…that sounds to me like somebody that's getting paid to a paid contract. I mean, you could never pay me to kill anybody," he says.
"A lot of people would say you're a serial killer," Kroft remarks.
"I might be a vigilante, but not a serial killer," Martorano says. "Serial killers, you have to stop them. They'll never stop. And they enjoy it. I never enjoyed it. I don't enjoy risking my life but if the cause was right I would."
Martorano says he "always" felt like he was doing the right thing. "Even if it was wrong, I always tried to do the right thing."
If you believe Martorano -- and the Justice Department does -- he killed out of a sense of loyalty and duty. He sees himself as a stand-up guy, a man of his word, which is why he decided to talk to 60 Minutes.
It goes back 50 years, when Martorano was a star running back on the Mount St. Charles Academy football team in Rhode Island. One of his blockers was the late 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley. He promised Bradley he would sit down with him and tell his story, but Ed died unexpectedly before Martorano got out of prison.
"I never thought I'd be sitting here with you, I thought I'd be here with Ed. But I'm sitting here because Ed wanted me to sit here and I'm honoring that," Martorano explains.
"I know one of the questions that Ed wanted to ask you. In sort of the way that Ed asked those questions, I think he wanted to be sitting here and say, 'What happened Johnny?' Why was it do you think that you went in different directions?" Kroft asks.
"Well, I think it was mainly the influence of my father and his principles and his values that he pushed onto me," Martorano explains.
His father owned an after hour's club called Luigi's in a rough Boston neighborhood known as the "Combat Zone." It was a hangout for hoodlums who would become Martorano's role models, and many of them shared his father’s simple Sicilian values.
"He was the oldest son, and he taught me 'You're the oldest son and this is your heritage. You've got to take care of your family and be a man. I don't care what else you are, you’ve got to be a man,'" Martorano says.
It was the code he lived by and killed for. The first time it was an ex con, Robert Palladino, he thought was going to implicate his brother Jimmy in a murder. Palladino was found under an expressway with a bullet in his head.
Martorano says he didn't see anything wrong with it. "I saved my brother’s life, somebody got hurt, that had to be," he says.
Asked if it felt like a duty, Martorano says, "An obligation."
"Was the next time easier?" Kroft asks.
"Well, it's sort of like a lawyer trying his first case. It's difficult but the next case is easier. Then it gets easier, I guess, as you go. 'Cause it's you know, doing this is harder than that," Martorano says.
Why?
"'Cause it's hard for me to do. I never did it before," he says.
By the 1970s, his circle of friends and family had expanded to include the Winter Hill Gang, led by the notorious Irish mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger and Stevie "The Rifleman" Flemmi. Martorano was their partner in a business that included gambling, loan sharking, extortion and murder. Martorano's specialty was conflict resolution.
"We had a lot of problems with people. And you know, you just killed them before they kill you. It's kill or get killed at times," Martorano explains.
"I mean, on one occasion, you walked into a crowded bar…and shot somebody. In broad daylight…with the policeman across the street," Kroft says.
"Correct," Martorano admits.
"That's pretty confident," Kroft remarks.
"Well, I felt confident," Martorano says. "You put a disguise on and you just get to feel invisible.
Martorano remembers what the disguise was. "I had a yellow hard hat, a white meat cutter's coat, full length and a beard and mustaches and sunglasses," he recalls.
Asked what he did afterwards, Martorano says, "I went home and changed, back to work."
They operated out of an old body shop, long since abandoned, but Whitey Bulger's chair is still there, and so is his old office.
"I think that's the trapdoor for the cellar. Used to leave that open all the time. Just to intimidate people. Try to get the truth out of them," Martorano remembers. "People would look down there and just wonder."
"Anybody go down there and never come up?" Kroft asks.
"I think so, yeah," Martorano says.
By 1978 Martorano had already killed 18 people, and facing an indictment for fixing horse races, he fled to Florida, where he was living a quiet life under the name "Richard Aucoin." He was only there a few years when Bulger and Flemmi called, asking him to carry out a murder that made headlines across the country, the assassination of a wealthy corporate executive in the parking lot of the exclusive Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa.
The victim was Roger Wheeler, the CEO of Telex Corporation and owner of World Jai Alai, a profitable sports betting business that Bulger was trying to muscle in on. Martorano says the logistical information to carry out the hit was provided by a former Boston FBI agent named Paul Rico.
"How did you manage to get into the Southern Hills Country Club to kill Mr. Wheeler?" Kroft asks.
"There was no gates. We drive in. Waited for him to finish playing golf. I had an update when he was gonna -- his tee time. So, I just waited for him to finish," Martorano remembers.
"You knew what he looked like?" Kroft asks.
"I had his description from Rico," Martorano says.
Martorano says he shot Wheeler once in the head.
Martorano says it wasn't the first or the last time he would get useful information from an FBI man. One of the FBI's top organized crime investigators in Boston, a corrupt agent named John Connolly, helped them out for years. Martorano says it was Connolly who told them that an associate of theirs named John Callahan was about to rat them out on the Wheeler murder. Callahan would become Martorano's 20th and final victim.
"Do you think that John Connolly knew that you were gonna kill Callahan?" Kroft asks.
"Sure," Martorano says. "He said it, 'We're all going to go to jail the rest of our life if this guy doesn't get killed.'"
"And this an FBI agent telling you this?" Kroft asks.
"This is an FBI agent telling it to Whitey, telling it to me," Martorano says.
Martorano has already told this story under oath, and is expected to tell it again to a jury in Florida this spring when Connolly goes on trial for complicity in that murder. He's already serving a ten-year sentence for obstructing justice. In the end, it was a Massachusetts State Police investigation that began to unravel the Winter Hill Gang. In 1995, Martorano, Flemmi and Whitey Bulger were all indicted for racketeering. Bulger, who was tipped off by Connolly about his impending arrest, went underground and is still a fugitive. And in a Boston courtroom, Martorano was about to learn something that would change his life forever.
He knew that Bulger and Flemmi had been getting information from the FBI. But he didn't know they had been also been providing it. For decades, his partners were top-level FBI informants, snitching on the Italian mafia and on Martorano and other gang members. They had violated his code of loyalty, especially Whitey Bulger.
"I'll go along with a lot of things, but not -- no Judas, not no informant," Martorano says. "I never informed or ratted on nobody. And if I could've killed him, I would've killed him. But he wasn't there and that's what I think he deserves."
Martorano decided to strike back the only way he could, using words as his weapon. "I gave him back what he gave everybody else," Martorano says.
"You became an informant?" Kroft asks.
"Nope, I became a government witness," Martorano says. "Not an informant, or a rat. I became a government witness."
Asked what the difference is, Martorano tells Kroft, "One's got the courage to stand on the stand, the other ones' are doin' it behind your back, and droppin' dimes. And how can I be rattin' on a guy who's the rat for 30 years? I'm tryin' to stop him from rattin' anymore."
Bulger, who is still on the FBI's "Most Wanted" list, is now facing 19 murder charges as a result largely of Martorano’s testimony, and Flemmi is in prison for life. His cooperation helped solve nearly 40 murders, including the 20 he confessed to -- and it helped uncover secret mob graves -- all in return for a sentence of just 14 years.
"In some ways, he got away with murder," Kroft tells Donald Stern, who was the U.S. attorney who eventually signed off on the agreement.
"In some ways, he did get away with murder," Stern agrees.
"The only thing worse than this deal was not doing this deal. 'Cause if we didn't do this deal, no one would receive any punishment for these murders. Corrupt law enforcement arrangements would not have been uncovered and prosecuted. And the cancer in law enforcement that existed in Boston for a number of years would have remained there," Stern says.
"So you're saying it changed the landscape of organized crime in Boston?" Kroft asks.
"It did," Stern replies.
When Martorano was released from prison last spring, he decided to return to Boston. He says he feels safe here now. Most of his enemies are dead, in jail, or on the lam.
"In some cases, regret can take over a person's life. I don't get the sense that that's the case with you," Kroft remarks.
"Well, maybe that's just not my temperament or my personality. Maybe it is, but you can't see it. Or maybe I can't express it the way you want it, but I have my regrets," Martorano says.
"You seem cold," Kroft says. "You killed 20 people and that’s all you have to say about it?"
"I wish it wasn't that way. I mean, I wish there was none. You know, you can’t change the past. I’m trying to do the best I can with the future and explain it as best I can. I regret it all, I can’t change it," Martorano says.
"You still a Catholic?" Kroft asks.
"Sure," Martorano says.
"I mean, you can burn in hell for killing one person," Kroft points out.
"I don't believe that," Martorano says. "At one point, maybe a couple years ago, I sent for a priest and gave him a confession. It was maybe 30 years since my last confession. But I went through the whole scenario with him, and went through my whole life with him, and confessed. And at the end of it, he says, 'Well, what do you think I should give you for penance?' I says, 'Father, you can justifiably crucify me.' He laughed and says, 'Nope. Ten Hail Marys, ten Our Fathers, and don't do it again.' So I listened to him."
"Anything that could get you to kill again?" Kroft asks.
"Not that I can think of," Martorano says.
Not even Whitey Bulger?
Says Martorano, "Well, there’s a bounty out on him."
Thanks to Steve Kroft
Martorano, a former Catholic altar boy and high school football star, became a cool and calculating killer. But as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, he is perhaps best known as the government witness who helped expose a web of corruption and collusion involving the mob and the Boston office of the FBI.
For years, he was one of the most feared men in Boston, and this is why: Martorano says he never kept count of how many people he killed. "Until in the end, I never realized it was that many," he tells Kroft.
Asked how many, Martorano says, "A lot. Too many."
"Do you have a number?" Kroft asks.
"I confessed to 20 in court," Martorano replies.
"You sure you remembered 'em all?" Kroft asks.
"I hope so," Martorano says,
Martorano had to remember them all. It was part of a deal he cut with the federal government that put him back on the streets of Boston after only 12 years in prison -- a little more than seven months served for each of the 20 people he killed, many of them fellow gangsters, and many of them at close range after looking into their eyes.
Asked if he always killed people by shooting them, Martorano tells Kroft, "I think I stabbed one guy."
"But you like guns," Kroft remarks.
"Well, it's the easiest way I think," Martorano says.
Martorano says he did not get any satisfaction out of the fact that people were afraid of him. "But everybody likes to be respected for one thing or another," he admits.
His manner is unemotional and detached, and he speaks with the brevity of a professional witness, which he has become. His testimony helped wipe out one of the largest criminal enterprises in New England, for which he served as chief executioner. But Martorano is no psychopath, and he doesn't much like the term "hit man."
"The hit man is…that sounds to me like somebody that's getting paid to a paid contract. I mean, you could never pay me to kill anybody," he says.
"A lot of people would say you're a serial killer," Kroft remarks.
"I might be a vigilante, but not a serial killer," Martorano says. "Serial killers, you have to stop them. They'll never stop. And they enjoy it. I never enjoyed it. I don't enjoy risking my life but if the cause was right I would."
Martorano says he "always" felt like he was doing the right thing. "Even if it was wrong, I always tried to do the right thing."
If you believe Martorano -- and the Justice Department does -- he killed out of a sense of loyalty and duty. He sees himself as a stand-up guy, a man of his word, which is why he decided to talk to 60 Minutes.
It goes back 50 years, when Martorano was a star running back on the Mount St. Charles Academy football team in Rhode Island. One of his blockers was the late 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley. He promised Bradley he would sit down with him and tell his story, but Ed died unexpectedly before Martorano got out of prison.
"I never thought I'd be sitting here with you, I thought I'd be here with Ed. But I'm sitting here because Ed wanted me to sit here and I'm honoring that," Martorano explains.
"I know one of the questions that Ed wanted to ask you. In sort of the way that Ed asked those questions, I think he wanted to be sitting here and say, 'What happened Johnny?' Why was it do you think that you went in different directions?" Kroft asks.
"Well, I think it was mainly the influence of my father and his principles and his values that he pushed onto me," Martorano explains.
His father owned an after hour's club called Luigi's in a rough Boston neighborhood known as the "Combat Zone." It was a hangout for hoodlums who would become Martorano's role models, and many of them shared his father’s simple Sicilian values.
"He was the oldest son, and he taught me 'You're the oldest son and this is your heritage. You've got to take care of your family and be a man. I don't care what else you are, you’ve got to be a man,'" Martorano says.
It was the code he lived by and killed for. The first time it was an ex con, Robert Palladino, he thought was going to implicate his brother Jimmy in a murder. Palladino was found under an expressway with a bullet in his head.
Martorano says he didn't see anything wrong with it. "I saved my brother’s life, somebody got hurt, that had to be," he says.
Asked if it felt like a duty, Martorano says, "An obligation."
"Was the next time easier?" Kroft asks.
"Well, it's sort of like a lawyer trying his first case. It's difficult but the next case is easier. Then it gets easier, I guess, as you go. 'Cause it's you know, doing this is harder than that," Martorano says.
Why?
"'Cause it's hard for me to do. I never did it before," he says.
By the 1970s, his circle of friends and family had expanded to include the Winter Hill Gang, led by the notorious Irish mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger and Stevie "The Rifleman" Flemmi. Martorano was their partner in a business that included gambling, loan sharking, extortion and murder. Martorano's specialty was conflict resolution.
"We had a lot of problems with people. And you know, you just killed them before they kill you. It's kill or get killed at times," Martorano explains.
"I mean, on one occasion, you walked into a crowded bar…and shot somebody. In broad daylight…with the policeman across the street," Kroft says.
"Correct," Martorano admits.
"That's pretty confident," Kroft remarks.
"Well, I felt confident," Martorano says. "You put a disguise on and you just get to feel invisible.
Martorano remembers what the disguise was. "I had a yellow hard hat, a white meat cutter's coat, full length and a beard and mustaches and sunglasses," he recalls.
Asked what he did afterwards, Martorano says, "I went home and changed, back to work."
They operated out of an old body shop, long since abandoned, but Whitey Bulger's chair is still there, and so is his old office.
"I think that's the trapdoor for the cellar. Used to leave that open all the time. Just to intimidate people. Try to get the truth out of them," Martorano remembers. "People would look down there and just wonder."
"Anybody go down there and never come up?" Kroft asks.
"I think so, yeah," Martorano says.
By 1978 Martorano had already killed 18 people, and facing an indictment for fixing horse races, he fled to Florida, where he was living a quiet life under the name "Richard Aucoin." He was only there a few years when Bulger and Flemmi called, asking him to carry out a murder that made headlines across the country, the assassination of a wealthy corporate executive in the parking lot of the exclusive Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa.
The victim was Roger Wheeler, the CEO of Telex Corporation and owner of World Jai Alai, a profitable sports betting business that Bulger was trying to muscle in on. Martorano says the logistical information to carry out the hit was provided by a former Boston FBI agent named Paul Rico.
"How did you manage to get into the Southern Hills Country Club to kill Mr. Wheeler?" Kroft asks.
"There was no gates. We drive in. Waited for him to finish playing golf. I had an update when he was gonna -- his tee time. So, I just waited for him to finish," Martorano remembers.
"You knew what he looked like?" Kroft asks.
"I had his description from Rico," Martorano says.
Martorano says he shot Wheeler once in the head.
Martorano says it wasn't the first or the last time he would get useful information from an FBI man. One of the FBI's top organized crime investigators in Boston, a corrupt agent named John Connolly, helped them out for years. Martorano says it was Connolly who told them that an associate of theirs named John Callahan was about to rat them out on the Wheeler murder. Callahan would become Martorano's 20th and final victim.
"Do you think that John Connolly knew that you were gonna kill Callahan?" Kroft asks.
"Sure," Martorano says. "He said it, 'We're all going to go to jail the rest of our life if this guy doesn't get killed.'"
"And this an FBI agent telling you this?" Kroft asks.
"This is an FBI agent telling it to Whitey, telling it to me," Martorano says.
Martorano has already told this story under oath, and is expected to tell it again to a jury in Florida this spring when Connolly goes on trial for complicity in that murder. He's already serving a ten-year sentence for obstructing justice. In the end, it was a Massachusetts State Police investigation that began to unravel the Winter Hill Gang. In 1995, Martorano, Flemmi and Whitey Bulger were all indicted for racketeering. Bulger, who was tipped off by Connolly about his impending arrest, went underground and is still a fugitive. And in a Boston courtroom, Martorano was about to learn something that would change his life forever.
He knew that Bulger and Flemmi had been getting information from the FBI. But he didn't know they had been also been providing it. For decades, his partners were top-level FBI informants, snitching on the Italian mafia and on Martorano and other gang members. They had violated his code of loyalty, especially Whitey Bulger.
"I'll go along with a lot of things, but not -- no Judas, not no informant," Martorano says. "I never informed or ratted on nobody. And if I could've killed him, I would've killed him. But he wasn't there and that's what I think he deserves."
Martorano decided to strike back the only way he could, using words as his weapon. "I gave him back what he gave everybody else," Martorano says.
"You became an informant?" Kroft asks.
"Nope, I became a government witness," Martorano says. "Not an informant, or a rat. I became a government witness."
Asked what the difference is, Martorano tells Kroft, "One's got the courage to stand on the stand, the other ones' are doin' it behind your back, and droppin' dimes. And how can I be rattin' on a guy who's the rat for 30 years? I'm tryin' to stop him from rattin' anymore."
Bulger, who is still on the FBI's "Most Wanted" list, is now facing 19 murder charges as a result largely of Martorano’s testimony, and Flemmi is in prison for life. His cooperation helped solve nearly 40 murders, including the 20 he confessed to -- and it helped uncover secret mob graves -- all in return for a sentence of just 14 years.
"In some ways, he got away with murder," Kroft tells Donald Stern, who was the U.S. attorney who eventually signed off on the agreement.
"In some ways, he did get away with murder," Stern agrees.
"The only thing worse than this deal was not doing this deal. 'Cause if we didn't do this deal, no one would receive any punishment for these murders. Corrupt law enforcement arrangements would not have been uncovered and prosecuted. And the cancer in law enforcement that existed in Boston for a number of years would have remained there," Stern says.
"So you're saying it changed the landscape of organized crime in Boston?" Kroft asks.
"It did," Stern replies.
When Martorano was released from prison last spring, he decided to return to Boston. He says he feels safe here now. Most of his enemies are dead, in jail, or on the lam.
"In some cases, regret can take over a person's life. I don't get the sense that that's the case with you," Kroft remarks.
"Well, maybe that's just not my temperament or my personality. Maybe it is, but you can't see it. Or maybe I can't express it the way you want it, but I have my regrets," Martorano says.
"You seem cold," Kroft says. "You killed 20 people and that’s all you have to say about it?"
"I wish it wasn't that way. I mean, I wish there was none. You know, you can’t change the past. I’m trying to do the best I can with the future and explain it as best I can. I regret it all, I can’t change it," Martorano says.
"You still a Catholic?" Kroft asks.
"Sure," Martorano says.
"I mean, you can burn in hell for killing one person," Kroft points out.
"I don't believe that," Martorano says. "At one point, maybe a couple years ago, I sent for a priest and gave him a confession. It was maybe 30 years since my last confession. But I went through the whole scenario with him, and went through my whole life with him, and confessed. And at the end of it, he says, 'Well, what do you think I should give you for penance?' I says, 'Father, you can justifiably crucify me.' He laughed and says, 'Nope. Ten Hail Marys, ten Our Fathers, and don't do it again.' So I listened to him."
"Anything that could get you to kill again?" Kroft asks.
"Not that I can think of," Martorano says.
Not even Whitey Bulger?
Says Martorano, "Well, there’s a bounty out on him."
Thanks to Steve Kroft
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