the corner of Broadway on Winter Hill in Somerville. Winter ran the gang along with Johnny Martorano, a former all-state football player from Milton whose father had run a gin mill in the Combat Zone, the city’s red-light district after the demolition of old Scollay Square in 1961, a seedy stretch of strip joints, adult bookstores, and pornographic movie theaters along lower Washington Street. After graduating from high school, Johnny had turned down seven football scholarships and instead stayed in Boston, hanging out in the Zone and quickly moving into the rackets, as did his younger brother, Jimmy, a few years later.
Martorano had fallen under the sway of Stevie Flemmi, and by the age of twenty-five he was a professional hitman. Johnny rapidly became one of the city’s most prolific killers, a reputation he solidified in January 1968, after a forty-seven-year-old black man made the mistake of beating up Flemmi in an after-hours joint. Martorano tracked his quarry to a car on Normandy Street in Roxbury, where the man was sitting with two people who turned out to be, not fellow criminals, but a nineteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy. Johnny walked up alongside the car and calmly killed all three of them with his trademark .38-caliber Police Special revolver. From then on, in certain circles, Johnny Martorano would be known as “Sickle Cell Anemia.” He was deadly to blacks.
The new, consolidated Winter Hill Gang soon began flexing its muscles. They wanted to control gambling north of the city, and that meant eliminating another crew of independent mob-sters led by Indian Joe Notarangeli, who operated out of Mother’s, a barroom under the elevated tracks of the Green Line at North Station.
The Notarangelis controlled a number of bookies in the Merrimack Valley, and they were stubborn. In March 1973, a bartender from Mother’s was killed by machine gun fire at a stoplight in Brighton. He had no connections to organized crime. His fatal error: He drove a Mercedes-Benz that looked a lot like one owned by Indian Joe’s brother Al.
Eleven days later, Whitey was in the front seat of an automobile with an Uzi machine gun as a Notarangeli hood named Al Plummer drove down Commercial Street in the North End. Whitey opened fire, practically decapitating Plummer and wounding another gangster in the car, an old associate of Stevie Flemmi’s named Hugh “Sonny” Shields.
The third person in the car was a hoodlum named Frank Capizzi, who had been wounded twice earlier by Winter Hill hit squads, namely Whitey. After the third shooting, on Commercial Street, he and his family fled Boston, crisscrossing North America to escape. As he wrote to a judge in 2003, his children “had the job of cleaning festering wounds and picking out bits of lead from my back as they surfaced.”
Four days later, on a Friday night, they caught up with Billy O’Brien, a thirty-two-year-old roofer and stevedore from South Boston (no relation to the Billy O’Brien who was murdered in 1967). O’Brien, who had served time for killing yet another hoodlum named O’Brien, in South Boston in 1964, was driving on Morrissey Boulevard. He had bought a cake at Linda Mae’s before picking up his ten-year-old daughter, Marie, for the weekend. In the car with O’Brien was another rackets guy named Ralph DeMasi. As they headed north, another car pulled up alongside them and the passenger opened fire, again with a machine gun. O’Brien was hit seventeen times, and died instantly. DeMasi was wounded.
“I thought someone was taking target practice on the road,” DeMasi said in a letter to a judge in 2004. “It was my good friend John Martorano.”
The driver: Whitey Bulger.
Eleven days later, a different pair of Winter Hill killers flew down to Fort Lauderdale to murder an ex-boxer from the Notarangelis’ hometown of Medford. When he opened the door to his apartment, the associate of Indian Joe was shot five times in the head.
By April 18,
Martorano had fallen under the sway of Stevie Flemmi, and by the age of twenty-five he was a professional hitman. Johnny rapidly became one of the city’s most prolific killers, a reputation he solidified in January 1968, after a forty-seven-year-old black man made the mistake of beating up Flemmi in an after-hours joint. Martorano tracked his quarry to a car on Normandy Street in Roxbury, where the man was sitting with two people who turned out to be, not fellow criminals, but a nineteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy. Johnny walked up alongside the car and calmly killed all three of them with his trademark .38-caliber Police Special revolver. From then on, in certain circles, Johnny Martorano would be known as “Sickle Cell Anemia.” He was deadly to blacks.
The new, consolidated Winter Hill Gang soon began flexing its muscles. They wanted to control gambling north of the city, and that meant eliminating another crew of independent mob-sters led by Indian Joe Notarangeli, who operated out of Mother’s, a barroom under the elevated tracks of the Green Line at North Station.
The Notarangelis controlled a number of bookies in the Merrimack Valley, and they were stubborn. In March 1973, a bartender from Mother’s was killed by machine gun fire at a stoplight in Brighton. He had no connections to organized crime. His fatal error: He drove a Mercedes-Benz that looked a lot like one owned by Indian Joe’s brother Al.
Eleven days later, Whitey was in the front seat of an automobile with an Uzi machine gun as a Notarangeli hood named Al Plummer drove down Commercial Street in the North End. Whitey opened fire, practically decapitating Plummer and wounding another gangster in the car, an old associate of Stevie Flemmi’s named Hugh “Sonny” Shields.
The third person in the car was a hoodlum named Frank Capizzi, who had been wounded twice earlier by Winter Hill hit squads, namely Whitey. After the third shooting, on Commercial Street, he and his family fled Boston, crisscrossing North America to escape. As he wrote to a judge in 2003, his children “had the job of cleaning festering wounds and picking out bits of lead from my back as they surfaced.”
Four days later, on a Friday night, they caught up with Billy O’Brien, a thirty-two-year-old roofer and stevedore from South Boston (no relation to the Billy O’Brien who was murdered in 1967). O’Brien, who had served time for killing yet another hoodlum named O’Brien, in South Boston in 1964, was driving on Morrissey Boulevard. He had bought a cake at Linda Mae’s before picking up his ten-year-old daughter, Marie, for the weekend. In the car with O’Brien was another rackets guy named Ralph DeMasi. As they headed north, another car pulled up alongside them and the passenger opened fire, again with a machine gun. O’Brien was hit seventeen times, and died instantly. DeMasi was wounded.
“I thought someone was taking target practice on the road,” DeMasi said in a letter to a judge in 2004. “It was my good friend John Martorano.”
The driver: Whitey Bulger.
Eleven days later, a different pair of Winter Hill killers flew down to Fort Lauderdale to murder an ex-boxer from the Notarangelis’ hometown of Medford. When he opened the door to his apartment, the associate of Indian Joe was shot five times in the head.
By April 18,
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