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 Bob Delaney 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
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
Saturday, January 05, 2008
AMW Fugitive Attending Mobster Funerals?
Joseph Quartieri: In the 1990's, AMW profiled elusive fugitive Joseph Quartieri a number of times. He was wanted for trying to kill a police officer in 1979, and then escaping from jail. AMW received a number of tips, but nothing led to Quartieri. Now, investigators believe he may have been sighted -- at mobsters' funerals.Investigators in New York and New Jersey keep an eye on the mob -- a close eye. And whenever there is a funeral of a well-known mob member, you can bet cops are watching. When John Gotti was buried in 2002, police were quick to identify nearly everyone who was there to lay the infamous Gambino crime boss to rest. But when investigators looked over the surveillance photos, there was one man they couldn't identify. They had a hunch it could be someone they had been hunting for years, but they weren't able to positively identify the guy.
Then, in 2006, police shot a photo of the same man at a different mob-related funeral. This was the funeral for the mother of a known mob member in New York City who police don't want to identify. Again, investigators say they spotted the same guy and again they have a hunch they know who it is. But, without someone positively identifying the guy, police can't make a move.
Police think the guy showing up at the funerals could be Joseph Quartieri. In 1979, Quartieri is accused of breaking into a jewelry store on Long Island and shooting at a police officer who responded to the call. Quartieri was charged with the attempted murder of the cop, and with robbery. Police knew Quartieri to be a low level associate of the Gambino crime family and a man with an extensive criminal record. In fact, the then- 32-year-old man had already been arrested 24 times and served eight years in prison. But, shortly after he was locked up for this robbery, police say he broke out of the Nassau County jail and hasn't been seen since.
AMW first profiled Quartieri in 1993, and has re-run his profile several times since. But nothing has led directly to this guy. It's as if he disappeared.
Police believe one of the following three scenarios to be true. Number one, the guy in the photos is their fugitive, Joseph Quartieri. Number two, mobsters had Quartieri killed because he had become a "liability" because he was a wanted man. Or, scenario number three, Quartieri is on the run and possibly out of the country. Regardless, investigators need the public's help to identify whoever the man in the surveillance photos is.
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