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as usual—sailors until 1 A.M. , wiseguys until 4. Andy Martorano wouldn’t give up his dream of a better, squarer life for his firstborn son, his golden boy. He wanted Johnny on the straight and narrow. Still perplexed at his son’s 4-F—“he’s as strong as a horse,” he would tell his friends—Andy was always happiest when Johnny spent a rare evening out of the Zone, on a date with his high-school sweetheart, Nancy O’Neill.
    It was the end of the 1950s, and “shacking up” was not an option, especially with an Irish-Catholic girl from North Quincy. So Johnny and Nancy decided to get married. Andy was ecstatic. Finally, he thought, Johnny might settle down. Maybe Nancy could accomplish what Johnny Williams had never been able to do: convince him to get a real job, or go to college, or perhaps even both. The wedding, in 1961, was big, and everyone from the Zone showed up to pay their respects, bearing envelopes bulging with cash. The honeymooners flew off to Miami Beach, and quickly checked into the bridal suite at one of Johnny’s old Collins Avenue hangouts, the Deauville Hotel.
    The fact that at least one of Johnny’s old buddies, a wiseguy named Skinny, immediately began calling the bridal suite from the hotel bar downstairs was not a propitious omen for the marriage.
    On their return to Boston, the newlyweds settled in Squantum, a middle-class section of Quincy. Nancy was soon pregnant with their first child, Jeannie. But Johnny had other things on his mind. His father had taken over the lease on a new club on the South End–Roxbury line.
    They were going to call it Basin Street South.
    LAWYER: Did you hire prostitutes to work at your restaurants for people?
    MARTORANO: No.… Socialized with prostitutes, I’ve gone with prostitutes. In my life, you were either a prostitute or singer or dancer, waitress or barmaid. That’s all the people I knew.
    LAWYER: And when you socialized with prostitutes, you paid them, didn’t you?
    MARTORANO: I might help them. I might give them money but not for sex.
    LAWYER: They were just gifts? Is that right?
    MARTORANO: Sure. I received plenty of gifts from prostitutes and I gave them plenty of gifts.
    The way Johnny Martorano would describe it decades later, Basin Street South was Boston’s version of the Cotton Club, the famous gangster-owned Harlem nightspot of Prohibition days. Basin Street attracted a mixed crowd—“black and tan,” as the phrase went. It featured a scantily clad chorus line and top-of-the-line black musical acts. Basin Street tended to showcase black acts either on the way up—Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, Lou Rawls, comedian Redd Foxx—or on the way down, like Count Basie.
    Basin Street South was at 1844 Washington Street. The building that housed Basin Street South, and the liquor license that went with it, were owned by an In Town wiseguy named Rocco Lamattina. Next door on Massachusetts Avenue (called Mass Ave by the locals) was Jules’ Pool Room, where upstairs the crap games never ended. As one of Jules’s few white patrons, Johnny quickly met another white guy, an ex-con stick-up artist named Bobby Palladino.
    The next building down Mass Ave served as a rooming house for the dancers and some of the acts. There were efficiency apartments upstairs, which were often rented out to the women who worked at the club. Soon Johnny was spending fewer nights at home in Squantum, and by 1962, he was never coming home. He had a year-old baby, and Nancy was seven months pregnant with his second daughter, Lisa. But Johnny’s first marriage was over.
    Irreconcilable differences—which was another way of saying, Basin Street South.

    Bobby Palladino, the first man Johnny Martorano would murder.
    *   *   *
    BY 1962, even the Boston Red Sox had integrated. They had two black players—infielder Pumpsie Green and a promising young pitcher named Earl