Read Online Hitman by Howie Carr - Free Book Online Page B

you.”
    *   *   *
    THE GANG war was spiraling out of control. All the old scores were getting settled, whether they had anything to do with Charlestown and Somerville or not. A Rhode Island con wrote a letter from his prison cell to Patriarca, comparing “the Man” to Fagan in Oliver Twist, the boss of a gang of thieves. When the Dickens-reading con was released from prison, a Mafia hit squad tracked him to Quincy, murdered him and a friend, and stuffed their bodies in the trunk of a car at a motel. Both victims were Italians, as were their killers. The next day the papers listed them as two more victims of the “Irish Gang War.”
    Another alleged victim of the war was a Roxbury loan shark named Henry Reddington. Wimpy Bennett borrowed $25,000 from Reddington, then figured out a way he wouldn’t have to pay. He called one of the local McLaughlins, a guy named Spike O’Toole, and told him that Reddington had been sleeping with his girlfriend. O’Toole immediately drove to Reddington’s suburban office and murdered him. The papers had another “victim” to write about, and Wimpy was off the hook for $25,000.
    The police wanted to at least appear to be cracking down on the mayhem, so they started clamping down on known hoodlums, pulling their cars over, searching them for weapons, taking them in for “questioning.” Deprived of their usual sources of income, hard-up mobsters began committing crimes that would have been unthinkable in better times—robbing bookmakers, doing home invasions. Such crimes invariably led to retaliations, and yet more bodies, which meant yet heavier police crackdowns, with hoods rousted and rounded up no matter how much they’d paid off the cops in the past.
    Since everyone now carried guns, and since most hoods already had criminal records, it was easy for the cops to bag anyone they wanted for being a felon in possession of an unregistered firearm. It wasn’t a major crime, but it could be used to get somebody hot off the street and into the House of Correction for a few months.
    Soon two of Johnny’s friends—Jimmy Flemmi and Joe “the Animal” Barboza—were doing state time. And that led to more problems: they quickly discovered that every morning, there was a “pill line,” where prisoners diagnosed with psychiatric problems would be given their daily doses of antidepressants or barbiturates. The Bear and the Animal began robbing everyone as they left the line, gobbling whatever they could. Their already erratic behavior quickly deteriorated even further. Plus, they had a lot more enemies: everyone they had crossed while in prison.

    Joe “the Animal” Barboza, the first gangster in the Witness Protection Program.
    Within months after his release from prison in 1963, Jimmy Flemmi had murdered two of his fellow ex-cons, Walpole warriors, as they were known on the street. One he shot to death; he then drove the body to Pembroke but ran out of gas and ended up on the side of the road after dumping the corpse in the woods. The other he shot in the head in a Dorchester bar owned by the Bennetts, using a gun Wimpy had gotten from a Boston policeman on his payroll. Not knowing whether the cop’s gun could be traced, the Bear chopped off the ex-con’s head with the bullet in it, put it in his car, and then torched the bar. That was one way to beat a ballistics test.
    Barboza, meanwhile, got married, and less than a week later murdered one of the hoods who had been in the wedding party. Another time he severely beat a teenager who he thought had refused to let him and a girlfriend cut in line for a ride at the amusement park in Revere Beach. The problem was, he beat up the wrong guy, but that didn’t matter to Barboza. He’d delivered a message to those punks at the amusement park—don’t fuck with Joe Barboza when he wants to cut in line. One day he used a baseball