Read Online Last Rites by William J. Craig - Free Book Online Page B

was with Paul Colicci. They had originally been very close friends—until Colicci went to jail. While in prison, he wrote several nasty and threatening letters to Patriarca. Once released, he took up with a minor thief named Vincent Bisesi. In 1964, the two men were hustling stolen televisions in beach areas like Revere. They would use an actual TV and plug it in to show the potential customer how it worked. Then they would go out to the truck and get a new TV in a box. Unbeknownst to the customer, the set in the box didn’t have any internal working parts. Patriarca found out that Colicci was living in a motel in Quincy, so he dispatched his best assassins. Unfortunately, Bisesi was there too. Patriarca’s assassins killed both of them and dumped the bodies in the trunk of a car, which they left in a parking lot. The police found them on July 23, 1964, only because someone complained about the stench around the vehicle.
    The second man on Patriarca’s list was a minor thief named Robert Palladino. Palladino had done a burglary with Tony Sasso, in which they had broken into a house and stolen some mink coats. It turned out that the coats belonged to the girlfriend of Mike Rocco, another mob figure. The thieves sold the coats to Ralph Lamattina, another wise guy and fence. When Lamattina found out where the coats had come from, he immediately dispatched a couple of assassins. Palladino was badly beaten and then was shot and dumped in the North End in November 1965. Sasso’s body was never found. It is widely believed that his remains are part of the foundation of the Wellington Shopping Center.
    Meanwhile, the war between Somerville’s Buddy McLean and the McLaughlin gang raged on. One evening in 1965, Buddy McLean was at the Peppermint Lounge in Somerville with bodyguards Americo “Rico” Sacramone and Anthony “Tony Blue” D’Agostino. Stevie and Cornelius Hughes opened fire as Buddy left the lounge, killing him instantly. Cornelius “Connie” Hughes was one of the most feared assassins from Charlestown and a loyal member of the McLaughlin gang. On the evening of May 26, 1966, while driving in a Revere neighborhood, he was spotted by “Cadillac” Frank Salemme and Joseph Barboza. The two Winter Hill killers pulled up to Hughes and opened fire on him. They poured round after round into his body before driving off. When the Revere Police arrived, they found a piece of Hughes’s brain on the floor of his car. Revenge was sweet for the Winter Hill Gang.
    After Buddy McLean was killed, Howie Winter was named as his successor. Winter was born on March 17, 1929, in Roxbury, Massachusetts. While he was still an infant, his family moved to Somerville. He began his criminal life early on and quickly became the right-hand man of Buddy McLean. He served as boss of the Winter Hill Gang from 1965 to 1978, when he was jailed for fixing horse races. The original indictment that had jailed Howie Winter also named Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi. However, FBI agent John Connolly had convinced federal prosecutor Jeremiah O’Sullivan to remove them from the indictment because of their status as informants against the mafia. A few years after Winter was released, he was arrested again, this time for dealing cocaine. Despite being faced with another decade behind bars at the age of sixty-five, he refused the FBI deal, telling the agents that he was not about to be a rat. Winter was finally released in 2004 and lives somewhere in Massachusetts.
    During the mob wars of the 1960s, the city of Revere was a virtual dumping ground for the bodies of those killed. With nightclubs and strip clubs dotting the city, Revere was a frequent hangout for these mobsters. One night, Revere Police officers were called to one of the clubs on the beach on the report of a shooting. Once the officers arrived, they discovered that not only was there no body, but a section of the carpet, presumably