Free Hitman by Howie Carr

bat to knock out the windows of a car in East Boston whose driver had the temerity to honk at him. Oddly, though, Barboza would not tolerate anyone swearing in front of a woman. Violation of his “code” was good for a beating, at the very least.
    Jimmy the Bear was also busy. High on Seconal one night, Jimmy Flemmi stabbed a twenty-two-year-old man who had the misfortune to bump into him at a Hayes & Bickford cafeteria downtown one night after the bars closed.
    Even hoodlums began clearing out of Boston. It was safer that way. A guy from the North End became a courier for Meyer Lansky. One of Buddy McLean’s friends moved to Hollywood, lost fifty pounds, took acting lessons, and changed his name from Bobo Petricone to Alex Rocco. His agent told him he might have a future in gangster movies. Years later in The Godfather, playing the Jewish gangster based on Bugsy Siegel, Alex Rocco would tell Al Pacino: “I made my bones while you were fucking cheerleaders.”

    Bobo Petricone of Somerville, under arrest in 1961, before he went to Hollywood and became the actor Alex Rocco, who specialized in gangster roles.
    Everyone in Somerville agreed Bobo delivered his line very convincingly.
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    AS THE bodies piled up, Johnny continued to split his time between Basin Street South and Luigi’s. He was also handling stolen furs. The Bear, in one of his increasingly rare sober moments, had introduced Martorano to a bold booster, who made his living climbing up the side of the old Furriers Building on Washington Street and also hitting the high-end fur shops on Newbury Street. Johnny would stash the stolen furs at Luigi’s until he could move them out of town. The clubs were doing well, but he could always use extra money. He still had his ex-wife Nancy and the two girls to support.
    But one night in November 1964, Martorano got a telephone call that changed his life. The Boston cops were swarming into Luigi’s, searching the upstairs floors where the stolen furs were kept. They had a search warrant, based on a “tip” from the same cop whose gun the Bear had used to kill his fellow Walpole warrior a few months earlier. Supposedly the cops were looking for furs, but they quickly discovered a body wrapped up in a rug, “like it was ready for the river,” as one cop put it.
    It was Margaret “Margie” Sylvester, age thirty-five, a blond divorcée from Dorchester, a longtime friend of Andy Martorano, who had been a waitress at Luigi’s for years. She had been stabbed to death.
    Johnny was not a suspect; the night Margie vanished, he’d spent one of his rare nights at home. But his brother Jimmy had a problem. The morning after Margie’s slaying, he’d replaced a rug at Luigi’s. He told police that his mother, who did the books for Luigi’s, had noticed a section of the rug in the back room missing and had asked him to put in a new section. The cops weren’t buying his story, but they couldn’t prove anything to the contrary. Jimmy swore to Johnny he knew nothing about Margie’s murder, although he admitted to Johnny that he had noticed blood stains on the edges of the rug that remained after he had replaced the missing section.

    Jimmy Martorano mug shots from the 1960s and 1970s.
    Johnny began his own investigation. He learned it had been a slow night at Luigi’s. Bobby Palladino, the ex-con and a friend, had been hanging out in the back room. So had John Jackson, a middle-aged black ex-prizefighter who worked occasionally as a bartender at Luigi’s. Johnny quickly found a third guy who’d been there—a former Boston cop who’d been fired for loansharking. The ex-cop was able to remember one more guy who Palladino and Jackson had apparently been afraid to mention: Jimmy the Bear.
    â€œThey were petrified of him,” Johnny said. “For obvious reasons.”
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    THE