On the Bad-Guys Beat–5 (An Accounting)
A postscript Post to the last two, this has updates on the few heroes and several villains of the B.C. Point-shaving and Roger Wheeler Murder cases. Call it part 16 (or Parts 14&15A) in our SI series.
The following information would be bragging if it called itself Appendix or any Appendix siblings in the Afterthought family: Addendum, Postlude, Index, Glossary. The following would be behaving with undeserved conceit were it to present as an Appendix.
I have never been trained as an indexer, appendix-er or any kind of lexicographer, but have observed closely many who are pros. I can attest they are dedicated, thorough, highly skilled. I used to be a pretty fair researcher and fact-checker but wouldn’t stake even those claims anymore. In my seniority I enjoy writing things that ring true and might have a vague point to make, but back in the day “ringing true” hardly counted and “vague” led to rewrite or job-loss.
Anyway . . .
For my own amusement and I hope for yours, I thought to learn, as best I could without pushing my chair back from my desk here, whatever in the world happened to some of the players in the narratives we’ve most recently read — specifically, entries 14 and 15 in out tragic-death-of-Sports Illustrated series. The earlier entry is the one with “ ’Midst the Mob” in the parenthetical half of its title, And No. 15 has “Blackest Whitey.” The earlier Post has to do with adventures in the rather hapless Boston College point-shaving case of the late 1970s and early ’80s; the subsequent one concerns Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang’s consequential entry into the once noble Basque sport of jai alai. Both capers — the basketball fixing and Whitey murder spree — went down in the same approximate timeframe in the late 1970s and made their appearances in SI’s pages in 1981.
Google and Wiki have been used in compiling this Hardly-an Appendix. My phone has been used, too. Other websites — personal, corporate, team, school —have been helpful. I have not relied on movies or mob bios for reasons that may be obvious; every movie of mob bio has a motive. When I have munched a morsel that was simply too irresistible to pass up but contains dubious nutritional value, I’ll share my skepticism as to its source.
I have benefitted from a few very smart correspondents. After reading my Posts here, some colleagues from back in the day, or friends from back when who knew what I was up to, or their friends, or new friends — these kinds of folk have been in touch to share their own thoughts and memories. I’m happy to report that they didn’t leave me horribly unsure about what I remembered from four decades ago, and it is always nice to hear from friends regardless. I have used a little of what I gleaned from those conversations in what follows.
Things like the spelling of Martorano or the chosen rendering of the nickname Jimmieor Jimmy were my job to check when I was writing the original Posts. Whether Runyons bar, which is no more, featured an apostrophe or not — well, ugh, I found dueling arguments about that when researching. There were disagreements among good sources including the Times, the Daily News and even Sports Illustrated, which argued with itself both ways in articles that ran years apart — articles, by the way, that I did not fact-check, I am happy to report.
Now, during my long career at Time Inc., I would have felt compelled to keep going till I had run down Runyons or Runyon’s. I would have felt compelled because if I didn’t, I’d be in trouble with my bosses. I would have kept going until I found an old cocktail napkin (maybe in a bag in my own attic?) from the long-gone Runyons, or perhaps saw a photograph of the place in a weathered clipping. But today, these things matter so much less — to me and I hope to you. And so, with Runyons, I just made a coin-flip decision, figuring that since the joint poured its last pint n 1991, you readers cannot seek it out and prove me wrong.
Actually . . .
That’s not quite true, regarding the coin-flip.
I finally chose Lupica’s spelling of Runyons (sans apostrophe) in a Daily News piece because I had bumped into Mike at Runyons’ bar-rail more than once or twice in the 1980s. I figured Mike was a borderline Red Check on Runyon-iana. I did look up the writer Damon Runyon’s name-spelling under the assumption that any saloon with such a proximate name must have been fashioned in tribute to him and his Prohibition Era milieu. It’s a good name for a bar. Damon was in fact R-U-N-Y-O-N, not Y-E-N.
Other fun facts I found along with that name-spelling led to a odd thought: Damon Runyon has got to be the only American ever who had a saloon named after him, a street named for him (in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan), a horse race called in his name (at Aqueduct) and . . . an elementary school in his honor (in Colorado — where, I hasten to add, the little children do not have Runyon on their reading list).
Of use when you next visit New York, so you’re not wasting your time, I’ve found, as mentioned, that Runyons is no more. But you’ll be happy to know that St. Patrick’s is still open for business on 50th between what was Runyons and what was the Time & Life Building, which is now called 1 Rockefeller Plaza since there is no Time Inc. anymore, nor any employees in the building’s 34 floors associated with either Time or LIFE magazines (or with Sports Illustrated, of course), both of which titles (all three of which titles) have been, as we have noted in these Posts, bought by others during our imploding company’s fire sale.
(You probably don’t recall that I stopped by St. Pat’s for prayer one Monday night between being threatened with death during a phone call with a Whitey associate to my office at the Time & Life Building and sipping my first after-work ale at Runyons. That’s what that last paragraph is about.)
BTW, I found Goodfellas, as a film title, rendered both ways, more often with the “f” lower-case. However and crucially: It’s upper-case in the Warner Bros. posters, and I went with that as authoritative.
C’mon! Let’s get to it! Where’s that Appendix?
(You ask this with fair impatience.)
What else is there to say about it, for goodness sake?
Well . . .
As I would were this an actual Appendix, I will categorize and then alphabetize within categories (point-shaving or murder) in each section. These larger “sections” have been chosen to reflect a person’s status of viability (e.g. heart rate — relative slant to being Compos Mentis or the alternative) and then what you might call Status in Society as defined by local law enforcement or the U.S. Justice Department (e.g. behind bars or not). Quick note on that: There is none among our characters remaining on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List — or the Thousand Most, or the Million Most — these 43 years later.
If you’re confused, rest assured: In the first few words in each entry, you should be able to tell in which caper that individual was involved, either the hoops or the jai alai.
(That “hoops-jai alai” phrase might not look it, but it’s a real rhymer, isn’t it? It’s not technically but at least phonically a little alliterative?)
Category-wise, I’ll lead with the living and proceed to the dead, for no good reason except that death is always a useful kicker. There are no page numbers indicated below because I can’t figure that these Substack Posts feature page numbers.
Correct me if I’m wrong on that, or about anything at all. For instance, if I have someone standing upright who is in fact lying coffined, tell me — or tell our mutual friends here in the readership.
My own friend John from Texas has already pointed out that in my last Post, which concluded with the death-threat/St. Pat’s/Runyons sequence, I failed to mention for my curious audience whether Dan Jenkins was at Runyons (perhaps Runyon’s) on the night in question. I thank Loyal Reader John for raising the point, just as I would thank you for raising any point at all.
The fact is, regarding John’s query regarding Dan: I don’t know if Dan was there that night or not. I just don’t remember. I don’t remember anything much at all about the rest of that evening after the death-wish phone call messed with my mind. I think I would guess with some confidence that Dan was there. It rings true.
AT LIBERTY
Ernie Cobb
The Connecticut native, who turns 66 this year, was the star and co-captain of the Boston College team that shaved points, and authorities alleged that, after the Eagles blew the mobsters’ plan for them to come in under the line in a test-run game against Providence, a game during which Cobb had not been involved in any shenanigans, Cobb was recruited into the scheme. He later was indicted but acquitted of conspiracy to commit sports bribery at the conclusion of the four-week trial in Brooklyn.
The third-leading scorer in B.C. history when he finished there in 1979, he was drafted first in the sixth round of that year’s NBA draft by the Utah Jazz, but when the B.C. scandal broke, his NBA career was put on hold, and in fact was never going to get untracked.
Cobb, though, would achieve in other ways. He eventually became an English and Special Education teacher at Alhambra, an inner-city high school in Phoenix not dissimilar from the tough one he had attended when growing up in Stamford, Connecticut. During the 2023-24 season, 46 boys were out for Head Coach Ernie Cobb’s Alhambra High Lions, who suffered a rough campaign in the win-loss category.
No matter. There are bigger things in life.
Tom Davis
The B.C. coach during the point-shaving season testified during the 1981 trial in Brooklyn, a proceeding that would lead to several convictions including that of bigtime mobster Jimmy “the Gent” Burke (Robert De Niro). Davis insisted on the witness stand that he never thought his team was intentionally trying to manipulate the score in any game it played.
However, I’ve found that, also in ’81, he did tell The New York Times that he’d heard rumors about strange betting patterns involving some B.C. games, and even about Cobb’s life being threatened before the Holy Cross game. He had the matter investigated, according to what he told the paper, and determined nothing was fishy.
Davis remained at B.C. through the 1981-’82 season, then left. He had compiled a sterling record of 100 wins against 47 losses in five years on Chestnut Hill, reaching the NCAA’s Elite Eight with his Eagles in ’82. In the next four seasons he coached Stanford. He enjoyed his greatest success at Iowa: 270-139 between 1986 and 1999, with forays into March Madness.
Davis is 85 now and retired, living with his wife Shari in the Iowa City area.
Rick Kuhn
The 6’5” inch forward and backup center at B.C. was the conduit between the players who shaved and their gambling overlord Henry Hill, who in turn was engineering the shave by placing bets for himself, his fellows (including Jimmy Burke) and sometimes even, if they wished, the players themselves, who were salaried by Hill to make the scheme work but could increase their already ill-gotten gains with a wager. Kuhn was never going to play in the NBA, so his jail sentence — he was the only player to spend time behind bars — did not derail any bigtime roundball career, like the scandal did Cobb’s.
Kuhn answered a few questions in the immediate aftermath of the trial and a few more when he was released from prison but, frankly, I haven’t been able to ascertain much about his life since his days at B.C., then Brooklyn, then the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. After serving four years of his 10-year sentence, he was freed, and decided, after that briefest flurry of explaining his actions and offering public apologies for them, he withdrew into a laudably maintained anonymity. Perhaps it was a fretful and necessary one. In a 1981 affidavit he’d told authorities that his life was quickly threatened — letters, phone calls — for offering his cooperative testimony during the trial that put bloodthirsty Jimmy Burke away.
Kuhn is still alive as far as I can tell. Therefore, like Cobb, he’s 66. Also like Cobb, he has worked with young athletes through the years—counseling them on the hazards and temptations of bigtime basketball in a gambling country, all the big money to be made in both college and pro sports.
Frank McLaughlin
I find this update a true hoot. Because of my Post on the B.C. point shave, I’m back in touch with Frank, the former Harvard basketball coach who ran game film for me in early 1981. I’m back in touch for the very first time since that one weird afternoon in Cambridge four decades ago. Hadn’t seen or spoken to Frank since. But in this age of electronic Posting and instant reckoning . . .
Well, here’s 2024, where there is no hiding.
Frank was, as mentioned in the Post, a former basketball star at Fordham University in the 1960s. After a year at Holy Cross then intensive coaching tutorials by Digger Phelps at both Fordham and Notre Dame, he landed the head job at Harvard, where he spent eight years improving the middling program. He was entirely uninvolved in the B.C. scandal beyond saying to me, “Sure, c’mon over, I’ll run some film for you, and we can play detective.” Or something like that.
He was lured back to the Bronx in 1985 by an offer to become his alma mater’s Athletic Director. He spent more than a quarter century as AD, during which time his and his wife’s three daughters came through and graduated from Fordham. Since 2012 Frank has been the university’s Associate Executive Director of Athletics/Associate Vice President of Student Affairs for Athletic Alumni Relations and External Affairs/Athletic Director Emeritus, which sounds like it was bestowed with oak-leaf clusters during a crossed-swords ceremony. Good things come to good guys and have long accrued with Frank. He retired from Fordham officially in 2022.
I learned this, too, about Frank, once we’d reconnected: He and his wife, Susan, raised those three daughters two towns north of me and Luci in Westchester Country. What happened was, we found this out and got on the horn (or whatever the phrase is for talking on your phone). I learned Frank was well and happy. Frank loves golf. One of his girls lives in Austin and is trying to lure her parents to Texas with the worm of year-round tee times. Generally speaking, Frank is as happy as a large smiling clam.
He does admit that, now and then down the years, he has reflected on the long-ago game at Boston Garden — so much of consequence happened in the aftermath, not least the public bow of Henry Hill and the putting away of Jimmy Burke.
B.C.-Harvard had tipped off with the Eagles a prohibitive point 12- to 13-point favorite but, with Kuhn & Co. doing their fakerooski thing on behalf of Hill and his gambler/mobster pal-o’s, won by only three. “During the game it stayed tight, and I thought I was doing a great job of coaching,” Frank says today with a rueful laugh. “Thanks, Bob, for bringing it up.”
Not that you care, but Frank and I are going to have a coffee, maybe lunch and an early-bird dinner, do some further catching up.
I’d suggest golf but sounds like Frank is a little too good for me.
Maybe we’ll take in a basketball game. A little side bet between old friends, loser buys dessert and coffee.
John Connolly
With Connolly we move from the B.C. point-shave case to players in the Roger Wheeler Murder case, beginning with this former FBI agent, who was designated by the Bureau to “handle” the notorious Whitey Bulger, with whom he, Connolly, reconnected at a coffee shop in Newton, Massachusetts, decades after he and Whitey had been childhood neighbors in a Boston housing project. (Whitey, ever the wag, nicknamed the adult Connolly “Zip” because they had once shared the same South Boston ZIP Code). Coffee in Newton (a Dunkin’s?) led to other things throughout Greater Boston. “Handling” meant Connolly would listen to Whitey as he squealed on his gangland brethren, but eventually the road went two ways with Connolly telling Whitey what the Bureau was up to next. Your classic double-dealing by a classic mole/rat/pick-your-turncoat-mammal-or-rodent. As said in the earlier Post about the Connolly case, it was he who was the lowlife that gave Whitey the heads-up that led to John Callahan’s murder and then Whitey flight from Boston as a fugitive — a life on the run that would last 16 years.
Connolly’s duplicity was found out as the Wheeler investigation developed. Connolly was prosecuted and convicted. Beginning in 2009, he rode a legal seesaw as his 40-year murder sentence for his part in Callahan’s death (tantamount to “life” at his advanced age) was endlessly appealed and reviewed. That penalty was affirmed, reversed, then reinstated by various judges and juries, one judge summing up poetically that the defendant had “crossed over to the dark side,” while one jury noted that Connolly hadn’t pulled the trigger and had in fact been on the Cape when the Callahan deed was done in Miami.
Finally, it seemed clear Connolly would die in jail. And yet here in our Pseudo-appendix, Connolly is listed as “At Liberty.” How possibly so?
Well, I would say that depends on how you define the term “at liberty.” He’s still alive, and not sleeping in a cell.
Connolly was released from a Florida state prison in 2021 when his mercy parole went uncontested even by Callahan’s widow and son. Connolly was said by his lawyers to be gravely ill, perhaps a year to live. He returned to Massachusetts.
It’s three years later now. He remains under “supervision” and this condition will last until 2047. That seems an unlikely circumstance even if his team was fibbing about what really ailed him. Connolly turns 84 on August 1.
Johnny Martorano
If it seems unlikely that Connolly, who figuratively dodged many bullets during his schizoid career, who made many enemies on both sides of his personal DMZ, is breathing fresh air in Massachusetts today, it might seem even more so that the case is roughly the same with Martorano, who in his lifetime personally executed 19 people (among them fellow gangsters, men, women, teens, crumbums, innocents, one corporate chieftain on a golf course, one Boston accountant in a Caddy in Miami), while eluding the Reaper himself. Nicks and scrapes, cuts and bruises — a few scars, is all.
The native of Somerville, a Boston suburb that is the empirical home of our famous Winter Hill neighborhood, is 83 years old now and has been at liberty since 2007 when he finished a sentence of 12 years. That curiously mild length of incarceration was granted in exchange for Martorano’s quick and useful help in investigations, then prosecutions, of Johnny’s former running mates Whitey, Steve and others.
It was, as we know, Johnny Martorano who did kill both Wheeler and Callahan. He was the principal gunman, “the hitman,” assisted in the Tulsa job by yet another Winter Hill associate, Joe McDonald.
Mac deserves a brief word, his own short paragraph. He, too, had been of Somerville — born there back in 1917. A decorated World War II veteran, McDonald had been one of the founding members of the notorious Somerville-based gang in the postwar years, along with Buddy McLean, Howie Winter and a few other Italian or Irish lads. The Mac Link leads me to a bizarre curiosity that I, once an Eastern Massachusetts lad myself, just this moment noticed: The Wheeler killing, which took place way out in dusty Oklahoma, and which had roots and, later, ramifications not only back home in Boston but in Connecticut and Florida — meanwhile making news nationwide and eventually landing Johnny Martorano, of all unlikely “Villens” (as Somervillians are vividly known in the region), a full segment chatting with Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes, can be otherwise seen as the story a Beantowner-made-good from Reading getting gunned down by two standard-order bums from five miles down the road. How about that? As with so much else here, this seems just a plagiarized Higgins, Parker or Lehane plot. You wonder if the feds called in Spenser and Hawk for some freelancing.
Martorano not only murdered Callahan, native of Medford, as well as Wheeler, of Reading, in his long and vile career, but 17 others. On one job in 1968, working with a .38 caliber snub-nosed revolver, he got the guy he was after in a parked car on Normandy Street in Dorchester, but also killed the 19-year-old woman and 17-year-old-boy who were the guy’s passengers.
It’s of no consolation to anyone and garners little sympathy in any corner, but “the Executioner,” as he was nicknamed by his colleagues, told Kroft of his merciless life-taking life, “I never enjoyed it.”
BEHIND BARS
Steve “the Rifleman” Flemmi
He’s still alive, which, as with both of his former associates Connolly and Martorano, is really saying something. Two-faced informants like Flemmi, or neck-saving flippers like Connolly and Martorano, when they end up in stir, sometimes don’t last long in a neighborhood where the grown-up kids I n adjoining cells were raised on a steady diet of Omerta (see: Whitey’s fate, just below).
Yet tucked away somewhere in the federal penitentiary system, the Rifleman is still ticking if not kicking at 89. So we are told.
Nine decades ago, little Stephen was born in Massachusetts to an Italian immigrant family and raised in a tenement in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. Serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he was awarded both the Bronze and Silver Stars. (Surprising tidbit: Flemmi got his nickname for marksmanship during that Asian war, not during Boston’s gang wars of the 1960s into the ’70s, in which conflict he also hit his targets.) Steve was honorably discharged from military service in 1955 and returned home to thrive and become famous in his career as a Boston hoodlum.
In the mid-1960s, Whitey Bulger had been released after nine years in prison for robbing banks. In his liberation, he was tabbed by the Winter Hill high command to be the gang’s agent in South Boston. Bulger had palled around with Flemmi in the past and greatly respected the Rifleman’s talents. He deputized Steve help him in Southie. When Whitey eventually ascended to the leadership of entire Winter Hill operation, Flemmi rose alongside.
All this time, the two of them were killing people (Flemmi’s death toll would settle at 14). They were also well-known as an evil two-man partnership in drugging and then raping underage girls. They were not well known, even to one another, for their independent sidelines as valued FBI sources. Eventually, and particularly with the Wheeler Murder case, they would turn on one another. They were both put away for life. Cooperation can only mitigate so much.
Since Flemmi’s is still dealing with life somewhere in America — dealing with it in a standing, breathing way — you could say that, between these two turncoats, he won.
IN THE GRAVEYARD
Whitey Bulger
A majority of the six individuals entombed in this section were involved in the Wheeler murder case, not the B.C. point-shave. There are reasons for this. Many in the basketball dramas cast of characters were young athletes or coaches in 1981, and although they are senior citizens now, they’re not dead yet — mobsters Hill and Burke being exceptions.
No one in the Wheeler Murder case was a fit athletes in their prime at the time of the crime’s commission, they were older, and they weren’t playing games. Exceptions among them in still being alive today — the elderly Connolly, Martorano and Flemmi — are in their mid- to late-80s. In and out of prisons, they have eluded the Reaper somehow, while their former associates have gone dust-to-dust. The Gangster Lifestyle, even in its supposedly safe harbor in the gated community called prison, might trim years from anyone’s life expectancy, and that truism delivers us conveniently to the most famous name in our Graveyard, that of James Joseph (“Jim,” “Jimmy,” “Whitey”) Bulger Jr.
Of him, we already know much.
We know he grew up near Connolly. We know the outlines of his rise to the head of the Winter Hill gang. We know why and how he got involved in jai alai, thereby Roger Wheeler. We know of the unraveling (for Whitey) of the Wheeler Murder’s aftermath, which led to Connolly suggesting Whitey get outta town, a tip leading to Whitey’s dark-of-night flight from Boston and a 16-year global manhunt. And, immediately above, we’ve sketched the association with his sidekick through much of that action, Steve Flemmi.
We’ll pick up with Whitey’s ultimate arrest and move on to his death.
Having been tipped by Connolly that Callahan was about to rat on him as well as Flemmi and Martorano, Whitey fled in 1994. He later said he did not use disguises or always stay indoors, but that he did travel about. He was a shifty and shadowy target, but at times he was exposed. (One confirmed sighting during his fugitive years was in London.)
It is now known that, beginning as early as 1996, he and his much-younger girlfriend and traveling companion, a former dental hygienist from Quincy named Catherine Greig, rented, under aliases, a top-floor condo in a 24-unit building three blocks from the beach in Santa Monica, California. In June 2011, one of Bulger and Grieg’s neighbors, a former Miss Iceland (which, I realize, has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but irresistibly adds a colorful true fact) called in a tip. Bulger and Grief were seized by a troop of agents from the Whitey Bulger Task Force and our ex-Miss Iceland was award the FBI’s promised $2 million bounty. While we’re talking money: More than $800,000 in cash and jewels, as well as more than 30 guns, were discovered behind the apartment’s walls.
Whitey was of course sentenced to life while Greig, unrepentant, got nine years for harboring a fugitive, the last of which she served in home confinement in 2019. At that point she was 68 and reportedly living in the well-to-do South Shore town of Hingham in a house owned by the daughter and son-in-law of Whitey’s kid brother, William, who, in the bizarre Shakespearian nature of the Bulger family saga, was the former head of the Massachusetts State Senate as well as Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts. (Another non-essential fact I just noticed and cannot restrain myself from sharing: In 2015 the always fine Benedict Cumberbatch played both Billy Bulger, replete with a Southie Dunkin’ Donuts accent, opposite Johnny Depp in the film Black Mass, plus Hamlet on stage at the Barbican in London. The Bard smiles.)
For behavioral and health-related situations that arose between 2014 and his death four years later, Bulger was shuttled to various prisons west, east, north and south during his final period of incarceration. There remains deep suspicion about the decision-making behind his ultimate transfer, on October 29, 2018, from a lockup in Florida, where it was later said he had been creating disturbances, to USP Hazelton in West Virginia. It certainly seems, in retrospect, that Hazelton inmates Fotios “Freddy” Geas, a former Mafia hitman, and Paul G. “Pauly” DeCologero, a Massachusetts gangster, were aware of the famous man’s imminent arrival. They were quick about their work, and Whitey would not last one night at Hazelton.
Certainly, there were many people both inside and outside Hazelton — law-abiding, law-breaking, and law-enforcing citizens among them — who would have wanted Whitey summarily executed with great prejudice. The specifics of Geas and DeCologero’s personal grievance is something I do not know in any kind of detail, but perhaps we will learn more if anyone is inclined to tall us in the wake of plea deals filed only last week by the defendants.
(As the case comes to a close, what we do know: Geas and DeCologero had been facing a murder trial that had been set to begin in December; a third inmate, who was their lookout, also had been charged but not with murder. He also pled out last Monday. We also know that, during investigation, the prosecution had secured testimony of at least one witnessing inmate. The U.S. Attorney’s office already had said it would not seek the death penalty in this case, so Geas and DeCologero were aware that, even if they were convicted of murdering Whitey, they were only facing additional time — and Geas, for his part, is already serving life for other murder convictions.)
Still not divulged in the settlement was how Whitey’s assailants had so keenly targeted the gangster’s arrival in West Virginia and dispatched him with such immediacy. Observers who might care — and there certainly seems a lot of ambivalence on this in official quarters — are no doubt left frustrated. The Justice Department watchdog’s report did cite, as factors in the killing, multiple layers of management failures, widespread incompetence, and flawed policies at the Bureau of Prisons. But no one person in authority has been fingered. There remains a thick haze overall, and therefore plenty of room to speculate in a future Lehane thriller.
One certainty as the curtain is drawn on Whitey: As with so many crimes associated with his saga, the final deed itself was viciously done. It wasn’t just brutal, it was vicious, and designed to make a point.
Geas and DeCologero struck Bugler repeatedly about the head with homemade weaponry including a belt with a lock attached to it and another lock in a sock, primed for swinging. Meantime, they worked to gouge out Whitey’s piercing blue eyes with a shiv. Further details may well be forthcoming as the plea bargain calls for the murderers to recount their crime, a crime whose violent frenzy is already easy to picture when one considers that Whitey’s face was reported to unrecognizable as himself, or even as human.
As thoroughly bludgeoned as the victim was, it was certainly Whitey Bulger. Forensics could tell by the fingerprints, and anyone at all could tell by the old man’s wheelchair — empty now, but with no poignancy and scant sympathy attending.
Jimmy Burke
It was the rare mobster or gangster who entered the trade after a Leave It to Beaverchildhood, but even relative to this native New Yorker James Burke had a rough go. He was sent to the first in a series of foster homes at age two. Beatings and sexual abuse started nearly as early. There were, finally, literally dozens of foster parents during his boyhood, including a man who died in an auto accident that had been caused when he was arguing in the car with 13-year-old Jimmy.
In the 1950s, Jimmy was adopted, so to speak, by the Lucchese crime family and learned the methods of mobstering. He was built for it both physically and spiritually. He was impulsive; he was ruthless and remorseless. He was think-skinned and hair-trigger. One example: In 1962, he wed, but when he heard that his wife was still being harassed by an ex-boyfriend, that young man’s remains were found strewn throughout his car.
As we already know, Jimmy the Gent was the mastermind behind the massive Lufthansa heist. His clean-up job after the successful robbery illustrates, more graphically than even the dramatic deed itself (and far more veritably than De Niro’s charismatic portrayal of Burke, rechristened as Jimmy the Gent Conway for GoodFellas) exactly what kind of man we’re dealing with here. In his planning stages for the operation, Burke had assembled a team of six robbers and two drivers. But when the surprising (to Burke no less than others) magnitude of the haul sent the law into an investigative frenzy, Burke managed to off several of his players, who had become potential turncoats, one by one.
His concern that a colleague might point the finger at him is coated with a deep, and deeply righteous, layer of irony. While the murder spree worked as hoped with the Lufthansa case, there was this other little nuisance out there that still and might . . .
In the much-smaller-potatoes B.C. point-shaving operation, Burke had not had his confederate Henry Hill killed, and that softheartedness, which most probably was just neglect, proved Burke’s comeuppance or downfall, take your pick. Convicted during the B.C. trial in Brooklyn largely because of Hill’s testimony, Burke was sentenced to 12 years. While behind bars, he had an additional 20 years tacked on for a non-Lufthansa murder conviction, the jabbering Hill again ratting him out.
Burke was due for a parole hearing in 2004 but didn’t make the date. He had died eight years in advance, at age 64, of cancer.
John Callahan
In this entry and the next I’ll highlight just a couple of things — amorphous things, speculations, un-fact-findable things —that have not yet been mentioned. We have said much that is reasonably specific about both Callahan and Hill already in dealing with the former’s role in the Roger Wheeler Murder Case and the latter’s in the B.C. Point-shave. Now, I’m hoping it’s a little interesting to know something about who Callahan and Hill were, actually were, when they were not being just plain criminals.
In the case of Callahan, each of us can perhaps contemplate without any satisfactory answer why a person like him, who seemed for so long to be traveling one of life’s smoother roads, might veer to the gutter and, quite willingly, get involved in the gangland assassination of a well-respected businessman. As for Henry Hill: He became a bona fide American celebrity, an especially weird species of Dangerous but Comic Figure who was trying to sell himself to the audience as engaging if not exactly lovable. Once he was unfettered from the mob and then exiled from the government’s protection program, he behaved quite oppositely to, say, Rick Kuhn or Ernie Cobb. Reticence and decorum continued to mean nothing to him; he showed no evidence of reform. He didn’t attempt to better himself and thereby render his life meaningful, as Cobb has, and he sure didn’t shy from the limelight like Kuhn decorously has. Henry flew to the light quicker than Norm Macdonald’s moth.
I know, I know, I know what you’re thinking: Sports Illustrated did business with the crumbum even before others did. Yes, we did, and we enriched the undeserving mug by 10 grand.
We can debate the ethics of that some other time, but here, let’s not bother with the messengers; let’s stick with Henry Hill. What was up with that guy? Why was the SI audience — and Pileggi’s audience, and Scorsese’s and Howard Stern’s — so eager to buy Henry Hill’s act? It could not have been the man’s irresistible charm. Ray Liotta had charm. But Henry himself? Not so much.
Callahan first; this was his entry.
He was born in the nice Boston suburb of Medford in 1937 and did what smart, ambitious young men from Medford did: He dutifully went to good schools and eventually obtained a business degree from, of all places, Boston College — future host campus to Kuhn, Cobb, Davis, Hill, Burke et al. I’d be tempted to put some kind of philosophical/theological/Jesuit spin on that if we weren’t dealing with violent crime in these cases, and my comment would be rightly taken as a bad joke. Let’s just say Pope Francis, himself the first Jesuit pontiff ever, would, if presented the coincidence, reel.
But anyway, local boy Callahan did well in all the apparent things. He stayed close to home after he married. After becoming a husband, he became a father. He built a successful career at well-respected Boston-based accounting firms, first Ernst & Ernst and then Arthur Anderson and Co. He was good at making and maintaining connections and clients. He consulted with the First National Bank of Boston. Specifically for our purposes here, he was pivotal in First National’s role in facilitating the sale of World Jai Alai Inc. to Roger Wheeler. That sale got a belatedly hard look when authorities began investigating the backstory after the Wheeler killing. That was far too late to have a good impact, and we can only surmise that, had the First National/Callahan/Jai alai/Wheeler deal been properly scrutinized by Florida’s para-mutuel regulators in real time, everything might have been different.
But to the point! Callahan never looked anything like a Winter Hill Gang associate. He looked like a suit.
Looks were deceiving. By the time of the Wheeler buy-in to the jai alai world, Callahan himself had officially come and gone as World Jal-Alai Inc.’s president, but as we know, he stuck around at the office, which is how Whitey and Steve wanted it. For them, Callahan was the vital cord, the connection from the machine to the outlet, a link that could not be allowed to fray.
As to what date precisely in the mid-to-late 1970s Callahan began consulting not just with such reputable folk as those of the First National Bank’s loan department but the nefarious ones in the Winter Hill gang, I do not know. But obviously, Callahan had grown up as a budding young buttoned-down comer from Medford and B.C. who nonetheless found the guys-with-gats reports of Boston’s gang wars, which he gobbled up in the Herald and Globe throughout the 1960s, not just exciting but enticing. And then . . .
Well, we know what happened — to Wheeler, and later to Callahan himself.
When, in 1982, Whitey Bulger grew fretful that Callahan was going to fink on him, he ordered the big guy killed, a task that fell to hitman Martorano as a companion piece to his Wheeler murder.
When, in 2013, Whitey, finally having been tried and convicted in Boston, was facing sentencing, Callahan’s son, Patrick, spoke emotionally to the court about how his father had been ripped from the fabric of their family, He himself had lost the possibility of a dad, he said, when Whitey sent Johnny to sever the connection.
“Life as I knew it forever changed,” Patrick testified on that dramatic November day. As he left the stand, he looked directly at Whitey, mere feet away at the defense table, and said, “You won’t even turn around and look at us. Coward.”
Unsaid in court, of course, was what John Callahan had been hiding his double-life even from his family. It was a life he had, for reasons of his own, been unable to resist, a life that lured him in ways the accounting trade never had or could. A life that got him killed.
Henry Hill
The late Ray Liotta, who was as talented as he was charming, should have won an Oscar in the role of Henry Hill. The same, perhaps minus the “charming,” could be argued for the man himself and his lively late-career star turn in Henry Hill: The Golden Years.
What a bold, dangerous performance his was! He sang (to a jury)! He danced (with his wife, right into the U.S. government’s Witness Protection Program, from which his bottomless flagrancy finally got him booted)! He even handled the comedy (alongside Howard Stern).
He was on his own in the wide, wide word, where any kind of sane reticence seemed impossible to him. He went at life with the same vigor he had gone at crime, at drugs, at women. He did not live to a ripe old age, but he didn’t get himself bumped off, either. Henry beat the system.
How’d he pull that off? Henry never made any effort to hide his act, even when delivered from the witness box, under any kind of bushel. How’d that not get him killed? He ratted but never reformed. How’d he get that to work for him?
It’s hard to say but wouldn’t have been impossible to predict. Scorsese and Pileggi, for example, surely knew the outlines of Henry’s sequel, and an astute moviegoer could’ve guessed the gist of what was to come — ongoing misbehavior, even brazen continuing criminality. The last scenes in GoodFellas, depict Liotta’s Hill, circa 1980-’81, as a frustrated rookie in the fed’s anonymity program. He turns to the camera and explains to us in the audience that his monochromatic suburban hideout is unbearable. He misses his mob life terribly. As the credits roll and we file out, we’re thinking: This ain’t over. We recall a teasing last line in a movie that had been jam-packed with two hours and 26 minutes of great lines.
LIOTTA/HILL: I’m getting’s a little itchy — I miss the action.
So, yes, the real-life Henry was predestined for a boisterous retirement, and he seemed to know it and be eager to give it a go.
The first thing required for his endgame was addition by subtraction. Somehow, he had to shuck his men-in-black babysitters In the U.S. Marshal’s Witness Protection Program. This took him seven years to accomplish — seven long years of being a horrible family man to Karen and their two children, and an even worse guest of their hosts in federal government.
He and his wife Karen (a cracking Lorraine Bracco in GoodFellas), whom he had wed in 1965 and who had already put up with a surfeit of extramarital escapades as well as Henry’s unaddressed drug addiction, drug trafficking and even worse crimes and misdemeanors, entered the U.S. Marshall’s Witness Protection Program in 1980 and were situated, then resituated, in Washington State, Ohio, Nebraska, Montana and Kentucky. It’s not that they were by nature nomadic or that the guidelines of the feds’ hide-a-rat program insisted on a peripatetic life, but that Henry kept getting himself into trouble. The Hills (or the Whichever-New-Alias-They Had Adopted; they would work through several; Henry at one point posed as “Martin Lewis” in homage to his favorite nightclub act from the old days) might have seemed a picture of familial bliss to their ever-fresh neighbors, the picture was a gloss. Henry stayed crazy; it has been reported by I-Cannot-Say-“Red Check” sources, for instance, that he’d tried (but failed) to convince the FBI to allow him to take two lovers into Witness Protection as family adjuncts. He seemed bent on replicating his old life at every turn. That life, minus firearms, continually manifested in his incognito world: He drank, he drugged, he even carried on a pusher, and was caught selling more than once. He made only the faintest show of prudence. Henry sometimes went out in public in a hat and shades, as or, as he reported later, a proto-Halloween get-up “to go to the track.” As borne out by the family’s many relocations, he did get caught being stupidly bad, once for flagrant inebriation leading to freeform urination. Such incidents necessitated Karen’s next packing of bags.
Get this for impudence! In Washington State, he had met a woman with whom he shared a hot affair that quickly led to hush-hush matrimony. Karen of course hadn’t been told that Henry was adding bigamy to his catalog of sins. Before the K&H Hills’ divorce was finalized a few years further on, Henry would cheat on both his wives simultaneously. That newest woman would become his final wife — final as far as I care to know or research any further. An observer might have said that Henry’s life was a mess. Henry would have begged to differ. He liked the action.
Even before he was dumped by the Witness Protection Program as too much of a bother in 1987, Henry felt himself in relatively safe circumstances, no matter how egregiously he ran amok. Most of his old mates — the really dangerous people in his life — were either travelling underground or dead underground or, thanks in large part to him, under sturdy lock and key.
I think I do know, now that I look at the dates and hearken to that day 43 years ago in Manhattan, that Henry was in the Northwest when I chatted with him from that midtown conference room, the lawyer with the shoulder holster monitoring. This would fit, timing-wise. I do also vaguely recall my friend with the gun saying something like “calling from out there” or alluding to “in the Northwest.” Washington was the beginning and end of the trail for Henry’s migratory family in several ways.
As said, the feds had finally had enough of Henry blowing his cover and in 1987 kicked him out of the program. Kathy had finally had enough, after yeoman efforts of loyalty, of Henry’s no-good ways, and filed for that divorce. The last straw for all parties seems to have been Henry’s second — second! — bust for selling heroin illegally in Seattle while purportedly under strict government supervision.
In a way, being expelled from Witness Protection left Henry fully unbound, unleashed. He dipped his toe into American Celebrityhood and found the water warm and welcoming. He had first waded into this alluring lake with urging from Sports Illustrated and then Nick Pileggi (who was glancingly introduced to us in a much earlier “Death-of-SI”-series Substack Post; Nick was my Irish golfing pal and colleague Sarah Ballard’s first husband, and the “Pileggi” referred to a few paragraphs north). Nick’s 1985 book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family put Henry back in the news, you might even say “on the map”; Mario Puzo of Godfather fame called Nick’s account “fascinating,” and it spent 10 weeks on the Times Bestsellers list.
Henry, no longer being harangued by his handlers after ’87, was hardly reluctant to trade on the book and, subsequently, the 1990 Scorsese flick fashioned from it. He even got around to an Entertainment Weekly photo shoot with his celluloid doppelganger, Liotta, who in a quiet moment offered him friendly advice: Get off the smack; check into rehab. Henry did try that — something of a novelty — and also started eating better, which of course led him to try a parlay by co-authoring a fast-food book, The Wise Guy Cookbook: My Favorite Recipes from My Life as a Goodfella to Cooking on the Run. Pileggi contributed the foreword. There was no blurb from Puzo this time, but as of this very moment the book is not only still in print but has a 4.7 out of 5 rating on Amazon, based on 504 reviews. Julia Child’s The French Chef Cookbook is currently rated 4.5. The Apocalypse is underway.
Henry took to the talk shows. He really hit it off with Geraldo and became a semi-regular on the Stern’s radio show. Henry no longer had to phone in from a secret site with an armed lawyer chaperoning.
He was a free man when he died of heart disease in a Los Angeles hospital on June 12, 2012. He and his girlfriend of six years, Lisa Caserta, co-founder of Goodfellas Art and Entertainment, had been living in Southern California for some time, and she was with him when he passed away. “He went out pretty peacefully,” she said, “for a goodfella.”
The moral to Henry Hill’s story?
You may see one, but I don’t.
Even “God Bless America!” doesn’t seem to work with this one.
H. Paul Rico
These next two will be shorter because neither is as significant to us as the Hill, Burke, Bulger or Connolly tales, and neither would be as much fun to overwrite as Henry’s. These final notes on Rico and then Paul Vario, the former involved in the Wheeler case and the latter in the B.C. point-shaving, will constitute what is called, in a dramatic play, “descending” or “declining” action. Such devices arrive after the play’s climax, and Paul Rico begins this coda.
Rico might seem to you, as his story is synopsized, an older, funhouse-mirror image of Connolly. Starting at the conclusion and stressing the main difference between his story and Connolly’s: Rico’s culpability in the Wheeler and Callahan murders remains unproved as he died in custody in 2004, age 78, before coming to trial. So, I let off the hook. Sort of.
He was born in Boston in 1925 and like Connolly graduated from Boston College then joined the FBI. As a young agent in 1956 he recognized fugitive bank robber Whitey Bulger in a Revere bar and arrested him. In 1965 he had information that Vincent Flemmi had murdered a local gangster on orders from the Winter Hill Gang but kept his mouth shut as four men affiliated with the Providence-based Patriaca crime family were convicted of the crime. The ramifications of these two items should be clear: We know that, early in his career, Rico was well familiar with Whitey Bulger and the Flemmi family, and they were well familiar with him.
We’re already a mite confused about whether Rico’s straight or crooked. We do know Whitey and Steve became his informants as the Bureau, as they did Connolly’s when he was in the same office. But . . .
We also know that after Rico retired from the FBI in 1975 he was hired to work security at World Jai-Alai. Rico, some of you might remember, was the FBI/WJ-A guy we mentioned 43 years ago in our Sports Illustrated piece on Wheeler’s death. That tells me something. I must have been informed at the time that Rico was being looked at by investigators. In fact, it might have been mentioned to me by the FBI agent I talked with in Boston. (And in fact, that agent could have been Connolly himself.) What this means or at least implies: Since our report in SI was a news story done on deadline, Rico was being looked at very, very soon after Wheeler’s murder. You might well ask, “Why?”
These many years later, the dominant suspicion holds that Rico behaved much like Connolly later would: a federal agent suddenly a Friend of Whitey’s. In 2003, Rico was indicted for his part in both the Wheeler and Callahan murders. The formal allegation was that he, too, consulted with Whitey and Steve, and urged them to act, whether through Martorano or otherwise. But that remains just a suspicion since Rico died within a year.
Suspicions being only suspicions, the Internet of course harbors lots of alternative theories insisting that Rico was clean until his dying day. The theorist shout that Rico was railroaded by others with their own secrets that needed hiding. You can enjoy the theorists’ accounts as you please.
Paul Vario
In conclusion we revisit a briefly mentioned but crucial cog in the point-shave scheme, the Lucchese crime family’s potent Paul Vario, who was portrayed in GoodFellas by the redoubtable Paul Sorvino but had only a cameo in our earlier Post about the doings at B.C., and still must be considered only a bit player in our narrative.
Born in New York City in 1914, he got his first taste of the slammer at age 11 — age 11!— and progressed from such a precociously impressive start to become a caporegime with the Luccheses, their man in charge of Gambling and Extortion. He, like Burke, took Henry Hill, a crazy kid scrounging in the neighborhood, under his large, black wing.
Vario’s crew had been involved in New York-area airline extortionary enterprises before the Lufthansa heist. It is to be assumed that he as Mastermind Jimmy Burke’s immediate boss — the Sorvino to Burke’s De Niro — was in on the Lufthansa job, too, but again as with Burke, it would not be that stunning crime that finally put him away. Yet a third time “as with Burke,” Vario’s final incarceration would, nonetheless and indeed, stem from his association in all sorts of different escapades with Henry Hill, a subordinate both men were ill-advised to trust.
We know that Vario knew of Burke and Hill’s sideline activities with the B.C. point-shave and allowed them to have their sporting fun. Historically speaking, that allowance is Vario’s key contribution to the famous case.
It was not, however, the point-shaving that caught up with Vario in court; he was unindicted in the 1982 prosecution where Burke took his fall. Two years later, however, Vario was convicted in a separate case of defrauding the government. Hill was again the material witness against an old colleague. Vario got four years. While in prison, he was charged again: extortion in an earlier airport JFK Airport plot (not the Lufthansa). Hill, top-notch witness that he was proving and now firmly established as the Luccheses’ Bane, took the stand a third time. Vario was guilty again and had 10 years added to his sentence.
That proved more than plenty for the feds and too much for Paul. Age 73 —— 62 years after he had first been in lockup, therefore quite a gold-watch career — he died at the Fort Worth Federal Prison of respiratory failure linked to lung cancer. He was 73.
Epilogue
That’s that for those guys, and I’m glad to bid them farewell, excepting Frank McLaughlin, who I hope to see soon for lunch.
I’m not sorry to see them depart these Posts, but I do want to say “sorry” to you. I thought this edition in our Death of SI series was going to be short and sweet, a series of bullet-pointed updates. But once I started getting into the weeds with these guys, I was having a ball, as in days of olde in the Bullpen. Henry posed for EW with Liotta? Paul was sent to jail at 11?! Many if not all of us at the magazine said we preferred the reporting to the writing, if only because it was constantly exciting and almost always easier. (Dan Jenkins and a few others found the writing a breeze.) We would keep digging with the fact-finding of a project, claiming — not dishonestly — that we were “working on it.” In fact, what we were doing had the ancillary benefit of forestalling the tougher tasks ahead, the tightening of sentences, the killing of show-offy alliterations and fancy-pants formulations, the finding of the mots justes suffisamment.
I no longer have the old excuses for tarrying with the writing, and I apologize to any few who might have noticed that this Post has taken so long. No excuses at all. I, at home at 70, am quite like Henry Hill after he was liberated from Witness Protection. I no longer must answer to handlers: editors, copy editors, fact-checkers. I am allowed to be indulgently alliterative, as I forewarned many moons —many thousands of words — ago.
I found it to be true sport to be digging for facts, actual factual facts, again. I still do this occasionally in taking on the occasional magazine assignment, and the same old juices get flowing, and there’s that satisfactory feeling of looking at the clock and finding five hours, not one or two, have passed since last I looked up. It’s fun, like reading a good book, or watching a four-hour Scorsese mob movie (as he makes them these days; see: The Irishman).
I don’t really apologize here because that would carry the hubris of implying someone was waiting for this stuff. I guess I’m just saying . . .
And I’m tired of saying the next Post will be shorter because I now realize I can’t rely on the pledge, even if I think it constitutes a real commitment.
What I will say: Most of the prior Posts traveled to posting faster because their only source was my memory, not the printed records and interviews of others. I will be returning to that mode now.
Enough realism for a while. Back to impressionism.
See you later, if not sooner.