On the Bad-Guys Beat–4 (Blackest Whitey)
A companion Post to the last, this one too has organized crime, a Boston setting, then organized crime getting busted in Boston and beyond. Part 15 in our series on the demise of Sports Illustrated.
There’s a solid sporting adage that has more than a touch of truth to it, as most good adages do: If a horse could talk, every race would be fixed. I had heard that one even before I’d met Bill Nack or John Henry. Keep it in mind as we enter the weird world of jai alai.
Such a nifty adage . . .
So nifty, I considered it for use in that SI jai alai piece in the spring of 1981, right when SI was beginning to enjoy its foray into True Crime Investigation. But I pretty quickly decided against the quick-and-easy Mr. Ed jokes because the adage is, like many another adage, more than a bit flip, and the story was anything but flip, and wasn’t even about horses or horse-racing. You might say it was about golf, since it started with an incident at a golf course, but it more about that weird Spanish pastime, jai alai — which does share horse racing’s pari-mutuel heart and features athletes who really can talk, albeit in Basque.
Hmmm.
At the end of the day, and despite the fact that “SPORTS” Illustrated ran the story, I don’t even think it was about sport.
It was about money. It was about mobsters. It was about murder.
As to that short paragraph there: Please pardon me If I sometime get Chandler-riffy in this Post with three- and four-word sentences. Consider it an homage to Our Master of All Things Murderous. I’m just amusing myself. The good thing about that, from my perspective, is: So much time has passed, and so many bad guys are good and dead or in supermax-security accommodations, I think I can finally approach this tale with some humor. I’ll go light on pastiche, alliterative similes and Bogart asides (except maybe in a second), but if there’s a gat joke at hand, I may go for it. “My Whitey Story” is not yet, for me, a yarn, much less a lark. But it is no longer sleep-depriving.
The phone rings.
Late Monday. I was heading out. Runyons. The phone rings. It’s Callahan. I’d been chasing him. He’d been unresponsive. Not peculiarly unresponsive, considering. But unresponsive. He says, essentially . . . On that Monday night, he says: “You’ve been calling.” I say, essentially, yeah. He says he has no comment. Fine. I’d expected “no comment.” He says, “Take my name out of your story.” He maybe says “outta,” not “out of.” Outta isn’t happening. Outta’s impossible. Losing that name, not happening. He says something like, “You know what can happen.” I get his gist. Nothing more to say. I’m scared witless. Shitless. Sure I am.
We go to press. I head for Runyons. Saloon. It’s a saloon, East 50th. Pass St. Pat’s on the way. It’s a church. Cathedral. Drop in. Say a novena. Light a votive. A buck in the slot.
Now, in a Chandler or a TCM noir, such a throw forward as that — it’s not exactly in media res or foreshadowing, but it’s related; I don’t know what it’s called — such a coming-attraction as that would be followed by a dissolve to the actual beginning of the story: a flickering-candle fade-out at St. Pat’s, a fade in to a cubicle in the SI Bullpen.
Let’s look at this as the real, somewhat focused lede to this Post:
I was in the office on a Thursday in the spring of 1981, enjoying my workweek’s first cup of coffee and beginning to read one of the three — free! — morning papers that each staffer at Sports Illustrated was delivered each morning. I must have started with the Timesbecause the Post or News wouldn’t have had this story. I must have started in the National section because Sports wouldn’t have had this story, not that early in anyone’s reporting of this story. Sports might have chased the jai alai angle at the Times later, but perhaps not, too. Sports might well have left the Wheeler Murder Story to National or Business because the story, in short and certainly at its inception, was, “Business Titan Slain in Oklahoma.”
This fellow named Roger Wheeler had been offed, to use the colorful underworld parlance, in the parking lot of a golf course in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’d been shot through the head at close range. That first Times account I read on Thursday might not have had that detail yet — the close range; bullet through the eye — but Wheeler had indeed been killed in what is called “gangland” or “execution” style.
This seemed very strange, so I read a little more. It was a certifiably weird story throughout. The industrialist, CEO of Telex, was a Massachusetts native — from Reading — so I was interested in that and kept reading. He was a self-made man. He was a success in all ways. He was respected in his community and by his business associates. He and his family had lived in Oklahoma for years, where he had headquartered Telex. Apparently, he was a midweek golfer, or he certainly had been this week. When he . . .
Played his last round . . .
Signed his card . . .
Anyway: golf. Hmmm.
A year and a half in with SI, I was a Reporter and had taken on the assignment of working with Senior Editor Jerry Kirshenbaum on the Scorecard section. I was always on the lookout for something to add to our weekly mix or perhaps be assigned to try at some greater length.
Golf? Might be for us? Golf’s a sort of sport.
At a reasonably early point in the evolving morning, I was in Jerry’s office and we were talking about that week’s possibilities. I mentioned the Wheeler thing to Jerry. He encouraged me to look into it a bit more. I suppose we were both wondering if Wheeler was some kind of superstar two-handicap Senior Class Country Club All-star Golfer — maybe a former Massachusetts State Champ at Reading High, a former Local Legend. We could hang a Scorecard item on that.
In the pre-Google epoch we were slithering through in 1981, I read what reports either I or Eleanor’s news-service office could put our actual hands on. I read the Wall Street Journal’s and Boston Globe’s news stories from Tulsa, plus, after checking the Roger Wheeler folder out of the Time magazine morgue (I must have beat Time’s Business reporter to the punch), random stories about the man, including a longish business magazine profile.
It turned out the murder might have had something to do with sports after all. But not golf. Jai alai, of all crazy shit. What the hell is jai alai?
Oh? That’s a sport, too? Sorta?
To move things along here. I’ll quote from the piece we eventually ran, which we threw together over the next five days, during which I dashed up to Connecticut and then Boston and back to New York, talking to a European-native jai alai expert and a too-friendly FBI agent at stops along the way, sharing a meal with old friends in Massachusetts, meantime transcribing notes and scribbling sentences like a lit dervish whenever time allowed. It really was exciting and fun.
Anyway, from SI:
“The gangland-style slaying on May 27 at a Tulsa country club of Roger M. Wheeler, chairman of Telex Corp. and the largely absentee owner of Miami-based World Jai-Alai Inc., has prompted Connecticut authorities to announce the reconvening of a grand jury to look into possible links between jai alai and organized crime. Whether or not Wheeler's murder had anything to do with jai alai — last week law-enforcement officials were leaning toward the view that it did — the prospect of a closer look at jai alai's possible mob ties is welcome.
“Certainly it didn't require Wheeler's murder to determine that World Jai-Alai, which operates four frontons in Florida and ran one in Hartford, Conn. until three months ago, has had at least indirect links to organized-crime figures. Those connections conceivably may have been strong enough for the Florida and Connecticut gaming commissions to deny or revoke pari-mutuel licenses. Yet the commissions took a see-no-evil approach to jai alai, a sport that, perhaps not incidentally, produces considerable tax revenue for both states.
“Specifically, the commissions seemed untroubled by the shadow that John B. Callahan, who was World Jai-Alai's president from December 1974 to March 1976, continued to cast after his departure from the company. A 275-pound accountant and Boston-based business consultant, Callahan . . .”
These years later, I feel bad about the dig at Callahan’s physique, but I had learned his corpulence somewhere along the way and it seemed to add color to the piece, maybe make the whole caper a little more . . . I don’t know . . . a little . . . Well, hey, I was envisioning the Fat Man, Sydney Greenstreet, all a-sweat and swatting those flies in The Maltese Falcon.
To introduce others in the real-world cast:
Wheeler, yes, had owned a jai alai fronton in Florida, and Callahan was a businessman and mobster wannabe from Beantown, an accountant by trade. The mob in his Eastern Massachusetts neck of the woods famously meant, among scattered other things such as the remnants of Raymond Patriaca’s formidable Providence family, Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang, named for a neighborhood in the just-north-of-Boston suburb of Somerville. Buddy McLean, Howie Winter and others were legends of Winter Hill, too, but for our purposes we have Whitey, who ran the gang beginning in 1979 after Winter went away for fixing horse races. We also care about Whitey’s associate, friend and cutthroat enforcer, Stephen “Rifleman” Flemmi. And then there’s a Boston-area hit man named Johnny Martorano, well known to Whitey and the Rifleman. He’ll also figure as an important player, although the name Martorano meant nothing to me or rival reporters in the days immediately after Wheeler’s assassination.
The owners of World Jai-Alai Inc. prior to Wheeler had installed Callahan as boss simply because, A), once Whitey Bulger had infiltrated something, as he had World Jai-Alai, he could be influential in all personnel matters, and, B), because Whitey knew how profitable jai alai could be, and how wonderfully crooked it had always been by nature, he chose to get involved but at arm’s length, and he wanted to retain Callahan. Jai alai’s profile in America was about the same as that of a Vegas casino, even below that of a dog track, so that was Whitey’s kind of game, but best if Whitey was an semi-absentee executive.
Before we return to the plotting that wound up with Wheeler and several others dead (and Whitey on the lam), let’s look at jai alai.
While soccer is “the beautiful game” and fast-breaking NBA basketball is a contender for the title, jai alai, too, can be seen as lovely. I’m going to lean on journalist Eric Nusbaum and quote from his always terrific “Sports Stories” weekly newsletter, which is published as a neighboring series here in this borough called Subtstack. During Eric’s career he has written on sports and other matters in myriad places and is the author of the acclaimed Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between. He has followed the Wheeler story as a fan in the stands, and I commend his “Sports Stories” Post about it, marvelously entitled, “The Palace of Screams”. An excerpt: “The sport looks a little bit like racquetball, but played on a bigger, more open court — and instead of rackets, players carry big, curved baskets called cestas that they use both to catch the ball and to hurl it back at the wall at speeds upward of 150 miles per hour. It is fast, dangerous, and tremendously entertaining.
“The first jai alai fronton in the United States (the fronton is technically the playing field, but the term is also used to describe the venue itself) was built for the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. But by then, jai alai had already caught on in Cuba. The Havana fronton was known as El Palacio de los Gritos, or The House of Screams.
“The name probably tells you all you need to know about the action of jai alai. But the other important thing to know is that for all the grace and athleticism you might see in jai alai, the sport’s primary purpose in America is to serve as a platform for gambling. Jai alai isn’t organized like traditional winner and loser sports. Matches (usually doubles) involve eight teams rotating in and out as points are won and lost. Each match ends with the teams in a ranked order. Bets are placed as they would be on horse races in a pari-mutuel style. You can pick not just a winner, but a second, third, or fourth place finisher.
“As jai alai grew more popular, the state of Florida loosened up gambling laws in order to make betting on it more accessible. Florida law also held that pari-mutuel betting sites like jai alai frontons were allowed to run casinos — making them even more lucrative for business owners and even more popular for fans. What had begun as a traditional Basque sport had over decades evolved into an institution that embodied the speed, glamour, and excess of Miami in the 1970s.”
And by the end of the ’70s, World Jai-Alai Inc. was based in Miami, ran four frontons in Florida and three in Connecticut, and was owned by Wheeler. How and why Wheeler bought the company is interesting because it shows just what a viperous pit World Jai-Alai already was, and how Callahan was connected to so many of the snakes. This, from our SI account on the Wheeler murder, helps us understand:
“Callahan was ousted [technically ousted, in 1976, two years before the sale to Wheeler] after it was learned that police in Boston had given Connecticut authorities information concerning alleged ties between mobsters and Callahan, a potential source of embarrassment to World Jai-Alai.” Callahan’s successor was a man he — Callahan himself — had brought into the company, a pal from the Boston area who had been a colleague in the accounting firm in which Callahan had worked. World Jai-Alai's board had seen enough and “soon began seeking a purchaser for the company . . . Callahan made overtures to buy, but the board apparently concluded that not even the notably lax Florida and Connecticut commissions would license him. Another prospective buyer, Jack B. Cooper, was also rejected; he was a convicted felon and a known associate of mobster Meyer Lansky. Cooper later testified he had been introduced to World Jai-Alai's management by Paul Rico, a former Boston FBI man who had been hired by Callahan as World Jai-Alai's security chief.” Cooper, by the way, had earlier hired Callahan as a financial consultant. Everyone knew everyone, and each had season’s tickets on the Boston-Miami air routes.
“Yet another suitor with mob ties, the Bally Manufacturing Company, which makes slot machines, was nixed by the board,” we reported. World Jai-Alai let it be known it sought a ‘very wealthy, totally independent’ buyer. Enter Wheeler, the head of Telex, a Tulsa-based manufacturer of computer and electronic gear.
“Described by friends as a churchgoing man who found gambling personally abhorrent, Wheeler nevertheless had become attracted to legalized gambling for investment purposes. After dickering in vain to acquire racetracks, a slot-machine business from Bally and a Las Vegas casino, Wheeler decided to buy World Jai-Alai . . . Investigators engaged by the Florida Pari-Mutuel Division to look into the proposed sale of World Jai-Alai adjudged Wheeler's ‘moral character’ to be acceptable.”
If Wheeler realized he was buying into a concern where big John Callahan and thuggish Whitey Bulger had active ongoing interests, where associates of Callahan’s were officially running the show and in charge of “security,” where graft, fixes and embezzlement constituted a revenue stream that the bad guys did not want disturbed — if Wheeler knew all that going in, then a heartless observer might say Wheeler knew what he was doing and got what he deserved. I happen to accept all these years later that Wheeler became a useful-enough pawn in someone else’s game for a short while, and then that pawn tried to move one space forward and was eliminated because he was getting in the way.
To what extent were the bad guys in control, even after Wheeler became owner? The bad guys were so in control there was a stipulation in the sale’s loan agreement that if Callahan’s successor — who, let us remember, Callahan himself had picked — ever resigned or was removed as W J-A Inc. President, then Callahan was to be approached for possible re-appointment.
Investigators weren’t happy that Callahan kept popping up as he “had been linked by law-enforcement sources to a Boston-area organized-crime faction headed by Howard Winter,” we wrote, “who was convicted in 1979 on racketeering and bribery charges largely on the testimony of master horse-race fixer Tony Ciulla. Nevertheless, the Florida agency approved the sale of World Jai-Alai to Wheeler in June 1978.”
Reminder: Howard Winter’s “organized crime faction” was the so-called Winter Hill Gang, now run by Whitey Bulger; Bulger had taken over when Howie Winter got sent upriver in ’79. At the risk of boring you further with reiteration, here’s a checklist of three other key details, because this can appear a real thicket:
— Callahan “left” World Jai-Alai in 1976 but never really left because the Boston gangsters wanted him involved.
— Callahan’s former accounting-company associate is technically in charge of World Jai-Alai.
— World Jai-Alai’s chief of security is a former Boston FBI agent, Paul Rico, who knew all about the Winter Hill Gang when working for the Bureau and probably knows about their ongoing jai alia sideline now that he’s working for Roger Wheeler’s World Jai-Alai.
I wasn’t sure at first why World Jai-Alai Inc. had expanded to Connecticut during its growth spurt, but it had. Perhaps this was simply because the Connecticut Commission on Special Revenue, having rebranded itself as the Gaming Policy Board, was, according to our eventual wording, “long considered a dumping ground for political hacks.” But anyway, I went to Jerry’s office that Thursday afternoon and said, “The story’s not in Tulsa, it’s in Boston, maybe Connecticut. People in those places may talk. It’s not about golf, it’s about jai alai. Wheeler owned a jai alai outfit in Miami, but they’re not talking. The Boston mob is involved, and everyone’s scared. A crucial guy who used to be there, at the jai alai company, is now back in Boston, I think — he’s a guy named Callahan. I’ve got a call in to him through his lawyer. Anyway, Wheeler’s jai alai link might’ve got him killed.”
“Can you go up to Boston?”
“Sure! If someone else checks the rest of Scorecard, I guess.”
That was arranged, and I arranged a car-rental with the great Ralph, who would remain My Good Friend in the Travel Department for the four decades of my Time Inc. career.
Everything happened very fast once I hit the highway. My travel started Thursday p.m. and we needed something in writing by Sunday morning if we were going to have a piece this week.
I remember the Hartford part of the trip vaguely, and the Boston visit a bit better since I stopped by the FBI headquarters (not as casually as that makes it sound; I did have an appointment). I sent Jerry quotes and paragraphs from the road, and he started assembling things. He’s a wonderful editor; I would say most of the writing in this piece was his. I was back in the office by Saturday p.m. I learned at that point — or maybe I’d been told while up in New England — that Sandy Padwe was attached to our effort too. So, we now had me, Legal (Mary, probably with Harry and Robin upstairs getting involved as things heated up) and two Senior Editors who both knew their way around an investigation: Time Inc. in Team Mode. This was all very adrenaline inducing. It was exhilarating. It was a gas.
I had left messages with different folks in Callahan’s camp in Boston and surprisingly enough heard back from an FBI agent who would talk with me on Friday morning. I did want to see a jai alai fronton, wondering if there might be color or quotes found at one. On the way north, right after the interchange of 84 and 91 in Hartford, I exited 91, and in a minute or two, located the stadium in the North Meadows section of the city. Although World Jai-Alai Inc. had recently ceased its Hartford operation, the shutdown was so fresh there were still folks working. Ghostly atmosphere in the stadium.
A woman in the lobby directed me to a man (down the hall there, then a right) who would have the best answers for me, perhaps.
He hadn’t been aware of any criminality, or so he said. On another matter, however, he could not have been more helpful. Everything he gave me was off-the-record because everyone was walking in the Third Man shadow cast by the Wheeler murder, but everything he said helped me understand his sadness.
He was originally from the Basque Country in Spain (still had the accent) and had played pelota and jai alai since boyhood. He always loved his sport and became expert at it, eventually turning pro. He was never involved in the gambling aspects of the game once it, and he, emigrated to America. He said many of his proud countrymen behaved in like fashion. But, yes, he acknowledged, it was easy to fix a jai alai match (there’s the horses-who-can-talk adage), and he conceded that jai alai has never been able to, or particularly willing to, cleanse its grimy image. Yes, he conceded further, the game’s reputation did nothing but attract a criminal element like bees to honey, and these insects, once inside the operation, could exercise other money-making skills beyond match-fixing — extortion, embezzlement, all manner of graft.
The man said he was heartbroken about all that had happened, and was continuing to happen, with his beloved sport. He said the scandals and a general fall from grace for a devoted player from the Basque Country like himself was akin to an American finding out that baseball was rotten. I did not suggest that this was a discussion for another day.
I got back on I-84 North. I stayed that night with my friends Jake and Annie in Andover rather than at a hotel. I chose a social visit to take some edge off. We had a nice dinner. Next morning, I was up early and prepped for my audience with the FBI. There were still no messages on my phone in Manhattan from Callahan’s people. I left them further prods from my friends’ phone in Andover. I found I had, somewhere in the rush, split the seat of my pants. I borrowed a pair of Jake’s slacks rather than show up at the FBI looking like a clown. These things happen, and these are the things you remember.
What I don’t remember is much about the FBI meeting. I recall that the office wasn’t big, but it was bustling. Everyone knew who I was supposed to talk with. It was quickly clear to me that this fellow had said “yes” to my interview request because he was a huge sports fan and this was his chance to talk with Sports Illustrated. It was also clear to me that he knew a lot about what was going on and wasn’t going to give me much. The crumbs he did drop were on background, or not-for-attribution, or off-the-record. He wasn’t going to talk about Paul Rico’s tenure in the Bureau’s Boston office before moving to World Jai-Alai, even on deepest background. He did talk, almost jocularly, about Whitey Bulger, and the now-spreading (but unproved) speculation that Whitey and the Winter Hill gang had had something to do with the killing in Tulsa. I sensed he knew they were all connected. This bolstered my confidence when writing aspects of the story or when convincing Jerry and Sandy that a particular assertion was “okay to go with.”
Another thing about the FBI guy . . .
I felt he was hitting me with the ol’ misdirection play. I no longer have my notes, but I certainly have wondered down the years if I’d been talking to Connolly, who had been provided to me as the obvious local expert on Winter Hill matters. Had my phone call referencing the Wheeler murder instantly been forwarded to Connolly?
Who is “Connolly”?
John Connolly was the field office’s “handler” of both Bulger and Steve Flemmi when they were ratting out their criminal confederates for several years. Connolly himself would be sentenced to life as an FBI turncoat for helping the Winter Hill gang as it negotiated its Roger Wheeler and then John Callahan problems. More on Connolly soon.
I returned to New York and spent many waking and sleeping hours on Saturday through till Monday evening working on the piece with Sandy and Jerry. I shared with them a thought. “It’s funny, when you’re out there, you sometimes know or sense that The Sporting News or another sports reporter is chasing the same story,” I said. “This time, up in Boston, I could tell we were going against the Times’s news-side guys, or their Business section. And The Wall Street Journal was hot on this thing, too. Funny. Not the usual competition.”
We nailed down our story with SI Legal, then cleared it upstairs with Time Inc. Legal. We closed on Monday, as late in the day as possible.
We wound down our piece this way: “No sooner was Wheeler's purchase of World Jai-Alai consummated than he found himself in a business attracting more than its share of unfavorable attention. A grand jury in Connecticut, the one now being reconvened, looked into allegations of corruption at Hartford and the state's two other frontons, an investigation that led to the conviction of seven people for fixing games. There also were charges that former fronton employees had provided inside information to a network of gamblers suspected of having organized-crime ties. . . . Wheeler, who had been described as having had ‘moral apprehensions’ about getting into jai alai, now was said to be contemplating getting out. Last March he sold the Hartford fronton to L. Stanley Berenson, a jai alai entrepreneur who had feuded with Callahan and Donovan and who had reportedly complained to the FBI that World Jai-Alai was infiltrated by mob elements. If the sale to Berenson was calculated to ruffle feathers, so was Wheeler's recent firing of 11 World Jai-Alai employees. Maybe none of this had anything to do with his murder, just as it may have been an unrelated development last Friday when somebody fired several bullets into the Miami building housing the Florida pari-mutuel division's offices. Still, this much was certain about Wheeler's last few months: Suddenly the absentee owner was making his presence very much felt.
“Last week Callahan's lawyer quoted him as denying ‘any involvement whatsoever with organized crime.’ ”
That’s the best I could do for anything on the record from Callahan’s camp. As for summing up Wheeler and his untimely death, what I had learned was that if he did try to sell his Florida frontons as he had his Hartford branch — sold them so very soon after having bought them — then even Florida regulators were bound to ask lots of questions, and Whitey and Flemmi didn’t want any questions, never mind lots. So, there’s your motive. The gangsters would kill Wheeler and then his scared-shitless heirs would keep things as they profitably were.
That was the thinking — that was Whitey’s thinking — and I knew, more or less for sure, that it was. But we could only imply it in the magazine, and we never named him at that stage, just talked about Boston’s gangland interest. We didn’t have enough corroboration yet to write my Whitey theory as fact.
Years later it would all come out in court thanks in part to the vivid testimony of Johnny Martorano, who by then, with his own active part in 20 murders pretty much proven, had turned state’s evidence in exchange for a lighter sentence. He fingered Whitey and Steve, and he clearly knew whereof he spoke. Whitey had suggested that the Rifleman carry out the hit on Wheeler himself, but finally they decided to add a cushion by hiring freelance assassin Martorano. Johnny described his actions after Wheeler had finished playing golf and was heading from the locker-room to the parking lot at the Southern Hills C.C. on that theretofore fine May day: “I saw a guy coming over the hill carrying a brief case. It looked like him. He was heading toward that car. So, I head toward that car. He opened the door and got in. So, I opened the door and shot him. Between the eyes.”
Martorano said he was ratting out his old pals from Boston because they had broken the code themselves by working with the FBI all those years. “It sort of broke my heart.”
(You felt the guy’s pain.)
(That’s meant to be read sarcastically.)
As for Whitey’s association with another breed of ratfink, namely Connolly of the FBI, let me say: It was Connolly, not us at SI, who sealed Callahan’s fate. Connolly was a dyed-in-the-wool Beantowner, as much so as Whitey. In fact, he’d been raised in the same Old Harbor Housing Project on O’Callaghan Way as the Bulger boys. At age eight Johnny met next-door Jimmy (who, when older, would become “Whitey,” a nickname bestowed by the police after his hair-color; Whitey always hated being called Whitey). John lost touch until falling in with Jim, businesswise, some three decades later. To his FBI bosses, Connolly was Whitey’s handler; to Whitey, Connolly was his friendly mole. It was Connolly who told Whitey that Callahan was being pressured by the feds about the Wheeler killing and that Callahan was poised to flip. Such treachery would be terrible news for Whitey and Steve. That tip was part of what subsequently got Connolly himself convicted of murder, and it was the whole Wheeler mess that prompted Connolly to warn Whitey that he should ixnay Boston soonest. Whitey did so, and would spend 16 years on the lam, some of that spent tied with Osama bin Laden atop the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Whitey and his girlfriend were nabbed in Santa Monica, California, in 2011. (Note: In my next Post I hope to provide updates on what has happened with the major players in this drama as well as those involved in the Boston College point-shaving case, which we looked at just earlier.)
Back to the summer of 1982: Connolly tells Whitey and Steve than Callahan’s caving, and again there is the thought that Steve might execute the hit. It’s again decided to create distance by calling upon Martorano, who later brings tears to the eyes of all with his testimony: “I objected. Callahan was a friend of mine. I had just killed a man for him, risked my life. I didn't want to kill Callahan. Eventually, they convinced me. It was two against one and it was three of us. And I finally agreed, ‘It has got to be done. It has to be done.’ ”
I need a paragraph here to say something. Just me to just you.
As my family and friends know, I’m boringly predictable in my predilections, and a loyalist to a fault. Among the things I love, I love Boston. I love my memories of Jordan Marsh’s Enchanted Village at Christmas, and the sundaes at Bailey’s on the pewter dishes after a Sox game in summer with my siblings, Dad and Mom. I loved Julia Child and still love the many Julia Child movies and docs, not just the one with Streep. I loved the Pats before they won, and I love all the other teams. I love Jayson and Jaylen and Kristaps (who doesn’t?), but right now I’m loving Derrick White to a surprising degree. [I wrote that before last night’s transcendence.]
This gets weird. Luci, whom I love most of all, is from up there as well, and when she and I were dating in New York City in the early 1980s, we never saw the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, yet each year subscribed to the Boston Symphony’s season at Carnegie Hall, concerts under the baton of Seiji Ozawa. I loved Seiji Ozawa, who was born in Japanese-occupied Shenyang, China, and died in Tokyo but was “of Boston.” For contrapuntal reasons, I always bragged on Leonard Bernstein of the NY Phil because he’d been born in Lawrence, 10 miles from my Massachusetts hometown, and spent so much time at his spread out near Tanglewood (see Maestro). I loved the Cars, loved Aerosmith (kinda), loved Boston (the band) as much as I could and, these days, love the Dropkicks. I loved “Dirty Water” even though the Standells were an L.A. band. I love Thoreau, Hawthorne, Kerouac, poets Phillis Wheatly and Emily Dickinson, plus the fact that Melville wrote Moby-Dick while living in the Berkshires and Frederick Douglass worked on his memoirs while in New Bedford. You get it.
I have tried, nonetheless, to remain clear-eyed, and have found that it’s surprising not hard. As a boy, I thought it was terrible what our fans and writers did to Teddy Ballgame. I’m conflicted on the Kennedys, and I’ve known a few of them, including Bobby Jr., who I used to get along with but cannot wait to vote against. Having grown up on the editorial slant of The Boston Globe, which I love and used to deliver in Chelmsford out of a canvas sack, I of course hate Boston’s racism as it has manifested itself down the decades — during busing, during Bill Russell’s career, during the very recent past. Only two years ago, Massachusetts was ranked second of 50 in white nationalist propaganda activity by the Anti-Defamation League.
Now, I’m sure that while James Bulger was on the run, building his legend with every absent day, there were folks back home who loved their Whitey. They imaged him as some kind of swaggering Johnny Depp/Jack Nicholson/Sean Penn antihero. They loved the Whitey and Billy Bulger Shakespearean plotline. Those folks who now cherish their memories of Whitey possess shit for brains and a black hole where any semblance of a conscience should be.
I love Dennis Lehane because he writes such great Boston novels (I loved Robert B. Parker, too), but I really love Dennis Lehane for the scumbag Whitey character who was fucking over his own people in Lehane’s recent masterwork Small Mercies.
Here's what I wanted to say in this paragraph that is now six paragraphs: When Jerry Kirshenbaum asked me if I wanted to go up to Boston and report the jai alai story I immediately said “Sure!” The thought in my head was, “a Boston story!” I felt just like I felt when working the point-shaving scheme (which of course was engineered by rotten out-of-towners); when doing anything down the years for the Globe, or Boston, or Yankee, or the late, lamented New England Monthly; when asked by Jim Kelly at Time if I wanted to go up to Boston and do a page on Pedro Martinez; when . . .
But this one. This one.
As I calmed down and got into the guts of it, sussing the bottomless broken-heartedness (not to mention terror) suffered by the Wheeler family and even the tangible sadness of that pelota-loving Basque guy in Hartford, and then I thought about all the others black-hearted Whitey had killed so casually, and then thought about how he and Flemmi and Connolly didn’t give one shit about any of that, and . . .
Well, you get it.
Where were we?
We had, in fact, got to our exit ramp.
Back in 1981, we had gone full-Chandler with our SI kicker: “When Wheeler had first bought into jail alai only a few years earlier, he’d ‘expressed the opinion at the time that the sport was ‘clean as a hound's tooth,’ adding, ‘I've staked my reputation and money on it.’ He said nothing about staking his life on it.”
With that, we were closed. I went to my office and started to sort and order my mass of messy notes and pages of handwritten paragraphs, saving every scrap to fill the folders that were to rest in peace in our morgue. My cubicle door was open. Someone entered quietly. I felt hands on my shoulders.
Padwe, as rabid a dog as any editor but equally as sweet a man, had come down the hall (I’d smelled his pipe smoke; I had deduced my visitor’s identity without turning, like Spenser would in a Parker). Padwe gave me a short back rub and said nicely done.
Padwe leaves. I pack up my notes. I’m heading for Runyons. Steve’ll be there. Craig. Maybe B.A. Lisa. Could be Brooks. J.P. I don’t know. We meet there Mondays, sometimes. The phone rings. It’s Callahan. He’s called to get his name taken out. Not happening.
He figures I’m young. He figures I’m scared. He threatens my life. I respond, basically, ‘So you don’t want to respond on the record? Or do you? Or “No comment”?’ He says he’s not gonna comment, and I should take his name out or I might wind up dead. That’s it for conversation. I’m done with Callahan. Click.
Take breath. Stand up slowly. I go down, report what happened to Sandy. He calls Legal upstairs. That’s that.
Runyons, then — just down from St. Pat’s. I’ll come in tomorrow. When I wake up. Send my notes to the morgue tomorrow. Right now, a novena and a chaser.
Just shy of a year later, Callahan was found dead in the trunk of a Caddy in the parking lot at Miami International. (Martorano and his parking lots!) Annie in Andover called me at the office and gave the news, which was big news up in Massachusetts. I had never before and have never since been glad to hear that a man or woman was dead.
You failed to mention that Southern Hills has hosted 3 US Open and 5 PGA Championships.
Plus Dan Jenkin's Stages of Drunkenness at Runyon's.
I could read you all day Sully. While I grew up in the south suburbs of Dayton, Ohio my love of the Cincinnati Reds brought me to Boston in October 1975 for the sixth and seventh games of the World Series at Fenway. It was the continuation of an unfolding story that eventually brought me to Boston to live in early 1977. The city was electric to a 24 year old from Dayton. Our office was in Somerville. I spent time at a gentleman’s club in Revere. I dined in the North End. I avoided the Combat Zone. My buddy Duke Edgeworth explained the facts of Boston mob life to me when he was pick-pocketed by a streetwalker in the Zone. Though I rarely came close to any direct contact with any mobsters, I had the good sense to show respect when in certain locales. I still root for the Red Sox especially against the Yanks. My fond memories of the Back Bay days are flooding back. I love your city and love this series. Thanks my friend.