Animal (24 page)

Fitzgerald in hospital. Surgeons spent nearly six hours operating on Fitzgerald, whose right leg had to be amputated three inches below the knee.
Courtesy of Howie Carr, author of
Hitman.

12

The Mickey Mouse Club

Don’t fear the reaper

BLUE OYSTER CULT

In the fall of 1965, H. Paul Rico and the
FBI
had come to the realization that their ignoble experiment with Jimmy Flemmi had failed. The feds had decided they would happily turn a blind eye to Flemmi’s crimes as long as he did not get caught, but the Bear could not keep up his side of the bargain. Flemmi had recently become a fugitive after failing to show up for court after he was charged with shooting a man named John Cutliffe. Unlike most of Flemmi’s victims, Cutliffe had survived to tell the tale and could positively identify the shooter. “In view of the fact that informant Jimmy Flemmi is presently a local fugitive, any contacts with him might prove to be difficult and embarrassing,”
⁶³
Agent Rico stated in a memo to his superiors. “In view of the above, this case is being closed.” Two months later, the Boston
FBI
office sent a follow-up letter to Director Hoover letting him know that Jimmy’s brother Stevie Flemmi was being designated as a Top Echelon Informant who could provide them with valuable information about the Mafia’s growing allegiance with the McLaughlin Brothers Gang (or what was left of it). This purported alliance was of course far from the truth. Raymond Patriarca had long respected Buddy McLean and the Winter Hill Gang and had nothing but contempt for their Charlestown rivals, who were now led by Connie and Stevie Hughes. But Paul Rico hated the McLaughlins, and J. Edgar Hoover hated
La Cosa Nostra
. By creating an allusion that both sides were now working together, Rico believed that the
FBI
would provide him with additional resources to destroy the McLaughlins once and for all.

While Paul Rico was moving his chess pieces around to stack the board in his favor, Joe Barboza remained on the front lines of the war—looking to strike first and prevent his enemies from taking him down. Barboza was
now giving much more thought to his own personal safety. The sheer act of leaving his home had become a highly coordinated operation. He used a motorcade of three cars and communicated with members of his crew by two-way radio. Police detectives followed him every night, but the Animal soon found ways to shake their tail, especially on nights when he had to perform his blood work.

Barboza’s next target was a small-time hood and part-time bartender named Ray Distasio. Distasio worked for the McLaughlin Gang, and he had once helped Punchy McLaughlin hunt Buddy McLean before both were subsequently murdered. This was not the reason Distasio was now on Joe’s hit list, however. Joe was given the contract to kill Distasio because the mobster had borrowed $15,000 from the Office and had made little attempt to pay it back. “You’ll get your money when I have it,” Distasio defiantly told the Mafia. Barboza found out that Distasio lived in a small house behind a school in the suburb of Medford. The original plan was to ambush Distasio when he walked out of his house. Joe and two members of his crew showed up one morning and waited in the adjacent schoolyard for Distasio to show himself, but the marked man had given them the slip. Several hours later, at approximately 5:00 p.m., Barboza and his crew, which now included fugitive Jimmy Flemmi, arrived at the Mickey Mouse Lounge on Revere Beach Boulevard where Distasio was working as a bartender. Joe pulled his car up on the sidewalk in front of the bar and stepped out with Flemmi and two others. Joe had another member of his crew waiting in a car down the street—ready to block traffic in case the cops came. Barboza ordered one of his men to stand guard near the entrance with a carbine as he, Flemmi, and another man went inside. Joe flipped the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and covered his eyes with a pair of dark sunglasses. As they entered the lounge, Flemmi wrapped his arms around his wide frame and shook. “Brr … it’s cold,”
⁶⁴
he said, while keeping his head low. Distasio, who was standing on the dance floor, looked up and smiled. At that moment Barboza appeared from behind Flemmi holding a .38 pistol. Distasio looked up in horror and ran back toward the bar where his friend John O’Neil was standing. Barboza caught Distasio in midstride, cutting him down with one bullet.

“I don’t wanna die,” O’Neil screamed as he took off in the opposite direction
across the dance floor toward the front door at the far end of the bar. Barboza and Flemmi gave chase, pausing just long enough to pump a few more bullets into Distasio’s head. Joe had not planned on killing O’Neil, but he felt that he had no choice. The Animal closed the gap on the fleeing O’Neil and raised his pistol. Barboza tried to pull the trigger but the weapon jammed. He then pulled out a backup gun, an airweight snubnose .38, and shot O’Neil once in the arm. O’Neil screamed in pain, grabbed his arm, and stumbled forward. Barboza shot him again in the same arm. Badly wounded, O’Neil fell to the ground. The Animal stood over the man, pointed his weapon, and finished the job.

Barboza and Flemmi spilled out of the Mickey Mouse Lounge, jumped into their getaway car, and sped over the General Edwards Bridge spanning the Saugus River toward Lynn. Joe pulled into a shopping center and switched cars. He continued on toward the Charter House Motel and dumped the murder weapons in some nearby weeds.

When police arrived at the scene a short time later, they immediately ruled out robbery as a motive for the slayings. There was more than $100 that sat untouched in two cash registers, and the victims’ wallets had been undisturbed. Detectives found Distasio lying face down on the floor, while the body of his friend O’Neil was discovered two feet from the front door. Detectives surmised that the man had been trying to flee. They were right. Police also found bullet casings scattered on the floor and two slugs embedded in the wall. O’Neil had been shot three times, while Distasio had been shot at least five times; most of the bullets were lodged in his skull. “This was a professional job,” one police official told the
Boston Globe
. “Whoever killed these men knew exactly what he was doing.”
⁶⁵

Although he had yet to be charged with the murder, the
Boston Globe
implicated Barboza almost immediately. The day after the hit, the
Globe
published an article suggesting that “the Animal and his Beasties” had committed the crimes. The article also painted John O’Neil as a devoted father of five and innocent bystander who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was true that O’Neil had been murdered as a matter of circumstance. He may have been a bystander, but by no means was O’Neil innocent. In reality, O’Neil was a gunrunner who supplied weapons to Distasio to sell to other members of the McLaughlin Gang.
Barboza was outraged when he read the article, despite the fact that it was mostly accurate. Joe even threatened to sue the newspaper but was talked out of it by fellow mobster and friend Wimpy Bennett.

Detectives were also scrambling to figure out if the hits at the Mickey Mouse Lounge were connected to another gangland murder earlier that same day in Boston. In certain ways they were, as all the murders had involved Jimmy “the Bear” Flemmi. Stevie Flemmi had asked his friend and fellow mobster, twenty-four-year-old Johnny Martorano, to grant him a favor. The Rifleman had heard that two mob associates, Bobby Palladino and John Jackson, were planning to testify that Jimmy Flemmi had been involved in the murder of a woman, Margie Sylvester, the year before. The thirty-five-year-old blonde divorcee had been stabbed to death and her body rolled up in a rug and stashed above a bar called Luigi’s on Washington Street. Johnny Martorano’s brother had already been indicted as an accessory after the fact. Jimmy Martorano ran the bar and had replaced the rug used to entomb Sylvester’s body. Martorano was confident that his brother would not flip on the Bear, but the same could not be said for Palladino and Jackson.

Johnny Martorano found Palladino at a blackjack game on Blue Hill Avenue and asked him to take a ride in his green Cadillac El Dorado convertible. Palladino got in the passenger seat while Martorano slid into the backseat. A friend of Johnny’s was behind the wheel. Once the car began moving, Palladino panicked and drew his gun. He fired a wild shot at the driver and missed, instead blowing out the driver’s side window. Johnny Martorano whipped out his revolver, pressed it to the back of Palladino’s head, and fired. Johnny then ordered his friend to keep driving toward the North End, where they would dump the body. They pulled Palladino’s bloody remains from the Cadillac and left the corpse next to a steel girder outside the Boston Garden. Later Martorano tossed his own bloody clothes down a sewer and torched the car. The next morning a news photographer snapped a photo of Palladino’s body that later found its way onto the pages of
Life
magazine. The Palladino murder infuriated Mafia underboss Jerry Angiulo, not because he had any warm feelings for the gangster, but because the killers had dumped his body in the North End, just a few blocks from Angiulo’s headquarters. The Palladino murder was the first gangland hit of Johnny Martorano’s notorious career, which
would span three decades. During that time Martorano would kill nineteen more people for his friend Stevie Flemmi, for the Mafia, and for his future partner—James “Whitey” Bulger.

Joe Barboza would supply members of his own crew to help Johnny Martorano take care of the other witness in the Sylvester murder a year later. John Jackson, an African American, had been a part-time bartender at the lounge where Margie Sylvester was killed. Martorano and Barboza cohort Tommy DePrisco trailed Jackson to his girlfriend’s apartment on Queensbury Street in the shadow of Fenway Park. Martorano hid behind a fence and shot Jackson as he stepped out of his car. The murder weapon, a shotgun, had been purchased hours before with a phony license at Sears Roebuck.

The murders had been committed to protect the Bear, who also had other legal problems to worry about. Jimmy Flemmi had finally been captured hiding in a closet in an apartment in Brookline and put on trial for the shooting of John Cutliffe. Flemmi was found guilty of armed assault with intent to murder and was shipped off to Walpole State Prison. Flemmi was also being eyed in the recent shooting of a McLaughlin Gang member named Maxie Shackleford, who had been wounded in the right arm while sitting in a parked car. A witness came forward and told reporters that he had seen “bullets flying everywhere” and that the gun battle had lit up the sky like the Fourth of July. When pressed by police to give up the name of the man who had shot him, Shackleford stayed true to the code. He told detectives that it was a misty night and that he couldn’t see anything. The witness had no such problems, however. He had written down the license number of the getaway car, which matched an automobile owned by the Bear.