Hitman by Howie Carr

above a deli on Blue Hill Avenue. They asked Palladino to step outside, and he shrugged and walked out onto the sidewalk. Palladino had been drinking, but was cooperative until Johnny told him he’d been “hearing stories.” Finally, though, they reached the street and got into the Cadillac, Palladino very warily. Johnny’s friend was driving, and Palladino sat next to him in the front seat, with Johnny in the back—the first of many times over the next seventeen years that Johnny would end up in the hitman’s seat.
    â€œLet’s go for a ride,” Johnny said. As his friend pulled the Caddy out into traffic, heading back downtown, Palladino panicked and pulled out a revolver and fired at Johnny’s friend. He missed, instead blasting out the front window on the driver’s side. Johnny drew his revolver and fired at Palladino’s head from point-blank range. One shot was all it took.
    Johnny Martorano, age twenty-four, was a murderer.
    At first it didn’t sink in what he’d done. The body of a guy he knew well was slumped in the front seat, dead, and Johnny had killed him. Now he had to get rid of the gun, figure out what to do with the blood-soaked Cadillac, and, most important, get rid of Palladino’s corpse. He had neither the time nor the inclination to ruminate over what he had done. All Johnny and his friend could think about was how to avoid getting caught and sent to prison for the rest of their lives. Johnny’s friend kept driving north on Blue Hill Avenue toward downtown, and they began a calm discussion of where they should dump Palladino’s body.
    They quickly decided the best place would be down by the North Station. Nobody was ever around down there at this time of night.
    *   *   *
    THEY DRAGGED Palladino’s body out of the car and propped it up against one of the stanchions under the Central Artery, but the corpse fell over onto the pavement. Early that morning a Herald photographer got a grainy shot of the corpse from up above on the highway, with a Boston police car and a detective nearby. It was a perfect picture that Life magazine used in 1967 as the lead illustration of its four-page spread about the carnage in the Boston underworld.

    Bobby Palladino’s body was dumped at North Station.
    It was almost dawn when Johnny got the Cadillac to the Inter-City Garage on Mass Ave in the South End. Waiting for him was another of his new friends—George Kaufman, a skilled mechanic and gang associate. Kaufman chopped up the Caddy, the first of many favors he would do for Johnny over the years.

    George Kaufman chopped up the Cadillac that had been used in the Palladino hit.
    The murder itself led the Boston papers’ evening editions, but Palladino’s death was quickly relegated to the back pages a few hours later when Joe Barboza and Jimmy the Bear committed one of their most atrocious crimes. They’d been looking for one of the McLaughlin Gang’s few Italian members, and had decided to take him out on a slow weeknight at the Revere Beach club where he tended bar—the Mickey Mouse Lounge. But when Barboza and Flemmi walked in, a construction worker was buying cigarettes at the bar. He was a young father of four from New Hampshire who’d been planning to move back to the White Mountains. Barboza and the Bear didn’t care—they shot the McLaughlin gangster first, then the construction worker as he begged for his life.
    For the next few days, the papers were full of pictures of the construction worker’s attractive young widow and her four adorable children. As angry editorials were written demanding an end to the underworld carnage, everybody forgot about Bobby Palladino. Everybody except In Town—specifically Jerry Angiulo. The murder might have left the police “baffled,” as the papers always put it, but Angiulo wasn’t. The next day, Johnny got the message that he and his