Hitman by Howie Carr Page B

both an auto mechanic and an electrician. Despite the fact that Salemme was half-Irish—his middle name was Patrick—like Barboza he dreamed of someday being inducted into La Cosa Nostra. Because of his taste in automobiles, everyone called Salemme “Cadillac Frank.”
    When Rico declared war on the McLaughlins, he swore that if he ever got the right opportunity—that is, no witnesses—he would shoot Punchy or anyone else from Charlestown in cold blood. He regarded them all as his “archenemies,” as Salemme put it. They had called him a fag.
    Rico often spent his weekday afternoons at Suffolk Downs in East Boston. One day his official FBI vehicle was sideswiped in the horse track’s parking lot. There was no way Rico could explain such an accident to his superiors. So he called Salemme, and Kaufman sent over a tow truck. They brought the fed’s car back to the garage, where they worked all night completing the repair job so that Rico could drive the car to work in the morning as if nothing had happened.

    An early mug shot of Francis Patrick Salemme, aka Cadillac Frank.
    The Roxbury gang’s charge to its FBI friend: nothing.
    Rico, of course, returned whatever favors he could. Back in the 1950s, as a young agent, he’d been involved in breaking up an interstate bank-robbing gang that had included a young career criminal from Southie named Jimmy Bulger, as well as Ronnie Dermody, a hard-luck Cambridge hood whose father had died in prison, and whose brother soon would.
    By 1964, everyone in Whitey Bulger’s old gang was finishing their federal sentences, and Dermody got out first. He quickly fell for the wife of yet another member of the old gang. During her husband’s prison sentence, this woman had taken up with another local hoodlum.
    Head over heels in love, Dermody bumped into some of the McLaughlins. He told them how much he’d like to be rid of his new girlfriend’s ex-beau, who was now himself serving a state prison sentence. The McLaughlins quickly suggested a deal: if Dermody, who wasn’t known on Winter Hill, could get close enough to Buddy McLean to shoot him, then one of the several McLaughlin Gang members serving state time would eliminate Dermody’s rival for the affections of the well-traveled moll.

    Ronnie Dermody made a fatal mistake—he trusted H. Paul Rico.
    Dermody instantly accepted the offer, but the problem was that he had no idea what Buddy looked like. Still, Dermody gamely drove over to Winter Hill, quickly spotted a wiry blond guy walking down Broadway, and opened fire. It wasn’t Buddy, and Dermody only wounded his mistaken target. Worse, as he fled, Dermody was identified, not by cops but by people connected to Buddy McLean, which in Somerville was almost everyone. Soon Winter Hill gunmen were tracking Dermody in Cambridge.
    Dermody was frantic. He didn’t know who to call for help, so he finally turned to the one cop he figured had to be straight, the guy who had once arrested him—Rico of the FBI. Rico, who lived in Belmont, gave Dermody directions to a secluded street on the Watertown-Belmont line. He told Dermody he’d meet him there, just after dark. Rico’s final instructions to him: Come alone, unarmed. And don’t tell anyone where you’re going.
    Then Rico called McLean. He told him that the guy who’d just tried to shoot him would be waiting there, by himself, in a car. Then he asked Buddy if he needed a lift to Watertown. An hour or so later, Dermody was shot to death in his car. Nobody in the neighborhood could identify the shooter, or the car he’d been in. It had been too dark.
    The next morning, all the newspapers carried ominous front-page headlines. The gang war, confined so long to the city and its grittier neighborhoods, had finally spread to the suburbs. Yet Rico did not file a report. Buddy McLean, meanwhile, vanished until the heat died down. His hideout was the