"How about a Fresca..Hmmmm,Hmmmmm"
Posted on 03/25/2007 7:41:27 AM PDT by raccoonradio
It was either Stevie Flemmi or John Martorano. There was one get-out-of-jail-free card left on the table and it was reserved for a serial killer.
So John Martorano walks, after doing 12 years for 20 murders and nobody is happy. But no matter how wrong Johnny Martorano’s deal seems, it could have been worse.
It could have been Stevie Flemmi who ratted out Martorano, rather than vice versa. The Rifleman might have grabbed the get-out-of-jail-free card. Stevie Flemmi, the pedophile who murdered his own stepdaughter, whom he began raping when she was 13. Stevie Flemmi, the drug dealer, frame artist, back-stabber, front-stabber, compulsive liar, you name it - as bad as Johnny Martorano is, Stevie Flemmi is worse.
The feds made a deal with the devil, but he was still the lesser of two evils. Stevie Flemmi was Whitey Bulger’s partner. What more do you need to know?
Except for Whitey, they all got arrested in 1995, and for more than two years Martorano dummied up. He’d been on the lam for 17 years, getting money from Boston and doing the occasional hit for Whitey and Stevie. He’d always been loyal to Stevie, once killed three people in a car in Roxbury, including two teenagers, just because the adult had gotten the best of Flemmi in a barroom brawl.
Martorano leaned into the car with his trusty .38 revolver and started firing. He worked so fast that when the cops arrived, no more than a couple of minutes later, he was long gone, but a cigarette was still burning in the dead fingers of the 19-year-old girl. (He’s apologized for the crime.)
Until 1997, Johnny Martorano kept his mouth shut. But then the feds released thousands of pages of Stevie Flemmi’s FBI files. Martorano was shocked by how his good friend Stevie had tried to do him in. As far back as 1966, Flemmi, a pimp and a drug dealer, was calling his pal Martorano a pimp and a drug dealer. He considered framing Johnny for the murder of a Mafia boss he himself was planning to whack.
In the H3 block at the Plymouth House of Correction, Martorano came to the realization that there was only one play. He went to see his co-defendant, Robert DeLuca.
“Robert,” he said, “I am going out that door before Stevie does. I am going to destroy him before he destroys me.”
So now he does walk out that door, at age 66. But his testimony assures that Stevie dies in prison, and maybe crooked FBI agent Zip Connolly, and perhaps, someday, even Whitey.
Right before Martorano’s sentencing, I got a call from a woman in Florida, the ex-wife of one of his (and Whitey’s and Stevie’s) victims. She asked me if her daughter could get a seat in the courtroom. In 1973, they had machine-gunned her ex-husband, himself a paroled killer, on their daughter’s 10th birthday.
He’d bought a birthday cake at Linda Mae’s and was heading to Southie to pick her up. Another hood in the car who survived wrote a letter to the judge describing what happened that day on Morrissey Boulevard. He mentioned how he suddenly heard shots being fired and thought it was target practice somewhere. Then he glanced over at the car that pulled had alongside and saw a guy with a machine gun.
“It was my good friend John Martorano,” he wrote. A few minutes later, the little girl was still looking out the window, waiting for her father. Instead, a Boston police car pulled up in front of her building.
By the time Whitey and Stevie got into strangling young women, Martorano was gone, on the lam in Boca Raton. He didn’t kill anybody after 1982.
But before that he had shot millionaires and stabbed guys who lived in flea-bag hotels and paid by the week. He killed Yale grads and ex-con boxers. He murdered witnesses and people who might have become witnesses and bartenders whose only mistake was driving the same model car as somebody else he was looking for.
And this morning John Martorano is a free man. But it could have been worse, really. It could have been Stevie Flemmi.
Howie Carr column ping
Where's Whitey???
I have a feeling his fellow on the lam girlfriend is probably not breathing oxygen anymore.
Wasn't he playing golf at the Bushwood Country Club not too long ago? "Hey Whitey, where's your hat?" (Caddyshack ping...)
"It's easy to grin When your ship comes in And you've got the stock market beat. But the man worthwhile, Is the man who can smile, When his shorts are too tight in the seat."
"How about a Fresca..Hmmmm,Hmmmmm"
Yup! And that of course is where Howie gets the Ted Knight laugh from, as Judge Smails makes a deal with Danny. There are some wav files from the movie online and one of them has the Fresca line but it cuts out before the Laugh!
There is this, though, with John Barmon--recently profiled
in the Herald, I believe, or was it the Globe: nowadays he's
a real estate agent in Cambridge but his one and only movie
role was Judge Smail's nephew (Grandson?), Spaulding.
(Barmon actually dated Nancy "Sandy" Shack for awhile...)
http://www.reelwavs.com/movies/sounds/caddyshack/iwant.wav
"I have a feeling his fellow on the lam girlfriend is probably not breathing oxygen anymore"
You mean to say "she won't be coming down for breakfast"? ;)
LOL, I thought of that 2 seconds after hitting the post button.
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