As it turned out, the bank had its own consulting relationship with John Callahan, and its loan provisions reflected that. Although Wheeler protested, the bank would put up the money only if he retained Callahan’s former business partner, Richard Donovan, as president of World Jai Alai. The other stipulation was that Wheeler keep former FBI agent Paul Rico as head of security.
With the rest of the deal too good to walk away from, Wheeler took the loan and bought the company. It was a coup for Callahan, for just two years before he had been discharged by the World Jai Alai board of directors for profligate spending and underworld ties with the likes of Brian Halloran and Johnny Martorano.
Although some of the handwriting about World Jai Alai was already on the wall, Wheeler was distracted by the opportunity to finally get a gambling business and dazzled by the $5 million profit a year, a healthy 16 percent of revenue. But behind the beguiling bottom line were some disturbing dossiers on Callahan and his longtime business partner.
Nevertheless, Wheeler thought he could have it all—gambling revenue and a clean skirt. He thought his business acumen could override the “shady characters.” Gradually, however, Wheeler had second thoughts about what he had gotten into. He became fearful, according to business associates. He took some ironic solace in the large retinue of former FBI agents who worked for World Jai Alai, including the redoubtable Paul Rico.
ABOUT a week after the meeting with Bulger, Halloran ran into Callahan at one of their watering holes and asked where things stood on Wheeler. Callahan was a little evasive and said they were still “working out the details”—as if they were pondering the fine points of a merger. Callahan changed the subject, and they bent their elbows.
A couple of weeks later Callahan called Halloran, asking him to stop by his North End apartment again. This time Callahan was waiting for him alone. He had a consolation prize for his friend, who didn’t make the hit squad. He handed Halloran a bag with $20,000 in cash—two stacks of hundred-dollar bills—and told him they had decided to take care of Wheeler without him. “Take the money,” Callahan said. “It’s best that [you] not get involved in the Wheeler deal.” Slapping him on the shoulder, Callahan said the group “should not have involved [you] to begin with.”
Halloran didn’t need much convincing to take the cash. He would not have to murder someone he didn’t know, and he had money for nothing. He viewed it as a professional courtesy from a big spender with money to burn. Halloran roared through the wad in a matter of days, spending it on furniture for his Quincy apartment, a blowout week in Fort Lauderdale, and a new car.
With Halloran on the sidelines, the Winter Hill hit team arrived in Tulsa three months later. On a bright spring afternoon Wheeler finished his weekly round of golf at an exclusive Tulsa country club and strolled from the locker room to the parking lot. Two men sat there waiting in a rented 1981 Pontiac with stolen license plates. They watched the dapper executive get into his Cadillac. Then one of the men, wearing sunglasses and a fake beard, walked briskly toward the car. He had one hand inside a brown paper bag and the determined look of a military commando on his face. As he approached the car door, the businessman looked straight at him. Johnny Martorano put the bag to the window and shot Wheeler once between the eyes with a long-barrel .38. He then walked just as briskly back to the tan sedan. The Pontiac peeled away as youngsters at a nearby swimming pool looked on and wondered what the noise was all about.
HALLORAN sensed he was standing at a Rubicon that ran through South Boston. His sour relationship with Bulger only complicated a deteriorating personal life. Cocaine consumption had become more important to him than cocaine sales. And he was alienated within the Winter Hill operation, hanging on to his job with Bulger’s sufferance. He had fit better with the older guys in Winter Hill—Howie Winter and Joe McDonald and Jimmy Sims, but those veterans were in jail or on the lam.
After the Wheeler murder, Halloran, as a survivor of Boston’s mean streets, was acutely aware that he and Callahan had been in on a murder plot with a ruthless executioner who didn’t like him. One morning in the fall of 1981 someone took a potshot at Halloran as he emptied his trash in front of his Quincy apartment. Notice had been served.
The unraveling of Brian Halloran continued on course a few weeks later, this time by his own hand. Dealing with some fallout from the drug trade, Halloran killed dealer George Pappas at close range inside a Chinese restaurant at four in the morning after they finished their meal. Halloran fired across the table while mafioso Jackie Salemme, Frank’s younger brother, looked on. It was just like the murder in the Godfather movie, with Michael Corleone dropping the gun on the table and running out the restaurant door to a waiting car that whisked him toward Sicily, an unlikely hero in his family. But the driver in this murder just took Halloran back home to Quincy, where his problems got worse. The Chinatown execution further alienated him from his peers, who saw him spinning out of control. The murder also meant trouble with the law.
After hiding out for a month, Halloran surrendered in November 1981 and then hit the street on bail, a frazzled coke addict facing first-degree murder charges that involved a Mafia soldier. He had made himself persona non grata with the Mafia and with Bulger—the worst place to be in Boston’s underworld. Halloran had become too much trouble for just about everybody. Bulger had the opening he was looking for.
In the fall of 1981 Connolly filed reports from Bulger and Flemmi that predicted trouble in Halloran’s future. Bulger told Connolly the Mafia wanted Halloran “hit in the head” to eliminate him as a false witness blaming Salemme for the murder. Two months later Flemmi piggybacked the Bulger report by saying that the Mafia was hiding Salemme until Halloran could be “taken out.” The tip was a page out of Stevie Flemmi’s original playbook. Flemmi had presaged problems for Boston bookie William Bennett back in 1968, presenting the information as a tidbit he had heard on the street. But Flemmi had already murdered Bennett, rolling his dead body out of a speeding car. It was a time-honored Flemmi deception to cover his tracks and send law enforcement off after someone else.
Halloran had a strategy too. In a no-man’s-land at the end of the line, it was time to trade up with law enforcement. He decided to strike a deal with the FBI, asking for their help in getting a reduced sentence for the Chinatown murder in exchange for his story about the party animal accountant, the Tulsa tycoon, and the killer from South Boston.