INDEED there was. Only doing Ferrara meant taking a pass on the bookies in the line at Mike London’s cashier window who were being extorted by Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi. London once told Chico Krantz, the premier bookmaker with a long-term deal with Bulger, to “shop Italian.” “Stevie can’t hold [Vinny’s] jockstrap. Vinny will work for ya . . . a collection agency, personal protection. Stevie don’t do nothin. This guy here will go to bat for you.” In another Mike London speech, a bookie nicknamed “Beechi” got the sad facts of life: pay Ferrara or “the other guys are gonna get your name . . . Stevie and Whitey.” But nobody in federal law enforcement seemed excited about the evidence implicating Bulger and Flemmi.
After O’Sullivan culled Vinny out of the tapes, the boxes of checks collected dust. Several prosecutors had taken one look at the evidence room and kept on going. No one wanted to wrestle a messy paper case to the ground to convict a Chelsea tavern owner. Joe Saccardo finally prevailed on a young eager prosecutor named Michael Kendall to take a look.
If the storage room was overflowing, the quality of the seized evidence was remarkable. Kendall had the patience to assemble the paper and prepare a chart showing how $200 million in gambling losses and loan-shark payments got turned into cash. Two years later London was convicted of money laundering and racketeering and sentenced to fifteen years.
CHICO KRANTZ was only a footnote in the London indictment, but Saccardo began to lobby for a second wave of prosecutions out of Heller’s Café—all the bookies who were paying rent. He didn’t know what the crimes should be, but he began to wonder if something in the mix could be used against Bulger. Kendall begged off, however, citing his caseload.
Then one of those mundane but magical things happened. Kendall recalled that Fred Wyshak had done a similar check-cashing case and went to talk to him about Chico Krantz. As luck would have it, Chico was just coming into focus out of a separate broad-based bookie investigation by state police in the Special Services Unit headed by Sergeant Tom Foley. The state police had set out to find bookies who dealt with Whitey Bulger, and as in Heller’s Café, Chico was at the head of the line.
Suddenly Chico, the whiz kid of betting lines, was overlapping himself as the perfect witness against Whitey Bulger. He had been paying tribute to the insular Bulger for nearly twenty years. He was one of the first to know about the new system of monthly rent payments when Bulger explained it to him in 1979. He was threatened with death by Bulger when he dragged his feet on paying a debt to another bookie. And his long history of payments to Bulger measured the expansion of Whitey’s empire. Over the years Chico’s monthly rent had climbed from $750 to $3,000.
Chico’s undoing began just about the time Mike London was indicted in 1990. State police targeted a bookie network with Mafia ties. Fat Vinny Roberto and his brothers handled daily action from thirty-five bettors who wagered up to $500,000 a week. But the big payoff from the Roberto investigation was the discovery that Krantz was his everyday boss, even setting the Roberto brothers’ work hours. Best of all, undercover state police followed Roberto to Chico’s suburban home, where he dropped off a package. A search warrant got them inside Krantz’s home, where they found keys to bank deposit boxes that were filled with $2 million in cash.
After Krantz was arrested on gaming charges in 1991 at the state police barracks outside Boston, he sought out Sergeant Foley. How come the police went to my house this time? Krantz asked.
Foley shrugged.
Where’s this thing going?
Foley shrugged again.
About a week later, with Krantz out on bail, Foley met with the master bookie at his Florida home, and they talked for two days about bookmakers and the Bulger gang. Krantz didn’t give up too much, talking in general terms about Flemmi, George Kaufman, and Joe Yerardi. But Krantz did agreed to be a “CI,” or a confidential informant.
With an ambivalent Krantz waiting in the wings, prosecutors and state police began to chase down leads from the Heller’s Café tapes and the related Middlesex County case that started with Fat Vinny Roberto. Wyshak soon focused on four check-cashing operations in greater Boston, including Heller’s. The investigators collated boxes of checks, much as Kendall had done in the London prosecution, isolating and tallying rafts of checks that exceeded the $10,000 limit that have to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.
Now the pressure on Krantz went up a notch. The state dropped the gaming charges against him in 1992 and turned the evidence over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In September, Foley told Krantz that he and his wife, who cashed checks for Chico while he was sick, were going to be indicted for money laundering. Foley even showed him draft copies of indictments. Chico sighed and asked to sleep on it.
The next day Krantz got a new lawyer and finally stopped playing games. He graduated from CI status to the witness protection program. He filled in holes in his earlier statements and finally talked about Whitey Bulger and his one-way loyalty.
In November, Chico and seven other bookies from Heller’s Café were indicted for money laundering in a massive check-cashing scheme. About the same time that London was sentenced in 1993, Chico Krantz slipped into another federal courtroom under tight security and pled guilty. He formally forfeited his $2 million in cash, with a wink and a nod on half of it that the government agreed to give back if he cooperated. And he admitted guilt on washing $2 million in checks, much of it at Heller’s. He also became number one on the witness list in the developing case against Bulger and Flemmi.
Jimmy Katz, who had also washed big money through Heller’s, found himself mired in the quicksand between Fred Wyshak and Stevie Flemmi. Just before Katz went to trial, Flemmi met him at a hamburger joint in downtown Boston. Flemmi offered him the parable of Eddie Lewis, another bookie in the Chico camp. Lewis had refused to give immunized testimony to a grand jury about rent and had gone off to do eighteen months for contempt. Stevie then got to the point: if Katz went off quietly to jail like stand-up Eddie, he would be well taken care of in prison. It would be worth his while.
They parted, and Katz went to trial. But he lost and was sentenced to four years. As his wife and daughter cried quietly beside him in the courtroom, Katz said he was standing on principle by refusing to cut a deal with Wyshak. “I won’t do that,” he said. “The government is turning everyone into rats. It’ll become Russia. Every other day they call me: ‘You wanna go with Chico?’”