Hitman Read Online Free PDF

the corner. By the 1960s, Joe Dee had $100,000 of Andy’s money out on the street, at a point or two (1 or 2 percent) a week. It was a good solid return on investment, and like municipal bonds, it was tax-free.
    Soon, Andy and Bess Martorano decided that Milton, just south of the city, would be a better place to raise the boys than rough-and-tumble Somerville. Their first house was at 79 California Avenue. Later, Andy bought a vacant lot around the corner and built a new house, on 64 Lockland Street.
    After he got married, my father quit as a bookie, but he still loved to gamble. And Andy liked baseball better than the track; in the summer he was always at the ballgames. This was back before the Braves moved to Milwaukee in ’53, so there was a game in Boston almost every day, either at Fenway or at Braves Field, which is now Nickerson Field at BU.
    My father used to take me with him to a lot of the games. One time I remember Sam Jethroe, the first black player on the Braves, was playing center field, and he misjudged a fly ball and it hit him on the head.
    We used to sit with this group of guys, usually way up in the right-field grandstand, or sometimes in the bleachers—always off by themselves. They knew all the ushers, so they got in for free. There was plenty of room, and plenty of empty seats. Back then, the Red Sox didn’t draw like they do now, and the Braves drew nobody. That’s why they finally had to move.
    My father and his friends didn’t care if nobody was there. They were there to gamble. There were maybe fifty to a hundred of them, depending on the game, who the Sox or the Braves were playing. Mostly Italians in the group, but other people, too. The common denominator was betting. That’s what these guys did. Some of them had businesses, like my father. There was another guy who owned a baby carriage company. I guess there were some wiseguys there, too. They’d gamble on every pitch, was it going to be a ball, or a strike? They’d bet on whether the batter was going to get a hit, strike out, ground out, or fly out. Anything, just action. Ted Williams comes up, maybe the odds were 20-1 or 30-1 that he’d hit a home run, depending on how good the pitcher was. Longer odds if the batter wasn’t that good a hitter, or if the pitcher was better. Everybody kept a pad of paper and a pen on their laps so they could keep track of the bets, because they’d be making so many of them over the course of nine innings. At the end of the game, everybody would settle up.
    That’s how I learned to gamble, from my father. He taught me how to gamble and how to drink.
    Johnny and Jimmy were now enrolled in St. Agatha’s parochial school in Milton. They were in the same class as a young Quincy boy named Billy Delahunt, a lefty. Johnny was a good all-around athlete, but his best sport was football. One day on the playground he ran over Mother Superior, and she chased him down the street with her cane. Another time he kicked a football through a window in the school.
    Johnny was a popular kid, a natural leader. Years later, Billy Delahunt, by then a congressman, was bragging at a party that he had never lost an election—as state rep, district attorney, or congressman. Someone else at the party, another St. Agatha’s alumnus, corrected Delahunt—he had lost at least one election, for the presidency of the seventh-grade class at St. Agatha’s. To Johnny Martorano.
    There was a priest there, a young guy, Father Riley. A great athlete. He called me Rocky. One day I went to him, I was in the seventh or eighth grade, and I asked him, Father, can you teach me how to throw and kick a football like you do? And he said, I’ll make a deal with you, Rocky, if you become an altar boy, I’ll coach you. It was a deal. I think I served Mass maybe once—somewhere there’s a photo of me and Billy Delahunt, in our robes, and in the middle is Cardinal Cushing.
    Johnny