Hitman

The radio talk show host sensation and crime reporter delivers a portrait of gangster Johnny Martorano, whose life inspired Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.

With a new epilogue detailing Whitey Bulger’s dramatic June 2011 capture

For two decades Johnny Martorano struck fear into anyone even remotely connected to his world. His partnership with Whitey Bulger and the infamous Winter Hill Gang led to twenty mob murders—for which Johnny would serve twelve years in prison. Howie Carr also looks at the politicians and FBI agents who aided Johnny and Whitey, and at the flamboyant city of Boston which Martorano so ruthlessly ruled.

A plethora of paradoxes, Johnny Martorano was Mr. Mom by day and man-about-town by night. Surrounded by fast-living politicians, sports celebrities, and show biz entertainers, Johnny was charismatically colorful—as charming as he was frightening. After all, he was, in the end . . . a hitman.

“Howie Carr weaves a frightening tale of unlawful conduct, and it’s all true.” —Bill O’Reilly

“The indictments of mobster-mangled Boston continue to rain down in Howie Carr’s superb new true-crime book, Hitman. It’s horrifying, it’s deadpan shocking, it’s a brilliant treatise on criminal psychopathy and a portrait of a city defined and subverted by hoodlums run amok. Read this book—it will grab you, garrotte you, and leave you gasping for breath.” —James Ellroy, New York Times–bestselling author of L.A. Confidential