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In the meantime, there was news about Johnny Martorano, who had been in Plymouth with Stevie and Salemme and Bobby DeLuca. As codefendants in the case, it had been advantageous to have both Johnny and Stevie in Plymouth so they could go over everything about their case, which they had been planning to fight together. But everything changed after Johnny learned what Jimmy and Stevie had been doing, which was probably a little before I heard about it on television. After that, Johnny had weighed his options. One option had been to kill Stevie right there in the cell block, which he was certainly both mad enough and capable enough to do easily. Another option was to cooperate. I bet it was a hard choice, but Johnny came to the same decision I eventually did: What am I protecting them for? These two have been giving everyone up right along. What am I going to do? Go to prison for life just to be able to say I am a standup guy? Johnny ended up cooperating, admitting he killed twenty people and implicating Jimmy and Stevie in multiple murders, in exchange for a fourteen-year sentence.

Although I’d only met Johnny Martorano a few times, I’d been brought up on the stories about him during the gang wars of the 1960s and 1970s up through the early 1980s. All I knew is that if you were going to go after Johnny Martorano, you’d better be in a tank. Now, here was this guy who was a legend in Boston, who had been involved in twenty murders with Jimmy and Stevie, and he had decided to cooperate against them.

A few years later, in June 2004, I ended up writing a letter to Judge Wolf on Johnny’s behalf before his sentencing, explaining that when a man of Johnny’s stature decided to cooperate against Jimmy and Stevie, it made my choice a lot easier. “After the life I led, trying to tell right from wrong, good guys from bad guys was very confusing. Then I realized that John Martorano seemed to know what to do. If it was right for him then it was right for me.”

But when I was still trying to decide what to do for myself, I learned that Frankie Salemme was trying to make a deal. I did a lot of thinking and talking it over with my family. I also spoke to Kevin O’Neil, who also ended up cooperating. “Listen, I’m gone,” I told Kevin. “It’s over.”

“And we don’t owe them a thing,” he said.

By late December 1999, I had decided to make a deal, to cooperate. In January 2000, I was brought up to Boston for an interview. By then the government had appointed me a new lawyer, Dennis Kelly, who was very articulate and knowledgeable. He’d been a federal prosecutor and knew his way around the federal system. We talked about some of the crimes I might or might not have been involved with and if maybe we might be able to find some bodies. At the second meeting, the agents and prosecutors said that before they made a deal with me, they wanted me, as an act of good faith, to go out and recover some of those bodies. At the time, I didn’t have any plea agreement or anything, but Dennis told me I should do it.

“If I give these people these bodies,” I told him, “they can use these bodies against me. I have nothing to sign now.”

“Kevin,” Dennis told me, “they have dealt with people before who have lied and double-crossed them. This time they want to make sure you can deliver what you are telling them before they make a deal with you.”

So on January 13, 2000, I showed them three bodies. That day, I had them bring me back to the place where, fifteen years earlier, on Halloween night, Jimmy, Stevie, and I had reburied Bucky Barrett, Johnny McIntyre, and Deborah Hussey. When we got there that cold January day, the snow-covered area was being prepared for a building, for a credit union of some sort, and all the landmarks were gone. The woods and the bushes were bulldozed down and everything was barren around where they were going to put the new building.

I laid down in the snow, just as I had done when I had been lying in the same spot with the machine gun in 1985. I figured out from the angle of the front door of Florian