John Callahan

John Callahan

Former president of World Jai Alai, knew too much. Whitey ordered him whacked. He fled to Florida, was met at the Miami airport by his good friend John Martorano, who shot him in the head and left his body to rot in the airport parking lot.

This was the family John Callahan left behind in 1982 when Johnny Martorano, on direct orders from Whitey Bulger, shot his good friend, the former president of World Jai Alai, in the head and left his body in the trunk of a rented car in a parking garage at Miami International Airport.

DETECTIVES SAY FBI SHIELDED MOBSTERS IN MIAMI MURDER CASE
SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG Miami Herald Staff Writer
August 2, 1998

John Callahan, once the president of Miami's World Jai-Alai, was a big man with big secrets. He chewed big, fat cigars. Sixteen summers ago, cops found him in the trunk of a silver Cadillac at Miami International Airport. He had two bullet holes in his head -- and a dime on his chest.
The homicide investigation went nowhere, and detectives now think they know why: The FBI was in cahoots with the killers. The suspects are two mob informants who seemed to have had a 20-year license to steal, sell drugs and whack jai-alai people in Miami, Boston and Tulsa, Okla.
``It's stunning and sickening,'' says Tulsa homicide Sgt. Mike Huff. He ran into federal roadblocks for 17 years after, the murder , of another jai-alai president, millionaire Roger Wheeler. ``All the noncooperation, the stonewalling, the hiding of suspects -- I never knew the extent of the undercurrent of impropriety.''
Says David Green, a former Florida organized-crime investigator: ``If local law enforcement had withheld information like the FBI, we'd all be indicted for obstructing justice.''
The damaging disclosures are trickling out at a pretrial hearing in Boston. Judge Mark L. Wolf must decide whether he should drop federal racketeering charges against top mobsters because the , FBI was allegedly in bed with them.
Testimony and once-secret documents suggest that agents not only failed to pursue allegations against the homicide suspects, James ``Whitey'' Bulger and Stephen ``The Rifleman'' Flemmi, but may have leaked identities of other informants. One was murdered.

FBI informants The saga of the FBI and the Irish mob, known as the Winter Hill Gang, begins in the 1960s, when Boston's gangs blasted away rivals and unruly members. The bureau recruited Flemmi, a former paratrooper, as an informant. His code name was ``Shogun.'' He became a sidekick of Whitey Bulger, boss of the Winter Hill Gang. He, too, agreed to provide the FBI with underworld secrets. The year was 1975.
The wealthy Boston owners of Miami's World Jai-Alai had just installed John Callahan, a brilliant accountant, as its top man. Callahan, a 6-foot, 250-pound weightlifter, had been to Yale, spoke Chinese and liked Dom Perignon.
Police figured he was the Winter Hill Gang's financial advisor. ``He had gangsteritis,'' says Lt. Stephen Murphy of the Boston homicide bureau.
As president of World Jai-Alai, Callahan put in his own people and got a fast start. But he didn't last long. When Connecticut detectives spotted him cavorting with gangsters at Boston's Playboy Club, out he went.

Risky bet
A few years later, Roger Wheeler, a blue-suit respectable millionaire from Tulsa, bought World Jai-Alai for $50 million. Although he figured jai-alai was a risky bet, he told friends he felt safe because so many ex-FBI agents worked there. His confidence didn't last long.
In December 1980, Peggy Westcoat, a slender jai-alai cashier, was found hanged at her tree-shaded Southwest Dade home. Her killer apparently looped a rope around her throat and fed it into the kitchen garbage disposal. Her boyfriend was hanged just inside the front door.
Though police said the murders were drug-related, not everybody was sure. When Wheeler added things up, he dispatched his son David to Miami to check out possible skimming. ``We knew something was wrong,'' David Wheeler says. ``We just didn't know the extent of it.''
On May, 27, 1981, Roger Wheeler played his regular Wednesday game of golf at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa. He left the locker room at 4:30 p.m. and got into his Cadillac. A burly, bearded man carrying a paper bag stepped up to the window, stuck the bag inside, and put a .38-caliber bullet between his eyes.

Different questions
Tulsa homicide Sgt. Huff interviewed dozens of people, including the ex-FBI agents. But the investigation fizzled. ``If I'd have known then what I know now, the questions would have been a whole lot different.''
In January 1982, a disaffected Winter Hill wiseguy showed up at the FBI's Boston office. His name: Edward Brian Halloran. He knew about the Wheeler murder, he announced.
, The FBI questioned him for six weeks. He told them that John Callahan tried to hire him to ``whack'' Wheeler -- in the presence of Bulger and Flemmi.
The FBI kept the information to itself. ``It was a terrible breach of ethics and a violation of criminal law not to inform the Tulsa authorities,'' says investigator Green.

Foul odor
On May 11, 1982, Halloran and a pal, Michael J. Donahue, sat in a car outside the Topside Bar on the Boston waterfront. Three men in a Chevrolet opened fire. Halloran, 41, shot 10 times, and Donahue were both killed.
At that point, cops everywhere wanted Callahan. They hoped he'd flip against Bulger and Flemmi. B, ut they couldn't find him.
On July 31, 1982, Callahan, 45, arrived at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Seven hours later, someone parked his silver Fleetwood in Parking Lot 3 at the Miami airport, hardly a mile from World Jai-Alai.
There it sat until a parking attendant smelled something foul. Callahan was in the trunk, stripped of jewelry and ID, the dime atop his chest: A warning to potential informants who might dime out the mob.

Dead-end investigation
Police seized thousands of pounds of records from World Jai-Alai. The feds vowed a big grand-jury investigation. It went nowhere.
Bulger and Flemmi flourished, allegedly presiding over loan-sharking and gambling rackets and sales of ``Santa Claus,'' the South Boston name for cocaine.
In 1990, after the press exposed their informant role, the FBI denied it, then dumped them. A federal indictment came five years later.
By then, Bulger was nowhere to be found. Supposedly, the FBI tipped him to the pending indictment. Flemmi got busted. So did John Martorano, 57, another Winter Hill gangster living on the lam in Boca Raton.
The bureau's long entanglement came unglued last year. Flemmi, trying to get racketeering charges dismissed, said the FBI had let him and Bulger commit crimes in exchange for spying on the underworld.

Information leak
Judge Wolf ordered the FBI to give defense lawyers its thick informant files. One former FBI supervisor, John Morris, confessed to pocketing $7,000 from Bulger and leaking information that helped him outmanuever homicide investigators.,
Several witnesses pointed fingers at ex-agent John Connolly, Bulger's handler. Connolly took the Fifth Amen, dment. But in an interview with the Boston Globe, he said, ``I'm not a rogue agent. . . . Anything I ever did, I did lawfully.''
Defendant John Martorano could be the next witness. People say he is ready to talk about as many as eight murders, among them Callahan's. The H, artford Courant, quoting sources, reports he is the killer. There's one hitch: He doesn't want to talk to the FBI. He prefers the Massachusetts State Police and the DEA.
Miami-Dade detectives Ramesh Nyberg and Greg Smith, occasional travelers to the Boston courtroom, hope to make a case on the Callahan murder.

Copyright (c) 1998 The Miami Herald