MARTORANO: Yes. LAWYER: And what was the relationship to Winter Hill? MARTORANO: There was a gang in Winter Hill and that was the gang. BILLY O’SULLIVAN WOULD be dead before he could call in the marker Johnny Martorano owed him for killing a guy in Billy O’s after-hours joint. But one of Billy O’s underworld pals would parlay the unpaid debt into the formation of a gang that would someday rival the Mafia for power in Boston’s underworld. When Frankie Salemme and Stevie Flemmi went on the lam in September 1969, in South Boston Donald Killeen may have thought his troubles were behind him, but they were only beginning. And it was homegrown trouble—the Mullens, that loosely knit gang of younger criminals. The more the Mullens saw of the Killeens, the less impressed they were. Holed up in the Transit Café in the Lower End, appearing occasionally on West Broadway, bleary-eyed, their faces splotchy, beer bellies hanging over their belts, the Killeens just looked like another crew of toothless tigers, project rats taking bets on the dogs when they weren’t sucking down dimeys and musties—half–Pickwick Ale, half–Narragansett beer drafts.
