John Vincent Martorano (born December 13, 1940; also known as "Vincent Joseph Rancourt", "Richard Aucoin", "Nick", "The Cook", "The Executioner", "The Basin Street Butcher") is an American former gangster and former hitman for the Winter Hill Gang in Boston, Massachusetts, who has admitted to 20 mob-related killings.
His father, Angelo "Andy" Martorano was an immigrant from Riesi, Sicily, and with his family he emigrated to the United States around 1915, to East Boston.
Martorano attended Mount Saint Charles Academy in Woonsocket, Rhode Island as a freshman while his brother remained in Milton, enrolling in Cunningham Junior High School.
During high school, he and Jimmie were standout football players, and were elected co-captains of the team for their senior season in 1958.
Hanging out in the Combat Zone, Martorano fell under the guidance of Stephen Flemmi, and by the age of 25 was an active mobster.
[3] Ralph DeMasi, a Boston mobster incarcerated in White Deer Township, Pennsylvania, would later write to the courts that when he was driving down Morrissey Boulevard with fellow Irish mobster William (Billy) O'Brien in 1964, Martorano pulled up in a car alongside them and gunned down O'Brien, shooting him seventeen times with a machine gun and wounding DeMasi.
[4] In 1979, Flemmi and Bulger learned that Martorano and several other Winter Hill members, including James "Gentleman Jim" Mulvey, 'Volkswagon' Dwight Taylor, and Victor 'The Vulture' Vitale, were about to be indicted for a horse race-fixing scheme involving Fat Tony Ciulla.
Along with Winter Hill member Joe McDonald, he was the triggerman for the hits on Roger Wheeler and John Callahan.
[5] Arrested in 1995, Martorano was charged, along with Flemmi and two Boston mafiosi, on a massive racketeering indictment; however, he abruptly agreed to a plea bargain deal in 1999.
Carolyn divorced him in 1975, after twelve years of marriage[11] In the Whitey Bulger biopic Black Mass (2015), Martorano is portrayed by W. Earl Brown.