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News and Features about Organized Crime, Mafia and La Cosa Nostra taken from National and Local News Sources. In an attempt to get you this type of coverage in a timely manner we can not be responsible for the content of the following material. |
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8-26-99 From informant to N.J. death row. Records show he tipped off the FBI for years. His jurors never knew.
August 26, 1999
By Thomas Ginsberg One of the four murders for which Martini was convicted - a 1977 shooting in Philadelphia - occurred while the FBI listed him among its tipsters on organized crime, according to records obtained by The Inquirer and knowledgeable sources who have read his FBI file. Martini, who started as an informant on truck heists in New Jersey, had been dropped by the FBI for dishonesty by 1986, three years before he kidnapped and killed an old trucking buddy, Irving Flax. His arrest for the New Jersey murder ended his crimes, which also included two Arizona killings, and led to investigations into a past that remains murky to this day. Today Martini is on death row at New Jersey State Prison. In 1994, while being held in the notorious Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia pending trial there, Martini declared he would rather die than live in such conditions or reveal more secrets in appeals. The New Jersey Supreme Court reviewed his case anyway and rejected his final state appeal. But with execution looming Sept. 22, Martini changed his mind on Aug. 11 and asked for another appeal. Yesterday, the high court formally put off his execution long enough for an appeal in federal court, a process that could take at least a year. It was unclear whether Martini's FBI history will be used in federal court. It was secret as recently as last month, when the New Jersey Supreme Court granted his request to keep certain mitigating evidence confidential. For Martini, exposure of his work, dating to the days of late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, apparently could be harmful to him in court or in jail. For the FBI, such exposure could illustrate the dark side of its long use of criminals as tipsters. The game of developing sources on mobsters can be essential to law enforcement but sometimes also bestows an unofficial veil of protection over some informants, crime experts say. There was no indication the FBI knew about the murders or shielded Martini from investigation. But much of its relationship with him remains secret, and FBI officials said in a 1989 memo - just after Martini's arrest - that only limited details about his past could be revealed to local investigators. Another memo days later shows the FBI rejected the then-murder suspect's request for witness protection in return for more information on organized crime and murder. FBI officials in Newark, N.J., declined to comment, saying the bureau does not speak publicly about the subject of informants. Martini has declined all requests for interviews. Many prosecutors, defense lawyers and investigators in the case declined to comment on his FBI history, citing court orders sealing the information. Largely unknown to the public that may yet execute him, Martini has been described as generous but hot-tempered. He eventually was questioned about but never charged with at least four other killings - the victims either his in-laws or family members. The cases remain unsolved. Lying about his age Even on death row, Martini fibs about his age. According to relatives and his own statements, he is 66. But because of fake identification used for decades, jail officials list him as 69. Ailing and uncomfortable, Martini apparently believes guards treat him better because of it - something prison officials adamantly deny. Martini was born July 30, 1933, into a large family in an Italian-Catholic community in the Bronx, N.Y. He grew up to find some of his neighbors had connections to the mob, with the ability to get - and sometimes get away with - anything. He married Alice Drew about 1950 when both were teenagers. They raised three girls and a boy, John Jr. They moved to North Jersey, where Martini worked as a truck driver. Trucks are prime targets for hijackings and heists, often by organized-crime figures looking for cargo to sell. The FBI long has considered the racket a breeding ground for mobsters and the tipsters who rat on them. In 1964, Martini was convicted in U.S. District Court of stealing a load of women's wear in Hudson County. He served time at a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., then apparently returned to work as a trucker living in Fort Lee, N.J. Martini then began tipping off the FBI about hijackings, purportedly by the mob. He began as an informant in 1966, court records show. According to people who have seen his FBI file, Martini was leading agents to hijacked rigs in North Jersey and New York. Value of information unknown It is unclear how valuable Martini's information was. FBI files show that although he led agents to trucks, the trailers often had been partially unloaded, indicating a ruse possibly by the tipster himself. Still, records show Martini was kept for years as an informant. It is unclear how he was compensated, although informer status sometimes can pay off by insulating tipsters from investigation of nonviolent crimes. "You get a certain absolution," said Frederick Martens, former executive director of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. "It's dirty but necessary" for police. In the mid-1970s, Martini moved with his wife to Arizona but apparently traveled often back East. He bought and operated bars in Phoenix and Glendale. He even speculated in real estate, he later told investigators. At the time, Martini was still an FBI informant, although it is unclear how active he was and what tips he offered. Martini also was developing a friendship with Anna Mary Duval, known as "Polly," a friend of one of Martini's sisters from Washington, D.C. According to court records, Duval, 62, let Martini withdraw $25,000 from her bank accounts, purportedly for a real estate deal he said had to be completed in Philadelphia, a place where neither had any ties. On Oct. 16, 1977, he picked her up at the airport and they drove a short distance, where she was shot several times in the head. Her naked body was dumped near the airport. Two decades later, despite saying that another person "training" to be a hitman had fired the shots, Martini would be convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. "This was one of the nastiest killers around," said Paul F. Laughlin, a former Philadelphia assistant district attorney who helped win the case. "If he can help himself by lying, he'll lie. . . . If he can help himself by killing, he'll kill." From 1981 to 1987, there were at least four more murders, still unsolved, about which Martini would be questioned but never charged: cousin Mario Martini, found shot in the head in his car trunk at the Phoenix airport; former son-in-law Robert Adsit, found shot in the head and chest in his car in Old Bridge, N.J.; and aunt and uncle Catherine and Raymond Gebert, found shot and stabbed in their Atlantic City apartment. Martini was the benefactor of his aunt's estate and was awarded $175,000 from it in 1989, although it's unclear whether he collected it. At some point, Martini began an affair with Therese Afdahl, who he later would testify pushed him into a $500-a-day cocaine habit and eventually helped him kill two people, according to court records. By 1986, Martini was still listed as an FBI informant, according to court records. But the relationship apparently had soured. At some point, he had made a claim about Mafia money-laundering schemes that turned out to be false. The bureau said it terminated him. "Due to [Martini's] dishonesty with the bureau, he was no longer used as an informant," court records stated almost a decade later, based on FBI closed-door testimony in Philadelphia. By Halloween 1988, Martini apparently was stiffed by the FBI, was hooked on cocaine, and was being sued for divorce. Paranoid that his drug supplier, Teresa Marie Dempster, 27, was trying to kill him, Martini shot her in the back of the head, he later would testify. He found her acquaintance David Uhl, 42, asleep in her car and shot him, too, although it was Afdahl who allegedly finished Uhl off, he would testify. By the time police found the rotting bodies in Dempster's car nine days later, Martini and Afdahl were heading to New Jersey, where they would kidnap Flax and kill him despite getting $24,500 in ransom in a well-publicized crime. Captured two days afterward, on Jan. 25, 1989, Martini was questioned by local police and his old employer, the FBI, including at least one agent who knew Martini had been an informant, court records show. Facing prosecution for murder, Martini claimed to have information about about 10 killings, Mafia extortion schemes in Arizona, and even the location of a mob safehouse for fugitives in New Jersey. But the FBI rejected any deal, records show, and Martini was left to a Bergen County jury, which convicted him on Dec. 3, 1990. His FBI past was not among the mitigating factors when it gave him a death sentence on Dec. 12, 1990. Afdahl was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in jail. Now preparing to appeal Martini's death sentence in federal court, Mark A. Friedman, an assistant deputy public defender, declined to say whether he would use any confidential information, without commenting on its substance. New Jersey Chief Justice Deborah Poritz wrote last month that the information, whose content she also did not divulge, is "double-edged," meaning it might sway a jury either way.
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