Howie Carr (17 page)

The enabling legislation flew through the General Court, and Governor King signed it into law. Except for one member appointed by the House speaker, everyone on the board was a friend of Billy’s. The chairman of the MCCA board was state Treasurer Bob Crane, Billy’s old House colleague, a fellow BC grad, and another Irishman from Boston. Mayor White had an appointee too—he selected Bob Crane’s son-in-law. Tom Finnerty, Billy’s old law partner, was also appointed.

The actual day-to-day management of the MCCA would be handled by longtime Bulger aide Franny Joyce. The MCCA board bestowed on him what was at the time one of the sweetest deals ever for a state employee—a $75,000 annual salary, with lifetime security. Of course, the board had to post the open position for a director. At the board’s first meeting ever, Chairman Crane announced with a straight face that only one person had applied for the lifetime $75,000-a-year job.

Francis Xavier Joyce of South Boston.

“It was a nationwide search,” Crane said to the State House reporters, as the other members of the board nodded.

The MCCA board met in Crane’s second-floor State House office, one floor down from Billy’s plush Senate chambers. Whenever the board considered anything that related to Billy, Crane would roll his eyes toward the ceiling and say, “This is for the little man upstairs.”

The MCCA became exactly the kind of money-pit its critics had predicted it would be. The final bill for the new Hynes Convention Center, including interest on the bonds, was $450 million—approximately $200 million overbudget. The potential for luring major conventions to a city with a cold climate like Boston’s turned out to have been greatly overestimated, and soon the Hynes was advertising its availability for wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs—competing with local union halls and private function rooms.

The annual MCCA deficit was supposed to be covered by a new tax on hotel rooms in the city, and by the revenues from the Boston Common garage, which had always been such a reliable cash cow for the city. But under the new MCCA management, maintenance work on the Boston Common garage was neglected, and eventually it had to be closed for massive repairs that cost more millions and plunged the authority even deeper into the red.

But the MCCA did provide jobs for the friends of the Bulgers.

One of Joyce’s first hires was Nancy Stanley, the daughter of Whitey’s girlfriend Theresa Stanley. Another early hire was Lisa Martorano, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Johnny, who was already on the lam. She soon stole $21,000 in MCCA funds; her uncle, Jimmy, who was out of prison by that time, had to reimburse the agency. The payments were renegotiated between Jimmy and an MCCA executive named Bob Sheehan, yet another former Boston FBI agent. Despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on outside legal assistance, the MCCA also employed an in-house legal counsel. He was Harold Clancy, the former editor of the old
Record American
and a long-time friend of Billy’s.

State Senator Alan Sisitsky of Springfield was proving to be a real headache for Billy. They’d served in the House together, and never gotten along. Now in his early forties and unmarried, Sisitsky appeared to be losing his mind. He would wander the State House halls, unshaven and disheveled after sleeping in his office, carrying a barbell, grabbing passersby by their lapels and haranguing them.

His hatred of Billy became an obsession. Somehow, it seemed, he resented that someone like Bulger—a Boston bigot, as Sisitsky used to call him—could rise so far. Sisitsky began charging his fellow senators, mainly Billy and Chester Atkins, with corruption. He was also writing letters to the attorney general, demanding investigations into how various bills had been passed. Sisitsky had taken a job as a law school teacher—in Tacoma, Washington. He spent much of the week in airports. As one who had “never been on the cutting edge of fashion,” as Billy dryly observed in his book, Sisitsky now looked like a homeless person. He was fixated on the high-handed way in which Billy had punished Judge Daher by having his pay cut. One night, from O’Hare Airport, he phoned into a radio talk show in Boston and announced: “Senator Bulger will be arrested tomorrow at noon.”

The host was astounded. He inquired as to the charges. “Federal agents will be waiting for him when he arrives at his office,” Sisitsky said.

As Billy recounted in his book, one day Sisitsky told the Senate, “The Senate president’s brother, Whitey Bulger, is listening. He hears everything we say.”

More than fifteen years later, several FBI agents, as well as Stevie Flemmi, would testify that they suspected the same thing, and no one would accuse any of them of insanity or paranoia. But Sisitsky had worn out his welcome, not just with Billy, but with the entire Senate membership. Sisitsky was drawing too much attention to a body that had come to prefer scheduling its most important votes in the evenings, often after midnight.

Finally, one day, as Sisitsky sat slouched in the Senate chambers, insulting one senator after another, Billy had had enough. Hearing no objections from anyone, Billy ordered his removal from the Senate. As the court officers, many of them from Southie, converged on Sisitsky, he yelled one final insult toward his nemesis on the rostrum.

“Being thrown out of this Senate,” he screamed, “is like being thrown out of a brothel.”

The budgetary constraints imposed by Proposition 2
¹
⁄2 gave Billy an opportunity to run the Senate with an iron hand. The mantra was that everyone had to tighten their belts, but the reality was that some belts wouldn’t be tightened as much as others.

In South Boston, Mayor White was threatening to close the L Street Bathhouse, where kids like Billy (not to mention gangsters like Frank Salemme) had hung out in the summer ever since Curley was mayor. To shutter such a Southie tradition was unthinkable to Billy. Suddenly, a state agency assumed control of L Street from the city, and the agency received a $280,000 appropriation for the next fiscal year to keep the venerable Southie institution open.

The power was starting to go to Billy’s head. As Senate president, everything had to go through him. One way or another, everyone who had ever crossed him would have to come to him, sooner or later, hat in hand, for one favor or another.

It was always payback time for somebody. The next one to feel the heat would be Barney Frank, who as a freshman state rep had tangled with Billy over the proposed state Senate redistricting in the early 1970s. Now Frank was a freshman congressman. And after the 1980 census, Massachusetts was scheduled to lose one of its twelve House seats.

None of the incumbents wanted to retire, so that meant someone would have to be redistricted out of office. Under the congressional redistricting plan approved by the legislature, Barney was gerrymandered into the district of Margaret “Peg” Heckler, an entrenched seven-term Republican incumbent from Wellesley. Initially, the plan was to cut most of Brookline and Newton—Barney’s liberal, Jewish base—out of the new district. But U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill of Cambridge had insisted that Barney at least have a fighting shot at survival. Besides, Tip didn’t particularly want Brookline and Newton added to his overwhelmingly Irish-Italian district.

As it turned out, 1982 was not a good year for Republicans. Barney ousted Heckler, who was then appointed ambassador to Ireland by President Reagan.

Even Billy couldn’t win them all.

CHAPTER 9

I
T WAS THE BEGINNING OF
1980, and what was left of the Winter Hill Gang needed new headquarters. After the race-fixing trial, everyone from Somerville was either in prison or a fugitive, so from Whitey’s perspective, it made sense to move the operations into the city. The “gang” was now reduced to two people—Whitey and Stevie—and they were both from Boston. So it was an easy call for Whitey and Stevie to base themselves at George Kaufman’s new garage in the West End of Boston. The West End was a much quicker commute from South Boston than Winter Hill.

Whitey, of course, had his own hangouts in South Boston, including Donnie Killeen’s old Transit Café in the Lower End. As a felon, Whitey couldn’t personally own a liquor license, but Kevin O’Neil could, and Whitey set him up as the West Broadway bar’s straw owner. O’Neil was a hulking thug who had been arrested back in 1968, along with two other future Whitey Bulger associates, for murdering a black man in a street brawl. The charges were dropped after O’Neil hired Billy Bulger as his lawyer.

Triple O’s—the name referred to O’Neil and his two brothers, the other owners of record—was all right as a place for Whitey to meet local hoods, but few outsiders cared to come into Southie. Plus, there was practically no parking, pedestrian traffic was heavy, and the bar was so close to the Broadway MBTA station that the cops could have easily kept a close eye on the underworld comings and goings had they so desired.

The West End, on the other hand, was neutral turf, a semi-deserted urban no-man’s-land where few strangers ventured, except on nights when there was a game at the nearby Boston Garden. It was an old ethnic melting-pot neighborhood that had been “redeveloped” in the early 1950s into high-rise apartment towers and bleak state office buildings within walking distance of the Garden and North Station. Kaufman called his garage Lancaster Foreign Motors, and in the morning, before the gangsters arrived, it actually was a functioning garage. But around noon, Whitey and Stevie would arrive and the place would become a den for them and other underworld figures.

Ironically, it was the FBI that first discovered that Whitey had relocated to the garage. In January 1980, Whitey decided to kill the twenty-four-year-old son of Stevie Hughes, the McLaughlin hitman who had been murdered by Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme in 1966. Steve Hughes Jr. had just gotten out of prison, and he was talking about avenging his father’s death by killing Stevie and Whitey.

But he was murdered first, in a Charlestown housing project, shot five times with a high-powered rifle from the roof of a building across the street. It was just another routine gangland murder, but on February 4, an FBI informant report included this information about how the Hughes job was arranged: “George Kaufman received a telephone call to get the [getaway] car outside of a garage on Lancaster St., Boston, Mass., just before the hit.”

Even though it was less than a five-minute walk from the FBI offices, no agent bothered to check out the garage where notorious hoodlums were stashing hit cars. The report was filed away and forgotten.

It wasn’t until April that the State Police found out about the garage, when a Statie driving by noticed George Kaufman standing on the sidewalk out front. The cop parked nearby and, reconnoitering the area, spotted Whitey and Stevie. The Staties returned a few times and saw a parade of familiar and unfamiliar faces making their way inside. Obviously, they were on to something, but street surveillance wouldn’t get them much. The streets themselves were too narrow, parking too difficult, and unless you were either gay or a wino, you stuck out like a sore thumb—which was just the way the boys inside liked it.

An undercover state cop rented a room above the gay bar across the street from the garage, and they began monitoring the comings and goings at Lancaster Foreign Motors. They quickly noticed one new face—Nicky Femia, a former associate of Joe Barboza’s, who had finally been murdered by the Mafia in San Francisco in 1976.

Whitey had realized the need for additional muscle, which explained Femia’s presence. He was one of the leading suspects in the Blackfriars Massacre of 1978, when gunmen had burst into a downtown bar after hours, stolen a large amount of cocaine, and murdered five men—including a former TV reporter for Channel 7—in cold blood. When Femia began hanging around the garage, Whitey wanted it established in the FBI files that his new associate had nothing to do with the Blackfriars murders, although he probably did. Whitey didn’t need any heat from some ambitious cop making a run at him just because of his association with a higher-profile killer like Femia. Soon a brief notice appeared in one of Zip Connolly’s FBI reports clearing Femia of any involvement in Blackfriars. (Later, after Whitey and Femia had parted ways, Zip put yet another report into Whitey’s file, suggesting that Femia had indeed been one of the triggermen in the Blackfriars killings. Femia eventually would be shot to death in a botched robbery in East Boston in 1983.)

Femia, who was both overweight and a cocaine addict, was not a good fit with Whitey. As he aged, Whitey was becoming more obsessed with physical fitness. He wore tight jeans and T-shirts, and grew increasingly disgusted with Femia’s gut. One time, when Femia returned from the nearby McDonald’s on Causeway Street with a bag of Big Macs and fries and began spreading out his fast food feast on the hood of Whitey’s black Chevrolet, Whitey went crazy, screaming and pelting him with French fries.

Femia wasn’t the only one to bear the brunt of Whitey’s new rants about clean living. George Kaufman’s son, Peter, sometimes worked odd jobs at the garage. At the time, Peter Kaufman smoked, and sometimes when he left he’d neglect to take his smokes with him. On his return, he’d shake a Marlboro out of the pack and notice that Whitey had taken a pen and written across the cigarette:
DON
’
T SMOKE
.

Soon the state cops surveilling the garage began seeing new faces showing up, sometimes with briefcases or small paper bags. One of Whitey’s new visitors, they would later discover, was one of the largest marijuana importers in New England.

Whitey had been shaking down local bar owners for protection ever since he’d taken control of the rackets in Southie in the early 1970s. But now he began expanding his collections of “rent” to include local drug dealers. A payoff here and there, and they could use the beaches of Southie, Dorchester, and Quincy to off-load their product, and then store it in the grimy warehouses of the Lower End. Whitey didn’t need a lot of muscle to retain control of this racket; all he had to do was guarantee that the dealers wouldn’t have any interference from the police. That was an easy promise for Whitey to keep.