Howie Carr (2 page)

About the allegations made against his older brother, Billy had written in his memoirs seven years earlier: “I am confident much of it has been circulated as an oblique political attack on me. I know some of the allegations and much of the innuendo to be absolutely false.”

But that was before the Massaschusetts State Police recovered six bodies, including those of two twenty-six-year-old women, from the shallow graves Whitey and his underworld partner, another serial killer named Stevie Flemmi, had dug on public property in and around Boston. In his memoirs, Billy had never mentioned that Stevie Flemmi was a pedophile, or that Flemmi’s parents had lived next door to him since 1980. Nor did he inform his readers that Flemmi often spent the night at his parents’ house, across the courtyard from Billy, and that most Sundays, Whitey and Stevie huddled at the Flemmis’ house with the FBI agents they had bribed with cash, jewelry, and wine.

“I do still live in the hope that the worst of the charges against him will prove groundless,” Billy Bulger read. “It is my hope.”

But the congressmen would have none of it. Although the committee was ostensibly investigating almost forty years of corruption in the Boston FBI office, today’s hearing was about the Bulger brothers—Whitey and Billy. Even the Massachusetts Democrats on the committee, playing to the vast television audiences watching in New England, would take their shots. But the most relentless congressman was Republican Dan Burton, the former committee chairman who had pursued Billy for more than a year. Dan Burton was from Indiana—a “jerkwater state,” as Billy would have described it at one of his annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts in South Boston. This was Dan Burton’s show, and he couldn’t be cajoled or threatened. If Burton had been from Massachusetts, Billy would have known which buttons to push. But he was from Indianapolis, and Billy Bulger was now under oath.

“Mr. Bulger,” Burton began, “what did you think your brother did for a living?”

Gone was the glib, gavel-wielding boss of Massachusetts politics. “Well, I know that he was for the most part,” Billy stammered, speaking uncharacteristically in sentence fragments. “I had the feeling that he was uh in the business of gaming and and uh . . .” He paused. “Whatever. It was vague to me but I didn’t think, uh—for a long while he had some jobs but uh ultimately uh it was clear that he was not uh um being um uh you know he wasn’t doing what I’d like him to do.”

Billy’s biggest problem was a phone call he’d received from Whitey in January 1995, just after he’d fled Boston. Though Billy was an attorney, an officer of the court, he had told no one in law enforcement about the conversation until 2000, after one of Whitey’s underlings had disappeared into the Witness Protection Program. The feds had called Billy before a grand jury, laying a perjury trap, but much to the feds’ chagrin, he’d admitted receiving the call. Angry and frustrated, someone in the U.S. Attorney’s Office had leaked his testimony to the newspapers.

“I expected I would receive a call,” Billy said, tentatively, mixing tenses. “That was his request. I am sure he would like a private conversation.”

Billy had had six months to prepare his answers, but he still couldn’t come up with the witty, cutting responses that had so long been his trademark in state politics. In fact, Billy sounded as tongue-tied as one of his majority leaders.

“I never thought we’d still be—that there would not have been a resolution of it. Ordinarily in these cases—”

—the cops catch the guy. Billy stopped himself before he actually said it. The only other time Whitey had been a fugitive, from a bank robbery indictment in 1955, he’d lasted only three months on the lam before the FBI collared him. But in 1994, Whitey was forty years wiser, and perhaps $40 million richer.

“So the tone of it,” Billy said, “was something like this: He told me, uh, don’t believe everything that’s being said about me. It’s not true.”

But of course it was true. All of it.

“I think,” Billy said, slowly, “he was trying to give me some comfort on that level and he—I don’t know . . .” Billy paused, as everyone stared at him. “I think he asked me to tell everybody he was okay and, uh, and then I told him, well, we care very much for you and um, we’re very hopeful. I think I said I hoped this will have a happy ending. At the time there was no talk of the more terrible crimes.”

It was December 23, 1994, the day that Whitey Bulger vanished. He had always assumed that it would come to this, so in 1977 he had begun constructing a new identity for himself. The most powerful organized crime figure in New England was about to turn into “Thomas F. Baxter.”

When the cops got around to searching his condo, and his girlfriends’ houses, they would find an Irish passport, as well as how-to books about living on the lam. There were almost as many of them as there were World War II books and videotapes. Whitey was obsessed with Nazis, so much so that in 2004 the feds would consider staking out the sixtieth anniversary commemorations of D-day in Normandy, hoping to catch him traveling on a European Union passport.

The cops would also find his diaries. He’d begun putting his thoughts down on paper a lot just before he left. He would sit at the kitchen table in his condo in Quincy, where he’d replaced the sliding glass door that led to his back patio with a bulletproof steel plate. Night after night, he’d write in his old-fashioned Palmer-style longhand about the LSD experiments he’d taken part in while in prison in Atlanta in the late 1950s.

“It’s 3 a.m. and years later, I’m still effected [
sic
] by L.S.D. in that I fear sleep—the horrible nightmares that I fight to escape by waking, the taste of adrenalin[e], gasping for breath. Often I’m woken by a scream and find it’s me screaming. I later read while still in prison that LSD can cause chromosome damage and birth defects—that one article determined for me that having children was too risky.”

Would a jury buy it? That Whitey Bulger cared about children? Whitey hoped he never had to find out.

It was late afternoon, and as he drove toward downtown Boston, the Christmas lights twinkled in the projects and the three-decker houses of South Boston where he’d spent his entire life, except for a few years in the air force, and later almost a decade in federal prison, in Lewisburg, Atlanta, Leavenworth, and Alcatraz.

About to be indicted again, for the first time in thirty-eight years, Whitey would disappear, until he could put the fix in, the way he always had. Something always seemed to happen when the law got too close to Whitey—wiretaps would be compromised, bugs discovered. Cops hot on his trail would find themselves demoted or transferred. Witnesses would disappear, or recant, or forget. Or Whitey would receive a phone call moments before the police raided a warehouse stuffed with marijuana that just happened not to be under his protection.

Surely something could be worked out this time too. And if not, “Tom Baxter” would enjoy his golden years, another retired gentleman on the road with his lady friend.

Beside him in the front seat of the Grand Marquis was his most trusted underling, Kevin Weeks, age thirty-seven. Weeks had been with Whitey almost from the day he graduated high school in 1974. Like all of Whitey’s closest associates, Weeks called him “Jim.” Over the years he’d helped Whitey plan his eventual flight. They had beepers, and code words, and now Kevin would be Whitey’s eyes and ears in the Town, as they referred to South Boston.

In the back seat sat Theresa Stanley. At fifty-seven, she was the oldest of Whitey’s girlfriends, and she preferred a more traditional, lace-curtain Irish phrase to describe their relationship. She “went with him,” and had since 1965 when he was a thirty-six-year-old ex-con, fresh out of Leavenworth, and she was a single mother of four young children.

Theresa had been looking forward to Christmas this year. She and Whitey had just returned to Boston after a lengthy trip to Europe, a dry run for the journey they were about to embark upon. Whitey had made good use of his time, renting safe-deposit boxes in banks in Dublin, London, and Venice, before they finally returned home, at Theresa’s behest, after Thanksgiving.

On this day, Whitey and Theresa had been planning to drive to Copley Square and finish their Christmas shopping at Neiman Marcus. But around 4:00 p.m., dusk on one of the shortest days of the year, Kevin Weeks had beeped Whitey and asked where he was.

“Theresa’s,” Whitey said. “We’re just going out.”

“We need to talk,” Kevin Weeks said. This was one of Whitey’s rules: Never talk on the phone if you didn’t have to, and if you had to, always keep it vague.

Weeks had gotten a tip from John Connolly—“Zip,” as Whitey called him—about an hour earlier. Zip, a retired FBI agent who’d been raised in the same public housing project as the Bulgers, had been feeding Whitey information for years— about informants, indictments, investigations, and wiretaps. And now, in addition to his FBI pension, Zip had a six-figure job at Boston Edison, compliments of Billy, Zip would always tell his friends while he and Billy both denied it publicly.

Five minutes after Weeks’s call, Whitey’s Grand Marquis pulled up in front of the South Boston Liquor Mart at the rotary on Old Colony Avenue, the gang’s headquarters for the last decade or so.

Weeks hopped in, but said nothing. That was another one of the rules. You didn’t talk in the car, not since the Drug Enforcement Administration had put the new door on Whitey’s car back in 1985 as part of Operation Beans. It had been yet another attempt to bring down Whitey that had failed after he received a propitiously timed tip.

At sixty-five, Whitey was not the stereotypical elderly driver. Years later, on the witness stand, Weeks was asked how they could get from South Boston to the Back Bay so quickly during rush hour two days before Christmas. Could Whitey make cars magically move and disappear?

“Jim Bulger could make a lot of things magically move and disappear.”

Whitey pulled the Mercury into the tow zone in front of Neiman Marcus. Then all three of them—Whitey, Kevin, and Theresa—got out of the car and Whitey told Theresa he’d be right with her. She waited at the entrance to Neiman Marcus, eyeing them nervously, as Kevin Weeks passed on the information he’d received from Connolly, that the indictments had come down, that they were sealed, and that the feds were planning to round up everybody over the holidays—including Whitey, his partner Stevie Flemmi, and Frank Salemme, the boss of the local Mafia.

“Have you told Stevie yet?” Whitey asked.

“I haven’t seen him,” Weeks said.

“Make sure you tell Stevie.”

Whitey called Theresa back over to the car and told her, “We’re going away again.”

Their first night on the road, Whitey and Theresa checked into a hotel in Selden, Long Island. They would be visiting a cousin of Kevin Weeks’s named Nadine, and her husband. Later Nadine and her husband would tell the FBI that they had no idea that they were entertaining a powerful, well-connected mobster. To them, they said, he was just Tom Baxter.

Theresa and “Tom” stayed in Selden for four days, then drove to New Orleans for New Year’s, where Whitey registered at a French Quarter hotel using his real name. No need to become “Tom Baxter” if this was all just a false alarm. By January 5, almost two weeks had passed since Whitey had been warned about the indictments, and still nothing had happened. Whitey told Theresa they were going home.

That night Stevie Flemmi pulled away from Schooner’s, his son’s new restaurant in Quincy Market, with his latest girlfriend, an attractive Asian thirty-five years his junior. Two Crown Vics cut Flemmi’s car off and blocked its escape.

A DEA agent dragged Stevie out of the car and put a gun to his head.

“What is this?” Stevie said in disgust. “A grandstand play?” A few minutes later, Stevie’s younger brother, Michael, a Boston cop, walked quickly into the L Street Tavern, which would soon become famous in the movie
Good Will Hunting.
Officer Flemmi saw Kevin Weeks playing cards at a table and asked him if he could have a word with him outside. Weeks threw in his hand, grabbed his coat, and walked outside with Flemmi. The cop told him about his brother’s arrest, and Weeks quickly paged Whitey. As usual, Whitey was one step ahead.

“I just heard it on the radio,” Whitey said. “I’m turning around.”

This time they drove back to Manhattan, where he and Theresa checked into a hotel and Whitey spent the night thinking things over. In the morning they headed west, driving aimlessly—the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, San Francisco—two aging tourists with an old-fashioned reliance on cash, rather than credit cards. Two weeks later Theresa Stanley told Whitey she’d had enough. She wanted to go home. Or so she testified later.

Whitey drove to Clearwater, Florida, withdrew his “Tom Baxter” documents from yet another safe-deposit box, and drove back to Selden. There “Tom Baxter” traded in his old Grand Marquis for a new one. He needed a new traveling companion too, and he had one in mind. Her name was Catherine Greig, age forty-two, and he’d had her on the string for close to twenty years. She was a twin, divorced from a Boston fire-fighter, an old-time Southie broad like Theresa who knew better than to ask questions, even about her ex-brother-in-law, whom Whitey had murdered twenty years earlier and buried on Tenean Beach in Dorchester.

The feds knew who Catherine Greig was. They’d tapped her phone at least once. They had surveillance shots of her and Whitey, walking her two black miniature poodles, Nikki and Gigi. Whitey was always complaining about those damn dogs, even though he had taken them to obedience school in Clearwater. Kevin Weeks had made it clear to her that she could not bring them along. Not on this trip.

But “Tom Baxter” and Theresa would spend one final night together. On their way back to Boston, they checked into a hotel in downtown Manhattan, and in the room, Whitey turned on one of his favorite shows—
America’s Most Wanted
. He watched, silently, as John Walsh introduced him as the Fugitive of the Week, and ran the blurry 1991 surveillance video of himself at the Massachusetts State Lottery Commission headquarters in Braintree.