Howie Carr (20 page)

And if Cincotti was there with him, he’d go too. That was the way Whitey and Stevie operated. Baione didn’t care what happened to Metricia, but he didn’t want to lose Cincotti in a senseless crossfire that would also ignite a gang war. So Metricia was brought in, and Baione got right to the point. He might be plotting to kill Whitey and Stevie every day, but with this small-timer Metricia, Baione wanted to maintain the polite fiction that organized crime protocol concerning unpaid debts mattered above all else.

“If you fuck someone that’s friendly with us . . .” Baione began. “So you just understand me, do you know that the Hill is us? Maybe you didn’t know that, did you?”

“No,” said Metricia, softly. “I didn’t.”

“Did you know Howie and Stevie, they’re us? We’re the fuckin’ Hill with Howie...You know that they’re with us. You didn’t know that?”

Metricia said he didn’t know that.

“You make sure,” Baione said, “you make a score, I’m going to see Whitey and Stevie get the money, and Howie. You understand? After all, you fucked them. These are nice people. These are the kind of fuckin’ people that straighten a thing out. They’re with us. We’re together. And we cannot tolerate them getting fucked.”

Whitey and Stevie got filled in on what was happening, of course. One night in early 1981, as both Morris and Flemmi would later testify, the FBI agent called and told them to meet him in a room at the Colonnade Hotel. When Whitey and Stevie arrived, with several bottles of wine, Morris was waiting for them with a tape recorder and a fresh audiotape he wanted them to hear, in which Gerry Angiulo badmouthed both of them in particularly profane terms.

They all laughed, and Morris started guzzling the gangsters’ wine. Two bottles later, he was too drunk to drive, and Whitey relieved him of the keys to his government car. Whitey drove the FBI vehicle out to Morris’s Lexington home, with Morris snoring softly in the front seat beside him. Stevie followed in Whitey’s car, and after getting Morris inside his own house, they drove back to Southie. From then on, Whitey always called Morris “Vino.” And they decided to keep the unedited tape that Morris had left behind in the hotel room. It might come in handy some day, if Vino ever got out of line.

Most of Whitey’s information about the tapes, though, came from his old reliable, Zip Connolly. He had to pull the occasional shift in the FBI’s van in Charlestown, monitoring the conversations that the bugs were recording. Angiulo was always complaining about the fact that Whitey and Stevie were still on the hook to him for the money Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano had borrowed from back in the mid-1970s when their football card racket collapsed. With vig, the debt was up to $245,000, and yet Gerry hadn’t been able to set up a sit-down with Whitey and Stevie to arrange for the $5,000-a-week payments he’d been assured would be forthcoming.

“Jesus Christ all fuckin’ mighty, why haven’t these guys been in touch with me? I don’t understand it. Fuck me maybe, they don’t like me. They got a right not to like me. It’s not a problem... But they been jerkin’ me around.”

Whitey, of course, had no more intention of repaying Angiulo in 1981 than he had had of repaying Richie Castucci in 1976, and for the same reason—Gerry Angiulo wasn’t going to be around much longer.

The bugs were pulled out of both 98 Prince Street and 51 North Margin Street on April 17, 1981, and it would take more than a year to transcribe the tapes. Gerry Angiulo was arrested on September 13, 1983, at his favorite restaurant, Francesco’s, and would never return to the street. But Zip Connolly was already so concerned about the continuous references to Whitey that he felt compelled to slip a report into the file that claimed “source [Whitey] is not a ‘hit man’ for Gerry Angiulo as has been contended.”

He neglected to mention that Angiulo had been recorded as quoting Whitey and Stevie saying, “We kill people for that guy,” that guy being Gerry Angiulo. But quibbling over such details didn’t matter as much now. With their Mafia rivals on their way out, Whitey and Stevie could begin to flex their muscles elsewhere. The feds had the situation in the North End well in hand.

CHAPTER 11

I
N
1982 M
ICHAEL
D
UKAKIS
won “the rematch” against Governor Edward J. King. John Forbes Kerry, the decorated Vietnam War hero who had prosecuted Howie Winter in the Somerville pinball case, won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor, and the Dukakis-Kerry ticket romped to an easy victory over a weak Republican in November.

The liberals were back in charge of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. But Dukakis had changed during his four years in exile, or so his supporters claimed. He now understood that he couldn’t snub the legislature’s urban street pols like Billy Bulger. The Duke, as Dukakis was called, would give them what they wanted, and in exchange for their beloved patronage jobs and judgeships and low-numbered license plates and the appointment of sheriffs who would eventually end up in their own jails, they would give the Duke his new programs and higher taxes.

It didn’t matter much to Billy who won the governorship. Whoever the governor was, he was going to have to play ball with Billy, and abide by his rules.

Billy controlled the Senate absolutely. Over in the House, Speaker Tommy McGee had to deal with an occasionally feisty Republican minority, as well as a band of Democratic dissidents, both liberal and conservative, who would soon oust him from the speakership. Billy, though, brooked no dissidence. Whatever he said, went.

As he settled into his middle years as Senate president, Billy grew accustomed to an ever more lavish lifestyle. He was starting to enjoy foreign junkets, at taxpayer expense. In 1982, he journeyed to China, and there was an outcry in the papers. But as the trips became more and more frequent, the negative stories became less frequent. In June 1984, he was off to Israel, and in September 1985 he journeyed to Ireland with nary a mention in the press.

For years afterward, as he traveled abroad more often, Billy worked his trips into his St. Patrick’s Day routines.

“If Dukakis goes, it’s a trade mission,” he would say. “If I go, it’s a junket.”

Kevin White had been mayor almost sixteen years. Since his near-defeat in 1975 he was a changed man. Busing had ended his national ambitions. Now he just wanted to survive, and so he used the city payroll to build a political machine of neighborhood people, from wards he felt no particular need to visit, except in election years.

The White machine soon became a magnet for criminals and grifters. At least two of his twenty-two ward bosses were excons. In the amoral atmosphere of Kevin White’s fourth term, other White operatives drifted into criminality—stealing grant money or faking disability pensions. Even the city’s low-numbered license plates began disappearing.

It was a situation made to order for an ambitious prosecutor, and his name was William Floyd Weld. After his appointment as U.S. attorney in 1981, Weld immediately focused his attentions on bringing down Kevin White and his City Hall machine.

He quickly won convictions against White’s two top operatives in Southie, then indicted the mayor’s chief fund-raiser and his budget director. At the State House, Billy watched in fascination as the feds decimated both White’s organization and his reputation. Billy began to wonder if he could parlay White’s failing fortunes into something more—the mayoralty itself. Billy had never really gotten over his disappointment at not being able to run in 1975, and now it appeared he might have another shot. After all, he could serve as both Senate president and mayor; there was no law against it, and Ray Flynn, among others, had been both a state rep and a city councilor simultaneously.

In October 1982 Billy floated the first of his trial balloons, to a reporter at the
Globe
. Billy, of course, was officially noncommittal, saying, “There are all the obvious reasons not to run, family and so on.”

The reporter wrote that Billy’s mention of his family was an “apparent reference to his nine children.” Whitey’s name did not appear in the story.

On May 26, 1983, a battered Kevin White announced that he would not seek a fifth term as mayor. Billy moved quickly— suddenly, he was speaking to reporters again. White’s favorability ratings had plummeted into the single digits, but he still had a citywide organization he could turn over. A week after his decision to pull out of the race, White and his wife gathered with Billy and state Treasurer Bob Crane and their wives for a lengthy, Friday night dinner at Anthony’s Pier 4. The very public message: Mayor White would support Billy.

Billy was so ecstatic that he commissioned a poll. Stories appeared that the business community was “urging” him to run.

In Billy’s own mind, at least, he seemed the perfect candidate. Was the electorate concerned about the city’s lack of revenues? That would no longer be a problem, because Billy would remain president of the Senate, assuring a steady flow of state revenues to the neighborhoods.

Billy would be the next Josiah Quincy 3rd, who had been elected mayor of Boston while serving as Senate president in 1844. He was already calling most of the shots; now he would have the title to go along with the power. Surely the voters would understand the power Billy could wield... for their benefit, of course. Through his control of the state budget, he could funnel enough money to balance the city’s books, while keeping the property tax rates low. The most powerful man at the State House would also be running City Hall. What could be better?

Then he got the poll results. Even the city’s voters, it seemed, had grown to distrust Billy. He was running in fifth place, with a mere 8 percent of the vote. The poll jolted Billy with a cold dose of political reality. At age forty-nine, he was not only unelectable statewide, which he had long known, but he probably couldn’t even win an at-large seat on the Boston City Council. Billy immediately issued a statement announcing his decision not to run for mayor. Family considerations were cited.

Billy had little impact on the 1983 mayor’s race. He endorsed no one—it would have been the kiss of death for anyone he embraced. In the end, Ray Flynn was the last white candidate standing, up against Mel King, a dashiki-clad black state rep from the South End. Flynn won easily, and Billy Bulger fumed. Southie had finally elected a mayor, and it wasn’t him.

Flynn became mayor in 1984, Billy gave him one opportunity to prove that he was a team player—for the Bulger team, naturally. Billy would forgive Ray for becoming mayor—on one condition. Zip Connolly would have to be appointed police commissioner of Boston.

Flynn refused Billy’s request. Instead he chose Francis “Mickey” Roache, another Southie guy, a career Boston cop and the brother of Buddy Roache, the hood that Whitey’s gangland pal, Billy O’Sullivan, had shot and crippled in 1971 as Whitey looked on.

Mickey Roache’s brother-in-law, Mickey Dwyer, had also been involved in the same gang war. Dwyer had somehow run afoul of the Killeens, and one night outside the old Transit Café, one of the Killeen brothers had run outside, jumped Dwyer, and bitten his nose off. A passerby had found the nose on the sidewalk, and Donnie Killeen had wrapped it in a bar napkin with a few ice cubes and then sent the nose off to the emergency room at Boston City Hospital in a taxi.

In early 1984, U.S. senator Paul Tsongas was diagnosed with cancer, and he soon announced that he would not run for a second term. Another political free-for-all was shaping up, and one of the candidates for the Senate seat was the incumbent congressman from the Merrimack Valley, James Shannon. His decision to run opened up the Fifth Congressional District seat, and Billy’s loyal Ways and Means chairman, Chester Atkins, prevailed, even though his opponent continuously assailed him as “Billy Bulger’s butler.”

What saved Chester in the end was the fact that his opponent was also a state senator, which meant that he too could be tarred with the Bulger brush. But Chester was an exception. Billy’s ties continued to doom most politicians who were close to him.

The same day that Atkins won the Democratic nomination for Congress, Billy’s majority leader, “Ditto” Dan Foley, was defeated by a reform candidate in his Worcester district. As he left the Senate chambers the next day, reporters crowded around Billy for a comment about the demise of Ditto Dan.

“He was a fine fellow,” Billy said. “He laughed at my jokes.”

Whatever Billy wanted, Billy got. When he decided he needed a three-digit license plate, he was given 979. Then it turned out that 979 had been improperly confiscated by the Registry of Motor Vehicles, and Billy had to return it. In its place, the Registry gave him an even lower tag for his white Oldsmobile—226. The new plate was issued, a spokesman for the Registry said, “to ease the pain.”

On the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority board, there was one dissident—Nick Rizzo, the appointee of the House speaker. He would later go to prison for embezzling money from the 1992 presidential campaign of Paul Tsongas, but in the early 1980s, Rizzo wasn’t yet considered dirty. He was the press’s main source of information about what was going on inside the MCCA. Rizzo just wasn’t with the program.

Mike Dukakis didn’t want any trouble. In July 1983, when Rizzo’s term expired, he was not reappointed to the board. A year later, Tom Finnerty’s term expired. He was a team player. Dukakis reappointed him.

Life was getting better and better for Billy. As the unquestioned boss of Beacon Hill, his lecture fees rose to $3,000 a speech. He bragged about not owning a television set, and buffed his intellectual credentials by quoting John Adams and Aristotle when he came out against a bill that would have allowed reporters to shield their sources. He joined the Union Club on Park Street, where the old Southie city councilor John E. Kerrigan had once been a busboy. In Southie it began to be whispered that Billy was putting on airs, but the Union Club was a nice place to entertain his new friends like Robert Novak, the nationally syndicated columnist. And as long as Billy didn’t rock the boat for their guy Dukakis, the
Globe
might leave him alone.