Howie Carr (25 page)

“He at one point put his head on her chest and said she was still alive,” Weeks said, “and then he wrapped a rope around her neck and stuck a stick through it and was twisting it.”

After she was dead, Stevie straddled her corpse and again used a pair of pliers to remove her teeth. Then he removed her shoes and stockings and used an ax to chop off her toes, after which he then chopped off her fingers.

Then they buried her in the basement, next to Bucky Barrett. In October 1985, the house would go up for sale, and Weeks would be assigned the grisly task of disinterring the bodies and, after dark on Halloween night, reburying them in a lot across the street from Florian Hall in Dorchester.

Digging up the corpses, Weeks and another gang member wore painters’ masks to cut the stench of the rotting flesh, then loaded the bodies into a station wagon they dubbed “the Hearse.”

In the vacant lot, the other gangster dumped the remains into predug graves, while Weeks stood guard with a machine gun. At one point, a passing car slowed down, but the driver apparently saw nothing and quickly sped off. Later that evening, when Weeks reported back, Whitey was outraged that his underling hadn’t killed the mysterious witness and thrown his body into the makeshift grave with the others.

Years later, when Weeks was on the witness stand, a prosecutor asked him why he had never tried to stop any of the murders.

“Because,” he said, “then I would have been going into the hole myself. They would have killed me. They’re not used to people saying no to them. I seen firsthand what happens to people that went to law enforcement.”

The shakedowns continued. Anything could be used as a pretext for extortion. A real estate developer in Quincy was taken for $200,000 after he advised a neighbor of Kevin Weeks’s in a dispute over the location of a fence. The developer, Richard Bucheri, got a call from Stevie Flemmi ordering him to appear at the Flemmis’ house in South Boston. When he arrived he saw Whitey sitting at a table, a sawed-off shotgun in front of him.

“Why the fuck did you get involved in that beef over the fence?” Whitey demanded. “Kevin is like a son to me. You should have minded your own fucking business and kept your fucking mouth shut.”

He stood up, and pointed the shotgun at Bucheri.

“I oughta fuckin’ kill you,” he said, before relenting. “I’ll let you go, but it’s gonna cost you two hundred grand.”

Bucheri paid Stevie by check. When the check cleared, Bucheri got a call from Flemmi.

“Jim says you’re his friend now,” Stevie reported.

Another victim was a South Boston real estate developer named Raymond Slinger. In federal court, Slinger later testified that Kevin O’Neil called him one day and told him that someone wanted to see him at Triple O’s. He understood that this was not an invitation he could refuse. He arrived at the bleak tavern and Kevin O’Neil escorted him up the stairs, where Whitey was waiting for him.

“I’ve been hired to kill you,” he told Slinger, using almost the exact same words that had so terrified Stippo Rakes.

Whitey told Slinger that there were alternatives available. He could pay Whitey to kill the other guy, or scare him.

“How much would it cost me to have you tell the other guy to leave me alone?” Slinger testified that he asked Whitey. “A thousand bucks? Two thousand?”

Whitey fixed him with an icy stare. “Are you shitting me? My boots cost more than that. Fifty grand would be more like it.”

Once he was back at his office, Slinger called City Councilor Jimmy Kelly. Kelly was a friend of both Bulgers, a former small-time criminal himself who’d done a stretch at the Deer Island House of Correction for illegal possession of a handgun. It was Kelly to whom Whitey turned when Theresa Stanley’s son wanted a city job.

Kelly assured Slinger he’d straighten out the matter. But a couple of weeks later, Slinger received a call from Kevin O’Neil.

“The man wants to see you again,” he said.

This time, Slinger brought a gun with him. But while frisking him for body wires, Weeks and O’Neil found the gun. Kevin Weeks punched him in the gut and threw him down into a chair. Whitey entered and Weeks handed him Slinger’s gun. Finding one bullet inside, Whitey walked over to Slinger and pressed the barrel against the top of his head.

“You know what happens if I shoot you?” Whitey asked. “When the bullet goes in from the top, there’s no blood.” He glanced over at Weeks. “Go get me a body bag.”

At least that was Slinger’s recollection. Weeks remembered Whitey saying, “Go get me a bottle of beer.”

Slinger paid Whitey $25,000. The shakedowns stopped after two FBI agents visited him at his office. When the feds had left, Slinger called O’Neil to tell him about his visitors. He was petrified that Whitey would think he’d made the call. He’d heard what happened to anyone who called the cops.

The Mafia was on the ropes. By 1986, the Angiulos and Larry Baione had all been convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, and there were no obvious candidates to succeed Gerry and Larry. Whitey wanted the Mafia disarray to continue. It was good for business.

Eventually, a new Mafia crew emerged, led by a cold-blooded 1971 graduate of Boston College named Vinny “the Animal” Ferrara. The crew set up their headquarters, not in the North End this time, but in the Back Bay, at the Prudential Center, in a bakery called Vanessa’s. But they made one mistake. They told Stevie Flemmi their plans. Soon the FBI had a wire in the back room of Vanessa’s.

The crew was planning the shakedown of Harry “Doc Jasper” Sagansky, an eighty-nine-year-old former dentist who had been running an extensive gambling operation in Boston since the 1930s. When he answered their summons to appear at Vanessa’s, they demanded a half-million dollars.

Doc Sagansky’s counteroffer was $3,000-a-month “rent”— double what he’d been paying the Angiulos. The Animal stuck to his demand for a half-million. Doc shook his head.

“Kid, I’m eighty-nine years old,” Sagansky said to the Animal. “How long am I gonna be in business? How can I go to work and make the kind of money youse talkin’ about? Listen, take the business, will you please, and forget about everything.”

“Give us the bankroll,” the Animal shouted.

“I’m not gonna give you no bankroll,” Sagansky replied. But a day later, he did—$250,000. The money was passed in the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel, and Vinny the Animal and his men hurried back to Vanessa’s to divide the take.

“Those motherfuckers,” the Animal said. “This better be real money.”

Whitey had nothing to fear from this new Mafia. With every word of the shakedown recorded on tape, it was only a matter of time before the Animal and his crew joined the Angiulos in federal prison.

Whitey had even fewer concerns about his old friends from Somerville. Without Howie Winter to keep them in line, they began shooting one another, sometimes in bars. Others dabbled in cocaine, often with disastrous consequences. Whitey paid them little heed, although sometimes the subject of Howie Winter’s old outfit at Marshall Motors did come up in conversation. On one bug that the Drug Enforcement Administration briefly installed in a car in the mid-1980s, Whitey was heard griping about still having to support Johnny Martorano in Florida. After all, he hadn’t killed anybody for Whitey in maybe three years. Whitey was also recorded telling Stevie, “There ain’t no more Winter Hill Gang,” and, for good measure, “Fuck Howie.”

After Winter’s release from prison, Whitey began feeding Zip derogatory information about his old boss. Whitey described Howie as “strictly a left-fielder,” who shook down criminals for protection he didn’t provide.

It wasn’t all work and no play for Whitey in the mid-1980s. Sometimes he was spotted at Roxbury Latin football games, watching his nephew Chris Bulger, Billy’s son, play.

He often socialized with friendly FBI agents. Whitey gave them all nicknames. John Newton, who had served in Vietnam, was “Agent Orange.” Nick Gianturco’s father had been a physician; he became “Doc” Gianturco. Most Sundays, he and Stevie hosted a dinner at Mrs. Flemmi’s house across the courtyard from Billy’s house, and Zip sometimes brought by other agents. Occasionally, two FBI agents later testified, Billy would even make a brief appearance, none of which he would be able to recall when he later testified under oath before Congress. Whitey also visited the homes of agents. John Newton had an apartment in Southie, where Whitey liked to meet Zip late at night to strategize. Newton testified that when Whitey arrived, he would take his dogs out for a walk.

But many of the get-togethers with agents were purely social. One evening in 1985, agent Nick Gianturco, invited Whitey and Stevie to dinner at his home, where they met another guest, the famous undercover New York FBI agent Joe Pistone, better known as Donnie Brasco. Gianturco introduced his Mob friends to Pistone as “Jimmy and Stevie.”

In the spring of 1985, Zip arranged a dinner party at John Morris’s home in Lexington that included himself, Morris, Stevie, Whitey, and, for good measure, Dennis Condon, still working for Governor Dukakis in the Public Safety Department. Condon fled after dinner, and the evening ended with Whitey pressing $5,000 cash into Morris’s palm.

When he wasn’t hobnobbing with the FBI or dining out with either of his girlfriends, some nights Whitey could be found hanging out at Jacques, the city’s original transvestite bar in his old stomping grounds, Bay Village. It was owned by Henry Vara, the cousin of the Martoranos who in the mid-1970s had become Billy’s business partner in a Florida radio station.

Whitey often vacationed in Provincetown, the heavily gay resort at the tip of Cape Cod. When John Callahan was murdered in 1982, Zip pointed out that Whitey couldn’t have killed him, because he was in Provincetown—“with female companionship,” Zip hastened to add in his report.

On another visit to Provincetown, Whitey had a photograph taken of himself wearing a cowboy hat and a leather vest with nothing underneath. In his hands he cradled a long-barreled revolver. When the
Herald
ran the photograph in 2004, it was captioned, “Wanted by the FBI . . . and the Village People.”

Occasionally he and Theresa Stanley went to Florida. Her brother had moved there decades earlier, and gone into law enforcement. He had eventually been elected sheriff of a small county near Tampa on the west coast. But the siblings’ visits were often short; Whitey and the sheriff, a pro-life Republican, did not get along.

On rare occasions, Whitey showed his sentimental side. His old Alcatraz buddy, Clarence Carnes, the Choctaw Kid, had never been able to make it on the outside, and back in federal prison, he contracted AIDS, died, and was buried in a prison graveyard in Missouri.

Whitey paid to have the Choctaw Kid’s body exhumed and sent back to Indian country for a traditional burial. He arrived twenty minutes late for his friend’s funeral, after collecting a speeding ticket in his rented Lincoln for doing 110 in a 55 miles-per-hour zone.

At the funeral, Whitey passed out $100 tips to everyone there—the preachers, the singers, even the funeral director, who would later get occasional late night calls from Whitey, in which Whitey mused about how he just wanted to buy a boat and sail around the world.

But Whitey’s main recreation was sex, with partners of both genders. He was often seen in the company of Catherine Greig’s younger brother, who would eventually die in what was ruled a suicide on Cape Cod. Some of the stories about Whitey’s sexual exploits were collected in a book by one of Whitey’s cocaine dealers, Edward MacKenzie—Eddie Mac, as he called himself. Entitled
Street Soldier: My Life As an Enforcer for Whitey Bulger and the Boston Irish Mob
, the book recounted how Whitey employed the same techniques on young males as the pedophile priests of the archdiocese of Boston. After seducing them, he would take the boys out for an ice cream cone.

But Whitey went both ways, and like his partner, Stevie Flemmi, he enjoyed the company of underage females, of which there was a ready supply at Cardinal Cushing High School, a now closed parochial school for girls on East Broadway a block or so east of Triple O’s.

Eddie Mac says Whitey often paid off the victims’ families with trips, or in at least one case, a new set of furniture, which according to one FBI report was the same modus operandi used by Stevie on more than one occasion. At the time, in the late 1980s, Eddie Mac was running a barroom known as Connolly’s Corner Café, and he also operated a gymnasium. The gym included a couple of locker rooms, with a Jacuzzi on the women’s side, and Eddie Mac quickly set up a lounge of sorts in a storage area next to the women’s locker room. Then he put in a two-way mirror that enabled him and his friends to enjoy a full-length view of the women’s locker room, where the young girls, often from Cardinal Cushing, went naked into the shower and the Jacuzzi.

They called their peep show setup the Dog Room. “Whitey... loved it,” MacKenzie wrote. “Of course there was no way he was going to sit with us. When he wanted the Dog Room, he got private shows, at 11 or 12 at night, often with high school girls from the projects...We were not allowed in the gym when he was there. He usually arranged for this guy named John to perform with women because he had a huge stick... But no one ever got to watch Whitey ...He trusted no one.”

In his book, MacKenzie claimed that one night he surreptitiously watched through the two-way mirror as Whitey raped a fifteen-year-old girl that MacKenzie recognized as one of “Whitey’s Cardinal Cushing groupies.”

“[The] naked girl lay face-down on a plastic tarp on the floor. Whitey, equally naked, kneeled over her. He was spreading different colors of paint all over her body; she looked like a tie-dye T-shirt...When he was finished, he turned her over and began having sex with her.”

Over the years, rumors have surfaced about amateur pornographic videotapes that were supposedly made by Whitey at the Dog Room. None have surfaced, so far.

Sooner or later, Whitey must have known, he was going to run out of luck. Zip wasn’t getting any younger, and eventually Whitey might have to go on the lam again. This time he was determined that it wouldn’t be a half-assed, haphazard flight like his trip across the country as a young fugitive in 1955. This time, he would do it right.