Howie Carr (28 page)

Like the Bulgers, the Bushes have long memories.

In the summer of 1988, Billy seemed to be sitting pretty. Whoever was elected president in the fall would owe him, or at least think he did. But one of Billy’s earlier schemes was about to come back to haunt him, in the scandal that became known as 75 State Street.

The complex, twisted tale had begun years earlier. Harold Brown was the biggest landlord in Massachusetts, a dodgy loner from Brighton who once had a convicted arsonist on his payroll. Now he was looking to become a major developer, and he had his eye on a city-owned garage at 75 State Street, just south of the booming Quincy Market area.

Brown had bought up most of the land he needed, but the garage remained beyond his grasp, and until he had the final parcel in hand, he could not begin construction of his skyscraper at 75 State. In 1982, the garage had been transferred from the city to the Boston Redevelopment Authority as part of the same legislative deal that had created the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. Under the legislation, the BRA was required to sell the garage, to whomever its board chose. At the very least, Billy exercised great influence over the members of both the BRA and the MCCA boards, and it was they who would decide who, in addition to Harold Brown, was going to make a lot of money on 75 State Street.

It was the old State House story: nothing on the level, everything a deal, and no deal too small. Selling the garage to Harold Brown was going to become the classic State House deal.

The first operative to come calling on Brown with his hand out was Eddie McCormack, the Bulgers’ old neighbor in South Boston, now happily retired from elective politics and prosperously established as a power broker. Through his connections to, most importantly, Mayor Kevin White, he had already taken control of the largest of the five affected city garages, the one at Government Center.

McCormack suggested that Brown needed someone to “protect” his “interests” at City Hall, but his price was too steep. Next to step up was Tom Finnerty, Billy’s longtime law partner. At the time, Finnerty was serving on the MCCA board, where he watched over the Bulger family interests.

Brown understood the clout Finnerty brought to the table. He would later charge that Finnerty had made it clear to him that the garage would not be sold to him by the BRA unless “a satisfactory financial arrangement” was made. After stalling for almost two years, Brown in 1985 finally signed a deal with Finnerty to pay him $1.8 million for his so-called monitoring of the sale at City Hall. It was an astounding amount of money for anyone, especially a renowned cheapskate like Harold Brown, to pay for what was, in fact, virtually nothing.

In July 1985, Brown gave Finnerty a first installment of $500,000, and Finnerty established a new bank account for the money. A month later, Billy Bulger and Finnerty each took $225,000 of Brown’s money. In October, they split another $30,000. A paper trail had been created—$500,000 taken, $480,000 divided.

Billy’s sudden splitting of the Harold Brown fee certainly looked odd, but then, the two lawyers had an extremely unconventional practice—“a curious relationship,” state investigators later noted, “in which Bulger appears to provide little or no substantive services in return for approximately one half of all fees generated by the Finnerty law firm.”

In 1986, for example, Finnerty’s law firm issued more than $350,000 in checks payable directly to Billy.

What made Finnerty’s role in the 75 State Street deal so odd is that he had virtually no experience in this sort of real estate development law. Since quitting as district attorney, he had established himself as a drunk-driving lawyer. It was a living— his clients included Sean McDonough, son of Billy’s
Globe
crony Will McDonough. But Finnerty, a father of six children, was in the throes of a messy divorce and needed to start making some real money.

As for Billy, he must have been feeling pretty good about himself. He didn’t know Brown, but now he had pocketed $240,000 of his money. Not that he’d miss it—that was how Billy looked at it. In his book, he described Brown as “obscenely rich,” and claimed that he had once been caught at the Turnpike’s Allston tollbooths throwing slugs into an exact-change basket. What was an endearing story when told about Sonny McDonough—how he bragged that his constituents all used slugs in pay phones to call him in Florida—somehow became a character flaw in Harold Brown.

But Harold Brown’s tendency to micromanage was about to catch up with him. In another similarity to Sonny McDonough, he didn’t trust bagmen. Brown handled his payoffs personally, a shortsighted refusal to delegate authority for a man who had recently been named to the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans.

In September 1985, two months after he had paid Finnerty the first installment of $500,000, Brown was indicted for lying to a federal grand jury about a $1,000 bribe he’d delivered to a Boston Building Department employee. Brown’s perjury indictment didn’t seem unmanageable, at least for Billy. In fact, Finnerty made the second, smaller payout to Billy after Brown’s indictment. But then, on November 15, 1985, Billy picked up the paper and read some disturbing news. A superseding indictment against Brown had been issued, and in the new version, Brown was accused of making payments in a doughnut shop to a Boston city councilor, as well as to “other public officials.”

As a board member of the MCCA, Finnerty was a public official. The story broke in the Friday papers, and by Sunday, Billy had issued his first repayment check to Finnerty.

The reason, he explained later, was that he hadn’t previously known the source of the money.

Brown by now had had enough of Tom Finnerty and federal indictments, so he refused to make the second payment. Negotiations dragged on for more than a year, but finally, in May 1987, Finnerty sued Brown for $426,000. The deal may have looked shady, but Finnerty did have a signed contract, and he had every reason to believe that Brown would want to settle, to prevent his name from being dragged through the mud any more than it already had been.

Instead, Brown stood firm in his determination not to pay. He hired a new attorney, Harvey Silverglate, the very sight of whom drove Billy into near apoplexy. They had tangled in correspondence during the controversy over the ouster of Senator Alan Sisitsky, but probably Silverglate’s worst sin in Bulger’s eyes was his friendship with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz—“the Al Sharpton of Cambridge,” as Bulger called him.

In the countersuit that Silverglate filed against Finnerty, Brown claimed the initial $500,000 payment had been extorted from him, and that the “purported contract was a sham device to sell improper political influence and was the product of duress.”

All of this might never have become public, except for the fact that Finnerty continued litigating for the rest of his “fee.” As the months wore on, Silverglate discovered more and more about the intricacies of the 75 State Street deal. The only question was, how could he get the story out?

for more than a decade, the Boston office of the FBI had done Whitey Bulger’s bidding, and vice versa. The agents Whitey had bribed continued to move up through the ranks, and John Morris was now the head of the public corruption unit.

But he was going mad. By now he had accepted $7,000 in bribes—the final $1,000 coming in the bottom of a case of wine that Zip Connolly handed over to him at the FBI office— and he knew that Whitey owned him. On the shelf of his office, Morris now kept a book that summed up his predicament. It was by Sissela Bok, the wife of the president of Harvard University. Its title:
Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life.

He was sickened as he watched his fellow agents grovel before Whitey Bulger. He had taken bribes, but other agents were almost as compromised. They dined out with Whitey, they exchanged gifts with him, they hung out in the same neighborhood. One day when Zip stopped by the State House, he appeared in the Senate gallery. Billy, presiding over the Senate, recognized him from the podium, and the obedient senators responded with a standing ovation.

For Zip Connolly.

And yet Morris could do nothing about any of it, because they had the goods on him. He knew Whitey still had that audiotape of the Prince Street Mafia bugging that he’d left at the Colonnade Hotel in 1981 when he was drunk. That alone was proof of his duplicity. When the feds put a wiretap on a phone belonging to a Roxbury bookie controlled by Stevie Flemmi, Morris became frantic that Stevie would be recorded on the wiretap, and that when he was arrested, he would give up his pal Vino.

So Morris told Zip to tell Stevie and Whitey not to call the bookie anymore on the bugged line. But Morris also told Zip to give them a warning: “I don’t want another Halloran,” he said.

In other words, no more murders. It wasn’t much of a line to draw in the sand, but at this point, it was the only one that Morris could still draw. Sixteen years earlier, in 1972, when Morris had been transferred to the Boston office, he had considered himself an honest man, a decent human being. Now, like almost everyone else he knew in Massachusetts, he was a crook and a drunk and a cheat. He had gone native. And there was only one way out. He would have to expose the corrupt marriage of Whitey Bulger and the FBI.

In the spring of 1988, just as Morris was falling apart, the
Globe
’s investigative unit, the Spotlight Team, began work on a new series, about the Bulger brothers, and their simultaneous rise to the pinnacles of their respective trades.

Whitey’s name had first begun surfacing again, as he had feared it would, when the Angiulo tapes were played in open court in the mid-1980s. Reporters had mentioned him, and none had been murdered, and the press’s willingness to take him on was increasing, albeit at a glacial pace. What particularly intrigued the
Globe
was the remarkable ease with which Whitey had floated above various investigations for so many years.

Gerry O’Neill was the editor of the Spotlight Team, and for many years he had used John Morris as a source. Once the Bulger series was greenlighted, O’Neill called Morris and they agreed to meet for lunch.

According to O’Neill in the book he co-authored with Dick Lehr,
Black Mass
, almost the first thing Morris said to him was, “You have no idea how dangerous he can be.”

There was no need for O’Neill to ask who “he” was.

By Labor Day, the
Globe
had nearly completed its series “The Bulger Mystique.” The usual suspects at the Boston FBI office were growing frantic—if Whitey was outted as an informant, there was no telling what he might do, but they all knew that he could bring any number of them down if he so chose. Already there were rumors on the street that Whitey had been surreptitiously recording his conversations with FBI agents for years.

The veteran agents in the Boston office decided to take one last run at derailing the series. They would resort to a tried-and-true method: the death threat against a reporter.

Kevin Cullen, an ex-
Herald
reporter, was living in South Boston and working for the Spotlight Team when he took a call one afternoon from another FBI agent, one who had worked the Winter Hill race-fixing case back in 1978.

The
Globe
reporters had been sniffing around again about the circumstances of the unprecedented free ride that Whitey and Stevie had received from the federal prosecutors who cut them out of the indictment at the last moment in 1979. The agent told Cullen that he had just received a call from Fat Tony Ciulla, who had urged him to pass on to the reporter a warning to be careful about making accusations against Whitey Bulger. Ciulla had been in the Witness Protection Program for almost a decade, so it would be impossible for Cullen to verify independently the message that the FBI man was passing on. (The agent later denied making any such call.)

“Specifically,” Cullen later recalled, “he claimed that Mr. Ciulla said to him that if we embarrass [Whitey], if we write something that’s not true, I believe the words were: He would think nothing of clipping you... [He] then added his own opinion, which was: Especially you, Kevin. And he stressed that he was telling me this because he was my friend.”

Cullen and his family—a wife and young child—were temporarily relocated outside South Boston. As the days went on, the reporters increasingly dismissed the agent’s call as yet another attempt by the FBI to frighten the media into not publishing a damaging story about one of its informants. That suspicion only intensified as time passed and the agent never called again about the threat.

“I would like to think,” Cullen testified later, “that if my life was in danger, they would have gotten back to me.”

The
Globe
’s four-part series “The Bulger Mystique” ran in September 1988, in the middle of the presidential race. The front pages were full of stories about the Dukakis presidential campaign’s missteps, but the
Globe
carved out plenty of room for the series. Whitey’s “special relationship” with the FBI did figure prominently in one installment. But it was couched vaguely enough that it ultimately had little impact on Whitey’s reputation in the underworld. Likewise there also wasn’t anything specific enough on any Boston FBI agents to trigger any kind of Internal Affairs investigation, even if the Justice Department had been interested in pursuing a case against its corrupt agents in Boston.

The series dealt a much more severe blow to Billy’s image. It recounted, sometimes at great length, his legislative maneuverings over now forgotten bills and his vendettas against politicians who were obscure even then.

Perhaps the most damaging piece was a sidebar that didn’t even run on the front page. The
Globe
reporters simply transcribed a taped session in which Billy had answered their questions about Whitey:

Q. How much do you see him?

A. He’s always welcome, but he doesn’t come exceedingly often... Sometimes if he’s in a talkative mood, he might come by. Or if he has something like a warm-up jacket for the kids, or something, that he thinks is good, for exercise, or something. He’s interested in that, encourages that.