Howie Carr (33 page)

After a few months at Allenwood, they’d be brought back to Boston and given a choice: answer the grand jury’s questions or have another eighteen months tacked on, even before their trials, for contempt.

“The government is turning everyone into rats,” one bookie said in open court. “It’ll become Russia.”

A few weeks later, he flipped. In the end, they would all testify.

Next, extortion victims started coming forward. The feds found a bar owner who had been threatened by Whitey in the back room of Rotary Variety, for not coming through with a promised bank loan. Once he got the bar owner behind closed doors, Whitey pulled his trusty knife out of his boot.

“You fuckster!” Whitey screamed at him, stabbing empty cardboard boxes with the knife before finally putting it to the bar owner’s throat. “You fuckster!”

The bar owner was shaken down for $35,000 cash before he’d had enough. He went, not to the FBI, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Two straight FBI agents were assigned to wire the bar owner and send him back to the store. Suddenly, Whitey refused to meet, or speak with him. As usual, he’d gotten a heads-up, from the FBI.

Stories began appearing in both newspapers about the grand jury’s ongoing probe. And yet, this time, unlike just a few years earlier, none of the witnesses vanished, unless it was into the Witness Protection Program. John Morris was belatedly getting his wish: There would apparently be no more Brian Hallorans, or John McIntyres, or Richie Castuccis. Either Whitey no longer had the juice out on the street, or he just didn’t care enough to kill anybody anymore.

Finally, the drug dealers started turning on Whitey. Polecat Moore was the first to roll. When the bank foreclosed on his family’s home and no one stepped forward with the cash to save it, Polecat was treed. He followed the Jewish bookies into the Witness Protection Program.

By 1994, Whitey had become concerned about the grand jury and the dangerous drift events were taking. Under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the feds didn’t need a lot to put an organized crime figure behind bars for good. All they had to do was prove a couple of recent crimes— “predicate acts”—and that would be enough to establish what was called a “pattern of racketeering.” And to prove the pattern they could bring up any crime that the criminal had ever committed. Gerry Angiulo, the Mafia underboss, had always fulminated against RICO, but it had been used to put him away for keeps. The annual attempt by local police to get a Massachusetts version of the RICO statute on the books was always blocked in the legislature.

But with Zip in retirement, the feds finally appeared serious about taking Whitey and Stevie down. Stevie, though, seemed strangely unconcerned about the ongoing probe. Whitey had been on the lam before, and had been pinched after only a month or so. Stevie, on the other hand, had had no problems during his four years as a fugitive, but then, he’d been protected by both the Mafia and the FBI. Stevie appeared to have no understanding of how much the world had changed in twenty-five years. As far as Stevie was concerned, it was business as usual. He had a teenage girlfriend who was pregnant, and he also traveled with a slightly older Asian companion by the name of Jian Fen Hu. One of his two sons by Marion Hussey was about to open a restaurant on High Street, Schooner’s, an enterprise in which Stevie was taking a great deal of interest.

In the summer of 1994, Stevie took his annual summer vacation to Montreal, to visit old friends. Whitey hit the road too, but unlike Stevie, he was a man on a mission. With Theresa Stanley in tow, he made the Grand Tour of Europe, often stopping off at banks to open a safe-deposit box. In London, he listed his brother Billy as the person to notify in case of a problem, giving the bank Billy’s home address and telephone number. Filling out the forms, Whitey used his own name. His alias, “Thomas Baxter,” was a seventeen-year work in progress, and he didn’t want to tip anybody to it if he didn’t have to.

Whitey had been in jams like this before, but somehow he’d always managed to wriggle out of them. The difference was that, in the past, he’d always been able to give the feds someone higher up on the Mob totem pole—from Howie Winter and Gerry Angiulo all the way to Frank Salemme.

Now, though, Whitey was at the top of the heap. The Mafia was finished, and there was nobody of consequence left in Somerville or Charlestown either. Whitey was now the Man, Mr. Big. There was nobody left to rat out. It was, finally, Whitey’s turn to take the fall.

CHAPTER 19

B
ILLY HIT IT OFF ALMOST
immediately with the new Republican governor, William Floyd Weld. It was not a friendship anyone would have predicted, but as 1991 began, Billy needed friends. The 1990 elections had been as much a referendum on him as on Dukakis, and he had been drubbed, his Senate majority decimated in the wake of the 75 State Street scandal and the revelations about his brother’s cocaine dealing.

His St. Patrick’s Day breakfast that March was a disaster. It was still televised statewide, but the no-shows included both U.S. senators, the new House speaker, and the new attorney general. Mayor Ray Flynn stopped by for all of eight minutes. Every missing politician was needled, of course. On the subject of the just concluded first Gulf War, Billy said, “It was touch-and-go for a while. John Kerry didn’t know which side he was going to go with.”

Weld made an appearance, though, and even wore a green button that said, in white letters, “I’m a friend of President Bulger.” As Weld arrived, Billy looked like a drowning man who’d just been tossed a life preserver.

Unlike Joe Malone or John Kerry, Weld treated Billy with respect. Weld even read an item from the paper, that
The New Yorker
had commissioned a profile on William M. Bulger. Billy beamed; it was something he couldn’t have mentioned himself on the television audience, lest he be accused of patting himself on the back.

Once Weld departed, though, the breakfast disintegrated. Billy had no proper foils left. All he could do was sing obscure, sad Irish ballads, and soon enough, the atmosphere in the hall had become as self-pitying and morose as the host.

At 12:36, Billy said, “This is awful.” Then he told a joke about gondolas.

“You’ve heard it before?” he said. “Well, you’d better laugh anyway.” At 12:39, as flop sweat formed on his brow, he threw up another prayer of a joke, and it clanged off the rim.

“Oh God,” he said, “why am I doing this?”

Even in that grim winter of 1991, Billy was again scheming to restore the old balance of power, that is, the balance where he had all the power. Fortunately for Billy, Weld didn’t seem to grasp how rare, and important, it was for the Senate to have sixteen Republican members. If Weld could maintain any party discipline, and he could, he could sustain any veto. That meant that, with his line item veto, Weld could control the $15 billion state budget. And that made Bill Weld, not Billy Bulger, the real governor.

Billy now seemed resigned to his public fate—he would forever be known as a mere “legislative leader,” the Corrupt Midget, brother of a gangster. Perhaps as time went on, he could somewhat restore his reputation, at least in some quarters. But most people outside the State House, he understood, would never accept him, nor would the media, which had increasingly turned against him after 75 State Street. Striking a reformer’s pose at this late date was simply too absurd to consider. So Billy went back to some of his old ways. He again began openly taking honoraria. What did he have to lose by grabbing, say, $5,021 from Pfizer for an appearance?

At home, in Southie, he struck a more combative pose. Billy’s campaign chairman, John J. Sullivan, would write his customary letter exhorting Billy’s friends to attend his annual birthday party (his fifty-seventh) at Anthony’s Pier 4 and celebrate his victory... over John DeJong.

“Against the thundering editorialists and their media accomplices,” wrote Sullivan, in a tone not unlike Billy’s own, “the voices of his neighbors and supporters were heard with emphatic clarity.... Hence, our celebration will be especially gratifying this year as we assemble to honor Senator Bulger.”

And for Billy, there was still the occasional punishment to be meted out. Congressman Chester Atkins, Billy’s former Ways and Means chairman, had turned against him in the wake of 75 State Street. Now it was time again for a congressional redistricting, and for Massachusetts to lose a seat. Atkins was in deep trouble. He’d been humiliated when he was publicly identified in the House banking scandal as one of the top check-kiters in Congress. And his former Senate aide Mark Ferber was headed to federal prison in a massive kickback scheme he’d masterminded as a private-sector adviser to several state agencies. If he had to run against an incumbent, Atkins wanted a shot at another weak check-bouncing incumbent, Joe Early of Worcester.

Atkins wanted to rid himself of most of his own district— namely, the Merrimack Valley, and annex Worcester. Through intermediaries he extended the olive branch to his old boss. But Billy made it clear that he was through being the fall guy for every crude power play on Beacon Hill. Billy insisted that before he could even consider gerrymandering the two districts into one, he would need Chester to publicly ask for it. Billy was baiting a trap for Chester, and Atkins was desperate enough to fall right into it.

Chester dutifully claimed that he felt more kinship with Worcester than with the Merrimack Valley, and those were the insincere words Billy had been waiting to hear. Billy immediately announced that no matter what changes in the map were required by the congressional redistricting, the “integrity” of the Valley would be maintained. Chester was shocked at his former boss’s move; most other politicians were amused that Atkins hadn’t realized that he was being set up.

In the Democratic primary the next year, Chester would be crushed two to one by a young assistant district attorney from Lowell making his first bid for public office, Marty Meehan.

The next foe of Billy’s to be taken down a notch was Christopher Lydon, the former
New York Times
reporter who was now the anchor of
The 10 O’Clock News
on the local public TV station, WGBH. Lydon and one of his reporters, David Boeri, had been relentless on the subject of 75 State Street, and Lydon had gone out of his way to humiliate Dukakis in a live interview after the lame-duck governor nominated Paul Mahoney for his judgeship in 1990.

Every year, Channel 2 sponsored a popular imported wine tasting for its well-heeled audience. For the tasting, Channel 2 needed a one-day liquor license, and all such licenses had to be approved by the legislature.

In 1991, the legislature initially balked at rubber-stamping WGBH’s liquor license, the way it would have for almost any other home-rule petition that came before it.

In the spring of 1991,
The 10 O’Clock News
was canceled. The one-day liquor license for Channel 2 was then approved.

As he had promised during the 1990 campaign, the new attorney general, Luther Scott Harshbarger, did undertake a new investigation of 75 State Street. The results of his office’s probe were released in September 1991, and the material, if not enough for an indictment, was still damning.

The investigators pointed out that “notwithstanding Bulger’s assertion that he repaid” the entire $240,000 to Finnerty,

“substantially all of those funds were later returned from that trust to Bulger over the next 12 months.” As an example, they cited a $61,000 check issued by the St. Botolph Trust, to which Billy had repaid his supposed loan, on June 6, 1986. The check was made out to Thomas Finnerty, P.C. Three days later, Finnerty issued a check for $61,000 payable to “William Bulger.” And Billy then deposited the money in the same Fidelity municipal bond account “which 10 months earlier had been used to accept the original St. Botolph checks which Bulger later repaid.”

The investigators also looked into other transactions between Finnerty, Bulger, and Richard McDonough. In addition to their work for the Quirk brothers, Sonny’s son and Billy also “received over $50,000 from a firm in California known as Herbalife reportedly for out of state ‘consulting’ activities by McDonough and Bulger on behalf of that firm.”

In the last four months of 1985, Billy took more than $50,000 out of the Finnerty firm. In 1986, the firm issued him checks worth more than $350,000.

There was no follow-up to the report. There would be no indictments.

The story about Billy ran in
The New Yorker
in the October 28, 1991, issue. The writer, Richard Brookhiser, tipped his hand when an interviewer asked him his opinion of Billy.

“I think,” Brookhiser said, “he is an admirable man in many ways.”

Billy, of course, had said much the same thing about his brother less than three years earlier.

In his gushing profile, Brookhiser ignored the recent report from the attorney general on 75 State Street. Billy’s patronage empire was brushed aside as the occasional procurement of “a job for a deserving acquaintance.” No mention was made of the ongoing cocaine trials in the federal court, in which the wiretaps included repeated references to the poor quality of the “snow” that “Whitey” was peddling. Franny Joyce of the Convention Center Authority surfaced as a “former Bulger aide,” but not as his tin whistle player, or the guy who hired both Whitey’s stepdaughter and hitman Johnny Martorano’s daughter.

A
Herald
columnist noted that after such an obsequious puff piece, Brookhiser “must be at the top of the waiting list for the next elevator operator’s job at the Suffolk County courthouse.”

Few people in Boston may have read the
New Yorker
article, but it was studied with great interest at CBS News headquarters in New York, and soon Billy would have his greatest moment in the media sun, on
60 Minutes
.

On St. Patrick’s Day 1992, the CBS camera crew was rolling tape at the Bayside Club. Once again Governor Weld was the guest of honor, and this time he brought with him a song written by the former treasurer, Bob Crane. It concluded with a reference to Whitey: