Howie Carr (35 page)

Everywhere Keating drove, he and his aide, a Southie native, saw members of the old Bulger crowd from City Point and the Lower End. They were all holding signs for the Republican Lane, even Andy Donovan, the legendary talk show caller who always defended Billy on the radio airwaves, invariably describing himself as a “first-time caller.”

Late in the day, Keating and one of his aides pulled their car into the parking lot at Norton High School, not far from the Rhode Island border. It was dusk, and few voters were in evidence, but Keating and his aide saw two men holding Lane signs. One was older, but Keating quickly recognized the younger man as a member of Billy’s inner circle. At least nominally, Billy was still a Democrat, and yet here was one of his own holding a sign for a GOP candidate, in violation of Democratic State Committee rules.

“Get the camera,” Keating told his aide.

But when the younger man and his older partner saw Keating and the aide walking toward them, they moved the signs up over their faces so they couldn’t be seen.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” the older man yelled at Keating. “You are a fucking asshole.”

Keating laughed. It was the end of a long, miserable campaign, and the Bulgers had beaten him, badly, but now, at least, he had a couple of them back on their heels, worried about being photographed as they held a Republican’s signs.

“We’re not leaving,” Keating’s aide said. “You can keep those Lane signs over your faces all night, but when you put them down, we’ll be here to take your pictures.”

The two men with the signs just stood there a few seconds longer. Then Keating heard the older man say to the younger man: “Put down the sign and go over there and let them take your picture.”

The young man obeyed instantly. Keating relished his mini-victory, as his aide snapped the pictures they could now at least threaten to send to the Democratic State Committee—or the newspapers. Meanwhile, the older man kept his Lane-for-Senate sign over his face, to prevent any pictures from being taken of himself. Finally Keating and his aide gave up and got back in their car.

It wasn’t until he was headed home toward Sharon that Keating suddenly realized why the younger man had so meekly followed the orders of the older man, and why the older man had never lowered the sign that covered his face. Miles away now from Norton High School, with the polls closed and all the sign holders scattered, Keating finally understood who the older man really was. It was Whitey Bulger.

CHAPTER 20

S
EVEN WEEKS AFTER THE
election, on December 23, 1994, Whitey vanished, ahead of the indictments he knew were coming down. As 1994 turned into 1995, it took a while for the cops even to grasp the fact that Whitey was gone for good.

For one thing, the indictment he was facing didn’t seem that serious. Taken as a whole, it was little more than a racketeering case, and its centerpiece was the extortion of some elderly bookies. How excited was a Massachusetts jury going to get about a gambling case?

Plus, Whitey had been away so often in the last couple of years that this latest absence didn’t seem particularly noteworthy. It was Christmas, after all, and then it was New Year’s, after which they assumed he’d be back, and they’d grab him. If Stevie was still in town, and he was, then obviously he and Whitey hadn’t heard about the pending indictments.

Certainly Stevie didn’t anticipate any major problems. After he was arrested outside his son’s restaurant near Quincy Market, he was taken to the federal courthouse, where he ran into Ed Quinn, one of the FBI agents who’d worked on both the Prince Street bugging and the Joe Murray case. Quinn was one of the agents Gerry Angiulo had always described as “a piece of shit Irish cop.” He was a friend of Zip’s. “Can you help me out here?” Stevie asked.

Quinn offered to get him a Coke.

After seventeen years as a fugitive, Johnny Martorano was arrested in Boca Raton. His brother, Jimmy, was collared in Boston. Frank Salemme stayed on the lam until August 1995, when he was picked up in West Palm Beach. Two other defendants—Frank Salemme Jr. and George Kaufman—died soon after their arrests. Only Whitey remained a free man.

As late as March 1995, Whitey’s flight was still regarded as little more than a lighthearted lark. On St. Patrick’s Day that year, Governor Weld journeyed to the Bayside Club to belt out a song about Whitey. The tune was taken from “M.T.A.,” the famous 1959 Kingston Trio song about the straphanger stuck on the Boston subway system. Except that the lyrics had been rewritten so that “Charlie” was now Whitey on the MTA.

“Will he ever return? No, he’ll never return. No he’ll never come back this way. I just got a call from the Kendall Square Station. He’s with Charlie on the MTA!”

It was the hit of the day. Billy especially enjoyed it. “Isn’t he great?” said Billy.

The FBI didn’t seem terribly concerned about Whitey’s flight either when they handed the investigation over to agent Charlie Gianturco. His brother Nick had just retired from the bureau, and had succeeded Zip as director of security for Boston Edison when Zip was promoted to vice president. When Stevie was arrested at Quincy Market, he had been told he could make one phone call.

“Get me Charlie Gianturco,” he said.

The indictments were handed up on Thursday, January 5. With Whitey nowhere to be found, on Monday morning, January 9, 1995, FBI agents John Gamel and Joe Harrigan dropped by the State House to speak to the Senate president.

“We cooled our heels for about fifteen minutes,” Gamel recalled. “Finally one of his aides came out and said he was pretty busy with legislative stuff and didn’t have time to talk.”

Gamel asked the aide to have Billy give him a call, and then both agents returned to their offices at the JFK Building in Government Center. Early that afternoon, Billy phoned and told Gamel without preamble: “I don’t expect to hear from my brother,” he said.

Gamel got the distinct impression that Billy did not want to be talking to the FBI. Gamel told Billy that if he did hear from Whitey, he should urge Whitey to call Gamel, so that a surrender could be arranged.

“I’ll consider it,” said Billy.

Later that month Billy and Whitey did speak, on the phone, at Eddie Phillips’s house. Gamel did not receive a call from Billy.

Whitey and Catherine Greig arrived in Grand Isle, Louisiana, in late January 1995. They were driving a new 1994 Mercury Grand Marquis that Whitey had bought on Long Island with a $13,000 bank check.

Twice in 1995, local police became suspicious of Bulger’s car, once when it was parked outside a Veterans Administration hospital in Wyoming, and later when a cop in Long Beach, Mississippi, decided to run the Massachusetts plates on the Marquis with the National Criminal Information Center. But in both cases, the car came back registered to a “Thomas Baxter,” who had no outstanding warrants. Not only was “Thomas Baxter” not arrested, he wasn’t even pulled over.

By early fall 1995 Whitey would be back on Long Island. And in October, he returned to South Boston. From a pay phone in a waterfront freight terminal, he called John Morris, who was wrapping up his FBI career at the agency’s training center in Quantico, Virginia.

The caller identified himself to Morris’s secretary as “Mr. White,” and said he urgently needed to speak to Mr. Morris. Morris took the call, and began taking notes. He knew he would have to prepare an incident report, a 302, if only because he suspected that Whitey was taping the call. Whitey demanded that Morris get a retraction from the
Globe
of their seven-year-old story that he was an FBI informant.

“He wanted me to use my Machiavellian mind to go to people at the
Globe
in order to get them to print a story which he in essence said that the prior information was... given to the
Globe
in an effort to discredit him or to remove him from a position of power.”

Whitey also mentioned something about Morris “ruining him and his family,” as Morris later recalled. Then he hung up, and Morris began writing his 302 incident report.

Whitey, meanwhile, called Kevin Weeks to tell him he’d gotten through to his nemesis. Again Whitey used the phrase “Machiavellian mind.” Apparently Whitey had been rereading
The Prince.

“Basically,” Weeks said, “he told Morris that if he went down, he was taking him with him, that he blamed this whole thing on Morris, that Morris started this whole thing and for him to use his Machiavellian mind to try to straighten this out. He blamed Morris for the
Globe
articles that started back in ’88. He figured it was the beginning of his problems.”

Later that evening, Morris’s secretary-turned-wife picked him up at the FBI training center.

“Remember that thousand dollars that John Connolly gave to you, to go to Glencoe?” he asked. “It came from Bulger and Flemmi.”

By this time he had decided to get it all off his chest.

“He told me that he asked for it,” Debbie Noseworthy Morris said under oath. “He told me that Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi really liked him, and that if there was anything he ever wanted or needed that they would help him out, and this was something that he chose to ask for.”

Then Morris told her about the other two payoffs from Whitey.

“He told me that there was another thousand dollars in the bottom of the case of wine and $5,000 that he was given some other way.”

That night, soon after they arrived at their suburban tract home in northern Virginia, Morris suffered a massive heart attack that nearly killed him. Ten weeks later, on December 31, 1995, Morris retired from the FBI.

Billy had other things on his mind. He was writing his memoirs, a book that would appear under the title
While the Music Lasts
. Published in early 1996, the book received respectful, if not rave, reviews. It was published before the full extent of Whitey’s criminality became public knowledge, and so Billy felt free to write how his older sibling “abhorred addictive drugs,” and that much of the evidence against him was “purchased.”

“From everything I could see,” he wrote of Whitey, “he appeared to have taken enormous steps to separate himself from the environment that led to his early misbehavior....I know some of the allegations and much of the innuendo to be absolutely false. Other matters I cannot be sure about, one way or the other.”

A recurring theme of the book was how much Southie loathed informers, as they’re described on page 4, and snitching, as it’s called on page 8, and spies, as they are referred to on page 171. In what seemed to be an unconscious description of his own travails since 75 State Street, Billy wrote of the hero of his youth, James Michael Curley: “It was said he accepted graft, but that was never proved.”

The state colleges and universities of Massachusetts have long been dumping grounds for politicians with nowhere else to go, a description that certainly fit Billy. He had to get out of the legislature. He had overcome the “insurrection,” so it could never be said that he had been pushed out. But his time was over, and he didn’t want to end up like deposed House speaker Tommy McGee, a pathetic shadow from the past, trying to hang on for a few more years to increase his pension before finally decamping for Florida.

Billy probably would have preferred an appointment to the Supreme Judicial Court, but between Whitey and 75 State Street, that was not in the cards. But the presidency of the University of Massachusetts was open. And it had several distinct advantages over the SJC. First, it paid a lot more, and the higher his salary, the larger Billy’s pension would be when he finally retired. And UMass would provide him with yet another patronage pit. He could bring everybody over from the State House. And power would be easy to hold, because his board of trustees would be appointed by his good friend, Governor William F. Weld.

On November 28, 1995, the UMass board of trustees voted to hire Billy Bulger as the new president of UMass. His starting salary was $189,000.

Billy had two final tasks to accomplish before leaving the Senate. The first was to see that Tom Birmingham, the nephew of an Irish gangster, secured the votes to succeed Billy Bulger, the brother of an Irish gangster, as president of the Massachusetts State Senate.

The second was to make sure Billy Bulger Jr. succeeded him in the First Suffolk District seat that Billy had held for twenty-five years. Running against Billy Jr. would be Pat Loftus, the candidate Whitey had considered killing back in 1970, and state Representative Steve Lynch. Lynch, an up-from-the-boot-straps ironworker who had gone to night law school, appeared formidable, and Billy tried to stall the date of the election, until after the filing deadline for the September primaries. That way Lynch would have to risk his House seat for a dicey fight. But Bill Galvin, another of Billy’s old enemies from the State House, was now secretary of state, and he saw through Billy’s ploy. The primary would take place in the spring, and for Lynch, it would be a free shot—if he lost to Junior, he could still run for his House seat in the fall.

Billy had tried his best to bring Billy Jr. along, but the undistinguished thirty-four-year-old lawyer proved to be a hopeless candidate. In most of the newspaper photographs of the abbreviated campaign, Billy is almost always seen with his son, and he is the one talking. At subway stops, Billy would invariably be the one out front. The signs said “William M. Bulger” with a tiny “Jr.” next to the “r” in Bulger. Most of Lynch’s workers, if not Lynch himself, called the boy “Junior.”

As the campaign wound down, Billy was surprised by the fissures in his own now creaking political machine. Mike Flaherty, the former state rep and longtime co-host of the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast who nurtured dreams of political success for his own son and namesake, endorsed Lynch, and Billy never forgave him.

Billy wanted an old-style Bulger campaign, but the edge was gone. Billy’s people had gotten old. They had moved to the suburbs, many of them, or they were retired, collecting their monthly “kiss in the mail” from the city or state. It had been so long since the Bulgers had been in a real fight in Southie that they’d forgotten how to conduct a street-level campaign. For Junior, there would be no polling, no targeting of voters, no computers. Once, when a reporter asked Billy why none of the modern methods were being utilized, he smiled and said, “We don’t do that here, lad.”