Howie Carr (37 page)

After he finished he turned and walked hurriedly out of the room.

“The only one that looked surprised,” said someone who was there, “was Frank.”

Once Stevie announced that he was an informant for the FBI, Wolf granted the defendants’ motion for open, pretrial hearings. He had little choice; the issues raised by the indictment of an informant who was providing intelligence about his co-defendants needed to be publicly addressed, and dealt with, before any trials could begin. The only question now was just how much of the FBI’s dirty laundry would be aired.

Almost immediately, on May 22, 1997, the feds admitted that Whitey too had been an informant—something they had adamantly denied for almost a decade. Such admissions weren’t everyday occurrences, the federal prosecutors conceded. This one involved “unique and rare circumstances.”

The hearings began with a parade of current and former FBI agents. But the fed who would have been the star of the show—Zip Connolly—refused to testify without a grant of immunity, a deal the government would not consider. As his lawyer he retained R. Robert Popeo, who had represented Billy Bulger in the later stages of the 75 State Street probe.

When Zip was finally called to the stand, he took the Fifth. Outside the courtroom, as one FBI agent after another tore into him, Zip held press conferences, called reporters, and issued any number of denials—for example, the front-page story that he had received free stoves and refrigerators from Kevin O’Neil’s appliance store on West Broadway was “an abject lie,” as he put it. He went on friendly radio talk shows to rebut everything and everybody, especially Morris, who, unlike Zip, had been granted immunity. Zip described his old friend as “the most corrupt agent in FBI history.” Zip mounted some of his most eloquent defenses on the weekend radio talk show hosted by Andy Moes, a former freelance narcotics agent from Cape Cod who had sold marijuana to a couple of Kennedy cousins while working undercover as a taxi driver.

Meanwhile, as thousands of previously classified FBI documents were made public, Stevie’s history of treachery over the decades began to emerge in graphic detail. Johnny Martorano now read that in the mid-1960s, Stevie had dismissed him as a “pimp.” A report from another informant described how Stevie had planned to murder Larry Baione and then frame Johnny for the hit.

One morning in Plymouth, during a lull in the hearings, Johnny walked into Robert DeLuca’s cell in H3.

“Robert,” said Johnny, “I am going out that door before Stevie does. I am going to destroy him before he destroys me.”

He had made the decision to become an informant. The next morning Johnny was gone from the jail. Zip realized the immense danger that Johnny’s defection posed to him. It was Johnny who had procured the diamond ring back in 1976 that Whitey had given to Zip—his first payoff from the mobsters. Johnny had been around all those afternoons in the Marshall Street garage when Whitey was bragging about his close ties to Zip—or so Johnny would soon be testifying.

Within days, one of the most loyal Bulger sycophants in the press, Mike Barnicle of the
Globe
, turned in one of his trademark concoctions of factual errors mixed with outright fiction. Barnicle wrote that Martorano had murdered three young black women in a car in 1968—it apparently wasn’t enough that he had shot three African-Americans, one of whom had happened to be female. Then Barnicle quoted one of Connolly’s closest friends in the Boston Police Department, Eddie Walsh, as saying Martorano used blacks in Roxbury for “target practice,” a statement so inflammatory that the U.S. attorney later felt obliged to denounce it as “madness” and “fantasy.”

In a strange coincidence, Barnicle’s half-baked attempt to protect Zip by trashing Martorano turned out to be his final regular column for the
Globe
. A quarter-century of journalistic abuses had finally caught up with him and he was forced out in disgrace over other, earlier transgressions unrelated to the final Martorano column. After Barnicle’s departure, the paper had to run one last lengthy correction cataloguing the errors in that final piece. And the Bulgers had one fewer lackey they could rely on in the media.

Stevie was, of course, the hearing’s star witness. He was the gangster who’d been protected by the FBI, and telling all was the only way he was ever going to see the light of day again. If he could prove, through the testimony of himself and others, that he had indeed had protection from the FBI, then Judge Wolf would have no choice but to throw out the entire indictment.

But Stevie’s problem was that he couldn’t really come clean. Without immunity, he couldn’t admit to killings he hadn’t been charged with. And by the time Stevie took the stand, in August 1998, Johnny Martorano had already started outlining the details of almost twenty murders he’d committed. Many of his hits had been done at the direction of Whitey and Stevie, who had paid him more than $1 million during his years on the lam between 1978 and 1995. With notes from Martorano’s ongoing debriefings in front of him, Fred Wyshak would pepper Flemmi with questions about, say, the murder of Tommy King, or Eddie Connors, or James Sousa.

“Assert the Fifth on that,” Flemmi would say over and over again.

Wyshak hammered him repeatedly on how much he and Whitey benefited from the destruction of the Mafia in Boston.

Flemmi: “I’m not saying I didn’t capitalize on it in some way.”

Wyshak: “And you capitalized on eliminating your competition from the picture, isn’t that true?”

Flemmi: “In the course of our involvement with the FBI, that’s what was happening. The LCN [La Cosa

Nostra] was getting decimated. That’s what the goal was of the FBI.”

Wyshak: “And that was your goal too?”

Flemmi: “It goes with the territory...”

Wyshak: “And that made you a wealthy man, didn’t it?” Flemmi: “I’ll assert the Fifth on that.”

Wyshak: “Do you think, Mr. Flemmi, that you and Mr. Bulger single-handedly took the LCN down?” Flemmi: “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Wyshak. We did a hell of a job.”

Stevie’s lawyer, Ken Fishman, was in constant contact with Zip, who was trying his best to protect, not only himself, but also Billy. When Morris testified that he too had seen Billy at one of the Sunday dinners with the gangsters, Stevie brought up the testimony himself, to deny that it ever happened.

“Just wanted to clarify that,” he said.

Stevie also tried to insulate Zip from taking the fall for tipping him to the pending indictment back in 1994. He told Wyshak he got the message from Whitey “by telephone” at his mother’s house.

Wyshak: “Where was Mr. Bulger?”

Flemmi: “He didn’t say.”

Wyshak: “Did you ask him?”

Flemmi: “No, I just took the message.”

It was a hearing, rather than a trial, which meant there was no jury in the courtroom, so the marshals seated the two remaining defendants—Salemme and Rhode Island mobster Robert DeLuca—in the jury box. Salemme sat directly across the courtroom from his old friend on the witness stand, and watched in increasing disbelief as Flemmi continued to lie. Stevie was jeopardizing all their cases to protect a crooked FBI agent.

During the next break, when they were all back in the courthouse holding pen, Salemme grabbed Flemmi and screamed: “You piece of shit! You fucked me all my life, and now you’re screwing everyone around you. Fucking scum!”

By now, Johnny Martorano had told the prosecutors that Stevie believed Whitey had tape-recorded many, if not most, of his conversations with FBI agents. Whitey had just considered it prudent to have evidence of the “protection” that he’d been promised over the years. Judge Wolf asked Stevie if he really believed Whitey had tape-recorded his meetings with the feds.

“Knowing Mr. Bulger, Your Honor, it’s very possible....

Anything is possible.”

Judge Wolf asked him if he’d ever seen any such tape recordings.

“I’ve seen his tape recorder. It was a pretty good one, a small tape recorder, and he had other electronic equipment.”

The prosecutor Wyshak tried to draw Stevie out, by asking him if he felt betrayed by Zip Connolly. Stevie admitted that he’d expected Zip to get him out of this terrible predicament. Through intermediaries, he’d asked Zip to help him out.

Wyshak: “And did you receive an answer?”

Flemmi: “He didn’t testify in my behalf.”

Wyshak: “Did you receive an answer?”

Flemmi: “That was my answer. He didn’t testify in my behalf.”

Zip had let him down, the feds had let him down, everyone had betrayed Stevie. And then there was Whitey.

Wyshak: “At some point, I guess, you realized Mr. Bulger wasn’t going to come to the rescue, is that right?”

Flemmi: “I can’t say that.”

Wyshak: “You can’t say that? Well, he hasn’t rescued you so far, has he?”

Flemmi: “He must be working on it.”

As president of the University of Massachusetts, Billy tried to ignore the circus unfolding down in Post Office Square. Usually when his name was mentioned, his spokesmen—two former State House reporters—haughtily responded that “the president” had no comment. On occasion, he had to respond. Eventually, former FBI supervisor James Ring took the stand and placed Billy at that dinner with Whitey and Stevie at Mrs. Flemmi’s house next door to his. Billy was asked to comment on Ring’s sworn testimony.

“I never met the man,” Billy said. “It never took place, but the business of denying such things is to make it appear as if something sinister had happened.”

Billy remained secure in his UMass sinecure, even after the departure of Governor Bill Weld, who had lost whatever little interest he still had in the governorship once he was defeated by Senator John Kerry in the 1996 U.S. Senate race. In 1997, Weld resigned and was replaced by Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci, that good friend of Billy’s whose primary political handicap was a $700,000 debt that he couldn’t quite explain.

Despite those lingering questions, in 1998 Cellucci eliminated two more of Billy’s longtime foes. In the GOP primary for governor, Cellucci crushed state Treasurer Joe Malone. And in the general election, Cellucci edged the attorney general, Luther Scott Harshbarger, who had issued the final not-exactly-exculpatory report on 75 State Street.

Still, election night 1998 was perhaps the last time that Billy could tell himself that nothing had really changed. Cellucci’s victory meant four more years of business as usual, and what pleased Billy even more was that Cellucci had picked as his running mate yet another malleable ex-Republican state senator, Jane Swift, a member of the Senate’s GOP Class of 1990.

Billy could relax for a while now. Even if Cellucci moved on, Billy would continue to have a close friend, a former senator, in the Corner Office. And that was what counted, because the governor appointed the members of the UMass board of trustees. And Billy quickly discovered that it was even easier to control the board than it had been the state Senate. Just as he’d renovated his own office at the State House, now he moved the president’s office to a much plusher location, at One Beacon Street. From the twenty-sixth floor, he could look down, literally, on the State House.

He now controlled thirty thousand square feet of prime office space, which he filled with the same crew of yes-men who’d subsisted for years, if not decades, on his Beacon Hill payroll. Paul Mahoney was gone, and in his place was Paul Mahoney Jr. Billy also continued the old State House tradition of “taking hostages”—hiring relatives of the politicians who controlled his budget. One of his new vice presidents was the wife of his handpicked replacement as Senate president, Tom Birmingham. Mrs. Birmingham made $148,000 a year.

Others were hired simply because they were longtime lackeys Billy felt comfortable with. Just as he surrounded himself with aides of questionable talent, so did his underlings. His new $168,000-a-year chancellor of UMass Dartmouth appointed as her $140,000-a-year associate chancellor a woman who didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree. The pair of State House reporters Billy had hired to issue his “no comments” to reporters were both soon making over $100,000 a year.

As his trustees, Billy sought out yet more of his “friends.” Andy Moes, the rotund ex-narc-turned-weekend-talk-show-host who had been so obsequious to Zip—his wife was a lawyer, and she was quickly appointed a trustee.

Once the board was stacked with similar rubber stamps and nonentities, Billy decided it was time to renegotiate his own contract. The $189,000 had seemed like a decent wage when he first engineered his own hiring, but since then, he’d been to conferences with other college presidents, and he’d also brushed up on the various foundations’ annual salary reports. Billy now felt he deserved a salary more befitting a man of his . . . caliber. The negotiations were handled by Bobby Karam, a businessman from Bristol County and a friend of Senator Biff MacLean’s, one of Billy’s oldest cronies on Beacon Hill, whose career had ended with his payment of a $512,000 fine for conflict of interest in the awarding of state insurance contracts.

Billy’s salary skyrocketed to $359,000, including perks. State employees began talking about just how huge Billy’s pension would be, should he ever retire. Soon the husband of Karam’s cousin was hired by Billy’s handpicked UMass Dartmouth chancellor for a $120,000-a-year job at the school. Billy and his friends then tried to buy a nearby unaccredited law school for UMass Dartmouth, even though less than a quarter of its recent graduates had been able to pass the Massachusetts bar exam. But even Billy couldn’t close that deal; faced with a need to spend perhaps as much as $40 million to win accreditation for a school the state didn’t even need, the Board of Higher Education nixed the purchase. Billy’s clout was starting to slip, if just a bit.

As Senate president, Billy had long chafed at the fact that reporters could find out how much he was paying, say, his niece, or his sister, or his son-in-law. So as soon as he was able to manage it, he had all the university payrolls transferred from the state comptroller to his own office. If any “savages” from the press now wanted to scour his schools’ payrolls, they’d first have to get his permission, and that would happen at about the same time he “deemed it appropriate,” as he once put it, to explain 75 State Street, namely, never.