Howie Carr (8 page)

They filed in for lunch, Ted and Billy and Doherty and a few others. Everyone else in the party took their cues from Teddy and ordered light. But Billy ordered the most famous and expensive item on the menu—Lobster Savannah, which cost $10, a fabulous sum for a meal in 1962.

All through lunch as the rest of the party implored Billy to jump the McCormacks’ sinking ship, he kept shoveling it in. Finally, Gerry Doherty, the Kennedys’ embarrassed emissary, asked Billy to put down the fork long enough to at least listen to their pitch. But Teddy shook his head.

“I don’t know whether we should try to persuade him,” Teddy said to Doherty. “I know we can’t afford to keep feeding him.”

Teddy Kennedy easily defeated Eddie McCormack in the primary, despite the attorney general’s sneering comment to him in a televised debate that, “If your name were Edward Moore, your candidacy would be a joke.” Suddenly, though, in October the focus shifted from state politics to international brinkmanship, as the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba, within easy striking distance of the U.S. mainland. President Kennedy demanded their immediate withdrawal, the Russians refused, and a naval blockade around the island began.

For several days, the world appeared to be on the verge of nuclear war. When the crisis ended, JFK’s poll numbers soared, and not only did his brother Teddy win what had become the family’s U.S. Senate seat, but Massachusetts narrowly elected JFK’s Harvard ’39 classmate, Endicott “Chub” Peabody, as governor. His first order of business was engineering the removal of the Iron Duke as speaker. Thompson had not been cooperative during the Cuban Missile Crisis when JFK had wanted a pro forma resolution of support from his home state’s legislature. Among the rank-and-file reps, the years of frustration were finally boiling over, and several candidates emerged, one of whom was Michael Paul Feeney, a reclusive state rep from Hyde Park who had first been elected in 1938, and whose proudest accomplishment in politics was his two-digit license plate, 54.

Billy Bulger threw in his lot with Paul Feeney.

For some who followed Billy’s career, it would be the first example of a problem that would haunt him through the decades—an inability to judge character or talent.

“Everybody knew what a pious fraud Feeney was,” said a surviving legislative colleague. “But Billy was still right there with him.”

Feeney’s candidacy went nowhere, but Billy wouldn’t budge. It was his year of lost causes—first Eddie McCormack, then Paul Feeney. On the eve of the vote, in January 1963, he received a phone call from the lame-duck attorney general, Eddie McCormack, asking him to come down the hall to his office right away. As soon as Billy arrived at Eddie’s office, he received a call from Speaker McCormack, asking him to change his vote from Feeney to Thompson.

Billy was in a quandary. He felt he still owed the speaker, for Whitey, yet he also didn’t want to ask Feeney to release him from his commitment to support him for speaker. McCormack told him not to worry, that Feeney would release everyone when he realized his cause was hopeless. He did, and the Iron Duke was reelected speaker, much to the irritation of JFK and his new, handpicked governor.

By then, Speaker McCormack had already delivered again for Whitey. He’d been transferred out of Alcatraz in 1962, a year before it was closed down. His last stop would be Leavenworth, where he had at least a couple of visitors from Boston. One was Will McDonough, now covering the Red Sox for the
Globe
. On a road trip with the team to Kansas City, McDonough rented a car and drove to Leavenworth, where he promised to take care of Whitey when he was released.

“I can get you a job,” he said, and Whitey knew the kind of work Will had in mind—a patronage job somewhere. That might look good to his parole officer, but Whitey had his own plans, and they didn’t involve punching a time clock.

Billy and Mary were now having one child per year. In 1964, old Jim Bulger died, but his widow, Jean, stayed on in the apartment on Logan Way. She was waiting for her oldest son, Jimmy, to come home to her. Which he did, finally. In March 1965, almost nine years since he’d pleaded guilty to bank robbery, Whitey Bulger was released from Leavenworth and returned to Boston.

In May 1965, the Massachusetts Crime Commission issued its final, blistering report on corruption in the state.

Part III dealt with the unchecked power of organized crime, and laid much of the blame for the state’s endemic corruption on urban politicians who looked the other way.

“Until the electorates in these areas elect officials who will attack illegal gambling actively, or until there is law enforcement by a state agency, such local conditions will continue,” the report concluded. “There is little indication that such electorates will change their voting habits in the foreseeable future.”

The commission was prescient, if nothing else. Then the panel assessed just how the Mob was able to survive:

“— They exercise strong political power in some quarters; “— They use bribery and physical violence without hesitation and with little fear of detection;

“— They command unlimited funds;

“— And they have a comprehensive spy system which enables them to exercise their power effectively.”

The commission had laid out, in a few words, exactly how Whitey Bulger would rise to the pinnacle of organized crime in Boston over the next thirty years.

CHAPTER 3

A
S MISERABLE AS HIS TIME IN
prison was, Whitey’s enforced absence from Boston between 1956 and 1965 was the best career move he ever made, even better than hooking up with the FBI a few years later.

During the time he spent in Alcatraz and Leavenworth, the Boston underworld’s internecine gang war eliminated large numbers of the hoodlums who would have become Whitey’s competition in the decades ahead. Many were murdered, others imprisoned, while still more simply fled the area forever.

What became known as the Irish Gang War began on Labor Day weekend 1961. In Charlestown and neighboring Somerville, two predominantly Irish mobs coexisted relatively peacefully. The Somerville group, the Winter Hill Gang, was run by Buddy McLean, and the McLaughlins of Charlestown were headed up by Bernie McLaughlin, the oldest of the three brothers who gave the crew its name. As summer 1961 ended, members of both gangs were partying in Salisbury Beach, New Hampshire. The youngest of the McLaughlin brothers was drunk, as usual, and he made some unwelcome advances toward the girlfriend of a fringe member of the Somerville crew.

When Georgie McLaughlin refused to take no for an answer, he was severely beaten and dumped unconscious in front of the emergency room of a local hospital. A few days later his older brother Bernie demanded that the Winter Hill boss, Buddy McLean, turn over the guys who’d inflicted the beating on Georgie.

McLean refused. Georgie, he said, had had it coming. Bernie was not accustomed to getting no for an answer, and a few nights later the McLaughlins tried to wire a bomb to the car Buddy McLean’s wife used to drive their children to school. Such a provocation could not go unchallenged. At noon the next day, on the McLaughlins’ home turf of City Square, Charlestown, Buddy McLean shot Bernie McLaughlin in the back of the head in front of dozens of witnesses, none of whom offered to positively identify the shooter for the police.

The war was on, and before it was over, more than forty Boston hoodlums would be dead.

At the beginning of the Irish Gang War, the local Mafia watched, amused, as the Irish and their Italian allies who weren’t in La Cosa Nostra slaughtered one another. Soon, however, the Italians realized their rackets were being adversely affected by the bloodshed and the resulting public attention. Individual Mafia members found themselves forced to choose sides, and they usually threw in with the gang whose members they’d been closest to during their last stretch in prison. It was a tangled situation, ripe for exploitation, and during Whitey’s absence from the scene, a new force appeared on the local underworld scene—the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Over the next three decades, the FBI would realize its goal, practically destroying organized crime in Boston. But as it dismantled the competing criminal syndicates, the bureau’s local office too would be devastated by the ethical compromises its agents had to make, compromises that quickly degenerated into outright corruption that included subornation of perjury, bribery, and even murder.

Until 1957, J. Edgar Hoover had denied even the existence of an American Mafia. But after Robert F. Kennedy was appointed attorney general by his brother, the pressure on Hoover to deliver Mafia scalps became overwhelming. Despite the Kennedy family’s long-standing ties to organized crime, dating from the patriarch Joe’s Prohibition bootlegging to the president’s sharing of a girlfriend with Chicago mobster Sam “Momo” Giancana, Bobby despised the Mob and put the heat on the FBI to crack down. On March 14, 1961, Hoover issued a memo instructing the field offices to “infiltrate organized crime groups to the same degree that we have been able to penetrate the Communist Party and other subversive organizations.”

In Boston, that task would fall mostly to H. Paul Rico, the Belmont native and Boston College grad who knew Whitey from the old days in Bay Village. Rico’s partner was Dennis Condon, a Charlestown guy, conveniently enough. They had joined the bureau within a month of each other in 1951.

As the gang war dragged on, a couple of particularly deadly hitmen began to stand out among the crews of underworld killers stalking Boston. Their names were Joe Barboza and Vincent Flemmi (better known as “Jimmy the Bear”), and both of them became so feared that the city’s newspaper photographers, a raffish lot themselves, often attached a note to the back of their arrest photos: “NO credit on photograph!”

Barboza was a Portuguese-American, from New Bedford, and he dreamed of being the first non-Italian to be inducted into the Mafia. But behind his back, Mafia boss Raymond Patriarca referred to him as “the nigger.”

By 1964, Patriarca insisted that all of Barboza’s hits be cleared through him. Discussions took place at his headquarters on Atwells Avenue on Federal Hill in Providence. In May 1965 the feds reported to Hoover on a conversation one of their informants had heard between Patriarca and his hitman Barboza, who wanted permission to whack an unidentified, but very hard-to-get, hoodlum whom Barboza had been tracking for months.

“He lives in a three-story house,” Barboza told Patriarca. “So what I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna break into the basement and pour gasoline all around and torch the place, after which I either get him with the smoke inhalation or I pick him off when he’s climbing out the window.”

Barboza had worked out a plan for every contingency. He would bring three shooters with him, to watch each side of the house. They would cut the telephone lines to the houses, so that the victim couldn’t call the fire department. And just in case one of the neighbors called, before setting the house on fire Barboza planned to phone in false alarms across the city to tie up every fire company.

Patriarca asked Barboza if anyone else lived in the house, and Barboza mentioned his victim’s mother.

“You’re gonna kill his mother too?” Patriarca asked. “It ain’t my fault she lives there.”

Patriarca canceled the contract.

The other top gun in the city was Jimmy “the Bear” Flemmi. Unlike Barboza, he was a Boston native, from Roxbury, and he and his younger brother Stevie both worked with an older hood named Wimpy Bennett. A third Flemmi brother, Michael, would soon join the Boston Police Department.

In the mid-1960s, the Bear too was piling up bodies right and left. Once in 1964 he murdered an ex-con in an Uphams Corner bar and then chopped off his head. Flemmi left the headless torso in a South Boston housing project (the head was never found). In May 1964, FBI agent Condon filed a report on a conversation another one of his informants had had with Jimmy the Bear: “Flemmi told him all he wants to do now is kill people, and that it is better than hitting banks.”

Finally, Gennaro “Gerry” Angiulo, who was running the Boston Mafia as Patriarca’s underboss, held a sit-down with Jimmy the Bear inside an FBI-bugged barroom on Tremont Street. From now on, Angiulo told him, Patriarca—“the Man,” as he was called—would have to approve each of his hits, personally, just as he did with Barboza.

“The Man says that you don’t use common sense when it comes to killing people,” Angiulo lectured. “Jimmy, you don’t kill somebody just because you have an argument with him.”

FBI agent Rico followed the bloodletting closely. Hoover’s newfound obsession with the Mafia meant the agents had carte blanche to cut deals with anyone who could help them achieve their mission of destroying Italian organized crime.

For any criminal who could provide the FBI with information about the Mafia, no favor was too great. Buddy McLean, for example, became one of Rico’s most valuable informants. In 1964, Ronnie Dermody, one of Whitey’s old bank-robbing crew, was released from prison and fell in with the McLaughlins. Gunning for the Winter Hill Gang boss, one night Dermody wounded a civilian he had mistaken for Buddy. As he fled, Dermody was positively identified by Winter Hill hoodlums. In a panic, knowing that he was now marked for death, Dermody called Rico to arrange his surrender to police. When Dermody arrived at the agreed-upon spot, a few blocks from Rico’s Belmont home, he was met not by FBI agents but by McLean, who shot him dead on the spot. It went into police files as another “unsolved” murder.

Rico couldn’t recruit Mafia members themselves as informants, because they were the target, so he focused instead on cultivating sources who associated with the Mafia but who had not been inducted into La Cosa Nostra.

In March 1965, Rico wanted to flip Jimmy the Bear. Rico didn’t care how many thugs Flemmi killed, as long as he could feed the FBI information on the Mafia. But even as Rico tried to recruit him, Flemmi was stalking his next victim, a smalltime hood named Edward “Teddy” Deegan. It was the murder of this minor figure that would come to symbolize the corruption in the Boston FBI office.