Where the Bodies Were Buried (14 page)

The bookies didn't like it. It was a thug move by Winter Hill, a strong-arm tactic. If you didn't pay rent, you'd be put out of business. Your family would be threatened. You might be murdered in a most violent manner, so as to serve as an example to others who considered defying the dictates of the Mob.

There were benefits to being aligned with Winter Hill. If a bookie were having a problem with a customer or a fellow bookie, the Winter Hill Mob would take care of it. Since bookies were not normally men of violence, they needed protection. Bulger, Flemmi, and their crew served as the muscle behind the entire operation.

According to Katz, Bulger and Flemmi's blunt demands for rent caused discord and dissension among the bookmakers, though it would not have been wise to voice those concerns too loudly. Chico Krantz, for one—Katz's mentor and benefactor—resented the new arrangement. His dissatisfaction would eventually lead to his becoming a rat and entering into a cooperation agreement with Wyshak and company.

For some, the alliance with Winter Hill was profitable. Katz was able to link up with other bookies, both as an agent and as a partner. His business diversified. He became a loan shark, or shylock, lending money to people at usurious rates. Katz became partners with Joe Yerardi, a Winter Hill guy, who along with being a major bookmaker also controlled the concession on poker and vending machines in bars and diners all around the city. And through the association with Winter Hill, the bookies developed what
seemed like a fail-safe way to launder their proceeds, always a problem for bookmakers.

At Heller's Café in Chelsea, a Winter Hill guy named Michael London ran a check-cashing business. If a bookie had a good, solid customer who could only pay by check, he could make out a check to “John Hancock” or “Babe Ruth” and the bookie would bring the check to Heller's.

“And when you brought the check with Babe Ruth's name on it to Michael London,” said Wyshak, “wouldn't he say, ‘You're not Babe Ruth'?”

“No, he had no qualms about taking the check.”

“And how would you endorse that kind of check?”

“I would sign, Babe Ruth.”

At this, for the first time since the Bulger trial began, laughter rippled through the courtroom. Even Bulger smiled.

Katz admitted that in his long career as a bookie he had probably laundered millions of dollars through this check-cashing scheme.

It was the plight of the bookmaker to occasionally get arrested and charged with a crime like wire fraud, or violating bank laws, or some other financial offense. In his career, Katz was busted numerous times.

“Have you ever been convicted for any crime other than gaming-related offenses?” asked the prosecutor.

“No,” said the witness. “That's been my life.”

On cross-examination Katz began to chafe a bit under the questioning. Up until then, his time on the witness stand had mostly been a pleasant trip down memory lane, but the defense counsel had other matters in mind.

“While you were in prison,” asked Carney, “did you learn about Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure number thirty-five?”

Katz contended that he had never heard of this rule by name, but, on further questioning, he admitted that he was well aware of the parameters of the statute. Virtually every incarcerated criminal knows about Rule 35. It is the federal statute that provides for a reduction of prison time if a criminal rats on another criminal and provides the feds with “substantial assistance.” Said Carney, “The determination about whether you give substantial assistance to the prosecutor is a decision made exclusively by the prosecutor, correct?”

“I was advised of that,” answered Katz.

“It's not a decision made by a jury, is it?”

“No, it's not.”

“It's not even a decision made by a judge?”

“Right.”

“It's made by the prosecutor, correct?”

“Correct.”

The implication was clear: prosecutors Wyshak and Kelly had for years had Katz eating out of their hand, telling them what they wanted to hear to get out of prison and stay out.

Carney concluded his cross-examination by getting Katz to admit that in all his years as bookie for the Winter Hill Mob, he met Jim Bulger exactly one time, and that no words were ever spoken between them.

RICHARD “DICKIE” O'BRIEN
was another bookie from the old days. But unlike Jimmy Katz, he met Bulger often and considered himself lucky to be alive to talk about it.

Before O'Brien took the stand, Judge Casper was informed by the prosecutors that the witness was nearly eighty-five years old, and that, normally, he was wheelchair-bound and on an oxygen tank. He would be testifying without his tank, it was believed, and everything should be okay, but the judge, in her role as custodian of the courtroom, needed to be informed about these things. It was another reminder that the events of the Bulger years were distant, and that many witnesses at the trial would be in their golden years, using their last remaining breaths to rat out Whitey and exculpate their sins before going to wherever it is that deceased racketeers go when they die.

On the stand, O'Brien was shown surveillance photos from the Lancaster Street garage, the remnants of state trooper Bobby Long's aborted investigation from long ago. O'Brien was shown the photos so that he could identify Bulger and Flemmi, but in one of the photos Flemmi was seen talking with a man in his forties, matinee-idol handsome, with a full head of black hair and impressive posture.

“Who is that man to the right of Mr. Flemmi?” asked the prosecutor.

O'Brien looked at the photo, blinked his eyes, as if he were conjuring memories and images from some faraway place. “That's me,” he said.

Thirty-five years later, O'Brien still had the hair, though it was now white. A generation removed from the dangers of the street, he was affable and almost wistful as prosecutor Zach Hafer led him on a journey deep into the hidden corridors and musty closets of his distant past.

He was a graduate of Quincy High School, class of 1947. After joining the army and serving one year in Korea during the war, O'Brien returned to Massachusetts and, utilizing the GI Bill, attended Boston University. That didn't last long. O'Brien dropped out of college and went to work with his father.

“And what did your father do?” asked Hafer.

“He was a bookmaker,” said O'Brien.

O'Brien's father had been a bookmaker since the 1930s. Though it was an illegal profession, he never hid the fact that he was a bookie. Cops, politicians, newspapermen, little old ladies—they all placed bets with the neighborhood bookmaker. To Dickie O'Brien, it was the family business, and with his friendly demeanor and old-world sense of honor, it was inevitable that he would follow in his father's footsteps.

By the late 1950s, when Dickie became involved, his father had his own office in Boston's South End. Dickie worked as an agent for his father, who in turn worked under a big-time bookmaker named Bernard McGarry. O'Brien explained his role: “As an agent, you go out on the street and get play. People want to gamble, they'll bet numbers, they'll bet horses, they'll bet sports, and they'll call it into their office, which my father and I ran the office. And you saw to it that if they won, they were paid promptly. . . . Now, the payment arrangements would be if the agent had a winning week with sports and horses, he would receive fifty percent of what he won. The other fifty percent would go to the office. So we would collect what was coming to us, and of course the agent would keep what was coming to them. . . . Now, the office obligation was to pay whatever the agent lost. So say that he lost five thousand for the week. Well, the office paid that five thousand. That five thousand would be set aside, called makeup. Until the agent won that five thousand back and got the office even, he wouldn't receive a commission. So it was an unwritten law that you stayed with an office, the office paid a certain amount of money to keep you in business. You stayed with them, and you tried to work it off.”

O'Brien recalled an incident in 1960, after Bernard McGarry was arrested and his father suffered the first in a series of heart attacks that would lead to his retirement. Dickie O'Brien was feeling like a man without a country, or at least a man without a financial benefactor to help sustain the O'Brien family business. That's when a friend of O'Brien said, “Well, I can help you solve that problem.”

“How?” asked O'Brien.

“I have a good friend in Providence. Mr. Patriarca.”

On the witness stand, O'Brien smiled. He was recapturing the moments of his prime, when the blood pumped vigorously in his veins, the money was good, and he had friends in high places.

Zach Hafer, the prosecutor, was not yet born at the time of these events. “Mr. O'Brien,” he asked, “did you go to Providence at some time in the early 1960s?”

“Yes, I did. To meet Mr. Patriarca.”

“Who did you understand Raymond Patriarca to be in the early 1960s?”

“A gentleman who was the head of the Mafia in New England.”

O'Brien described his meeting with Patriarca in Providence as if it were a high point in his career, akin to having had a sitting with the pope. Apparently, that day Jimmy Hoffa, president of the Teamsters union and a friend of the Mob, had been arrested. “They were all rather up in arms about that,” remembered O'Brien. “And so he said to me, Mr. Patriarca”—always “Mister” with O'Brien, never “Raymond”—“Lookit, he said, you go to Boston, it's already been arranged for you to meet with the Angiulo people, which I did.”

And so, thanks to the Godfather of New England, O'Brien was assigned as an agent with the Angiulo brothers in the North End. He was officially with the Mafia now.

These were heady days for the O'Brien family business. They lasted for eight years, until late 1968, when Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo, boss of the Italian North End, was indicted on a murder charge. The main witness against Angiulo was Joe Barboza, scourge of the Boston underworld. Angiulo would eventually beat this case, but in the meantime, the indictment put their bookmaking operations on hold. This meant that Dickie O'Brien was once again without an office to lay off his action. But he was a well-known
bookie by now, with friends all over town. He did business with Italians, Irish, African Americans, it didn't matter. O'Brien was able to function as an independent operator and keep his business afloat for the next five years.

And then he received a message from a fellow bookie that there was someone in South Boston who wanted to speak with him.

O'Brien had heard of Whitey Bulger, though they had never met. He was aware that Bulger was affiliated with the Winter Hill Mob, which at the time was headed by Howie Winter. It behooved anyone in the Boston underworld who was engaged in criminal business to know all the players and with whom they were connected. O'Brien was not against the idea of hitching his wagon to a larger organization, always a beneficial arrangement for a bookmaker, because you could lay off bets with the office. So when Dickie was called to a meeting at a bar in Quincy called Kimberly's, he did not hesitate to go.

Asked the prosecutor, “What was the purpose of this meeting at Kimberly's in the early 1970s?”

“Well, the thing was, being independent, the news got out, naturally, it's street talk, that I was independent, and Mr. Bulger wanted to talk to me. . . . He said to me, You're by yourself—in so many words, I don't remember the exact wording, but, in so many words, he said, You're by yourself now. I said, Yes. And he said, Well, I think you should be with us. And I said, Well, I had been with the North End. He said, Forget the North End. If you want to be in business, you're with us. And that was put down by law.”

“Did you know who he was associated with?”

“Well, I heard about them, because their reputations always preceded them.”

“And what was that reputation?”

“That they were very capable.”

“And by ‘capable' what do you mean?”

O'Brien explained it as if he were talking with someone who spoke a different language. “Well,” he said, “they had somewhat of a gang war in South Boston and people were shot, and Mr. Bulger ended up on top, so you can draw your own conclusions.”

This meeting at Kimberly's had taken place not long after the momentous mobster summit meeting at Chandler's, where Pat Nee, Howie Winter,
John Martorano, and others had agreed to an arrangement where Bulger had officially become a member of the Winter Hill Mob. At the time of that meeting, Bulger's gang, led by the Killeen brothers, was in the process of being wiped out. Bulger was at that meeting almost as a favor; the Winter Hill Mob was willing to cut him in partly because he was a guy with an up-and-coming brother in state politics. Somehow, on the street, Bulger had turned this into a story of how he won the gang war. It was an early manifestation of Bulger's talent for burnishing his own legend.

Dickie O'Brien felt as if he had no choice: if he did not go into business with Bulger and his crew, he would be put out of business.

It turned out to be a bad arrangement. Unlike the Mafia, the Winter Hill Mob had no interest in establishing an office so that bookies under their umbrella could lay off bets. The only interest that Winter Hill had was in collecting rent from the bookies, numbers runners, loan sharks, and other racketeers within their domain. “It was like night and day,” said O'Brien. “With the Angiulos, they were very businesslike. There was no rent being paid. You gave them your business, layoffs, and they took the opportunity to win or lose. But when it was Stevie and Mr. Bulger, they weren't interested in that. They were interested only in the rent.”

O'Brien made payments of two thousand dollars a week to Bulger, usually hand-delivered in a brown paper envelope at Triple O's Lounge or the South Boston Liquor Mart, two locations that served as headquarters for Whitey's criminal operations in Southie.