Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (11 page)

In 1971, the Mullens-Killeen war
escalated dramatically, both in its malevolence and in its pointlessness. One day Buddy Roache, a Mullens member, approached O’Sullivan and Whitey in a bar on Broadway. Buddy said he didn’t have a beef with them, but that he was going to kill Donnie Killeen and end the war once and for all. It was a remarkable thing to say, especially given that there were no other Mullens present to watch his back. Buddy Roache must have assumed that O’Sullivan and Whitey were too smart to do something stupid in a crowded barroom.

Buddy’s brother Mickey was a cop and a decade later would become Boston police commissioner. But Buddy Roache was alone and unprotected when O’Sullivan pulled a .22 from his pocket. The shot struck Buddy Roache’s spine and paralyzed him. Even with Buddy’s brother a police officer, there were no arrests: While Buddy couldn’t walk, neither would he speak, at least to the cops. The bar was crowded, but in typical Southie fashion, no one saw the shooter.

The war then took a turn that Whitey wasn’t ready for. He was in New York, visiting an old friend from prison in Atlanta, Tommy Devaney, an enforcer with the Westies gang on Manhattan’s West Side, when he got the phone call: The Mullens had shot Billy O’Sullivan in front of his house. O’Sullivan’s murder rattled Whitey; if his mentor, the craftiest killer around, was vulnerable, what of him? At Whitey’s urging, Devaney traveled to Southie and drove around with him. The word spread quickly: the Westies were with the Killeens. But if this display was meant to intimidate the Mullens, it didn’t work. O’Sullivan’s murder had convinced them that they were winning.

“We weren’t afraid of them,” Pat Nee said, “and they knew it.”

Nee, by his own account, came close to killing Whitey twice. Both times he had him in his crosshairs but held his fire, fearing he’d hit innocent bystanders. His first chance came one afternoon when Nee was sitting in a bar across from South Station, the main commuter train station on the city’s south side. It was rush hour and Nee looked out the window as traffic inched along and horns blared.

“Shit,” he said to Paul McGonagle. “It’s Whitey.”

Whitey was sitting in the driver’s seat of a blue LTD, little more than a hundred feet away. He was trapped—by traffic, and now by the Mullens.

“Give me your gun,” Nee whispered.

McGonagle slid a .32 under the table and Nee slipped it into his jacket. He walked out the bar door and broke into a gallop. Jack Curran, a Killeen enforcer, and another guy were in the backseat. They usually carried, but Nee had them cornered. Or thought he did. Whitey, who prided himself on his evasive driving techniques, simply pulled the car onto a median strip and plowed into the opposing lane, sending sparks flying from the undercarriage. Nee stopped and took aim. Whitey was careening away and there were innocent passersby everywhere, so Nee let his arm fall to his side and melted into the crowd.

Nee walked back into the bar and found that McGonagle had bought a beer to console him. “I found out something,” Pat Nee said. “They weren’t carrying. If they were, they would have drawn on me.”

The next day, Nee went down to the Mullens clubhouse and sat at the bar next to Jimmy “The Weasel” Mantville. Mantville was one of the Mullens who had enthusiastically embraced the transformation from brawlers to shooters. “Weasel,” Pat Nee said, sliding an arm around his shoulder, “we’re going hunting.”

They made a lovely couple, Nee and Mantville. Nee wore a dark wig and mustache. Mantville squeezed into one of his girlfriend’s dresses and donned a woman’s blonde wig. Nee took a baby doll and bundled it up in a child’s car seat. But their prey proved elusive. Whitey was nowhere to be found, and Donnie Killeen was hard to find alone. Whenever he wasn’t in his house or at the Transit, holding court, he walked on Broadway with his young son. “We had standards in Southie, and no one would shoot a guy if the guy was with his kid,” Nee said. “If you did that, you’d end up dead.”

The courtesy went both ways, Pat Nee found out. Like most of the other high-profile Mullens, Nee had moved out of his home in Southie during the war and was staying at a girlfriend’s house in the Bunker Hill housing project in Charlestown. He kept his .45 with him at all times, and as he watched TV with his girlfriend’s young daughter, Nee had the gun hidden under a dish towel on the coffee table.

“The light from the TV lit up the window to the apartment, and I could see a rifle barrel pointed at the window. Actually, at me,” Nee said. “I saw Whitey’s face. I knew it was him. He had the drop on me.”

Nee went for his gun, and his sudden motion startled his girlfriend’s daughter. The little girl jumped up. “She was right in the line of fire,” Nee said. “She was between me and the window. I looked right over her at Whitey. He lowered the gun and smiled at me. And then he just disappeared.”

Nee grabbed a rifle and gave chase. He saw Whitey running across the courtyard, holding a rifle. Nee knelt down and tried to focus on Whitey in his scope. There were people sitting on stoops and walking in the courtyard, and they kept coming into Nee’s view. Before he could draw a bead, Whitey was in the passenger-side seat of a car whose door had swung open. The tires squealed and Pat Nee cursed. “I never regretted not shooting in those circumstances, because I could have hit anybody, even though I’m pretty sure I would have got Whitey, too,” Nee said. “And if I had, a lot of other people would still be alive.”
¹⁸

As adroit as Whitey was at dodging assassination attempts, he knew some day his luck might run out. So he planned ahead for his own death. He bought a fine suit and hung it in a girlfriend’s closet. “In case I was gunned down in gang war,” he explained to a friend years later. “For [my] funeral, if open casket, [I] wanted to make good appearance.”
¹⁹

Like a lot of people, Nee believes the credit for ending the Southie gang war goes to Jimmy Mantville and Tommy King. While the Mullens had abided by the rule of not shooting Donnie Killeen as he walked on Broadway with his son, there was nothing that said they couldn’t shoot him outside his suburban home after the boy’s birthday party.

It was a Saturday night, May 13, 1972, and the Killeen family had just finished dinner and were about to cut the cake for Killeen’s four-year-old son when Donnie told his wife he had to get something outside. As soon as he climbed into the driver’s-side seat of his car, Mantville and King ran up with a submachine gun. They had been lying in wait, hidden in a nearby aqueduct, for hours. The medical examiner took fifteen slugs from Killeen’s body. The .38 revolver Killeen grabbed from the glove compartment hadn’t been fired.
²⁰

The Mullens were exultant. They sent a bouquet of flowers to Donnie Killeen’s wake with an “Au Revoir” ribbon stripped across the front. There was one final insult: the flowers were sent COD.
²¹

Chandler’s nightclub in Boston’s South End
was a living, breathing stereotype, the Hollywood image of a gangster hangout. The polished mahogany bar was lined with hard men, many of them wearing leather jackets, and garishly painted women. Everybody wore loud clothes and everybody was loud. A cacophony of profane conversation bounced off the walls, and a cloud of smoke hovered above the bar. Chandler’s looked exactly as a mob bar should. But on this morning in 1972, the only noise was a vacuum cleaner moaning in the far reaches of the dining room and the clinking of spoons in coffee cups, as a dozen gangsters huddled in a couple of booths. The Southie gang war had to end, and it would end over breakfast at Chandler’s.

Since the end of the Somerville-Charlestown gang war in the 1960s, Chandler’s had emerged as something of a United Nations for gangsters. Ostensibly owned and operated by Winter Hill Gang leader Howie Winter and some of his partners, the nightclub was a gathering spot that attracted criminals of all ethnic groups. Mafia figures socialized with Winter Hill mobsters. In a city known for its racial segregation, even black criminals were welcome. So it was appropriate that Chandler’s became the Versailles of the Southie gang war. Both sides knew the killing couldn’t go on. It brought heat from the police; it was bad for business.

Donnie Killeen was dead. Kenny Killeen had no intention of meeting his brother’s fate and had suddenly retired. That left Whitey Bulger as the de facto leader of what was left of the Killeen gang. And it was Whitey who sought out Howie Winter to mediate the truce with the Mullens. Winter presided over the biggest, most powerful Irish mob in metropolitan Boston. He had the respect of both sides. “Whitey walked into Chandler’s,” Winter recalled. “I never knew him before that. He knew I was friendly with the Mullens gang. He asked if I would intercede. I said, ‘Are you serious about this? I don’t want to intercede if you’re not going to abide by it.’ He said he would.”
²²

The word went out, and on the appointed morning, Howie Winter stood in the aisle between the two booths of Southie rivals, proposing an end to their war. “Instead of fighting each other, why not join forces and make some money?” Winter suggested. The Southie guys eyed each other suspiciously, but as Winter kept talking they began nodding. He even offered to bankroll a bookmaking operation in Southie that they could share. “Why don’t you start booking some horses and dogs and sports and make money that way?” Winter said.
²³

Whitey Bulger got the wiseguy equivalent of stock options in the transaction. Howie Winter anointed him the leader of the Southie faction, and, as a result, Whitey became partners with Howie Winter, Joe McDonald, Jimmy Sims and John Martorano—the real muscle of Winter Hill. Howie Winter liked Whitey, whose hard time in Alcatraz impressed him, as did Whitey’s purported alliance with the Westies in New York.
²⁴
And now with his blessing, Whitey would lord it over Southie for the Hill.

Needless to say, this didn’t sit well with Paulie McGonagle, Pat Nee, Tommy King, and the rest of the Mullens. They thought they had won. It was, after all, the hit on Donnie Killeen, which Nee called “The Hiroshima” of the Mullens-Killeen war, that had ended it. The Killeens had sued for peace almost immediately after Donnie was buried. The Mullens thought they were being magnanimous to even consider the requested armistice, and they expected to reap the rewards. But Winter Hill was institutionally biased toward the more traditional organized crime outfits, and the Mullens were too unstructured, too wild, for their tastes. The Mullens might have ended the war, but the bookies who had worked for the Killeens were proven moneymakers. It came down to who could put more loanshark money on the street and take more gambling action off it. Howie Winter decided that man was Whitey.

At one point in the discussions, Tommy King took Pat Nee aside. “I don’t like this,” King said. “We shoulda killed Whitey before we settled this. We’re going to live to regret this.”
²⁵
King was considered a hothead, a loose cannon, and not the smartest of the Mullens. But he was prescient about the threat posed by the newly formidable Whitey Bulger.

In just a few short post-prison years,
Whitey had made the transition from small-time troublemaker to a major player, well positioned to rise toward the top. He had as well, in the Mullens-Killeen war, gained a kind of graduate education in the ways of the Irish underworld, in the strengths and weaknesses of the players, in the blood sports of attack, reprisal, and revenge, in the uproarious randomness of so much of it, and in the fine art of survival. Nothing he had learned contradicted what he had long thought of himself—that he was smarter than most hoods, more cunning and careful, and completely at ease in the use of violence as a tool in his chosen trade. There was also something about Whitey that drew people to him and made him stand out as a leader, something strangely charismatic in his ferocity, his self-mastery, and his obvious ambition.

His aura—not to mention the trim physique and penetrating eyes—was also a powerful draw for women, and, after his years in prison, Whitey had a lot of catching up to do on that front as well. Even before he reestablished himself as a criminal, he was aggressively reestablishing himself as a ladies’ man. After nine years of no physical contact with women, he set out to bed as many as possible. The vast majority of these encounters were flings that, beyond the sex, meant little, if anything, to Whitey. But one of them was more than a one-night stand and produced his only known child.

He had been out of prison a year when he started working a jackhammer at a construction site in Quincy, just south of Southie. He noticed a young waitress leaving a diner across from the construction site. Her name was Lindsey Cyr, and she worked mornings at the diner and afternoons at a law office. Auburn-haired and buxom, she was a younger, darker version of his blonde former paramour Jacquie McAuliffe.

Whitey began showing up at the diner for breakfast before work. He flirted with Cyr, who at twenty-one was fifteen years younger than Whitey and was flattered by the attention of an older man. “God,” Cyr recalled, “he was good-looking.” He was also polite and well mannered and shockingly honest, telling Cyr he had been in prison and why. That wasn’t the reason Cyr kept turning him down when he asked for a date. She was trying to get out of a bad relationship and wasn’t ready for a new one. But Whitey would not be deterred.

Her former boyfriend showed up at the diner one morning while Whitey was having his breakfast. The man grabbed Cyr by her blouse and began screaming at her about some perceived slight. It was a perfect opportunity for Whitey to step in as her white knight. He pushed the man outside to the sidewalk, hit him quickly with four punches, and left him crumpled on the ground. Whitey then calmly walked back to his seat, picked up his coffee mug and said, “He won’t be a problem anymore.”
²⁶

Whitey’s brutal gallantry worked; she agreed to go out with him. After a few dates, however, Whitey was frustrated because Cyr kept turning him down for sex. “I’m tired of taking you out and going some place else for what I want,” he told her. “You know where to find me. It’s put up or shut up.”
²⁷
Cyr didn’t see him for six weeks, but she had fallen for him, and his absence weighed on her. Six weeks after Whitey’s ultimatum, she strolled into the Transit Cafe. “I’m ready,” Lindsey told him.