Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (14 page)

“Hurry up,” Whitey called after him, throwing the car into park.

They buried Tommy King not far from the Dunkin’ Donuts, in the tidal banks of the Neponset River.
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Later that night, Whitey went looking for and found Buddy Leonard, another Mullens gang member. Leonard might have taken revenge for King’s murder. and Whitey wasn’t going to give him a chance. But Leonard’s murder was more than a preemptive strike. It was also a diversion. After the shooting, Whitey told John Connolly that Tommy King had killed Buddy Leonard.

Whitey had only been an informant for a little more than a month when he killed Tommy King and Buddy Leonard, and he quickly realized how useful his new arrangement with the FBI could be. He had been feeding Connolly mostly gangland gossip, but he was able to use Connolly to disseminate reports to the FBI and Boston police that kept the focus of the investigation of the King and Leonard murders away from him.

Four days after Leonard’s body was found in King’s car, Connolly quoted his unnamed informant, who was Whitey, saying that King had killed Leonard after a violent argument. “Source stated that King would probably face some reprimand from the Mullin [
sic
] gang for killing Leonard in that manner although it would probably not be anything severe as Leonard was disliked by almost all of the Mullin crew, and himself had been responsible for a few murders.”

Eleven days later, Whitey went back to Connolly with a new story.

Source advised that Tommy King, who recently murdered Francis X. “Buddy” Leonard, was told by the Mullin [
sic
] gang that he is to remain out of the Boston area on a permanent basis. According to source, King was forced to accept the decision but agreed that it would be best if he never came back in light of speculation that the police are believed to have a couple of witnesses to the Leonard murder. Both the Mullin [
sic
] gang and the Winter Hill people made the decision and, according to the source, they plan to support King while he is away.

Sometime around New Year’s Eve, Whitey decided to alter the story for a third and final time. He could write his own history and he was starting to enjoy it. “Source stated that the word is out that Tommy King has been ‘taken out.’ Source stated that various rumors are flying about as to whether or not he is actually gone and the reasons for it,” Connolly wrote. “Source heard that King had gone ‘kill crazy’ and was placing people’s lives in jeopardy in that he was talking crazy about killing various people including police officers. Source stated that King gave them no alternative but to make a move on him.”
²⁶

When Whitey fed John Connolly those stories, they were sitting in a car less than a mile from Tommy King’s body.

6

Southie Is His Hometown

N
ight had fallen on September 8, 1975,
as Whitey slid into his green Chevrolet Impala and set off across town. The cool rush of air filled the car as he cruised through Franklin Park, down to Forest Hills, bound for Brookline, a prosperous town and liberal stronghold on the other side of the city, fifteen minutes, five miles, and a world away from South Boston. He was angry—seething, in fact—and had a mission in mind, something to shake up the city.

It wasn’t the usual sort of thing that was testing Whitey’s temper—not a betrayal by a criminal associate, or a bookie slow to pay. No, what had him upset was the silence. The Boston public schools had opened that morning, and the day had passed quietly, especially compared to the year before, when court-ordered school integration had gone into effect and the first buses carrying black kids climbed the hill on G Street to South Boston High School. The black students were greeted by a wave of rocks and slurs. To Whitey, the comparative peace smacked of complacency or at least an end to forceful resistance to the busing plan, a plan that he, like most residents of Southie, saw as a mortal threat to the neighborhood as they knew it and the high school that bore its name. An incorrigible student, Whitey had never managed to enroll at South Boston High, but he recognized it as a symbol of the neighborhood’s sovereignty and resolve. With Southie gone silent, he decided to make some noise of his own. He had everything he needed close at hand—a bottle full of gasoline, a lighter in his pocket, a can of spray paint in the backseat, and an accomplice up front.
¹

It was sometime after ten when Whitey parked on Stedman Street, which runs parallel to Beals Street, in a leafy part of Brookline. As he later described it to an associate, Whitey grabbed the Molotov cocktail and the paint can, cut through a backyard, and jumped a fence. He walked down a narrow lane and found himself standing next to an old-fashioned gaslight in front of a three-storey green clapboard house at 83 Beals St.
²
It was the house where John F. Kennedy was born. A national historic site, it was usually full of tourists during the day, but empty and unguarded at night. Whitey had been in Alcatraz when Jack Kennedy was elected president. Like just about every other Irish Catholic in America, he’d felt a surge of ethnic, religious, and cultural pride at the time. But the Kennedys were no longer heroes; they were enemies, the political patrons of W. Arthur Garrity Jr., the federal judge who had just turned Southie upside down. Jack Kennedy had appointed Garrity US Attorney in Massachusetts, and Garrity had worked for Bobby Kennedy. After the president’s assassination, Senator Edward Kennedy became Garrity’s chief patron, pushing his appointment to the federal bench. The senator remained Garrity’s most influential supporter, and a leading advocate for busing as an imperfect but necessary remedy for the long-running shame of Boston’s schools—their stark racial divide in educational opportunity and quality. The Kennedys, who had once symbolized the unlimited upward mobility of Irish Catholics in America, now were seen in Southie as rich, out-of-touch scolds, sitting in smug, liberal judgment of their own tribe. To Whitey, the Kennedys had become something worse than enemies. They were traitors.

Whitey bent down and aimed the spray-paint can at the sidewalk. He stood up and admired his handiwork, big looping letters in black paint:
Bus Teddy.
Then he slipped around back and peered through the darkened hallway into the kitchen. Whitey lit the rag he had stuffed into the bottle’s neck and smashed the backdoor window.
³
The bottle exploded on the gold carpet and flames were licking the kitchen walls by the time Whitey and another man vaulted the fence behind a house on Stedman Street owned by someone named Marvin Feil. Feil noticed that they wore dark shirts but could say little else about them.
⁴

Feil and other neighbors called the police, and firefighters quickly extinguished the blaze. But the police couldn’t find the car, identified as a green Impala, that had been parked in front of the home of a man named Robert Novak, at 82 Stedman St.
⁵
By the time the fire was out, the kitchen was gutted and Whitey and his accomplice were back in Southie, the car stashed in a garage. Whitey boasted to friends that he had personally shut the Kennedy house down for three months.
⁶

Whitey’s trip to Brookline came
just ten days before his September 18 meeting with John Connolly, when the agent first broached the idea of Whitey becoming Winter Hill’s “liaison” to the FBI. It was a time when Whitey was sitting pretty and had been since the summer before.

He had not only survived the war with the Mullens gang, he had managed to fill the leadership vacuum left by the assassination of his former boss in the South Boston rackets, Donnie Killeen. He was a full-fledged member of the Winter Hill Gang, controlling South Boston for the Somerville-based crime group. The money was rolling in from his gambling and loansharking operations in Southie. But outside forces, the bane of the proud residents of South Boston, were conspiring to insult their honor and encroach on their territory. A federal judge was, in 1974, about to make Southie a prisoner of its reputation as a racist stronghold—a reputation unfair to many, perhaps most, who lived there—with a ruling that would have a profound impact on Whitey’s world. Judge Garrity’s plan was meant to be an exercise in achieving racial equality but quickly devolved into an ugly battle over identity and power, and the resulting tremors threw Boston into a period of instability and polarization that lasted more than a decade.

In South Boston, residents cherished the ethos of neighborhood cohesion. Parents were outraged that their teenagers would be forced out of their own neighborhood to attend a high school miles away. They were particularly horrified that Southie students were slated to be shipped to Roxbury, a neighborhood that was mostly black, with higher crime rates and a high school that the judge himself had deemed inferior. Just as unthinkable was the idea that outsiders would be coming in. This challenged the neighborhood’s basic sense of self-governance. The court-ordered disruption also threatened the separate criminal and political empires the two Bulger power brokers had built. The status quo before Garrity’s order had served the brothers well, albeit in starkly different ways. Neither saw an upside to changing it. And they’d be damned if outsiders were going to tell them or anybody else in Southie what to do.

As South Boston’s state senator, Bill Bulger quickly emerged as busing’s most articulate foe. He denounced the judge who issued the court order and the mayor who acquiesced to it. He confronted the police who enforced it, accusing them of heavy-handed tactics against ordinary citizens with legitimate grievances. He savaged suburban liberals, with some justice, as phonies who would never allow their own children to be bused to faraway, inferior schools in high-crime neighborhoods. And he blasted the media for playing up racism and downplaying the concerns Southie residents had about their children being used as human guinea pigs in a social experiment.

The oft-repeated guinea pig analogy might well have resonated with Whitey, taking him back to his experience in prison when he volunteered for the government program testing the effects of LSD. But his major focus was on a side effect of the turmoil in his home neighborhood—the army of police that flooded the city to enforce the court order posed a problem for someone in a business like his. Whitey came to see the situation as requiring a tactical shift. With police so preoccupied with public order, and most police resources deployed during the day, he figured he had to do most of his work at night. More than ever, he used the cover of darkness to take care of personal business, picking off his rivals—and making his way to Brookline with a Molotov cocktail in hand.

The school busing crisis thus cemented the brothers’ positions in the neighborhood: Bill, the elected defender of Southie, visible, on the streets and at the podium; Whitey working from the shadows, engaging in symbolic, rear-guard gestures that thrust a communal middle finger in the face of those who would presume to push South Boston around. To borrow an analogy from Irish Republicanism: If Billy was the leader of the anti-busing movement’s political wing, Whitey, in effect, commanded its stealth military wing.

The hard fact confronting Judge Garrity
in 1974 was that because Boston’s neighborhoods had long been segregated, as much by ethnicity as by race, its schools were largely one color or the other, black or white. After the great Depression-era migration to the north of southern blacks, and the post–World War II migration of white ethnics, especially Jews, from Boston to the city’s suburbs, the neighborhoods of Roxbury, the South End, and parts of Dorchester became overwhelmingly African American. Southie, Charlestown, East Boston, Hyde Park, the North End, and West Roxbury remained, as they had been, overwhelmingly white. The 1970 census showed that more than 98 percent of Southie’s 38,489 residents were white.
⁷

Boston had been the capital of the abolitionist movement during the decades before the Civil War era, and throughout the nineteenth century the city’s public schools were, at least officially, not segregated. But Boston students had always attended the school nearest their home, and those schools reflected the demographics of the neighborhoods. If they were racially separate largely by accident of history, the blatant gap in quality between schools serving whites and those serving blacks was a matter of political choice by the white establishment.

After the US Supreme Court ruled, in 1954, that de facto segregation was unconstitutional, the Boston School Committee had taken its usual course in the face of the obvious school segregation—it did nothing. Boston came to be seen as among the least tolerant of northern cities. The abolitionist movement may have been led by the Brahmin establishment, but the immigrants from Europe who flooded into Boston in the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially the Irish, were less concerned with the fate of slaves and their descendants. In many cases, they saw blacks as rivals for jobs and public housing.

The Boston School Committee brusquely denied any suggestion that its policies perpetuated segregated schools. But that posturing would soon be seen for what it was, in part because of the efforts of Whitey Bulger’s spiritual adviser and Bill Bulger’s law school dean: Father Robert Drinan.

In 1964, the same year he was signing letters accepting a role as Whitey’s parole adviser and sponsor, Drinan began preparing a report on Boston’s schools as chairman of the Massachusetts State Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. He emerged as a leading intellectual force in Massachusetts not only because of his support for desegregation but because he believed that busing schoolchildren across neighborhood lines was the most practical remedy for generations of institutionalized segregation. He wrote regularly about the need to advance the civil rights of blacks in
America
, the Jesuit magazine that Whitey had subscribed to in prison at Drinan’s suggestion. Drinan’s seminal report for the US Commission on Civil Rights found that Boston’s schools were segregated and that the ones black children attended had inferior books, buildings, and educational results.
⁸

Drinan wrote that the segregation of Boston’s schools had damaged the self-confidence of black children, reinforced “the prejudices of children regardless of their color,” and created “a gap in the quality of education facilities among schools.”
⁹
The report was ignored by the Boston School Committee, but it helped inspire passage of a 1965 state law that required schools to be racially balanced. The Boston School Committee ignored the new law, too.

In 1972, frustrated at the city’s inaction, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed suit on behalf of a group of black parents. Judge Garrity was assigned the case, and in June 1974 he ruled in favor of the black parents. That fall, South Boston High’s entire junior class, which was all white, was sent to Roxbury High School, and Roxbury High’s sophomore class, which was mostly black, was sent to South Boston High. Some eighty-five members of South Boston High’s senior class who lived in neighboring Savin Hill were bused to a predominantly black school in Dorchester. Other schools in predominantly white neighborhoods were likewise affected by the first phase of busing, including Roslindale, West Roxbury, and Hyde Park. There were angry protests and outbreaks of violence throughout the city, with whites attacking blacks and blacks attacking whites. But Southie produced a more sustained and volatile reaction. Residents of South Boston viewed Garrity’s order as punitive and greeted it with guffaws and defiance. If some parents in the other neighborhoods vowed resistance, Southie promised outright revolt.

Signs and bumper stickers appeared overnight. Southie Won’t Go. Southie Says No. No Forced Busing. A grassroots anti-busing group, the South Boston Information Center, appeared suddenly in a previously vacant storefront. The young men who staffed the office were aggressive and, to outsiders at least, intimidating. Anti-busing rallies were quickly organized by South Boston residents, many of whom vowed to never let their children be bused out of the neighborhood. Some sent their children to parochial schools. Others later formed a private academy. Busing was Southie’s ultimate nightmare, but it was also a powerful unifying issue for a neighborhood that tended to downplay its own ethnic and class divisions.

Bill Bulger especially bristled at suggestions that, for all the talk of neighborhood integrity, a good number of his constituents simply did not want black kids coming into Southie. He insisted it wasn’t about race but about government overreach and class. “The promised quick fix of busing—busing of poor urban children only—enjoyed noisy support from millions who lived in the all-white citadels in the suburbs,” Bill Bulger said. “It was endorsed by affluent citizens of Boston who could afford to send their children to private schools, and who did so. None of them was affected. Only the intended victims resisted—only those in the targeted communities, primarily urban ethnic Catholics with thin pocketbooks.”
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