Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (35 page)

Whitey also had occasional bouts of arrhythmia, and in the late 1980s he had regular appointments with a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He began taking Atenolol to prevent chest pain and lower his blood pressure. When the doctor advised him to reduce the stress in his life, Whitey had a solution. “He dropped two of his girlfriends and stuck with just Teresa and Cathy,” Weeks said. “Jimmy said women brought on more stress than other criminals.”

Weeks was convinced that Whitey’s determination to simplify his life included the conscious effort to stop murdering people.
³⁰
“Part of it was, we didn’t need to kill anyone anymore,” Weeks said. “But a big part was Jimmy just trying to do what the doctors were telling him, and what his own body was telling him. He had to take a step back.”

Stanley had come to accept that part of being Whitey’s companion meant biting her tongue. It meant suffering his lectures and badgering. But after Whitey started seeing the psychiatrist and after he began taking seriously his doctors’ admonitions to reduce stress and lower his blood pressure, Stanley noticed a change, too. He stopped arguing over every little thing. Living with Whitey Bulger got easier. “He wasn’t as angry,” she said. “He wasn’t as tough or tense. He’d say he didn’t want to argue. Whereas before his temper would get the better of him. I remember him saying the doctor said there was something wrong with his heart. Nothing bad. He was told he had to simplify his life or, they told him, you’re going to have a heart attack or a stroke.”

As the 1980s rolled on,
Whitey continued to rely on extortion as a reliable source of cash, knowing that even when things got messy, as they did with Rakes, John Connolly and the FBI could make it all go away. Connolly, who had continued to use Flemmi as an informant after going through the motions of closing him in 1982, won approval to reopen him in 1986. Whitey and Flemmi, as ever, felt invincible. “Someone hired me to kill you,” Whitey told Ray Slinger, a Southie real estate agent he had summoned to Triple O’s in 1987. It wasn’t what Slinger expected to hear. A decade after the school busing debacle, Southie had become the hottest real estate market in Boston. Yuppies were flooding in, buying condominiums in newly converted three-deckers. Whitey had previously gone to Slinger’s office asking for advice on how to catch the real estate wave. Slinger thought the meeting at Triple O’s was about property; instead, Whitey had a proposition. Slinger could pay him to kill the guy who wanted Slinger dead or pay him to scare the guy. Slinger opted for the scare option and asked if one or two thousand dollars would cover it. “My boots cost more than that,” Whitey told him.
³¹
He set the price at fifty thousand dollars.

Slinger, terrified and confused, called his friend Jimmy Kelly, a city councilor. Kelly had been on the fringes of the Mullens gang but had made a respectable career in politics on the strength of his pugnacious leadership during the anti-busing movement in the 1970s. Slinger told Kelly what had happened and asked Kelly to intervene with Whitey. Kelly called Slinger back soon after and said, “Everything should be okay.” It wasn’t. Slinger was summoned to the second floor of Triple O’s again. He was so scared that he borrowed a gun from a friend—a futile gesture, given that Slinger didn’t know the first thing about firearms. Whitey’s minions, the two Kevins, Weeks and O’Neil, the Triple O’s owner, took it off him as soon as he arrived. They patted him down to see if he was wearing a wire, and, having ascertained that he wasn’t, they started beating him. They sat him down in a chair. Whitey sauntered over and took out his own gun. He poked the top of Slinger’s head with the barrel of the gun and explained that if he shot Slinger at that angle, the bullet would travel straight down his spine, with the added benefit of spilling little, if any, blood. Whitey turned to the two Kevins. “Get me a body bag,” he said.
³²

A terrified Slinger agreed to pay Whitey fifty thousand dollars. But he couldn’t keep up with the weekly payments, and he knew what that would mean, so he called the FBI. Unannounced, agents John Newton and Rod Kennedy arrived at Slinger’s real estate office. Newton was one of John Connolly’s best friends on the job and had developed a friendly camaraderie with Whitey and Flemmi. He let Connolly use his South Boston home to meet with the two informants, who often arrived with steak bones for Newton’s two golden retrievers. Newton and Kennedy managed to sit through the interview with Ray Slinger and not file any reports. Newton said that Kennedy, the lead agent on the investigation, took notes during the interview, and that he thought that Kennedy had filed a report.
³³
But Kennedy testified years later that he didn’t remember the interview.
³⁴
Again, the FBI made the potential case against Whitey go away. Slinger was the sort of person—a snitch putting him at risk—whom Whitey would almost automatically have killed in the past. But now he saw no need. Why risk it when the FBI was so willing to protect him? With carte blanche from the bureau, Whitey continued to summon people like Ray Slinger to Triple O’s, using his standard line: “I’ll let you buy your life.” He used it over and over again, amassing a war chest that would one day finance his years on the run.

Whitey’s problem was never with the FBI
which had no intention of going after him. It was a group of honest local cops, state police officers, and Drug Enforcement Administration and IRS agents who had tried for years to make a case against him. The honest cops didn’t just hate him; they hated the FBI. The bureau’s protection of Whitey had made him a higher-priority target for others in law enforcement. But Whitey had skirted many efforts to bring him down. His unnatural luck had bred paranoia among other agencies, who knew that Whitey had others looking after him. They believed his protectors included his brother, now senate president William Bulger.

The target on Whitey’s back grew considerably larger in 1986 when a presidential commission on organized crime identified him as a bank robber, drug trafficker, and murderer. Not long after it was published, Whitey objected to one of the commission’s findings while attending a wedding. “I’m no drug trafficker,” he insisted.
³⁵
But the presidential commission did more than challenge the myth of Whitey’s anti-drugs policy. It put his name in the public domain, inviting media and even public scrutiny like never before. A pair of South Boston community activists, Dan and Nancy Yotts, began to question the way the neighborhood was run. They specifically challenged the power of the Bulger brothers. Dan Yotts spoke openly about Bill Bulger controlling the legitimate aspects of South Boston life, especially through patronage jobs, and about Whitey Bulger controlling the underworld.
³⁶
Such public criticism in Southie was unprecedented, but the Yottses spoke for a growing constituency disgusted by the increasing use of drugs in the neighborhood and its attendant crime, and tired of the myths about Whitey’s role. “I had blind loyalty once,” Nancy Yotts, a former anti-busing leader, said. “But I saw it was ridiculous. You’re supposed to walk the way they walk, talk the way they talk, and think the way they think.”

Not long after Dan and Nancy Yotts were quoted in the local newspapers criticizing the power structure in Southie, their home was pelted with eggs. Then the tires on their car were slashed. When the anonymous threatening phone calls wouldn’t stop, they moved out of Southie late in 1987.
³⁷

But a precedent of truth telling had been set. Besides his mention in the presidential report, Whitey’s name featured prominently in the long trial of Jerry Angiulo and the Mafia leadership. Angiulo and other Mafiosi boasted about their relationship with Whitey and about how dangerous he was. Long a menace only whispered about, Whitey was suddenly a public figure. He and Flemmi knew that with two successive waves of Mafia prosecutions out of the way, they were now the main event. Not only had Jerry Angiulo and his brothers been carted off to prison, the Mafia leaders who replaced them were arrested, too, along with their underlings. Whitey and Flemmi were in everyone’s crosshairs, including the
Boston Globe
’s.

In 1988, the
Globe
set out to unearth and tell one of the great unwritten stories of Boston, a story about the intersection of politics and the underworld: the rise and reign of the Bulger brothers, Bill and Whitey, the state’s most powerful politician and the gangster who dominated the South Boston rackets. The story had been out there for years, but the news media had adopted Southie’s wary deference, leaving Whitey out of Billy’s world. It didn’t seem fair to tar a politician for being the brother of a mobster. But there were many people in Boston who believed that the brothers benefited from each other’s domination of their chosen fields.

Bill Bulger cooperated with the
Globe
reporters on the newspaper’s investigative unit, the Spotlight Team. Bill saw the story as almost a biography of his family and how he had risen to become the longest-serving senate president in Massachusetts. But Connolly’s antenna went up early. A month before the
Globe
’s four-part series was published, Connolly sent a memo to Special Agent in Charge James Ahearn, warning that the captioned source BS 1544-TE—Whitey—might be identified. “Over the past several weeks writer has been made aware that the
Boston Globe
intends to write a Spotlight Series of articles and captioned source will be prominently mentioned with the possibility that writer’s name may also be linked to captioned source,” Connolly wrote. “The SAC [special agent in charge] is aware of some of the past associations that have been made, however, this could be different.”
³⁸

Connolly speculated that the
Globe
had him and Whitey under surveillance and said he planned to stay away from his informants for a while. His memo, however, made no mention of the FBI’s extensive efforts to prevent the
Globe
from revealing the bureau’s secret relationship with Whitey. Two months before the series was published, FBI agent Tom Daly called the Spotlight office at the
Globe
. A secretary passed the call on to Kevin Cullen, then a member of the investigative team. Daly was agitated. He said he had gotten a phone call from Tony Ciulla, the star witness in the 1979 horse race–fixing case that had resulted in charges against the entire Winter Hill Gang leadership except Whitey and Flemmi. Ciulla had gotten a letter from someone at the
Globe
, asking about the case. Cullen told Daly that his
Globe
colleague Dick Lehr had sent the letter. “I’m a little annoyed you didn’t call me,” Daly said. He didn’t like the newspaper going behind his back to talk to his informant. “Ciulla will not talk to you, first off. I know Billy Bulger’s been interviewed by the
Globe
. Ciulla told me, ‘Give them a message. Be very careful about what they say about Whitey. Whitey is a dangerous guy. You don’t want to piss him off.’”

Daly said he was only telling Cullen this because he was a friend. But Cullen barely knew Daly and certainly didn’t consider him a friend; and Daly’s tone was not friendly. “Whitey Bulger,” Daly said, “is the type of guy, if you write the truth he has no problem with that. But if you embarrass him or his family, or write something untrue then, and this is what Ciulla said, ‘The guy would never live with that. He wouldn’t think nothing of clipping you.’ Especially you Kevin. I mean it in all sincerity. I’m not trying to be dramatic. He’s extremely dangerous. I know you live over there in South Boston.”

Daly’s warning was both menacing and mendacious. He claimed that the warning was coming from Ciulla, but he was adding details—such as Cullen’s living in Southie—that Ciulla didn’t know. So was the warning coming from a criminal or the FBI—or both? And was there a difference? Cullen and the other reporters and editors huddled. They all believed that the FBI’s motive was to get the
Globe
to back off the story.

The idea that Whitey would go after a reporter did have some precedent. In the late 1960s, Whitey occasionally stopped by the Boston Press Club, a local watering hole frequented by the press, and argued with reporters about their stories. But he had avoided the media during the years of his brother’s political rise. Then, in 1980, a bookmaker who worked for Whitey, Louis Litif, was found dead in the trunk of his Lincoln Continental. There were rumors all over Southie that Whitey had killed him. Paul Corsetti, a reporter for the
Boston Herald American
, had been hearing snippets of the story and was looking for a scoop when Whitey caught wind of it. The way Whitey heard it, Corsetti was looking into a story that would link Whitey to a recent visit to South Boston by Irish Republican Army operatives looking for weapons. Worse, as far as Whitey was concerned, was that Corsetti was trying to throw Whitey’s brother Bill into the mix.
³⁹

Corsetti was something of a barfly, and on Saturday nights he was usually found in the Dockside, a popular bar in Faneuil Hall Marketplace. By 1:00 a.m., the crowd had thinned, and a man Corsetti didn’t recognize walked up to him.

“You Paul Corsetti?” the man asked.

“Yeah.”

“You know who I am?”

“No,” Corsetti replied.

“I’m Whitey Bulger, motherfucker, and I fuckin’ kill people for a living.”
⁴⁰

Whitey let that sink in a moment and leaned in toward Corsetti.

“I understand you’re going to do a story on my brother. I heard you’re trying to tie me and my brother together.”

“There’s nothing there,” Corsetti told him.

Whitey ignored him and proceeded to list where Corsetti lived, his wife’s name, where she worked, his daughter’s name, where she went to school.

“If I wanted to do you,” Whitey sneered, “you’d be easy.”

Whitey gave Corsetti one last look of sheer contempt and walked away. Corsetti was shaken. Not only did he tell the police, he went to the Mafia. “Larry Baione owed me a favor,” Corsetti said of the consigliere of Boston’s Mafia. “I kept his name out of the paper on some story.” Baione told him Whitey couldn’t be intimidated out of anything by the Mafia. “The best I can do for you is have someone talk to him after the story comes out—then you can figure out how sore he is,” Baione told Corsetti.