Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (37 page)

Foley’s uncle was the senate majority leader, Bill Bulger’s right-hand man, and Foley smiled and nodded as Connolly proceeded to sing the praises of Bill Bulger.
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Foley could tell right away that Connolly was an operator, but he couldn’t help liking him. Foley had risen through the ranks of the state police, acquiring along the way a suspicion of the FBI’s relationship with Whitey Bulger. Working on task forces with the FBI only intensified his skepticism. After he helped the FBI indict a state trooper who was deemed too close to a bookie, Foley watched with incredulity as the FBI let an office secretary who had leaked information to a mobster quietly resign. The double standard irked him.
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In 1990, Foley was put in charge of the Special Services Section of the state police, which focused on organized crime. They worked regularly with the FBI, but it was, as ever, an uneasy alliance. As soon as he took over, Foley had one thing in mind: targeting Whitey Bulger and Steve Flemmi. And he knew exactly how to do it. “We’re going to go after the bookies,” Foley told Ed Quinn, supervisor of the FBI’s organized crime squad, one afternoon as they were sitting around, plotting strategy. As the case agent in the FBI’s biggest case ever in Boston, the takedown of the Jerry Angiulo regime, Quinn should have appreciated the strategy. It was information from disgruntled bookies—not the gossip of Steve Flemmi and Whitey Bulger—that showed the FBI the way to get the bugs into the Mafia’s headquarters in the North End. Instead, Quinn turned up his nose. “That’s a waste of time,” he said.
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Foley ignored him. There was little point in trying to persuade an FBI man that the Staties had a better idea of how to take down gangsters. Like many state cops, Foley couldn’t understand why Whitey and Flemmi had been given a pass, even as the FBI was still pursuing pathetic mob wannabes trying to fill the power vacuum left by successive Mafia prosecutions.

He decided that the only way to get Whitey and Flemmi was to freeze the FBI out discreetly. He assembled a team of state troopers to round up the bookies. The idea was not just to arrest them but to seize their money, creating an incentive to cooperate. It was common knowledge that Whitey and Flemmi had taken advantage of the troubles befalling the Mafia by shaking down bookies for tribute. “If we get enough of them, and take their money, some of them are going to talk,” Foley reasoned.
⁶¹

And if Chico Krantz talked, Whitey and Flemmi were history. Foley knew Chico was paying Whitey and Flemmi protection money, because Chico had been picked up on a state police bug planted inside a seedy bar in Chelsea called Heller’s, complaining about it. Heller’s was the bookie bank, where bookies went to cash their checks from gambling proceeds. Chico was there to wash his money, and he started bitching and moaning to Mike London, the banker to the bookies. London sat in a teller’s booth, behind thick, bulletproof glass, and commiserated. He knew just how dirty this business was. And how lucrative.
⁶²
London didn’t raise an eyebrow when the bookies signed the checks with obviously made-up names: Arnold Palmer, Marvin Hagler, Bill Russell. He took 1 to 2 percent of every transaction, and London was washing up to fifty million dollars a year. His bar was in Chelsea, one of the poorest cities in Massachusetts. His house was in Weston, the richest.
⁶³

Chico was tired of paying Whitey rent for nothing. London told Chico he was wasting his time with Whitey and Flemmi, who just took your money and didn’t help chase down debts. He urged Chico to walk away from them and join up with Vinnie Ferrara, the ambitious Mafioso who was trying to replace the Angiulo regime. “Vinnie will work for you,” London told Chico. “This guy here will go to bat for you.”
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The feds had used electronic surveillance gathered in the mid-1980s to indict Mikey London and Vinnie Ferrara in 1990. But they let the bookies skate, because bookies were considered small fish: You threw them back. But the conversations gleaned from the bookie’s bank at Heller’s and then at Sonny Mercurio’s sandwich shop, where Ferrara was trying to reinvent the Mafia, was manna for Foley and his team: They learned that Chico was an unsatisfied customer. Chico hated Whitey and Flemmi. In the right circumstances, Chico might talk.

The Staties needed a break, and it came in the hulking form of Vinnie “Fat Vinnie” Roberto. It was hard for Fat Vinnie to lose a tail, and one day in February 1991 state troopers followed him all the way to Chico Krantz’s front door in Chestnut Hill, one of the most exclusive suburbs in the Boston area. Vinnie delivered a huge bag of cash. Chico had his money. Foley’s team had their probable cause for a search warrant. During a search of Chico’s house, the police found a safe deposit box key. They traced it to a bank in a neighboring suburb. It was opened in the presence of a startled bank manager, who exclaimed, “There’s more cash here than we have in the entire bank.”
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There was one million dollars in that box, and another million in another box. Chico was in Florida when the Staties grabbed his money. He flew back and arranged to meet with Foley. Chico showed up without his lawyer. He wanted to make a deal, and he wanted his money back. He complained about the police tactics, saying that there had always been an unwritten rule that they didn’t raid bookie’s houses. “Yeah, well,” Foley replied, “it’s a new ball game.”
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Foley explained that if Chico was willing to talk, they might be able to work something out. Chico flew back to Florida, and Foley sensed an opening. He called one of his mentors, Pat Greaney, a state trooper who had worked organized crime for years. Foley and Greaney followed Chico to Florida and spent several days trying to convince him to become a confidential informant. Greaney put Chico at ease, telling stories about old bookies. Foley kept the pressure on, reminding Chico that Whitey and Flemmi were taking his money and giving him nothing in return. The more Greaney and Foley talked, the more Chico realized how much he hated and resented Whitey and Flemmi. He had grown up in Dorchester, in the days when Jewish kids like him were often the targets of Irish and Italian kids like them. Chico made something of himself and went to college. The idea of people like Whitey and Flemmi taking his money was especially galling.

Chico had first met Whitey in the 1970s, when Whitey was muscle for the Winter Hill Gang. Whitey went right up to Chico on the street, demanding $86,000 that Chico owed a bookie who was paying rent to Winter Hill. “Pay up,” Whitey told him, “or I’ll kill you.” Then, in 1979, after the FBI allowed Whitey and Flemmi to escape the horse race–fixing indictment that scattered the rest of Winter Hill, Whitey and Flemmi began rounding up all the bookies. They went back at Chico, saying he had to pay them rent. It started at $750 a month, but within five years it was $3,000. When Chico complained that another bookie owed him money, Whitey arranged a meeting at a restaurant in Cambridge. The dispute was resolved, and Whitey turned to Chico and demanded a $5,000 mediation fee on top of the rent. “What am I paying these guys for?” Chico asked.
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But what really bothered Chico was the way Whitey treated bookies. Sitting in a hotel that straddled the Massachusetts Turnpike in Newton, not far from his house, Chico told Greaney and Foley how Whitey had summoned a bookie Chico was friendly with for a sit-down. Whitey accused the bookie of cheating him. He poured bleach on the bookie’s arm, burning him. The bookie screamed, and Whitey smiled and said, “Do you think I’m fuckin’ around?”
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With every story, Chico’s resentment flourished. Still, every time Foley suggested he testify and put Whitey and Flemmi away, he got scared. “They’d kill me,” he said. “They’d kill my family.”

Foley got a second search warrant, and they hit Chico’s house again. This time, they had enough evidence, between bookmaking records and cash and surveillance, to put Chico away. They also had evidence implicating Chico’s wife, Jacqui, in money laundering: She was depositing cash for him. Foley called Chico and said they needed to talk. It was urgent. Late on a Saturday night, Chico met Foley and Greaney in the parking lot of a strip mall in West Roxbury, near Chico’s house in suburban Chestnut Hill. Chico got in and sat in the passenger seat next to Foley, who put the car in drive and headed out of the parking lot. Greaney was in the back with a bag of muffins and three coffees. He handed Chico a cup of coffee. Foley handed Chico a draft indictment.

“Chico,” Tom Foley said. “Jacqui’s going to be indicted.”

Chico leafed through the papers. It didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. Jacqui had been moving his money.

“Chico,” Foley said, “your options are pretty limited. You’re going to be a cooperating witness, or Jacqui’s going to jail.”

Chico stared out the window.

“Chico,” Pat Greaney said from the backseat, “do you think Whitey and Stevie give a shit about you? They’d cut you up in little pieces and throw you in the river.”
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Chico knew they were right. It was time to play ball.

They drove him back to his car at the strip mall. Chico got out and looked around the parking lot. He started walking toward his car but turned back as if he’d forgotten something. Pat Greaney rolled down the window and Chico leaned in.

“Hey,” Chico Krantz said. “Are you gonna eat that last muffin?”

Greaney handed Chico Krantz a blueberry muffin. For a man about to risk his life and turn the tables on Whitey Bulger, it was the least he could do.
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*
Steve Flemmi pleaded guilty in 2003 to participating in ten murders, including those of Davis and Hussey, and was sentenced to life in prison.

PART THREE

THE RUN

13

A Head Start

John Morris: What do you think these guys really want from us?
John Connolly: I think all they want is a head start.
¹

T
eresa Stanley was home alone
when a woman called her South Boston house late one night in the fall of 1994, looking for Whitey. “He’s not here,” Stanley said. “I think we have to talk,” said the caller, identifying herself as Cathy Greig and making a vague reference to her involvement with Whitey. “Something bad is going on.”
²
The name meant nothing to Stanley, but she suddenly felt anxious. Women didn’t call her house looking for Whitey, and now a stranger was on the phone. Stanley had heard rumors about Whitey’s womanizing, but he had convinced her she was his only lover. She didn’t know about the son he had fathered and lost. She didn’t know much about what Whitey did when he wasn’t with her. Stanley was speechless when Greig asked if she could pick Stanley up at the home she shared with her twenty-something daughter and take her someplace private to talk
.

Minutes later, Greig pulled up outside Stanley’s house in a green Ford Explorer, and Stanley climbed in. It was an awkward moment, the first time the two women Whitey had so carefully kept apart for decades met. Stanley’s heart was pounding, but she willed herself to stay calm and dignified. At fifty-three, she was still a beautiful woman, shapely, with platinum blonde hair and clear blue eyes. Greig, ten years younger, had also kept up the looks that had drawn Whitey to her. They drove in silence during the six-mile trip to Greig’s home in the Squantum section of Quincy, a narrow peninsula where modest homes are crammed together on postage-stamp lots. Whitey had bought Greig the four-bedroom split-level ranch with a white picket fence, just as he had bought Stanley her house in Southie. Greig led Stanley into the living room, where she took a seat, nervously lit a cigarette, and listened in silence as Greig revealed that she had been having an affair with Whitey for nearly twenty years, that she loved him and had been devoted to him and that he supported her—even though she had known all along about Stanley. She knew about Whitey’s many other women, too, she said, and they had often fought about it. She was tired of living a double life and wanted Whitey to choose between her and Stanley. She was ready to break off the relationship once and for all, and telling Stanley about their long, secret affair was the best way she could think of to make him mad enough to finally let her go.

Stanley listened intently as Greig talked for twenty minutes, struggling to maintain her composure, and then said softly, “Thanks for telling me.” Inside, however, she was thunderstruck. She hadn’t known about Greig. She hadn’t known about the other women Greig mentioned. She felt like a fool. Thirty years together and she didn’t know?
³
The two women were still sitting, stewing in awkward discomfort, when a highly agitated Whitey showed up with Kevin Weeks in tow, banging on the door until Greig let him in. Both Stanley and Greig had witnessed this before—Whitey breathing heavily, battling his temper. These were dangerous signs. Whitey was under tremendous pressure already—a grand jury had been hearing testimony from Chico Krantz, the embittered bookie, among others. Whitey had been hearing rumors that a multicount extortion indictment was being prepared. Now his personal life was imploding, too. Someone who had seen the two women drive off together had called him. Even before he got to Greig’s house, Whitey knew what was going on.

“Let’s go,” he snapped at Stanley.

“No!” Stanley screamed. She had always been meek and deferential around him. No more. “She told me everything,” Stanley said. “You’ve been living with her. . . . This is it!”
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Whitey started swearing and screaming at Greig as he grabbed Stanley by the arm, trying to force her to leave. Greig was yelling back, over and over. “I’m tired of being the second fiddle. You’re going to have to choose.”

Finally, Whitey succumbed to his rage. “He grabbed Cathy by the neck, whipped her down to the floor, and started choking her,” Weeks recalled. “He lost it. He had both hands on her neck squeezing her. I thought he was going to kill her.”
⁵
Almost ten years before, Weeks had stood by when he had come upon Whitey strangling Deborah Hussey in The Haunty on East Third Street. This time he reacted, as much to save Whitey as to save Greig. Relying on his old skills as a bouncer at Triple O’s, Weeks tugged hard on his boss’s arm, dragging him away from Greig and toward the door. Greig struggled to her feet, trying to regain her breath and her composure.

Weeks turned to Stanley and said, “Let’s go, Teresa. There’s going to be trouble here.”
⁶
Whitey again demanded that Stanley follow him, and this time she complied. In the car, the argument continued as they drove back to Southie. Whitey acknowledged that he had had a long affair with Greig, but he insisted that he had already ended it. “It’s over between us, and she’s just doing this because I left her for you,” he told Stanley.
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Stanley wasn’t buying it. She lit a cigarette, defying Whitey’s smoking ban. He didn’t say anything. “You’re a liar!” Stanley shrieked, staring straight ahead. “You’re a liar!” Stanley knew that Greig was telling the truth, and she was devastated. She never saw her again, and she never felt the same about Whitey. She couldn’t get over his betrayal, which quietly continued. A few days after the blowup, Whitey was back at Greig’s door, and Cathy wouldn’t or couldn’t turn him away.

Whitey decided that, in the name of peace, Stanley needed, or deserved, more attention. He took her on a whirlwind tour of Europe, making stops in Dublin, London, Venice, and Rome. But it wasn’t just a vacation. Whitey suspected that the grand jury targeting him was wrapping up its investigation. It was time to finalize preparations for a life on the run. While they were staying at Le Méridien Piccadilly, a five-star hotel in the heart of London’s West End, he accessed a safe deposit box he had opened at a nearby Barclay’s bank two years earlier using his name and Stanley’s. In the box he left fifty thousand dollars in US and foreign currency and his Irish passport.

They had only been home a week
or two when, a few days before Christmas, US Attorney Donald K. Stern alerted FBI officials that his office was poised to indict Whitey and Flemmi. He wanted to know if what had long been suspected was true. Was Whitey an FBI informant? It would take eighteen days for the FBI to respond, and the grudging answer was that, yes, he was. And so was Flemmi.
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But it only took hours for Whitey’s former FBI handler, John Connolly, to find out what was up and give Whitey the head start he had long ago promised. Dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, he stepped into Whitey’s South Boston liquor store and stamped his feet. It was December 23, and the wind was gusting off the nearby water at up to fifty miles per hour.
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Connolly had been inside the liquor store before, looking for Whitey. But this was different. He looked around, then walked to the counter where Weeks waited; Weeks betrayed neither surprise nor warmth.

“Is the other guy around?” Connolly asked.
¹⁰

Weeks shook his head.

“What about Stevie?”

Again, Weeks shook his head.

“Listen,” Connolly said, anxiety bleeding through his usual cocky front. “I’ve got to tell you something. It’s really important.”

Weeks led him to a walk-in cooler where they kept the beer. The cooling fans would drown out any possible listening device. “They’re gonna indict Jimmy and Stevie and Frankie Salemme,” Connolly said. “It’s imminent. They’re trying to put them together over the holidays and grab all three of them at once. There’s only four people in the FBI who know this. One of them is Dennis O’Callaghan, and he told me.” O’Callaghan was the No. 2 man in the FBI office in Boston, and a close friend of Connolly’s.
¹¹

Connolly made Weeks repeat back to him what he had just said. “It’s really important you remember this,” Connolly said. “You’ve got to tell Jimmy and Stevie.” As soon as Connolly left, Weeks beeped Whitey, who was just heading out with Stanley for some last-minute Christmas shopping. He was still being very solicitous of her. Whitey pulled his car in front of the liquor store and Weeks climbed into the backseat. Weeks didn’t dare say anything in the car. It wasn’t Stanley so much as a bug he was worried about. It took them about fifteen minutes to get to Copley Square in the midafternoon traffic. Stanley wanted to go to Neiman Marcus. “Go ahead,” Whitey told her. “I’ll catch up.” Stanley went to window-shop, and Weeks and Whitey walked to the back of the parked car.

“Zip came by,” Weeks said. He repeated what Connolly had told him.

“Did you tell Stevie yet?”

“No,” Weeks said. “Not yet.”

Whitey said nothing for a while, then he turned and whistled sharply.

“Hey,” he yelled at Stanley. “Let’s go.” There would be no last-minute shopping.

“You gotta get a hold of Stevie and let him know,” Whitey said. “I’ll call him, too.”

Whitey took Stanley aside and said he had a surprise: they were going to go on a cross-country trip for Christmas. She didn’t ask why.
¹²

They said little in the car on the way back to Southie. Whitey dropped Weeks off at the store at 4:30 p.m. Flemmi came in about an hour later. Weeks repeated the warning, but Flemmi was blasé. “My guy is right on top of everything,” he said, referring to Richard Schneiderhan, the corrupt state cop who had been feeding him information for years. “He knows what’s going on.”

“Only four people know about this,” Weeks said. “Maybe your guy isn’t one of them.”

“My guy knows,” Flemmi replied. “I’ve got time.”
¹³

A few days after Christmas, Flemmi came strolling into the convenience store next to the liquor store Whitey used as a base. Weeks was flabbergasted.

“What are you still doing around?”

“My guy’s on top of it,” Flemmi replied. “He’ll let me know.”

“What are you still doing here? Jimmy’s already gone.”

Weeks couldn’t understand Flemmi’s attitude.

“Leave for a couple weeks,” Weeks said. “If nothing goes down, you can come back. If they’re looking for you, you get a head start.”
¹⁴

But Flemmi never got his head start.

Stanley wasn’t happy
about missing Christmas with her kids and grandkids, but Whitey had to get out of town fast, and he had promised her a good time. They spent Christmas Eve in New York and New Year’s Eve in New Orleans—staying at Le Richelieu, a small boutique hotel in the French Quarter, under their actual names. Next, they drove to Clearwater, Florida, where Whitey picked up cash and some phony identification he had stashed in a safe deposit box years earlier. He had long thought Clearwater might be the place for him to retire. In early 1993, he was jogging on the beach on Sand Key, a barrier island off Clearwater, when he spotted a condominium complex called Bayside Gardens II. He asked a woman who lived there if there were any condos for sale. She pointed him to Unit 216, overlooking the bay. He sent the woman flowers and champagne after closing on the condo—Whitey’s idea of a finder’s fee.
¹⁵
Then he set to work remaking the unit to his own taste, ripping up the carpet and replacing it with sleek tile. But he would never get a chance to enjoy the improvements. He had bought the condo under his real name. He knew now the feds would be onto it soon enough.

He was ready to take on his new identity as soon as he had to but didn’t want to jump the gun on such a huge, disruptive, and perhaps permanent change in his life. He checked back home every day, and there was still no word of an indictment; maybe it was a false alarm. “Let’s go home,” he told Stanley a few days after New Year’s. But at almost exactly the moment Whitey was turning his car north from Florida, the FBI, the state police, and the DEA were finalizing their arrest plan. Tom Foley and his state police team and DEA agent Dan Doherty were still wary of including the FBI in the arrests, but they had no choice on this one. It was a federal charge of extortion—squeezing money from a bookie—and the FBI had been part of the investigation. Whitey hadn’t been seen for days, but a team was assigned to find him at either Stanley’s house in Southie or Greig’s in Quincy. Even if Stanley had been oblivious for years, Whitey’s juggling act with the two women had long been known to the law.

Flemmi was spotted first. On the evening of January 5, he walked out of Schooner’s, a new restaurant his son was about to open in Boston’s Financial District. Flemmi had his new Chinese girlfriend with him, and they were just getting into her white Honda Accord when the officers made their move. Doherty, the DEA agent, and state troopers Tom Duffy and John Tutungian had orders to act immediately if Flemmi went mobile. The troopers used their car to box in the Honda. Flemmi ducked down in his seat; he thought he was going to be hit. Doherty pulled open the door, pressed the barrel of his gun to Flemmi’s temple, and screamed, “Put your hands where I can see them, Stevie!”
¹⁶

Doherty took a hunting knife and some Mace from Flemmi’s pocket. Flemmi’s girlfriend was breathing hard, almost hyperventilating. Flemmi said that she was afraid of them because she had been a protester at Tiananmen Square. “She doesn’t like cops,” he said. They let her go and brought Flemmi to the FBI’s office in Boston to be held in a cell overnight until the courthouse opened in the morning. Flemmi exuded confidence as he sat in a fingerprinting room with two state troopers and an FBI agent. “I am not worried about this,” he said, suggesting the case hinged on the word of a bookie. Duffy, the state cop, shot back, “Do you think this is a one-person case? We have about fifty witnesses lined up against you now and more coming in every day.” But Duffy was puzzled when the FBI agent, Charlie Gianturco, sidled up to the gangster and said, “This thing of ours, it’s not like it used to be. There’s no more respect.” The exchange gave the state police officer an uneasy feeling. “It was like he was saying, ‘Don’t expect this asshole to treat you with the respect you deserve,’” Duffy said.
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