One week later, Kenny Killeen was limping past a car at City Point when a voice called out, “Hey Kenny.” Killeen turned to see the familiar face of Whitey Bulger thrust out the passenger side window; he was holding a gun. “It’s over,” said Whitey. “You’re out of business. No future warnings.” The car drove off.
Bulger’s role in the Boston gang wars became the stuff of legend. It was the beginning of a period in which the Southie gangster would be given credit or blamed for just about everything that took place in the city’s criminal underworld. By the time the full story of Whitey Bulger’s life and times had been recorded and mulled over by a national audience, he would hold a special place in the U.S. gangland saga as the most revered and most vilified Irish American mobster of all time.
Like many professional criminals, Bulger started out as the bad seed in his family. Born on September 3, 1929, and named after his father, James Bulger was the oldest boy in a clan of what would eventually consist of six brothers and sisters. He was nine years old when his family moved from Everett, a Boston suburb, into the Old Harbor housing project in Southie. Bulger’s dad worked as a clerk at the Charlestown Navy Yard across town, while his mother assumed the traditional role of housewife with stoic devotion. From the beginning, there was something different about Jim. The other Bulger children took after their parents—conservative, disciplined, devoted Catholics, solidly middle-class. Jim’s younger brother, William “Billy” Bulger, was an especially diligent student. While Billy was showing early signs of academic achievement and what would eventually be a distinguished career in politics, Jim was already in trouble with the law.
At the age of nineteen, he was arrested for assault, the result of his activities with a Southie street corner gang known as the Shamrocks. By the early 1950s, Bulger had moved on to more serious crimes, including hijackings and bank hold-ups. Whitey never graduated from high school. Instead, he joined the air force, went AWOL in Oklahoma City, and wound up in county jail in Great Falls, Montana on a sexual assault charge. When he returned to Boston, Bulger immediately fell in with a local crew of bank robbers. He was acquitted of several minor larceny charges before setting out on a robbery spree that took him from Massachusetts to Rhode Island and Indiana. After going on the lam for awhile, dying his blond hair black, he was eventually apprehended in Revere, Massachusetts, prosecuted for bank robberies in various jurisdictions, and sentenced to twenty years in federal prison.
Bulger’s first stop was a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, where he was involved in a number of scuffles and spent a total of ninety days in the hole. After two years in prison, he took part in an experimental drug program in exchange for a minor reduction in his sentence. Whitey’s small volunteer unit at Atlanta was part of a CIA project to find out how people reacted to LSD, a program documented in a 1977 book entitled The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, which exposed medical abuses by the intelligence agency. In exchange for dropping acid and submitting himself to testing, Bulger had three days a month taken off his sentence.
In late 1959, Whitey was transferred to Alcatraz. While incarcerated at the infamous “Rock” in San Francisco Bay, Whitey adopted a lifelong habit of studying World War II and military strategy, reading biographies of Rommel and Patton and dissecting battles from all sides. He also became a physical fitness buff. In July 1962, around the time Alcatraz was closed down, Bulger was transferred to a federal prison in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania before being paroled in March 1965, after serving nine years.
Upon his return to Southie, the thirty-five-year-old Bulger moved back in with his mother in the Old Harbor housing complex where he grew up. His brother Billy, by then a three–term state representative, got him a job as a courthouse janitor that paid seventy-six dollars a week. It was the classic old-style Irish arrangement—one brother pulling strings for another, trying to exert whatever influence he could to help out a loved one in need. Whitey didn’t last long as a courthouse custodian, although it did serve the purpose of keeping his parole officer happy. Within the first year of his release from prison, Bulger was collecting vig and doing hits for the Killeen brothers.
Despite the fact that he was right back where he started as an inveterate Southie hood, by most accounts Whitey Bulger was not the same person he had been before he went to prison. The young Bulger had been a freewheeling, smart-mouthed punk prone to impulsive behavior. The new Bulger was disciplined and taciturn. He had spent his time in Alcatraz reading books on military history, everything from the ancient Greeks to World War II. He was a student of Machiavelli, which was de rigueur for any upwardly mobile mobster. And he had a penchant for cleanliness and overall physical health that bordered on fetishism. Exuding what would later be identified as “the Bulger mystique,” he was exceedingly polite in public, and projected a courtly image even as he pistol-whipped loan shark debtors and executed selected members of the Mullin Gang.
By the time of Donald Killeen’s gangland execution in 1972, Whitey was well positioned to ascend as the new Irish mob boss of South Boston. His brother Billy was a significant player in Massachusetts state politics. Although there was no indication that Billy Bulger played a role in (or even knew the full extent of) his older brother’s criminal shenanigans, the relationship gave Whitey a potent symbolic edge in the local underworld. The symbiotic connection between the gangster and the politician, which had long been at the very root of the Irish Mob, was even more powerful in this case because it was contained within one family, brother to brother. The fact that Whitey and Billy never appeared together in public only added to their mystique. Just being brothers enhanced both of their careers, without either of them having to lift a finger.
The Bulger Mystique was important to Whitey. As he faced an era of uncertainty following the death of his boss, he needed every edge available to him. By the early 1970s, the underworld in Boston and other U.S. cities was entering into a new epoch whose genesis had less to do with what was happening on the streets or in the courtrooms, and everything to do with what was playing at the local bijou.
At the same time that Whitey was emerging as a major player in Boston’s criminal underworld, the movies The Godfather (1972) and Godfather, Part II (1974) were filling movie houses around the country, dazzling audiences, and winning awards. Together, the two movies presented a fanciful and appealing theology of Italian American organized crime, tracing the roots of Cosa Nostra to Sicily and illustrating its emergence in New York through the fictional Corleone family. The terms “Cosa Nostra,” “Mafia,” or “Syndicate” are never used in The Godfather; instead, the film’s writer and director—Mario Puzo and Francis Coppola—have their characters speak only of “the family.” In the movie, the family turns out to be less of a criminal organization and more of a defender of noble values like honor, loyalty, tradition, and respect for one’s elders in the midst of a sordid and corrupt world.
Since at least the days of Jimmy Cagney and The Public Enemy, movies had played a major role in defining the image of the gangster in American society. The Godfather was a new and even more powerful example of this phenomenon. Puzo and Coppola’s presentation of a violent criminal tradition as an extension of old-world family values not only changed the way society viewed the Mafia; it changed the way many mafiosi viewed themselves, allowing even the most brutish of Italian American criminals to take refuge in the belief that they weren’t really thugs or parasites, but part of a noble tradition that was currently enjoying new levels of deification in popular American culture.7
When The Godfather was first released, the real-life Mafia had hit an all-time low. The Valachi hearings had shattered the myth of omerta; new laws and criminal prosecutions in the late 1960s had seriously depleted families in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and elsewhere. The Mafia was on the way out, but it was revived partly by Mario Puzo’s book and then by a duo of cinematic masterpieces that presented Italian American criminal traditions in a manner that met with great approval from the mobsters themselves. As a result, la famigl
ia was infused with a new generation of recruits, many who fancied themselves the real-life equivalent of Sonny and Michael Corleone.
For non-Italian mobsters plying their trade in the American underworld, “the Godfather Syndrome” (as it was called in a 1977 Time cover story) was bound to have a deleterious effect. The Mafia had always been a part of the underworld, but now they were the star attraction. Everyone wanted to do business with “the Don.” Increasingly, Italian American criminal organizations viewed themselves as part of an exclusive club. “We’re in charge; you work for us,” became the unofficial motto of Cosa Nostra. Emboldened by new levels of notoriety and prestige, Mafia crews throughout the United States began to see themselves as the rightful heirs to any and all underworld rackets, regardless of historical precedent or territorial imperative.
For the Irish, this new cockiness on the part of the Mafia was less of an issue in Boston, the “greenest” of all American cities, than in other jurisdictions. In cities like New Orleans and Chicago, the Irish American mobster was virtually eradicated. In New York City, it was a whole different story.
By the mid-1970s, in the wake of “the Godfather years,” the Mafia in New York had regrouped and was bigger and stronger than ever with a ruling Commission that met like the bosses of old. The Five Families—Gambino, Bonanno, Genovese, Luchesse, and Colombo—had determined that they should have a controlling interest in every racket in town. For the most part, they seized control of these rackets through a series of internal coups, in which mafiosi killed other mafiosi in an effort to stratify the business of illegal narcotics, gambling and policy, union and municipal extortion, large-scale cargo heists, the distribution of stolen goods, and so on. Since the mafia had within its operating framework a vast hierarchy of capos, consigliaris, and soldatos designed to facilitate the ebb and flow of illegal commerce, the entire American underworld willingly deferred to “the Italians,” with one notable exception.
On the West Side of Manhattan, where the twentieth century version of the Irish Mob had been conceived and exalted during the glory days of Prohibition, old habits died hard. Criminal rackets that had been passed from one generation to the next still existed in this congested accumulation of tenements and saloons along the Hudson River, and the natural successors to Owney Madden, Big Bill Dwyer, and Boss Joe Ryan of the ILA were not quite ready to relinquish their piece of the pie. If the guineas wanted to move in and take over this neighborhood, it was not going to happen without the kind of gangland jockeying for position that usually resulted in dead bodies and shattered lives. And so the Irish and Italian mobsters resumed their longstanding battle with newfound ferocity, this time in the legendary cradle of the Irish Mob: Hell’s Kitchen.
CHAPTER # Eleven
11. i left my heart in hell’s kitchen
Mickey Spillane was a fortunate man; he inherited the long-standing criminal rackets on the West Side of Manhattan mostly by default. As a kid, Spillane had been a numbers runner for a sweaty, 300-pound bookmaker and policy boss named Hughie Mulligan. Mulligan was soft, both figuratively and literally; he wore thick-rimmed glasses and moved with the grace of a water buffalo. His considerable stature as a bookmaker had more to do with his brains and likeability than his muscle, for Mulligan was not a violent man. He was known to be a facilitator, or bag man, a person whose sway in the underworld was based on his array of friends in city government, the police department, and among crooked contractors and shady businessmen. Mulligan had been smart enough to snatch up Mickey Spillane and turn him into a neighborhood organizer when Spillane was in his early twenties. Spillane was a handsome kid and respectful of his elders; everyone knew Mickey would one day supplant Hughie, who was from Queens and probably never should have been in charge of the neighborhood rackets in the first place.
The fact that Mulligan was running things in Hell’s Kitchen was due to atrophy more than anything else. The neighborhood’s rightful heir, Eddie McGrath, had fled New York City around the time of the infamous Cockeye Dunn-Squint Sheridan murder trial in the early 1950s. Ever since that trial and the Waterfront Commission hearings, the neighborhood in general had gone into a precipitous decline. This was due in part to the waterfront’s dwindling appeal as an object of pilferage and plunder. Starting in the late 1950s, air freight and overland shipping via truck sent the seagoing cargo industry into a tailspin from which it never recovered. The membership of the ILA in the Port of New York dropped from a high of 40,000 in 1945 to just 18,000 by 1970. With the disappearance of all those workers, many of whom had taken part in an extortionate system that started with the shape-up, labor racketeering and peripheral moneymaking scams like policy, gambling, and loan-sharking weren’t what they used to be.
Not all was gloom and doom, however. By the 1960s, when Mickey Spillane was taking over as boss of the West Side, there was a renewed sense of excitement in the air. While an Irish Catholic sat in the White House in Washington, D.C., Spillane worked out of the White House in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. The White House bar was a modest gin mill at Forty-fifth Street and Tenth Avenue from which he played the role of neighborhood benefactor, doling out favors and settling disputes like an ancient clan chieftain from the fields of Athenry. When Spillane learned a neighbor had landed in the hospital, he usually sent flowers. On Thanksgiving, turkeys went out to families in need. The man from the White House bar was especially popular with the nuns at Mount Carmel convent on West Fifty-fourth Street, to whom he made occasional donations.
What made Spillane popular—especially among neighborhood old-timers—was his sense of history. In 1960, the year of JFK’s inauguration, he married into the McManus family. The McMani, as they were known to nearly everyone on the West Side, had ruled the Midtown Democratic Club since 1905. In the beginning, there was Thomas J. McManus, who first wrested control of the district leadership from the illustrious George Washington Plunkitt. After vanquishing Plunkitt, McManus became one of the most powerful district leaders in the city. When he dropped dead from a heart attack unexpectedly, the incident was treated like the passing of a monarch. Some five hundred floral pieces filled the back room of the Midtown Democratic Club, where the wake was held. Days later, New York Governor Al Smith led the funeral march of one hundred policemen and three hundred carloads of mourners.
In 1945, McManus’s nephew, Eugene, proprietor of a funeral parlor on West Fifty-first Street, became district leader. Eugene McManus ruled the local Democratic club for nearly two decades until—around the same time Mickey Spillane married Eugene’s daughter Maureen—his health declined, and he turned over the reigns to his son James, Maureen’s brother.
The marriage of Mickey and Maureen was a big deal in Hell’s Kitchen; the melding of two such archetypal neighborhood families—one criminal, the other political—carried huge symbolic weight. If Hell’s Kitchen had been a wedding cake, Mickey and Maureen were the bride and groom on top, the living embodiment of the link between legitimate and illegitimate forces that had always been at the heart of the Irish Mob.
As a mobster, Mickey Spillane was more of a pseudopolitician than a tough guy; after all, he had come from the halfway respectable side of the business: bookmaking, numbers, a little loan-sharking. But like other Irish American gangsters, Spillane had grown up the hard way. His first brush with the law was in 1950 at the age of seventeen, when he was shot and then arrested by a patrolman while robbing a Manhattan movie theater. He was sent to St. Clare’s Hospital, then to jail. Over the years, he would rack up twenty-four more arrests on an assortment of charges including burglary, assault, gun possession, criminal contempt, and the crime he was most often associated with, gambling. But Mickey only did short stretches in the joint, and his solicitous demeanor and neighborhood affiliations made him seem more like a gentleman gangster than a hood.
And then, of course, there was the name: Mickey Spillane. It didn’t hurt at all that the most popular pulp fiction writer in America had the same name. The fact came up all the time. Once, Spillan
e’s youngest son Bobby rushed home with a Mickey Spillane paperback he’d picked up at a Times Square candy store. “Hey pop,” he said. “Did you see this?”
“Yeah,” said Mickey. “I know.”
“Well,” asked the son, “have you read his stuff?”
“I tried,” replied the father, a churchgoing Catholic. “Too much sex.”
In the early 1970s, the coincidence of the two Mickeys became part of a formal inquiry when a crusading assistant D.A. dragged Spillane, Hughie Mulligan, and other West Side mobsters before a grand jury that was investigating corruption in the NYPD. Spillane, under oath, was asked a number of incriminating questions, such as: “Were you present on certain occasions when Hughie Mulligan paid bribes to police officers?” and “Have you ever assaulted anyone in an attempt to collect a usurious loan for anyone?” Other questions concerned a conversation between Mulligan and Spillane, recorded by the police, in which Mickey allegedly sanctioned the murder of a government witness.
Throughout his afternoon on the stand, Spillane refused to answer questions. Finally, the exasperated assistant D.A. asked, “Well, can you tell me this: Are you related to the other Mickey Spillane? The famous writer?” After a momentary pause, Mickey leaned over to the microphone and said, “No. But I’d be happy to change places with him at the moment.” Everybody laughed, but Spillane’s refusal to talk cost him a contempt charge and sixty days at the Rikers Island House of Detention.
While Spillane lost time on the street, he gained stature in his community; refusing to talk was a revered neighborhood trait. The culture of the underworld was probably as deeply ingrained in the blood and sinew of Hell’s Kitchen as in any neighborhood in the country. Unlike South Boston, which was predominantly Irish, Hell’s Kitchen had always been mixed—a classic New York–style melting pot. Through criminal gangs like the Gophers and through political control of the neighborhood (courtesy of the McMani), the Irish had established an early foothold. It was Spillane’s job to see to it that certain neighborhood traditions were protected from outside encroachment. In the Irish American criminal arena, that usually meant standing up to the Italians.
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