by Howie Carr
“So I’m the one introduced Debbie Davis to Stevie Flemmi. Not one of my better matchmaking efforts.”
* * *
ANOTHER OF Johnny’s interventions on behalf of romance proved more successful, and long-lasting. One night one of the regulars at Chandler’s, a successful businessman whom Johnny looked up to, walked in frowning, a dejected look on his face. Johnny invited him over to his table for a drink and asked him what the problem was.
He said he was just thinking about this girl who lived down the street, and how she was going out with another guy. And she had told him, if she wasn’t tied up, she’d love to go out with him. I think she was afraid of this guy she had been dating. Now, this guy I’m sitting with is not just a customer of mine, he’s my friend, you follow me? So I told him, maybe I can do something for you. Give me a day or two.
He left and I saw Alvin Campbell sitting at the bar. So I said to Alvin, do me a favor, go see this guy—the girl’s boyfriend—and tell him to pack his bags and get outta town. I think the guy knew Alvin’s reputation, which didn’t hurt the situation. After Alvin had a chat with him, he ran away. I was surprised. I didn’t think he’d leave, it was strictly a bluff on our part.
A couple of days later, my friend comes back into Chandler’s, and now he’s got a big smile on his face. He says he’s got a date with this girl, now that the boyfriend is gone. As of 2010, they are still married.
Call me Cupid.
Tony Ciulla would follow the race circuit—living in hotels near wherever the meet was. A couple of times a week, he’d call Johnny from the hotels and give him the next batch of races that he’d fixed, and how they should bet them.
Eventually, Ciulla started buying thoroughbreds with Howie. This put him even deeper into the gang. Through straws, Ciulla eventually purchased a horse named Spread the Word.
It was a $30,000 horse that Fat Tony had somehow figured out how to run in $10,000 races. So we could win some really big money on Spread the Word. But we could only do it a few times before the tracks figured it out, so we had to make the races count. We had guys out everywhere when Spread the Word was running. This one guy, Jerry Matricia, he was from Boston but he’d moved to Vegas. We had him bet on Spread the Word—told him to just bet as much as he could, and then call us before the race, so we’d know how much we owed him if he lost. Spread the Word won, and so did Matricia—$90,000.
The problem was, before we could get somebody out to Vegas to collect, he went into the casinos, figuring he could use our money to win a few grand more for himself. You can imagine what happened next—he gets down 5 or 10 thousand, panics, tries to get it all back and loses everything, the whole 90 grand. Then he starts running, because he’s afraid. That’s the kind of problem you’re going to get when you have as many guys handling cash as we did.
Another time Ciulla paid off a jockey to lose and he won. Double-crossed us. We lost a bundle. Joe Mac went crazy, he wanted to hit the guy and bury him in the back stretch at Suffolk, as a lesson to all the other jockeys. I think Ciulla even testified to that in court. But it ended up Howie and Barnoski went out and gave the guy a slap and told him, “If we ever pay you again to lose a race and it looks like you’re gonna win it, then you just better make sure you don’t, even if you have to jump off the fucking horse.”
The Hill was making big money with Fat Tony, but Ciulla was addicted to gambling. It didn’t matter how much he made fixing races, he was always in the hole, because he couldn’t stop wagering. Winning just gave him more money to lose on the races and the games he couldn’t fix. It was the thrill of the action that turned him on. Through the Hill, he could finally place bets on his fixed races, but he was still losing everything he made and more, betting on sports with Hill bookies like Bobby Gallinaro. So Ciulla went back to working his old scams, upgrading his old diamond-ring bait-and-switch. Now he was using bars of gold.
Fat Tony knew a guy named James Sousa, and Sousa knew a dentist who had a lot of cash he was looking to invest. Ciulla gave Sousa some gold samples to show the dentist. Just as in the diamond grift, the gold was of high quality, and the dentist went for it.
Sousa arranged to meet the dentist in the parking lot of what was by now the Star Market on Winter Hill, across Broadway from the garage. The dentist would bring cash, which Sousa would take in exchange for a crate full of what was supposed to be gold, but was in fact bricks. But that wouldn’t be a problem, because after the transaction Barnoski was supposed to arrive, gun drawn. According to Ciulla’s plan, Barnoski would rob the dentist and steal the crate of “gold,” so that the dentist would never know he’d been scammed.
Ciulla’s setting this up on his own and we know nothing about the details. The problem comes when he realizes he needs a second gun for the score, so Ciulla’s running around Marshall Street looking for somebody, and he runs into Joe Mac. Joe says okay, he’ll be the second gun. But when they get over to the parking lot, everything goes wrong. The dentist has his ten-year-old kid with him, and he brought a gun himself. When he sees Barnoski and Joe Mac with guns, he starts shooting. Doesn’t hit anybody, but everybody’s running for cover and screaming. Joe and Barnoski manage to escape, but Sousa gets arrested. Ciulla grabs the dentist’s kid—to protect him, he says, that’s his story later, and drives him around the block. But it’s still kidnapping, and the dentist knows Sousa, who knows Joe was there. That’s our problem. Now Joe is jammed up.
So Tony came into the garage with Barnoski, and by this point there’s a John Doe warrant out for kidnapping the kid. Sousa’s in a panic, he wants money for an attorney, he’s afraid of jail, he knows Barnoski and Ciulla. I didn’t think Ciulla would hold up.
Ciulla and Barnoski were told to leave and the partners convened a summit. Johnny immediately made a pitch for killing Ciulla, on the grounds that the whole crazy stunt was his idea, and because he was the one who snatched the kid. But he knew Howie would never sign off on hitting Ciulla. They owned horses together. So Sousa would have to go.
A few days later, Barnoski brought Sousa to the garage, and then left. Johnny and Stevie would handle this one. They told Sousa to go into the back office and wait for them. It was the middle of a weekday, since Sousa was supposed to pick up some money from them, during regular banking hours. Sousa wasn’t worried. After all, there was a full crew of mechanics and body-shop guys working in the garage. To make sure nobody could hear the shots, Johnny had somebody start up the large motors in the repair bays. Then he sent the workers out for lunch early. Finally he put someone on the door to the office.
Johnny walked into the back office as Sousa watched him. Suddenly he drew a .38-caliber revolver from his coat pocket and shot Sousa in the head. Sousa slumped over in the chair, dead, and blood immediately started gushing from his head. Stevie rushed in and grabbed a paint bucket to catch the blood before it spilled onto the floor and made an even bigger mess. Johnny threw the gun down and changed into different clothes—the ones he’d been wearing when he shot Sousa were bloody, and there was gunpowder all over them.
Joe McDonald’s brother Leo arrived with a sleeping bag to wrap Sousa’s corpse in. Joe McDonald and Jimmy Sims came by and loaded the body into the back of a car, which they drove to Boxford. Sousa’s body was never found, and probably never will be. The two guys who disposed of it, Joe Mac and Sims, are both long gone.
Sousa had a court date coming up pretty soon. Barnoski shows up, pretends to be surprised when Sousa is a no-show. He goes up to Sousa’s wife and says, “Where is your husband? Everybody is looking for him.” Then he gives her some cash and tells her, “If you get in touch with him, have him call me.”
Since he had come back from Montreal, Stevie Flemmi seemed different. More serious. And preoccupied—sometimes he’d be sitting in a room with the others, and they’d eventually notice that he was just staring off into space, and hadn’t said a word for a half hour. Yet he and Whitey somehow seemed to hit it off. They were the two Hill guys who were actually from Boston, the
city itself. Stevie told the feds later that he first realized Whitey’s potential one day when they were shaking down an independent Jewish bookie. Whitey grabbed an ax and so thoroughly frightened the bookie that he fainted.
But Whitey and Stevie had more in common than their propensity for sudden violence. Unlike everyone else in the gang, members and associates alike, they barely drank. They didn’t smoke. Stevie was into what passed in the 1970s for health food. He enjoyed Japanese cuisine, but whenever he talked the other guys into joining him at a Japanese restaurant, he’d lecture them about the health hazards of sake. Some mornings he would bring a box of cornflakes to the garage. But he refused to drink milk, so he would take a bowl of cereal over to the sink and run tap water over it. Then he would eat it—with a fork.
Stevie had also become a bit of a hypochondriac. He was obsessed with “germs,” constantly washing his hands. He hated shaking hands with anyone. Whitey was the same way. The younger guys in the gang quickly learned that if they didn’t want Whitey and Stevie around, all they had to do was cough into their hands a few times. Whitey and Stevie would quickly excuse themselves for the rest of the day, or evening. Stevie didn’t smoke marijuana anymore. He seemed to have nasal problems—he was always sniffing, so much so that even Whitey would grow exasperated with him.
Increasingly, Stevie seemed to care, as Salemme put it, “only about his money and his women, not necessarily in that order.” He had set up Marion Hussey in the house in Milton, but he was also spending a lot of time with his new nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Debbie Davis. She had a sister named Michelle who had dark hair—“my Ava Gardner,” Stevie would call her, as if she had any idea who Ava Gardner was. She was thirteen. Then there was Deborah Hussey, Marion’s daughter. Stevie was her common-law stepfather. She was thirteen when Stevie started raping her.
There were other young girls, too, in South Boston, where Stevie seemed to spend more of his time than in Roxbury, now that his old neighborhood was overwhelmingly black. He still had a flag planted in Roxbury—the Marconi Club on Northampton Street, into which Johnny had also invested. But Flemmi he spent less time there as the years went by. Increasingly Stevie and Whitey kept to themselves, which was just as well. From what they were starting to see and hear, the rest of the gang at the garage didn’t really want to know what Stevie and Whitey were doing in their spare time.
* * *
IN 1975, Whitey and Stevie reported a problem in Savin Hill, the Dorchester neighborhood between Whitey’s Southie and Stevie’s Roxbury. It seemed that Eddie Connors, the career criminal and proprietor of the Bulldog Tavern, had been bragging to the customers on the other side of his tap about how he’d set up Spike O’Toole for the Hill.
The only guys we ever heard this from were Stevie and Whitey. Later on I learned that Eddie had been arrested on an armored-car job, but I don’t know if they were somehow involved and wanted to shut him up. By then, Stevie and Whitey were like Ike and Mike. And they told us, this time they wanted to be the shooters. They wanted to kill Connors together. Maybe it was going to be their bond, or maybe they wanted to have something on each other. I’m not sure. All I know is, it was a Southie thing. They even wanted to use a Southie car instead of one of our boilers. It was a sedan, I remember that.
It was Howie’s name that Eddie Connors kept dropping when he was telling his patrons about setting up Spike O’Toole—or so Stevie and Whitey said. So Howie called Connors at the Bulldog and said he had to discuss something important with him, on a safe phone, which in those days meant a pay phone.
Howie didn’t let on what he wanted to talk about, just said it was imperative that they talk. Finally, Connors gave him a phone number Howie could call him at in a couple of nights. Johnny used the same song-and-dance he’d employed before the Indian Joe hit—calling the phone company and finally getting a supervisor. Once again, Johnny spun a tall tale about his son’s car breaking down, and how the boy had run out of change before he could give him the address where he was stranded. The supervisor was only too happy to oblige.
This pay phone was at a gas station at the corner of Morrissey Boulevard and Freeport Street, not far from the Bulldog. Johnny was driving the Southie car. There was a hill right behind the station—a good place for Johnny to park.
The next day they would read in the papers that several hundred yards down the boulevard, hundreds of cops had been attending a formal dinner at a local banquet hall. But they were off-duty, and loaded, and none of them heard a thing. But then Whitey noticed a Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) police speed trap on Morrissey Boulevard, which could have conceivably presented a problem.
Eddie Connors, Dorchester bar owner, was shot to death in a phone booth in 1975.
Whitey quickly spotted another phone booth and told Johnny to pull over. He called in a report of a bank burglary in progress down in Quincy. He knew that would get their attention. A couple of minutes later the MDC cops were heading south toward Quincy at about 90 miles an hour, blue lights flashing. Johnny started the boiler and they resumed their journey to the gas station.
* * *
JOHNNY PULLED the Southie boiler over on Freeport Street and watched Whitey and Stevie scramble up the hill. Then he heard a volley of gunshots, after which they came running back down the hill. They jumped in the car and Whitey said, “He’s gone.” Johnny turned onto Morrissey Boulevard, heading back toward Southie. He wasn’t in any hurry, considering that it was a stolen car and they still had the murder weapons with them. Suddenly, from the backseat, Whitey yelled, “Pull over.”
“I want to drive,” he told Johnny. “I know this area better than you do.”
Johnny got out and climbed into the backseat.
* * *
IT WAS 1975, and Southie was in turmoil. Court-ordered school busing in Boston had begun a year earlier, and the epicenter of the city’s white resentment was South Boston. Whitey’s brother Billy, the state senator, sometimes showed up outside South Boston High School to lead the protests as the buses full of black students from Roxbury arrived in the morning. Stones were often hurled.
The situation on the streets in Southie quickly degenerated into total anarchy. The police grew so frustrated that one Saturday night off-duty members of the Tactical Patrol Force, which bore the brunt of the daily street battles, taped black duct tape over their badge numbers. Then they invaded the Rabbit Inn on Dorchester Street, where the rioters often congregated in the mornings after pelting the cops with stones. The first cop through the door slapped an unloaded throwdown on the bar—to provide some scrap of evidence that they had been threatened. Then the rest of the cops swarmed inside and beat the shit out of everyone inside the Rabbit Inn.
The most enthusiastic proponent of forced busing was the Boston Globe, then owned and operated by wealthy Ivy League–educated Yankees from the tonier suburbs—“social-planning liberal do-gooders,” in the words of Johnny’s former in-law, City Councilor Dapper O’Neil. The Globe daily lectured its blue-collar city readers on their duty to obey the busing decrees of the federal judge, who lived in Wellesley. The new Democrat governor, who lived in Brookline, a town that was almost totally surrounded by the city but with a school system that had not been ordered to integrate, agreed with the Globe and the judge that the lower-middle- and working-class white population of Boston must obey the law as laid down by their suburban betters.
Whitey Bulger was not a particularly political person. His only known instance of political activism came in 1970, when his brother was running for an open state senate seat after eight years in the House. Despite the fact that Billy’s opponent barely represented a threat, Whitey told anyone who would listen that he was planning to kill the bum who had the temerity to run against Billy. Testifying before a congressional committee in 2003, Billy Bulger said that he had tracked Whitey down and told him to immediately desist in his “madness.”
Five years later, apparently, no one was around to dissuade Whitey when he got the idea of shooti
ng up the Globe presses. The broadsheet was published on Morrissey Boulevard, a few hundred yards from where Eddie Connors had been gunned down. The Globe in those days was immensely profitable, and powerful, and its presses, at street level behind plate-glass windows, were visible symbols of the Globe’s clout. The whole operation—the presses, the smug bow-tied editors and reporters, even the green delivery trucks—was a constant grating reminder of the suburban political establishment’s domination of the poor whites of South Boston.
The Globe was so despised in Southie that on the night that the TPF wrecked the Rabbit Inn, the patrons who hadn’t been taken by ambulance to the emergency room of Boston City Hospital would call only the Herald American to get their side of the story out. They didn’t trust the trust-funded reporters of the Globe to tell the truth.
Finally, Whitey decided to strike a blow for the Town. One night in October 1975, he and some of his crew drove down Morrissey Boulevard to the Globe, where he opened fire with a high-powered rifle on the presses, shattering the plate-glass windows.
The next day, the editorial-page editor from Cambridge, the editor from Lincoln, the governor from Brookline, and the judge from Wellesley all once again denounced the outrageous lawlessness among the white Roman Catholic working classes of Boston.
* * *
DESPITE HIS brief foray into civil disobedience, Whitey was still more interested in settling his own personal scores. Next he wanted to get rid of Tommy King, another of the old Mullen gang. Whitey had been bad-mouthing him for years at the garage, dropping hints about how Tommy had to go, but no one else cared. He’d been in on the Donald Killeen hit in 1972, then Paulie McGonagle’s murder, and a couple of other murders since then. He had set up Ralph DeMasi perfectly and had driven a crash car on the Indian Joe hit. He could get the job done and he kept his mouth shut. In other words, he was capable.