Hitman

by Howie Carr

  Joe Russo under arrest in 1989.

  When the ceremony was finished, Vinnie Federico yelled downstairs to his girlfriend that it was time to eat. As for Vinnie himself, he just picked at his food. He was heading back to MCI-Shirley, he explained, and they were planning their usual big Sunday-night feed. Vinnie went on, explaining that one of the Greek inmates at Shirley was a great cook. This weekend, Vinnie said, the Greek’s menu included lobster, shrimp, and, for dessert, pineapple upside-down cake. The old-time goombahs from Revere, who’d done time in the hellhole that was the old Charlestown prison, couldn’t believe what Federico was telling them about incarceration in the Dukakis era.

  “You call dat doin’ time?” one of the Revere guys said.

  After everyone went home, or back to prison, Vinnie Ferrara was in a great mood as he cleaned up the house, telling one of his men what a beautiful fucking thing it had all been. The FBI bugs were still recording.

  “Only the ghost knows what happened here today, by God,” said the Animal.

  Only the Ghost Knows—Zip had the title for his screenplay!

  * * *

  ZIP’S EUPHORIA didn’t last long. In August 1990, a combination of various law-enforcement agencies—pointedly excluding the FBI—began rolling up Whitey’s drug rings in Southie. The arrests began before dawn on a Friday morning, when they picked up one mid-level dealer sleeping at his job at the city DPW yard. In the morning, he had been planning to punch in at his second job, at a state agency where hiring was controlled by the wife of one of Billy Bulger’s loyal state senators.

  In the morning, Zip was frantically working the phones to make sure Whitey hadn’t been indicted. Why, didn’t these people read the Globe? Didn’t they understand, Whitey kept the drugs out of Southie.

  That afternoon, the DEA held a press conference.

  “For years the Bulger organization has told people there are no drugs in Southie,” said the DEA agent in charge. “These arrests show that that’s not true. These arrests show the people have been had by James Whitey Bulger.”

  Some of the arrested dealers were shipped down to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, where Rubber Lips Patriarca had been incarcerated since his arrest after the Guild Street induction ceremony. Rubber Lips knew who was being brought in, and when he saw one of the Southie guys, the Mafia boss of New England called him over. Without even introducing himself, Rubber Lips shook his head and began talking:

  “You do know why you’re here, don’t you?” he asked the Southie cocaine dealer. “You got ratted out by your boy Whitey. He’s been snitching for years.”

  * * *

  DOWN IN Florida, Johnny wasn’t worried about the drug dealers. He knew nothing about any of that. But he was concerned about another problem, this one in Chelsea. A number of the Jewish bookies who had been paying “rent” to Whitey and Stevie for years were starting to feel the heat from a probe begun by the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, with subsequent help from the state police (but not, of course, the FBI).

  The bookies had been laundering cash out of Heller’s Café, under the Mystic Tobin Bridge in Chelsea. The feds started by targeting the barroom owner, a guy named Michael London. Once they had London’s books, they knew exactly who they could take down for money laundering and income-tax evasion. It was now just a question of figuring out which bookies to flip first.

  It was a guy named Chico Krantz who started the stampede. He used to drive a delivery truck for the Herald. Now I begin to get worried a little bit. He was one of the guys Joey Y was collecting for. What I’m worried about is RICO—the Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act. That’s what they got Jerry Angiulo on. They hook you on a couple of recent crimes—predicate acts, they call them. After they’ve established them then they can drag in anything else, even if the statute of limitations has expired on the earlier crimes.

  I remember when I first went on the lam, Whitey and Stevie told me they were getting out of the bookmaking business, that all they were gonna do now was “protection.” I said to them, I don’t get it. Bookmaking is a state offense, a year tops, in the House of Correction, which means three months, like I did in Plymouth in ’78. “Protection” is extortion. That’s a federal rap, ten years, and nowadays you gotta do 85 percent of a federal sentence. It didn’t make sense to me, Whitey and Stevie exposing themselves like that, but then, I didn’t know they had complete protection. Their problems with “protection” only started when their own protection began to break down.

  In the fall of 1990, Zip Connolly suddenly decided to retire from the FBI. Times were changing rapidly—the Republicans had swept the statewide elections in a landslide. The cocaine busts, the dealers’ state jobs, and Whitey’s increasing notoriety were among the many issues that had infuriated the electorate. Nine of Billy Bulger’s rubber-stamp Democratic senators were ousted from office, and the GOP came within perhaps 20,000 votes of taking over the entire state senate for the first time since 1958.

  Billy Bulger’s clout was definitely diminished, at least temporarily, and it was time for Zip to cash out while he still could. Although both would later deny it, at the time Zip told his friends that Billy had arranged a job for him, as chief of security at Boston Edison. He succeeded another former FBI agent, and would in turn eventually be succeeded by another G-man pal of Whitey’s.

  That agent, Nick Gianturco, was the host of Zip’s farewell dinner at Joe Tecce’s in the North End in December 1990. A camera recorded the event, and a copy of that videotape was later found in Whitey’s personal effects when he became a fugitive four years later.

  Among those in attendance at Zip’s farewell dinner were a number of high-ranking Boston cops, including a future police commissioner and Eddie Walsh, that dear friend of Zip’s who made the first pinch on Johnny. Also in attendance was a gangster named Arthur Gianelli—Zip’s brother-in-law, an underworld associate of Joey Yerardi’s. Zip’s second wife was also there, visibly pregnant for the second time in three years. She would soon give birth to twin boys.

  Everyone lauded Zip’s career as a lawman and gangbuster. The number-two agent in the Boston office read the letter that the then U.S. House Speaker John McCormack had written to J. Edgar Hoover on Zip’s behalf back in 1968.

  The head of the Organized Crime Strike Force, a future superior court judge named Diane Kottmyer, presented Zip with a bottle of wine and said, “John, they wanted me to say that that bottle came courtesy of South Boston Liquors, but I won’t say that.”

  She didn’t quite get the name right—it was the South Boston Liquor Mart—but Zip was ready with a quip of his own.

  “No finer liquor store in the Commonwealth,” he said, to gales of laughter and applause.

  Finally, it was Billy Bulger’s turn to laud his pal.

  “Who’s the personification of friendship in our community other than John Connolly? He’s a splendid human being. He’s a good pal.… John Connolly is the personification of loyalty, not only to his old friends and not only to the job that he holds but also to the highest principles. He’s never forgotten them.”

  * * *

  WHEN THEY brought Chico Krantz into court to plead guilty, he had more protection than any Boston mob witness since Joe Barboza. Uniformed marshals patrolled the halls outside the courtroom with M-16s. Once Chico was in the Witness Protection Program, the feds began raiding the other bookies’ bank safe-deposit boxes. Eight of the Heller’s Café bookmakers were indicted on money-laundering charges. A few of them flipped immediately and went into the Witness Protection Program. They testified that they had been paying “the Hill”—Whitey and Stevie—up to $3,000 a month in “rent.”

  Others, though, hung tough. Sooner or later, they figured, the laws’ attention would wane, as it always had in the past, and then they could get back to business as usual. But this time it was different. At the urging of the feds, judges began denying the bookies bail, on the grounds that they were in danger, which they probably were.

  B
efore their arrests, whenever he spoke to them, Stevie Flemmi would mention the words “Barney Bloom”—a bookie who’d been murdered in the 1970s, not by Stevie or the Hill, but by In Town. But it made Stevie’s point, or so he assumed.

  The bookies were not young men—most were in their sixties. It was tough on them, being shipped off to Allenwood for a few months and then brought back to Boston and given a second chance to testify. If they refused again, they’d be threatened with eighteen months for contempt of court—before their money-laundering trials even began.

  “The government is turning everyone into rats,” one bookie groused to his attorney in open court. “It’ll become Russia.”

  A few weeks later, he flipped. Emboldened by what they were now reading in the papers, some of Whitey’s extortion victims began coming forward. One guy was a Southie bar owner who had worked in a bank. Whitey had brought him to their convenience store, Rotary Variety, and demanded a “loan.” Whitey had pulled a knife out of his boot and began stabbing empty cardboard boxes and calling this latest victim a “fuckster” over and over. In the end, the man paid Whitey $35,000, but then screwed up his courage and went to the FBI. He was fitted for a wire, but then the old pattern reasserted itself. Whitey refused to meet with or even speak to the guy. As usual, Whitey had gotten a tip from one of the crooked G-men on his payroll.

  But this time, what was even more significant was what didn’t happen. The banker who had gone to the cops wasn’t robbed or whacked or put in a hole or thrown in jail as a feather in somebody’s cap. Whitey’s grip on Southie was starting to slip.

  I began to hear the word “amalgam.” At first I didn’t even know what it meant. But then I found out, and I became even more concerned. They were going to use some of those tapes from 1981, when Larry Baione was saying, “We’re the Hill and the Hill is us.” It all went back to 1972, when the Winter Hill Gang was formed, and Howie and I sat down with Jerry and decided there weren’t going to be any more independent bookies, that they have to go with either us or In Town.

  So they got those tapes, from ’81, and now we find out, they’ve also been bugging Heller’s Café, and they have these wiseguys from In Town saying to the bookies, you either gotta go with Whitey and Stevie, or Vinnie the Animal. They got one Mafia guy on tape saying, Stevie can’t carry Vinnie’s jockstrap.

  Once we know the questions they’re asking in the grand jury, it’s pretty obvious where the feds are going with their theory. They’re going to say that the Hill and the Mafia are “amalgamated,” that since ’72 it’s really just one gang. That means this time everybody’s getting indicted, not just the Mafia, or us guys from Somerville. Looks like Whitey and Stevie could finally have a problem.

  But still, I’m laying back. I mean, at that point all they got on me is the race fixing.

  Whitey had always understood the necessity of staying out of the limelight. After threatening Herald reporter Paul Corsetti in 1981, he’d been pretty much left alone by the media until the Globe series in 1988. He and Stevie often did business standing on the sidewalk at the traffic rotary outside the South Boston Liquor Mart, but no media ever took their pictures. The cops knew what he looked like, as did a few reporters, but to the general public beyond the Broadway Bridge, Whitey was a wraith, a phantom, a legend.

  No pictures, no story, or at least not nearly as much of a story—Whitey had long benefited from that journalistic fact of life. But his instincts finally failed him. In the summer of 1991, with so many of his bookies and drug dealers looking at serious prison time, Whitey should have been somewhere far, far from Southie.

  But then one of his old associates won $14.3 million in the state lottery’s Mass Millions drawing. It has never been clear exactly how Whitey engineered it, but he ended up with a one-sixth cut of the winning ticket, good for $120,000 a year before taxes. Every year for the next twenty years, Whitey would get a check from the state on July 1 for just over $89,000.

  Not a bad “kiss in the mail,” as the boyos on Castle Island would say. It wasn’t a phony disability pension—white man’s welfare, as such pensions were called in Boston’s blue-collar neighborhoods. But the annual lottery payout would serve as the white man’s welfare. Whitey’s sycophants at the Globe, sullen and silent since the cocaine busts eleven months earlier, sprang deliriously back into action. One even recounted the fable about how Whitey “has delivered … beatings to people accused of dealing drugs in South Boston.”

  The downside to this latest score was that Whitey had to go to lottery headquarters in Braintree and present himself as a winner. The lottery had surveillance cameras in the lobby, and suddenly, thanks to the new Republican state treasurer, every TV network in the country had video of Whitey. His picture—in sunglasses and a white Red Sox hat—appeared on the front page of USA Today.

  Now everyone in the country would know what Whitey Bulger looked like.

  Surveillance photo of Whitey at the lottery headquarters in Braintree, claiming his Mass Millions winnings in 1991.

  * * *

  BILLY BULGER began a public-relations campaign to rehabilitate his image. No longer the all-powerful de facto governor, he now had to deal with someone in the Corner Office at the State House who was not a rubber stamp. Bill Weld, the former U.S. attorney, had been elected governor after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his private fortune on TV ads that morphed his Democratic opponent into Billy Bulger (and, by implication, Whitey).

  Billy could no longer rely on the Boston press to restore the luster to his tarnished reputation. Outside the Globe, many in the local media were now too wary of either Bulger brother to cozy up to them. As for those who had spent decades cheerleading for them, their credibility was shot. So Billy had to seek out the national press. His first score came in the October 28, 1991, issue of The New Yorker magazine. The trials of Whitey’s cocaine dealers were going on as the story was written, but no mention was made of the wiretapped complaints by drug dealers about the poor quality of the “snow” that someone named “Whitey” was peddling.

  The New Yorker piece was picked up by 60 Minutes, and in March 1992, CBS cameras recorded Billy’s St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, complete with the senate president joking about his brother’s lottery win the previous summer. On September 17, 1992, almost 20 million Americans watched 60 Minutes’s puff piece on Billy Bulger, complete with a fleeting reference to Whitey, so that Billy could say: “He’s my brother. I care about him. I encourage him to come by all the time.”

  * * *

  DICK O’BRIEN, the South Shore bookie who had done three months with Johnny back in 1978, had by now also moved down to Boca Raton. He and Johnny saw a lot of each other socially. Soon the feds were looking for him, too, as part of their expanding bookie investigation. Stevie called Johnny and told him he needed to talk to O’Brien. They all agreed to meet at the Cracker Barrel in Okeechobee.

  I heard people say later maybe Stevie wanted to make a move on Dick, or me, or both of us, but I never thought so. He just wanted to get an idea what Dick was going to do when he got called to testify before the grand jury. Dick told him he’d go to jail, and I told Stevie, you can count on Dick. And they could—he ended up in Plymouth with the rest of us later, for contempt of court for refusing to testify. Obviously, though, Stevie had to be getting very concerned, to come to Florida to sit down with the both of us.

  Later on, there was speculation that as the noose tightened around them, Whitey and Stevie had been on the verge of hatching another scheme, one that would have eliminated almost everyone who could testify against them in all of the murders that were still officially listed as “unsolved.”

  According to this version, widely circulated in the underworld, Whitey and Stevie first planned to take out Howie Winter. Since his release from prison on the race-fixing charges, Howie hadn’t had much luck, getting involved in one ill-fated criminal venture after another. The fact that he would never rat on any of his codefendants did a lot toward solidifying his
gangland stature as a stand-up guy, but it didn’t help his prospects for shorter time whenever he came up for sentencing.

  By 1994, Howie was broke and way behind in his taxes on the long-shuttered old garage in Somerville. He was living in Millbury. Meanwhile, Frankie Salemme was still moving around the city, hustling, trying to make up for his seventeen lost prison years. According to the supposed plan, Whitey and Stevie would first kill Howie, then call Johnny in Florida and tell him that Frankie had done it. They could always concoct believable stories as to why someone had to go.

  Then Johnny would rush up from Florida, pick up some guns in Southie, and quickly eliminate Frankie—with the help of Whitey and Stevie, of course. Then, as soon as Frankie was dead, and a hole was dug for the body, Whitey and Stevie would shoot Johnny, too, and dump him in the hole on top of Cadillac Frank’s body. That was another thing Whitey and Stevie had gotten quite good at over the years—burying multiple bodies in one location.

  In one weekend, they could have eliminated the witnesses to all but a couple of their murders. Then they could have gone into court and pleaded guilty to racketeering, done three years, and ridden off into the sunset with their saddlebags stuffed full of all their millions in ill-gotten gains.

  I don’t know for sure if they ever planned anything like that, but it’s certainly a plausible theory. They’d kill anybody to protect themselves, they’d long since proven that. And it would have tied up the loose ends, once and for all. But even if they had wanted to kill us all, by then events were moving too fast for them.

  By 1994, it was clear that the feds were about to make their move. Whitey spent much of the year shuttling back and forth to Europe, stashing cash across the continent in various safe-deposit banks. One of his final public appearances came on election day 1994. Billy was being challenged for the senate presidency by a younger Democrat, Senator Bill Keating of Sharon, an old acquaintance of Eddie Connors of all people. Whitey held a sign on election day in Norton, down on the Rhode Island border, for Keating’s Republican opponent. Whitey’s candidate lost.