Hitman

by Howie Carr

  At the Chinese restaurant, Whitey coolly said good-bye to Teresa and told her he’d call her. She never heard from him again. From a pay phone, she called her son-in-law, Chris Nilan, a former NHL hockey player. It was Nilan who Whitey had been on his way to visit in Montreal in 1988, when he had his run-in with Trooper Johnson over the bag full of cash at Logan Airport.

  When Nilan arrived at the Chinese restaurant, he didn’t recognize his mother-in-law. On Whitey’s orders, she had dyed her hair white.

  * * *

  IN LATE January 1995, Whitey arranged to call his brother Billy at the home of one of Billy’s favorite State House employees, a senate court officer—a uniformed door-opener—who was one of the few men in the building actually shorter than Billy himself.

  Even though he was an attorney—an officer of the court—the senate president never reported that he had received a phone call from his brother, a federal fugitive. In 2001, Billy Bulger was called before a federal grand jury to answer questions about the call. Specifically, he was asked if he told Whitey he should surrender?

  “I doubt it because I don’t think it would be in his best interest to do so.”

  Did he ever consider turning his fugitive brother in?

  “I don’t feel an obligation to help everyone catch him.”

  Two years later, Billy was again questioned about the call, this time in a public forum, on live television, by members of a congressional committee. Once again, Billy Bulger was less than forthcoming about his conversation with Whitey.

  “The tone of it was something like this,” Billy said. “He told me, uh, don’t believe everything that’s being said about me. It’s not true.”

  Not a single body of any of his victims had yet been disinterred, and yet Whitey was already pleading not guilty.

  “I think he was trying to give me some comfort on that level and he—I don’t know.” Billy paused. “I think he asked me to tell everybody he was okay and, uh, then I told him, well, we care very much for you and um, we’re very hopeful. I think I said I hoped this will have a happy ending. At the time there was no talk of the more terrible crimes.”

  * * *

  AS THE months went by, more and more of Johnny Martorano’s old associates arrived in Plymouth. Cancer-stricken George Kaufman had been indicted with the others, but he was allowed to remain free to die at home. After his death Kevin Weeks and another Southie guy went to his home to remove yet another stash of weapons Stevie had stored in George’s attic. Weeks missed one automatic rifle, which came as quite a shock to the new owner of Kaufman’s house when he stumbled upon it a few months later.

  Frankie Salemme was arrested in West Palm in August 1995. Dick O’Brien was likewise brought north and thrown into Cellblock H after he refused to testify before the grand jury. Another of the Winter Hill bookies, Charlie Raso, soon joined them. Rubber Lips ended up in a different wing, along with Sonny Mercurio, who had gone on the lam after the Vanessa’s bakery bugging but had since been arrested and returned to Massachusetts.

  There was only one guy who wasn’t there—Whitey Bulger.

  I don’t think I ever asked Stevie—where’s Whitey? At that point, I just hoped he never got caught. I certainly had nothing derogatory to say about him, and neither did anyone else. At least not on our cellblock.

  Richie Egbert was Johnny’s original attorney on the race-fixing case. But as an old friend of Johnny’s, Marty Weinberg quickly offered his services. And he came up with a plan. He told Johnny, just sit tight for a few months, and then we make our move. In August 1995, after seven months in confinement, Weinberg filed a motion for dismissal of the race-fixing charges, claiming that Martorano had been denied his right to a speedy trial.

  An afternoon hearing was scheduled in front of U.S. District Court Judge Reginald Lindsay. To the prosecutors, Lindsay made clear his displeasure that the Justice Department had not officially charged Martorano.

  It was about 3:50. The judge told the prosecutors, If you can’t come up with an indictment by four o’clock, or an arrest warrant to hold him, he’s outta here. He’s pointing at me as he says this. A couple of the Justice Department guys rush out of the courtroom and the other prosecutors are just sitting there, along with me and Marty and the judge and his clerk and a couple of marshals. Tick-tick-tick. Nobody says anything. We’re staring at the clock and then glancing at each other, me and Marty.

  Finally it’s four o’clock. The judge points his finger at me and says, “It’s time. I’m leaving, and you’re outta here.” Marty and I bolted for the door. We didn’t even wait for the elevator; we ran down eleven flights of stairs, down the courthouse steps, and out onto Devonshire Street. I had no money, so Marty throws me a hundred-dollar bill and tells me to call him at nine that night. Then we split up and head off as fast as we can go in opposite directions. Back upstairs, in the courtroom, the prosecutors are back with the warrant to hold me, but it’s too late.

  I’m walking fast, but then I realize, I have no idea where I am. I haven’t set foot in Boston for sixteen years. I’m lost. I jumped in a cab and said, “Take me to Somerville.”

  He went straight to Patty’s mother’s house, on Morrison Avenue. He still had a few grand stashed there, which he picked up. Then he called his daughter Lisa, and she drove in from Quincy and picked him up. Then they headed down to the Cape where they enjoyed a leisurely dinner. Around nine, Johnny called his lawyer.

  I told him, this is great being out. But Marty said, “I hate to burst your bubble, but we gave our word you’d be back at the courthouse at nine tomorrow morning if they came up with a new arrest warrant.” Which they had. I asked Marty, how about if I just go to Florida for the weekend and come back Monday? He says, “If you’re not back in the morning, Johnny, they say they’re going to start knocking down the doors of all your families.” So I went back, and then they put out a superseding indictment—there were a few of those over the years—and they added Joey Y to it. By then, George Kaufman had died, so basically they just put my name in the indictment wherever George’s had appeared, because most of the time, whatever calls he was making to Joey Y he was making for me.

  So I’m back in Plymouth and Stevie says, “What are you, crazy? Why’d you come back?” I said, “I didn’t want to leave you here alone with all these guys.” I figured the charges were still basically gambling and racketeering shit, nothing about murder. But it was time for me to make a deal with Marty to defend me on the new charges they’d tacked on. I needed money. Weinberg got me a severance from the others, which is the best thing to have, and everybody was putting in pretrial motions. I was going to sit with the rest of them in the hearings, so they didn’t have to go through everything twice.

  We all get visitors, and you can mill around and talk to the people visiting the other guys. Stevie had told me he and Whitey had set up this thing they called the “X” fund, which they use for miscellaneous expenses, buying guns, bribing cops, things like that. Now Whitey’s gone and Stevie’s in jail, so this kid Kevin Weeks, who hasn’t been indicted yet, has control of the X fund. They got maybe a hundred grand in it. Stevie’s seeing Weeks all the time, giving him instructions as best he can. So one day Stevie is talking to Weeks, and I yell over to Weeks, “Tell the other guy”—meaning Whitey—“I could use a little help.”

  Stevie nods, and so Weeks delivers 10 grand to Phil Costa, Stevie’s guy, and Phil gets it to Loretta in Somerville, who sends it to Patty. I still needed 50 grand for Marty, but I knew somebody who’d help me out. You remember that guy I told you about from Chandler’s—I sent Alvin Campbell down to threaten the boyfriend of the woman he ended up marrying. He was like a big brother to me. Well, I called that guy, he was and still is a good friend of mine. I told him I needed $50,000. He came through, no questions asked.

  Whitey and Catherine were touring the country in Whitey’s new Mercury Marquis, for which he had paid $13,000 on Long Island. Twice in 1995, cops pulled him over and ran his plates—once in Long Beach
, Mississippi, and another time outside a Veterans Administration hospital in Wyoming. Both times the plates came back registered to “Thomas Baxter,” who had no outstanding warrants. Whitey never even got a ticket.

  Finally the couple settled in the bayou country of Louisiana—Grand Isle. They rented a duplex on the beach called It’s Our Dream. They befriended a struggling Cajun family, buying them new kitchen appliances with cash—$100 bills. “Tom” carried the bills in a pouch, along with a pearl-handled knife.

  Some nights “Tom and Helen” would drive forty miles to the Walmart superstore in Galliano. It was open all night, and during his stay in Louisiana Whitey used the pay phone outside to call at least five of his fellow former Alcatraz inmates—usually ex–bank robbers like himself. He would ask them for assistance in getting new IDs. It was surprising that “Thomas Baxter” had lasted as long as it had.

  Whitey was restless. He’d been expecting that somehow, everything would get worked out, the way it always had in the past. But Zip had retired, and his brother’s political career was drawing to a close. Billy was angling for the presidency of the University of Massachusetts as his golden parachute.

  Billy parlayed his 60 Minutes puff piece into a modest book contract, and now his memoir was about to come out. The book’s title was While the Music Lasts. In it Billy defended his older brother against all allegations, saying that the evidence against Whitey was “purchased.” James, as he called Whitey, “abhorred addictive drugs.… I know some of the allegations and much of the innuendo to be absolutely false. Other matters,” Billy conceded, “I cannot be sure about, one way or the other.”

  In his memoir, Billy also discussed, at some length, Southie’s hatred of informers. That was why Billy occasionally handed out a faux prize at his St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, to someone who had crossed him, or Southie, which Billy had come to consider synonymous with himself. He called it the Gypo Nolan Award, named after the title character in the Liam O’Flaherty novel that John Ford made into the Academy Award–winning 1935 movie, The Informer.

  In the book, Billy mentioned “informers” on page 4, “snitching” on page 11, and “spies” on page 171, but never in the context of his brother James.

  * * *

  IN LATE 1995, Whitey’s frustration over the stalemate in which he found himself finally got the better of him. He knew that John Morris had been promoted, and that he was now the director of training for new agents at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia.

  One afternoon he placed a call to Morris, and got through after identifying himself as “Mr. White.” Morris immediately began taking notes, to be used in preparing a 302 incident report, perhaps because he suspected Whitey was taping the conversation. Whitey demanded that Morris use his “Machiavellian mind,” as Whitey put it, to get a retraction from the Globe for its 1988 series, which he now believed was the beginning of the end of the Bulger hegemony in Boston.

  Whitey also mentioned “ruining him and his family,” as Morris later recalled under oath. Finally, Whitey hung up and phoned Kevin Weeks to brag about his call to Morris.

  That evening, Morris’s wife came to pick him up. He asked her if she remembered the $1,000 in cash that John Connolly had handed her back in 1981, when she was a secretary at the Boston FBI office. She’d used the money to fly down to Georgia and shack up with him at the FBI training session in Glynco, even though he was married to another woman? Did she remember that money? Morris asked her. Of course she remembered.

  “It came from Bulger and Flemmi,” he confessed. Once he got home, Special Agent Morris keeled over with a massive heart attack. Ten weeks later, on December 31, 1995, Morris retired from the FBI.

  * * *

  IN EARLY 1996, Governor Bill Weld’s appointed board chose Billy Bulger as the president of the University of Massachusetts—another “nationwide search,” as the State House joke went. That opened up the Southie state senate seat for the first time since 1970, when Whitey had openly threatened to kill Billy’s underdog opponent.

  Billy had already handpicked his successor as senate president. It would be Tom Birmingham of Chelsea. He’d only been in the legislature for three terms, but his pedigree was impeccable. His namesake uncle was a small-town Charlestown hoodlum who’d been shot to death in a rooming house in 1969. His father was the former veterans’ agent for the City of Boston who’d been indicted for obtaining welfare payments for the family of Suitcase Fidler, the gangster/partner of the late Eddie Connors. The charges had been dismissed after the elder Birmingham had hired as his attorney one William M. Bulger, Esq.

  With Birmingham as president of the senate, Billy now wanted his son, Billy Bulger Jr., to replace him in the state senate. And then perhaps in six or eight years, Billy Junior could follow in his father’s footsteps to the presidency of the senate, or even better, someday succeed his father’s pal, Joe Moakley, in John W. McCormack’s old seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

  But there was a roadblock—the state rep from Southie, a former ironworker named Steve Lynch. Lynch boldly jumped into the special election to fill Billy’s senate seat. Still, the Bulgers seemed to have everything going for them: at his final St. Patrick’s Day breakfast as senate president in 1996, Billy insisted that everyone, including U.S. Senator John Kerry, wear a green Billy Bulger Jr. campaign button. Billy Senior worked the Red Line stations at rush hour with his son, an undistinguished attorney and even more lackluster candidate.

  It was the first time since 1964 that Whitey hadn’t been moving around Southie on election day. When the votes were counted, Lynch had crushed Billy Junior by a two-to-one margin. Billy Bulger Sr. couldn’t even carry his own home precinct for his son. It was the end of the Bulgers in Massachusetts politics. None of them would ever run for public office again.

  * * *

  OF ALL the organized-crime types in Plymouth, Stevie Flemmi was the only one who had never done any time, not even a few months in the House of Correction. And at the age of sixty, he was not doing “good time.”

  Stevie kept waiting for someone—anyone—to ride to his rescue. But nothing ever happened. He began covering his bed with pictures of the saints. Soon he took up with a burglar who was a Jehovah’s Witness. For hours Stevie would lie on his back in the cell, softly moaning as the Jehovah’s Witness massaged his feet. When he wasn’t attending religious services of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, he would spin out endless tales to his codefendants, often about Whitey and the FBI.

  He told them Whitey’s stories about LSD experiments in Atlanta were “bullshit,” and that it was H. Paul Rico who’d made sure Whitey got time off for good behavior. He claimed the FBI had its own hit squad. He mentioned how Whitey always carried tiny tape recorders that he used to record all of his conversations with the FBI. Stevie talked about the Sunday-afternoon dinners at his mother’s house, a few feet from the sunporch where the gang’s machine guns were stashed, and where Debbie Davis was murdered. Stevie told them how any number of FBI agents, not just Morris and Connolly, had stopped by to dine with him and Whitey, and how Billy Bulger had joined them “plenty of times,” a claim Billy would later unconvincingly deny.

  The more Stevie talked, the more the other guys wondered. But at first, they couldn’t even articulate what they were starting to suspect. Or maybe they just didn’t want to.

  * * *

  WHITEY HAD been gone from Boston for over a year. His Louisiana home, Grand Isle, was too deserted in the winter for Whitey’s liking, so he and “Helen” went back on the road, only to return in May 1996. He again rented a house near his Cajun friends. Whitey continued paying his rent with $100 bills, and he still passed on his monthly copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine to his friends. But there had been a change in his favorite Cajun family since he left. Their father-in-law was living with them now, and he and “Thomas Baxter” didn’t get along.

  The father-in-law was appalled that Tom would brag in front of Helen that “I have control of my women.” The two men also squab
bled over the value of work, with the father-in-law bragging that he’d worked every day of his life since he turned fifteen.

  “I never had to work,” Whitey retorted. “I had people working for me.”

  * * *

  IN 1996, the FBI finally got around to interviewing Teresa Stanley and she gave up Whitey’s alias. Kevin Weeks found out and got word to Whitey that he needed new IDs. In July 1996, Whitey and Catherine left Grand Isle and drove north, finally ditching the Mercury in Yonkers, New York. The feds soon had it staked out, but Whitey never returned. When it was impounded, the feds discovered that Whitey had put 65,000 miles on it in the eighteen months he drove it.

  By then, Whitey was holed up in Chicago, where one of his fellow former Alcatraz inmates was working for a mobbed-up local union. Whitey needed new IDs, and first Weeks posed Whitey’s youngest brother, the court clerk Jackie, for the photos. But they weren’t close enough, so Weeks flew out to Chicago to get new pictures of Whitey. Later Weeks shook a state police tail and got the new IDs to Whitey in Chicago.

  Whitey and Catherine flew to New York, and then caught a plane to Europe. Neither has been seen in the United States since 1996.

  * * *

  THE JUDGE who’d drawn the racketeering case was Mark Wolf, and every time he had all the defendants in court together, he would ask the prosecutors if there were any “surprises” they were holding back. It was almost as if he were trying to drop a hint, and finally someone on the defense team picked up on it.

  Before being appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, Wolf had been the first assistant U.S. attorney in Boston under Bill Weld. In other words, he’d been around in the office when the Dog House bugs were installed, and for at least a few of the occasions when Jeremiah O’Sullivan had gone out of his way to protect Whitey and Stevie.