by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
“In a further effort to avoid apprehension,” the FBI report states, “BULGER dyed his hair black, adopted the wearing of horn-rimmed glasses, changed the style and color of his clothing, and assumed the practice of carrying a cigar in his mouth to distort his facial features.”
On March 4, 1956, Rico received a tip that Whitey had been hanging out at a nightclub in Revere. The FBI agents staked it out for a couple of nights, and finally, on the evening of March 6, they arrested Whitey as he walked out. He was unarmed and in the company of an ex-con named John DeFeo.
The next morning, at his arraignment, the prosecutor described Whitey as “a vicious person, known to carry guns, and [who] by his own admittance has an intense dislike for police and law enforcement officers.”
Bail was set at $50,000. For the Bulger family, it might as well have been $50 million.
The Bulgers managed to find a politically connected lawyer for Whitey, a former state rep who would eventually become a judge. But the case was hopeless, and on June 21, 1956, after being described by the U.S. attorney as a “habitual criminal,” Whitey was sentenced to twenty years in federal prison by U.S. District Court Judge George C. Sweeney.
“I went to court the day Jim was sentenced,” Billy wrote, leaving it at that. He had just completed his sophomore year at BC.
Whitey would not return to Boston for nine years.
Back at college, money was no longer such a pressing problem for Billy, thanks to the GI Bill. Billy’s plan, in the fall of 1955, was to finish up at BC, then go on to BC Law School, after which he would enter politics. By now he and Mary were “courting,” and often they walked to Castle Island, where they’d stand in line at Kelly’s Landing to buy a box of fried clams. Billy supplemented his income by working, not just as a lifeguard, but also as a master of ceremonies at parties held at McLaughlin & Gormley’s, a banquet hall in Dorchester.
He had returned from the army just in time to witness his hero James Michael Curley’s final campaign for mayor. In his book, Billy recalls the night of the preliminary election in 1955. He has Curley finishing second, although it was actually fourth. Billy then recounts Curley’s final concession speech, in the ballroom of the old Brunswick Hotel, quoting John Paul Jones at the end of his sixty-year political career.
“I have not yet begun to fight.”
In 1960 Representative Joe Moakley ran for the state Senate seat held by John E. Powers. Only two years earlier, Powers had become the first Democratic president of the state Senate since before the Civil War, but he was wounded. After John B. Hynes decided not to seek a fourth term as mayor in 1959, Powers had been a heavy favorite to succeed him at City Hall, but had been defeated after Boston police raided an East Boston bookie joint in a building that just happened to have a large “Powers for Mayor” sign above it. Photos had appeared on all of the front pages, and Powers lost, the victim of a classic dirty trick.
But no one had time to mourn. All that mattered in the jungle of Southie politics was that Powers was now vulnerable. Never one to stand on ceremony, Moakley sensed an opportunity, and he took it. He would not succeed in ousting Powers this time, but his decision to oppose Powers was a boon for Billy; there was now an open House seat in South Boston. Billy hadn’t expected to run so soon; he still had a year left in law school. And he was also planning to ask Mary Foley to marry him. But open House seats didn’t come along often, especially in South Boston, where service in the legislature was considered an opportunity, not a duty. But Billy’s father, growing ever more timid in his dotage, tried to talk him out of both the race and the marriage.
“You can’t support her,” Billy recounts him saying in his book. “For God’s sake don’t tell anybody about this.”
Billy and Mary were married nonetheless, at St. Margaret’s in Dorchester, where Whitey had attended parochial school twenty-five years earlier. The couple soon settled into an apartment, in Southie of course. Mary was almost immediately pregnant with Bill Jr.
Billy’s major source of income was the summer lifeguarding job, but he plunged ahead with his plans to run for Moakley’s open seat in a crowded field of sixteen candidates.
His skeptical father told Billy his opponents would use Whitey against him. For once, his father was right. In one incident, which he mentioned in his congressional testimony, one man snarled at him, “You belong in prison with your brother.”
Billy’s campaign manager was Will McDonough, his oldest friend, by now a sportswriter for the Globe. Another campaign worker was Roger Gill, whom Billy would reward with jobs on various state payrolls for the rest of his life. They envisioned themselves as street urchins, going up against what Billy called the F.I.F.’s—the First Irish Families of Southie.
Of necessity, Billy ran a low-budget campaign. He had a single blue suit, and his clever opponents quickly nicknamed him “One Suit” Bulger. He recalled running into Mary when she got off the subway at Andrew Square, returning from her job at the State House, and telling her he’d dipped into their rent money to buy bumper stickers. He looked chagrined, he recalled, and she smiled and offered to buy him some fried clams.
One of his most formidable opponents was Gerry O’Leary, a high school football hero who would later go to prison for an attempted $650,000 shakedown of a school bus company in 1980 while he was serving on the Boston School Committee. Another tough foe was James Collins Jr., son of a well-heeled bookmaker who would later move out of Boston and be elected treasurer of Norfolk County. Collins too would end up in prison, in 1985, for embezzling county pension funds. The Collins family’s most memorable contribution to Bulger lore would be to spread the rumor that he was actually part Polish or Lithuanian—a believable enough falsehood, given his light hair.
By most accounts, Billy and his crew simply outworked everyone else, and on primary day they prevailed. On election night, he stopped in at the parties of all his major opponents. Where they had called him “One Suit” Bulger, Billy later recalled, he told them he owed his victory to his lucky suit. When he ran into Collins’s father, he told him it was the Polish and Lithuanian votes that had put him over the top. All the while Billy kept smiling. In January he would be a state rep. Finally, a male member of the Bulger family would have a real job.
CHAPTER 2
BILLY BULGER WAS SWORN in as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives on January 5, 1961. Senator John F. Kennedy would succeed Dwight Eisenhower as president in just over two weeks.
A new era might have been about to dawn nationally, but back on Beacon Hill it was business as usual. Politics was still an overwhelmingly Irish game, so much so that an Irish name, it sometimes appeared, was all you needed in politics to succeed.
Everyone seemed to be named Hynes, or Hines, or Craven, or McDonough, or McCormack. There were Tierneys and Kearneys and Connollys galore. Both the president-elect and the state treasurer of Massachusetts were named John F. Kennedy. John E. Kerrigan would soon be joined on the Boston City Council by John J. Kerrigan.
Billy Bulger took office as one of 240 members of the House of Representatives. There were few actual offices at the State House for most of the legislators. All but about forty—the leadership and the chairmen of the more important committees—operated out of the House chambers, from their desks, which were more like open carrels in a public library. The reps had no direct phone lines; calls were taken at the bank of telephones just outside the chambers.
White flight out of the city of Boston was just beginning, and the city delegation still represented one-sixth of the House—forty of the 240 members. Twenty-three of the forty were Irish, seven were Italian, five were Yankee Republicans, and four were Jews. Of the three blacks in the delegation, two had been elected for the first time in 1960—an indication of the continuing black migration into Roxbury, which was starting to spill into North Dorchester.
The rules of life at the State House in 1961 boiled down to three points:
1. Nothing on the level.
2
. Everything is a deal.
3. No deal too small.
The Boston reps lived and died by that credo. Of the forty House members from Boston who were sworn in with Billy in January 1961, at least five ended up in prison—two for income tax evasion, one for bribery, one for assaulting a federal narcotics agent, and another for larceny in connection with a state sidewalk-construction project. Another of the 1961–62 reps was eventually indicted, but acquitted, and two others, including Billy, made appearances before grand juries.
That was how Massachusetts politics operated. Edwin O’Connor, the author of The Last Hurrah, summed up the era in his final novel, All in the Family: “Corruption here had a shoddy, penny ante quality it did not have in other states…. Here everything was up for grabs and nothing was too small to steal….In our politics there seemed to be a depthless cushion of street-corner cynicism, a special kind of tainted, small-time fellowship which sent out a complex of vines and shoots so interconnected that even the sleaziest poolroom bookie managed, in some way, however obscure, to be in touch with the mayor’s office or the governor’s chair.”
Or both.
The police, by and large, were just as compromised as the politicians. As in most large urban areas, many of the cops had grown up on the same street corners with future Mob kingpins. Long before Whitey Bulger perfected the use of law enforcement as both witting and unwitting tools of organized crime, gangsters in Boston had been using them in similar ways.
Anything could be fixed—absolutely anything. Frank Salemme, Stevie Flemmi’s early partner, recalled for a congressional committee in 2003 a time when two Boston cops witnessed one of Stevie’s brothers, “Jimmy the Bear,” murder another man in a car.
“Jimmy Flemmi got out of the car and left, and they [the police] took the car and pushed it out of their division so it would be in another division and they wouldn’t have to investigate it.”
Then the cops returned to the South End, hunted down Stevie Flemmi, and demanded $2,500 in return for not turning in his brother. Stevie didn’t quibble over the amount.
“That’s the era it was, anything for money, even murder,” Salemme said. “It wasn’t considered illegal to do that kind of thing, as crazy as that may sound today.”
If, by some unimaginable bit of bad luck, you were arrested by an honest cop, and you couldn’t fix the case in the district attorney’s office, or bribe a juror, other options remained even after you were in jail.
You could buy a pardon or a commutation from the Governor’s Council, the way Raymond Patriarca, the first boss of the Mafia in New England, had done back in 1938, when a governor’s councilor even composed a letter from a nonexistent priest, attesting to Patriarca’s stellar character.
The council had been around since colonial times, and consisted of eight members whose primary responsibility was confirming the governor’s judicial nominations, as well as his commutations and pardons. Their only real power was their ability to stop someone from getting something he had already paid someone else, either the governor or a legislator, to obtain. Therefore, in order to keep business, and payoffs, flowing smoothly, the governor needed to have a majority of the eight councilors permanently on his side. Whoever the governor was, Democrat or Republican, rogue or reformer, he would almost always be willing to toss a few bones their way—judgeships and clerkships, as well as the occasional pardon.
When Billy arrived at the State House, the governor’s councilors were making the real money rubber-stamping pardons. A couple of the councilors had even printed up what amounted to rate cards—a pardon for, say, manslaughter, naturally cost more than one for an armed robbery, with rapes the second most expensive pardon to purchase, behind only murder.
The prime shopping season for pardons was Christmas, because then they could be justified, or at least rationalized, as acts of Christian charity. The transactions took place in the lobby of the old Manger Hotel, next to the Boston Garden. In the lobby, several of the councilors stationed bagmen who would sit in the hotel’s overstuffed easy chairs, an open satchel beside them, into which the friends or relatives of convicted criminals would drop their cash-filled envelopes. In his day, Governor Jim Curley had called the council a “hock shop,” but it was worse than that.
In 1961, the longest-serving member of the Governor’s Council was from Billy’s own district. Patrick “Sonny” McDonough was an old-time rogue who in many ways was the original Billy Bulger, both in personality and style.
Sonny, who was not related to Will McDonough, was fifty when Billy arrived at the State House in 1961. After a lifetime of watching the Curleys and the McCormacks, among so many others, Sonny had many theories about how to make a buck, and he wasn’t shy about sharing them with his protégés, Billy among them.
For instance, Sonny detested cops, and suggested to his younger associates that they never use anyone with a badge as a bagman.
“I hate it when a cop gives me $300, because I never know if he’s stolen $200 or $700,” he would tell the younger pols in a reflective moment. “The problem with cops is, they think whatever they get is theirs.”
Whitey, meanwhile, was doing hard time in the federal prison system. After his conviction in 1956, his first stop was at the Atlanta penitentiary, and it was there that he met Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, a professor at the Emory University medical school who was conducting experiments with a new drug—LSD.
It was 1957, long before Dr. Timothy Leary urged young people to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Ken Kesey’s electric Kool-Aid acid tests were still seven years in the future. Few had even heard of the drug when Dr. Pfeiffer began looking for volunteers at the local federal penitentiary.
“We were recruited by deception,” Whitey began in the handwritten notes he left behind when he fled Boston in 1994. “We were encouraged to volunteer to be human guinea pigs in a noble humanitarian cause—searching for a cure for schizophrenia. We were told that they could induce all the symptoms of schizophrenia by a chemical LSD-25…
“I was serving a twenty year sentence and was motivated by a desire for some kind of a reduction of sentence—3 days off my sentence for each month of participation—also I was a believer in the government to the degree they would never take advantage of us and also felt that I would be giving something back to society.
“Once a week we checked into the so-called Nuero [sic] Psychiatric Ward—a large room with bars + steel locked door in [the] basement of the prison hospital…we were given the LSD in varying dosage—some times light some times massive that would plunge us into the depths of insanity and followed by periods of deep depression suicidal thought and nightmares and interrupted sleep.”
Now Whitey was positioning himself as the victim of a mad scientist during a white, psychedelic version of the Tuskegee Project.
“Two men [who] went insane on the project were carried down the hall to a strip cell shipped to Springfield Mo and placed in the wing of the criminally insane.”
Billy writes in his memoir that he and his father visited Whitey at least once in Atlanta and then again when Whitey was transferred to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He recalled Whitey’s contempt for the correctional officers.
“You have to score very high in the stupidity test to be a guard in this place,” Whitey told his brother.
But they were apparently smart enough to catch Whitey with what Billy described as “contraband of some sort,” and in 1959, Whitey was shipped west to “the Rock.”
In his early “acclimatizing” years, as Billy called them, he made few ripples at the State House. In his first term, he was the third youngest of the 240 members. By 1961, the Democrats’ majority, expanding by a few seats each term, had risen to 153–87. On average, the Republican members were perhaps ten to fifteen years older than their Democratic counterparts. Those who weren’t being picked off were dying off.
The legislature was also in transition from its tradition of part-time service—in many outlying communities, it had long been considere
d a sacrifice of sorts to serve a term or two in Boston. Now it was becoming a lucrative, full-time career, at least for those in the leadership, who controlled the flow of legislation to the floor. In 1961, though, no one would have thought to list their “profession” as legislator, as so many do now. The 1961–62 “bird book” of Massachusetts politics—the collection of photos and résumés of all the members of the legislature—includes as occupations of the House membership funeral director (6), firefighter (4), farmer (3), housewife (2), foreman (2), and one each of the following: factory worker, bowling alley manager, dentist, and barber.
In May 1961, Billy graduated from Boston College Law School, shortly after his wife, Mary, gave birth to their first child, a son, Billy Jr., on April 3. Between preparing for the bar exam and helping Mary with the baby, Billy wasn’t much for the Beacon Hill nightlife. And for an ambitious young state rep, that was a problem, because the quickest way to rise in the House was to become a drinking buddy of the House speaker, John Forbes Thompson of Ludlow, known as “the Iron Duke.” Only forty, he had been in the legislature since 1949, and legend had it that he’d never taken a drink until he arrived at the State House. He had been wounded in World War II, and many were willing to overlook his increasing dependence on alcohol because of the shrapnel that he still reportedly carried in his body. By 1961, though, the booze was his crutch, a way of life, a disease.
“He wasn’t a bully,” Billy wrote of the Iron Duke. “In fact, he was kind when he thought about it. But he rarely thought about much beyond his next drink. He was at best a spectator, in charge of nothing—least of all himself.”
A backbencher, Billy saw himself going nowhere in such a dysfunctional legislature. He blamed his problems on the speaker, who spent his evenings carousing through the North End, promising jobs at the State House to waiters and bartenders. The next morning they would show up at the speaker’s office asking when they could start work. Not remembering anything about the previous evening, the Iron Duke never turned any of them away, and the number of “court officers”— door openers—continued to swell, leading future congressman Barney Frank to remark that the State House had to be the only building in the world with more door openers than doors.