by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
A few days after the Irish Gang War began with the murder of the first of the McLaughlin brothers on October 30, 1961, a forty-five-year-old housewife from South Boston named Louise Day Hicks was elected to her first term on the Boston School Committee. She seemed an unlikely crusader for Boston’s white ethnic neighborhoods. Traditionally, the School Committee was about jobs—it paid nothing, but for many committee members, the rewards were great, and they came in cash. Louise was a member of one of the F.I.F.’s—the First Irish Families of South Boston—that Billy had run against in his first campaign a year earlier. Her father was a lawyer, a part-time judge in the South Boston District Court, the owner of the “Irish” bank in Southie.
During Billy’s first decade in politics, Louise would overshadow not only him but every other politician from South Boston, including U.S. House Speaker John McCormack. She would appear on the cover of TIME magazine. Within four years, she would become such a symbol of what would soon be known as “the Silent Majority” that Martin Luther King Jr. would journey to Boston to deliver a speech on the Common.
“Will you,” he asked his supporters, “follow Louise Day Hicks or Martin Luther King?”
For Billy Bulger, the answer was obvious.
During her first term, Louise was just another job-hungry Southie pol. But then, in June 1963, a number of reform groups led by the Boston chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People charged that the Boston public schools had been deliberately segregated. They presented compelling evidence that the black schools tended to be older, and that the per capita spending on black students was lower than that spent on their white counterparts. At the time the report was issued, Governor George Wallace of Alabama was trying to block integration of the University of Alabama, and Medgar Evers had just been gunned down in Mississippi. From a public relations standpoint, the last thing President Kennedy needed was the Boston NAACP demanding an end to segregation in the public schools of his home-town. But Louise Day Hicks angrily rejected the NAACP’s contentions, and almost overnight she became a fixture on the networks’ evening newscasts, an overweight middle-aged housewife in frumpy clothes and funny hats denouncing “radical agitators” in a thick Boston accent.
At the White House, the Kennedys were not amused by this unexpected turn of events.
Both JFK’s top aide, Kenny O’Donnell, and then his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called Louise. Neither got anywhere with her. Finally JFK placed a call himself, pleading with her to back off. By then, though, it was too late. Running for reelection to the School Committee in November 1963, she got 74 percent of the vote, twenty thousand more than incumbent mayor John Collins.
In both South Boston and the entire city, she had become almost a force of nature, Hurricane Louise.
Through the next two years, Louise Day Hicks and her supporters would duel with the civil rights groups over the segregation in the public schools, both in court and in the media. Outside Southie, though, the tide was running against the “neighborhood schools” that Louise professed to want to preserve. The national elections of 1964 produced a Democratic landslide, and in 1965 a new federal civil rights act would be passed. President Lyndon Baines Johnson would announce the beginning of the “War on Poverty.”
The Massachusetts legislature followed suit, passing the Racial Imbalance Act, which decreed that a school was “imbalanced” if it was more than 50 percent black. Only three cities in the state had such schools: Boston, Springfield, and Cambridge, so it was an easy, feel-good vote for suburban legislators of both parties, whose constituents would never be affected, and that was what so infuriated white working-class Boston.
Billy seethed at the hypocrisy of the rich white suburbanites, who reminded him of the people Sonny McDonough dismissed as “the League of Women Vultures.” But once more it was Billy’s neighbor Louise Day Hicks who most candidly articulated the resentments of white ethnic Boston: “If the suburbs are honestly interested in solving the problems of the Negro,” she said, “why don’t they build subsidized housing for them?”
As J. Anthony Lukas wrote in Common Ground, his study of court-ordered busing in Boston, “Louise had tapped a much broader sense of grievance, rooted less in race than in class: the feeling of many working-class whites that they had been abandoned by the very institutions—City Hall, the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church, the popular press—that until recently had been their patrons and allies.”
Busing was still almost a decade away, but it was already clear that the next few years in Boston would be scarred by racial animosity and bitter class warfare. Incumbent mayor John Collins had no stomach for what lay ahead. In early 1967 he announced he would not seek a third term, and Louise quickly entered the race. At her announcement, the band played the old standard “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise.”
Her slogan: “You know where I stand.”
There were a host of candidates, but the race quickly boiled down to Louise versus Kevin Hagen White, the secretary of state, the son and grandson of Boston politicians. White had been elected secretary of state in 1960, at the age of thirty-one. At the time he was so obscure that at a pre-election rally, JFK introduced him as “Calvin White.”
By 1967, though, he had been elected statewide four times, and he became the consensus anybody-but-Louise candidate. The Globe, which was consolidating its own position as the newspaper of record for liberal Massachusetts, ended its ninety-year policy of no endorsements for political office to come out strongly for White, and he won easily, despite Louise’s lopsided margins in the blue-collar, white working-class wards. White resigned as secretary of state, and the legislature selected House Speaker John
F. X. Davoren as White’s successor, which opened the way for Majority Leader Bob Quinn of Dorchester to become speaker.
For the first time, Billy had a friend—a neighbor, in fact— at the helm. But as his top deputy, Quinn picked David Bartley of Holyoke, who was two years younger than Billy. In terms of advancing in the leadership, Billy still appeared stuck on a treadmill to oblivion. And that meant he didn’t have the political juice to deliver the number of patronage jobs to Southie that his constituents demanded.
In 1968, Billy even found himself on the short end of a legislative redistricting. For a time he looked like the odd man out in his three-person Southie district, so he appealed to Louise Day Hicks to campaign for him. On the stump, she quoted John Boyle O’Reilly, the Irish immigrant and poet for whom Billy’s first public elementary school was named.
“‘Loyalty,’” she said, quoting O’Reilly, “‘is the holiest good in the human heart.’ Billy Bulger has never forsaken his own.”
Billy was reelected. It would be his last tough race.
Though his political future was secure, at least temporarily, Billy still wasn’t making much money in his little two-man law firm with his fellow Southie native Tom Finnerty. Billy was always a little short of cash, especially with a new child continuing to arrive every other year. And it was during this period that he began to develop some bad financial habits that would later get him into some serious trouble, namely, investing with his law partner, Tom Finnerty.
In February 1968, Billy did his first land deal with Finnerty. With a group of five other wired Boston pols, he bought fourteen acres of land from the federal government in Winthrop on the old Fort Banks military base.
Beacon Winthrop won the land after an open bidding process, paying $201,818. Eventually, after a few more of the paper transfers of the sort that Whitey would someday perfect in his own real estate transactions, the land was sold off between 1970 and 1972 for $499,999—a 148 percent return.
It was all “strictly legit,” as they would say at the State House. It was also Billy’s first big score with Tom Finnerty. It would not be his last.
In March 1970 Speaker John McCormack finally announced he would not seek a twenty-third term, and for the first time since 1926, the South Boston Congressional
seat was open.
It was Louise Day Hicks’s for the taking.
But Senator Joe Moakley called Billy one night to give him the heads-up that, Louise or no Louise, he too would be running for Congress. And that meant that Billy could run for his open Senate seat, just as he’d run for Moakley’s open House seat a decade earlier. This time, though, he would be the favorite. His only significant opponent would be an aide of McCormack’s named Patrick Loftus.
Loftus never really threatened Billy, but the same could not be said of Whitey’s attempts to intervene on his brother’s behalf. In the summer of 1970, Billy heard from someone in Loftus’s campaign that Whitey had been “sounding off ” about taking care of Loftus. In 2003, under oath, Billy described to the congressional committee what happened next: “So I drove up the street, and I found him and I said, ‘This is madness. Don’t do this… .’ I think probably he thought he was doing this for me and ultimately around this time I made it very clear to him. Please don’t do it. He said, ‘I assure you I will never be near any of us again.’”
Billy won easily, just as Louise Day Hicks defeated Moakley in the Democratic primary to win McCormack’s seat. In January 1971, Billy was sworn into the state Senate. With forty members, compared to the 240 in the House, it was a much smaller pond, in which Billy would soon find himself a much larger fish than he had ever been before.
CHAPTER 5
BY 1972 BOTH BULGERS had risen higher in their respective trades than anyone could have imagined twenty years earlier. But any further advancement seemed unlikely. Both Billy and Whitey found their paths to the top blocked. For Billy, the problem was the state senators ahead of him in the Democratic leadership—President Kevin Harrington and Majority Leader Joe DiCarlo.
Whitey was now the undisputed king of the rackets in Southie, and he rapidly began consolidating the protection racket. Even though he had still not been officially designated as an FBI informant, Condon remained in contact with him.
In September 1973 he filed this report on Whitey: “Informant advised that JAMES ‘WHITEY’ BULGER has been moving around the city pressuring bookmakers and shylocks for payments of money. BULGER was told that he had been coming on too strong and is going to curtail these activities in the future.”
Whitey, obviously, had a different plan for the future. His goal was to curtail the activities of anyone in the underworld— or law enforcement—who could order him around. If any curtailing of activities was going to be ordered, Whitey wanted to be the one issuing the commands, not taking them.
But standing in Whitey’s way was the Mafia. If he were ever to dominate organized crime in Boston, he would have to eliminate Gerry Angiulo and his brothers who hung out on Prince Street in the North End. But even before that, Whitey would have to somehow take over the non-Mafia mob that he now associated with—the Winter Hill Gang of Somerville.
The Hill operated out of a compound of buildings and a garage owned by Howie Winter on Marshall Street, on the corner of Broadway on Winter Hill in Somerville. Winter ran the gang along with Johnny Martorano, a former all-state football player from Milton whose father had run a gin mill in the Combat Zone, the city’s red-light district after the demolition of old Scollay Square in 1961, a seedy stretch of strip joints, adult bookstores, and pornographic movie theaters along lower Washington Street. After graduating from high school, Johnny had turned down seven football scholarships and instead stayed in Boston, hanging out in the Zone and quickly moving into the rackets, as did his younger brother, Jimmy, a few years later.
Martorano had fallen under the sway of Stevie Flemmi, and by the age of twenty-five he was a professional hitman. Johnny rapidly became one of the city’s most prolific killers, a reputation he solidified in January 1968, after a forty-seven-year-old black man made the mistake of beating up Flemmi in an after-hours joint. Martorano tracked his quarry to a car on Normandy Street in Roxbury, where the man was sitting with two people who turned out to be, not fellow criminals, but a nineteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy. Johnny walked up alongside the car and calmly killed all three of them with his trademark .38-caliber Police Special revolver. From then on, in certain circles, Johnny Martorano would be known as “Sickle Cell Anemia.” He was deadly to blacks.
The new, consolidated Winter Hill Gang soon began flexing its muscles. They wanted to control gambling north of the city, and that meant eliminating another crew of independent mob-sters led by Indian Joe Notarangeli, who operated out of Mother’s, a barroom under the elevated tracks of the Green Line at North Station.
The Notarangelis controlled a number of bookies in the Merrimack Valley, and they were stubborn. In March 1973, a bartender from Mother’s was killed by machine gun fire at a stoplight in Brighton. He had no connections to organized crime. His fatal error: He drove a Mercedes-Benz that looked a lot like one owned by Indian Joe’s brother Al.
Eleven days later, Whitey was in the front seat of an automobile with an Uzi machine gun as a Notarangeli hood named Al Plummer drove down Commercial Street in the North End. Whitey opened fire, practically decapitating Plummer and wounding another gangster in the car, an old associate of Stevie Flemmi’s named Hugh “Sonny” Shields.
The third person in the car was a hoodlum named Frank Capizzi, who had been wounded twice earlier by Winter Hill hit squads, namely Whitey. After the third shooting, on Commercial Street, he and his family fled Boston, crisscrossing North America to escape. As he wrote to a judge in 2003, his children “had the job of cleaning festering wounds and picking out bits of lead from my back as they surfaced.”
Four days later, on a Friday night, they caught up with Billy O’Brien, a thirty-two-year-old roofer and stevedore from South Boston (no relation to the Billy O’Brien who was murdered in 1967). O’Brien, who had served time for killing yet another hoodlum named O’Brien, in South Boston in 1964, was driving on Morrissey Boulevard. He had bought a cake at Linda Mae’s before picking up his ten-year-old daughter, Marie, for the weekend. In the car with O’Brien was another rackets guy named Ralph DeMasi. As they headed north, another car pulled up alongside them and the passenger opened fire, again with a machine gun. O’Brien was hit seventeen times, and died instantly. DeMasi was wounded.
“I thought someone was taking target practice on the road,” DeMasi said in a letter to a judge in 2004. “It was my good friend John Martorano.”
The driver: Whitey Bulger.
Eleven days later, a different pair of Winter Hill killers flew down to Fort Lauderdale to murder an ex-boxer from the Notarangelis’ hometown of Medford. When he opened the door to his apartment, the associate of Indian Joe was shot five times in the head.
By April 18, Indian Joe had abandoned Mother’s. He retreated to his home turf, Medford Square, a bustling downtown area with heavy pedestrian traffic and narrow, clogged streets. About 3:45, he walked into the Pewter Pot coffee shop, used the pay phone, and then sat down and ordered a coffee.
He hadn’t been there long when Johnny Martorano walked in, wearing construction clothes. Johnny shot Indian Joe twice, then walked out of the restaurant and jumped into a car driven by an older man with “stubby fingers,” as one witness put it.
Ten months later, in February 1974, Johnny Martorano caught up with Indian Al, shot him in the head, and left his body in the trunk of a stolen car in Charlestown. Days later a couple of Charlestown teenagers took the car for a joy ride. The cops caught up with them in Somerville. In the trunk was the frozen corpse of Indian Al.
The Hill began calling in, one by one, the bookies who’d been laying off their action to the Notarangelis. One of the calls went out to Jackie McDermott, the top bookie in Lowell. McDermott was summoned, as he later told the story, to the Holiday Inn on the Somerville-Charlestown line and escorted to Room 13. Whitey was there, but Howie Winter did most of the talking, and McDermott did all of the agreeing. What choice did he have?
Finally, when all of the arrangements had been made, McDermott was told he was free to l
eave. He nodded, but said he had just one question he’d like to ask.
“Why’d you hit Joe like that, in front of so many people? Right downtown there, in broad daylight?”
Whitey Bulger threw in his two cents’ worth: “Because we wanted to show everyone how easy it is.”
Whitey was in the gang, but he still wasn’t of it. The other gangsters appreciated his impeccable Boston police and courthouse sources; even the Mafia would come to rely on Whitey to keep them informed. Gerry Angiulo would say to him, “Whitey, you can find out a little more than me…”
But he was still the odd man out in Boston organized crime, the one guy from Southie, the city’s overwhelmingly Irish neighborhood. Somerville was at least as Italian as Irish; Howie Winter was married to an Italian woman. The Martoranos and Frank Salemme were half-Irish. Whitey, though, was what the others laughingly called FBI—full-blood Irish. It didn’t disqualify him from membership in the gang, but it did set him apart from everyone else.
Now, though, the FBI was about to construct for Whitey his own little mini-crew, a gang within the gang. The two men who would become his closest associates—FBI agent John “Zip” Connolly and mobster Stevie Flemmi (from an Irish neighborhood, married to an Irish woman)—were about to return to Boston.
Flemmi had been on the lam since the fall of 1969. By early 1972, he was holed up in New York, but he wanted to return to Boston, and the FBI wanted him back. Flemmi was, after all, the best kind of organized crime informant—an Italian hood who was trusted by the Mafia, but who had no compunctions about informing on them. The problem was, he still faced a pair of outstanding warrants, for the Billy Bennett murder in 1967 and for the car-bombing of Barboza’s lawyer, a semi-shady underworld attorney named John Fitzgerald. The Bennett murder was disposed of quickly, when two of the other defendants were acquitted of the charges by a Suffolk County jury.