Howie Carr

by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century

  Johnny Martorano leaned forward and shot King in the back of the head. They took his car keys, and then they buried him on the banks of the Neponset River on the Quincy-Dorchester line. For years afterward, whenever he drove past the spot, Whitey would tell whoever was with him: “Tip your hat to Tommy.”

  Once Tommy was gone, they went after his best friend, Buddy Leonard, one of Whitey’s old neighbors in the projects. He had to go, for two reasons. First, he might try to settle the score for his old pal when Tommy turned up missing. Second, killing him would muddy the waters. Buddy was a heavy drinker, and Whitey knew he’d be drunk and therefore easy to take after closing, and he was. Just a few hours after killing Tommy King, they snatched Buddy Leonard outside a Southie bar and pushed him into a car—Tommy King’s, of course— and then they shot him in the head. Whitey ditched the car in the projects and Stevie, who’d followed him in a second car, gave Whitey a lift home.

  The next day, in the evening editions, police were described as “baffled” by the murder of Leonard in the automobile belonging to his best friend, who was now himself missing. But the cops suspected the two incidents might somehow be related.

  Frank Capizzi had been on the run for years after being shot by Whitey on Commercial Street in the North End in the spring of 1973. Finally, though, he decided the heat had died down enough that he could return to Boston. But something had changed in the time Capizzi had been away. Whitey was now officially an FBI informant. He had friends in high places, and Frank Capizzi didn’t.

  When word got out that Capizzi was back in town, three cops showed up at his home in Winthrop for a pro forma interview—FBI agent Dennis Condon, Boston police detective Eddie Walsh, and the new kid in town, Zip Connolly.

  In a letter he wrote to the federal court before Connolly’s sentencing in 2003, Capizzi recalled his meeting with the cops.

  “I looked directly into John Connolly’s Machiavellian eyes and told [him], Mr. Connolly, James Bulger shot me three times!!!… Dennis Condon listened attentively, writing it all down.”

  Despite Capizzi’s positive identification, Whitey was not arrested. Nor would he be, ever again. As a Top Echelon informant, Whitey was headed for the top of the rackets.

  CHAPTER 6

  SENATE PRESIDENT KEVIN Harrington and Billy Bulger, his number-three man, made an odd pair walking through the marble State House corridors—Harrington was six foot nine, almost a foot and a half taller than Billy. Billy was soon joking that he was spending so much time with Harrington that he had begun ducking whenever he went through a doorway.

  But Harrington’s closest ally was his majority leader, Joe DiCarlo of Revere. Billy had a four-year head start on him in the legislature, but DiCarlo had more than made up for lost time. A former teacher, he’d become a chairman in his first term in the House, in 1965, and three years later he knocked off a twelve-term Senate incumbent in the primary. Billy, of course, had never run against an incumbent, nor would he ever.

  Another ambitious young senator, a former state rep and accountant from Oxford, was James Kelly (not the Jimmy Kelly who was a minor South Boston hoodlum who eventually became president of the Boston City Council). After winning the Senate presidency in 1971, Harrington had appointed Kelly chairman of Ways and Means. Kelly wrote the Senate’s version of the state budget, and it wasn’t long before Kelly was referred to in the press as “D-Ritz,” for his table in the Ritz Café, where he held court. With Kelly it was pay to play, strictly cash ’n’ carry, no reasonable offer refused. According to State House lore, he employed two bagmen.

  A decade later, Billy would be blamed in the press for a trend begun by Jimmy “D-Ritz” Kelly that centralized even more budgetary power in the hands of the legislative leadership—the use of “outside sections” to surreptitiously enact legislation in the state budget. In the years to come, Billy would be suspected of using outside sections to settle scores with Whitey’s foes. They would be filed anonymously, with no fingerprints, by the legislative leadership, and would become law without ever having been publicly filed, or heard in committee, or debated on the floor, passed by both branches, reconciled in conference committee and then signed into law. For instance, a major contributor to a legislative leader might need a parcel of state-owned land for a development that was opposed by the community in which the land was located. Under normal legislative rules, the affected municipality could block such a project. But by using an “outside section,” the leadership could deliver the land, or any other favor, to anybody who hired the properly connected lobbyists, with no chance for any opponents of the measure, however odious it might be, to complain. Or a connected state worker recently convicted of a crime might need to add a few more years of government “service” to bolster his pension. A single vaguely worded paragraph, buried in hundreds of pages of innocuous boilerplate, would often get the job done.

  Once the state Senate had been a proud deliberative body. Calvin Coolidge had served as its president. But by the early 1970s its membership had degenerated badly. Other politicians occasionally used to ask Harrington why he didn’t appoint better people to committees. Harrington would throw the bird book, the illustrated legislative directory, at the questioner, and snarl: “You find somebody in there!”

  Billy still devoted some time to his law practice. Representing constituents has always been considered part of the job, another service to be performed “on the arm”—for free. Still, despite the picture he later tried to paint in his memoir, Billy was far from destitute. By 1974, he had accumulated enough cash to buy a summer “cottage” in Mashpee on Cape Cod, the ultimate status symbol for an up-and-coming legislator. But he could have been making much more had not such a large part of his practice continued to be for short, if any, money. The cases Billy did handle often involved his political cronies. One such case he handled was for the father of the man who would succeed him as Senate president, Tom Birmingham.

  Birmingham’s father, Jackie, was a veterans’ agent for the city of Boston. Jackie Birmingham and Billy Bulger were close, perhaps because of something they had in common— both their brothers were gangsters.

  According to Billy’s account in his book, his friend Jackie had approved unemployment benefits for one Suitcase Fidler, the Charlestown hood whose name Whitey would drop when he was successfully setting up Tommy King to be murdered.

  Suitcase, according to Billy, was indeed a jobless veteran, but was in prison at the time.

  Suitcase’s family had needed the money, and now Jackie Birmingham was caught up in a corruption investigation by the Suffolk County district attorney’s office. By his own admission, Billy intervened and “the result was that Jackie never appeared, never had to tell his story, never had to take his hit.”

  Billy hadn’t been in the Senate for even a full year when the series of events that would deliver the Senate presidency to him began to unfold.

  In 1971, the state auditor issued a scathing audit report of the ongoing construction of the new UMass Boston campus at Columbia Point in Dorchester. He was appalled by the cost overruns of a New York company that was overseeing the entire project—McKee-Berger-Mansueto. The Senate set up a committee to investigate, with DiCarlo as chairman.

  MBM’s executives knew they had a problem, and began trying to reach out to the legislators to see if something could be worked out. Eventually an MBM executive got to Republican Senator Ron MacKenzie of Burlington, who was tight with DiCarlo. The MBM executive mentioned something about… contributions. MacKenzie understood, and took the offer back to DiCarlo.

  In November 1971 DiCarlo’s Senate committee issued a report exonerating MBM, and two months later, according to court testimony, the MBM executive met Senator MacKenzie in the Point After lounge in the Back Bay and handed him $5,000 cash in $50 and $100 bills. MacKenzie returned to the State House and gave half the money to DiCarlo.

  A month later, in the men’s room of the Parker House bar, MacKenzie took another $7,000 in cash. The next meeting
was again at the Point After, with a different MBM executive handling the delivery. MacKenzie stuffed the money into his coat and said he’d have to be very careful driving home.

  “It would make quite a splash in the headlines,” the Republican senator told the MBM executive, “if a senator was in a car with $10,000 on him.”

  The clock had begun ticking down on Joe DiCarlo.

  In 1972, the House had amended its rules to change to a system of single districts, doing away with the old system of double- and triple-districts in the cities. The first tangible result was the election of several more black House members who for the first time formed a caucus and began lobbying for the creation of a new black state Senate district in Boston.

  In hindsight, Billy was never in any real danger, but what the black legislators were proposing would mean serious changes in his own district, which contained most of what was then black Roxbury. The minority population of Billy’s First Suffolk District amounted to about 30 percent overall, although the percentage of black voters was much smaller.

  Among those white liberals pushing for a new black Senate district was a freshman state rep from Beacon Hill by the name of Barney Frank. Billy considered Frank’s efforts to be a personal attack on himself, his career, and his neighborhood.

  “What bothered Bulger,” Frank said in an interview in 2004, “was the idea of the people who were involved in trying to change his district—liberals, blacks, a Republican governor from Dover. And busing was coming too.”

  In the end, a black Senate district was created, but it would be carved out of the two Jewish districts, one of which had been devastated by white flight in North Dorchester and Mattapan.

  Frank now had a problem—he had crossed Billy. And Billy saw to it that any bill with Frank’s name on it was torpedoed in the Senate. If any of his legislation was to have even the slightest chance of passage, Frank had to convince senators to put their names on his bills. Frank’s name alone was enough to assure a bill’s demise. That was how things worked in the Senate, even before Billy became president. If someone in leadership wanted something done, it was. To get along, as the saying goes, you had to go along. Anyone who refused to go along would quickly find himself persona non grata—another Barney Frank. Then, just to add insult to injury, Billy arranged for Barney’s Beacon Hill district to be transferred into the South Boston Senate district, where Irish conservatives outnumbered Jewish liberals by at least a five-to-one margin. Barney couldn’t “move up.” He would forever remain a state rep, or so it seemed.

  The decade-long struggle over the integration of the Boston public schools was finally coming to a head. For years the city, the School Committee, and the NAACP had been tangling in federal court, while on Beacon Hill the legislature proposed one unworkable solution after another.

  Finally, the case had been taken over by Judge W. Arthur Garrity, a Kennedy liberal who lived in Wellesley. Fed up with the school committee’s foot-dragging, in 1973 Garrity ordered busing to begin in the fall of 1974.

  In the city, especially in South Boston, the white working-class population was outraged at the injustice of it all. They well understood that it was they and their children who would have to bear the brunt of a solution imposed by their more affluent neighbors, whose residence in the suburbs shielded them from the crime and racial polarization that increasingly plagued Boston. The suburbs would be insulated from the chaos that they were forcing by judicial fiat on blue-collar Bostonians who quite often worked, in one form or another, as their hired help—as cops, cabbies, teachers, and tradesmen.

  At the time, Boston was the sixth largest metropolitan area in the country, but the city of Boston proper was no larger than the twentieth in the nation. In almost any other part of the country, many of Boston’s affluent suburbs would have been part of the city—and any busing plan. If the suburbs had been included in Garrity’s grand design, his neighbors—and Harvard classmates—would have surely brought their economic and social clout to the table to insist on a more equitable solution. But that was not the case, and as the years went by, even many white working-class Bostonians with the wherewithal to flee did. As white flight accelerated, those still stranded in the city saw their political clout dwindle even further, and outside Boston’s declining white neighborhoods, there was no upside for any politician to come to the defense of the beleaguered Irish and Italians in the city. It would have offended the Globe. Particularly galling to Southie and Charlestown and East Boston was the sanctimonious posturing of many of the residents of the town of Brookline, which was practically surrounded by Boston.

  Brookline had once been predominantly Yankee, and was now heavily Jewish. Many of its residents had been part of the first waves of white flight out of Roxbury, North Dorchester, and then Mattapan. The symbol of Brookline’s smug hypocrisy was former state representative Michael Stanley Dukakis. He had run for lieutenant governor with Kevin White in 1970 and lost, and now in 1974 was seeking the Democratic nomination for governor against Billy’s old friend from Dorchester, Bob Quinn, the former House speaker who was now the attorney general. Quinn was the favorite, but with the Watergate scandal dominating national headlines, 1974 was not shaping up as a good year for conservatives or regulars from either party.

  Dukakis was a strong supporter of Judge Garrity and the forced busing plan. For Billy, politics was always personal, and just as he could not quite let go of his grudge against Barney Frank, he never really forgave Dukakis for his stand in favor of forced busing in a city in which Dukakis did not live.

  “I could never quite get over the pain of knowing that he harbored such contempt for me and my family that he would want my children shipped to inferior schools,” Billy wrote in his book. “I wondered what the reaction of Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, would have been if told that their children were to be bused into a high-crime area.”

  For years Billy had talked about a judgeship, and as the 1974 election season heated up, the embattled Republican governor, Frank Sargent, decided to make a few friends for himself in a Democratic stronghold. Just before the Fourth of July 1974, shortly after the birth of Billy and Mary’s final child, Brendan, the Republican governor nominated Billy for the open judge-ship in the South Boston District Court. He would of course be confirmed by the Governor’s Council; Sonny McDonough would see to that.

  Billy was ecstatic at first, but he quickly began to get cold feet. He received a call from former U.S. House Speaker John McCormack telling him how disappointed he was that Billy was giving up politics. His resignation from the Senate would have meant a short, brutal primary fight—potential candidates would have included Louise Day Hicks, who had lost her seat in Congress to Joe Moakley in 1972. Others sure to run included the two state reps, Billy’s friend Michael “Flats” Flaherty and Ray Flynn, a camera-loving former Providence College basketball player whom Billy already detested. For the Town as a whole, the timing of any primary couldn’t have been worse— it would take place the same week that the court-ordered busing began.

  There was another problem for Billy. The Governor’s Council had just changed its rules, and now judicial nominees had to make at least limited financial disclosure. Billy didn’t like that one bit. There was no need for his constituents to know how well he’d been doing; it would just give them something else to resent. As Dr. Samuel Johnson observed in 1775, “The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another.” Nothing had changed in two hundred years.

  If Billy’s neighbors in Southie found out about the “cottage” in Mashpee, or the real estate deals, many were likely to begin whispering that Billy was putting on airs, trying to rise above his station. He would be castigated for going, as they say, “high-hat.”

  The Globe soon reported that a Bulger “associate” believed that the new financial disclosure rules, in effect for only a month, should be “waived for a candidate like Bulger, who has been in the Legislature for 14 years.”

  There would be no waivers. And so Bill
y dithered. Few outside South Boston yet knew about Whitey’s rise in his chosen career. But as Billy considered the duties of a judge, he sometimes seemed to be thinking of his older brother, although he would later tell Congress that he never heard any talk of “the more terrible crimes.”

  In the Sunday Globe of July 14, 1974, he said he wanted to “avoid even the appearance of impropriety….I believe unpopular clients need defense. I’ve always been stubborn about that. They’re entitled to representation. You’re not defending a murderer or a rapist. You’re defending a human being, a person, who has been accused of rape or murder. And they have a right to counsel.

  “There are degrees of guilt. Every case is different. Every person is different. I don’t want to say anything now that seems like a blanket statement.”

  Still, the reporter noted near the end of the lengthy profile that some in Southie were “skeptical” that he would take the judgeship. Eight days later, Billy hand-delivered a letter to Sargent in the governor’s Corner Office.

  “I do not believe it appropriate for me to disengage myself from legislative service at this time,” he began. “You will understand, I hope, the difficulty and strain of reaching this decision, especially in the light of my initial reaction to accept the appointment.”

  It was a blow, especially, to Representative Flynn. He was already running for Billy’s Senate seat, and four candidates were running for his seat in the House. Also surprised was the governor, a Republican struggling vainly to win reelection in the wake of Watergate.

  Six weeks later, court-ordered busing began in the city of Boston.

  Busing changed everything in South Boston, forever. A large part of the Town’s stabilizing influence—its middle class— fled the chaos for the inner suburbs south of the city, while others who could not yet afford to leave everything behind shipped their children out beyond the city limits to live with relatives on the more tranquil South Shore. Among those who remained in Southie, respect for the old traditions gave way quickly. Pathologies that had previously existed only on the fringes—drugs, family breakups, out-of-wedlock pregnancies—rapidly became the norm for ever-growing segments of Southie’s population.