by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
“I wasn’t sure if they knew they were informants,” Morris said, in all seriousness.
Whitey still had provided no information of any consequence to Zip. He’d turned over the license plate numbers of a few troublesome Southie hotheads he wanted taken off the board, and he’d also passed on some negative, self-serving gossip about several political figures, including District Attorney Delahunt and at least one of Mayor Kevin White’s political operatives in Southie. Zip dutifully wrote up the “tips,” although he couldn’t have been satisfied with the quality of the information.
But as Whitey discovered, there were other ways to keep an FBI agent happy. In June 1976, the same month Jimmy Martorano was convicted, Whitey presented his first gift to Zip Connolly. It was a stolen diamond ring. Zip gave it to his first wife, as she would testify during his racketeering trial in 2002.
Meanwhile, the flow of “gold” out of the FBI office to South Boston continued unabated. Whitey next learned that a bookie named Richie Castucci had become an informant for the FBI. Castucci ran the Ebb Tide, the old Mafia hangout on Revere Beach where the Teddy Deegan hit had been planned back in 1965. Castucci was tight with Winter Hill—he’d introduced Flemmi and Johnny Martorano to a major New York book-maker when they were organizing Fat Tony’s race-fixing scheme. But then Castucci started feeding information to the FBI, and he passed on some information about two fugitive Winter Hill gangsters—Joe McDonald and Jimmy Sims. He knew they were hiding out in New York’s Greenwich Village, and he told the feds.
The penalty for such treachery was death. The Hill decided Richie Castucci had to go, but before they killed him, they planned to make a lot of money off him.
All through the fall of 1976, everyone in the gang bet football games heavily with Castucci. Even Whitey and Stevie, the nongamblers, took the plunge, because they had no intention of ever paying off Castucci, except with a bullet. For about half the season, the Hill remained ahead, and Castucci dutifully paid them off each Monday. But as the season wore on, the boys went into the red. They kept doubling up on their bets, but they couldn’t get even, and by Christmas, they knew it was time for Castucci to go.
He was told he could pick up his money in Somerville at the garage. When he got there, as Johnny Martorano later confessed, he handed Castucci a bagful of cash and told him to go to an apartment with two guys and count it. The two guys were Whitey and Stevie. Castucci was sitting in the apartment kitchen sorting the bills, with his back to the front door, when Johnny Martorano walked in and shot him in the head. Whitey and Stevie cleaned up the blood and wrapped the body in a blanket. Then they put Castucci’s body in the trunk of his car and drove it back to Revere, where they abandoned the vehicle in the parking lot of an apartment building.
To protect Whitey and Stevie, Connolly immediately began filing reports suggesting that Castucci was deeply in debt to both the Hill and the Mafia, and that Castucci settled with Winter Hill first. That was a fatal breach of organized crime protocol, Connolly wrote, because the Mafia always insisted on being paid off first. But the murder of an FBI informant required more than the usual duplicity. The day after Castucci’s body was found, the feds convened a multi-agency meeting to figure out who had murdered their informant. Representing the FBI was Zip Connolly. He suggested that the hit bore all the hallmarks of a Mafia assassination.
“Winter Hill doesn’t kill like that,” he said.
The legend of Whitey Bulger continued to grow, at least in the FBI reports filed by Zip Connolly. Soon Zip was claiming that Whitey had saved the life of an undercover FBI agent named Nick Gianturco.
Gianturco had been working undercover out of a warehouse in Hyde Park as “Nick Giarro.” The sting, which was called “Operation Lobster,” involved Gianturco setting himself up in operation as a fence, buying stolen goods from truck hijackers, mainly from Charlestown.
At one point, an associate of Stevie Flemmi’s asked if “Giarro” had any protection, because the associate was planning to rob him and didn’t want any repercussions.
Stevie phoned Whitey, who called Zip, who immediately got in touch with Gianturco and asked him if he had any meetings planned. Gianturco told him that he did, that night, but he’d already decided to blow the crew off because, wisely enough, he didn’t trust them.
As the years went by, Connolly and Morris increasingly exaggerated the importance of the tip. Morris eventually cited it as one of the two occasions on which Whitey’s information had prevented the murder of an FBI agent. During his testimony in 1998, Morris was asked to name the second agent.
“I cannot recall,” he said.
Whitey and Stevie had tried vending machines, and now Howie Winter and his associate Sal Sperlinga decided to put pinball machines into all the bars and veterans clubs in Somerville. First they got the Somerville aldermen to repeal the city ordinances outlawing the machines. But once pinball was legal, other, more legitimate businessmen quickly moved in, undercutting the Hill’s high gangster prices. In no uncertain terms, Howie Winter informed his would-be competitors that it was the Hill that had brought pinball back to Somerville, and that it was the Hill that would now enjoy the fruits of its monopoly. But instead of knuckling under, some of the other companies went straight to the Middlesex County district attorney, and soon the lantern-jawed first assistant district attorney, John Forbes Kerry, was announcing the arrests of Winter and Sperlinga.
The pinball arrests in late 1977 were a major break for Whitey and Stevie. Howie was the undisputed boss, and Sperlinga one of his top money men. With both of them off the street, Johnny Martorano was the last remaining at-large Winter Hill hoodlum who outranked them, so to speak.
The pinball machines, though, were just the beginning of Howie Winter’s troubles. One of Fat Tony Ciulla’s crooked jockeys had been arrested in New Jersey, and he flipped. Once the Garden State jockey implicated Ciulla, Fat Tony cut a deal for himself with prosecutors, and then he sold his story to Sports Illustrated, which put it on the cover of its November 6, 1978, issue. In the piece, Ciulla didn’t mention the names of anyone from Boston, but in New Jersey, a judge ordered Fat Tony to reveal the names of the gangsters who were involved in fixing races with him in Massachusetts.
“Your Honor,” he complained, “I don’t know if I am allowed to say these names here in open court.”
The judge didn’t care about federal grand juries. “You are here now,” he said.
Fat Tony took a deep breath and began speaking.
“Fellows that were partners of mine,” he began. “One’s name is Howie Winter. One name is John Martorano. M-A-R-T-OR-A-N-O. Whitey Bulger. Stephen Flemmi.”
It was the first time Whitey’s name had been mentioned in a federal courtroom since 1956.
By January 1979, Whitey was in deep trouble. During Fat Tony’s run, he and Stevie had been in charge of finding bookies willing to take action on the fixed races. Like everyone else, they’d made a lot of money over the years, but now Fat Tony had put them squarely in the middle of the conspiracy, along with everyone else in the gang. With Howie Winter and Sal Sperlinga already in state prison on the pinball machine case, it looked like the end of the line for Winter Hill.
But then Zip Connolly went to bat for Whitey. He had to—he was already on Whitey’s payroll, often leaving his government paychecks uncashed in his desk at the JFK Building in Government Center for months at a time. Zip’s new side-kick, John Morris, would also soon be accepting Whitey’s cash. Now the two feds would really have to earn their keep, by deep-sixing a much higher-profile case than that of shakedown victim Francis X. Green or the botched takeover of the vending machine racket. The FBI agents went to Jeremiah O’Sullivan, the head of the federal organized crime strike force. They made a simple pitch: The FBI was preparing to bug Gerry Angiulo’s Mafia headquarters, the Dog House, at
98 Prince Street, and they needed both Bulger and Flemmi as sources. It was an easy sell, and the race-fixing indictment was quickly rewritten to include both Whitey
and Stevie only as unindicted co-conspirators.
Everyone else in the gang was indicted for fixing horse races, and those who weren’t convicted, fled. Using information from their new friends in law enforcement, Whitey and Stevie got word to Johnny Martorano ahead of the indictments, and he vanished. But before leaving, Johnny turned over some valuable names to Stevie Flemmi, one of them a state trooper who had funneled inside information about various investigations to Martorano over the years.
Martorano also passed on the names of his contacts at the telephone company, who had provided numbers for, among other things, the Eddie Connors telephone booth hit in 1975. Martorano still had his loansharking money out on the street, but during the seventeen years he was on the lam in Florida, Whitey and Stevie would send him about a million dollars in cash. In return, Martorano would come in handy as a hitman in the years to come.
Once they dodged the race-fixing indictment, it was back to work, shoveling underworld shit to the FBI in return for federal gold. Now that Richie Castucci had been murdered for being a rat, the FBI needed someone else to help them keep tabs on fugitive gangster Joe McDonald. This was a perfect chore for Whitey, and he took up where Castucci had left off when he was murdered for providing the sort of information that Whitey would now willingly pass on to the feds.
Three times in the summer of 1979 Connolly filed reports on what Whitey told him about McDonald’s activities, whereabouts, and drinking habits. Based on Whitey’s information, the FBI made no arrests, and no one was hit for tipping off the feds. The Boston office of the FBI wasn’t really interested in arrests, only in deluding its superiors in Washington that it was keeping tabs on organized crime. And Whitey wasn’t truly concerned about rats, only about making money off them. He just wanted to rip them off, the way he had Castucci, before murdering them on the grounds that they were informants.
On October 16, 1979, Jimmy the Bear Flemmi died of an apparent drug overdose at the state prison in Norfolk. In 1975, while serving an eleven-to-eighteen-year sentence for assault with intent to commit murder, he’d received one of the state’s first weekend furloughs from prison. Like an early Willie Horton, Jimmy had immediately fled, and was not apprehended until three years later, in Maryland. He was forty-seven when he died.
Meanwhile, Stevie’s mother had been mugged again in Mattapan, by a mob of fifty blacks, and a photo of her sitting outside her car, on the pavement, dazed and bloody, had appeared on the regional Associated Press wire. Stevie was fed up.
He needed to relocate his parents to a “nice” neighborhood—an all-white neighborhood. He asked Whitey if he knew of anything available in Southie, and Whitey told him that the house at 832 East Third Street, next door to his brother Billy’s at 828, happened to be for sale.
It would be a good place for the Flemmis, Whitey told Stevie. And it would be a convenient place for everyone to meet— Whitey, Stevie, their FBI agents, and even, on occasion, Billy. The house included an enclosed sun porch, which, if weather-proofed, would be usable year-round. The sun porch would be perfect for storing things—machine guns, silencers, even the bodies of young women.
As always, Whitey was thinking ahead.
CHAPTER 8
IN SEPTEMBER 1976, Majority Whip Billy Bulger got the break he’d been waiting for. Senate Majority Leader Joe DiCarlo was finally indicted for extortion, after years of fitful investigations by the FBI. Within fifteen months, the scandal would destroy the careers of the only two men who stood between Billy and the Senate presidency.
DiCarlo was charged with taking payoffs from McKee-Berger-Mansueto, the New York consulting firm that had managed the construction of the new University of Massachusetts campus at Columbia Point in Dorchester. Just a year earlier, U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill had assured DiCarlo that he was in the clear. But the turning point in the long probe came when the Boston FBI office abruptly moved two of its older agents—Condon and Sheehan—off the case. Two young go-getters named Connolly and Morris were temporarily transferred from the organized crime unit and sent to Lubbock, Texas, to reinterview two former MBM underlings.
As his lawyer, DiCarlo hired a lobbyist, Walter Hurley. Hurley worked for Tom Joyce, a Beacon Hill power broker who was a close friend of Billy Bulger’s. Every morning, the defense team would meet in Joyce’s office across Beacon Street from the State House—the defendants, their lawyers and aides, along with Joyce, Harrington, and one other person: Billy Bulger.
On January 23, 1977, after a four-week trial, DiCarlo and his bagman—Republican senator Ron MacKenzie of Burlington—were convicted on all eight counts. On February 28, Billy was appointed majority leader, but the MBM scandal turned out to be the gift that just kept on giving. In late 1977, DiCarlo and MacKenzie’s new lawyers filed an appeal for a new trial, charging that their previous lawyers had mishandled the case by not introducing as evidence important details implicating other prominent politicians in the scandal, among them Senate President Kevin Harrington.
According to documents included in DiCarlo’s desperate appeal, his onetime mentor Harrington had received a $2,000 corporate check in 1970 from MBM. Harrington, who was struggling to mount a campaign for governor against Dukakis, offered the feeble defense that he had “no memory” of receiving the check, which he had not deposited, but cashed, in a bank in his hometown of Salem.
Kevin Harrington was never charged with any crime, but he was finished, both as a candidate for governor and as Senate president. It was just a matter of time now until Billy inherited the gavel.
As for the defense lawyers for the two convicted senators, both would be appointed to state judgeships by Michael Dukakis. Joe DiCarlo has remained silent about his downfall, and its aftermath, for more than twenty-five years, but his friends never fail to mention the judgeships for the defense lawyers. Or that DiCarlo’s lawyer, Walter Hurley, was eventually forced to retire from the bench with a special sweetheart pension deal approved by the Governor’s Council. Hurley’s ouster came after he was implicated in a low-grade scandal involving preferential treatment for some lawyers at the Boston Municipal Court. Among those connected lawyers was a former state senator, George “Gigi” Kennealley, who also had a job at the State House as counsel to the Senate. Among Kennealley’s employees: Jean Bulger Holland, Billy’s oldest sister.
In August 1978, after the year’s budgetary work was completed, Harrington announced he was quitting, and Billy, his number-two man, was quickly confirmed as his successor by the Democratic caucus. Normally, Billy would have appointed his own majority leader, but his support was shaky, especially among the suburan liberals, who remembered with distaste his endless anti-busing harangues. So, in an unprecedented move, Harrington dropped down, from president to majority leader. That way, the dissidents could not coalesce behind someone who might threaten Billy in January 1979.
Billy then selected one of the Senate liberals, Chester Atkins of Concord, as his Ways and Means chairman. Not only was Chester a liberal, he was a Yankee. It was a sop both to the liberals in the Senate and to the Yankees at the Globe.
Meanwhile DiCarlo’s appeal went nowhere. The only thing accomplished by DiCarlo’s public revelations about Harrington’s $2,000 check was the demolition of the career of his old friend. The only two people who had stood in Billy’s way had turned on each other, both had been destroyed, and only Billy was left to fill the vacuum of power.
Tom Finnerty, Billy’s original law partner, had been elected district attorney of Plymouth County in 1974, but now he was having a tough time making ends meet on a prosecutor’s salary. He knew he could make more money in private practice. Still, county prosecutors had wide discretion over how criminal cases were handled and they also controlled large numbers of patronage jobs. District attorney was not a job any political organization would relinquish easily, especially not one in which Billy Bulger had a say.
But there was an obvious solution, so obvious that it would be used again and again by Billy’s cronies through the years. As
the filing deadline for candidates in the district attorney’s race approached in the spring of 1978, Finnerty gathered the signatures on his nomination papers. But his top aide, William O’Malley, was quietly informed that his boss would not seek reelection, and that he should start getting his own signatures.
On the final day to file, with only a few hours before the deadline, Finnerty called reporters into his office and announced he wouldn’t be running. O’Malley then filed the nomination signatures he’d surreptitiously gathered, and ran unopposed in the Democratic primary.
Now Billy Bulger’s allies would continue to control the district attorney’s office in Plymouth County, and all its jobs, and Tom Finnerty, Billy’s old partner, could return to the private practice of law.
Edward J. King was the longest of long shots to upset Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1978 Democratic primary. The former chief of the Massachusetts Port Authority, King was fifty-two and a member of the postwar generation at Boston College that included, among others, H. Paul Rico and state treasurer Bob Crane. King had a thick Boston accent and was a daily communicant at Mass—Michael Dukakis, needless to say, couldn’t stand him, and had in fact fired King from his beloved Massport post in 1975, almost as soon as he became governor.
On the stump, King was stiff, wooden. But it didn’t matter. Dukakis had made too many enemies. He had raised taxes, he was arrogant, he was against the death penalty, and he hadn’t rewarded his supporters with the sorts of patronage jobs many had been expecting when they backed him as an underdog candidate in 1974. On primary night 1978, liberal Massachusetts was stunned as King took 50 percent of the Democratic vote to Dukakis’s 43. At the victory celebration at Anthony’s Pier 4 in South Boston, King’s street manager, a former state legislator from Hyde Park, put it succinctly: “We put all the hate groups into a pot and let them boil.”