by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
An undercover state cop rented a room above the gay bar across the street from the garage, and they began monitoring the comings and goings at Lancaster Foreign Motors. They quickly noticed one new face—Nicky Femia, a former associate of Joe Barboza’s, who had finally been murdered by the Mafia in San Francisco in 1976.
Whitey had realized the need for additional muscle, which explained Femia’s presence. He was one of the leading suspects in the Blackfriars Massacre of 1978, when gunmen had burst into a downtown bar after hours, stolen a large amount of cocaine, and murdered five men—including a former TV reporter for Channel 7—in cold blood. When Femia began hanging around the garage, Whitey wanted it established in the FBI files that his new associate had nothing to do with the Blackfriars murders, although he probably did. Whitey didn’t need any heat from some ambitious cop making a run at him just because of his association with a higher-profile killer like Femia. Soon a brief notice appeared in one of Zip Connolly’s FBI reports clearing Femia of any involvement in Blackfriars. (Later, after Whitey and Femia had parted ways, Zip put yet another report into Whitey’s file, suggesting that Femia had indeed been one of the triggermen in the Blackfriars killings. Femia eventually would be shot to death in a botched robbery in East Boston in 1983.)
Femia, who was both overweight and a cocaine addict, was not a good fit with Whitey. As he aged, Whitey was becoming more obsessed with physical fitness. He wore tight jeans and T-shirts, and grew increasingly disgusted with Femia’s gut. One time, when Femia returned from the nearby McDonald’s on Causeway Street with a bag of Big Macs and fries and began spreading out his fast food feast on the hood of Whitey’s black Chevrolet, Whitey went crazy, screaming and pelting him with French fries.
Femia wasn’t the only one to bear the brunt of Whitey’s new rants about clean living. George Kaufman’s son, Peter, sometimes worked odd jobs at the garage. At the time, Peter Kaufman smoked, and sometimes when he left he’d neglect to take his smokes with him. On his return, he’d shake a Marlboro out of the pack and notice that Whitey had taken a pen and written across the cigarette: DON’T SMOKE.
Soon the state cops surveilling the garage began seeing new faces showing up, sometimes with briefcases or small paper bags. One of Whitey’s new visitors, they would later discover, was one of the largest marijuana importers in New England.
Whitey had been shaking down local bar owners for protection ever since he’d taken control of the rackets in Southie in the early 1970s. But now he began expanding his collections of “rent” to include local drug dealers. A payoff here and there, and they could use the beaches of Southie, Dorchester, and Quincy to off-load their product, and then store it in the grimy warehouses of the Lower End. Whitey didn’t need a lot of muscle to retain control of this racket; all he had to do was guarantee that the dealers wouldn’t have any interference from the police. That was an easy promise for Whitey to keep.
Some of the money was still being funneled to the beleaguered associates of Whitey and Stevie. Johnny Martorano was delivered money in Florida. And every Friday night, at his Marconi Club in Roxbury, Stevie would meet Frank Salemme’s brother, Jackie, and hand him $200 for Frank, who was still in state prison for the 1967 bombing of the car belonging to Joe Barboza’s lawyer. That was little enough money for Stevie to pay, considering how much Salemme knew, and how tightly he was keeping his mouth shut.
But money was all they would provide to their old colleagues. When Sal Sperlinga, out on work release, was murdered by a junkie, from prison Howie Winter demanded that the killer be whacked. In mid-January 1980, according to an FBI report, Howie reached out to the Angiulos for assistance in avenging his partner’s murder. The Angiulos were surprised by the request, and asked Howie’s envoy why he was coming to them rather than to his own crew, Whitey and Stevie.
“Because,” the messenger said, “them two guys don’t give a fuck.”
Neither did the Mafia. The junkie was not hit.
In the summer of 1980, after several months of surveillance, the Staties finally got a court order to install bugs in the garage. But there were problems. One of the devices was planted in a couch, and every time one of the gangsters, particularly the 250-pound Femia, collapsed onto the sofa, it sounded like an earthquake. But the most crucial bug—the one in the garage office—worked perfectly. The conversations were clear, the voices distinct. The Staties figured it was only a matter of time before Whitey and Stevie incriminated themselves.
But then the Staties began to notice a not-so-subtle change in the tone of the conversations. Suddenly Whitey began to go on, sometimes at great length, about what a wonderful job the State Police were doing, particularly with their speed traps along the Mass. Turnpike. When criminals arrived to discuss business, Whitey would direct them out of the bugged office, and into his car, or out onto the street.
The bug had been blown. It has never been proven conclusively who tipped them. But however it happened, the compromising of the bug precipitated a spate of interagency finger-pointing and name-calling that didn’t subside for more than two decades. As for Whitey, he stopped coming to the garage. He began conducting much of his business from a bank of pay phones at the Howard Johnson’s on the Southeast Expressway. The angry Staties soon picked up the trail of Whitey’s black Chevrolet and followed it to Hojo’s. Every afternoon, they would watch Femia arrive in the Howard Johnson’s parking lot. Once he determined that the phones were safe, Whitey and Stevie would arrive. One day, the troopers saw Femia, with a small handgun tucked into his belt, standing behind Whitey and Stevie as they greeted a man later identified as the Mafia’s top drug importer in New England.
The State Police got a wiretap order on the bank of phones, but in what was becoming an all-too-familiar scenario, as soon as the phones were bugged, Whitey never appeared at Hojo’s again.
Less than ten years earlier Whitey had been a hunted man in Southie, and he was still sensitive to any threats, perceived or otherwise, on his home turf. One of the top bookmakers in Southie was Louie Litif, who was one of Zip Connolly’s hand-ball partners at the Boston Athletic Club. Earlier than most, he realized that drugs, not gambling, were where the money would be made in the future. One of the local drug dealers was named James Matera, and he somehow crossed Litif.
Litif ordered Matera to a sit-down at the bar he hung out in, Hap’s Lounge. The place was deserted, except for the bartender, Kenneth “Bobby” Conrad. Then Litif appeared and ordered Matera into the basement.
“Hey Bobby,” Matera yelled over his shoulder toward the bar, as he walked down the stairs. “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, come looking for me, ’cause I’m probably dead.”
He was. Litif killed him. And soon thereafter, Bobby Conrad vanished. When Conrad’s daughter went to the FBI for help in finding her father, the case was turned over to Zip Connolly. Zip’s goal, as with every crime committed in Southie, was to make the case go away. Litif worked for Whitey, and if the heat suddenly came down on Litif, he might be tempted to try to cut a deal, by turning on Whitey.
So Litif would have to go. He hadn’t been authorized to kill anyone, but he had, and the penalty for that was death. Whitey’s theory was, if you let your people start doing freelance hits, clipping guys might get to be a habit, and that meant anarchy. Look what happened to Donnie Killeen.
But first they had to deal with Conrad’s daughter. As she later recalled, when she went to the FBI looking for answers about her father’s fate, Zip told her bluntly what had happened.
“Honey,” he said, “your father’s dead. They knifed him. But don’t worry. They got him drunk first.”
How did he know, she recalled herself asking him in a 2001 newspaper account.
“I saw it,” he said.
Zip told her that if she went to the Boston police, it might jeopardize some very important underworld informants. The daughter’s problem was that her family badly needed the money from her father’s life insurance policy, but couldn’t collect without a
death certificate. Zip straightened everything out with a single letter to the insurance company on FBI stationery. Two decades later, the Conrads were able to produce a letter from the carrier stating that the case had been resolved thanks to the efforts of “agent Connolly.”
Whitey next summoned Litif to Triple O’s. Brian Halloran, Jimmy Martorano’s friend and co-defendant, had just gotten out of prison and was hanging around, so Whitey sent him to meet Litif. They drove back to Triple O’s in Litif’s car, and Halloran dropped him off at the front door. Litif went upstairs, to Whitey’s makeshift office, where Whitey murdered him.
After Whitey and Halloran wrapped the body in a blanket, they dragged it downstairs and put it in the trunk of Litif’s car. The next question was, where to drop off the body? Whitey always liked a body to make a statement, either by disappearing completely, or ending up somewhere as a message. This time, the message would go to Larry Baione. Like Stevie, Whitey had never particularly liked the blustery, hard-drinking Mafia crew chief. Litif had spent a little too much time in the North End for Whitey’s liking. Whitey considered it somehow disloyal. And even more recently, Whitey had been watching as a young South End hoodlum named Bobby Sullivan built up a thriving drug business. Sullivan operated out of the Baione family’s tavern on Shawmut Avenue, and had come up under Baione’s tutelage. But because his name was Sullivan, Whitey felt he should be the one providing “protection.” But that was not to be—not yet anyway.
So Whitey instructed Halloran to park Litif’s car on Shawmut Avenue in front of Larry Baione’s laundromat. It was just a reminder, both to Baione, not to even think about messing with Southie, and to Sullivan and his crew, that the Mafia wasn’t the only game in town. Halloran parked Litif’s car, wiped down the steering wheel and doors for fingerprints, and then walked back to South Boston, where he assumed his natural pose, on a bar stool at Triple O’s. Litif’s body was discovered the next day; neither newspaper mentioned the significance of where it had been found.
A week or so later, Paul Corsetti, a Vietnam veteran and second-generation police reporter for the Herald American, the Hearst-owned daily, was sniffing around the Litif murder, and Whitey’s obvious involvement in it. After several days of reporting the story, Corsetti got a call at the paper telling him that if he wanted more information on the Litif hit, he should show up at 6:00 p.m. at P. J. Clarke’s, a popular watering hole in Quincy Market. The caller dropped just enough tantalizing tidbits to pique Corsetti’s interest.
That evening, Corsetti was sitting by himself at the bar when an average-sized, middle-aged man pulled up the stool next to him.
“You’re Paul Corsetti, aren’t you?” he said.
Corsetti nodded, and the garrulous fellow made more small talk, until finally Corsetti said, “I’d like to talk to you, but I’m waiting for somebody.”
The man’s smile disappeared. “You’re waiting for me, mother-fucker,” he said. “I’m Jimmy Bulger and I kill people.”
He then pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and began reading to Corsetti—first Corsetti’s address, in Medford, and then the make, model, and license number of his car, and then his wife’s car. Finally, he mentioned Corsetti’s preschool daughter, and where she was dropped off for day care every morning, and at what time. Then Whitey walked away.
The next morning, Corsetti arrived in the city room with a .38-caliber revolver on his hip. He had reason to be worried. Whitey was bad enough, but at that point Nick Femia was still on the gang payroll, and he had likely already murdered at least one reporter, at the Blackfriars in 1978.
Corsetti arranged a meeting at police headquarters. The cops too were concerned; one of them told Corsetti that they “had” Bulger for “at least 50 murders,” none of which they could prove, of course. They suggested that Corsetti might have better luck if he reached out to Mob sources with more influence on Whitey. So he immediately sought out Larry Baione, who had himself been thinking about Whitey since the discovery of Litif’s body outside his laundromat. Baione greeted the reporter warmly at his “clubhouse” on North Margin Street in the North End. Then he asked Corsetti what he could do for him. Corsetti only got as far as the words “Whitey Bulger” when Baione interrupted.
“Anything else I can take care of,” he said. “But Whitey— he’s fucking crazy. I can’t do nothing with him.”
Eventually, Corsetti got word that Whitey, for some unknown reason, had been concerned that the newspaper was working on a story about his brother Billy. Through intermediaries, Corsetti made it clear to Whitey that he was interested only in Louie Litif, not Billy Bulger. Soon, anonymous tips began flooding in, and Corsetti was able to cobble together a passable, if incomplete, story on a subject that promptly vanished from the public prints. Paul Corsetti’s confrontation with Whitey would be long remembered, at least in the city’s news-rooms, and it would be five years before the Boston media mentioned Whitey again in anything more than passing.
The State Police were still incensed that their bugging operation at the garage had been blown. The issue of who informed Whitey has never been definitively resolved, and Stevie did have at least one reliable source in the State Police who later went to prison. But given his other services to the gang over the years, Zip Connolly still seems the most likely suspect. The State Police brass certainly thought so. To vent their anger, they had insisted on meetings with their FBI counterparts, which quickly degenerated into loud, angry exchanges of accusations. The top feds in the Boston office knew that the State Police were likely correct in their suspicions, and they wondered if this particular pair of wiseguys was worth all these headaches. Zip Connolly, who had by now become a confidant, neighbor, and employee of Whitey’s, was frantic that his boss and Stevie were about to be terminated as informants. So he went into overdrive. He filed a report about the charitable deeds Whitey had performed, including rescuing a young white woman from the clutches of a black pimp. Then, on October 15, he and Morris met with Whitey and, according to their report, advised Whitey that it was now “common knowledge” that he was an informant and his life was in jeopardy.
Whitey shrugged off the warning, saying anyone capable of killing him wouldn’t believe he was an informant. He was more worried, he said, about the Mafia figuring out how weak his gang was.
“Informant reiterated,” Zip wrote, “that in his opinion, if he is ever murdered, it will be as a result of gangland warfare rather than him being identified as an informant.”
In other words, Whitey believed that if he ever got hit, it would be over money, not a matter of principle. As far as he was concerned, the old saw was correct. There was no honor among thieves.
In a follow-up report on October 30, Connolly wrote that Whitey told him that “State Police hierarchy speculate that SA Connolly possibly tipped off Whitey Bulger [to the garage bug] through his brother, Senate President William Bulger.”
It was incendiary stuff for Zip to put down on paper—an accusation against himself, and Billy. But he had to portray Whitey as a mere pawn in a political dispute, a victim of petty, paranoid State House politics. Out on the street, though, Whitey remained as cocky as ever. On October 19 another FBI informant quoted him as bragging that “Stevie Flemmi and I are not worried about nothing.” Two days later, Billy Bulger’s name was mentioned by another informant, who told the FBI that Whitey had “gone to his brother … to obtain aid in the release” of a convict.
By November 1980, Connolly’s bosses had come to the conclusion that Whitey and Stevie were far more trouble than they were worth. They would be terminated as informants, at the worst possible time imaginable, just as the FBI was about to place a bug in the Mafia’s Boston headquarters in the North End. Once the Angiulos were removed, “my Irish,” as Connolly called the Bulgers, could take over organized crime in Boston. The crew formerly known as the Winter Hill Gang might be but a shadow of its former self, but the Mafia likewise wasn’t what it had once been. Over the years, Angiulo had eliminated any Italians
who might pose a threat to him, much as Whitey and Stevie had in their own spheres of influence.
Now Angiulo too was having to cope with a severe shortage of talent. A few months later, he would be recorded on an FBI bug, bemoaning his mob’s dire situation, specifically, the dearth of “intelligent tough guys.”
In addition to Whitey’s ambitions to take over the Boston underworld, the other reason it was imperative for him to remain as an informant was that once the bugs were installed, the feds were sure to hear discussions about the crimes of both Whitey and Stevie. And that would likely lead to their indictments, unless, of course, they were still federal informants, in which case Zip could protect them, just as he had in the race-fixing case.
To get a court order to bug Prince Street, the FBI needed affidavits from informants as to the nature and scope of the criminal enterprise being conducted at “the Dog House.” If Flemmi and Bulger stopped by the Dog House, Connolly could list them as sources of information in the FBI’s official application for a bug—a Title III. If they were included in the Title III, it would be almost impossible for the feds to cut them loose later, if only because it would give the Angiulos grounds for an appeal.
The problem with Zip’s plan was that neither Whitey nor Stevie was keen on the idea of dropping in on their Mafia counterparts. Neither totally trusted the Angiulos, for good reason. But they both knew it had to be done, to protect their status as informants. And so, on November 20, 1980, Whitey and Stevie dropped in at 98 Prince Street. During a mundane discussion with three of the Angiulo brothers, they learned from Donato “Danny” Angiulo they had “concern that revenue was down.” Then a young mobster walked in and they all talked about collecting a $65,000 blackjack debt owed to Larry Baione. Then Whitey and Stevie left.
And this, Connolly wrote in a memo to his superiors, was the sort of incredible inside Mob stuff they’d lose forever if they dumped Whitey and Stevie because of the controversy over the blown bug on Lancaster Street.