Howie Carr
Page 20
“Give us the bankroll,” the Animal shouted.
“I’m not gonna give you no bankroll,” Sagansky replied. But a day later, he did—$250,000. The money was passed in the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel, and Vinny the Animal and his men hurried back to Vanessa’s to divide the take.
“Those motherfuckers,” the Animal said. “This better be real money.”
Whitey had nothing to fear from this new Mafia. With every word of the shakedown recorded on tape, it was only a matter of time before the Animal and his crew joined the Angiulos in federal prison.
Whitey had even fewer concerns about his old friends from Somerville. Without Howie Winter to keep them in line, they began shooting one another, sometimes in bars. Others dabbled in cocaine, often with disastrous consequences. Whitey paid them little heed, although sometimes the subject of Howie Winter’s old outfit at Marshall Motors did come up in conversation. On one bug that the Drug Enforcement Administration briefly installed in a car in the mid-1980s, Whitey was heard griping about still having to support Johnny Martorano in Florida. After all, he hadn’t killed anybody for Whitey in maybe three years. Whitey was also recorded telling Stevie, “There ain’t no more Winter Hill Gang,” and, for good measure, “Fuck Howie.”
After Winter’s release from prison, Whitey began feeding Zip derogatory information about his old boss. Whitey described Howie as “strictly a left-fielder,” who shook down criminals for protection he didn’t provide.
It wasn’t all work and no play for Whitey in the mid-1980s. Sometimes he was spotted at Roxbury Latin football games, watching his nephew Chris Bulger, Billy’s son, play.
He often socialized with friendly FBI agents. Whitey gave them all nicknames. John Newton, who had served in Vietnam, was “Agent Orange.” Nick Gianturco’s father had been a physician; he became “Doc” Gianturco. Most Sundays, he and Stevie hosted a dinner at Mrs. Flemmi’s house across the courtyard from Billy’s house, and Zip sometimes brought by other agents. Occasionally, two FBI agents later testified, Billy would even make a brief appearance, none of which he would be able to recall when he later testified under oath before Congress. Whitey also visited the homes of agents. John Newton had an apartment in Southie, where Whitey liked to meet Zip late at night to strategize. Newton testified that when Whitey arrived, he would take his dogs out for a walk.
But many of the get-togethers with agents were purely social. One evening in 1985, agent Nick Gianturco, invited Whitey and Stevie to dinner at his home, where they met another guest, the famous undercover New York FBI agent Joe Pistone, better known as Donnie Brasco. Gianturco introduced his Mob friends to Pistone as “Jimmy and Stevie.”
In the spring of 1985, Zip arranged a dinner party at John Morris’s home in Lexington that included himself, Morris, Stevie, Whitey, and, for good measure, Dennis Condon, still working for Governor Dukakis in the Public Safety Department. Condon fled after dinner, and the evening ended with Whitey pressing $5,000 cash into Morris’s palm.
When he wasn’t hobnobbing with the FBI or dining out with either of his girlfriends, some nights Whitey could be found hanging out at Jacques, the city’s original transvestite bar in his old stomping grounds, Bay Village. It was owned by Henry Vara, the cousin of the Martoranos who in the mid-1970s had become Billy’s business partner in a Florida radio station.
Whitey often vacationed in Provincetown, the heavily gay resort at the tip of Cape Cod. When John Callahan was murdered in 1982, Zip pointed out that Whitey couldn’t have killed him, because he was in Provincetown—“with female companionship,” Zip hastened to add in his report.
On another visit to Provincetown, Whitey had a photograph taken of himself wearing a cowboy hat and a leather vest with nothing underneath. In his hands he cradled a long-barreled revolver. When the Herald ran the photograph in 2004, it was captioned, “Wanted by the FBI … and the Village People.”
Occasionally he and Theresa Stanley went to Florida. Her brother had moved there decades earlier, and gone into law enforcement. He had eventually been elected sheriff of a small county near Tampa on the west coast. But the siblings’ visits were often short; Whitey and the sheriff, a pro-life Republican, did not get along.
On rare occasions, Whitey showed his sentimental side. His old Alcatraz buddy, Clarence Carnes, the Choctaw Kid, had never been able to make it on the outside, and back in federal prison, he contracted AIDS, died, and was buried in a prison graveyard in Missouri.
Whitey paid to have the Choctaw Kid’s body exhumed and sent back to Indian country for a traditional burial. He arrived twenty minutes late for his friend’s funeral, after collecting a speeding ticket in his rented Lincoln for doing 110 in a 55 miles-per-hour zone.
At the funeral, Whitey passed out $100 tips to everyone there—the preachers, the singers, even the funeral director, who would later get occasional late night calls from Whitey, in which Whitey mused about how he just wanted to buy a boat and sail around the world.
But Whitey’s main recreation was sex, with partners of both genders. He was often seen in the company of Catherine Greig’s younger brother, who would eventually die in what was ruled a suicide on Cape Cod. Some of the stories about Whitey’s sexual exploits were collected in a book by one of Whitey’s cocaine dealers, Edward MacKenzie—Eddie Mac, as he called himself. Entitled Street Soldier: My Life As an Enforcer for Whitey Bulger and the Boston Irish Mob, the book recounted how Whitey employed the same techniques on young males as the pedophile priests of the archdiocese of Boston. After seducing them, he would take the boys out for an ice cream cone.
But Whitey went both ways, and like his partner, Stevie Flemmi, he enjoyed the company of underage females, of which there was a ready supply at Cardinal Cushing High School, a now closed parochial school for girls on East Broadway a block or so east of Triple O’s.
Eddie Mac says Whitey often paid off the victims’ families with trips, or in at least one case, a new set of furniture, which according to one FBI report was the same modus operandi used by Stevie on more than one occasion. At the time, in the late 1980s, Eddie Mac was running a barroom known as Connolly’s Corner Café, and he also operated a gymnasium. The gym included a couple of locker rooms, with a Jacuzzi on the women’s side, and Eddie Mac quickly set up a lounge of sorts in a storage area next to the women’s locker room. Then he put in a two-way mirror that enabled him and his friends to enjoy a full-length view of the women’s locker room, where the young girls, often from Cardinal Cushing, went naked into the shower and the Jacuzzi.
They called their peep show setup the Dog Room. “Whitey… loved it,” MacKenzie wrote. “Of course there was no way he was going to sit with us. When he wanted the Dog Room, he got private shows, at 11 or 12 at night, often with high school girls from the projects…We were not allowed in the gym when he was there. He usually arranged for this guy named John to perform with women because he had a huge stick… But no one ever got to watch Whitey …He trusted no one.”
In his book, MacKenzie claimed that one night he surreptitiously watched through the two-way mirror as Whitey raped a fifteen-year-old girl that MacKenzie recognized as one of “Whitey’s Cardinal Cushing groupies.”
“[The] naked girl lay face-down on a plastic tarp on the floor. Whitey, equally naked, kneeled over her. He was spreading different colors of paint all over her body; she looked like a tie-dye T-shirt…When he was finished, he turned her over and began having sex with her.”
Over the years, rumors have surfaced about amateur pornographic videotapes that were supposedly made by Whitey at the Dog Room. None have surfaced, so far.
Sooner or later, Whitey must have known, he was going to run out of luck. Zip wasn’t getting any younger, and eventually Whitey might have to go on the lam again. This time he was determined that it wouldn’t be a half-assed, haphazard flight like his trip across the country as a young fugitive in 1955. This time, he would do it right.
As far back as 1977, Whitey had begun assembling his new identit
y—“Thomas Baxter,” of New York. But to make it work, he would need money, and he would need it everywhere. Soon he and Theresa were taking trips, not just to Florida and Oklahoma, but around the world. Often Whitey would use the opportunity to scout out a bank where he could rent a safe-deposit box, which he would then stuff with cash, jewelry, rare coins, and passports.
But their most frequent foreign destination was the country next door—Canada.
On September 8, 1987, Whitey and Theresa arrived at the Delta Airlines terminal to catch a flight to Montreal. Theresa paid cash for two first-class tickets. As they went through security, a guard noticed several bricklike objects in Whitey’s carry-on luggage. The guard opened the satchel and saw that it was filled with brand-new $100 bills. The estimates of the amount of cash Whitey was carrying have ranged as high as $100,000, far above the federal limit of $10,000 that is permitted to be taken out of the country without notifying authorities. When the guard told Whitey that he would have to call the State Police, Whitey grabbed the bag and ran, yelling “Kevin!” at an associate who was leaving the terminal.
“Kevin” took the bag from Whitey and escaped through the revolving door. Security guards tried to chase after him, but Whitey blocked the door, giving “Kevin,” most likely Kevin Weeks, time to escape.
Billy Johnson, a plainclothes state trooper and Vietnam veteran, was the first to arrive on the scene. As Whitey, scowling, looked on, Johnson asked the security guards to tell him what happened. As the guard began to speak, Whitey pointed at him.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “You’re a liar.”
Johnson asked Whitey for his identification, and he came up with a driver’s license with a South Boston address. Whitey kept telling the guard to shut the fuck up, and finally Johnson shoved Whitey up against the wall.
“I’ll lock you up,” he said.
“Is this how you treat citizens?” Whitey yelled.
Johnson checked Theresa Stanley’s bag. She was carrying $9,923 in cash, just under the federal limit. Both she and Whitey had skirted the law, and Whitey had behaved very badly indeed, but neither had committed a crime, at least none that an East Boston jury, or magistrate, would consider worthy of a State Police pinch. Johnson reluctantly let them go.
The next day, David Davis, Mike Dukakis’s handpicked director of Logan Airport, appeared at the State Police’s F Troop barracks and confronted the trooper, demanding the copy of his report on the incident.
Johnson refused to hand it over without getting a receipt. Davis, a longtime Boston political operative, stormed out of the barracks without the report that someone back at the State House had wanted very badly. Soon thereafter, Billy Johnson was transferred out of F Troop to a less desirable barracks. His overtime dried up, it became clear he would never be promoted, and he plunged into a deep depression that didn’t lift even after he finally quit the job. In 1998, Johnson committed suicide. He couldn’t fight the machine, any more than Joe Murray could.
In 2003, at the congressional hearing, Billy dismissed the story of Johnson’s transfer as “tabloid talk show stuff in Boston.” His lawyer produced a notarized statement from Davis saying that he had not gone to the barracks at the behest of Billy Bulger. But of course the order wouldn’t have come directly from Billy. Davis worked for Michael Dukakis, so the directive would have come from someone who worked for the governor. In his letter, Davis didn’t say who told him to pick up the report.
Joe Murray may have been a major drug smuggler, but he was also an Irish nationalist. And in 1984 he’d convinced Whitey to help him put together, for a price, a shipment of arms for the Irish Republican Army—machine guns, rifles, and heavy-caliber pistols, .357s and .44s, seven tons of ordnance in all. The weaponry was driven up to Gloucester and loaded onto a seventy-seven-foot fishing boat called the Valhalla. Three Southie gangsters went along, to protect the boss’s investment, along with a crew that included another member of Murray’s gang, John McIntyre, a small-time thirty-two-year-old criminal and deckhand from Quincy.
McIntyre didn’t much care for Whitey’s guys. “They got the Adidas jump suits,” he later told the Quincy police, “and they ain’t got a speck of dirt on them. Every day, they take two, three showers.”
Off the west coast of Ireland, the weapons were off-loaded onto an Irish fishing boat, the Marita Ann. But someone had informed the Irish navy and the Marita Ann was stopped and its weapons seized, along with a number of bulletproof vests, one of which belonged to Stevie Flemmi’s younger brother, Boston police officer Mike Flemmi. When the Valhalla returned to port in Boston, it too was seized, and the story briefly became big news on both sides of the Atlantic.
McIntyre had observed Whitey long enough to know that someone was going to have to take the fall, and he suspected that he was at the top of their list. In October 1984, shortly after his return, McIntyre was arrested by the Quincy police on an unrelated domestic charge. Soon he was talking, nonstop, about the Bulger gang, even though he refused to use Whitey’s name, preferring to refer to him and Stevie as “the two guys who ride around together.”
As he told the cops, “I didn’t start out in life to end up like this.”
McIntyre told them about another drug ship, the Ramsland, and it was seized in the harbor, along with thirty-six tons of marijuana. Whitey was furious; in 2005 Stevie testified that he and Whitey had been expecting to be paid “about a million” for their so-called protection of the shipment. Meanwhile, as a departmental courtesy, the DEA let the FBI know who their informant was, and the clock began ticking down on McIntyre. On November 30, 1984, McIntyre left his parents’ home in Quincy to meet Pat Nee, Whitey’s liaison to the Murray crew, at the same house where Bucky Barrett had already been murdered, and Deb Hussey soon would be. McIntyre thought he was going to a party; he walked into the house carrying a case of beer. But Whitey was waiting for him.
According to Weeks and Flemmi, Whitey briefly discussed sending McIntyre into the grand jury with a script, or perhaps giving him enough money to flee to South America. But they quickly rejected those options.
“Jim decided at the last minute to kill him,” Weeks later said.
With McIntyre tied to a chair in the basement, Whitey looped a rope around his neck and began throttling him. But the rope wasn’t thick enough, and Whitey couldn’t finish him off. He stopped to catch his breath, then went back to work on McIntyre’s neck. Still he survived, and finally Whitey gave up and threw the rope aside. Whitey picked up a revolver and released the lock. He looked at McIntyre.
“Do you want me to shoot you in the head?” Whitey asked. “Yes, please,” McIntyre answered.
Whitey fired once into McIntyre’s head, and the force of the shot knocked over the chair he was tied to. Stevie bent over and put his ear to McIntyre’s chest.
“He’s still alive,” Stevie announced. So he grabbed a handful of McIntyre’s hair and pulled on it, just enough to get his head off the basement floor. Whitey then leaned over, put his revolver directly against McIntyre’s temple, and shot him repeatedly, at point-blank range, as Stevie gripped his hair.
Now McIntyre was dead. Stevie went to work with his pliers, and this time, he removed not only McIntyre’s teeth, but also ripped out his tongue. It would be another warning to rats, except for one thing. No one was ever supposed to see McIntyre again. Kevin Weeks had another corpse to bury in the basement.
Sixteen months later, Nee and Joe Murray were indicted for gunrunning. So was the missing John McIntyre. After his conviction in 1987, Murray found himself sitting in the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.
He knew who’d killed Brian Halloran, and Bucky Barrett, and he knew the names of the cops who were selling information to Whitey. Joe Murray reached out for Bill Weld, the former U.S. attorney in Boston who was now in Washington as an assistant attorney general in Ed Meese’s Justice Department.
Murray couldn’t make the calls himself from prison, so he had someone else phone Weld’s office. The first
call was on January 20, 1988. Murray’s friend named John Connolly and a Boston police officer as two cops who sold information to Whitey. Weld’s secretary, Judy Woolley, took the dictation.
In the second call, on February 3, 1988, at 3:04 p.m., Murray’s friend informed the Justice Department who had murdered Bucky Barrett, and why. A week later, he called again, and this time he told the secretary who murdered Brian Halloran. And Murray’s friend included this tantalizing information: “There is a person named John, who claims he talked to Whitey and [another gang member] as they sat in the car waiting for Halloran on Northern Avenue. He sits in a bar and talks about it.”
Weld forwarded the information to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, with the handwritten notation that “both [Jeremiah] O’Sullivan and AUSA [assistant U.S. attorney, and future head of the FBI] Bob Mueller are well aware of the history, and the information sounds good.”
It was so good, in fact, that the Boston office of the FBI did nothing with it for fifteen months. Finally, in June 1989, Murray was shipped up from Danbury to Boston, and interviewed. He was questioned by two of Zip’s best friends in the office.
“In view of the unsubstantial and unspecific allegations,” the agents wrote after speaking to him, “and the official relationship between SSA [Supervisory Special Agent] CONNOLLY and the sources, Boston recommends that this inquiry be closed, and no administrative action taken.”
In other words, business as usual. Murray was shipped back to prison and his charges ignored for more than a decade. But everything he had said was true—Whitey and the FBI and the Boston police did have their machines, and Murray couldn’t survive against them, nor could anyone else. Because it was all one big machine now, and Whitey Bulger called the shots. Like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat, he was on top o’ the world, Ma, top o’ the world.
CHAPTER 15
ST. PATRICK’S DAY 1987. Senate President Billy Bulger was also at the pinnacle of his power, and he was reveling in it. This was his big day of the year—the Sunday of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Southie. Before it began at 1:00 p.m. out of Andrew Square, Billy would host his annual three-hour breakfast at the old German Club, now known as the Bayside Club, on H Street.