Howie Carr

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

  But before the FBI had an opportunity to officially exonerate Billy, the Globe rushed the story into print. Billy and Mary were in Brussels when the story broke on Sunday, December 8, in a slow news period after the presidential election. The headline was “The Deal Behind a Skyscraper” and the lead laid it all out: “Senate President William M. Bulger has benefited from a trust bankrolled with money that a Boston real estate magnate claims was extorted from him in 1985 by Bulger’s long-time associate in a downtown law practice.”

  Jack Cloherty was the spokesman for the Boston FBI office. He lived in Southie and liked to brag that his ancestors came from the same village in County Galway as Zip Connolly’s. As late as 2005, two of his siblings remained on State House payrolls controlled by Billy’s political allies. In a few months, Cloherty would be retiring from the FBI, and the master of ceremonies at his farewell dinner would be Billy Bulger. Cloherty quickly issued a statement totally clearing Billy: “This investigation failed to develop any evidence of a violation within the jurisdiction of the FBI.”

  The state attorney general, former Congressman James Shannon, also took a pass. But it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle, especially once the Boston media learned that Billy had never even been interviewed by the authorities.

  Billy returned from Europe “terribly depressed,” as he later wrote. But he issued no public statements; he was confident that in the end, it would all blow over, the way it always did for him and Whitey. And indeed, events did seem to be moving in his direction. Harold Brown suddenly decided to settle out of court with Finnerty for $200,000—$1.1 million less than Finnerty had claimed he was still owed. It has always been assumed that someone, namely Whitey, made Brown the proverbial Godfather-like “offer that he couldn’t refuse.” Brown has steadfastly denied this, and his then attorney, Harvey Silverglate, has also maintained silence, citing attorney-client privilege.

  In a final press release, Silverglate blasted the FBI and the state attorney general for the collapse of Brown’s lawsuit, saying that their “extraordinary public announcements … seemed calculated toward, or at least had the appearance of, undermining Mr. Brown’s position.”

  It just didn’t pay to cross anyone named Bulger.

  But 75 State Street wasn’t quite over. In late January, the interim U.S. attorney, Jeremiah O’Sullivan, decided, under great pressure from the media, to reopen the case. The investigation was tossed back into Morris’s lap. Billy retained R. Robert Popeo, one of the city’s top criminal defense attorneys. Zip Connolly went to work immediately for his mentor, Billy.

  Even though Zip knew that Morris had leaked Whitey’s informant status to the Globe, he still sought him out once the federal probe was restarted. Business was business. And as much as Zip liked Whitey, he loved Billy. Zip had no qualms about soliciting Morris’s aid on behalf of Billy.

  “They’ve asked him to submit to an interview,” Connolly told Morris. “What do you think?”

  “He should do it,” Morris told him. “The case against him isn’t very strong. I don’t think he hurts himself. He does it and that’s the end of the uproar.”

  Just to make sure, Zip sought out one of the assistant U.S. attorneys on the case, Jonathan Chiel. He begged Chiel to join him for lunch at Zip’s personal table at the landmark North End restaurant, Joe Tecce’s.

  As soon as Chiel climbed into Zip’s car, Connolly started in on him.

  “The Senate president is a great man, a special person,” he said. “This is crazy. I don’t know what they think they’re doing.”

  The lobbying continued once they arrived at the restaurant, but Zip’s entreaties were undercut somewhat when owner Joe Tecce wandered over to greet Zip and made a crude anti-Semitic remark. Chiel was Jewish.

  In his book, Billy later told a far-fetched story about how the $240,000 he accepted from Finnerty was a “loan” pending his payment for legal representation in a civil case he had been brought into by Richard McDonough, another of Sonny’s sons. McDonough was a former state employee who had quit to become a lobbyist. His clients were two brothers named Quirk, and the case involved a real estate dispute in a town that Billy has variously identified as Maynard or Sudbury. At the time, Billy wrote, he was nearly broke, and when the case was settled quickly, in favor of the Quirks, Billy claimed he dreamed of buying a new car for Mary and getting a new roof.

  In fact, he invested the money in the Fidelity Tax-Free Bond Account. Billy Bulger, who liked to brag on St. Patrick’s Day that he could slap a tax on a galloping horse, apparently didn’t much like paying those taxes himself.

  Billy’s interview took place February 28, 1989, in Popeo’s fortieth-floor office overlooking the harbor. Present, in addition to the assistant U.S. attorneys, was Billy Bulger Jr., who after four years at two different law schools had lately been working at the Plymouth County district attorney’s office for Finnerty’s handpicked successor.

  A memorandum of the interview was written in 1991 by an assistant attorney general, David Burns. According to Burns’s report, when asked about his partnership with Finnerty, Bulger was beyond vague, saying that they had an “oral agreement” and that he “could not be any more specific regarding this agreement.”

  He also said he had “no documentation” to support the fee he charged the Quirk brothers. And he told the investigators that while he had “a sense” that he had other investments with Finnerty, he couldn’t actually name any of them.

  Burns addressed other questions raised by Billy’s tangled financial relationship with Finnerty, and included Billy’s responses:

  • “Bulger advised that he is still confused on how he paid for his share of ownership in this property [that he owned with Finnerty].”

  • “He did not know the source from which the funds originated other than it came from Finnerty’s account.”

  • “He borrowed another $15,000 from Finnerty for an investment opportunity. Bulger could not recall what investment the $15,000 was used for by him.”

  The interview had been conducted secretly, but the Globe heard about it. They needed a second source, and so O’Neill went back to his original FBI source, Morris, who immediately confirmed it for him. It was not, Morris later said, an attempt to discredit Whitey’s brother.

  It didn’t take long for interim U.S. attorney O’Sullivan to announce that there would be no indictment. There was no evidence, O’Sullivan explained. The joke around Boston became, if you want to hide something real good, just stick it in one of Jerry O’Sullivan’s law books. Before O’Sullivan made the announcement, Popeo got a heads-up, and Billy vanished from the State House. The Globe wanted a photo of him, and Billy was determined not to play ball. He’d cooperated on “The Bulger Mystique,” and they’d croaked him, and then again on 75 State Street. He didn’t like the Herald either, but this time, he would punish the Globe by giving its tabloid competitor the photo everyone wanted. A picture of a grinning Billy standing outside his East Third Street home in the dark appeared next morning on the front page of the Herald.

  Another Bulger had dodged another federal bullet. But the press had tasted blood, and nothing would ever be the same for Billy again.

  CHAPTER 17

  IN FEBRUARY 1989, Michael Dukakis announced he would not seek a fourth term as governor the following year. It was another terrible tactical decision, tipping his hand so far in advance of the 1990 elections. As Sonny McDonough had always said, “Lame duck is my favorite dish.” Even before the Duke’s announcement, he had already largely lost control of state government.

  During the campaign, Billy had been only too happy to move into the vacuum of power, but now he too was wounded, by 75 State Street. Every day the papers—especially the Rupert Murdoch–owned Herald, which unlike the Globe had no stake in preserving the Democratic hegemony—were full of stories about government mismanagement and patronage run amok. Everything in state government had gone out of control. Howie Winter even returned briefly to the headlines—duri
ng his incarceration, the Dukakis administration had paid for his hair-transplant treatments. Suddenly it was open season, not just on Dukakis, but on Billy Bulger. Seemingly overnight, he had gone from Teflon to Velcro. Now everything stuck to him.

  Embarrassing stories that would have once rated at most a mention in the papers’ Sunday political notes columns became major revelations. His 1968 partnership with Tom Finnerty, among others, to purchase surplus land in Winthrop had gone unnoticed on the public record for more than twenty years. But suddenly the Finnerty connection made Billy’s first financial score front-page news. For days the Herald front-paged Billy’s radio station holdings in a company owned by Henry Vara, the gay-bar owner who was a cousin of the Martorano brothers. Billy tried to adjust to the new reality, “amending” his State Ethics Commission forms to include the investment, more than seven years after he purchased the stock. But Billy’s feeble explanations for his partnership rang hollow.

  In 1989, as always, copies of invitations to Billy’s birthday fund-raiser at Anthony’s Pier 4 were slipped to the papers. But reporters now noticed for the first time that the Bulger Committee shared an address and a phone number with Tom Finnerty’s law office. The letter was signed, as always, by a mysterious John J. Sullivan, who did not work at Finnerty’s firm. The significance of the Finnerty address was unclear, but it gave the press a chance to rehash 75 State Street again.

  Dukakis seemed paralyzed, blaming his woes on radio talk show hosts as he demanded again and again that the legislature raise taxes to deal with his increasingly unbalanced state budget. The more Dukakis complained about the press, the harder he was hit, and his complaints in fact became reality. The radio talk shows, along with the Herald, soon were dominating the agenda. And after Dukakis himself, no one made a better piñata for the media than Billy Bulger.

  Whitey’s world too was changing. After serving sixteen years for the bombing of Joe Barboza’s lawyer, Frank Salemme was finally out of state prison, and he was looking to make up for lost time. Even though Vinny Ferrara’s crew was still operating out of Vanessa’s at the Prudential Center, Salemme fancied himself the next Mafia boss of Boston. After all, Salemme figured, he’d done a lot more for the Mafia back in the 1960s than Ferrara and his crew of second-stringers from East Boston ever had. And then he’d kept his mouth shut all those years in prison. Both the Mafia and the Hill owed him, big time, or so Salemme thought.

  Suddenly Stevie was spending a lot of time with Salemme, and his son, Frank Jr. Whitey knew that Zip had asked Stevie to keep an eye on Salemme, but Whitey still didn’t appreciate Stevie’s new “special relationship.” He ordered Kevin Weeks to set up several new stashes of weapons in Southie, just in case Stevie “wasn’t around,” as he put it to Weeks. It wasn’t that Whitey didn’t trust his old friend Stevie; he didn’t trust anybody, period.

  Whitey also had another looming headache—the DEA. In 1987 District Attorney Newman Flanagan had gone to the DEA, and offered to cut them in on a new investigation of the cocaine dealing that was getting out of control in South Boston. Flanagan had only one condition: They couldn’t tell the FBI, for obvious reasons. Both the local prosecutors and the DEA recalled the leaks that had just two years earlier doomed an earlier drug investigation, Operation Beans. During that period, Zip Connolly was so wired into the probe that once, when DEA agents pulled Whitey’s criminal records, moments later they received a call from Zip, demanding to know exactly what they were up to.

  Still, despite Zip’s interference in Operation Beans, the cops had actually succeeded in placing a bug inside the front driver’s-side door of Whitey’s Chevrolet Caprice. But as always, Whitey got a tip, and eventually, the DEA agents had to storm into one of his garages to retrieve their $50,000 worth of state-of-the-art bugs. As the feds burst into the garage, Whitey was ripping open the door panel and Weeks was waving an electronic bug detector, trying to find out exactly where the microphone had been placed.

  The agents and gangsters stared at one another for a few moments, until Whitey broke the ice.

  “We’re all good guys,” he said. “You’re the good good guys. We’re the bad good guys.”

  A few days later, Stevie Flemmi ran into the DEA crew, and he commiserated with the cops who’d worked so hard on Operation Beans, only to come up empty. A month after he and Whitey had garroted Deborah Hussey with a rope, he calmly lectured the DEA on how they should be working with him and “Jim.”

  “We don’t need Miranda,” Stevie explained. “We can wrap a rope around anyone’s neck.”

  By February 1989 the second DEA probe was well underway, and for once, it looked as though there hadn’t been any leaks. The DEA was well aware that Zip Connolly had both a brother and an ex-roommate who worked for the drug agency. As an FBI supervisor later noted in a memo, the head of the DEA’s Boston office “quietly changed the duties of both these DEA special agents so they would not become aware of this matter.”

  Whatever the status of any investigations, Whitey maintained a strict policy of total insulation from any dealers below Weeks in the hierarchy of the four cocaine distribution rings that now dominated the drug trade in Southie.

  Running one of the crews was John “Red” Shea, a fatherless young boxer, born in 1967. In a 2003 essay, after serving a lengthy prison sentence for his crimes, Shea wrote in the third person about how he was personally recruited by Whitey.

  “Whitey convinced Red that he was wasting his time with boxing,” Shea wrote. “It was for dumb fucking niggers.”

  One day Shea got a phone call to come down to Rotary Variety, Weeks’s convenience store next to the Liquor Mart. In the basement there he found two men pointing Uzis at him. From a darkened corner, Whitey began screaming at Shea, demanding to know where one of his partners kept his money.

  His associate had no money, Shea said. Then he shrugged and told Whitey to do what he had to do. Whitey stepped out of the shadows and threw his arm around Red.

  “It was just a test,” Whitey said. “The last guy I did that to, he would have told me where Jimmy Hoffa was buried. He shit his pants.”

  Red Shea could hold his mud, as Punchy McLaughlin used to say. Whitey loved Red Shea; he would make a good drug mule for the gang. Weeks would give him cash and Red could travel to Miami and do business with the Cubans. Those treacherous fucks might sell him stepped-on shit every once in a while, but Whitey never had to worry about Red running off with his cash. Red was a stand-up guy, which, to Whitey’s way of thinking, made him a complete patsy, especially with the feds circling around Southie.

  Frank Salemme was trying to put the Mafia back together again, and he sometimes held court on Castle Island, in Southie. Whitey didn’t care that Salemme’s mother had been Irish, or that he knew Billy from the L Street Bathhouse when they were both kids. About to turn sixty, Whitey just didn’t need the aggravation. If he could eliminate Salemme he was sure that the next generation of Mafia wannabes to rise up would be even more inept than the last two.

  Zip, of course, had a plan. He would get Salemme’s Mafia rivals—namely, Vinny Ferrara’s crew—to kill Cadillac Frank before he could muscle in on the hoods Zip still insisted on calling “my Irish.”

  On June 19, 1989, the front-page story in the Herald was about Salemme’s impending move to wrest control of all the local Mafia rackets. The story, quoting anonymous federal sources, predicted that a gang war was about to break out between the rival Mafia factions.

  Two days later, as he walked through the parking lot of the International House of Pancakes in Saugus to a sit-down with Vinny Ferrara’s guys from East Boston, someone in the back seat of a speeding rented car leaned out the window with a machine gun and opened fire on Cadillac Frank, striking him with at least four bullets.

  Bleeding profusely, Salemme stumbled into the IHOP and collapsed into a booth as customers began screaming. A frightened waitress screwed up enough courage to approach him.

  “Can I do anything for you?”

  “Yea
h,” he said, clutching his stomach. “Could you bring me some more napkins, please?”

  Salemme eventually recovered, but within hours, the two Mafia factions were shooting at each other in both Massachusetts and Connecticut. As the toll mounted in Zip’s own little gang war, the Mafia bosses of New England decided that there was only one way to end the bloodshed. They would hold a traditional Mafia initiation, to bury the hatchet between the two warring factions.

  Zip knew about it almost immediately, not from Whitey, although he would later try to give him credit for the original tip. But Zip immediately understood that if he could bug the initiation, this would be his big score. His new wife was pregnant, and he wanted to retire and start making big, private sector money. If he could pull this off, record an actual Mafia initiation ceremony, then he could fulfill his dream, of going Hollywood, writing a screenplay about a courageous FBI agent who single-handedly destroyed the Mafia in his hometown.

  Taping a Mafia induction. It had never been done before. * * *

  The initiation took place in Medford, on Sunday, October 29, 1989. There was one problem, though, that looked like it might force a postponement: one of the hoodlums to be made, Vinnie Federico, was in state prison, serving a sentence for killing a black guy in a dispute over a parking space in the North End. They had to spring Vinnie, because it was his sister’s house they were planning to use.

  In the end, Vinnie was able to get a weekend furlough, just as Willie Horton had a few years earlier. Vinnie apparently didn’t realize the great import of the moment, because he brought a date, a thirty-year-old woman who worked for Mayor Ray Flynn at City Hall. When she arrived the puzzled Mafia bosses told her to go downstairs and watch TV until it was time to eat.

  The house had been wired earlier, and outside the feds were everywhere. They trailed the Rhode Island guys up from Providence in an airplane. Carmen Tortora, the Mafia leg-breaker whose brother had once run for the Senate in Dorchester, spotted some heat at a phone booth in a parking lot. Despite the ominous portents, they went ahead with the ceremony anyway. It was the usual wiseguy stuff—pricked fingers, incinerated Mass cards, mumbo jumbo for the four new inductees about entering the organization alive and leaving it dead.