by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
By 1994, Whitey had become concerned about the grand jury and the dangerous drift events were taking. Under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the feds didn’t need a lot to put an organized crime figure behind bars for good. All they had to do was prove a couple of recent crimes— “predicate acts”—and that would be enough to establish what was called a “pattern of racketeering.” And to prove the pattern they could bring up any crime that the criminal had ever committed. Gerry Angiulo, the Mafia underboss, had always fulminated against RICO, but it had been used to put him away for keeps. The annual attempt by local police to get a Massachusetts version of the RICO statute on the books was always blocked in the legislature.
But with Zip in retirement, the feds finally appeared serious about taking Whitey and Stevie down. Stevie, though, seemed strangely unconcerned about the ongoing probe. Whitey had been on the lam before, and had been pinched after only a month or so. Stevie, on the other hand, had had no problems during his four years as a fugitive, but then, he’d been protected by both the Mafia and the FBI. Stevie appeared to have no understanding of how much the world had changed in twenty-five years. As far as Stevie was concerned, it was business as usual. He had a teenage girlfriend who was pregnant, and he also traveled with a slightly older Asian companion by the name of Jian Fen Hu. One of his two sons by Marion Hussey was about to open a restaurant on High Street, Schooner’s, an enterprise in which Stevie was taking a great deal of interest.
In the summer of 1994, Stevie took his annual summer vacation to Montreal, to visit old friends. Whitey hit the road too, but unlike Stevie, he was a man on a mission. With Theresa Stanley in tow, he made the Grand Tour of Europe, often stopping off at banks to open a safe-deposit box. In London, he listed his brother Billy as the person to notify in case of a problem, giving the bank Billy’s home address and telephone number. Filling out the forms, Whitey used his own name. His alias, “Thomas Baxter,” was a seventeen-year work in progress, and he didn’t want to tip anybody to it if he didn’t have to.
Whitey had been in jams like this before, but somehow he’d always managed to wriggle out of them. The difference was that, in the past, he’d always been able to give the feds someone higher up on the Mob totem pole—from Howie Winter and Gerry Angiulo all the way to Frank Salemme.
Now, though, Whitey was at the top of the heap. The Mafia was finished, and there was nobody of consequence left in Somerville or Charlestown either. Whitey was now the Man, Mr. Big. There was nobody left to rat out. It was, finally, Whitey’s turn to take the fall.
CHAPTER 19
BILLY HIT IT OFF ALMOST immediately with the new Republican governor, William Floyd Weld. It was not a friendship anyone would have predicted, but as 1991 began, Billy needed friends. The 1990 elections had been as much a referendum on him as on Dukakis, and he had been drubbed, his Senate majority decimated in the wake of the 75 State Street scandal and the revelations about his brother’s cocaine dealing.
His St. Patrick’s Day breakfast that March was a disaster. It was still televised statewide, but the no-shows included both U.S. senators, the new House speaker, and the new attorney general. Mayor Ray Flynn stopped by for all of eight minutes. Every missing politician was needled, of course. On the subject of the just concluded first Gulf War, Billy said, “It was touch-and-go for a while. John Kerry didn’t know which side he was going to go with.”
Weld made an appearance, though, and even wore a green button that said, in white letters, “I’m a friend of President Bulger.” As Weld arrived, Billy looked like a drowning man who’d just been tossed a life preserver.
Unlike Joe Malone or John Kerry, Weld treated Billy with respect. Weld even read an item from the paper, that The New Yorker had commissioned a profile on William M. Bulger. Billy beamed; it was something he couldn’t have mentioned himself on the television audience, lest he be accused of patting himself on the back.
Once Weld departed, though, the breakfast disintegrated. Billy had no proper foils left. All he could do was sing obscure, sad Irish ballads, and soon enough, the atmosphere in the hall had become as self-pitying and morose as the host.
At 12:36, Billy said, “This is awful.” Then he told a joke about gondolas.
“You’ve heard it before?” he said. “Well, you’d better laugh anyway.” At 12:39, as flop sweat formed on his brow, he threw up another prayer of a joke, and it clanged off the rim.
“Oh God,” he said, “why am I doing this?”
Even in that grim winter of 1991, Billy was again scheming to restore the old balance of power, that is, the balance where he had all the power. Fortunately for Billy, Weld didn’t seem to grasp how rare, and important, it was for the Senate to have sixteen Republican members. If Weld could maintain any party discipline, and he could, he could sustain any veto. That meant that, with his line item veto, Weld could control the $15 billion state budget. And that made Bill Weld, not Billy Bulger, the real governor.
Billy now seemed resigned to his public fate—he would forever be known as a mere “legislative leader,” the Corrupt Midget, brother of a gangster. Perhaps as time went on, he could somewhat restore his reputation, at least in some quarters. But most people outside the State House, he understood, would never accept him, nor would the media, which had increasingly turned against him after 75 State Street. Striking a reformer’s pose at this late date was simply too absurd to consider. So Billy went back to some of his old ways. He again began openly taking honoraria. What did he have to lose by grabbing, say, $5,021 from Pfizer for an appearance?
At home, in Southie, he struck a more combative pose. Billy’s campaign chairman, John J. Sullivan, would write his customary letter exhorting Billy’s friends to attend his annual birthday party (his fifty-seventh) at Anthony’s Pier 4 and celebrate his victory… over John DeJong.
“Against the thundering editorialists and their media accomplices,” wrote Sullivan, in a tone not unlike Billy’s own, “the voices of his neighbors and supporters were heard with emphatic clarity…. Hence, our celebration will be especially gratifying this year as we assemble to honor Senator Bulger.”
And for Billy, there was still the occasional punishment to be meted out. Congressman Chester Atkins, Billy’s former Ways and Means chairman, had turned against him in the wake of 75 State Street. Now it was time again for a congressional redistricting, and for Massachusetts to lose a seat. Atkins was in deep trouble. He’d been humiliated when he was publicly identified in the House banking scandal as one of the top check-kiters in Congress. And his former Senate aide Mark Ferber was headed to federal prison in a massive kickback scheme he’d masterminded as a private-sector adviser to several state agencies. If he had to run against an incumbent, Atkins wanted a shot at another weak check-bouncing incumbent, Joe Early of Worcester.
Atkins wanted to rid himself of most of his own district— namely, the Merrimack Valley, and annex Worcester. Through intermediaries he extended the olive branch to his old boss. But Billy made it clear that he was through being the fall guy for every crude power play on Beacon Hill. Billy insisted that before he could even consider gerrymandering the two districts into one, he would need Chester to publicly ask for it. Billy was baiting a trap for Chester, and Atkins was desperate enough to fall right into it.
Chester dutifully claimed that he felt more kinship with Worcester than with the Merrimack Valley, and those were the insincere words Billy had been waiting to hear. Billy immediately announced that no matter what changes in the map were required by the congressional redistricting, the “integrity” of the Valley would be maintained. Chester was shocked at his former boss’s move; most other politicians were amused that Atkins hadn’t realized that he was being set up.
In the Democratic primary the next year, Chester would be crushed two to one by a young assistant district attorney from Lowell making his first bid for public office, Marty Meehan.
The next foe of Billy’s to be taken down a notch was Christopher Lydon, the
former New York Times reporter who was now the anchor of The 10 O’Clock News on the local public TV station, WGBH. Lydon and one of his reporters, David Boeri, had been relentless on the subject of 75 State Street, and Lydon had gone out of his way to humiliate Dukakis in a live interview after the lame-duck governor nominated Paul Mahoney for his judgeship in 1990.
Every year, Channel 2 sponsored a popular imported wine tasting for its well-heeled audience. For the tasting, Channel 2 needed a one-day liquor license, and all such licenses had to be approved by the legislature.
In 1991, the legislature initially balked at rubber-stamping WGBH’s liquor license, the way it would have for almost any other home-rule petition that came before it.
In the spring of 1991, The 10 O’Clock News was canceled. The one-day liquor license for Channel 2 was then approved.
As he had promised during the 1990 campaign, the new attorney general, Luther Scott Harshbarger, did undertake a new investigation of 75 State Street. The results of his office’s probe were released in September 1991, and the material, if not enough for an indictment, was still damning.
The investigators pointed out that “notwithstanding Bulger’s assertion that he repaid” the entire $240,000 to Finnerty,
“substantially all of those funds were later returned from that trust to Bulger over the next 12 months.” As an example, they cited a $61,000 check issued by the St. Botolph Trust, to which Billy had repaid his supposed loan, on June 6, 1986. The check was made out to Thomas Finnerty, P.C. Three days later, Finnerty issued a check for $61,000 payable to “William Bulger.” And Billy then deposited the money in the same Fidelity municipal bond account “which 10 months earlier had been used to accept the original St. Botolph checks which Bulger later repaid.”
The investigators also looked into other transactions between Finnerty, Bulger, and Richard McDonough. In addition to their work for the Quirk brothers, Sonny’s son and Billy also “received over $50,000 from a firm in California known as Herbalife reportedly for out of state ‘consulting’ activities by McDonough and Bulger on behalf of that firm.”
In the last four months of 1985, Billy took more than $50,000 out of the Finnerty firm. In 1986, the firm issued him checks worth more than $350,000.
There was no follow-up to the report. There would be no indictments.
The story about Billy ran in The New Yorker in the October 28, 1991, issue. The writer, Richard Brookhiser, tipped his hand when an interviewer asked him his opinion of Billy.
“I think,” Brookhiser said, “he is an admirable man in many ways.”
Billy, of course, had said much the same thing about his brother less than three years earlier.
In his gushing profile, Brookhiser ignored the recent report from the attorney general on 75 State Street. Billy’s patronage empire was brushed aside as the occasional procurement of “a job for a deserving acquaintance.” No mention was made of the ongoing cocaine trials in the federal court, in which the wiretaps included repeated references to the poor quality of the “snow” that “Whitey” was peddling. Franny Joyce of the Convention Center Authority surfaced as a “former Bulger aide,” but not as his tin whistle player, or the guy who hired both Whitey’s stepdaughter and hitman Johnny Martorano’s daughter.
A Herald columnist noted that after such an obsequious puff piece, Brookhiser “must be at the top of the waiting list for the next elevator operator’s job at the Suffolk County courthouse.”
Few people in Boston may have read the New Yorker article, but it was studied with great interest at CBS News headquarters in New York, and soon Billy would have his greatest moment in the media sun, on 60 Minutes.
On St. Patrick’s Day 1992, the CBS camera crew was rolling tape at the Bayside Club. Once again Governor Weld was the guest of honor, and this time he brought with him a song written by the former treasurer, Bob Crane. It concluded with a reference to Whitey:
“And now Bill this bonus is on me / Your winning ticket to the Lottery. / You’re going to be a millionaire, there is no doubt / For I had your brother pick these numbers out.”
Billy was beside himself with glee. “He’s a great sport, isn’t he?” he told the crowd.
Six months later, on September 17, more than twenty million Americans watched Morley Safer’s 60 Minutes piece on Billy. It made The New Yorker story look like hard-hitting journalism.
“In this age of gray, faceless men, it’s just plain fun to have a leader with blood in his veins,” the elderly Canadian correspondent intoned. “Billy Bulger almost defines Boston Irish. His district is South Boston, the home of the legendary boss politician, James Michael Curley, whose spirit is alive and well in Bulger.”
Except that Curley was from Roxbury, not Southie. Whitey’s name was ever so briefly invoked, so that Billy could say, “He’s my brother. I care about him. I encourage him to come by all the time.”
Safer fell back on the oldest of clichés, the good brother and the bad, the good one “always with a song in his heart and on his lips, and, yet true or not, a shadow of menace.”
Menace, from Billy? It was clear Morley Safer was having none of it, and that was the message he conveyed to the viewers. The ogre of the 1990 campaign had almost totally reinvented himself, for a national, if not local, audience, as a lovable leprechaun.
Billy basked in his national exposure. And election night 1992 would be even sweeter, almost as much of a vindication as 1990 had been a repudiation. Bill Clinton’s victory in the presidential election meant little to Billy. What did matter was that five Republican state senators were defeated, and Governor Weld lost his power to sustain a veto. The 1990 Senate Republicans were reformers, and as Billy always said, reformers never came back. The Senate once again belonged to Billy Bulger.
By 1993, it had become clear to the junior members of the Senate that, in his fifteenth year as president, Billy was staying put. The old saying was “Up or out,” but until there was an “up” for Billy, there would be no “out.”
Once again, Billy was trying to expand his influence. When Mayor Ray Flynn quit City Hall to become ambassador to the Vatican, a special election was scheduled to replace him. Billy quickly mobilized his troops behind Representative Jimmy Brett of Dorchester, the husband of his longtime secretary, Patricia Brett.
Brett made it to the runoff, but in the final couldn’t overcome Tom Menino, who as the president of the City Council had become acting mayor after Flynn’s departure. But the fact that Billy had been able to muscle his lightweight candidate into the final meant that he wasn’t quite dead yet.
Many younger Democratic politicians were growing concerned that with the governorship gone, and the two U.S. senators less than attentive to state politics, the face of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts had become William M. Bulger.
Any Democrat who ran for governor from now on could— and would—be portrayed as a tool, not just of Bulger, but of “the Bulgers,” which was to say, organized crime. The Democrats would remain in control of the legislature, but the Corner Office seemed out of reach until someone could rid them of that diminutive ward-heeler, Billy Bulger. For the good of them all, someone would have to wrest the Senate presidency away from him.
That thankless task would eventually fall to Senator Bill Keating of Sharon. Keating was not someone anyone would have picked as a future rival of the Senate president. But it was 1993, and the natives were restless. Billy understood that any legislative leader who wishes to survive must preserve at least an illusion of upward mobility for his members. If the rank-and-file legislator sees no future for himself in the status quo, he is more likely to willingly participate in any uprising against the leadership.
Everyone in the Senate now knew that Billy had nowhere to go, and that until he found himself a parachute, preferably of the golden variety, he wasn’t leaving. To survive, Billy would have to start easing out his more ambitious members, among them Bill Keating. Billy had passed him over for the chair-manship of Ways and Means, pickin
g instead Tom Birmingham, Billy’s obvious heir apparent. Soon after Birmingham got Ways and Means, a court officer approached Keating and told him “the president” wished to see him in his office. Keating dutifully appeared.
“How’d you like to be a judge?” Billy asked him.
“I’m too young to be a judge,” Keating said.
“I don’t think so.”
After turning down the judgeship, Keating knew he was finished in Billy’s Senate, which gave him a new freedom. One day in the spring of 1993, in the Senate chamber in front of the podium, he goaded Billy. He began talking about his old pal from the House, Mayor Ray Flynn, who was about to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the next ambassador to the Vatican. Keating went on, in loud terms, about what a great guy Hizzoner was. Finally Billy handed the gavel to one of his underlings and stalked off the rostrum, steaming. A few minutes later, a court officer told Keating the president wanted to see him.
Keating was ushered into Billy’s office. This time, Morley Safer wouldn’t have recognized “the little Irishman from South Boston.” Billy was pacing the floor of his exquisitely carpeted office. Finally he looked up at Keating.
“That Flynn is not a good person, you know.”
“I know Ray a long time,” Keating said, using the present tense, relishing the chance to give Billy the needle. “I know him since before I was even a state rep. You know where I first met him?”
Billy inhaled and looked at Keating truculently. He had no interest in how or where Keating and Flynn met, and Keating knew it.
“I met him at this bar in Savin Hill,” he said. “Maybe you heard of it—the Bulldog Tavern.”
Of course Billy had heard of the Bulldog Tavern. It was in his district.
“Yeah,” Keating continued, “I’m in the Bulldog, and so’s Ray, and this guy I know, he introduces us. You know who that guy was?”
Billy must have known by now where this story was going, but it still seemed inconceivable that someone would dare trifle with him like this.