by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
On November 17, 1999, Kevin Weeks and Mob money-launderer Kevin O’Neil were both arrested. The next day, Weeks’s mother died. The papers began speculating which of the Kevins would flip first—O’Neil or Weeks. They were shipped out to Central Falls, Rhode Island, away from Flemmi and what was left of the gang down in Plymouth. In cell block H3, Robert DeLuca took pen to paper to commemorate the end of what was left of the Bulger gang with a poem that recalled Catherine’s Greig’s abandoned poodles, Nikki and Gigi. When she went on the lam in 1995, Catherine Greig had left the dogs with her twin sister, Margaret McCusker. But McCusker herself had been indicted earlier in 1999 for perjury after she lied about receiving telephone calls from her twin. After being sentenced to six months of house arrest, McCusker had both poodles put down. But DeLuca nonetheless entitled his poem “Who’s Minding the Puppies?”
Who’s keeping tabs on Broadway,
Now that Weeksie’s landed in court?
Who’s gonna clean the rifles?
Who’s gonna put out the hits?
Who’s gonna pull the trigger
Now that Stevie’s hit the pits?
Who’s shaking down the bookies,
And who’s gonna deal the drugs?
Who’s gonna sell the hot stuff
From TV’s to Persian rugs?
Who’s gonna travel the whole world
Disguised as a couple of yuppies?
And while Whitey’s with the Greig girl,
Who’s taking care of the puppies?
The feds asked Kevin Weeks how old his kids were—sixteen and fourteen. If you go down on these charges, they told him, your oldest son will be your age, forty-three, before you get out. You’ll be seventy. Weeks cut a deal, and his nickname instantly became “Two,” as in Two Weeks, which was about how long he’d held out.
On December 12, 1999, Zip was indicted on racketeering and obstruction-of-justice charges. By then, it was common knowledge that Weeks had flipped, and in mid-January, the State Police began unearthing the first death pit, at Florian Hall in Dorchester.
When he pleaded guilty, Weeks read a statement to the judge about how both of his brothers had gone to Harvard, while he had never gotten beyond South Boston High. Yet, Weeks said, his late father, an ex-boxer, had been prouder of him than either of his Harvard-educated brothers, one of whom had been elected a selectman in a suburban town, while the other had become a trusted aide to Governor Michael Dukakis.
Kevin Weeks said his father had always bragged about him, not his brothers, Bill and Jack. The thing his father was proudest of, Kevin Weeks said, was the fact that his youngest son worked for Whitey Bulger. In his father’s eyes, Kevin Weeks said, that made him a big man in Southie.
Despite everything, Billy was able to land one prestigious event for the University of Massachusetts.
Presidential debates are always haggled over and arranged at the highest levels, and Billy knew that in this election year, he had both sides covered. On the Democratic side, there was Ted Kennedy, his old foe, now a friend. Soon Billy would be negotiating with the senior senator to turn his papers over to UMass. And UMass Boston was next door to the JFK Library in Dorchester. Any debate in Boston, especially the first one, would entail a week of media genuflection at the memorial to Teddy’s slain older brother.
On the other side, the Bush family still felt warmly about Billy, and his surreptitious tips during the 1988 presidential campaign against Dukakis. And so the first debate of the 2000 campaign took place at UMass Boston, and Billy enjoyed a brief moment in the national spotlight as he welcomed everyone both to his city and his school.
Unbeknownst to Billy, however, Kevin Weeks had just told his law enforcement handlers about another of the death pits, and as George W. Bush and Al Gore flew to Boston to debate the great issues of the day, just south of the campus on Columbia Point, within easy view of the candidates and the national press corps, the State Police were exhuming the remains of Catherine Greig’s late brother-in-law, Paulie McGonagle, whom Whitey had murdered a quarter-century earlier, with help from Tommy King, whose murder Whitey had ordered a year or so later, after which he was buried next to McGonagle.
In early 2001, Billy was subpoenaed to testify before the Boston grand jury. Once Weeks flipped, it had been only a matter of time. It was Weeks who in January 1995 had arranged Whitey’s phone call to Billy at the Quincy home of his longtime employee (and driver), Eddie Phillips, whose son was now on Billy’s UMass payroll.
Billy admitted taking the call, but acknowledged little else. “I don’t feel an obligation to help everyone catch him,” he said. “I do have an honest loyalty to my brother, and I care about him, and I know that’s not welcome news, but it’s my hope that I’m never helpful to anyone against him.”
Did he urge Whitey to surrender?
“I doubt that I did because I don’t think it would be in his best interest to do so.”
It would have been devastating to Billy’s career if his testimony had been made public and the taxpayers had learned that the highest paid employee of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not to mention an officer of the court, felt no compunction to assist the authorities in capturing a serial killer and cocaine dealer. But Billy made his admissions in the secret proceedings of the grand jury, and they did not leak, at least immediately.
In Tulsa, the investigation into the 1981 murder of World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler remained open, even after Johnny Martorano pleaded guilty to being the hitman. The lead detective remained Mike Huff, who would occasionally fly in to Boston to pursue his latest leads.
Once, shortly before Zip’s indictment, he had dropped in on the crooked ex-agent in his Boston Edison office in the Prudential Center. Zip spent much of his time toiling on his screenplay about the 1989 bugging of the Mafia initiation in Medford. The working title: “Only the Ghost Knows.” Zip’s secretary typed and retyped draft after draft, as she later resentfully explained at his racketeering trial.
Zip ushered Huff into his plush inner office. Huff sat down and immediately hit Zip with the $64 question.
“What do you know about Bulger and Flemmi?”
Zip ignored the question. “Do you know HBO is going to make a movie about me?”
“I know they set it up,” Huff continued. “But nobody here will help me.”
“Do you understand what I did?” Zip said. “I mean, do you really understand? I took down LCN. I took down twenty-eight guys, man, I’m proud of what I did. You guys, you just don’t know what it’s like. That’s why I have to write the screenplay. I’m the only one who can do it.”
Finally, in 2002, Huff had had enough of the runarounds. He put out a wanted poster of Whitey, describing him as a man with “extreme bad breath” who “may be found in homosexual communities/resorts or nudist facilities.”
With the case heating up again, America’s Most Wanted ran three segments on Whitey in 2002—on January 29, March 11, and September 23. That made seven in all, so far.
Next it was Congress’s turn to make a run at the Bulgers. Congressman Dan Burton was the chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, and what in the federal government could possibly need more reforming than the Boston FBI office?
The committee members had been following the developments in Boston as far back as 1997, when Governor Weld pardoned Joe “the Horse” Salvati, one of the four innocent men convicted in 1968 of the murder of Teddy Deegan on the perjury of FBI informant Joe Barboza.
As the FBI began releasing documents from the files of Stevie Flemmi, it became clear that the FBI had known the identities of the real killers hours after Deegan’s murder in 1965, and had in fact known before his slaying that he was about to be killed.
Burton subpoenaed still more FBI documents, but the Justice Department balked. When Burton threatened to cite Justice Department officials for contempt of Congress, the administration quickly folded, and turned over yet more previously classified reports. In May 2001, in Washington, Congressman
Burton’s committee held its first hearings into the thirty-year pattern of FBI corruption in Boston. Joe the Horse was a particularly compelling witness, as was his wife, Marie. Soon they would be featured on
60 Minutes, like Billy Bulger before them.
Nothing in the Deegan case directly involved Whitey, but any even moderately thorough investigation of the Boston FBI office could only lead directly to him.
Perhaps the most damning testimony in that first hearing came from former agent H. Paul Rico. Surly, monosyllabic, claiming memory loss, the seventy-six-year-old Rico practically snarled his way through a brief appearance. Asked about Salvati’s thirty years in prison for a crime Rico had known he didn’t commit, the old fed shrugged.
“What do you want from me?” Rico asked Burton. “Tears?”
The Bulgers’ old neighbor, Congressman Joe Moakley, died on Memorial Day 2001. During one emotional interview, Billy recalled how an ailing Moakley had made a point of sitting with him in a public place during some of the worst of the revelations about Whitey, as a way of showing his continued support for the Bulgers.
Another linchpin had been knocked out from under Billy’s base of support.
Had Moakley lived, the congressional hearings might not have gone quite so badly for Billy. Moakley was well liked on both sides of the aisle, and although he couldn’t have halted the hearings, he might have at least been able to … guide the membership with some relatively gentle questioning of his old pal.
But now that was impossible. In a special 2001 election, five state senators—four Democrats, one Republican—squared off to succeed Moakley. The winner was Steve Lynch, of South Boston.
Zip Connolly had expected to be represented at trial by R. Robert Popeo, who had successfully defended a number of local politicians, including Billy Bulger. But Popeo didn’t like losing, especially when he wasn’t being paid much. Zip’s dwindling band of cronies had organized a Friends of John Connolly group to raise money for his defense, but the dollars dried up as one death pit after another was excavated. Popeo handed off the case to one of his lesser partners.
In the courtroom, a parade of witnesses exposed Zip not only as a scheming gangster, but also as an utterly inept crook. For instance, when calling Steve Flemmi’s lawyer, Ken Fishman, to strategize on Flemmi’s defense, Zip would use a pay phone near his house on the Cape. But after taking the precaution of leaving his own home in order to avoid having his calls traced, he would then charge the calls to his Boston Edison credit card, thereby creating the paper trail that he was using the pay phone to avoid. The prosecutors even produced a former FBI staff assistant who testified that once, when she’d opened the top drawer of Zip’s desk, she had seen “at least ten” uncashed pay checks. When Whitey was taking care of you, who needed a paltry government paycheck?
Kevin Weeks and John Martorano also testified against him. Weeks’s most memorable moment came when he quoted Whitey’s words as he’d counted out cash for his annual holiday payoffs to the local constabulary: “Christmas is for cops and kids.”
Martorano’s testimony at the Connolly trial devastated Billy. Martorano recalled Whitey telling him how Billy had instructed Zip to take care of Whitey. Now Chairman Burton had a reason to call Billy as a witness.
After Martorano testified about the two-carat diamond ring that Zip had taken from Whitey in 1976, Connolly’s ex-wife was called to confirm that she had indeed received a two-carat diamond ring as a gift from Zip that year. Liz, Zip’s second wife, twenty years his junior, watched in stony silence as the ex-wife testified, and the media duly noted that if Zip hadn’t dumped her for Liz, she would have been precluded from testifying against him.
Also offered as evidence was an FBI training video from 1983, in which the future defendant intoned, “It’s my belief that you should never pay informants.”
He did not say whether he thought informants should pay FBI agents. And in what might have been his epitaph, Zip solemnly lectured the young agents-in-training: “Never try to out-gangster a gangster.”
As the trial wound down, the papers speculated that perhaps Zip’s low friends in high places had managed to slip a ringer onto the jury, “a Hibernian highwayman,” as one columnist put it. If Zip could get a mistrial, the theory went, despite the overwhelming evidence against him, perhaps he could finagle a plea bargain, which he had angrily rejected before the trial began.
But it was not to be. Zip was found guilty on several serious charges, including obstruction of justice and racketeering, although he was not convicted of setting up any of the three FBI informants that Whitey murdered. Zip was sentenced to ten years in prison. If he is not convicted of any other crimes, he will be eligible for parole on June 15, 2011.
As 2002 began, despite the controversy that now enveloped him, Billy still felt he could hang on a few more years. Even if the next governor was a foe, it would take him years to gain a majority on the UMass board, and if the next governor was a friend, Billy would be able to survive indefinitely.
But Billy’s luck finally failed him. Jane Swift had succeeded Paul Cellucci as governor a year earlier, when President Bush appointed his longtime supporter ambassador to Canada.
But Swift had been buffeted by a series of minor scandals, and it was obvious she could not be reelected. Enter Mitt Romney, a wealthy Republican businessman from Belmont, a graduate of both Harvard Law and Harvard Business Schools. In March 2002, a poll showed Romney leading Jane Swift among Republican voters by a margin of 72–11, and three days later Swift dropped out of the race for reelection.
Billy was backing state Treasurer Shannon O’Brien, a former state senator and the daughter of a governor’s councilor who had served with Sonny McDonough. Shannon had an impeccable hack pedigree, but she ran a surprisingly inept campaign. She sealed her fate in the final debate against Romney when she tried to make a joke about, of all things, parental consent for teenage abortions. Wearing an all-black outfit that accentuated her weight problem, Shannon suddenly flashed a weird grin at debate moderator Tim Russert and said, leeringly, “Want to see my tattoo, Tim?”
Mitt Romney won convincingly, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Billy.
Billy went to work on the new governor-elect immediately. He had co-opted the last four governors, so he had no reason to believe that Romney couldn’t be brought around with a little blarney and bluster. But just in case he couldn’t work his magic one more time, Billy wanted to make sure his pals were taken care of. Lame duck Governor Swift found a Superior Court judgeship for Stevie Flemmi’s lawyer, Ken Fishman. Billy’s $175,000-a-year top aide, Jim Julian, had a younger brother named John who worked as an assistant district attorney in Boston. Swift appointed John Julian to an open district court judgeship on Nantucket.
But even as judgeships for his loyal retainers were being arranged, the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform was painting a target on Billy’s chest. Chairman Burton would be holding his next series of hearings in Boston, and a couple of weeks after Romney’s election, the committee issued a subpoena for Billy. Billy had researched the situation, and he knew that under the new rules of the House, Burton was term-limited as a chairman. Come January, he would be replaced as chairman by Tom Davis of Virginia, an Amherst College graduate who Billy was certain would be amenable to working something out privately.
So Billy decided to duck the appearance. He made no such pronouncements himself, of course, but his minions put out the word. Burton was nothing more than a “habitual headline fiend,” as one of Billy’s lickspittles in the press put it. But then someone asked Governor-elect Romney what he thought of the impending Bulger no-show.
“I believe,” he said, “that President Bulger has a responsibility, as all citizens do, to respect Congress by responding to their subpoena.”
That changed everything. Billy couldn’t afford to alienate the man who would be appointing the trustees to the UMass board for at least the next four years.
Then Billy suffere
d a staggering setback, when transcripts of his 2001 testimony before the grand jury suddenly appeared on the front page of the Globe. All the devastating quotes about not wanting Whitey captured were suddenly on the public record.
On Friday, December 5, Billy appeared at the old McCormack Courthouse in Post Office Square. The press, including some of his most severe critics, sat in the jury box, just a few feet away. With C-SPAN broadcasting the hearing live, Burton began by reading a quotation from Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Billy stared straight ahead. He was usually the one who quoted Edmund Burke to great effect. Present that morning were two Republicans, Burton and Chris Shays, from Connecticut, and three Democrats, all from Massachusetts—John Tierney, Marty Meehan, and Bill Delahunt, the former district attorney of Norfolk County, whom Whitey had long ago disparaged in Zip’s FBI reports. Neither Meehan nor Delahunt were members of the committee, but would be allowed to ask questions. The other Massachusetts congressman who served on the committee, Steve Lynch of South Boston, the Bulgers’ recent nemesis, was running late.
Burton, a graduate of the Cincinnati Bible Seminary, looked down at Billy and asked him if he had anything to say for himself before the committee began questioning him.
“I believe,” Billy said haltingly, “my attorney if it, if it, uh, if it, uh, is acceptable would like to make a statement.”
Burton smiled wanly. “You may confer with your attorney, but we want to hear from you, so could you pull the mike close to you, sir?”
Then Billy read from some notes, citing Rule 11k(5), which allowed the committee to proceed in closed session if the hearing “may tend to defame or ridicule the witness.”
In other words, Billy wanted the press expelled, so that he could take the Fifth behind closed doors. Burton smiled again. The hearing was not going to be closed. Burton ran his committee hearings much the same way Billy had run his state Senate deliberations—everything had been hashed out beforehand, behind closed doors. When the congressmen appeared in public, at least at these sorts of regional hearings, everyone was on the same page. The vote by the committee members not to close the hearing was 4–0, with the tardy Steve Lynch arriving just in time to join the two Republicans and John Tierney to make it unanimous.