by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
Burton immediately asked Billy if he knew where James Bulger was.
“On advice of counsel,” Billy said, “I am unable to answer any questions today. This position is based among other things on privacy and due-process rights and the right against being compelled to provide evidence that may tend to incriminate oneself, all of which are found in the Bill of Rights.”
Burton adjourned the hearing, and Billy rushed for the courtroom door, several of his sons behind him blocking the reporters tumbling out of the jury box in pursuit. Accompanied by a flying wedge of beefy state court officers, Billy scurried down the back stairs of the courthouse toward a double-parked sedan out on Devonshire Street, like so many just indicted State House pols before him.
In the hallway outside the courtroom, Billy’s attorney told UMass students watching on television that their president’s refusal to testify in a congressional probe of organized crime was merely “a lesson in civics… [that] this constitutional protection exists to protect the innocent.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the hall, Burton addressed his comments directly to the oldest Bulger brother.
“If Whitey [is] paying attention today,” he said, “he could have done his brother a real service by turning himself in. I’m sure taking the Fifth Amendment is going to cause Mr. Bulger a great deal of concern.”
Billy had always been lucky. With a couple of exceptions like 75 State Street, everything had always broken right for him. Now nothing did. Every few weeks, it seemed, new lawsuits were filed by survivors of one or another of the victims of Whitey and Stevie. The families of John McIntyre, Deb Davis, Brian Halloran, and both Wimpy and Walter Bennett all filed civil suits against the U.S. government, claiming that the FBI’s protection of Whitey and/or Stevie had resulted in the murders of their loved ones. In almost every news story, Billy Bulger’s name would be mentioned along with his brother’s. But Billy had gotten used to that.
Then, in February, Will McDonough, Billy’s childhood friend and 1960 campaign manager, died suddenly while watching ESPN SportsCenter. For Billy, McDonough’s death was a crushing blow. Will was a contemporary, and, like Joe Moakley, he had always stood by the Bulgers, in good times and bad. At the funeral Mass at St. Augustine’s, Billy collapsed and had to be wheeled out on a stretcher. Moments after the videotape appeared on TV, cynical talk radio callers began suggesting that “the Corrupt Midget” was setting himself up for a 72 percent tax-free disability pension—“white man’s welfare,” as Billy’s constituents always called it.
Billy and Mary flew to Florida. Ostensibly Billy was “fund-raising” for UMass, but it appears that after forty years of taxpayer-funded junkets, he was enjoying one last “trade mission.” He spent days holed up in the finest hotel in Palm Beach, The Breakers, where sixty years earlier James Michael Curley and Joseph P. Kennedy had been turned away as undesirables. Times, and standards, had obviously changed.
Back in Boston, Romney was laying waste to whatever little reputation Billy had created for himself as a university administrator. The UMass payrolls were leaked to the Herald, and soon they were posted on the Internet, available for perusal by faculty members who had gone years without a pay raise. The UMass payrolls had been larded almost beyond belief. There was layer upon layer of bureaucracy—entire new levels of Bulgerite hack-ocracy had been created in less than seven years. Everyone in both academia and politics, it appeared, had been allowed to hire or promote whomever they wanted. The husband of the state rep from Amherst, a history professor, was being paid $128,000 a year. An obscure former state rep was making $125,000 as an “associate chancellor.” There were new provosts, chancellors, and deans by the dozen, all making more than $100,000.
In February 2003 came word of the first confirmed Whitey sighting in six years. On September 10, 2002, a British man walking in Piccadilly Square had spotted an American gentleman he’d made the acquaintance of back in 1994, when the American was staying at a local hotel and working out daily at a neighborhood health club.
The British man recognized his old friend, who was tanned and now sporting a goatee, and asked him how he’d been. The American, shocked at being recognized, told the Brit he had the wrong man, and then set off quickly in the opposite direction. The Brit thought no more of it until a few months later, when he was watching the movie Hannibal. When he noticed a brief shot of Whitey as the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List appeared on the screen, the Brit decided to tell Scotland Yard of their brief meeting.
Weeks later, the FBI discovered a safe-deposit box registered to James Bulger at a Barclays branch bank in Mayfair. Inside the safe-deposit box, police found more than $50,000 in various currencies and a key to another safe-deposit box, in Dublin. Then word leaked that Theresa Stanley had told the FBI about the Barclays box in 1996.
“I find that interesting,” Congressman Burton commented on this latest example of FBI ineptitude. “There was either some sloppy work done or they didn’t want to do it.”
America’s Most Wanted put Whitey back in the spotlight, running segments on him February 22 and again on May 3.
Whitey’s photo appeared in the British media, and soon there was another sighting, this time in a military memorabilia shop in Manchester, where he was reported to have been buying Nazi memorabilia. It turned out not to be Whitey, but that news wasn’t announced to the media until months later.
Unable to keep his brother’s name out of the headlines, Billy continued trying to negotiate a deal with Davis, who had succeeded Burton as chairman of the Government Reform Committee. But under heavy pressure from both Republicans and Democrats on his committee, Davis was forced to schedule a public hearing in Washington on June 19.
Meanwhile, on April 10, Jackie Bulger pleaded guilty in federal court to two counts of perjury. He admitted lying in 1996 when asked about whether he’d ever visited yet another of Whitey’s safe-deposit boxes, this one in Clearwater, Florida. He also admitted lying in 1998 about his attempts to provide Whitey with new ID photos. Just before his indictment, Jackie had resigned from his beloved clerkship in an attempt to preserve his $3,778-a-month pension.
The only break Jackie caught was that the federal judge in his case, George O’Toole, was married to a woman who had contributed hundreds of dollars over the years to Jimmy Brett, the state rep who was married to Billy’s personal secretary. The feds asked for a fourteen-month sentence; O’Toole handed Jackie a four-month wrist slap. Asked by a reporter whether he should have recused himself from the case, given his family ties to the Bulgers, Judge O’Toole said he’d considered bowing out, then decided not to.
In January 2003, Stevie Flemmi’s brother Michael, now a retired Boston cop, also pleaded guilty to selling a load of his brother Stevie’s stolen jewelry for $40,000. The major witness against him was his nephew, William St. Croix, formerly known as William Hussey, Stevie’s bastard son by Marion Hussey. St. Croix had turned against his father after learning that Stevie and Whitey had strangled his half-sister, Deborah Hussey.
Franny Joyce, handpicked executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, was forced out with a golden parachute that included $72,000 for thirty-eight weeks of unused vacation, an $80,000 bonus, and a retroactive $24,000 pay raise, to $150,000, which also raised his annual pension to $75,000.
Bernard Cardinal Law was the next friend of Billy’s to go, after more than a year of newspaper accounts of pedophile priests running amok in his archdiocese. Law was “reassigned,” first to Maryland, then to Rome.
Billy had lost yet another person with whom he could commiserate over the decline of morality in American society. Fortunately for Billy, John Silber, nearing eighty, still endured at Boston University. He urged Billy to hang in as president of UMass, that it was his “destiny” to lead.
Negotiating with the Congressional committee, the most Billy’s lawyer could arrange was a grant of immunity from prosecution for his sworn public testimony. That meant that Billy could not be prosecuted for anythi
ng he admitted to under oath. But if he lied, he could be charged with perjury. The stakes were high as Billy reached Washington on June 19, 2003, to testify about an organized crime faction that had for all practical purposes ceased to exist.
Billy’s position, he knew, was untenable. He had been summoned to Washington to be pummeled, humiliated. And if he lied, he would be indicted for perjury, like his brother Jackie.
He had prepared to some degree. His attorney provided a number of produced affidavits for the committee and the press. Harold Brown said no one, i.e. Whitey, had threatened him in the 75 State Street scandal. Mike Barnicle, the disgraced former journalist and longtime apologist for the Bulgers, said Billy had never told him that Whitey taped his conversations with FBI agents. An executive from Boston Edison, now known as NSTAR, wrote that Billy had never intervened to get Zip Connolly a job. And on it went.
The congressmen, though, seemed more interested in that morning’s front-page story in the Herald, headlined “Club Whitey,” in which it was reported that two perpetually destitute South Boston hangers-on had somehow scraped up the cash to purchase a ramshackle inn in the Caribbean. One of the buyers admitted knowing Whitey, whom he called Seamus, which is Gaelic for James. His name was Concannon, and his brother worked in the probation office, with Billy’s son Chris. The other buyer was a Boston police officer who had recently returned to active duty after twenty-nine years on disability.
Workers at the club said that soon after the place was purchased by the Southie men, a strange-acting priest took up residence.
“He was wearing a collar, but he didn’t act like a priest,” the bartender said of the strange, Whitey Bulger–like cleric. “He had a foul mouth and a bad temper.”
Billy’s lack of memory did not play well with either the congressmen or the public. The Massachusetts congressmen stuck mainly with specific lines of questioning—Lynch, for instance, questioned Billy at length about which FBI agents he had known, and took pains to point out the well-paying jobs they had landed upon their retirement.
Chairman Burton, meanwhile, worked the broader themes, as in this exchange.
Burton: “There are people who say Whitey came up to them and said, ‘Do you know who I am and if you don’t leave my brother alone you’ll regret it.’ You don’t know anything about that?”
Billy, after a pause: “I don’t know much about it, no.” Burton: “Do you know who the people were who were threatened?”
Billy: “No.”
Burton: “You had no connection or relation—”
Billy: “I can assure you, I would never never authorize or ask for such a madcap kind of conduct on his part or anyone’s part.”
At other times, Burton did inquire about specific incidents, such as a rider anonymously attached to the 1982 state budget that would have forced the retirement of several high-ranking members of the State Police, one of whom was Lieutenant Colonel Jack O’Donovan, Whitey’s sworn enemy who had blamed the FBI for the blown Lancaster Street garage bugging operation. After word of the budgetary attack on O’Donovan got out, Governor King had immediately vetoed the outside section. At one point during the hearing, Billy suggested that perhaps a State Police union had managed to insert the rider. Later that year, congressional investigators would be dispatched to Massachusetts to pore over the ancient budgetary records and to interview the legislative leaders of the time. But no fingerprints—of anyone—were ever found.
Still, Burton questioned Billy relentlessly about the surreptitious attempt by someone to sack a cop who was hot on the trail of Whitey Bulger.
Burton: “You had nothing to do with it and you don’t remember?”
Billy: “Well, the premise is not true that such people were penalized.”
Burton: “Well, what did the amendment do?”
Billy: “I’m uncertain of that.”
Burton: “To say it wasn’t penalizing you must know what it did.”
Billy: “But it never became law, Congressman.”
Burton: “If you don’t remember it, how do you recall it didn’t take effect?”
Billy: “Because subsequent to that, it’s been written about.”
Burton: “Oh, I see. You picked it up from the newspaper.”
At the end of his disastrous day in the District, only one or two new-breed Globe sycophants were willing to deny the obvious: that Billy had damaged himself beyond repair. Of course, he still had his handpicked university trustees behind him. After the hearing ended in mid-afternoon, Grace Fey, the chairman of the UMass board, issued a statement saying she had “never been prouder” of Billy.
Both Republican Governor Romney and Democratic Attorney General Tom Reilly, a longtime Bulger ally who had once taken a $100 campaign contribution from Zip Connolly, expressed their disbelief that Billy would try to stonewall a congressional committee. Romney, moreover, decided to do something about it. Fey’s husband had at least one contract with the university, so the Republican State Committee quickly filed a complaint with the State Ethics Commission, charging her with a conflict of interest. Embarrassing headlines appeared in both newspapers, and it would cost her thousands of dollars in legal fees to contest the charges. Billy had deliberately picked trustees who could be controlled, like the state senators he’d once dominated. With his shot across Fey’s bow, Romney had made it clear that he was not averse to trashing the trustees’ reputations or their bank accounts, if they were unwilling to vote to fire Billy.
When, on June 26, the trustees again gave Billy another ringing endorsement, the Romney forces decided to go a different route. They would pack the board with Billy’s “foes.”
Three vacancies were opening up in September. Romney’s operatives began talking up three people: Alan Dershowitz, Judge E. George Daher, and a Herald columnist—the author of this book—who had sat behind Bulger at the hearings. All expressed willingness, indeed eagerness, to join the board.
One Sunday night in late July, Billy and his wife, Mary, dined at Baxter’s in Hyannis, enjoying the same treat they’d shared on their first date, almost a half-century earlier, fried clams. When Billy spotted a former UMass trustee and his wife, he invited them over to his table, and talk quickly turned to the ongoing struggle with Romney.
“I think it’s pretty well blown over,” said Billy. “Don’t you?” “I don’t think so,” said the former trustee. He then named the three men Romney planned to appoint.
“He wouldn’t dare,” Billy said.
Two weeks later, in Lowell, Billy resigned as president of UMass. Ted Kennedy issued a statement saying that he was “saddened” by the news. Bill Clinton, who had phoned Billy at a couple of the later St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts, called from Chappaqua with his condolences. The settlement of the deal the trustees had negotiated with him cost Massachusetts taxpayers more than $960,000.
And Billy got a pension too. He took the survivor’s option, which assured that Mary would continue to receive the kiss in the mail even if Billy predeceased her. After taxes, his monthly check from the commonwealth came to $11,312.29 a month.
But even that wasn’t enough for Billy. In his final hours on the job, he ordered one of his lackeys to send over more documents to the State Retirement Board, claiming that his “housing allowance” and his annuities, which amounted to another $40,000 or so a year, should also be included in calculating his pension, thus adding another $32,000 a year to what was already by far the largest public pension in state history.
The Herald led its next edition with the story—and a photo of a grinning Bulger next to the headline, “Back for More.”
One of the few anti-Bulger trustees on the board told the newspapers, “[He’s] going out the door, grabbing everything but the pictures on the walls. It’s supposed to be public service, not self-service.”
It was a concept the Bulgers never did grasp.
EPILOGUE
IN OCTOBER 2003, STEVIE Flemmi pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Boston to ten counts of murder
. He made the decision as part of a deal to reduce the sentence for his brother Michael, the former Boston cop, who was not scheduled to be released from prison until 2010. In open court, prosecutor Fred Wyshak read aloud Flemmi’s agreed-upon statement, and as Wyshak reached the paragraph about the 1981 murder of Debra Davis, one of her brothers stood up in court and screamed at Stevie, “Fuck you, you fucking piece of shit!”
At a single hearing, the State Retirement Board heard the appeals of both Billy and Jackie Bulger. Billy’s attorney argued that his client’s pension should be increased by another $32,000 a year. Jackie’s lawyer contended that his client’s $44,000-a-year pension should be restored, because although Jackie did commit multiple felonies while a public employee, he’d resigned from his job and applied for a pension before he was indicted.
On separate 5–0 votes, the board turned down both Bulgers. In November, Frank Salemme led police to the Hopkinton Sportsmen’s Club, where he said he and Stevie had buried the bodies of Wimpy and Walter Bennett in 1967. After days of digging, the police abandoned the search, claiming that the topography of the area had been changed by the dumping of millions of tons of dirt from the Big Dig, the $15 billion public works boondoggle in downtown Boston that was now the subject of multiple federal and state corruption investigations.
In December 2003 the city of Somerville began foreclosure proceedings on the old Marshall Street garage out of which the Winter Hill Gang once operated. According to city officials, Howie Winter, now seventy-four and living in Millbury, owed more than $11,000 in back property taxes.
In December 2003, former FBI agent H. Paul Rico answered a knock at his front door in Miami and admitted several police officers to his house. When they told him they were there to arrest him on a murder warrant from Oklahoma, he asked them if they were joking. When he realized they were serious, and that he was going to be taken away to jail, Rico defecated in his trousers.