Mayor Flynn was now promising to integrate the projects on a first-come-first-served basis. To us it felt just like busing: because of past injustices by public officials, BHA applicants would now have no say in where they would live, unless they chose to move into a neighborhood where the majority of residents were of a race other than their own. In that case, they could move to the top of a waiting list of ten thousand families. And how could the new immigrants, who’d never heard of Southie and who desperately needed housing, pass that up?
The battle lines were drawn. Here we go again, I thought. Ma said, “That’s it! I’m getting the fuck out. The blacks can have this place.” Then she wondered out loud why we were always fighting for the same piece-of-shit schools and cockroach-infested apartments. “Why don’t they go after Newton with its beautiful lawns?” she screamed. “I’ll join the NAACP, then we’ll all get a piece of the pie.”
I laughed, imagining Newton seeing the likes of us tinkers coming through carrying everything we own in trash bags, and Ma with the accordion. But beyond that image, I was beginning to find out just how different Southie really was from suburbs like Newton. At school I’d learned that social scientists over the years had dubbed South Boston a “death zone,” along with Roxbury, our black counterpart for the failed busing experiment. I had never heard that one before, but I was glad to find out that I wasn’t imagining what I’d seen in the streets. Families had been too ashamed to say their kids were dying of anything other than car accidents or freak heart attacks, but the truth was that we had some of the city’s highest death rates for suicide, drugs, and alcohol, and through the early eighties had the city’s fastest-growing homicide rate. I was relieved reading the statistics. I’d thought I might be going crazy whenever Southie people were appalled by my own death zone stories.
Police escorts surrounded the moving trucks that came through the project at one in the morning, sneaking the black families into the best place in the world while everyone slept. But the crowds were waiting; it was the end of summer and the neighborhood was always lively until early morning on hot summer nights. And everyone was ripping mad that the black families were being given free rent to be part of what some were calling another experiment on Southie. For some, this was sure to be the most excitement since busing. Something to come together around, another battle to fight, and to lose. Old Colony Task Force leaders and the politicians tried to organize rallies, bringing back the same old chants: “Here We Go Southie, Here We Go.” But the chants didn’t sound as strong. There’d been drugs in the neighborhood back before the busing, but not nearly as much as we’d seen since then, with so many kids dropping out of school. The neighborhood was more fragmented now. We didn’t have the fight in us that we had back in 1974. Ma wasn’t the only one who wanted to get the hell out; others were feeling the same way now that the blacks were coming. But most people had nowhere to go.
The first black families had twenty-four-hour police protection at their doors. But much of the time the cops ended up sleeping in their cruisers because there wasn’t any action. Ma said the city councilor was going around with his boys, changing the BHA’s locks on vacant apartments and moving in homeless white families as squatters. Some people were starting to complain about the newcomer white families too, saying they were “white trash.”
Before long busing revival rallies took place in church basements, where residents talked about minorities hanging sheets out the windows to dry, and playing loud music all hours of the night. “For Chrissake, I don’t know what country I’m in half the time, between the Haitians hanging their sheets, and the Spanish dancing on top of my head upstairs,” a scared older woman shouted from the back row. But we’d always hung sheets out windows, and played loud music. Our leaders played on the fears of elderly folks, stirring up anxieties about things Southie had seen for years before bringing out the big gun in their arsenal of threats: minorities would bring drugs and crime into South Boston.
When the minorities did move in, the little kids in the neighborhood played together fine. Most of the trouble came between teenagers, and in Old Colony we had the most teenagers of all the projects. There had always been fights in Old Colony, long before the first black family arrived. That’s life in the projects. But now if a fight broke out between two neighbors with racial differences, the battle lines were drawn, names were called, and the fight was labeled a hate crime.
The Asian families mostly went unnoticed. “Thank God!” I heard one neighbor say when she saw two Asians jumping out of the moving truck backing toward our front stoop. Then she saw about twenty more climbing out of the truck. “For fuck’s sake, how will they all fit in that tiny apartment?” Everyone said “the Orientals” were quiet people, though. No one seemed to mind them, despite the occasional dark discussions about people’s missing cats and dogs.
No one expected the blacks and Hispanics to last long. These families often demanded transfers back to their neighborhoods once they found out Southie wasn’t the clean-cut middle-class neighborhood our politicians had always publicized in the press. “Shit! Those little white motherfuckers are worse than the niggers in Orchard Park!” I heard one black woman on the train telling her friend who was being sent by the BHA to Southie. “I caught this one motherfucker trying to steal my air conditioner right out of my window. I pulled out the biggest blade I had in my kitchen and ran right outside to put it up against his dick. He put it back, but I said, ‘fuck this, I’m outta here.’ ” She went on and on while her friend listened to every word, shaking her head.
There was no way we would’ve believed integration could work in Southie. Even Nellie, who’d lived with a black man and had a daughter by him, feared Southie opinion. She used to sneak our cousin Lisa in and out of Old Colony in blankets once she realized she wouldn’t be able to pass her off as “half Italian.” But before long, Ma was inviting our Puerto Rican neighbors into the house to teach them Irish step dancing and to play a few tunes on the accordion. The mothers didn’t understand English, so Ma started talking to them louder and stretching the words out. “Aaaaccoooordiiiian,” Ma yelled, bringing out the instrument to show what she was talking about. “Muuuusiic.” The women looked at Ma with worried faces, either because they didn’t understand her or because they thought she was nutty. Then Ma brought out Maria, still sleepy from her nap, and pointed at her, yelling, “Cuuubaaaa!” thinking they might bond over Ma’s little girl being Hispanic. But when Ma got the idea that a free haircut might break the ice, and brought out her pair of sharp scissors, they leaned back against the wall looking terrified.
There were also more promising signs that we all might get along. Sometimes black, white, and Hispanic mothers sat on the stoop together, watching out for each other’s kids in wading pools on hot summer days. Stevie was excited and proud when he brought home the Alice Casey Award from the Perkins School, an award established after busing to reward kids like Stevie who got along with all races, and the only attempt by liberal leaders that I’d heard of to promote peace since busing.
But any peace that did exist started to crumble when the police dispatched its squads of the Community Disorders Unit. People started talking about the CDU, the cops who dealt with hate crimes, like it was the TPF all over again. All the talk around Old Colony was about how the CDU was targeting Old Colony white kids whenever a fight turned racial. Thirteen-year-olds were being lined up against the walls, frisked, arrested, and given juvenile records for racial assaults they sometimes were involved in, and sometimes weren’t. To fit the description “a white youth with a Fightin’ Irish baseball cap” was a liability. The resentments built up, the tensions flared, teenagers were criminalized, families were sometimes evicted. And before long no one even wanted to look at, never mind speak to, a neighbor of a different race, for fear of being accused of harassment.
Even Ma stopped her famous hospitality. “Where were my civil rights when my kids’ lives were at stake when we first moved in?” she said. Then she la
ughed, “Jesus, to think, if Chickie had been black I’d probably have been in federal court.”
“A trailer park? The Rockies?” I couldn’t believe Ma was packing her trash bags to flee Old Colony and move to a trailer park in the mountains of Colorado. “I’m heading for the hills,” she laughed. “You can keep the apartment. I had to lie about my welfare benefits being even less than they are and had the rent brought down to $150 a month. I’ll send you some food stamps. Johnnie’s getting out of the Seals and he’ll be staying with you for awhile.” Ma said she wanted me to hold on to the apartment in case things didn’t work out in the mountains. Seamus was thirteen, Stevie was twelve, and friends their age were being arrested for calling people “niggers” when they got in fights. And Ma was sick of going to wakes. One month in 1989 she was at the confirmation mass for Michael Dizzo, the ice cream man’s nephew, and the next month she was seeing him off at Jackie O’Brien’s after he and his uncle were shot to death. That was it for Ma. “This fuckin’ place is like Sodom and Gomorrah, and if I ever look back may God turn me into a pillar of salt, like that guy’s wife in the Bible.” Ma had been watching Pat Robertson on the TV and was starting to talk more and more about the end of the world and Armageddon. “There’s gonna be a great chastisement, and haven’t I had enough chastisement for one lifetime? It’ll be safe in the mountains. Lot, that’s his name, the guy in the Bible.” Ma was half joking and half serious with all her apocalyptic talk.
She didn’t tell the little kids they were moving away for good. She thought it would break their hearts to leave what they thought was the best, and the only, place in the world. She told them they were going on a trip and that she’d be joining them. Ma sent the kids along with Kathy, talking to herself, on a plane to Colorado. When Joe sent money for her airfare, Ma left for Colorado too. She snuck out the back door that day so she wouldn’t have to answer all the questions from the ladies on the stoop. She said goodbye to Mrs. Duggan, who she’d always respected, and walked out of Old Colony Project. With Maria in one arm, her accordion over the other shoulder, and two trash bags full of pots, pans, clothes, and religious pictures that had hung on our walls since the day we first moved in, she carted away all that was salvageable from 8 Patterson Way.
She flagged down a cab and made the driver stop off at the wall on Broadway to say goodbye to the homeless guys before taking her to the airport. All Ma had left to give from her trip to Fatima was the scapula around her own neck. She took it off and put it around the neck of one of the guys. Then she went back to the cab and pulled out her crumpled picture of the Divine Mercy and gave it to another man who looked like he wanted something too. Ma held his hand and told him that the picture of the risen Christ had got her through every single morning since the kids died. Ma told them all she’d never see them again, and they all waved goodbye to her cab, calling her “Mother Helen.” The cab drove Ma away from Southie and on to the airport.
Early one morning in August 1990, law enforcement agencies woke up some of the town’s top businessmen in the cocaine trade. Fifty-two in all were taken from their homes and charged in a criminal conspiracy in South Boston. Stories abounded that day about shotguns to the face and the surprised look of groggy gangsters waking up to squadrons of armed agents in their bedrooms and relatives being taken away by “the bad guys.” The televised news reports showed many of my handcuffed neighbors filing into police trucks with T-shirts pulled over their heads, many wearing flip flops and gym shorts on the hazy August morning. “There’s Pole Cat Moore! They got Tommy Cronin, and Eddie McGlaughlin! Andre! Little Red Shea!” I was telling Ma on the phone from Colorado everything I was seeing on TV. We both felt bad about the arrest of Joey Earner, who was like a MacDonald to us.
I watched the replays of news reports all day. That line of neighbors filing into police trucks was a who’s who of the Southie drug world. Police said their biggest catches were Tommy Cronin, who used to hand out twenties to my little brothers; Red Shea, who they said was making coke runs down to the Colombian connections in Florida; and Paul Moore, who worked for the BHA. They panned shots of 8 Patterson Way, where Paul Moore ran his business. Then there were the little guys, like Joey Earner, who’d been used by the boys since childhood. I kept watching, wondering which one was Whitey Bulger, who I’d still never laid eyes on. But as I later found out, Whitey wasn’t arrested in the roundup at all.
That elusive Whitey Bulger! What a mystery! Always staying out of trouble and keeping his hands clean. Some newspaper articles commented on Whitey’s absence among the suckers who got caught, another chapter in the saga of the gangster genius, an Irish leprechaun playing tricks on the most powerful law enforcement agencies federal, state, and local government could muster. It seemed as if every law enforcement agency in town was at the bust: guys wearing jackets that said DEA, ATF, BPD, and even some state troopers were there to help usher Whitey’s boys into the trucks with caged windows. Every kind of cop under the sun—except for the FBI.
Then the rumors started, reaching into every crevice in South Boston, from City Point down to the buckled concrete of the Lower End. And the whole neighborhood tried to shield itself from the ugly truth. Which one among us wanted to believe that the man who’d epitomized the Southie code, who’d mouthed the familiar words about loyalty that we desperately wanted to be true, would turn out to be the biggest snitch of all. Kevin Cullen at the Globe had been working on stories since 1988 suggesting that Whitey Bulger was one of the FBI’s most prized informants, that he’d helped lock up the Italian mob across town, even as he killed our own families with his drugs and his violence and his Southie code. As much as I’d hated Whitey for what I’d seen happening to my neighborhood, it was nothing compared to the rage I felt when I realized that agents of the U.S. government had turned a blind eye while we were slaughtered.
Most of my neighbors continued to grapple with the revelations about Whitey. One Boston Police detective said anonymously that he believed there was more cocaine in Southie, per capita, than in any other neighborhood in the city. “For years the Bulger organization has told the people of South Boston they were keeping drugs out of their community,” a DEA agent said. “The people of South Boston have been had.” But none of that was news to me, or to all the others who’d seen their families decimated. What was news to me was that the FBI had sponsored the parade of caskets that passed through the streets of Southie.
I’d thought Ma was losing it sometimes with all her talk of conspiracies, and now I thought I might be going crazy. I began to wonder for the first time what my brothers might’ve looked like if they’d been given the chance to grow into manhood. But then the memory of all that blood overwhelmed me, and I simply gave up trying to picture the kids getting older. I got angry, angrier than I’d ever known I could be.
The people of South Boston have been had, I thought. But not simply by a local gangster. He had a little help—from one of the most powerful agencies in American government.
C H A P T E R 10
J U S T I C E
IT WAS JUST ME NOW AT 8 PATTERSON WAY, AMONG THE abandoned wreckage of mattresses, collapsing bureaus, and a generation’s worth of kids’ clothes—whatever Ma hadn’t been able to fit into her bags—piled in a heap on top of Coley’s wooden couch that looked like a coffin. It was spooky coming home now to the ten-room apartment, which had once seemed too small for the excitement coming and going through those heavy steel doors. The doors squeaked whenever I opened them, and I tried to remember when that had started or if I’d just never noticed the sound before.
Every time I came up those stairs on a Friday night after passing by the parties on front stoops, I knew for sure my family would be there, all together again in the apartment. Ma, all dressed up to go to the Emerald Isle, would be bent over the washer doing her last load of laundry, holding the hose in place to keep the machine from rattling like thunder. Seamus and Stevie would be watching “World Wrestling Federation” and practicing Hulk Hogan moves on ea
ch other. Davey would be pacing the floors and smoking cigarettes. Mary and Jimmy and their two kids might be over with Chinese food for everyone. Joe would be waiting for Frankie to finish devouring every last bit of protein in the house, before the two headed out to meet girls. Kevin wouldn’t be there, but there’d at least be a story going around about his latest exploits. Johnnie would be calling in from some undisclosed location with the Navy Seals. And Kathy would be all dolled up and sneaking out the front door, as sure-footed and determined as she once had been. But the door creaked shut, and the screams, sirens, and laughter from the street overwhelmed my memories. I wasn’t home. I knew I never would be again.
I started sleeping at friends’ houses all over Boston, coming back every day just for a change of clothes. I came and went fast, so that I wouldn’t have time to sit and wonder what had happened to the family that had once surrounded me. I kept all the windows shut, and the air in the apartment was so thick and heavy that I felt I was swimming through ghosts. I changed my clothes and fled out the door every day.
Johnnie took the apartment after leaving the Seals. Never did I think I’d see the day he’d have anything to do with the Old Colony Project. He was the one who’d “gotten out.” He’d never spent much time in the project before. He was always at Latin School, playing football in the afternoons, and studying at the library at night. He’d gone right from Latin to Tufts University, and then straight into the Navy to become a lieutenant. The only time Johnnie came home was when he was on leave for a funeral, taking his position as a pallbearer, investigating the details of the kids’ deaths, and leaving dents with his fist in our concrete walls when nothing seemed to make any sense. But now Johnnie was back. He found the cleanest mattress in the rubble of someone’s old bedroom, and made a spot for himself in a corner of the parlor.
All Souls Page 24