by Dick Lehr
Bergeron uncovered a man leading two lives. It was apparent that Theresa did not know about Catherine. But besides his women, Bergeron was witness to another Bulger double cross—one against his neighborhood. Bulger had an iron grip on drugs moving through South Boston and beyond. He made dealers pay “rent” on every gram of “Santa Claus,” a Southie code name for cocaine. He extorted a share of everything from nickel bags to kilos, loose joints to burlap-wrapped bales of marijuana. Just across from the liquor mart, certain apartments in the Old Colony project, a project near where Bulger had grown up in Old Harbor, had visitors tapping at the door at all hours of the day and night. Young men, even some mothers, were selling drugs out of the homesteads—angel dust, mescaline, valium, speed, coke, and heroin—and nothing moved without Whitey’s okay. (Paul “Polecat” Moore, one of Bulger’s underlings in the drug business, kept a place in Old Colony.) Bulger might often refer to drugs as “fuckin’ shit,” but his disgust didn’t stop him from making big money off the drug trade, which smoked hotter in the two projects at the rotary than it did in the more middle-class streets of City Point. It got to where “P-dope,” a heroin mixture, cost only four dollars a hit—cheaper than a six-pack.
It would take another decade before the code of silence began to break, when victims’ groups would sprout up and begin pushing back against the Bulger tide, when social workers would hit the streets to take hold of the neighborhood kids and urge them to quit snorting coke and shooting up the heroin, when former addicts would stand up. There was the Southie eighteen-year-old who openly described how he hadn’t seen his dad in eight years, how his mother had died from an overdose, how he’d even tried once to hang himself in the hallway of his project. But after all that, he actually considered himself lucky: he hadn’t shot up in fourteen months. There was a nineteen-year-old named Chris who described his seven years lost to drugs—a spiral that began with booze and pot, then LSD, coke, and heroin. He’d served time but was now determined to go straight. “There’s nothing out there for me if I go back, nothing but a grave with my name on it.” Patrick, a thirty-nine-year-old recovering addict, talked about the slippery slope that teen junkies followed: “When they’re fourteen or fifteen, they start out snorting it. They’ll say, ‘I’d never stick a needle in my arm.’ Then, once they do that, they’ll say, ‘I’ll never use a dirty needle.’ Before long they’ll use a rusty nail to get high.”
The thaw was not only about recovery. Too often there was bad news. Shawn T. “Rooster” Austin, a twenty-four-year-old who’d grown up in Old Colony, was found dead one morning in a rooming house from a suspected drug overdose. The empty bag of heroin and a syringe without a needle were discovered near the corpse. “I can remember him as a little boy on his bike,” said a tenant at Old Colony, adding that she’d seen Rooster just a few weeks earlier. “He was saying that all his friends were dying, that all he was doing was going to wakes. Now, to think....” Patricia Murray, a twenty-nine-year-old Southie woman, was a high school dropout and a hard-core heroin addict when she was picked up on prostitution charges in the late 1980s. “Do you think I like going out on the street?” she said at the time, her thin legs covered in a maze of sores. “Well, I don’t.”
But in the 1990s, for the first time, people were fighting back. Michael McDonald, who also grew up in the Old Colony project and would later write a best-selling memoir about life in Southie, founded the South Boston Vigil Group. Drugs had ripped apart his family, and two brothers died playing with the fire that Whitey stoked. “There’s a lot of pain in this neighborhood that’s been ignored by us,” he once said. “If you look at this community the way you look at an addict, we’re at the stage where the addict admits he has a problem.”
Former addicts like Leo Rull emerged as frontline troopers in Southie’s new war on drugs. Back when he was eighteen in the mid-1980s, he was heavy into angel dust and coke, and a decade later he described himself as “a man on a mission,” trying to save the lives of a new generation of project kids, at times rushing those who’d overdosed in alleyways to emergency rooms and then counseling them afterward. Rull worked for an agency with a federal grant that was trying to break the cycle of poverty and drugs in the poorest sections of Southie and Roxbury, an ironic pairing given their past animosity. During busing one of the Southie chants had been that Roxbury was plagued with troubles not found in the neighborhood whose twenty-nine thousand residents—and especially its pols—saw it as the best and most blessed place to live.
Later in the 1990s the city of Boston was planning to open the state’s first detox and treatment center geared exclusively for adolescent drug users. Inside the former rectory at St. Monica’s Church at the rotary near Whitey Bulger’s liquor mart, Catholic Charities had opened Home for Awhile, a halfway house with a dozen beds for boys aged fourteen to eighteen sent on referrals from the South Boston courthouse or detox centers.
Even if some believed that blacks and busing were the twin forces killing the neighborhood, that wasn’t the whole of it—one of their own was at it too. Southie had suffered in Whitey’s hands. This was the reality that Bergeron knew, that DEA agents knew, that state troopers knew, that drug dealers all around knew. If you wanted to supply Southie, one dealer later told an undercover DEA agent, “you either pay Whitey Bulger or you don’t deal or you end up dead.”
But back in the 1980s these were truths the old neighborhood was reluctant to confront. Instead, everyday people clung to the notion that Whitey was their protector. More powerful than any politician, he could police and preserve. To think this way gave them a lift; the ache for a protector had never been greater than after busing, when much of Boston and even the nation unfairly looked down on Southie as a racist, backwater town. Whitey might rarely be seen, but his presence was palpable and, for many, a source of comfort. He might even send flowers or contribute to the funeral expenses of a family who’d lost a member to drugs or violence. He had the right touch that way—sticking to the shadows. His hands were clean. Drugs and prostitution might be “a way of life in other sections of the city, but they will not be tolerated in South Boston,” the South Boston Information Center boldly declared in one of its newsletters, even as crime statistics showed that the neighborhood was just like any other in the city—awash in drugs. Yearly drug arrests were tripling in Southie between 1980 and 1990. Narcotics cases doubled in South Boston District Court from 1985 to 1990, and one Boston police detective said he thought there was more coke in Southie per capita than anywhere else in Boston. In the end the neighborhood’s personality—its reserve and deep mistrust of outsiders—simply served Whitey all the more.
But just as the neighborhood was in denial, the FBI in Boston did not want to know the true story about drugs and Bulger and the forgotten casualties like Patricia Murray. Circulating instead on the streets of Southie and in the corridors of the FBI was a warm, do-good version of Whitey: Whitey hated drugs, hated drug dealers, and did his best to make Southie a drug-free zone.
It was a classic collision of reality and myth.
THE anti-drug Whitey Bulger was always one of the most stubborn and durable stories about the crime boss. It was a position that Bulger, along with John Connolly, staked out by using a linguistic sleight of hand. To the self-styled moral gangster, drug money was separate from the drugs themselves. He could extort “rent” from dealers, loan them money to get them started, and demand that they buy from wholesalers with whom he and Flemmi were associated. He’d make the world safe for drug dealers in return for a piece of the action, but he didn’t personally cut the coke or bag the marijuana. That distinction became the basis for the Bulger ballyhoo: Bulger didn’t do drugs.
It was a tortured kind of semantic somersault, but there was precedent: Bulger’s attitude about alcohol. Bulger drank only occasionally, and when he did, just a glass or two of wine. He hated to see other people drink. Even on St. Patrick’s Day he would complain about celebrants drinking at midday. He once said “he didn’t trust any
one who drank.” Drinkers, he said, “were weak” and might rat him out.
During their two decades together, the only time Bulger hit Theresa Stanley was after she stayed out late drinking wine at a friend’s house. If she sipped two drinks, he’d act as if she’d guzzled a dozen. “I almost got killed for drinking a couple glasses of wine,” Stanley recalled. Yet at the same time he was berating his girlfriend for wine-tasting Bulger was emerging as the neighborhood’s biggest liquor supplier. He happily emptied the register at the liquor store he’d taken over from Stephen and Julie Rakes and once bragged to a patrolling Boston cop, “We have the busiest liquor store around.” There were those who weren’t fooled by the hypocrisy. The increasing numbers of dopers and junkies joked about the poster hanging in one of the stores Bulger controlled: “Say Nope to Dope.” The liquor mart Bulger had taken over was nicknamed the “Irish Mafia store.”
Eventually Flemmi himself was caught red-handed trying to push the phony wordplay. He claimed under oath that he could not be prosecuted for the illegal gambling operation he and Bulger ran during the 1980s because the FBI knew about it and had even “authorized” it. As part of the claim, Flemmi described the gambling operation: he and Bulger mostly required bookmakers to pay them “rent” for protection. “So part of the gambling business was shaking down bookmakers?” Flemmi was asked by a prosecutor. Flemmi replied, “That’s correct.”
Then the prosecutor pounced: “If you were shaking down drug dealers, you’d be in the drug business, right?”
“I assert the Fifth on that,” Flemmi responded.
Flemmi was stuck. Faced suddenly with extending the same logic to drugs, Flemmi blinked. If he hadn’t, he would have undercut the comfortable fiction that had served him and Bulger for years—the claim they were not involved in drugs.
Under the FBI’s informant guidelines, Bulger’s drug activities should have led to an abrupt end to the deal he and Connolly and Morris had worked so hard to preserve. Instead, the developing underworld intelligence putting Bulger together with drugs had to be discounted and deflected, and what better way to accomplish that than by cultivating a definition of drug activity that separated the money from the merchandise? Then Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly could share a refrain: shaking down drug dealers did not make Bulger the person he in fact was—a drug lord.
RIGHT from the start, Bulger and Connolly had begun drawing a portrait of Bulger as the anti-drug gangster. During the crucial powwow on November 25, 1980, when Larry Sarhatt was conducting his suitability review of Bulger, the gangster proclaimed that he was “not in the drug business and personally hates anyone who [is]; therefore he and any of his associates do not deal in drugs.” Inside the bureau Bulger’s words went untested: if Bulger said so, it must be true. And in January 1981, as other police agencies were documenting Bulger’s alliance with the drug trafficker Frank Lepere, John Connolly was padding the FBI files with the opposite. Connolly reported that Bulger and Flemmi were actually distancing themselves from Lepere because of the latter’s drug predilection. Bulger, wrote Connolly, had formerly associated with Lepere but more recently had “broomed him due to his involvement in the marijuana business.”
It was a Teflon coating that came in handy in 1984.
The FBI was not a major participant as the DEA and the Quincy police put together Operation Beans. But as a matter of courtesy, the Boston FBI had been notified by the DEA of its intentions. The Boston office now faced a dilemma: what to do with Bulger and Flemmi? To decide, FBI managers in Boston naturally turned to the agents in the best position to gauge what Bulger and Flemmi were up to: John Connolly and Jim Ring, who’d taken over from John Morris as supervisor of the Organized Crime Squad. The fortyish Ring had been fighting the Mafia in New England for nearly a decade, but mostly from Worcester, a city in central Massachusetts viewed by agents as a minor league outpost. From the moment he took over the squad, Ring recalled, Connolly insisted that Bulger and Flemmi “weren’t involved in drugs, they didn’t do drugs, and they hated drug dealers, and that they would never allow drugs in South Boston.” When managers began raising questions, Connolly, fixed in place as the bureau’s authority on all things Bulger, came armed with his FBI files discounting any possible link between the gangster and drugs.
Having to notify FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., about the DEA’s plans, the Boston office fired off a two-page telex to headquarters on April 12, 1984, explaining that the DEA was targeting Bulger and Flemmi, “whom DEA alleges are individuals who control a narcotics trafficking group.” But the FBI in Boston urged calm. It labeled the DEA’s allegations “unsubstantiated, and DEA has furnished no specific information relative to their involvement.” Bulger, the telex concluded, should not be “closed due to the past, present and future valuable assistance.”
Ring authored a more detailed memo later in the year explaining the Boston office’s hands-off position toward Operation Beans, and once again the FBI in Boston displayed its backing for the anti-drug version of Bulger. “The predication” for the DEA’s investigation, wrote Ring in October, “although it may be correct, is not consistent with our intelligence regarding the activities of these individuals.” Guided mainly by Connolly but also by Ring, the FBI brass in Boston would simply not accept the drug talk building around Bulger.
But behind Ring’s back, even Connolly was apparently engaged in hushed FBI talk about Bulger and drugs. In early April 1983 fifteen tons of marijuana were seized from a warehouse at 345 D Street in South Boston. The marijuana belonged to a trafficker named Joe Murray, and after the raid Connolly and agent Rod Kennedy got to talking. Connolly described specifically for his colleague how Bulger profited from Murray’s drug business, Kennedy said later.
“The conversation was basically that Joe Murray was required to pay rent to Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi for having used South Boston as a storage warehouse for his drug activity,” Kennedy recalled. He said Connolly told him that Murray had paid Bulger and Flemmi between $60,000 and $90,000 for that particular load. “It was like rent money for having used, you know, having gone into South Boston and using that area for illegal drug activity,” said Kennedy, adding that this amount was on top of more regular tribute.
But that was off the record. In a report he filed after the bust, Connolly did not write a word about the payments Murray was making to Bulger and Flemmi. Instead, Connolly stated that the “Murray crew” was worried about Bulger being “upset with them over their storing grass in his town.”
Kennedy, who worked briefly as the bureau’s liaison with the DEA for Operation Beans, did share some of his intelligence about Bulger’s drug activities with DEA agents Reilly and Boeri. (Kennedy had an informant who’d told him Bulger relied on a South Boston drug dealer named Hobart Willis to serve as his go-between with Joe Murray.) But Kennedy never told anything to FBI supervisor Ring. Nor did Kennedy tell Ring or the DEA agents about Connolly’s disclosure regarding Joe Murray and Bulger. That was Connolly’s responsibility, not his, Kennedy felt. Besides, Connolly had probably expected him “not to pass it on,” and he didn’t want to cross Connolly.
Eventually more FBI agents in Boston would have informants telling the bureau about Bulger and drugs. By the mid -I990s even some of Bulger’s own rank-and-file dealers—like Polecat Moore—had decided to testify against him. And other dealers too. David Lindholm told investigators that in 1983 he was summoned to East Boston, where Bulger and Flemmi held a gun to his head to persuade him to pay them their share of his illegal drug action. In 1998 federal judge Mark Wolf ruled that Flemmi lied to FBI supervisor Jim Ring in 1984 in denying his and Bulger’s drug involvement. “It’s my understanding that he [Flemmi] was at least involved . . . in extorting money from drug dealers,” Wolf said on September 2, 1998.
But Connolly never let up. He had played a key part in creating the myth, and he clung to it. “Well, you know, I’ve never seen any evidence that they ever did get into drugs,” he boasted in I998—six weeks after Judge Wolf�
��s comments in court. Never mind the evidence, the testimony, the federal judge’s findings. “I mean, to get involved with a drug dealer, to collect rent from them—they are the lowest form of animal life. A guy like Flemmi or Bulger is not ever going to put himself in a position to be dealing with these guys.”
Denial is not a river in Boston.
BERGERON soon developed another reason for wanting to take Bulger and Flemmi down. He believed he’d lost a promising informant to them. It began one Sunday night in early October 1984 when the detective got word he better hurry down to the station. He arrived and learned that some other cops on the Quincy force had brought in thirty-two-year-old John McIntyre, an army vet with a string of minor run-ins with the law, for questioning after he was found trying to break into his estranged wife’s home. Held in one of the claustrophobic, poorly lit cells, McIntyre’s talk soon went way over the heads of the patrol officers. The man was rambling on about marijuana, mother ships, gunrunning, and, most shocking, the Valhalla.
The fishing trawler Valhalla had left Gloucester, Massachusetts, on September 14 for a few weeks of swordfishing. At least that was the cover story. In fact the trawler was carrying seven tons of weapons valued at a cool million—163 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition—destined for the IRA in Northern Ireland. Two hundred miles off the coast of Ireland, the Valhalla met up with a fishing boat from Ireland, the Marita Ann. The cache of weapons was transferred, and the operation seemed a success. But the Irish Navy had been tipped off and intercepted the Marita Ann at sea. The seizure of an IRA-bound arsenal made front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic.