Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (30 page)

The cops had learned that Bulger ran the rackets in Quincy and was now often spending his nights there—reason enough to take action against him. But Bergeron had come up with an intriguing and altogether new twist about the crime boss. By consulting with his own network of underworld informants, Bergeron had learned that Bulger and Flemmi “now appear to have broadened their horizons into drug trafficking.” With their “expansion into the drug market,” wrote Bergeron in flat, official prose, “they will be helping people destroy their lives.”

Bergeron finished typing his report, handed it off to his boss, and returned to the street. He and other detectives continued to follow Bulger as the gangster moved between their city and South Boston and as he met regularly with Flemmi, a few other select gangsters, and George Kaufman, the associate who often served as a front for them as the owner of record of their garages. In early 1984 Bergeron watched Bulger and Flemmi replace the sign out in front of the liquor mart at the rotary with a new one: South Boston Liquor Mart.

Eventually Bergeron’s written proposal worked its way through various law enforcement channels, landing at the federal agency specializing in drug cases, the DEA. Bergeron’s report was consistent with the DEA’s own intelligence. The DEA had busted a major drug dealer, Arnold Katz, who had told DEA agents about Bulger’s business ties to another major drug trafficker, Frank Lepere. Lepere was the dealer the state police had seen with Bulger at the Lancaster Street garage during surveillance in 1980. Now Katz was disclosing to the DEA that during the early 1980s Lepere had forged an “alliance with Whitey and his partner, Stevie Flemmi, in which Lepere agreed to pay Whitey and Stevie whenever he smuggled a load of narcotics in return for protection.” Katz said Lepere had told him all about the deal himself, including how he delivered cash payments to Bulger in a suitcase.

The DEA had more. Early in 1981 a confidential informant had reported that Bulger and Flemmi were on the move—“attempting to control drug trafficking in the region by demanding cash payments and/or a percentage of profits for allowing dealers to operate.” With the arrival of the secret Quincy police report, two DEA agents, Al Reilly and Steve Boeri, were assigned to work with Bergeron. Reilly and Boeri quickly added to the growing pile of Bulger intelligence. In February 1984 Reilly met with one of his informants, named “C-2” in DEA reports, who told him that coke dealers were complaining about having to “pay protection money to Whitey.” The informant identified a pub owner in South Boston who paid Bulger for the right to sell “small quantities of cocaine and heroin from the bar.” Then agent Boeri met with one of his informants, named “C-3,” who’d known Bulger for two decades and said the ambitious gangster “most recently” had taken control of “drug distribution in the South Boston area.”

The drug theme was reiterated by “C-4,” as well as by other underworld sources, and by early 1984 the pieces were falling into place for a joint investigation into Bulger’s drug activities. The case, called Operation Beans, would mainly involve the DEA and Quincy detectives.

It had come from bottom-up police work, especially through the often mind-numbingly tedious efforts of Bergeron and his colleagues. Piling up night after night of surveillance throughout 1983 and early 1984, Bergeron had learned a lot about Bulger. Going through the trash at the condo, Bergeron might find a grocery list intact, in Greig’s swirling cursive handwriting—“asparagus, chicken breasts, sherbet, ricotta cheese, olive oil”—but he’d also find Bulger’s papers torn into tiny pieces or burned to ash. He’d learned that Bulger was “habit-oriented”—leaving the condo in Quincy at about the same time each afternoon for dinner at Theresa’s house in South Boston. Then a full night of secret business meetings, mostly at the liquor mart. Then home to the condo. If it was sunny the next day, he’d often appear on the second-floor patio in the early afternoon for a breath of fresh air, sometimes still clad in pajamas.

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 bestselling 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 anyone 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.”