Howie Carr (26 page)

As far back as 1977, Whitey had begun assembling his new identity—“Thomas Baxter,” of New York. But to make it work, he would need money, and he would need it everywhere. Soon he and Theresa were taking trips, not just to Florida and Oklahoma, but around the world. Often Whitey would use the opportunity to scout out a bank where he could rent a safe-deposit box, which he would then stuff with cash, jewelry, rare coins, and passports.

But their most frequent foreign destination was the country next door—Canada.

On September 8, 1987, Whitey and Theresa arrived at the Delta Airlines terminal to catch a flight to Montreal. Theresa paid cash for two first-class tickets. As they went through security, a guard noticed several bricklike objects in Whitey’s carry-on luggage. The guard opened the satchel and saw that it was filled with brand-new $100 bills. The estimates of the amount of cash Whitey was carrying have ranged as high as $100,000, far above the federal limit of $10,000 that is permitted to be taken out of the country without notifying authorities. When the guard told Whitey that he would have to call the State Police, Whitey grabbed the bag and ran, yelling “Kevin!” at an associate who was leaving the terminal.

“Kevin” took the bag from Whitey and escaped through the revolving door. Security guards tried to chase after him, but Whitey blocked the door, giving “Kevin,” most likely Kevin Weeks, time to escape.

Billy Johnson, a plainclothes state trooper and Vietnam veteran, was the first to arrive on the scene. As Whitey, scowling, looked on, Johnson asked the security guards to tell him what happened. As the guard began to speak, Whitey pointed at him.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “You’re a liar.”

Johnson asked Whitey for his identification, and he came up with a driver’s license with a South Boston address. Whitey kept telling the guard to shut the fuck up, and finally Johnson shoved Whitey up against the wall.

“I’ll lock you up,” he said.

“Is this how you treat citizens?” Whitey yelled.

Johnson checked Theresa Stanley’s bag. She was carrying $9,923 in cash, just under the federal limit. Both she and Whitey had skirted the law, and Whitey had behaved very badly indeed, but neither had committed a crime, at least none that an East Boston jury, or magistrate, would consider worthy of a State Police pinch. Johnson reluctantly let them go.

The next day, David Davis, Mike Dukakis’s handpicked director of Logan Airport, appeared at the State Police’s F Troop barracks and confronted the trooper, demanding the copy of his report on the incident.

Johnson refused to hand it over without getting a receipt. Davis, a longtime Boston political operative, stormed out of the barracks without the report that someone back at the State House had wanted very badly. Soon thereafter, Billy Johnson was transferred out of F Troop to a less desirable barracks. His overtime dried up, it became clear he would never be promoted, and he plunged into a deep depression that didn’t lift even after he finally quit the job. In 1998, Johnson committed suicide. He couldn’t fight the machine, any more than Joe Murray could.

In 2003, at the congressional hearing, Billy dismissed the story of Johnson’s transfer as “tabloid talk show stuff in Boston.” His lawyer produced a notarized statement from Davis saying that he had not gone to the barracks at the behest of Billy Bulger. But of course the order wouldn’t have come directly from Billy. Davis worked for Michael Dukakis, so the directive would have come from someone who worked for the governor. In his letter, Davis didn’t say who told him to pick up the report.

Joe Murray may have been a major drug smuggler, but he was also an Irish nationalist. And in 1984 he’d convinced Whitey to help him put together, for a price, a shipment of arms for the Irish Republican Army—machine guns, rifles, and heavy-caliber pistols, .357s and .44s, seven tons of ordnance in all. The weaponry was driven up to Gloucester and loaded onto a seventy-seven-foot fishing boat called the
Valhalla
. Three Southie gangsters went along, to protect the boss’s investment, along with a crew that included another member of Murray’s gang, John McIntyre, a small-time thirty-two-year-old criminal and deckhand from Quincy.

McIntyre didn’t much care for Whitey’s guys. “They got the Adidas jump suits,” he later told the Quincy police, “and they ain’t got a speck of dirt on them. Every day, they take two, three showers.”

Off the west coast of Ireland, the weapons were off-loaded onto an Irish fishing boat, the
Marita Ann
. But someone had informed the Irish navy and the
Marita Ann
was stopped and its weapons seized, along with a number of bulletproof vests, one of which belonged to Stevie Flemmi’s younger brother, Boston police officer Mike Flemmi. When the
Valhalla
returned to port in Boston, it too was seized, and the story briefly became big news on both sides of the Atlantic.

McIntyre had observed Whitey long enough to know that someone was going to have to take the fall, and he suspected that he was at the top of their list. In October 1984, shortly after his return, McIntyre was arrested by the Quincy police on an unrelated domestic charge. Soon he was talking, nonstop, about the Bulger gang, even though he refused to use Whitey’s name, preferring to refer to him and Stevie as “the two guys who ride around together.”

As he told the cops, “I didn’t start out in life to end up like this.”

McIntyre told them about another drug ship, the
Ramsland
, and it was seized in the harbor, along with thirty-six tons of marijuana. Whitey was furious; in 2005 Stevie testified that he and Whitey had been expecting to be paid “about a million” for their so-called protection of the shipment. Meanwhile, as a departmental courtesy, the DEA let the FBI know who their informant was, and the clock began ticking down on McIntyre. On November 30, 1984, McIntyre left his parents’ home in Quincy to meet Pat Nee, Whitey’s liaison to the Murray crew, at the same house where Bucky Barrett had already been murdered, and Deb Hussey soon would be. McIntyre thought he was going to a party; he walked into the house carrying a case of beer. But Whitey was waiting for him.

According to Weeks and Flemmi, Whitey briefly discussed sending McIntyre into the grand jury with a script, or perhaps giving him enough money to flee to South America. But they quickly rejected those options.

“Jim decided at the last minute to kill him,” Weeks later said.

With McIntyre tied to a chair in the basement, Whitey looped a rope around his neck and began throttling him. But the rope wasn’t thick enough, and Whitey couldn’t finish him off. He stopped to catch his breath, then went back to work on McIntyre’s neck. Still he survived, and finally Whitey gave up and threw the rope aside. Whitey picked up a revolver and released the lock. He looked at McIntyre.

“Do you want me to shoot you in the head?” Whitey asked. “Yes, please,” McIntyre answered.

Whitey fired once into McIntyre’s head, and the force of the shot knocked over the chair he was tied to. Stevie bent over and put his ear to McIntyre’s chest.

“He’s still alive,” Stevie announced. So he grabbed a handful of McIntyre’s hair and pulled on it, just enough to get his head off the basement floor. Whitey then leaned over, put his revolver directly against McIntyre’s temple, and shot him repeatedly, at point-blank range, as Stevie gripped his hair.

Now McIntyre was dead. Stevie went to work with his pliers, and this time, he removed not only McIntyre’s teeth, but also ripped out his tongue. It would be another warning to rats, except for one thing. No one was ever supposed to see McIntyre again. Kevin Weeks had another corpse to bury in the basement.

Sixteen months later, Nee and Joe Murray were indicted for gunrunning. So was the missing John McIntyre. After his conviction in 1987, Murray found himself sitting in the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

He knew who’d killed Brian Halloran, and Bucky Barrett, and he knew the names of the cops who were selling information to Whitey. Joe Murray reached out for Bill Weld, the former U.S. attorney in Boston who was now in Washington as an assistant attorney general in Ed Meese’s Justice Department.

Murray couldn’t make the calls himself from prison, so he had someone else phone Weld’s office. The first call was on January 20, 1988. Murray’s friend named John Connolly and a Boston police officer as two cops who sold information to Whitey. Weld’s secretary, Judy Woolley, took the dictation.

In the second call, on February 3, 1988, at 3:04 p.m., Murray’s friend informed the Justice Department who had murdered Bucky Barrett, and why. A week later, he called again, and this time he told the secretary who murdered Brian Halloran. And Murray’s friend included this tantalizing information: “There is a person named John, who claims he talked to Whitey and [another gang member] as they sat in the car waiting for Halloran on Northern Avenue. He sits in a bar and talks about it.”

Weld forwarded the information to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, with the handwritten notation that “both [Jeremiah] O’Sullivan and AUSA [assistant U.S. attorney, and future head of the FBI] Bob Mueller are well aware of the history, and the information sounds good.”

It was so good, in fact, that the Boston office of the FBI did nothing with it for fifteen months. Finally, in June 1989, Murray was shipped up from Danbury to Boston, and interviewed. He was questioned by two of Zip’s best friends in the office.

“In view of the unsubstantial and unspecific allegations,” the agents wrote after speaking to him, “and the official relationship between SSA [Supervisory Special Agent] CONNOLLY and the sources, Boston recommends that this inquiry be closed, and no administrative action taken.”

In other words, business as usual. Murray was shipped back to prison and his charges ignored for more than a decade. But everything he had said was true—Whitey and the FBI and the Boston police did have their machines, and Murray couldn’t survive against them, nor could anyone else. Because it was all one big machine now, and Whitey Bulger called the shots. Like Jimmy Cagney in
White Heat
, he was on top o’ the world, Ma, top o’ the world.

CHAPTER 15

S
T
. P
ATRICK
’
S
D
AY
1987. Senate President Billy Bulger was also at the pinnacle of his power, and he was reveling in it. This was his big day of the year—the Sunday of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Southie. Before it began at 1:00 p.m. out of Andrew Square, Billy would host his annual three-hour breakfast at the old German Club, now known as the Bayside Club, on H Street.

Both of next year’s major-party candidates for president— Governor Michael Dukakis, who had just been reelected to his third term, and Vice President George Bush—would be there, if not in person, at least on the phone. Since 1980, most presidential candidates felt compelled to pay their respects to the strange little man who had become the de facto governor of Massachusetts, if only because Massachusetts was next door to New Hampshire, where the nation’s first presidential primary was held every fourth year.

The ramshackle old hall was, as usual, jammed with people. Unless you were one of the VIPs with a reserved seat at the head table, under the giant banner that said in Gaelic CEAD MILLE FAILTE (A Thousand Greetings), you were expected to arrive early.

When the doors to the main ballroom opened, around 9:30, the guests entered single-file and squeezed together along either side of one of the tables packed in at 90-degree angles to the raised head table. The rickety folding chairs were then passed out, and everyone sat down. From that point on, for the three-plus hours until the breakfast finally petered out shortly before 1:00 p.m., everyone in the room—judge, clerk, legislator, or nun—was Billy’s captive audience.

Most of those who showed up every year were supplicants of one type or another. They were senators who wanted a more powerful chairmanship, or judges seeking more money for their courthouse’s line item in the state budget. Even congressmen showed up, at least they did if they knew what was good for them, because Billy could settle scores, or at least try to, during redistricting, as Barney Frank could well attest.

Billy had taken over the roast in the early 1970s, after Sonny McDonough had grown tired of having to return from Marathon, Florida, to host it. By the mid-1980s, with Billy as the master of ceremonies, it had become as stylized and predictable as a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Every year it was the same jokes, the same songs, the same tired routines and references to James Michael Curley. Billy haughtily dismissed all criticism.

“Do they complain,” he asked, “when Sinatra sings the same words to his old songs?”

In many ways, 1987 would be Billy’s last great St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. After 1987, with the state economy reeling under the impact of endless tax increases and the payroll padding that came to characterize the final years of the Dukakis era, the event would appear shamelessly self-indulgent, not to mention ossified, and after the collapse of the Democratic monopoly on statewide political power in 1990, the jokes would grow yet more brittle, forced.

But on this late-winter morning in 1987, the breakfast had not quite lost its exotic air, and all was still right in Billy’s constricted little world. All the usual hail-fellows-well-met had gathered in their customary places at the head table—Congressman Joe Moakley, state Treasurer Bob Crane, former House Speaker Tommy McGee. Billy was beaming as he made his customary entry into the ballroom, wielding a shillelagh and singing his St. Patrick’s Day theme song—“The Wild Colonial Boy,” a rollicking Australian ballad about an outlaw Irish immigrant named Jack Duggan.

On this day, Bernard Cardinal Law of the Boston archdiocese had joined the politicians at the head table, along with the visiting bishop of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. If Dukakis was running for president, His Eminence was running for pope. It was quite a coup to have the cardinal in attendance—he was the shepherd of the flock, after all, and the pederast-priest scandals that would topple him were still fifteen years in the future.