Howie Carr (27 page)

“This is a remarkable gathering,” Law piously said in his invocation, as everyone bowed their heads and stared into their beer glasses. “Thank God for places like this. We ask your blessing on our land and on the Emerald Isle that first was land for many of us and our ancestors.”

“Isn’t it great?” Billy said, trying to give the crowd direction on how to react. “Isn’t he great?”

At this point, Billy was still letting everyone settle into their seats. As the plates of corned beef and cabbage were passed down, boardinghouse style, he was warming up the crowd with a few introductions of people he knew well, and who owed him, and who would thus understand when to smile, and when to scrape and bow.

One recurring theme of the breakfast: If anyone who showed up was “great,” like the cardinal, then anyone who didn’t was not only not great, but was also fair game. Even Mayor Ray Flynn, his longtime neighborhood rival, would stop in for a few moments.

This year, Billy was displeased with one no-show in particular—freshman U.S. senator John Forbes Kerry. He glanced over at the bishop from Harrisburg and asked him if he’d ever seen Senator Kerry on TV.

The bishop shook his head.

“Then you must not have a TV,” Billy said. “He’s not coming this morning. He’s angry Dukakis is running for his job.”

Billy, like most State House pols, figured Kerry was more interested in running for president himself one day than in hobnobbing with them. It was Billy who one St. Patrick’s Day coined the phrase that would often be repeated in the 2004 presidential campaign: “JFK—Just For Kerry.” In another phrase that would resurface in Kerry’s failed run for president, Billy said presciently of the junior senator, “He’s only Irish every sixth year.”

The more prominent guests, who often had other parades or roasts to get to, arrived by climbing up the hall’s back fire escape. The fire escape door opened directly into the ballroom, only a few feet from the head table, so the VIPs could arrive and depart without having to endure the indignity of working the crowd of coatholders. Waiting for Dukakis to arrive, Billy continued acknowledging some of the more familiar faces in the crowd, who might appreciate having their names mentioned on statewide TV.

Zip Connolly got a public plug, as did Zip’s guest—that year’s new special agent in charge of the Boston FBI office. It never hurt for Zip to remind his transient bosses at the bureau about the kind of hometown clout he had behind him.

Whitey, of course, was off-limits, totally. His name would never be mentioned until 1992, after he “won” the Mass Millions lottery.

Joe Kennedy, the new congressman from Brighton, Bobby’s oldest son and Teddy’s nephew, appeared in the doorway that opened onto the fire escape. Billy looked at the dim young man with the million-dollar smile and asked him how the traffic was coming up from Marshfield, where he had lived until he needed a Boston address for his successful campaign to replace Tip O’Neill.

Joe smiled and tried his one scripted joke of the morning. It was about Washington.

“Down there we’ve got President Ronald Reagan who can never seem to remember anything and up here we’ve got President Bulger who can never seem to forget anything.”

There was an awkward silence for a moment—Joe, or an aide who’d come up with the joke, had hit a little too close to home. Most of the other pols, who had learned Billy’s vindictive ways at the State House over the years, would never have dared say such a thing. But Joe, with no State House background, had just blundered ahead. Billy quickly changed the subject.

“Where’s your uncle Teddy this morning?” Billy asked.

“I don’t follow Uncle Teddy in the morning.” Gasps from the crowd. “After the decisions he’s made the night before, I kinda leave him on his own in the morning.”

There it was—the first sound bite for the evening TV newscasts.

Other pols came and went. Some handled themselves gracefully; most delivered lame jokes that fell flat. Then came the day’s big moment—the call from Vice President George Bush.

Billy picked up the phone, looked down at Dukakis, and said, “Your opponent is here.”

“Ask the governor,” said Bush, “if he’s going to run for president of the United States.”

Dukakis looked up at Bulger and said, “He sounds like Frank Hatch.” Dukakis was referring to the old Yankee state rep who had lost the governorship to Ed King in 1978. There was a hint of disdain in Dukakis’s voice—he was already underestimating the man who would crush him in the presidential election twenty months later.

Bush, well prepped, then told Billy about his problems with the
Globe
. So Billy mentioned that the
Globe
’s new editorial page editor, who had been hanging around up on stage for the last half-hour or so, had just moved to K Street in Southie.

“Well, there goes the neighborhood,” said the vice president, and the unscripted line brought the house down. The TV crews had another joke for their evening newscasts.

By the time Vice President Bush bid his farewells, Dukakis had finished eating, so Billy had him stand up and take a microphone so they could do a routine of sorts together. But Billy always remained in charge, and using Dukakis as a straight man, he began introducing the Bulger family.

“There’s my sister,” Billy said. “Carol McCarthy.”

“Sister Carol,” Dukakis said.

“Would you believe she’s not on a public payroll?”

“I don’t believe that for a minute.” Dukakis looked directly at sister Carol. “What agency do you work for? What agency did you work for? What agency would you like to work for?”

A few weeks later, she would end up at a state program designed to fight illiteracy. It was run by one of Billy’s dimmest, most loyal soldiers—former Senator Gerry D’Amico of Worcester. The previous year, he’d run for lieutenant governor, but his campaign had never recovered from the moment when, after winning the state convention’s endorsement, he rashly introduced Billy to the crowd as “the guy I work for.”

Billy was still electoral poison, even in a Democratic primary.

But because he controlled the state budget, Billy could always find jobs for his defeated senators, and in return they would still hire his relatives and friends. D’Amico was soon gone from the state payroll after revelations that he had run up hundreds of dollars in parking tickets on his state car while parking outside the Quincy Market office of his political consultant during business hours. But Carol Bulger McCarthy hopped from one state payroll to another for another fifteen years before finally taking advantage of an early-retirement program in 2002.

Most of Billy’s siblings—and their spouses—had similar careers. Other than Whitey, none had any interest in the private sector. They had learned from their father—business was cruel, and heartless. Better to go “on the state,” or “on the city.” Jackie Bulger was typical. He had the courthouse job, and both his son and his son-in-law worked at the MBTA. His daughter was employed at the State House—on Uncle Billy’s office payroll.

But you didn’t need to be a Bulger to enjoy a no-heavy-lifting job. As long as you played ball, you and your family were taken care of. It was as simple as that. That was the real context of the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. It was the high holy holiday of hacks. It was a celebration of themselves, and their king. Once you were in the family, the king would take care of you, and the king was Billy Bulger. And on this day, all his liegemen and their liegemen were there to pay homage.

By now, Billy was out of both A-list guests and Irish ballads that everyone knew the words to. He was reduced to running out the clock by introducing his friends, and Whitey’s friends.

“Representative Jimmy Brett,” he said, “no ordinary mortal.” He was married to Billy’s secretary.

“Dennis Condon is here,” he said, referring to Whitey’s old handler in the FBI.

“Senator Walsh,” he said, referring to Joe Walsh, the old warhorse from Dorchester, the leader of another ancient hack family that included his sister, a member of the School Committee. His son was on the West Roxbury District Court payroll, along with Jackie Bulger’s ex-wife. Senator Walsh himself was on both the state and city payrolls. Times were catching up with Walsh, though, and by 1987 he was sixty-six. He’d just survived a serious primary challenge, after a third candidate suddenly jumped into the race, to confuse and split the anti-Walsh vote. Such minor candidates were a Boston tradition. They were known as straws, and after their secret sponsors had been safely reelected, they were usually rewarded with a public job. The previous year, Joe Walsh’s straw had been John Tortora, whose brother was a Mafia leg-breaker named Carmen. With John Tortora draining off just enough votes, Walsh had been reelected to another term, and John Tortora had been hired to work at the MBTA.

Finally, just before 1:00 p.m., with Billy totally out of gas, and jokes, the parade’s grand marshal arrived via the fire escape. His name was John Hurley—John “Whacko” Hurley, not to be confused with John Hurley, an oldtime Charlestown hood who was trusted by both Joe Murray and Whitey.

When Whacko arrived, it meant it was time for the parade to begin. And it was time for Billy to make one final joke.

“Whacko,” he would say. “The name says it all.” Whacko had a job at the MBTA.

CHAPTER 16

I
N
1988
THE
B
ULGER
brothers seemed to be at the top of their games. Whitey ran everything in the rackets, not just in Southie, but throughout much of the entire region. Whitey had moved from simply protecting cocaine dealers to actually distributing it himself, with Weeks overseeing a network of four autonomous rings, separately managed by midlevel Southie hoods. All of them, from Whitey on down, were growing rich far beyond anything they could have imagined in the old days of peddling football cards and grabbing cases of razors off the backs of trucks as they left the Gillette factory.

Billy, meanwhile, continued to serve as the de facto, un-elected governor of Massachusetts, more powerful than ever. The four-hundred-pound House speaker, George Keverian, was ineffectual, and the nominal governor, Mike Dukakis, was always out on the campaign trail, running for president. Sometimes it seemed as though Dukakis no longer even considered himself the real governor—one day, asked a question somewhere, he began his response by saying, “If I were a sitting governor...”

There were a few, minor dark clouds, such as Billy’s new nickname: “the Corrupt Midget,” which was often shortened to “the CM.” It had been bestowed on him by Judge E. George Daher of the Boston Housing Court, who’d refused to promote Sonny McDonough’s son all those years ago. A year earlier, the House had passed a budget that would have restored the Housing Court’s funding that Billy had cut back in 1981. But at Billy’s behest, Dukakis had vetoed the restoration, and in a newspaper interview Daher had lashed out at the would-be president: “How can he stand up to the Russians if he can’t stand up to a corrupt midget?”

But Billy was still the king of the hill—Beacon Hill. In February, on his fifty-fourth birthday, he threw his annual “time”—Boston slang for fund-raiser—at Anthony’s Pier 4. More and more, it was Billy’s campaign account that paid for his increasingly lavish lifestyle. In 1987, a nonelection year, he had spent $158,000, much of it on hotel and restaurant bills. His tab for gift certificates at Anthony’s Pier 4 alone was $5,000, and he had become a regular at Locke-Ober’s, still the most expensive restaurant in the city. The Ritz Café, where his old Senate rival Jimmy Kelly had once concocted schemes, was another of his favorite haunts. He even used his campaign account to shower his friends with copies of books he had enjoyed. Tom Wolfe’s first novel,
The Bonfire of the Vanities
, was a particular favorite of Billy’s; he thought it perfectly captured the modern urban zeitgeist. He dropped $1,415 on honey-baked hams. He privately printed a pamphlet,
The New Terrorism: Historical Development of Press Power in America
, and it behooved any lobbyist who received a copy to ask for an autograph, at least if he didn’t want his legislation dispatched to the oblivion of the Committee on Bills in Third Reading.

To keep his war chest full, Billy reached out to everyone who did business on Beacon Hill—a practice he had always disdained others for. Even after a year-long spending spree in 1987, he still had $355,000 on hand on December 31. And after his birthday fund-raiser at Anthony’s Pier 4, he was comfortably above a half-million again.

Billy was so flush with campaign money, in fact, that he stopped taking speaking engagements—a profitable sideline that “the new terrorists” in the media used as a bludgeon against him. He spent $160,000 in public funds renovating his office at the State House. It was the only one in the building with a full kitchen. And when the older, but still perfectly serviceable, carpets were pulled up, they were shipped directly to the Roxbury Latin School, where his youngest son, Brendan, was a student. In April, at a town meeting in Dorchester, a taxpayer had the audacity to ask him a question about his new digs.

“Can you see it?” Billy said. “Of course not! It’s only for Napoleon.”

In the late spring, he went on a campaign swing with Dukakis through, of all places, Texas. But behind the scenes, Billy played a different role, for a different party, at least according to veterans of the 1988 Bush campaign. After the Democratic convention in July 1988, Dukakis had opened a seventeen-point lead in the national polls, and the vice president’s prospects looked grim. But at Billy’s suggestion, Bush flew into Boston, and toured Boston Harbor in a boat, stressing not only the massive pollution problems, but also the fact that it was costing billions to clean it up, and that Dukakis and his state government had been so lax in addressing the issue that a federal judge had been forced to take over the entire project.

Bush’s harbor news conference and photo op was a direct assault on two of Dukakis’s perceived strengths: his environmentalism and the “competence” that he never tired of citing out on the campaign trail. After Bush’s visit to Boston Harbor, Dukakis’s poll numbers began falling, and by Labor Day, the Duke found himself behind by double digits. The Bush family values loyalty, and ever since, they have gone out of their way to help Billy whenever possible. In 2002, George W. Bush’s Justice Department stonewalled Congress on release of thousands of FBI documents on Whitey and the Boston FBI office that would have, and eventually did, embarrass Billy. George W. Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, did not relent until the Republican leadership in the House threatened to cite him for contempt of Congress. Ostensibly the dispute was about executive privilege, but the Bush administration seemed strangely determined to protect secrets from a long-ago era in which Democrats dominated both the Congress and the presidency.