Howie Carr (30 page)

Whitey’s world too was changing. After serving sixteen years for the bombing of Joe Barboza’s lawyer, Frank Salemme was finally out of state prison, and he was looking to make up for lost time. Even though Vinny Ferrara’s crew was still operating out of Vanessa’s at the Prudential Center, Salemme fancied himself the next Mafia boss of Boston. After all, Salemme figured, he’d done a lot more for the Mafia back in the 1960s than Ferrara and his crew of second-stringers from East Boston ever had. And then he’d kept his mouth shut all those years in prison. Both the Mafia and the Hill owed him, big time, or so Salemme thought.

Suddenly Stevie was spending a lot of time with Salemme, and his son, Frank Jr. Whitey knew that Zip had asked Stevie to keep an eye on Salemme, but Whitey still didn’t appreciate Stevie’s new “special relationship.” He ordered Kevin Weeks to set up several new stashes of weapons in Southie, just in case Stevie “wasn’t around,” as he put it to Weeks. It wasn’t that Whitey didn’t trust his old friend Stevie; he didn’t trust anybody, period.

Whitey also had another looming headache—the DEA. In 1987 District Attorney Newman Flanagan had gone to the DEA, and offered to cut them in on a new investigation of the cocaine dealing that was getting out of control in South Boston. Flanagan had only one condition: They couldn’t tell the FBI, for obvious reasons. Both the local prosecutors and the DEA recalled the leaks that had just two years earlier doomed an earlier drug investigation, Operation Beans. During that period, Zip Connolly was so wired into the probe that once, when DEA agents pulled Whitey’s criminal records, moments later they received a call from Zip, demanding to know exactly what they were up to.

Still, despite Zip’s interference in Operation Beans, the cops had actually succeeded in placing a bug inside the front driver’s-side door of Whitey’s Chevrolet Caprice. But as always, Whitey got a tip, and eventually, the DEA agents had to storm into one of his garages to retrieve their $50,000 worth of state-of-the-art bugs. As the feds burst into the garage, Whitey was ripping open the door panel and Weeks was waving an electronic bug detector, trying to find out exactly where the microphone had been placed.

The agents and gangsters stared at one another for a few moments, until Whitey broke the ice.

“We’re all good guys,” he said. “You’re the good good guys. We’re the bad good guys.”

A few days later, Stevie Flemmi ran into the DEA crew, and he commiserated with the cops who’d worked so hard on Operation Beans, only to come up empty. A month after he and Whitey had garroted Deborah Hussey with a rope, he calmly lectured the DEA on how they should be working with him and “Jim.”

“We don’t need Miranda,” Stevie explained. “We can wrap a rope around anyone’s neck.”

By February 1989 the second DEA probe was well underway, and for once, it looked as though there hadn’t been any leaks. The DEA was well aware that Zip Connolly had both a brother and an ex-roommate who worked for the drug agency. As an FBI supervisor later noted in a memo, the head of the DEA’s Boston office “quietly changed the duties of both these DEA special agents so they would not become aware of this matter.”

Whatever the status of any investigations, Whitey maintained a strict policy of total insulation from any dealers below Weeks in the hierarchy of the four cocaine distribution rings that now dominated the drug trade in Southie.

Running one of the crews was John “Red” Shea, a fatherless young boxer, born in 1967. In a 2003 essay, after serving a lengthy prison sentence for his crimes, Shea wrote in the third person about how he was personally recruited by Whitey.

“Whitey convinced Red that he was wasting his time with boxing,” Shea wrote. “It was for dumb fucking niggers.”

One day Shea got a phone call to come down to Rotary Variety, Weeks’s convenience store next to the Liquor Mart. In the basement there he found two men pointing Uzis at him. From a darkened corner, Whitey began screaming at Shea, demanding to know where one of his partners kept his money.

His associate had no money, Shea said. Then he shrugged and told Whitey to do what he had to do. Whitey stepped out of the shadows and threw his arm around Red.

“It was just a test,” Whitey said. “The last guy I did that to, he would have told me where Jimmy Hoffa was buried. He shit his pants.”

Red Shea could hold his mud, as Punchy McLaughlin used to say. Whitey loved Red Shea; he would make a good drug mule for the gang. Weeks would give him cash and Red could travel to Miami and do business with the Cubans. Those treacherous fucks might sell him stepped-on shit every once in a while, but Whitey never had to worry about Red running off with his cash. Red was a stand-up guy, which, to Whitey’s way of thinking, made him a complete patsy, especially with the feds circling around Southie.

Frank Salemme was trying to put the Mafia back together again, and he sometimes held court on Castle Island, in Southie. Whitey didn’t care that Salemme’s mother had been Irish, or that he knew Billy from the L Street Bathhouse when they were both kids. About to turn sixty, Whitey just didn’t need the aggravation. If he could eliminate Salemme he was sure that the next generation of Mafia wannabes to rise up would be even more inept than the last two.

Zip, of course, had a plan. He would get Salemme’s Mafia rivals—namely, Vinny Ferrara’s crew—to kill Cadillac Frank before he could muscle in on the hoods Zip still insisted on calling “my Irish.”

On June 19, 1989, the front-page story in the
Herald
was about Salemme’s impending move to wrest control of all the local Mafia rackets. The story, quoting anonymous federal sources, predicted that a gang war was about to break out between the rival Mafia factions.

Two days later, as he walked through the parking lot of the International House of Pancakes in Saugus to a sit-down with Vinny Ferrara’s guys from East Boston, someone in the back seat of a speeding rented car leaned out the window with a machine gun and opened fire on Cadillac Frank, striking him with at least four bullets.

Bleeding profusely, Salemme stumbled into the IHOP and collapsed into a booth as customers began screaming. A frightened waitress screwed up enough courage to approach him.

“Can I do anything for you?”

“Yeah,” he said, clutching his stomach. “Could you bring me some more napkins, please?”

Salemme eventually recovered, but within hours, the two Mafia factions were shooting at each other in both Massachusetts and Connecticut. As the toll mounted in Zip’s own little gang war, the Mafia bosses of New England decided that there was only one way to end the bloodshed. They would hold a traditional Mafia initiation, to bury the hatchet between the two warring factions.

Zip knew about it almost immediately, not from Whitey, although he would later try to give him credit for the original tip. But Zip immediately understood that if he could bug the initiation, this would be his big score. His new wife was pregnant, and he wanted to retire and start making big, private sector money. If he could pull this off, record an actual Mafia initiation ceremony, then he could fulfill his dream, of going Hollywood, writing a screenplay about a courageous FBI agent who single-handedly destroyed the Mafia in his hometown.

Taping a Mafia induction. It had never been done before. * * *

The initiation took place in Medford, on Sunday, October 29, 1989. There was one problem, though, that looked like it might force a postponement: one of the hoodlums to be made, Vinnie Federico, was in state prison, serving a sentence for killing a black guy in a dispute over a parking space in the North End. They had to spring Vinnie, because it was his sister’s house they were planning to use.

In the end, Vinnie was able to get a weekend furlough, just as Willie Horton had a few years earlier. Vinnie apparently didn’t realize the great import of the moment, because he brought a date, a thirty-year-old woman who worked for Mayor Ray Flynn at City Hall. When she arrived the puzzled Mafia bosses told her to go downstairs and watch TV until it was time to eat.

The house had been wired earlier, and outside the feds were everywhere. They trailed the Rhode Island guys up from Providence in an airplane. Carmen Tortora, the Mafia leg-breaker whose brother had once run for the Senate in Dorchester, spotted some heat at a phone booth in a parking lot. Despite the ominous portents, they went ahead with the ceremony anyway. It was the usual wiseguy stuff—pricked fingers, incinerated Mass cards, mumbo jumbo for the four new inductees about entering the organization alive and leaving it dead.

“Do you want it badly and desperately?” the family boss, Raymond “Rubber Lips” Patriarca, inquired of Tortora, who had most recently gone to prison for leaving death threats on a telephone answering machine. “Your mother’s dying in bed, and you have to leave her because we called you. It’s an emergency. You have to leave. Would you do that, Carmen?”

“Yes.”

After the ceremony, they adjourned to the kitchen to a good square meal, Mafia style. Newly made man Vinnie Federico demurred. He had other plans, back at the state prison in Shirley.

“We got a Greek guy, cooks for us,” he told his new brothers. “Tonight it’s lobster, shrimp, and then a pineapple upside-down cake.”

One of the old-timers who’d been invited from Revere couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“You call that doin’ time?” he said.

Afterward, Vinny “the Animal” Ferrara, the head of the clownish Vanessa’s crew, cleaned up the house. As he finished, he turned to one of his men and said, proudly, “Only the ghost knows what happened here today, by God.”

Two weeks later, they were all arrested, everyone except Vinnie Federico’s date, who continued working at Boston City Hall.

Whitey may have relished this latest body blow to the Mafia, but he didn’t have long to savor his good fortune. As the new decade began, the DEA, the IRS, and Boston police raided a number of homes and businesses connected in one way or another to Whitey, including the South Boston Liquor Mart and Rotary Variety, as well as Red Shea’s home, where they discovered a pistol and a stun gun.

The raids were a preview of what was to come. Most worrisome for Whitey was that the cops had used phone taps to develop a working knowledge of how his cocaine distribution network was managed. They knew that the street dealers all answered to one of four midlevel gangsters who, with the exception of Red Shea, more closely resembled traditional organized crime enforcers and collectors than wholesalers. Whitey of course kept no organizational charts. The only thing that mattered to him was that the street dealers kicked up, through his men, to Whitey himself.

This time the cops appeared serious. They hit the homes of all the ringleaders, in addition to raiding a warehouse on East Second Street where they discovered “miscellaneous drug packing and processing materials, scales, cutting boards, Baggies, razor blades, etc.”

Actually, the raids didn’t put much of a dent in Whitey’s organization—the cops took only $24,000 in cash, some guns, police scanners, marijuana, and a kilo of cocaine. Newspaper reports linked several of the hoodlums whose homes were searched to a series of murders in West Broadway barrooms in 1985–86.

Despite the slowly increasing heat, Whitey continued to operate in the same fashion he always had, adroitly eliminating any other criminal who he perceived as posing even the slightest threat to him.

The next to go was Pat Nee. In 1990, he’d just finished serving four years in federal prison for the IRA gunrunning operation that had ended with John McIntyre’s murder. Nee was smart, and still only forty-five, and although Whitey had worked with him for years, he had never forgotten how Nee had once been part of the crew that had hunted him back in the days when he worked for Donnie Killeen.

On parole, Nee was looking for work, and Whitey steered him to a tough crew of armored car robbers headed by a Lower End hood named Jazzbo Joyce. Whitey neglected to mention to Nee that the FBI had planted an informer, one of Whitey’s loanshark victims, in the gang, and that Jazzbo’s next job, in Abington, would be his last. Instead, Whitey gave Pat Nee a machine gun and wished him well in his new venture.

When the Southie crew arrived in Abington, the FBI was waiting for them. Surrounded by cops, Pat Nee didn’t try to use the machine gun; if he had, he’d have been killed, because Whitey had removed its firing pin before giving it to Nee.

What Nee didn’t learn until later was that while he had been in prison, Congress had passed a new law—use of a machine gun during the commission of a federal crime was now punishable by an additional thirty years in prison, on and after whatever other sentences were imposed.

Whitey would never again have to worry about Pat Nee. He was going away for a very long time. (Ultimately, Nee’s conviction on the machine gun charge was thrown out; a judge decided that if a weapon had been disabled, it was hardly fair for the government to still refer to it as a machine gun. Whitey had been, as they say at the State House, too cute by half.)

In 1990, Billy would have a serious opponent for the first time since 1970. Republican Dr. John DeJong, a thirty-four-year-old Back Bay veterinarian, quickly got a taste of hardball Boston politics when the president of Tufts University, Dr. Jean Mayer, called him with concerns that DeJong’s candidacy would cost the veterinary school, from which DeJong had graduated, its state grants.

DeJong leaked word of the conversation to the press. Billy denied knowing that DeJong was a graduate of the school. Trying to appear nonplussed by the challenge, Billy came up with a new slogan: “The state may be going to the dogs, but this is no time to call in a veterinarian.”

But Billy wasn’t taking any chances. A straw candidate, Janie DuPass quickly entered the race, to dilute the anti-incumbent vote. Not only did her name sound like DeJong’s, but also like that of a Southie political activist named Janie DuWors. DuPass lived on a $501 disability check, in Roxbury, and yet three-quarters of the signatures on the nomination papers she filed to get onto the ballot came from Southie, including eleven from East Third Street, Billy’s home street. Her nomination papers were signed by people with such fine Bulger-associated names as Joyce, Flaherty, Nee, and Gill. The signatures had been gathered by Billy’s operatives. It was one of the oldest tricks in the urban political playbook, and if the Bulgers could have found another person named John DeJong, no doubt his name would have gone onto the ballot too.