Howie Carr (32 page)

Just as he hadn’t been able to publicly attend his mother’s funeral back in 1980, Whitey had to miss Zip Connolly’s retirement dinner at Joe Tecce’s. Whitey bid Zip farewell in his own fashion—he gave the crooked FBI agent $10,000 cash, as “severance,” Stevie Flemmi would testify in 2005. Over the years, Zip had taken more than $200,000 from the Mob, and now he would be feted at Tecce’s by the political and law enforcement leaders of Boston. A videotape of the farewell roast would be given to Whitey, so that he could watch the entire event, complete with cutaway shots of Zip’s entire family, not just his brother, Jim, the DEA agent, but also his mobbed-up brother-in-law, Arthur Gianelli, sitting at the table directly behind the rostrum, clapping politely as one law enforcement official after another offered fawning tributes to Zip. Connolly’s young second wife, Liz, daubed tears from her eyes as she heard her husband described in glowing terms by one colleague after another. She had given birth to a son the previous year, and was now visibly pregnant again, this time with twins.

The master of ceremonies was not Billy, but FBI agent Nick Gianturco, the agent whose life Whitey had “saved” back in the days when he was working undercover as a fence named “Nick Giarro.”

Gianturco would later succeed Zip as head of security for Boston Edison, just as Zip was succeeding former agent Jack Kehoe, who was also in attendance.

Gianturco mentioned the Prince Street wiretaps, and how while other agents showed up dressed casually, Zip would appear in “tan slacks, Gucci loafers, velvet velour shirt open at the chest with enough gold showing to be the envy of most members of the Gambino Crime Family.”

Gianturco did not mention that Zip’s nickname among the younger agents was now “Cannoli,” for the very reasons he had just outlined.

The microphone was quickly handed over to Billy Bulger, who treated the occasion, as he did most, at least when he was among friends, as a smaller version of the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, using his numbingly familiar stock one-liners.

Eventually Billy began quoting from the classics, beginning with Aristotle: “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”

“Who’s the personification of friendship in our community other than John Connolly?” he asked. “He’s a splendid human being. He’s a good pal.”

A good pal—Billy’s ultimate accolade.

“The Roman philosopher Seneca said ‘Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.’ John Connolly is the personification of loyalty, not only to his old friends and not only to the job that he holds but also to the highest principles. He’s never forgotten them.”

Diane Kottmyer, the chief of the organized crime strike force and a future Superior Court judge, gave him a gag gift of a bottle of wine and then added: “John, they wanted me to say that that bottle came courtesy of South Boston Liquors, but I won’t say that.”

At which point Zip, knowing full well that this bizarre gathering was being videotaped for the edification and amusement of his paymaster, leaned in close to the microphone and said, “No finer liquor store in the commonwealth.”

One by one the various connected federal and local cops trudged up to the microphone. Jack Cloherty, who had issued the statement clearing Billy in 75 State Street. Dennis Condon. City Councilor Dapper O’Neil, Zip’s old roommate Jack Kelly from the DEA, Eddie Walsh from the police department—all paid their respects, one after the other. Then came Dennis O’Callaghan, the number-two agent in the Boston office, who felt compelled to mention his family’s roots in County Cork. He read from the letter Boston Special Agent in Charge Thomas Hughes had sent to Boston Edison: “John Connolly’s service to the FBI was the essence of its motto: ‘Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity,’ and he will be missed.”

Then O’Callaghan mentioned Zip’s “loyalty to his roots in Southie, loyalty to his family and those who he calls friends.”

In less than four years, Zip would show his loyalty to those friends by getting O’Callaghan to warn him of Stevie’s and Whitey’s impending indictments. In the end, O’Callaghan presented him with a chair—“something for you to sit in and rock the children.”

Zip picked up the chair and stared at the bottom. It wasn’t a rocking chair.

Finally it was time for Zip to say a few words, and he concentrated his remarks on a predictable subject: the greatness of Billy Bulger.

“He is a special, special person,” Zip said. “He taught me the value of public service.”

He talked about “working” for Billy, and how “proud” he was to call him a friend. Then he decided to dust off one of Billy’s favorite Latin quotations, in English of course. This one came from the satirist Juvenal: “Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor and for the sake of life to lose what makes life worth having.”

Zip chose not to mention what is perhaps Juvenal’s most famous saying, which seemed even more appropriate for the gathering of these public officials in the back room of Joe Tecce’s.

“Who is to guard the guards themselves?”

CHAPTER 18

I
T WAS
1991,
AND
W
HITEY
’
S
criminal career was winding down. He would turn sixty-two in September and his cocaine rings had been busted up. But he was still the king of Southie. Easy rested the head that wore this crown—there was nobody coming up behind him the way he’d come up behind Donnie Killeen. Kevin Weeks was not a threat, nor was Kevin O’Neil, especially now that he’d ballooned to four hundred pounds. As for the rest of them—Red Shea, Eddie Mac, “Polecat” Moore, John Cherry—they hadn’t really been gangsters so much as they’d been ex-boxers and barroom brawlers who had become cocaine dealers. And now they were imprisoned cocaine dealers.

Everybody, it seemed, was in the can. Except for Whitey and Stevie.

Whitey hadn’t murdered anyone since Deborah Hussey in 1985. Since being released from Leavenworth in March 1965, he’d never gone that long without killing somebody. Now he carried a senior citizen discount card from the MBTA. He loved cable TV—he was a sucker for all those PBS and Discovery Channel specials on World War II. At the end of the episode, the announcer would mention a toll-free number to call if you wanted to order the video, and Whitey always did.

Money was not a problem, to say the least. In the late 1980s, when the cocaine money was flowing,
Boston
magazine estimated his net worth at $50 million.

There had been so much cash coming in that Whitey set up what he called an X fund, to handle payoffs and other emergency expenditures, such as bribes to FBI agents. By the late 1980s, the amount of cash in the X fund never dipped below $100,000.

Whitey had also come up with a way to establish a record of legitimate income, by continually flipping his properties. He’d “buy” one of Weeks’s lots or condos for $40,000, say, and then turn around and sell it on the same day to O’Neil, or Stevie’s mother, Mary Flemmi, for $400,000. He would give them a “mortgage,” and they’d pay off the note, monthly. It was the Bank of Whitey, and no one ever missed a payment. Three years after Whitey went on the lam, Kevin O’Neil was still dutifully depositing $4,600 a month in Whitey’s account at the South Boston Savings Bank. Mary Flemmi was particularly useful in Whitey and Stevie’s money-laundering schemes—the feds are always reluctant to hound someone’s mother, especially if she is over eighty.

O’Neil was important too. As the owner of record of Triple O’s, O’Neil was in a great position to launder cash, plus he had the nearby newsstand (with a Lottery license) as well as a number of tenants in the small apartments above the barroom. So if the Internal Revenue Service ever asked O’Neil how he was paying off those mortgages to the Bank of Whitey, he could show them a steady stream of income.

But by 1991, the newspapers had figured out that property-flip scam. Whitey needed a new way to show income.

Pat Linskey had long since moved out of Southie, to Hanover. Most people had forgotten his arrest, along with Kevin O’Neil, for the fatal stabbing of a black man on D Street back in 1968. In a 1970 trial, Linskey was acquitted, as was a third defendant, Tommy Nee, who later became a hitman and was eventually shot to death outside his West Broadway bar in 1986 in a dispute over $10. But Pat Linskey still hung out with Whitey.

The way the story was told later, at Christmas 1990 Linskey bought ten season’s tickets to Mass Millions. Nine of them, the losing ones, he gave to various family and friends. But the one that would turn out to be the $14.3 million winner he would later claim he just happened to give to his brother Michael one day when a bunch of the guys were all lounging around Rotary Variety.

And that, he said, was when they came up with the plan to split the dough if they got lucky.

Seven months later, in July 1991, the lucky 8-15-32-35-40-42 ticket hit. Michael Linskey posed for a front-page photo as he claimed his first installment. He took half the prize, and the three friends from Rotary Variety—Whitey, Kevin Weeks, and Michael’s brother Pat—split the other half.

Even if he could have taken a lump-sum payout, which wasn’t allowed under state Lottery regulations, Whitey would have opted for the twenty years of annual checks—$89,000 every July 1, after taxes. He wanted the paper trail. He could buy a lot of World War II videotapes every year with $89,000 per year, tax-free.

However he arranged it, Whitey ended up with a share of a $14.3 million jackpot. And what made it even sweeter was that it was also a major embarrassment for the new Republican treasurer, Joe Malone, one of whose duties was managing the Lottery Commission.

It also gave Whitey’s hagiographers at the
Globe
a chance to burnish the Bulgers’ increasingly tarnished reputations. Most of the reporters had long understood what Whitey was, but some columnists refused to concede that perhaps he wasn’t quite the Robin Hood they’d always portrayed him as. After he hit the Lottery, the gullible
Globe
columnist Mike Barnicle insisted that Whitey would likely now be handing out money to down-and-outers at St. Augustine’s, and then added that Whitey had nothing to do with Billy “other than saying ‘Pass the gravy’ during occasional Sunday dinners.” Another of the Bulger sycophants at the
Globe
recounted the old fable about how Whitey “has delivered... beatings to people accused of dealing drugs to Southie youths.”

The problem was, after the cocaine busts of 1990, nobody believed such half-baked fiction anymore. And now, by cashing in that winning Mass Millions ticket, Whitey had made himself national news.

He had become, for lack of a better term, a legend in his own time. And as the late crime novelist John D. MacDonald once observed, “People who become legends in their own time usually don’t have much time left.”

Until 1991, Whitey had always understood his limitations. He had remained in the background, a “squirrel,” as Frank Salemme called him. He had never tried to muscle into anything outside his own natural sphere of influence.

To claim his winnings, Whitey had traveled to Lottery headquarters in Braintree, where a surveillance camera scanned the lobby. Suddenly, every news organization in America had access to videotape or stills of him, in a white Red Sox cap, wearing sunglasses. Part of his mystique of menace had always been his inaccessibility. Grainy black-and-white police surveillance photos of him were few and far between. Only those who lived in Southie, or drove by the liquor store, had known what Whitey actually looked like. Now he was suddenly a celebrity.

Brand-new photos of Whitey ran at the top of the front page of
USA Today
. He was perhaps the nation’s second-best-known gangster, after John Gotti. Reading about Whitey’s Mass Millions score in
GQ
a few months later, Gotti grew so angry that he threw the magazine to the floor of his jail cell.

“That Irish puke,” Gotti said. “What the fuck is going on?” At the Justice Department in Washington, the same question was finally being asked, if in a more decorous fashion. The old wall that had protected Whitey for so many years was finally crumbling.

Two weeks after Whitey won Mass Millions, one of his boxers-turned-cocaine-dealer, Paul “Polecat” Moore, was sentenced to nine years and one month in prison. He had no intention of ratting out his boss. He was from Southie, after all, and he went way back with Whitey’s crew. Back in 1974, when Kevin O’Neil had been looking for a bouncer at Triple O’s, Polecat was the first guy he’d offered the job to. Polecat turned him down, Kevin Weeks got the job instead, and the rest was history—at least in Southie, which was the only place that mattered to Polecat.

During a recess at his trial, Moore was handed a subpoena to appear a week later before a federal grand jury investigating Whitey.

Polecat planned to keep his mouth shut. That way, Whitey would take care of his family. Or so he’d always been told.

The drug dealers had always been the ones Whitey had worried would flip. But they stood up, at least at first. They were frightened of Whitey—they were younger, by and large, and they’d grown up in Southie listening to the stories about how anyone who crossed Whitey disappeared, even women. The dealers didn’t have enough money to run away for long, and they were certainly savvy enough not to trust the cops.

But Whitey never figured he’d have a problem with the Jewish bookies. In the early 1990s, though, they started going down hard. A lot of them were laundering money through a bar in Chelsea under the Tobin Bridge. It was known as Heller’s Café. First the U.S. Attorney’s Office, working with the State Police rather than the FBI, went after the bookies, some of whom were paying Whitey and Stevie as much as $3,000 a month for protection. The feds raided their bank safe-deposit boxes, and in November 1992 eight of the Heller’s Café bookies were indicted on money-laundering charges. Several decided to cut deals and go into the Witness Protection Program, in return for which they had to spell out for a new federal grand jury how much “rent” they’d had to pay Whitey and Stevie over the years. A few of the bookies balked at rolling over, at least at first, but then the feds began denying them bail on the money-laundering charges, claiming they were in danger, which in fact they probably were. Speaking with them, Flemmi always mentioned the name “Barney Bloom”— a bookie whose murder in the 1970s remained unsolved.