Howie Carr (34 page)

“And now Bill this bonus is on me / Your winning ticket to the Lottery. / You’re going to be a millionaire, there is no doubt / For I had your brother pick these numbers out.”

Billy was beside himself with glee. “He’s a great sport, isn’t he?” he told the crowd.

Six months later, on September 17, more than twenty million Americans watched Morley Safer’s
60 Minutes
piece on Billy. It made
The New Yorker
story look like hard-hitting journalism.

“In this age of gray, faceless men, it’s just plain fun to have a leader with blood in his veins,” the elderly Canadian correspondent intoned. “Billy Bulger almost defines Boston Irish. His district is South Boston, the home of the legendary boss politician, James Michael Curley, whose spirit is alive and well in Bulger.”

Except that Curley was from Roxbury, not Southie. Whitey’s name was ever so briefly invoked, so that Billy could say, “He’s my brother. I care about him. I encourage him to come by all the time.”

Safer fell back on the oldest of clichés, the good brother and the bad, the good one “always with a song in his heart and on his lips, and, yet true or not, a shadow of menace.”

Menace, from Billy? It was clear Morley Safer was having none of it, and that was the message he conveyed to the viewers. The ogre of the 1990 campaign had almost totally reinvented himself, for a national, if not local, audience, as a lovable leprechaun.

Billy basked in his national exposure. And election night 1992 would be even sweeter, almost as much of a vindication as 1990 had been a repudiation. Bill Clinton’s victory in the presidential election meant little to Billy. What did matter was that five Republican state senators were defeated, and Governor Weld lost his power to sustain a veto. The 1990 Senate Republicans were reformers, and as Billy always said, reformers never came back. The Senate once again belonged to Billy Bulger.

By 1993, it had become clear to the junior members of the Senate that, in his fifteenth year as president, Billy was staying put. The old saying was “Up or out,” but until there was an “up” for Billy, there would be no “out.”

Once again, Billy was trying to expand his influence. When Mayor Ray Flynn quit City Hall to become ambassador to the Vatican, a special election was scheduled to replace him. Billy quickly mobilized his troops behind Representative Jimmy Brett of Dorchester, the husband of his longtime secretary, Patricia Brett.

Brett made it to the runoff, but in the final couldn’t overcome Tom Menino, who as the president of the City Council had become acting mayor after Flynn’s departure. But the fact that Billy had been able to muscle his lightweight candidate into the final meant that he wasn’t quite dead yet.

Many younger Democratic politicians were growing concerned that with the governorship gone, and the two U.S. senators less than attentive to state politics, the face of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts had become William M. Bulger.

Any Democrat who ran for governor from now on could— and would—be portrayed as a tool, not just of Bulger, but of “the Bulgers,” which was to say, organized crime. The Democrats would remain in control of the legislature, but the Corner Office seemed out of reach until someone could rid them of that diminutive ward-heeler, Billy Bulger. For the good of them all, someone would have to wrest the Senate presidency away from him.

That thankless task would eventually fall to Senator Bill Keating of Sharon. Keating was not someone anyone would have picked as a future rival of the Senate president. But it was 1993, and the natives were restless. Billy understood that any legislative leader who wishes to survive must preserve at least an illusion of upward mobility for his members. If the rank-and-file legislator sees no future for himself in the status quo, he is more likely to willingly participate in any uprising against the leadership.

Everyone in the Senate now knew that Billy had nowhere to go, and that until he found himself a parachute, preferably of the golden variety, he wasn’t leaving. To survive, Billy would have to start easing out his more ambitious members, among them Bill Keating. Billy had passed him over for the chair-manship of Ways and Means, picking instead Tom Birmingham, Billy’s obvious heir apparent. Soon after Birmingham got Ways and Means, a court officer approached Keating and told him “the president” wished to see him in his office. Keating dutifully appeared.

“How’d you like to be a judge?” Billy asked him.

“I’m too young to be a judge,” Keating said.

“I don’t think so.”

After turning down the judgeship, Keating knew he was finished in Billy’s Senate, which gave him a new freedom. One day in the spring of 1993, in the Senate chamber in front of the podium, he goaded Billy. He began talking about his old pal from the House, Mayor Ray Flynn, who was about to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the next ambassador to the Vatican. Keating went on, in loud terms, about what a great guy Hizzoner was. Finally Billy handed the gavel to one of his underlings and stalked off the rostrum, steaming. A few minutes later, a court officer told Keating the president wanted to see him.

Keating was ushered into Billy’s office. This time, Morley Safer wouldn’t have recognized “the little Irishman from South Boston.” Billy was pacing the floor of his exquisitely carpeted office. Finally he looked up at Keating.

“That Flynn is not a good person, you know.”

“I know Ray a long time,” Keating said, using the present tense, relishing the chance to give Billy the needle. “I know him since before I was even a state rep. You know where I first met him?”

Billy inhaled and looked at Keating truculently. He had no interest in how or where Keating and Flynn met, and Keating knew it.

“I met him at this bar in Savin Hill,” he said. “Maybe you heard of it—the Bulldog Tavern.”

Of course Billy had heard of the Bulldog Tavern. It was in his district.

“Yeah,” Keating continued, “I’m in the Bulldog, and so’s Ray, and this guy I know, he introduces us. You know who that guy was?”

Billy must have known by now where this story was going, but it still seemed inconceivable that someone would dare trifle with him like this.

“It was Eddie Connors.” The same Eddie Connors that Whitey and Stevie had machine-gunned in the phone booth on Morrissey Boulevard in 1975. Eddie Connors, partner of Suitcase Fidler, for whom Tom Birmingham’s father had committed welfare fraud. Billy knew very well who Eddie Connors was. It was verboten to mention Whitey or his crimes in Billy’s presence, and Keating had done it, in a backhanded way no less, with a smirk on his face. Bill Keating paused a beat to let it all sink in.

“Yeah, Mr. President,” he said. “It was poor Eddie Connors introduced me to Ray Flynn. You remember Eddie Connors, Mr. President?”

Now it was war.

The “insurrection,” as Billy called it, began October 26, a week or so before Tom Menino crushed Bulger’s man Jim Brett in the mayoral race. To run his campaign, Keating hired Michael Goldman, who’d handled George Keverian’s successful insurgency against House Speaker Tommy McGee in 1984.

The rap on Keating’s challenge was that he had no real rationale for his campaign other than his desire to take control of the Senate. But what was never articulated quite so bluntly was that Billy had no real rationale for wanting to maintain control, other than the fact that he had nowhere else to go.

Keating rented a room down the hill at the Parker House for his announcement, and if he needed an indication of how the battle would be waged, he immediately got it. Fifteen minutes before his scheduled announcement, someone phoned in a bomb threat to the hotel.

The eleven-month battle for the Senate presidency never quite developed into a major statewide campaign, but as it began, no one could know it would be a nonstarter. Tension was palpable in the State House corridors. At one point in the fall of 1993, a Bulger senator, Bob Durand of Marlboro, confronted one of Keating’s band.

“Why?” Durand reportedly said. “Why? Why did you have to make this a Bulger-Keating thing?”

The Keating guy was puzzled. “What’s wrong with that?” “Don’t you understand?” Durand said. “I’m with Bulger!” There were advantages, though, to being with Bulger. Now that the redistricting of the congressional seats was done, it was time for the legislative redistricting. All of Billy’s supporters in the Democratic caucus ended up in impregnable districts, while Keating’s supporters suddenly found themselves representing much more problematical constituencies.

The most blatant gerrymandering was of Keating’s own district. He lost two of the towns where he was best known— Norwood and Canton—and several GOP communities were added to his district, to weaken him and to strengthen the pro-Bulger Democratic senator who was shedding them. GOP Senate leader Brian Lees told Keating he now represented the most Republican Senate district in Massachusetts. It slithered south to the Rhode Island border—to get to Norton, Keating actually had to drive through Rhode Island.

Keating quickly came to believe that he was under surveillance at all times. A new trash pickup crew appeared at the State House. One night, just to test his suspicions, he scrawled the name of a former state rep on a pink While-U-Were-Out telephone message sheet, then wrote under his name, “WILL RUN!” Keating then tossed the slip into his office wastebasket and left for the evening. The next day, the relatives of the state rep called Keating, asking why they were getting calls about their father, who, as Keating well knew, had been dead for several years.

He also assumed his phone was tapped. As the months wore on, the tapped phones became a running joke in Keating’s campaign. One day, he and his campaign manager Goldman decided to send them on a wild-goose chase. They began discussing how they hoped Bulger would never find out about “that case” out in Hampden Probate Court. Was it public record? Goldman inquired, in a whisper. Yes, said Keating, that was what made it so potentially damaging. All somebody had to do was drive out to Springfield and dig through the records and they’d find—here he made up a name—and that would be the end of his campaign. Keating always assumed someone had been ordered to make a pointless two-hour trip out to Springfield.

At one point, the dissidents scheduled a bus tour of various newspaper editorial boards in the hinterlands. At 5:30 a.m., just before they left, Senator Lois Pines of Newton remembered something she had left behind in her office. She turned the key and opened the door and found a young man going through her desk. He said he was there to work on the “plumbing,” and then quickly ran out the door.

One day, Keating got a telephone call from a reporter who said “unnamed sources” had told him that Keating’s son had been arrested for beating his wife. At the time, Keating’s son was three years old.

Billy and his allies did a masterful job of keeping Keating off balance. They hit him everywhere, even on the op-ed page of the
Globe
. Two of the most ardent pro-Bulger columnists were former President George H. W. Bush’s nephew, and a black writer who in one piece quoted at length from a black “community leader,” without mentioning that the leader worked for Jackie Bulger in the Juvenile Court, making almost $1,000 a week.

Inside the building, Bulger and his allies harassed Keating whichever way he turned. He would come under withering personal fire in the Senate’s Democratic caucus, which was closed to the press, and supposedly off the record. Calls would be made to all the Democratic members in the morning, and they would “caucus” in Bulger’s office before the regular, open session began. One or another of the Bulger regulars would tee off on Keating, for something that had appeared in a suburban newspaper, or an offhand comment made on a radio talk show.

Bulger would listen impassively, as though he were an independent arbiter. Finally, as the Bulger loyalist sat back down, he would turn to Keating and demand: “Well, what do you say to that?”

One morning, Keating stood up and yelled at the tormentor, “Don’t you understand—I’m not the threat to you.” He pointed at Bulger. “He is. He’s the one who’s going to cost you your seat.”

As the fight went on, Bulger spent more time with his undersized aide Eddie Phillips, a licensed private detective. Phillips was one of the few people anywhere who could understand Billy’s obsession with his height, which seemed to bother him more than ever during the “insurrection.” One day, Billy bumped into the owner of a local talk radio station. Billy asked about one of the station’s hosts, who continually described him as “sixty-five inches tall” and insisted on referring to him as the Corrupt Midget.

“I don’t mind corrupt,” Billy said, “but can’t you make him stop calling me a midget?”

In addition to pummeling Keating, the Bulger forces also went after his campaign manager, Michael Goldman. The usual code words were trotted out once more. By various senators across the state, Goldman was described as “a master manipulator...mercenary... greedy... voice from the shadows.” He had a “profit-making agenda.” In one newspaper, a senator referred to him as “an ambitious puppeteer manipulating reform senators who have chosen to surrender their votes and consciences to Goldman’s control.”

By the summer of 1994, it was clear that Keating’s challenge was doomed, and Billy began to relax. The surest sign that it was all over came in Milton a week before the primary election, when he joked about Whitey in a speech sponsored by the Milton Town Club.

“Next month,” he said, “no one play the Lottery. I hear my brother is going to win again.”

On primary day 1994, Billy voted early at St. Brigid’s, then met former mayor Kevin White for a walk around the Public Garden. That evening, he dined at Amrhein’s on West Broadway with his son Billy Jr.—two years from now, God willing, it would be a different William M. Bulger running unopposed in the First Suffolk District.

By ten, the results were in. Not a single one of Keating’s challengers had ousted a Bulger loyalist. Billy Bulger was the once and future Senate president.

Two months later on election day 1994, Bill Keating just wanted to hang on to his own Senate seat, not that he would have much trouble with Chris Lane, the former one-term Republican senator who had been personally recruited by Governor Weld to run against Keating. Still, Keating felt he had to show the flag in the Republican-leaning towns of his new district.