Howie Carr (7 page)

The council had been around since colonial times, and consisted of eight members whose primary responsibility was confirming the governor’s judicial nominations, as well as his commutations and pardons. Their only real power was their ability to stop someone from getting something he had already paid someone else, either the governor or a legislator, to obtain. Therefore, in order to keep business, and payoffs, flowing smoothly, the governor needed to have a majority of the eight councilors permanently on his side. Whoever the governor was, Democrat or Republican, rogue or reformer, he would almost always be willing to toss a few bones their way—judgeships and clerkships, as well as the occasional pardon.

When Billy arrived at the State House, the governor’s councilors were making the real money rubber-stamping pardons. A couple of the councilors had even printed up what amounted to rate cards—a pardon for, say, manslaughter, naturally cost more than one for an armed robbery, with rapes the second most expensive pardon to purchase, behind only murder.

The prime shopping season for pardons was Christmas, because then they could be justified, or at least rationalized, as acts of Christian charity. The transactions took place in the lobby of the old Manger Hotel, next to the Boston Garden. In the lobby, several of the councilors stationed bagmen who would sit in the hotel’s overstuffed easy chairs, an open satchel beside them, into which the friends or relatives of convicted criminals would drop their cash-filled envelopes. In his day, Governor Jim Curley had called the council a “hock shop,” but it was worse than that.

In 1961, the longest-serving member of the Governor’s Council was from Billy’s own district. Patrick “Sonny” McDonough was an old-time rogue who in many ways was the original Billy Bulger, both in personality and style.

Sonny, who was not related to Will McDonough, was fifty when Billy arrived at the State House in 1961. After a lifetime of watching the Curleys and the McCormacks, among so many others, Sonny had many theories about how to make a buck, and he wasn’t shy about sharing them with his protégés, Billy among them.

For instance, Sonny detested cops, and suggested to his younger associates that they never use anyone with a badge as a bagman.

“I hate it when a cop gives me $300, because I never know if he’s stolen $200 or $700,” he would tell the younger pols in a reflective moment. “The problem with cops is, they think whatever they get is theirs.”

Whitey, meanwhile, was doing hard time in the federal prison system. After his conviction in 1956, his first stop was at the Atlanta penitentiary, and it was there that he met Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, a professor at the Emory University medical school who was conducting experiments with a new drug—LSD.

It was 1957, long before Dr. Timothy Leary urged young people to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” Ken Kesey’s electric Kool-Aid acid tests were still seven years in the future. Few had even heard of the drug when Dr. Pfeiffer began looking for volunteers at the local federal penitentiary.

“We were recruited by deception,” Whitey began in the handwritten notes he left behind when he fled Boston in 1994. “We were encouraged to volunteer to be human guinea pigs in a noble humanitarian cause—searching for a cure for schizophrenia. We were told that they could induce all the symptoms of schizophrenia by a chemical LSD-25...

“I was serving a twenty year sentence and was motivated by a desire for some kind of a reduction of sentence—3 days off my sentence for each month of participation—also I was a believer in the government to the degree they would never take advantage of us and also felt that I would be giving something back to society.

“Once a week we checked into the so-called Nuero [
sic
] Psychiatric Ward—a large room with bars + steel locked door in [the] basement of the prison hospital...we were given the LSD in varying dosage—some times light some times massive that would plunge us into the depths of insanity and followed by periods of deep depression suicidal thought and nightmares and interrupted sleep.”

Now Whitey was positioning himself as the victim of a mad scientist during a white, psychedelic version of the Tuskegee Project.

“Two men [who] went insane on the project were carried down the hall to a strip cell shipped to Springfield Mo and placed in the wing of the criminally insane.”

Billy writes in his memoir that he and his father visited Whitey at least once in Atlanta and then again when Whitey was transferred to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He recalled Whitey’s contempt for the correctional officers.

“You have to score very high in the stupidity test to be a guard in this place,” Whitey told his brother.

But they were apparently smart enough to catch Whitey with what Billy described as “contraband of some sort,” and in 1959, Whitey was shipped west to “the Rock.”

In his early “acclimatizing” years, as Billy called them, he made few ripples at the State House. In his first term, he was the third youngest of the 240 members. By 1961, the Democrats’ majority, expanding by a few seats each term, had risen to 153–87. On average, the Republican members were perhaps ten to fifteen years older than their Democratic counterparts. Those who weren’t being picked off were dying off.

The legislature was also in transition from its tradition of part-time service—in many outlying communities, it had long been considered a sacrifice of sorts to serve a term or two in Boston. Now it was becoming a lucrative, full-time career, at least for those in the leadership, who controlled the flow of legislation to the floor. In 1961, though, no one would have thought to list their “profession” as legislator, as so many do now. The 1961–62 “bird book” of Massachusetts politics—the collection of photos and résumés of all the members of the legislature—includes as occupations of the House membership funeral director (6), firefighter (4), farmer (3), housewife (2), foreman (2), and one each of the following: factory worker, bowling alley manager, dentist, and barber.

In May 1961, Billy graduated from Boston College Law School, shortly after his wife, Mary, gave birth to their first child, a son, Billy Jr., on April 3. Between preparing for the bar exam and helping Mary with the baby, Billy wasn’t much for the Beacon Hill nightlife. And for an ambitious young state rep, that was a problem, because the quickest way to rise in the House was to become a drinking buddy of the House speaker, John Forbes Thompson of Ludlow, known as “the Iron Duke.” Only forty, he had been in the legislature since 1949, and legend had it that he’d never taken a drink until he arrived at the State House. He had been wounded in World War II, and many were willing to overlook his increasing dependence on alcohol because of the shrapnel that he still reportedly carried in his body. By 1961, though, the booze was his crutch, a way of life, a disease.

“He wasn’t a bully,” Billy wrote of the Iron Duke. “In fact, he was kind when he thought about it. But he rarely thought about much beyond his next drink. He was at best a spectator, in charge of nothing—least of all himself.”

A backbencher, Billy saw himself going nowhere in such a dysfunctional legislature. He blamed his problems on the speaker, who spent his evenings carousing through the North End, promising jobs at the State House to waiters and bartenders. The next morning they would show up at the speaker’s office asking when they could start work. Not remembering anything about the previous evening, the Iron Duke never turned any of them away, and the number of “court officers”— door openers—continued to swell, leading future congressman Barney Frank to remark that the State House had to be the only building in the world with more door openers than doors.

Whitey’s inmate number at Alcatraz was 1428. His initial psychological evaluation described him as “very self-centered in all he does and [he] has never developed any social responsibility.”

Whitey’s three years at Alcatraz would become another topic that in later years he would never tire of bringing up. He would discuss the Rock endlessly, with whoever would listen. There were no educational classes, no rehabilitation. Inmates saw two movies per month. It was not a happy time for Whitey.

“After I left Atlanta and arrived in Alcatraz,” he wrote in his journal, “I realized I still had LSD problems—visual hallucinations and audio hallucinations—I never mentioned it to the officials or doctor—at that point I feared they may permanently commit me to a mental institution.”

Whitey did his time on the Rock in its final days—only 148 more prisoners’ names appear on the Alcatraz roster after his. His closest friend was a Native American from Oklahoma— Clarence Carnes, better known as “the Choctaw Kid.” A couple of years older than Whitey, he’d been at Alcatraz since age eighteen, the youngest prisoner ever sent to the Rock, after his conviction on murder and kidnapping charges.

As Whitey arrived at Alcatraz in 1959, the Choctaw Kid, then thirty-two, had spent almost half his life on the Rock. In later years, Whitey told stories of a prison of unimaginable horrors, and thirty years later, at the Choctaw Kid’s funeral, which he paid for, Whitey would say Carnes had saved his life.

Another of his Alcatraz pals was John Joseph O’Brien, a bank robber from Chicago with whom he had much in common. They were the same age, and both came from urban Irish political families—O’Brien’s brother became a Cook County judge. But there was, however, one major difference between Whitey and O’Brien. To protect his family’s good name, O’Brien quickly changed his name—he became known as “Barney Grogan.” His fellow inmates called him “Dirty Shirt.”

Whitey often talked about the racial tensions at Alcatraz. The blacks were segregated in Block B, and were not allowed in the shower room at the same time as the white prisoners. One day in the late 1970s, as Whitey chatted with some of his gangland associates in a restaurant in Boston, the talk turned to a state prison, MCI-Norfolk. One of Whitey’s acquaintances at the table mentioned how “tough” he thought MCI-Norfolk was.

Whitey chuckled. “You think Norfolk’s tough? I’ll tell you what was tough. Alcatraz was tough.”

Then he recounted a story about how one time a hulking black inmate had started making sexual advances to a smaller white con, sidling up behind him and telling him in graphic detail how he planned to rape him. Terrified, the white guy fashioned a scythe-type weapon in the prison shop, which he smuggled back to his cell. A couple of nights later, just before evening lockdown, the white con hid at the top of a stairwell that he knew the black inmate would soon climb.

As Whitey told it, when the black guy reached the top of the stairs, the white inmate stepped out of the shadows and swung his scythe at the black man’s neck and took off his head. The inmates listened in their cells as the head bounced down the stairs one step at a time like a bowling ball.

Solitary at Alcatraz in the Treatment Unit—TU—was another of Whitey’s favorite topics. He would tell the same stories time and again, until the eyes of his closest associates, Stevie Flemmi and Kevin Weeks, would begin to roll as he began another recounting of how the screws would strip you to your underwear and leave you in the unheated steel boxes. It wasn’t called “the cooler” for nothing. In the winter the temperature often dipped under 50 degrees and everyone soon learned to sit in such a way as to minimize bodily contact with the steel.

Whitey Thompson, another former inmate of the Rock, described Alcatraz as “the land of forgotten men,” and that was surely the way it seemed to Whitey. His father was dying, his brother had a growing family, and instead of being less than four hundred miles from Boston, as he’d been in Lewisburg, he was now more than three thousand miles away.

Billy passed the bar exam in the summer of 1961, and joined his old friend Tom Finnerty in a two-man firm at 41 Tremont Street in downtown Boston, just down Beacon Hill from the State House. Naturally much of his work involved cases at South Boston District Court, where Sonny McDonough controlled everything. In his memoirs, Billy paints a rosy, nostalgic glow on those days, with enough avuncular judges, nipping janitors, and inept burglars to populate a John Ford movie.

Nineteen sixty-two was shaping up as a big year in Massachusetts politics. In June, in response to the increasing public outcry about corruption in state government, the legislature reluctantly passed a bill establishing the Massachusetts Crime Commission, with subpoena power to conduct closed, grand-jury-like proceedings. The commission’s chairman was an old Yankee Republican lawyer from the North Shore, whom Sonny McDonough immediately dubbed “a poor man’s Cotton Mather.”

The bigger story, though, was the impending election to fill JFK’s old Senate seat. In most years, state Attorney General Eddie McCormack would have seemed a heavy favorite. But in 1962, the president’s youngest brother, Ted, age twenty-nine, was running for the seat, with the blessing of the White House.

Billy, though, would side with Eddie McCormack. He owed the McCormacks. It wasn’t just the fact that Eddie’s father, Knocko, had passed out the snow buttons to him when he was a kid, or that they were all from Southie. In the six years that Whitey had been in federal prison, Eddie’s uncle, U.S. House Speaker John McCormack, had watched out for him. In his book, Billy described the speaker as the family’s sole source of information about Whitey’s life in prison. As first the House majority leader, and then speaker, McCormack’s inquiries to the Bureau of Prisons were always answered promptly, and McCormack would relay the information back to an increasingly despondent James Bulger Sr., assuring the old man that his eldest son might someday change his ways, if only he could catch a break. McCormack was also close to J. Edgar Hoover, and when the FBI director spoke, Washington listened.

In short, the speaker had been there for the Bulgers, and now the Bulgers, or at least Billy, would be there for his nephew Eddie. The Kennedys understood, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t make a run at Billy. The approach would be made through Gerry Doherty of Charlestown, another young Boston state rep. Teddy wanted to sit down with him, Doherty told Billy, at Locke-Ober’s, by far the most expensive restaurant in Boston.