Howie Carr

by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century

  The cops would also find his diaries. He’d begun putting his thoughts down on paper a lot just before he left. He would sit at the kitchen table in his condo in Quincy, where he’d replaced the sliding glass door that led to his back patio with a bulletproof steel plate. Night after night, he’d write in his old-fashioned Palmer-style longhand about the LSD experiments he’d taken part in while in prison in Atlanta in the late 1950s.

  “It’s 3 a.m. and years later, I’m still effected [sic] by L.S.D. in that I fear sleep—the horrible nightmares that I fight to escape by waking, the taste of adrenalin[e], gasping for breath. Often I’m woken by a scream and find it’s me screaming. I later read while still in prison that LSD can cause chromosome damage and birth defects—that one article determined for me that having children was too risky.”

  Would a jury buy it? That Whitey Bulger cared about children? Whitey hoped he never had to find out.

  It was late afternoon, and as he drove toward downtown Boston, the Christmas lights twinkled in the projects and the three-decker houses of South Boston where he’d spent his entire life, except for a few years in the air force, and later almost a decade in federal prison, in Lewisburg, Atlanta, Leavenworth, and Alcatraz.

  About to be indicted again, for the first time in thirty-eight years, Whitey would disappear, until he could put the fix in, the way he always had. Something always seemed to happen when the law got too close to Whitey—wiretaps would be compromised, bugs discovered. Cops hot on his trail would find themselves demoted or transferred. Witnesses would disappear, or recant, or forget. Or Whitey would receive a phone call moments before the police raided a warehouse stuffed with marijuana that just happened not to be under his protection.

  Surely something could be worked out this time too. And if not, “Tom Baxter” would enjoy his golden years, another retired gentleman on the road with his lady friend.

  Beside him in the front seat of the Grand Marquis was his most trusted underling, Kevin Weeks, age thirty-seven. Weeks had been with Whitey almost from the day he graduated high school in 1974. Like all of Whitey’s closest associates, Weeks called him “Jim.” Over the years he’d helped Whitey plan his eventual flight. They had beepers, and code words, and now Kevin would be Whitey’s eyes and ears in the Town, as they referred to South Boston.

  In the back seat sat Theresa Stanley. At fifty-seven, she was the oldest of Whitey’s girlfriends, and she preferred a more traditional, lace-curtain Irish phrase to describe their relationship. She “went with him,” and had since 1965 when he was a thirty-six-year-old ex-con, fresh out of Leavenworth, and she was a single mother of four young children.

  Theresa had been looking forward to Christmas this year. She and Whitey had just returned to Boston after a lengthy trip to Europe, a dry run for the journey they were about to embark upon. Whitey had made good use of his time, renting safe-deposit boxes in banks in Dublin, London, and Venice, before they finally returned home, at Theresa’s behest, after Thanksgiving.

  On this day, Whitey and Theresa had been planning to drive to Copley Square and finish their Christmas shopping at Neiman Marcus. But around 4:00 p.m., dusk on one of the shortest days of the year, Kevin Weeks had beeped Whitey and asked where he was.

  “Theresa’s,” Whitey said. “We’re just going out.”

  “We need to talk,” Kevin Weeks said. This was one of Whitey’s rules: Never talk on the phone if you didn’t have to, and if you had to, always keep it vague.

  Weeks had gotten a tip from John Connolly—“Zip,” as Whitey called him—about an hour earlier. Zip, a retired FBI agent who’d been raised in the same public housing project as the Bulgers, had been feeding Whitey information for years— about informants, indictments, investigations, and wiretaps. And now, in addition to his FBI pension, Zip had a six-figure job at Boston Edison, compliments of Billy, Zip would always tell his friends while he and Billy both denied it publicly.

  Five minutes after Weeks’s call, Whitey’s Grand Marquis pulled up in front of the South Boston Liquor Mart at the rotary on Old Colony Avenue, the gang’s headquarters for the last decade or so.

  Weeks hopped in, but said nothing. That was another one of the rules. You didn’t talk in the car, not since the Drug Enforcement Administration had put the new door on Whitey’s car back in 1985 as part of Operation Beans. It had been yet another attempt to bring down Whitey that had failed after he received a propitiously timed tip.

  At sixty-five, Whitey was not the stereotypical elderly driver. Years later, on the witness stand, Weeks was asked how they could get from South Boston to the Back Bay so quickly during rush hour two days before Christmas. Could Whitey make cars magically move and disappear?

  “Jim Bulger could make a lot of things magically move and disappear.”

  Whitey pulled the Mercury into the tow zone in front of Neiman Marcus. Then all three of them—Whitey, Kevin, and Theresa—got out of the car and Whitey told Theresa he’d be right with her. She waited at the entrance to Neiman Marcus, eyeing them nervously, as Kevin Weeks passed on the information he’d received from Connolly, that the indictments had come down, that they were sealed, and that the feds were planning to round up everybody over the holidays—including Whitey, his partner Stevie Flemmi, and Frank Salemme, the boss of the local Mafia.

  “Have you told Stevie yet?” Whitey asked.

  “I haven’t seen him,” Weeks said.

  “Make sure you tell Stevie.”

  Whitey called Theresa back over to the car and told her, “We’re going away again.”

  Their first night on the road, Whitey and Theresa checked into a hotel in Selden, Long Island. They would be visiting a cousin of Kevin Weeks’s named Nadine, and her husband. Later Nadine and her husband would tell the FBI that they had no idea that they were entertaining a powerful, well-connected mobster. To them, they said, he was just Tom Baxter.

  Theresa and “Tom” stayed in Selden for four days, then drove to New Orleans for New Year’s, where Whitey registered at a French Quarter hotel using his real name. No need to become “Tom Baxter” if this was all just a false alarm. By January 5, almost two weeks had passed since Whitey had been warned about the indictments, and still nothing had happened. Whitey told Theresa they were going home.

  That night Stevie Flemmi pulled away from Schooner’s, his son’s new restaurant in Quincy Market, with his latest girlfriend, an attractive Asian thirty-five years his junior. Two Crown Vics cut Flemmi’s car off and blocked its escape.

  A DEA agent dragged Stevie out of the car and put a gun to his head.

  “What is this?” Stevie said in disgust. “A grandstand play?” A few minutes later, Stevie’s younger brother, Michael, a Boston cop, walked quickly into the L Street Tavern, which would soon become famous in the movie Good Will Hunting. Officer Flemmi saw Kevin Weeks playing cards at a table and asked him if he could have a word with him outside. Weeks threw in his hand, grabbed his coat, and walked outside with Flemmi. The cop told him about his brother’s arrest, and Weeks quickly paged Whitey. As usual, Whitey was one step ahead.

  “I just heard it on the radio,” Whitey said. “I’m turning around.”

  This time they drove back to Manhattan, where he and Theresa checked into a hotel and Whitey spent the night thinking things over. In the morning they headed west, driving aimlessly—the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, San Francisco—two aging tourists with an old-fashioned reliance on cash, rather than credit cards. Two weeks later Theresa Stanley told Whitey she’d had enough. She wanted to go home. Or so she testified later.

  Whitey drove to Clearwater, Florida, withdrew his “Tom Baxter” documents from yet another safe-deposit box, and drove back to Selden. There “Tom Baxter” traded in his old Grand Marquis for a new one. He needed a new traveling companion too, and he had one in mind. Her name was Catherine Greig, age forty-two, and he’d had her on the string for close to twenty years. She was a twin, divorced from a Boston fire-fighter, an old-time Southie broad like Theresa who knew
better than to ask questions, even about her ex-brother-in-law, whom Whitey had murdered twenty years earlier and buried on Tenean Beach in Dorchester.

  The feds knew who Catherine Greig was. They’d tapped her phone at least once. They had surveillance shots of her and Whitey, walking her two black miniature poodles, Nikki and Gigi. Whitey was always complaining about those damn dogs, even though he had taken them to obedience school in Clearwater. Kevin Weeks had made it clear to her that she could not bring them along. Not on this trip.

  But “Tom Baxter” and Theresa would spend one final night together. On their way back to Boston, they checked into a hotel in downtown Manhattan, and in the room, Whitey turned on one of his favorite shows—America’s Most Wanted. He watched, silently, as John Walsh introduced him as the Fugitive of the Week, and ran the blurry 1991 surveillance video of himself at the Massachusetts State Lottery Commission headquarters in Braintree.

  The pictures were almost four years old now. Whitey was wearing sunglasses and a white Red Sox cap as he claimed his “share” of a $14.3 million Mass Millions ticket that he had received under murky circumstances.

  At the time, strolling into Lottery headquarters had seemed like a lark, but now Whitey saw it for the hubris that it was. For the first time, the cops had video of him. Not that it would matter much—during the next nine years, America’s Most Wanted would feature Whitey twelve times, to no avail.

  The next day, Whitey and Theresa returned to Massachusetts. Just after dark, he pulled into a restaurant parking lot in Hingham.

  As Theresa got out of the car, Whitey told her he was headed for Fields Corner in Dorchester, to meet Kevin Weeks. In fact he was about to drive to Malibu Beach, where Kevin Weeks would deliver Catherine Greig to him.

  As for Theresa, she had some nice diamond jewelry she could hock, if times got tough. Or she could go back to being a banquet waitress, if her varicose veins didn’t act up. Sooner or later, Whitey knew, the cops would come calling, and she’d give up “Tom Baxter.” But then she’d feel guilty, and call Kevin, and Kevin would beep him. With any luck, all this would be straightened out by then, and if it wasn’t, he would have a new alias, or two, or three. For that, he was counting on his old friends from Alcatraz.

  But right now, he wanted to talk to his brother Billy. In case the feds already had a pen register on Billy’s phone, they would use Eddie Phillips’s house in Quincy. Eddie worked for Billy at the State House, and the joke was that his most important qualification was that he was one of the few guys in the building shorter than Billy.

  Once Whitey talked to Billy, he could get back on the road. Whitey wanted to drive and drive and drive. That’s what he’d done when he’d gone on the lam in 1955, and that was still the plan. A year later, when the feds recovered “Tom Baxter’s” Grand Marquis, in Yonkers, New York, it would have 65,000 miles on its odometer.

  Whitey watched as Theresa got out of the car in front of the restaurant in Hingham, clutching her single suitcase.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  She never saw him again.

  Nine years later, his brother Billy was still being questioned, under oath, about the phone call, by one of the few congressmen of either party on the committee who seemed even slightly sympathetic, Representative Henry Waxman of Los Angeles.

  “Where were you,” Waxman asked Billy, “when you received the telephone call from James Bulger?” He pronounced the last name incorrectly, as “Bul-gar,” rather than “Bul-ger,” with a soft g.

  “I was in a friend’s, an, an employee’s home,” he said. “I was asked where I would be and I received a call there.”

  Waxman: “Who asked you where you would be?”

  “I don’t have a specific recollection,” he said. “But the only person it possibly would have been would be his friend, Kevin Weeks.”

  His ex-friend, now. Weeks had been arrested, finally, in 1999. After less than a month in the federal holding pen in Central Falls, Rhode Island, he had flipped. Overnight his nickname in Southie went from “Kevin Squeaks” to “Two Weeks.”

  All-powerful a decade earlier, the Bulger gang had scattered to the winds—they were either dead, in prison, on the lam, or under house arrest. Even the youngest Bulger brother, Jackie, had just pleaded guilty to federal perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges involving Whitey’s safe-deposit box in Clearwater, Florida. The conviction cost Jackie four months in prison and, at least temporarily, his $3,778-a-month state pension.

  Zip Connolly, the Bulger family’s personal FBI agent, was in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky, until June 2011, unless, perhaps, he could serve up someone else, the way Kevin Weeks had delivered Connolly with his testimony in U.S. District Court.

  Now Dan Burton was asking Billy what he discussed with his brother, the serial killer. Billy’s response was gibberish.

  “I’m his brother,” Billy said. “He sought to call me. Or he sought to call me and I told his friend where I’d be and I received the call and it seems to me, um, that is in no way inconsistent with my devotion to my own responsibilities, my public responsibilities as a, well, at that time, uh, president of the Senate. I believe that I have always taken those as my first, my first obligation.”

  Burton asked Billy if he had offered Whitey any advice. “My brother’s an older brother,” Billy said. “He doesn’t—he didn’t—come to me looking for advice.”

  Four Massachusetts congressmen watched anxiously, awaiting their turns to question Billy. Not so long ago, when he had controlled congressional redistricting, many of these same politicians had flattered him, attending his St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts and laughing at his ancient jokes, donating more than generously to his campaign committee. Now they couldn’t wait to throw him overboard.

  Representative Marty Meehan of Lowell took the microphone now. Before Marty had first run for Congress he had been solicitous enough of Billy’s blessing to arrange a formal introduction from one of Billy’s dearest friends, a lobbyist. Like everyone else on Beacon Hill, Meehan had considered it imperative to have the imprimatur of Mr. President before he embarked on any endeavor, political or otherwise.

  Not that any of that mattered now. Meehan was ambitious, he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate someday, and as a former prosecutor he knew how to draw blood. He asked Billy about the proximity of his house to the Flemmi residence, which the feds had lately taken to calling a “clubhouse” for Whitey’s Winter Hill Gang.

  “How much distance,” Meehan asked, “is there between your house and the Flemmis’?”

  “Perhaps from here to the first desk.” About fifteen feet, in other words.

  “Nothing ever looked suspicious over there?”

  “No.”

  “You’re aware Debra Davis was murdered next door?”

  “Yes.” Debra Davis, one of Stevie’s girlfriends, had been twenty-six when Whitey strangled her.

  Next up was John Tierney, from the North Shore of Massachusetts. He had more questions about Zip Connolly.

  “Did you encourage Connolly to attend Boston College?” There was a pause, followed by a sigh. “I may have,” Billy said. “I honestly don’t recall. I would, um, I was a little older of course and Connolly would be, uh, around, and I, I could very well have.”

  Tierney: “Did you write a letter of recommendation for him to attend graduate school?”

  “I don’t believe so.” Then Billy’s lawyer leaned over and whispered something in his ear.

  “Oh,” Billy said, nodding. “About the Kennedy School of Government, I am reminded I think I did send a letter over to the Kennedy School.”

  Tierney: “Mr. Connolly worked on some of your campaigns?”

  “I believe he probably did.”

  The committee counsel brought up the subject of one of Whitey’s hitmen, John Martorano, who had already pleaded guilty to twenty murders between 1965 and 1982. Martorano had testified under oath that Whitey once told him that Billy had ordered Zip Connolly to keep Whitey
out of trouble.

  “He said that?” Billy asked. “And was Mr. Martorano there when I did? Was he present?”

  “He understood,” the lawyer said, “that you had done that at some point.”

  “I see,” said Billy. “Well, if I ever did say something like that uh, influence him to stay on the straight and narrow, if that’s what’s meant by it I could well have said it….I think it’s a pretty innocent comment, if in fact I made it. I have no recollection but I don’t want to quarrel with that source.”

  When Billy was asked about his relationship with Kevin Weeks, he looked weary. He mentioned how he knew Kevin’s brother, a onetime advance man for Governor Mike Dukakis. And how Kevin would sometimes stop by Billy’s home on East Third Street, unannounced, and they would talk.

  “I think I was inflicting my advice upon him,” Billy said. “He seems very young to me. His brother is in Chicago and I know I told him that he should go to Chicago and that he should take his wife and family and go to Chicago.”

  Instead, he pleaded guilty to being an accessory to five of Whitey’s murders and his testimony sent Zip Connolly to prison for nine years. He wasn’t so young anymore either. He was forty-seven.

  Then it was Burton’s turn again, and this time he came at Billy from out of left field. Had Billy ever tried to arrange for Zip Connolly, the convicted-felon FBI agent, to be appointed police commissioner of the city of Boston? The crowd murmured at this new information.

  “Can you give me an idea of the year of that?” Billy said, and Burton instantly deduced that Billy was stalling for time to come up with an answer that wouldn’t cost him his job as president of the University of Massachusetts.

  “Did you recommend him?” Burton repeated.

  “Excuse me, who’s the mayor at that time?” It was Ray Flynn, Billy’s neighbor from South Boston, a political rival whose popularity Bulger had often envied, and whose intellect he had always disparaged.

  Burton stared at him, waiting for Billy to respond, and Billy stared back.

  “Maybe way back,” Billy finally said. “Many years before, there was a neighbor of ours who was mayor, and I may have suggested John to Raymond Flynn…I may have suggested him as a candidate, somebody that might be looked at.”