by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
The disaster that unfolded over the next several years also dashed whatever faint hopes Billy might have had of someday running statewide. He became known as an anti-busing zealot, which pushed him further to the margins of the increasingly liberal and suburban Democratic Party in Massachusetts.
The court-ordered busing began on September 12, 1974, and it went smoothly throughout most of the city. But outside South Boston High School, in front of network TV camera crews, angry mobs gathered and chanted, “Niggers go home!” Six hours later, with the buses headed back to Roxbury on Day Boulevard—“that memorial to Louise Day Hicks’ father,” as J. Anthony Lukas noted—crowds gathered to throw rocks and beer bottles at the buses. Nine black students were injured by the projectiles and the broken glass.
Four days later, the city canceled an anti-busing protest march, and Southie teenagers attacked blacks at a subway station. The Boston Police Department had to break up brawl after brawl inside the schools. Attacks on solitary blacks in Southie led to retaliatory assaults on whites in Roxbury. Soon, Governor Sargent had to mobilize the National Guard.
The indignities for South Boston never seemed to end. The Globe, whose Yankee editor was from Lincoln, and whose editorials were written by a Cambridge Brahmin named Anne Cabot Wyman, would win a Pulitzer Prize for covering a phenomenon that did not adversely affect the lives of any of the paper’s top editors, reporters, or, needless to say, its blue-blooded owners.
On October 7, someone fired gunshots from Morrissey Boulevard at the presses of the Globe. Mayor White stationed police sharpshooters on the roof of the building. Billy was in the thick of things in Southie, appearing informally before Judge Garrity in court, often haranguing crowds on the street. One radio reporter, Dick Levitan, later recalled Billy singling him out during one particularly vitriolic speech, pointing at him and saying that the crisis was all the fault of “Zionists like Dick Levitan.” Billy denied he’d ever said such a thing.
Like most of his constituents, Billy was obsessed with busing, the utter unfairness of it. To describe the situation, he often resorted to the word “Orwellian.” The swells, the outsiders who foisted school integration on Southie—the Globe, Ted Kennedy, the judge from Wellesley, the lawyers from Brookline—they were a “manicured mob.” As the furor over busing wore on, relations between the police and the community deteriorated to the point of open hostility. The brunt of the tough law enforcement in Southie fell to a special Boston Police unit, the Tactical Patrol Force, the TPF.
The police commissioner was Robert diGrazia, one of those credentialed out-of-staters that Kevin White relied upon so heavily during his first two terms as mayor. Billy couldn’t stand diGrazia. One day in 1974, when the police had arrested some demonstrators outside Southie High, Billy yelled at the cops, calling them “Gestapo”—an epithet he tossed around carelessly in those days.
DiGrazia threw it right back at Billy.
“If you had any guts,” he said, “you’d tell those people to get their kids into school.”
Bulger stared at the outsider, the blow-in, the drifter ordering him and his people around.
“The community,” he told diGrazia, “has a message for you, Commissioner. Go fuck yourself!”
With the situation near anarchy, Louise Day Hicks was still in the forefront of the anti-busing forces, but she was… Louise, yesterday’s news. Billy’s leading rival in Southie politics was now Ray Flynn, a state rep who was everything Billy was not— a heavy drinker, a graduate of Southie High, a nonlawyer, an ex-athlete.
Billy loathed him, and not just because he was a maverick in the legislature, or because, like Billy, he wanted to run for mayor in 1975. He also distrusted Flynn’s tentative olive branches to the communities beyond the bridge, and to the media. To Billy, Ray Flynn was simultaneously a lightweight and a traitor.
He was also a media hog. Billy had gotten along well enough with the boozy State House press corps of the 1960s. He played hearts with them on occasion, and would make sure they had copies of speeches he planned to deliver in the afternoon, so they could get their stories into the evening editions. But now the era of the legmen, mostly high school dropouts, phoning in stories to rewrite men back in the city room for the “replate” editions, was passing. The trade of newspapering was becoming the profession of journalism. And Billy didn’t much care for the new breed of Ivy Leaguers that Globe editor Tom Winship was hiring.
In the winter of 1975, Billy was still uncertain about his future in the Senate. There were occasional stories in the newspapers about a federal “probe” of payoffs to unnamed state legislators by McKee-Berger-Mansueto executives, but as the months dragged on, the investigation seemed to be going nowhere. The two agents doing much of the legwork were Dennis Condon and Bob Sheehan. Both were nearing retirement, which meant they had entered the go-along, get-along phase of their careers. Condon was even known to be a friend of the majority leader, occasionally hanging out in the DiCarlo family’s furniture store on Hanover Street.
If DiCarlo survived, Billy was all done in the Senate. There wasn’t room for two forty-one-year-olds from Suffolk County in the two top spots.
The 1975 mayoral race would be between Kevin White and state Senator Joe Timilty, a former city councilor and ex-marine whose uncle, Diamond Jim, had been Curley’s police commissioner. Timilty was a street guy, a high school dropout who lived in Mattapan. He had a driver named Tom Menino, who in 1993 would become mayor himself. With busing overshadowing everything else, 1975 became a brutal fight. Billy continued with his anti-busing harangues, both on the floor of the Senate and on the streets of Southie.
On November 3, 1975, White narrowly won a third term for mayor over Timilty. White—beset by busing and the early signs of the corruption that would dog his later years at City Hall—decisively lost the white vote in the city. Only the black wards stuck by him, and for years Timilty’s supporters claimed that fraud had been rampant at the polls. As for White, he later claimed that “the Mob” was behind Timilty.
Kevin White had always tried to keep himself at arm’s length from the darker, more paranoid, self-pitying side of the “shanty Irish,” as the residents of hardscrabble neighborhoods like Southie and Charlestown were often called by those who’d made it out. Kevin White was originally from West Roxbury, Ward 20, a neighborhood of single-family homes and shady, tree-lined streets. Kevin had gone to Williams College rather than Boston College. He seldom drank—his father, a career Boston politician, was an alcoholic—and Kevin didn’t even belong to the Knights of Columbus. As an adult, he lived on Beacon Hill. But as assimilated as the mayor was, he was still able to grasp instinctively how both Bulger brothers were simultaneously tightening their respective grips on South Boston.
In 1978, White sat for an end-of-year television interview with Christopher Lydon of Channel 2’s Ten O’Clock News. After the formal interview ended, as the cameraman began recording a few setup shots for later use as cutaways, White began talking about the media’s reluctance to take on the connection between the two brothers—Whitey and Billy.
“You don’t want to touch the tough ones,” he said, apparently thinking he was speaking off the record. “The point is, if my brother threatened to kill you, or you thought he would kill you, you would be nothing but nice to me. You just wouldn’t want to get too close to investigating the mayor.”
Then the mayor recounted an incident during busing, when he played tennis one night at an athletic club in South Boston, and came out at 11:00 p.m. by himself, or so he told Lydon.
“I was never more scared in my life. I almost slept in the club, ’cause I figured if they pump me out—which, why not? Whitey would be crazy enough to do it even then… . And if they shoot me, they win all the marbles. They draw [Gerry] O’Leary as mayor. So why not shoot the son of a bitch?”
Whitey didn’t, but that summed up his emerging philosophy rather succinctly.
CHAPTER 7
THEY WERE PARTNERS NOW—Whitey and Stevie and th
e FBI. And from the very beginning, it was a one-sided deal. Each side would do “favors” for the other, but the FBI’s were a lot more valuable than the cash and gifts that Whitey and Stevie would pass on to their agents.
“Me and Whitey gave them shit,” Stevie said later, “and got back gold in return.”
The FBI would tip them to informants and make sure they were cut out of indictments. They would scare off potential witnesses, so that Whitey and Stevie could continue their twoman crime wave. In return, Stevie would claim in 2005 that he and Whitey bribed a half-dozen agents, thoroughly corrupting the Boston office and destroying the FBI’s reputation in New England for more than a generation.
In the mid-1970s, as the deal began to take shape, the FBI bailed Whitey and Stevie out of one jam after another, and in return, their two Top Echelon organized crime informants gave up Johnny Martorano’s younger brother, Jimmy.
Jimmy Martorano had to go because the FBI needed a scalp, quickly, to show Washington how well its new informants were producing. The G-men would naturally have preferred some higher-profile Mafia types, but at that moment Stevie could offer nothing from Prince Street other than gossip— mostly lists of guests at Mafia weddings and the dates of restaurant openings on Hanover Street.
But then Whitey saw an opportunity to do a favor for the FBI. Jimmy Martorano was owed $2,000 by a bar owner in Revere. One of Martorano’s drinking buddies at the garage was an ex-con named Brian Halloran, who would later figure in what were perhaps Whitey’s most spectacular pair of murders. In October 1974 Jimmy asked Halloran to collect the debt for him, and Halloran, drunk as always, pulled a gun on the bar owner and then stole $445 out of his cash register. The terrified victim went running to the FBI and was placed under the protection of a new agent named John Morris.
Jimmy Martorano and Halloran were arrested and charged with loansharking. But Jimmy thought he had a solid defense—he was going to claim that he had actually loaned the money to somebody else, who had then given the $2,000 to the bar owner. If this person were willing to testify that the $2,000 was actually his, then Jimmy and Brian Halloran could argue that they were simply doing a favor for the first guy in getting his money back from the bar owner. It might still be robbery, or assault, but those were relatively minor state crimes, and even if they were convicted, it wouldn’t mean heavy prison time, especially not from a judge in Suffolk County.
One morning, at the garage, Martorano announced he was going downtown to talk to his lawyer about his impending trial. Whitey and Stevie asked if they could tag along, and Jimmy, suspecting nothing, agreed. The two new FBI informants got to listen in as Martorano and his lawyer confidently discussed their plan to have their secret witness testify.
The next morning, FBI agent Zip Connolly and the new guy in the office, John Morris, suddenly appeared at the new witness’s home and asked him if he had received a $2,000 “loan” from Martorano. Frightened by the agents’ brusque questions, the potential witness suddenly concocted a new story about the money—he told the agents he had in fact taken the $2,000 from his wife, who had been saving to buy some furniture. He mentioned nothing about borrowing any money from Martorano.
As soon as he heard about the FBI agents’ visit, Jimmy knew he was gone. If the man were now called as a defense witness, and told the original, exculpatory story under oath, Morris and Connolly would then be sworn as witnesses to impeach his testimony. In short, their star witness could no longer testify for Martorano and Halloran. In June 1976, Martorano was convicted on the loansharking charges. (Halloran, already in state prison on gun charges, was acquitted.) Now, on the big Winter Hill scores, there was one fewer guy to split the pot with. And Whitey’s guy in the FBI had a notch on his belt.
Much later, after he had confessed to being an informant, one of Stevie Flemmi’s co-defendants asked him why he and Whitey had ratted out their alleged friend Jimmy Martorano for something as seemingly inconsequential as allowing Zip to score a few brownie points with his bosses in Washington. Stevie shrugged.
“Somebody had to go,” Flemmi said, “and Jimmy did good time.”
One down, many to go.
Despite their proficiency in destroying their competition, the Winter Hill Gang was ripe for the picking. They were deeply in debt and they were getting sloppy. With their bookmaking business still in the red, most of their cash was coming from Fat Tony Ciulla’s fixed horse races. But Ciulla, like Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano, was a compulsive gambler. He too was always short of cash, and when he and one of his underlings tried to supplement their race-fixing earnings with a robbery, they botched it, and ended up exchanging gunfire with the intended victim.
The problem for Ciulla was that they had added a third gun for the heist, a guy named James Sousa, and now Fat Tony fretted that the hired hand was a weak link who could be flipped. Ciulla went to the garage and asked for help, and Johnny Martorano got the contract. He lured Ciulla’s accomplice to an apartment on Winter Hill and murdered him. Sousa’s body was never found.
The fact that the Somerville guys were now killing people for Fat Tony should have told them something was seriously wrong. But they needed money.
Now that they had a secret to share, Whitey and Stevie were soon spending more and more time in each other’s company. They often drove together to the garage from Boston, and eventually they decided to go into business together. As Howie and Johnny became more and more reckless, their Boston associates fretted about the future of their joint ventures. So with George Kaufman, Whitey and Stevie set up a company to install vending machines throughout the city. Their salesmen basically had one pitch—mentioning the names of Bulger and Flemmi.
They had barely set up the operation before Kaufman convinced a bar to switch to the Bulger-Flemmi machines. That meant that the machines owned by Melotone, the established vending machine company in Boston, had to go. When the Melotone owners found out what had happened, they immediately went to the FBI. There was talk of wiretaps and bugs, but before any court orders could be obtained, Zip Connolly decided to pay a visit to Melotone’s corporate offices. Zip informed the owners that if they decided to cooperate, they should be prepared to join the Witness Protection Program and leave Boston.
As Flemmi explained on the witness stand in 1998, “It probably was a threat. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. All I know is what the results were.”
The results were, Melotone’s owners lost interest in prose-cuting Whitey and Stevie. The criminal investigation was ended, and Whitey and Stevie pulled their machines out of the disputed bar, assuring that there would be no more complaints, or probes. No harm, no foul. Melotone moved its machines back in, and shortly thereafter, Whitey and Stevie folded their company. There would be easier ways to make money.
Stevie’s flow of usable information, as opposed to gossip, was little more than a trickle, but the FBI’s protection never flagged. Zip Connolly’s next save came in early 1976. An excon and businessman named Francis Green owed $175,000 to a finance company with ties to Winter Hill. Accompanied by Johnny Martorano, Stevie and Whitey drove to the Back Side restaurant in Dedham to put the squeeze on Green. The deal was, they would receive a cut of whatever money they could wring out of him.
As they walked into the restaurant, Martorano spotted one of his old grade-school classmates—Bill Delahunt, the new district attorney of Norfolk County. As Whitey and Stevie found a table, Martorano walked over to say hello to the prosecutor. After a few pleasantries, they traded verbal jabs, and finally Delahunt told Johnny to stay in Boston and out of Norfolk County.
By then Green had joined the Bulger party, and Martorano walked over and sat down with them. From across the restaurant, Delahunt was now staring at the gangsters, but that didn’t deter Whitey.
“If I don’t get my money,” he said to Green, “I will kill you. I will cut your ears off. I will stuff them in your mouth, and then I will gouge your eyes out.”
Green went first to the Norfolk County district attorney
, but the office punted to the FBI. And there the case died. It was becoming a pattern. Dennis Condon wrote the report, describing Green in the first sentence as “a convicted swindler.” He pointedly mentioned that Whitey was trying to collect for a woman, “a friend of theirs.” He wrote nothing about the threats.
Condon, however, would soon retire, taking a job in the administration of Governor Michael Dukakis. Another of Condon’s contemporaries, Bob Sheehan, would take his federal pension and become the state comptroller. The old guard was changing at the Boston office of the FBI. H. Paul Rico had retired from the bureau’s Miami office in 1975 after twenty-four years on the job. He soon had a new job—director of security for World Jai Alai, a gaming company based in Florida. Rico would soon be back in the middle of everything in Boston, but for now, he was relaxing in the Florida sunshine.
Meanwhile, Connolly was putting together a new FBI crew. Other than Zip, the most important agent for the future would be John Morris, who’d helped out on the Jimmy Martorano case. Morris and Dennis Condon both lived in Lexington and would commute into the city together. Soon Morris was one of the boys, and eventually Zip decided it was time to introduce him to Whitey.
In federal court, Morris later recalled Connolly’s instructions as to how he should handle Whitey: “Be sure to treat him with respect.”
When Morris finally met Whitey, he was surprised to see that Stevie Flemmi had also shown up. According to FBI regulations, informants weren’t supposed to be interviewed together; they weren’t even supposed to know who else was giving information to the bureau. But no one on either side seemed terribly concerned about the bureau’s rules.
