by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
King crushed a liberal Yankee Republican legislator in the final election. He was sworn in as governor in January 1979, the same month Billy was elected to his first full term as Senate president.
Philosophically, Ed King and Billy were simpatico, but there was a wariness to their relationship. King was an Irishman from East Boston, and it was the old story with Billy: He could get along better with Republicans—and even liberal Democrats—than he could with his own kind. His own kind held him to higher standards than the Republicans and liberals.
Once King was sworn in, one of Billy’s first chores was to set up his younger brother in a job that didn’t involve any heavy lifting. Jackie was the runt of the litter, average in every respect, with a pair of brothers who were not, to say the least, average. Jackie worked at the MBTA, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, once known as the MTA but now most commonly referred to simply as “the T.” He supplemented his income by working part-time at a fish store in Roslindale Square. But he wanted more, and soon Jackie had a job at the Boston Juvenile Court, just a block or so away from the State House. Next Jackie wanted a promotion to clerk. It would mean extra money, and behind that, a larger pension. There was only one problem for Jackie: the Juvenile Court already had a clerk. But that logjam was eliminated when Governor King appointed the clerk to a judgeship and then filled the vacancy with Jackie Bulger, Boston English High School Class of 1956.
On the day of Jackie’s pro forma confirmation hearing before the Governor’s Council, Billy walked across the hall and presented himself to the Governor’s Council.
“Never have I seen a person so qualified,” Billy said, “a person so deserving, a person so capable in every material respect, a person so clearly without peer as the candidate in whose behalf I speak today: probably the most brilliant choice ever to come before this council—my brother!”
The vote to confirm was 8–0.
Whitey and Billy’s mother, Jean, died in January 1980. All the children gathered for the wake—all, that is, except Whitey. He had to wait until after visiting hours to join his siblings mourning in the parlor of the funeral home. Neither Billy nor Whitey wanted an errant snapshot of the brothers together appearing in the paper.
Soon after Jean’s burial, Sonny McDonough suddenly checked himself into the hospital. Billy’s beloved mentor was dying of cancer. As he reached what Billy always called “the checkout counter,” he requested that Billy take care of his son, Patrick Jr. He hadn’t even graduated high school, but so what? Like Jackie Bulger, he too wanted to be a clerk, and he had his eye on the Boston Housing Court, which was presided over by Judge E. George Daher.
There was only one hitch: Eighteen other candidates had applied for the clerk’s job, all of them attorneys, and one in particular stood out: a black lawyer named Robert Lewis. Lewis got the clerk’s job, and then, according to newspaper accounts, he was supposed to appoint Patrick as his assistant. If the Jackie Bulger scenario could be repeated, and why shouldn’t it have been, then soon Lewis would be a judge, and Patrick would have the clerkship Billy had promised his old man.
Lewis got the job, but then declined to appoint young McDonough. And Judge Daher backed him up. There would be trouble, and it wasn’t long in coming.
As Daher later recalled, one court administrator pointed a finger at him and said, “What the Senate president gives, he can take away.”
On a courthouse elevator, a judge was even blunter with Daher: “Don’t fuck with Billy Bulger on this one, okay?”
But he did, and it wasn’t okay. The next budget contained an “outside section” that folded the Boston Housing Court, which had been independent, into the Boston Municipal Court. That meant that Daher was no longer a presiding judge—his pay was automatically cut $2,500—and his support staff was eliminated.
Governor King vetoed the reorganization, but the pay cut stood. The judges had learned the lesson from one of their own: Don’t fuck with Billy Bulger.
And there was one other lesson everyone learned: Billy could hold a grudge.
A few years later, at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, one of Billy’s allies joked that Judge Daher had been reduced to “holding court in a Winnebago,” and that he desperately needed an increase in his budget. Billy smiled and leaned in close to the microphone.
“He’ll have to wait,” Billy said, “until I hear from Sonny.”
In 1980, the voters of Massachusetts overwhelmingly approved a referendum question that capped increases in local property taxes at 21⁄2 percent a year, unless the voters, rather than elected officials, approved an override. Because of the mandated percentage, the new law became known as Proposition 21⁄2, and it changed politics in Massachusetts profoundly, by making the cities and towns more reliant than ever on financial aid from the commonwealth. Suddenly, state government was playing a larger role than ever in the daily lives of the population.
Then the city of Boston was dealt another financial body blow. For years, it had been assessing commercial property at a higher rate than residential. Finally, however, the commercial interests had gone to court, and prevailed. The city owed millions in rebates, and, because of Prop 21⁄2, had no way to raise the money it needed to pay off the court judgment.
In 1981, the fiscal crisis in Boston gave Billy the opportunity to bail out the city and simultaneously concentrate still more power in his hands. The plan was developed not by Billy, but by the staff of his Ways and Means chairman, Chester Atkins. No one called Chester a liberal anymore. Bob Crane, the state treasurer, used to say, “When the boys from the suburbs go home, the boys from Boston go to work.” Chester, the Yankee from Concord, was now one of the boys from Boston.
Since Billy had become president, in fact, Chester had been the Bulger team’s MVP. He had a keen eye for talent, and he soon brought on a young man named Mark Ferber. He was Jewish, which meant he didn’t have much in common with Billy, but he was smart, and Billy did appreciate that, at least in his aides who did not represent a potential threat to his power. It was Ferber who came up with the idea of how the city could pay off its court-ordered settlement to the commercial-property owners.
The city would sell some of its prime real estate to the state, for cash. The Hynes Convention Center on Boylston Street in the Back Bay was the obvious choice—the city needed a new hall, and couldn’t afford to build one. But the state government could issue bonds to pay for the new hall, and the resulting debt could be paid off with revenue from the city’s most successful cash generator, the parking garage under the Boston Common.
To build and then oversee the new convention center on Boylston Street, the state would set up the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA). Under the informal agreement worked out with Mayor White and Governor King, Billy’s appointees would dominate the MCCA board, and with that power came control of the jobs.
The MCCA would provide jobs for friends of both Billy and Whitey. The fact that it was an “authority” made its financial records, not to mention its payroll, less accessible to the press. And the money, through the garage and later a hotel-motel occupancy tax, would flow endlessly.
The enabling legislation flew through the General Court, and Governor King signed it into law. Except for one member appointed by the House speaker, everyone on the board was a friend of Billy’s. The chairman of the MCCA board was state Treasurer Bob Crane, Billy’s old House colleague, a fellow BC grad, and another Irishman from Boston. Mayor White had an appointee too—he selected Bob Crane’s son-in-law. Tom Finnerty, Billy’s old law partner, was also appointed.
The actual day-to-day management of the MCCA would be handled by longtime Bulger aide Franny Joyce. The MCCA board bestowed on him what was at the time one of the sweetest deals ever for a state employee—a $75,000 annual salary, with lifetime security. Of course, the board had to post the open position for a director. At the board’s first meeting ever, Chairman Crane announced with a straight face that only one person had applied for the lifeti
me $75,000-a-year job.
Francis Xavier Joyce of South Boston.
“It was a nationwide search,” Crane said to the State House reporters, as the other members of the board nodded.
The MCCA board met in Crane’s second-floor State House office, one floor down from Billy’s plush Senate chambers. Whenever the board considered anything that related to Billy, Crane would roll his eyes toward the ceiling and say, “This is for the little man upstairs.”
The MCCA became exactly the kind of money-pit its critics had predicted it would be. The final bill for the new Hynes Convention Center, including interest on the bonds, was $450 million—approximately $200 million overbudget. The potential for luring major conventions to a city with a cold climate like Boston’s turned out to have been greatly overestimated, and soon the Hynes was advertising its availability for wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs—competing with local union halls and private function rooms.
The annual MCCA deficit was supposed to be covered by a new tax on hotel rooms in the city, and by the revenues from the Boston Common garage, which had always been such a reliable cash cow for the city. But under the new MCCA management, maintenance work on the Boston Common garage was neglected, and eventually it had to be closed for massive repairs that cost more millions and plunged the authority even deeper into the red.
But the MCCA did provide jobs for the friends of the Bulgers.
One of Joyce’s first hires was Nancy Stanley, the daughter of Whitey’s girlfriend Theresa Stanley. Another early hire was Lisa Martorano, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Johnny, who was already on the lam. She soon stole $21,000 in MCCA funds; her uncle, Jimmy, who was out of prison by that time, had to reimburse the agency. The payments were renegotiated between Jimmy and an MCCA executive named Bob Sheehan, yet another former Boston FBI agent. Despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on outside legal assistance, the MCCA also employed an in-house legal counsel. He was Harold Clancy, the former editor of the old Record American and a long-time friend of Billy’s.
State Senator Alan Sisitsky of Springfield was proving to be a real headache for Billy. They’d served in the House together, and never gotten along. Now in his early forties and unmarried, Sisitsky appeared to be losing his mind. He would wander the State House halls, unshaven and disheveled after sleeping in his office, carrying a barbell, grabbing passersby by their lapels and haranguing them.
His hatred of Billy became an obsession. Somehow, it seemed, he resented that someone like Bulger—a Boston bigot, as Sisitsky used to call him—could rise so far. Sisitsky began charging his fellow senators, mainly Billy and Chester Atkins, with corruption. He was also writing letters to the attorney general, demanding investigations into how various bills had been passed. Sisitsky had taken a job as a law school teacher—in Tacoma, Washington. He spent much of the week in airports. As one who had “never been on the cutting edge of fashion,” as Billy dryly observed in his book, Sisitsky now looked like a homeless person. He was fixated on the high-handed way in which Billy had punished Judge Daher by having his pay cut. One night, from O’Hare Airport, he phoned into a radio talk show in Boston and announced: “Senator Bulger will be arrested tomorrow at noon.”
The host was astounded. He inquired as to the charges. “Federal agents will be waiting for him when he arrives at his office,” Sisitsky said.
As Billy recounted in his book, one day Sisitsky told the Senate, “The Senate president’s brother, Whitey Bulger, is listening. He hears everything we say.”
More than fifteen years later, several FBI agents, as well as Stevie Flemmi, would testify that they suspected the same thing, and no one would accuse any of them of insanity or paranoia. But Sisitsky had worn out his welcome, not just with Billy, but with the entire Senate membership. Sisitsky was drawing too much attention to a body that had come to prefer scheduling its most important votes in the evenings, often after midnight.
Finally, one day, as Sisitsky sat slouched in the Senate chambers, insulting one senator after another, Billy had had enough. Hearing no objections from anyone, Billy ordered his removal from the Senate. As the court officers, many of them from Southie, converged on Sisitsky, he yelled one final insult toward his nemesis on the rostrum.
“Being thrown out of this Senate,” he screamed, “is like being thrown out of a brothel.”
The budgetary constraints imposed by Proposition 21⁄2 gave Billy an opportunity to run the Senate with an iron hand. The mantra was that everyone had to tighten their belts, but the reality was that some belts wouldn’t be tightened as much as others.
In South Boston, Mayor White was threatening to close the L Street Bathhouse, where kids like Billy (not to mention gangsters like Frank Salemme) had hung out in the summer ever since Curley was mayor. To shutter such a Southie tradition was unthinkable to Billy. Suddenly, a state agency assumed control of L Street from the city, and the agency received a $280,000 appropriation for the next fiscal year to keep the venerable Southie institution open.
The power was starting to go to Billy’s head. As Senate president, everything had to go through him. One way or another, everyone who had ever crossed him would have to come to him, sooner or later, hat in hand, for one favor or another.
It was always payback time for somebody. The next one to feel the heat would be Barney Frank, who as a freshman state rep had tangled with Billy over the proposed state Senate redistricting in the early 1970s. Now Frank was a freshman congressman. And after the 1980 census, Massachusetts was scheduled to lose one of its twelve House seats.
None of the incumbents wanted to retire, so that meant someone would have to be redistricted out of office. Under the congressional redistricting plan approved by the legislature, Barney was gerrymandered into the district of Margaret “Peg” Heckler, an entrenched seven-term Republican incumbent from Wellesley. Initially, the plan was to cut most of Brookline and Newton—Barney’s liberal, Jewish base—out of the new district. But U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill of Cambridge had insisted that Barney at least have a fighting shot at survival. Besides, Tip didn’t particularly want Brookline and Newton added to his overwhelmingly Irish-Italian district.
As it turned out, 1982 was not a good year for Republicans. Barney ousted Heckler, who was then appointed ambassador to Ireland by President Reagan.
Even Billy couldn’t win them all.
CHAPTER 9
IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF 1980, and what was left of the Winter Hill Gang needed new headquarters. After the race-fixing trial, everyone from Somerville was either in prison or a fugitive, so from Whitey’s perspective, it made sense to move the operations into the city. The “gang” was now reduced to two people—Whitey and Stevie—and they were both from Boston. So it was an easy call for Whitey and Stevie to base themselves at George Kaufman’s new garage in the West End of Boston. The West End was a much quicker commute from South Boston than Winter Hill.
Whitey, of course, had his own hangouts in South Boston, including Donnie Killeen’s old Transit Café in the Lower End. As a felon, Whitey couldn’t personally own a liquor license, but Kevin O’Neil could, and Whitey set him up as the West Broadway bar’s straw owner. O’Neil was a hulking thug who had been arrested back in 1968, along with two other future Whitey Bulger associates, for murdering a black man in a street brawl. The charges were dropped after O’Neil hired Billy Bulger as his lawyer.
Triple O’s—the name referred to O’Neil and his two brothers, the other owners of record—was all right as a place for Whitey to meet local hoods, but few outsiders cared to come into Southie. Plus, there was practically no parking, pedestrian traffic was heavy, and the bar was so close to the Broadway MBTA station that the cops could have easily kept a close eye on the underworld comings and goings had they so desired.
The West End, on the other hand, was neutral turf, a semi-deserted urban no-man’s-land where few strangers ventured, except on nights when there was a game at the nearby Boston Garden. It was an old ethni
c melting-pot neighborhood that had been “redeveloped” in the early 1950s into high-rise apartment towers and bleak state office buildings within walking distance of the Garden and North Station. Kaufman called his garage Lancaster Foreign Motors, and in the morning, before the gangsters arrived, it actually was a functioning garage. But around noon, Whitey and Stevie would arrive and the place would become a den for them and other underworld figures.
Ironically, it was the FBI that first discovered that Whitey had relocated to the garage. In January 1980, Whitey decided to kill the twenty-four-year-old son of Stevie Hughes, the McLaughlin hitman who had been murdered by Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme in 1966. Steve Hughes Jr. had just gotten out of prison, and he was talking about avenging his father’s death by killing Stevie and Whitey.
But he was murdered first, in a Charlestown housing project, shot five times with a high-powered rifle from the roof of a building across the street. It was just another routine gangland murder, but on February 4, an FBI informant report included this information about how the Hughes job was arranged: “George Kaufman received a telephone call to get the [getaway] car outside of a garage on Lancaster St., Boston, Mass., just before the hit.”
Even though it was less than a five-minute walk from the FBI offices, no agent bothered to check out the garage where notorious hoodlums were stashing hit cars. The report was filed away and forgotten.
It wasn’t until April that the State Police found out about the garage, when a Statie driving by noticed George Kaufman standing on the sidewalk out front. The cop parked nearby and, reconnoitering the area, spotted Whitey and Stevie. The Staties returned a few times and saw a parade of familiar and unfamiliar faces making their way inside. Obviously, they were on to something, but street surveillance wouldn’t get them much. The streets themselves were too narrow, parking too difficult, and unless you were either gay or a wino, you stuck out like a sore thumb—which was just the way the boys inside liked it.
