by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
“Do you want it badly and desperately?” the family boss, Raymond “Rubber Lips” Patriarca, inquired of Tortora, who had most recently gone to prison for leaving death threats on a telephone answering machine. “Your mother’s dying in bed, and you have to leave her because we called you. It’s an emergency. You have to leave. Would you do that, Carmen?”
“Yes.”
After the ceremony, they adjourned to the kitchen to a good square meal, Mafia style. Newly made man Vinnie Federico demurred. He had other plans, back at the state prison in Shirley.
“We got a Greek guy, cooks for us,” he told his new brothers. “Tonight it’s lobster, shrimp, and then a pineapple upside-down cake.”
One of the old-timers who’d been invited from Revere couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“You call that doin’ time?” he said.
Afterward, Vinny “the Animal” Ferrara, the head of the clownish Vanessa’s crew, cleaned up the house. As he finished, he turned to one of his men and said, proudly, “Only the ghost knows what happened here today, by God.”
Two weeks later, they were all arrested, everyone except Vinnie Federico’s date, who continued working at Boston City Hall.
Whitey may have relished this latest body blow to the Mafia, but he didn’t have long to savor his good fortune. As the new decade began, the DEA, the IRS, and Boston police raided a number of homes and businesses connected in one way or another to Whitey, including the South Boston Liquor Mart and Rotary Variety, as well as Red Shea’s home, where they discovered a pistol and a stun gun.
The raids were a preview of what was to come. Most worrisome for Whitey was that the cops had used phone taps to develop a working knowledge of how his cocaine distribution network was managed. They knew that the street dealers all answered to one of four midlevel gangsters who, with the exception of Red Shea, more closely resembled traditional organized crime enforcers and collectors than wholesalers. Whitey of course kept no organizational charts. The only thing that mattered to him was that the street dealers kicked up, through his men, to Whitey himself.
This time the cops appeared serious. They hit the homes of all the ringleaders, in addition to raiding a warehouse on East Second Street where they discovered “miscellaneous drug packing and processing materials, scales, cutting boards, Baggies, razor blades, etc.”
Actually, the raids didn’t put much of a dent in Whitey’s organization—the cops took only $24,000 in cash, some guns, police scanners, marijuana, and a kilo of cocaine. Newspaper reports linked several of the hoodlums whose homes were searched to a series of murders in West Broadway barrooms in 1985–86.
Despite the slowly increasing heat, Whitey continued to operate in the same fashion he always had, adroitly eliminating any other criminal who he perceived as posing even the slightest threat to him.
The next to go was Pat Nee. In 1990, he’d just finished serving four years in federal prison for the IRA gunrunning operation that had ended with John McIntyre’s murder. Nee was smart, and still only forty-five, and although Whitey had worked with him for years, he had never forgotten how Nee had once been part of the crew that had hunted him back in the days when he worked for Donnie Killeen.
On parole, Nee was looking for work, and Whitey steered him to a tough crew of armored car robbers headed by a Lower End hood named Jazzbo Joyce. Whitey neglected to mention to Nee that the FBI had planted an informer, one of Whitey’s loanshark victims, in the gang, and that Jazzbo’s next job, in Abington, would be his last. Instead, Whitey gave Pat Nee a machine gun and wished him well in his new venture.
When the Southie crew arrived in Abington, the FBI was waiting for them. Surrounded by cops, Pat Nee didn’t try to use the machine gun; if he had, he’d have been killed, because Whitey had removed its firing pin before giving it to Nee.
What Nee didn’t learn until later was that while he had been in prison, Congress had passed a new law—use of a machine gun during the commission of a federal crime was now punishable by an additional thirty years in prison, on and after whatever other sentences were imposed.
Whitey would never again have to worry about Pat Nee. He was going away for a very long time. (Ultimately, Nee’s conviction on the machine gun charge was thrown out; a judge decided that if a weapon had been disabled, it was hardly fair for the government to still refer to it as a machine gun. Whitey had been, as they say at the State House, too cute by half.)
In 1990, Billy would have a serious opponent for the first time since 1970. Republican Dr. John DeJong, a thirty-four-year-old Back Bay veterinarian, quickly got a taste of hardball Boston politics when the president of Tufts University, Dr. Jean Mayer, called him with concerns that DeJong’s candidacy would cost the veterinary school, from which DeJong had graduated, its state grants.
DeJong leaked word of the conversation to the press. Billy denied knowing that DeJong was a graduate of the school. Trying to appear nonplussed by the challenge, Billy came up with a new slogan: “The state may be going to the dogs, but this is no time to call in a veterinarian.”
But Billy wasn’t taking any chances. A straw candidate, Janie DuPass quickly entered the race, to dilute the anti-incumbent vote. Not only did her name sound like DeJong’s, but also like that of a Southie political activist named Janie DuWors. DuPass lived on a $501 disability check, in Roxbury, and yet three-quarters of the signatures on the nomination papers she filed to get onto the ballot came from Southie, including eleven from East Third Street, Billy’s home street. Her nomination papers were signed by people with such fine Bulger-associated names as Joyce, Flaherty, Nee, and Gill. The signatures had been gathered by Billy’s operatives. It was one of the oldest tricks in the urban political playbook, and if the Bulgers could have found another person named John DeJong, no doubt his name would have gone onto the ballot too.
“Something,” DeJong understated, “is very fishy here.”
Billy knew that someday soon he would retire, and he wanted his oldest son, Billy Jr., to succeed him in the Senate. Eventually, if Billy Jr. didn’t succeed Joe Moakley in Congress, Billy’s dream was to see his namesake follow in his footsteps by becoming president of the Senate.
But to assure Billy Jr.’s ascension to Senate president, Billy would need a transitional figurehead to serve as president while Billy Jr. learned the ropes. This regentlike figure would have to be someone who would understand that he would be expected to step aside when the time came.
Enter Tom Birmingham, the son of Billy’s old friend and client, Jackie Birmingham. Young Birmingham had a well-known name in Chelsea and Charlestown—his uncle, also named Tom Birmingham, was a local gangster who had been shot to death in a rooming house in 1969. A graduate of Harvard Law School, young Tom had unsuccessfully tried to unseat Democratic Senator Franny Doris of Revere in 1988.
When it came time to run for reelection, Doris went out and collected his nomination signatures as if he would be running for another term. No one else filed, except Tom Birmingham, who was left as the only candidate on the ballot when Doris suddenly announced his retirement a few hours before the deadline for filing nomination papers. Then, after his retirement from the Senate, Doris took a high-paying job at the MBTA.
Billy had his heir apparent.
Next Billy needed a candidate for governor. He couldn’t afford any loose cannons who actually might think they were running the state. Billy quickly got behind John Silber, the feisty sixty-four-year-old president of Boston University who had become a fixture at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts. He and Billy formed a two-man admiration society, perhaps because Silber had at least as large a chip on his shoulder as Billy. Born and raised in Texas, Silber too had always felt like the odd man out—a withered right arm had kept him out first out of schoolboy athletics and then World War II. He became an academic, and after being forced out of his job as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Texas because he was “too liberal,” Silber had moved north in the early 1970s to
take over a moribund Boston University. He’d saved BU almost by himself, but for twenty years he chafed at always having to play second fiddle to the school across the river, Harvard.
After eight years of Mike Dukakis’s stifling political correctness, the voters were ready for Silber’s brutal candor. Soon after he announced his candidacy, Silber wondered aloud why so many welfare-collecting immigrants had arrived in Lowell “from the tropical climes.”
That was the first “Silber shocker.” Many more would follow. He would suggest that elderly people who were “ripe” owed it to everyone else to die and get out of the way. He said that any woman over the age of twenty-five was over the hill.
As a candidate for governor, Silber’s greatest albatross was his attempt to position himself as the “outsider” in the Democratic field while running with the complete support of Senate President Bulger.
“Billy Bulger is not a crook,” Silber would say again and again.
At the Democratic state convention in June, Silber needed to get the votes of 15 percent of the delegates in order to qualify for the September ballot. It was close, but Billy twisted enough arms to get Silber over the 15 percent hurdle and onto the ballot. Billy figured his man was now a shoo-in.
“He’ll be inaugurated in January,” Billy told friends, “and he’ll invade Rhode Island in February.”
The DEA and the Boston and State Police started arresting Whitey’s cocaine dealers Thursday night, August 9. Earlier that day, Zip Connolly had been apoplectic. He had sought out Jonathan Chiel—the same assistant U.S. attorney he’d taken to lunch when he thought Billy was about to be indicted during the 75 State Street scandal. Now he burst into Chiel’s office again, with a similar question.
“Is Whitey Bulger being indicted today?” he asked. There were rumors out there in the Republican campaigns, he said. Chiel hemmed and hawed until Zip finally left, but in fact Whitey had skated again. They’d even gotten a court order to monitor his cell phone, but Whitey had either gotten a tip about the tap or understood enough about the new technology not to incriminate himself.
“The case, we believe, was compromised,” Chiel testified later.
Not so lucky were fifty-one of Whitey’s dealers. Among the first to be collared was Red Shea, as he stood on the corner in front of the D Street Deli, one of Kevin Weeks’s old joints. He made a break for it, screaming, “I’m a working man!”
He was apparently referring to his public sector job at the Boston Housing Authority.
A few hours later, after midnight, the cops grabbed Thomas “T.K.” Cahill. He was sleeping through his overnight shift at the city Department of Public Works yard on Frontage Road, and had been expected to report for work the next morning at his other public sector job at the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, where the personnel director was the wife of a state senator loyal to Billy.
In case anyone still doubted Whitey’s involvement in cocaine trafficking in his hometown, the DEA put everything onto the record at an afternoon press conference.
“For years the Bulger organization has told people there’s no drugs in Southie,” said the DEA assistant special agent in charge, “that Southie boys are not involved in drugs, that we throw drug dealers out of here. These arrests show that that’s not true. These arrests show the people have been had by James Whitey Bulger.”
The arrested dealers ranged from drug-addled drunks to players just below Weeks in Whitey’s hierarchy. At the John W. McCormack Federal Courthouse in Post Office Square, magistrates recorded their vital statistics. A large percentage of them had public patronage jobs. Many of the dealers were either on disability pensions or workmen’s comp. In the vernacular of Boston, they were hacks.
Among those arrested was the proprietor of the Dog Room, Eddie MacKenzie. Along with some of the other higher-level dealers, Eddie Mac was shipped off to the federal penitentiary in Danbury where Raymond “Rubber Lips” Patriarca, the boss of the reeling New England Mafia, was awaiting trial on racketeering charges stemming from the Guild Street Mafia inductions ten months earlier. Patriarca called Eddie Mac over, and without even introducing himself, told MacKenzie: “You know why you’re here, don’t you?…You got ratted out by your boy Whitey. He’s been snitching for years.”
Rubber Lips didn’t have the story exactly straight; Whitey had been snitching for years, but he hadn’t directly ratted Eddie Mac out. He just hadn’t given Eddie Mac any warning about the busts he had to have known were about to come down. In the final days, Eddie Mac claimed to have been paying Whitey, through his collectors, more than $20,000 a week. For that kind of money, Eddie Mac didn’t get much protection.
John Silber easily won the primary, just as Billy had predicted he would. In the general election, he would be running against William Weld, the former U.S. attorney who’d put so many of former mayor Kevin White’s crew behind bars, and then later, as an assistant attorney general in Washington, became the prosecutor to whom Joe Murray had tried to funnel information on Whitey.
As the leaves began to turn, Weld found himself trailing Silber in all the polls. He had to find an issue, quickly, and since the electorate had apparently become inured to “Silber shockers,” Weld decided to concentrate on the two Bulger brothers, specifically, the fact that so many of Whitey’s cocaine dealers had public jobs while the state teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.
Whitey and Billy would be the twin symbols of the corruption and profligacy of the last eight years. Billy’s thirty years in the legislature were suddenly an afterthought; his only identity was as the brother of “cocaine dealer Whitey Bulger.”
The Republican state chairman called a press conference to demand that Billy publicly address the issue of drug trafficking in South Boston.
“He may very well be condoning it,” Billy’s GOP opponent John DeJong said. “I just think he better open his eyes and answer the questions the people in the district and the state have about what’s going on right under his own nose.”
The Republicans unleashed a tough series of ads, referring to the “Silber-Bulger” ticket. Another spot highlighted Weld’s career as a “corruption fighter,” and noted his crackdown on “disability insurance scams,” a type of crime now almost exclusively associated with Southie gangsters on public payrolls.
Even the Republican candidate for treasurer, Joe Malone, vowed to “clean up” the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. The GOP theme was, if you were a Democrat, you were a Bulger Democrat. The short-tempered Silber was particularly incensed about being continually linked to organized crime and cocaine dealing.
“I get fed up with being told that if I know Billy Bulger I must be some sort of crook,” Silber said at a meeting with supporters at the World Trade Center in October. “Billy Bulger is not a crook.”
Weld hung in, holding his own in the debates against Silber. Still, it appeared his spirited effort would fall short. But then Silber did an interview with the top female TV anchor in Boston, who asked him a standard question about what he considered his weaknesses. Silber lost his temper and began yelling at her.
When the segment aired, Silber immediately collapsed in the polls, and he and Billy were forced to try to soften their hard images in the final hours of the campaign. Billy even took questions from the State House press corps, complaining about his treatment since 75 State Street.
“I’ve been Willie Horton–ized,” he said.
On election night, Billy easily prevailed over DeJong by a 63 to 37 margin; in the end, he hadn’t even needed DuPass. Otherwise, it was a Republican night across the commonwealth. Weld won handily enough in the suburbs to overcome Silber’s edge in the cities. Massachusetts would have its first Republican governor since 1974. In the treasurer’s race, another Republican, Joe Malone, cruised to victory, and would replace Billy’s friend Bob Crane, who was retiring after twenty-six years in office.
But most importantly, from Billy’s perspective, nine of his incumbent Democratic senators were knocked off,
most by Republican novices, one of whom was a Bible salesman. The Taunton incumbent who was ousted by the Bible salesman quipped to reporters: “Tell him he won’t sell too many Bibles in the Senate.”
The only bright spot for Billy was that the new lieutenant governor would be Paul Cellucci, a Republican state senator from Hudson who had never crossed Billy. But even that was overshadowed by the fact that 75 State Street was once again returning to haunt him. With the future appearing so uncertain, Billy called in one final chit from that lamest of lame ducks, Michael Dukakis. Billy wanted a district court judgeship for his chief aide, Paul Mahoney, an undistinguished career coatholder.
But the long knives were out for Mahoney. Harvey Silver-glate, Harold Brown’s first lawyer, had never released his findings about Billy’s financial records because Brown, his client, had ordered him not to. But now Silverglate had a clean shot at one of Billy’s closest associates. Also appalled by Dukakis’s final descent into backroom horse-trading was Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor who had also briefly worked for Harold Brown.
Silverglate and Dershowitz waged a public campaign in their usual fashion, bombarding the Globe with letters and statements and feeding information to Channel 2’s Ten O’Clock News. Finally, on December 5, 1990, at Paul Mahoney’s confirmation hearing, as Silverglate and Dershowitz waited their turn to speak, Billy Bulger pushed his way into the packed hearing room with his entourage—a couple of his sons, diminutive Senate aide Eddie Phillips, and a few lobbyists looking ahead to the future. Billy pointed directly at Dershowitz and Silverglate and shouted: “The two biggest liars in Massachusetts …a true, true conniver … exceedingly crafty … vindictive …very manipulative…. They are reckless and they are liars and they have no moral constraints upon them.” He pointed at them.
