Howie Carr

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

  “It was Eddie Connors.” The same Eddie Connors that Whitey and Stevie had machine-gunned in the phone booth on Morrissey Boulevard in 1975. Eddie Connors, partner of Suitcase Fidler, for whom Tom Birmingham’s father had committed welfare fraud. Billy knew very well who Eddie Connors was. It was verboten to mention Whitey or his crimes in Billy’s presence, and Keating had done it, in a backhanded way no less, with a smirk on his face. Bill Keating paused a beat to let it all sink in.

  “Yeah, Mr. President,” he said. “It was poor Eddie Connors introduced me to Ray Flynn. You remember Eddie Connors, Mr. President?”

  Now it was war.

  The “insurrection,” as Billy called it, began October 26, a week or so before Tom Menino crushed Bulger’s man Jim Brett in the mayoral race. To run his campaign, Keating hired Michael Goldman, who’d handled George Keverian’s successful insurgency against House Speaker Tommy McGee in 1984.

  The rap on Keating’s challenge was that he had no real rationale for his campaign other than his desire to take control of the Senate. But what was never articulated quite so bluntly was that Billy had no real rationale for wanting to maintain control, other than the fact that he had nowhere else to go.

  Keating rented a room down the hill at the Parker House for his announcement, and if he needed an indication of how the battle would be waged, he immediately got it. Fifteen minutes before his scheduled announcement, someone phoned in a bomb threat to the hotel.

  The eleven-month battle for the Senate presidency never quite developed into a major statewide campaign, but as it began, no one could know it would be a nonstarter. Tension was palpable in the State House corridors. At one point in the fall of 1993, a Bulger senator, Bob Durand of Marlboro, confronted one of Keating’s band.

  “Why?” Durand reportedly said. “Why? Why did you have to make this a Bulger-Keating thing?”

  The Keating guy was puzzled. “What’s wrong with that?” “Don’t you understand?” Durand said. “I’m with Bulger!” There were advantages, though, to being with Bulger. Now that the redistricting of the congressional seats was done, it was time for the legislative redistricting. All of Billy’s supporters in the Democratic caucus ended up in impregnable districts, while Keating’s supporters suddenly found themselves representing much more problematical constituencies.

  The most blatant gerrymandering was of Keating’s own district. He lost two of the towns where he was best known— Norwood and Canton—and several GOP communities were added to his district, to weaken him and to strengthen the pro-Bulger Democratic senator who was shedding them. GOP Senate leader Brian Lees told Keating he now represented the most Republican Senate district in Massachusetts. It slithered south to the Rhode Island border—to get to Norton, Keating actually had to drive through Rhode Island.

  Keating quickly came to believe that he was under surveillance at all times. A new trash pickup crew appeared at the State House. One night, just to test his suspicions, he scrawled the name of a former state rep on a pink While-U-Were-Out telephone message sheet, then wrote under his name, “WILL RUN!” Keating then tossed the slip into his office wastebasket and left for the evening. The next day, the relatives of the state rep called Keating, asking why they were getting calls about their father, who, as Keating well knew, had been dead for several years.

  He also assumed his phone was tapped. As the months wore on, the tapped phones became a running joke in Keating’s campaign. One day, he and his campaign manager Goldman decided to send them on a wild-goose chase. They began discussing how they hoped Bulger would never find out about “that case” out in Hampden Probate Court. Was it public record? Goldman inquired, in a whisper. Yes, said Keating, that was what made it so potentially damaging. All somebody had to do was drive out to Springfield and dig through the records and they’d find—here he made up a name—and that would be the end of his campaign. Keating always assumed someone had been ordered to make a pointless two-hour trip out to Springfield.

  At one point, the dissidents scheduled a bus tour of various newspaper editorial boards in the hinterlands. At 5:30 a.m., just before they left, Senator Lois Pines of Newton remembered something she had left behind in her office. She turned the key and opened the door and found a young man going through her desk. He said he was there to work on the “plumbing,” and then quickly ran out the door.

  One day, Keating got a telephone call from a reporter who said “unnamed sources” had told him that Keating’s son had been arrested for beating his wife. At the time, Keating’s son was three years old.

  Billy and his allies did a masterful job of keeping Keating off balance. They hit him everywhere, even on the op-ed page of the Globe. Two of the most ardent pro-Bulger columnists were former President George H. W. Bush’s nephew, and a black writer who in one piece quoted at length from a black “community leader,” without mentioning that the leader worked for Jackie Bulger in the Juvenile Court, making almost $1,000 a week.

  Inside the building, Bulger and his allies harassed Keating whichever way he turned. He would come under withering personal fire in the Senate’s Democratic caucus, which was closed to the press, and supposedly off the record. Calls would be made to all the Democratic members in the morning, and they would “caucus” in Bulger’s office before the regular, open session began. One or another of the Bulger regulars would tee off on Keating, for something that had appeared in a suburban newspaper, or an offhand comment made on a radio talk show.

  Bulger would listen impassively, as though he were an independent arbiter. Finally, as the Bulger loyalist sat back down, he would turn to Keating and demand: “Well, what do you say to that?”

  One morning, Keating stood up and yelled at the tormentor, “Don’t you understand—I’m not the threat to you.” He pointed at Bulger. “He is. He’s the one who’s going to cost you your seat.”

  As the fight went on, Bulger spent more time with his undersized aide Eddie Phillips, a licensed private detective. Phillips was one of the few people anywhere who could understand Billy’s obsession with his height, which seemed to bother him more than ever during the “insurrection.” One day, Billy bumped into the owner of a local talk radio station. Billy asked about one of the station’s hosts, who continually described him as “sixty-five inches tall” and insisted on referring to him as the Corrupt Midget.

  “I don’t mind corrupt,” Billy said, “but can’t you make him stop calling me a midget?”

  In addition to pummeling Keating, the Bulger forces also went after his campaign manager, Michael Goldman. The usual code words were trotted out once more. By various senators across the state, Goldman was described as “a master manipulator…mercenary… greedy… voice from the shadows.” He had a “profit-making agenda.” In one newspaper, a senator referred to him as “an ambitious puppeteer manipulating reform senators who have chosen to surrender their votes and consciences to Goldman’s control.”

  By the summer of 1994, it was clear that Keating’s challenge was doomed, and Billy began to relax. The surest sign that it was all over came in Milton a week before the primary election, when he joked about Whitey in a speech sponsored by the Milton Town Club.

  “Next month,” he said, “no one play the Lottery. I hear my brother is going to win again.”

  On primary day 1994, Billy voted early at St. Brigid’s, then met former mayor Kevin White for a walk around the Public Garden. That evening, he dined at Amrhein’s on West Broadway with his son Billy Jr.—two years from now, God willing, it would be a different William M. Bulger running unopposed in the First Suffolk District.

  By ten, the results were in. Not a single one of Keating’s challengers had ousted a Bulger loyalist. Billy Bulger was the once and future Senate president.

  Two months later on election day 1994, Bill Keating just wanted to hang on to his own Senate seat, not that he would have much trouble with Chris Lane, the former one-term Republican senator who had been personally recruited by Governor Weld to run against Keating.
Still, Keating felt he had to show the flag in the Republican-leaning towns of his new district.

  Everywhere Keating drove, he and his aide, a Southie native, saw members of the old Bulger crowd from City Point and the Lower End. They were all holding signs for the Republican Lane, even Andy Donovan, the legendary talk show caller who always defended Billy on the radio airwaves, invariably describing himself as a “first-time caller.”

  Late in the day, Keating and one of his aides pulled their car into the parking lot at Norton High School, not far from the Rhode Island border. It was dusk, and few voters were in evidence, but Keating and his aide saw two men holding Lane signs. One was older, but Keating quickly recognized the younger man as a member of Billy’s inner circle. At least nominally, Billy was still a Democrat, and yet here was one of his own holding a sign for a GOP candidate, in violation of Democratic State Committee rules.

  “Get the camera,” Keating told his aide.

  But when the younger man and his older partner saw Keating and the aide walking toward them, they moved the signs up over their faces so they couldn’t be seen.

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” the older man yelled at Keating. “You are a fucking asshole.”

  Keating laughed. It was the end of a long, miserable campaign, and the Bulgers had beaten him, badly, but now, at least, he had a couple of them back on their heels, worried about being photographed as they held a Republican’s signs.

  “We’re not leaving,” Keating’s aide said. “You can keep those Lane signs over your faces all night, but when you put them down, we’ll be here to take your pictures.”

  The two men with the signs just stood there a few seconds longer. Then Keating heard the older man say to the younger man: “Put down the sign and go over there and let them take your picture.”

  The young man obeyed instantly. Keating relished his mini-victory, as his aide snapped the pictures they could now at least threaten to send to the Democratic State Committee—or the newspapers. Meanwhile, the older man kept his Lane-for-Senate sign over his face, to prevent any pictures from being taken of himself. Finally Keating and his aide gave up and got back in their car.

  It wasn’t until he was headed home toward Sharon that Keating suddenly realized why the younger man had so meekly followed the orders of the older man, and why the older man had never lowered the sign that covered his face. Miles away now from Norton High School, with the polls closed and all the sign holders scattered, Keating finally understood who the older man really was. It was Whitey Bulger.

  CHAPTER 20

  SEVEN WEEKS AFTER THE election, on December 23, 1994, Whitey vanished, ahead of the indictments he knew were coming down. As 1994 turned into 1995, it took a while for the cops even to grasp the fact that Whitey was gone for good.

  For one thing, the indictment he was facing didn’t seem that serious. Taken as a whole, it was little more than a racketeering case, and its centerpiece was the extortion of some elderly bookies. How excited was a Massachusetts jury going to get about a gambling case?

  Plus, Whitey had been away so often in the last couple of years that this latest absence didn’t seem particularly noteworthy. It was Christmas, after all, and then it was New Year’s, after which they assumed he’d be back, and they’d grab him. If Stevie was still in town, and he was, then obviously he and Whitey hadn’t heard about the pending indictments.

  Certainly Stevie didn’t anticipate any major problems. After he was arrested outside his son’s restaurant near Quincy Market, he was taken to the federal courthouse, where he ran into Ed Quinn, one of the FBI agents who’d worked on both the Prince Street bugging and the Joe Murray case. Quinn was one of the agents Gerry Angiulo had always described as “a piece of shit Irish cop.” He was a friend of Zip’s. “Can you help me out here?” Stevie asked.

  Quinn offered to get him a Coke.

  After seventeen years as a fugitive, Johnny Martorano was arrested in Boca Raton. His brother, Jimmy, was collared in Boston. Frank Salemme stayed on the lam until August 1995, when he was picked up in West Palm Beach. Two other defendants—Frank Salemme Jr. and George Kaufman—died soon after their arrests. Only Whitey remained a free man.

  As late as March 1995, Whitey’s flight was still regarded as little more than a lighthearted lark. On St. Patrick’s Day that year, Governor Weld journeyed to the Bayside Club to belt out a song about Whitey. The tune was taken from “M.T.A.,” the famous 1959 Kingston Trio song about the straphanger stuck on the Boston subway system. Except that the lyrics had been rewritten so that “Charlie” was now Whitey on the MTA.

  “Will he ever return? No, he’ll never return. No he’ll never come back this way. I just got a call from the Kendall Square Station. He’s with Charlie on the MTA!”

  It was the hit of the day. Billy especially enjoyed it. “Isn’t he great?” said Billy.

  The FBI didn’t seem terribly concerned about Whitey’s flight either when they handed the investigation over to agent Charlie Gianturco. His brother Nick had just retired from the bureau, and had succeeded Zip as director of security for Boston Edison when Zip was promoted to vice president. When Stevie was arrested at Quincy Market, he had been told he could make one phone call.

  “Get me Charlie Gianturco,” he said.

  The indictments were handed up on Thursday, January 5. With Whitey nowhere to be found, on Monday morning, January 9, 1995, FBI agents John Gamel and Joe Harrigan dropped by the State House to speak to the Senate president.

  “We cooled our heels for about fifteen minutes,” Gamel recalled. “Finally one of his aides came out and said he was pretty busy with legislative stuff and didn’t have time to talk.”

  Gamel asked the aide to have Billy give him a call, and then both agents returned to their offices at the JFK Building in Government Center. Early that afternoon, Billy phoned and told Gamel without preamble: “I don’t expect to hear from my brother,” he said.

  Gamel got the distinct impression that Billy did not want to be talking to the FBI. Gamel told Billy that if he did hear from Whitey, he should urge Whitey to call Gamel, so that a surrender could be arranged.

  “I’ll consider it,” said Billy.

  Later that month Billy and Whitey did speak, on the phone, at Eddie Phillips’s house. Gamel did not receive a call from Billy.

  Whitey and Catherine Greig arrived in Grand Isle, Louisiana, in late January 1995. They were driving a new 1994 Mercury Grand Marquis that Whitey had bought on Long Island with a $13,000 bank check.

  Twice in 1995, local police became suspicious of Bulger’s car, once when it was parked outside a Veterans Administration hospital in Wyoming, and later when a cop in Long Beach, Mississippi, decided to run the Massachusetts plates on the Marquis with the National Criminal Information Center. But in both cases, the car came back registered to a “Thomas Baxter,” who had no outstanding warrants. Not only was “Thomas Baxter” not arrested, he wasn’t even pulled over.

  By early fall 1995 Whitey would be back on Long Island. And in October, he returned to South Boston. From a pay phone in a waterfront freight terminal, he called John Morris, who was wrapping up his FBI career at the agency’s training center in Quantico, Virginia.

  The caller identified himself to Morris’s secretary as “Mr. White,” and said he urgently needed to speak to Mr. Morris. Morris took the call, and began taking notes. He knew he would have to prepare an incident report, a 302, if only because he suspected that Whitey was taping the call. Whitey demanded that Morris get a retraction from the Globe of their seven-year-old story that he was an FBI informant.

  “He wanted me to use my Machiavellian mind to go to people at the Globe in order to get them to print a story which he in essence said that the prior information was… given to the Globe in an effort to discredit him or to remove him from a position of power.”

  Whitey also mentioned something about Morris “ruining him and his family,” as Morris later recalled. Then he hung up, and Morris began writing his 302 inc
ident report.

  Whitey, meanwhile, called Kevin Weeks to tell him he’d gotten through to his nemesis. Again Whitey used the phrase “Machiavellian mind.” Apparently Whitey had been rereading The Prince.

  “Basically,” Weeks said, “he told Morris that if he went down, he was taking him with him, that he blamed this whole thing on Morris, that Morris started this whole thing and for him to use his Machiavellian mind to try to straighten this out. He blamed Morris for the Globe articles that started back in ’88. He figured it was the beginning of his problems.”

  Later that evening, Morris’s secretary-turned-wife picked him up at the FBI training center.

  “Remember that thousand dollars that John Connolly gave to you, to go to Glencoe?” he asked. “It came from Bulger and Flemmi.”

  By this time he had decided to get it all off his chest.

  “He told me that he asked for it,” Debbie Noseworthy Morris said under oath. “He told me that Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi really liked him, and that if there was anything he ever wanted or needed that they would help him out, and this was something that he chose to ask for.”

  Then Morris told her about the other two payoffs from Whitey.

  “He told me that there was another thousand dollars in the bottom of the case of wine and $5,000 that he was given some other way.”

  That night, soon after they arrived at their suburban tract home in northern Virginia, Morris suffered a massive heart attack that nearly killed him. Ten weeks later, on December 31, 1995, Morris retired from the FBI.

  Billy had other things on his mind. He was writing his memoirs, a book that would appear under the title While the Music Lasts. Published in early 1996, the book received respectful, if not rave, reviews. It was published before the full extent of Whitey’s criminality became public knowledge, and so Billy felt free to write how his older sibling “abhorred addictive drugs,” and that much of the evidence against him was “purchased.”