Howie Carr
Page 32
In January 2004 Rico was extradited from Florida to Oklahoma to stand trial on charges of arranging the 1981 murder of his boss, World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler. From a wheelchair, Rico pleaded not guilty at his arraignment at the county jail.
On January 16, 2004, H. Paul Rico died in a Tulsa hospital room, as armed jail guards stood outside his door. He was alone when he died.
In January, federal agents arrested a Winthrop man named Graham Bulger for allegedly burglarizing a telephone company building in Waltham a month earlier. In its press release, the Secret Service said Bulger was a relative of Whitey Bulger’s. The headline in the Herald the next day read: “Bulger Kin Charged in Thefts of Equipment.”
Graham Bulger’s sister fired off an e-mail, denying that she and her brother were related to any other Bulgers. She said her family was a victim of “Unjust Surname Profiling.”
In February, on the day of the New Hampshire primary, when few reporters were in Boston, Billy appeared in a charcoal-gray business suit and topcoat at the Social Security office at the Tip O’Neill Building in the West End and filed his application for Social Security.
In March, the Boston Public Library hosted a black-tie “Celebration of Service and Leadership 70th Birthday Tribute to William M. Bulger.” The master of ceremonies was former Governor William F. Weld.
In the spring of 2004, the family of Billy Bulger was again questioned by federal investigators, this time about a call that was placed to their home on East Third Street by Barclays Bank in 1997 when the branch where Whitey had stashed $50,000 and the key to another safe-deposit box in Dublin was moved. According to bank records, a woman answered the phone and was asked if she knew where the bank could reach James Bulger.
“His current whereabouts are unknown,” the bank recorded the woman as replying.
On April 1, Jackie Bulger was released from the minimum-security federal prison in Ayer, Massachusetts, after serving four months with, among others, Mafia underboss Gerry Angiulo.
On April 17, 2004, America’s Most Wanted ran its twelfth segment on Whitey Bulger. None of the tips Fox received after the show’s airing proved of worth to investigators.
In May 2004 imprisoned ex-FBI agent Zip Connolly was transported from a federal penitentiary in North Carolina to testify before the federal grand jury in Worcester that was continuing its investigation of FBI corruption and organized crime in Boston. In prison, without benefit of dye, Zip’s black hair had turned gray. During the interrogation, he guzzled glass after glass of ice water. Whenever a difficult question was asked of him, he would look up at the prosecutor and ask, “Can I go to the little boys’ room?”
In May, one of Billy’s toadies at UMass Boston wrote a letter to the editor of a weekly newspaper in Dorchester suggesting that the new campus center at UMass Boston be named for Billy Bulger “because of his unparalleled career in service to the Commonwealth in general and to students and the people of Boston in particular.”
The building was not named after Billy.
Working out of the Coast Guard Building on Northern Avenue, the Violent Fugitive Task Force in Boston continued running down leads on the whereabouts of Whitey. Sightings were reported in, among other places, a remote town in Thailand best known for its male brothels, in Portugal, in Maine, and in Ohio, where two uniformed cops reported that they believed they had released him after a routine traffic stop. None of the leads panned out.
The new state treasurer of Massachusetts sought an appraisal of the Hynes Convention Center, the building on which Billy had spared no expense when he created the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. Including debt service on the bonds, the MCCA admitted that the building on Boylston Street had cost taxpayers at least $450 million. With a new state-funded convention center about to open in South Boston, the treasurer decided that the center was no longer viable as a commercial property, if indeed it ever had been. He asked that the appraisal be based on the land’s worth if the Hynes were torn down and replaced with housing units. Using those parameters, the appraisers decided that the Hynes’s true current value was $35 million.
In July at the Democratic National Convention in Boston’s Fleet Center, Senator John F. Kerry—“Just For Kerry,” as Billy had called him—was nominated as his party’s presidential candidate. Billy did not attend, but his old rival from Southie, former mayor Ray Flynn, made the rounds, offering comments to reporters on any subject except his refusal to appoint Zip Connolly as the Boston police commissioner twenty years earlier.
“It’s a Southie thing,” Flynn said with a smile, shaking his head. “You’ve got Billy under oath on it, right? What more do you need?”
Letting bygones be bygones, Flynn added, “Whatever Billy said, that’s what happened.”
In August, Bulger loyalist Grace Fey resigned as chairman of the UMass board of trustees. In a newspaper interview, she described what it was like to be associated with Billy Bulger in his final days as president of the university.
“I realized I was in trouble,” she said, “the day I got a call from someone at The New York Times who said he was a crime reporter. A crime reporter!”
At Johnny Martorano’s final sentencing, Judge Wolf tacked another two years onto the almost ten years he had already served. Wolf complained that a twelve-year sentence for nineteen murders still didn’t seem nearly long enough.
A local gangster who survived a 1973 machine-gunning on Morrissey Boulevard by Johnny and Whitey sent a letter from prison to Judge Wolf that was read into the record.
“I expect to see most people involved in this case in hell someday,” said Ralph DeMasi, sixty-eight. “I hope you all get there before me. Don’t worry, the drinks will be on me.”
Zip Connolly’s screenplay, Only the Ghost Knows, about a crusading FBI agent who brings down the Mafia in his hometown, remains unsold in Hollywood.
Kevin O’Neil, former owner of Triple O’s, onetime law client of Billy Bulger’s, and veteran money-launderer for Whitey, was sentenced to time served—eleven months. He was described as a cooperating witness and his lawyer claimed that the gangster, who had trimmed down to 320 pounds, was in danger from a “psychotic killer”—Whitey. An unnamed observer was quoted in the Herald the next day as saying that Twinkies and Ho-Ho’s posed a greater threat to Kevin O’Neil’s health than Whitey. As O’Neil’s lawyer described his “economic hardships,” his two daughters wept. After the sentencing, they left the J. Joseph Moakley Courthouse in a Lexus SUV.
The same day O’Neil was sentenced in Boston, in Tulsa Stevie Flemmi pleaded guilty in state court to conspiring to murder World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler in 1981. He apologized to the Wheeler family and offered any assistance he could in bringing the last killer—Whitey Bulger—to justice.
Boston mayor Thomas Menino confirmed that Billy would remain on the board of the Boston Public Library.
“He’s an avid reader,” the mayor said.
In October, a district court judge best known for singing Irish ballads at public occasions restored Jackie Bulger’s $3,778-a-month pension, saying that the felonies he was convicted of, including perjury, had nothing to do with his job as a court clerk. The state treasurer announced he would appeal.
In November, an administrative law judge overruled the State Retirement Board and ordered that Billy Bulger’s pension be increased by another $29,000 a year, raising his annual post-retirement take to $208,365. The state treasurer announced he would appeal.
In November 2004, Frank Salemme, age seventy-one, was arrested in Virginia after his indictment on charges of lying to federal agents about a 1993 murder. The main witness against him once again: Stevie Flemmi.
In December 2004, Zip Connolly’s brother-in-law, Arthur Gianelli, was indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with attempted arson.
That same month, Zip Connolly was revealed as having served as an informant in federal prison against a Louisville crack dealer. In an interview with the Globe, Zip said he just wanted to h
elp law enforcement.
“Once an FBI agent, always an FBI agent,” he said. “I have never forgotten my oath.”
In April 2005, Stevie Flemmi was deposed in New York by a group of lawyers representing the families of his and Whitey’s victims who are now suing the federal government.
Among other things, Stevie testified that he and Whitey had been paying off six FBI agents in the Boston office. Those who could be reached for comment issued denials. Flemmi also named Pat Nee as the other shooter, along with Whitey, in the 1982 murders of Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue. Nee responded in the Globe by calling Flemmi a “punk.”
“He should shut up and do his time like the rest of us,” Nee said.
Stevie was also questioned at length about the 1985 murder of his step-daughter, Deborah Hussey.
“How could you, Mr. Flemmi?” the Hussey family attorney asked. “How could you?”
“You need not answer that,” Flemmi’s court-appointed lawyer told him.
In May 2005, Zip Connolly was indicted on first-degree murder charges in Florida for the 1982 shooting of World Jai Alai executive John Callahan. If convicted, Zip could spend the rest of his life in prison.
In June 2005, ex-House Speaker Tom Finneran, who became the most powerful legislative leader in Massachusetts after Billy’s retirement in 1996, was indicted by a federal grand jury on three counts of perjury relating to his testimony in a civil lawsuit over legislative redistricting.
Finneran, a fixture at Billy’s St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts who first described the MBTA as “Mr. Bulger’s Transportation Authority,” hired as his attorney the same lawyer who defended Jimmy Flynn when Whitey attempted to frame him for the murder of Brian Halloran in 1982.
Finneran was succeeded as speaker by Majority Leader Sal DiMasi of the North End, whose name and phone number had been found in Vinny “the Animal” Ferrara’s address book a decade earlier. DiMasi said he was the Mafia captain’s divorce lawyer.
After serving sixteen years in prison, Vinny the Animal was released from prison. Now fifty-six, Ferrara swore that he would not “revisit” his past.
“To do so,” he told Judge Mark Wolf, “would be to qualify myself for the Hall of Idiots.”
In July 2005, the FBI sent agents to Uruguay on yet another fruitless search for Whitey. A Montevideo newspaper ran a story about Whitey under the headline “Million Dollar Baby.”
“Alias Whitey,” the article began in an Internet translation, “is a dark personage, in spite of his present face of a defenseless grandfather. Always is he armed with a knife. Bulger had friendship with superior agents of the FBI during the time in which he collaborated with them to catch the enemy number 1, the Italian Mafia. Later, as usually it happens, its own ally became the enemy to follow—the bin Laden syndrome.”
In August 2005, Billy and Mary Bulger spent a week in Israel on a junket for “community leaders.” Other guests included the new House Speaker, Sal DiMasi.
Also in the summer of 2005, from his jail cell in Miami, Zip Connolly filed motions seeking a new trial on the racketeering charges. In one brief, he accused his old friend, former federal prosecutor Jeremiah O’Sullivan, of telling investigators conflicting stories about his knowledge of Whitey Bulger’s crimes for “dishonorable self-serving reasons.”
Connolly also released a sealed 1997 FBI interview in which O’Sullivan described Zip as a “disruptive” agent who “wanted nothing to do with police corruption cases.”
In addition, the bitter Connolly filed a 2004 FBI interview of a minor organized crime figure who had been imprisoned with Frank Salemme, who had been a witness against Zip in 2002. The informant quoted Salemme as saying that he believed Billy Bulger “was still in contact” with Whitey and “had sent him money.”
Reached for comment, ex-con Kevin Weeks scoffed at the informant’s claims, saying that “Jimmy” would never “put his brother in that position.”
Besides, Weeks added, Whitey “has money stashed all over. He didn’t need his brother to send him money.”
On September 3, 2005, Whitey turned seventy-six. The search continues.