Black Mass

by Dick Lehr

  “I am going to my mother’s house at this hour of the night?” Julie yelled, all upset. Stephen told her about the cash in the paper bag and repeated his demand. Just get out of here and take it to your mother’s.

  “What is going on here? Why is this happening?”

  Stephen could not help her with the existential.

  Julie was confused, crazy. “I can’t go to my mother’s. It’s almost midnight. What are you talking about?”

  Holding it together as best he could, he told Julie he’d already called her mother. She was expecting her. Get going. His voice and his body were rigid. His eyes were still wet from crying earlier. “Your mother is waiting for you.” He wore an expression that said, Do as you’re told.

  The money, he said, was from Whitey Bulger. “It represents our investment,” he said, parroting Bulger’s angle. “We’re lucky to have got it,” he added, hypnotically.

  Julie was off to her parents’ house on Old Colony Avenue. Her mother and father were waiting at the door, a stone-cold look in their eyes. They’d heard enough from Stephen to know that the couple were entangled in business with Bulger—new territory for Julie’s family, ground none of them wanted to occupy. Inside the bag was more cash than any of them had ever seen. Julie handed the bag to her mother. “Hide it.” Her mother took the bag and padded into her bedroom and tucked it away inside a hope chest. Hysterical and now inside her parents’ home, Julie broke down to her father.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, and she cried.

  IT TOOK a few days for the Rakes family to fathom what actually had happened, to grasp fully that a bomb indeed had exploded in their midst. Part of the delay was likely due to certain stories, or myths, about Bulger. It was often spread around town that Bulger was supremely loyal to the people of Southie, that he liked helping people, that assisting the locals made him feel good. It was said that Bulger didn’t like bullies and he would put them in their place. It was said that Bulger, while not actually instructing anyone not to uphold the law, would encourage them to pursue their pleasure outside the neighborhood. Supposedly, if he heard that someone had burglarized a home in South Boston, he would grab the perpetrator and take him to school in Bulger Ethics 101—the first rule being that you could burglarize homes in swanky suburbs like Brookline and Wellesley but not in your own hometown. Men like Kevin Weeks were among the many who frequently promoted the Bulger propaganda, and the Rakeses had known Weeks for many years. The Rakeses, even if they didn’t know Bulger, knew this reputation. But now, firsthand, the couple knew it was not true—Bulger had ripped the liquor mart away from them.

  The other reason for the delay was a kind of paralysis. First there was the shock of it all, the suddenness of Bulger’s takeover. Then came anger at the unexpected ambush. The next stage would have been acceptance—facing up to the reality that there was little they could do about their loss. But before their anger had a chance to settle into that kind of quiet despair, the Rakeses, especially Julie, decided to put up a fight. In hindsight, maybe she should have known better and been more clear-headed about facing up to the facts of life in South Boston. But no one, not the Rakeses, not their family, not anyone really, understood just how thoroughly Bulger had sewn up the neighborhood—and beyond, for that matter.

  Soon after the midnight takeover, Julie and Stephen went to see her uncle, Boston police detective Joseph Lundbohm. Lundbohm, a veteran cop who’d joined the force in 1958, was now working in the homicide unit. He was Julie’s mother’s brother and lived in Quincy, just south of Boston, with his family. He’d attended Julie and Stephen’s wedding and saw them occasionally at other family gatherings.

  Lundbohm already knew about the new store the couple had opened; the good news had spread through the family. But he didn’t know much else. He took his niece and her husband into his kitchen, and they all sat down. Mostly Julie talked, and she poured out her heart, telling her uncle, Lundbohm said, “about three men coming to her house and stating they were going to purchase the liquor store.” The narrative included the part about Flemmi and the little girl and the handgun, and Lundbohm bolted upright—the threat was unmistakable. Talking about it again upset Julie. Once she was done, Lundbohm let a few minutes pass to allow her to calm down.

  Julie asked her uncle if there was anything he could do, if there was anyone they could talk to. Lundbohm replied that he knew someone whom he “trusted who was an FBI agent.” Lundbohm’s thinking was that this sort of extortion was a perfect fit for the FBI. After all, the federal agency had more resources, in terms of manpower and technical capability, such as fancy electronic surveillance equipment. Moreover, Bulger and Flemmi were organized crime bosses. The FBI, not the Boston police, specialized in developing cases against organized crime. The FBI was the big time, and best of all, the agent Lundbohm knew was on its Organized Crime Squad.

  The Rakeses gave their okay and left.

  Lundbohm soon called the agent. Within a few days the two law enforcement officials were seated at breakfast in a Boston restaurant—on the one side Boston police detective Lundbohm, and on the other FBI agent John Connolly.

  Following some small talk, the agent asked what was on Lundbohm’s mind. He told Connolly everything—about his niece and husband having just opened this new business, and then the gun, the girl, and the money. Connolly listened. This was a crime that could not be justified, as others had been, as necessary for Bulger to maintain his position in the underworld in order to provide the FBI with intelligence about the Mafia. Bulger’s move on the Rakeses had nothing to do with the Mafia.

  Faced with this dilemma, Connolly opted to go with what was now reflex. The FBI agent let the police detective finish and then said, “Would Rakes be willing to wear a wire?” Of all the available options, he’d thrown out the most intimidating. Connolly said nothing about wanting to bring in the Rakeses for a debriefing with FBI agents. Nothing about how the bureau might want to proceed cautiously to further investigate Bulger. He was playing hardball, as if the only option was the most dangerous and least likely to be enthusiastically received.

  “They’d be afraid to,” Lundbohm replied instantly. Lundbohm knew—indeed every cop knew—that wiring up someone to see Whitey Bulger was high risk and extremely dangerous. Police agencies couldn’t even convince wiseguys who had been turned into informants to wade into Bulger waters with their bodies wired up for sound. The idea of putting civilians at risk like that was reckless. The Rakeses were amateurs. Besides, still fresh in the minds of cops like Lundbohm was the murder of Brian Halloran two years earlier. The story was all around that he was shot down right after going to the FBI. Lundbohm waved off Connolly’s talk about body wires. It was like asking someone to jump off the Tobin Bridge.

  “I don’t think so. I would advise against it.”

  “Then I’m not sure if much can be done, Joe.” The meeting was over. “But I will look into it.”

  Connolly never did. Connolly did not write up Lundbohm’s information in a FBI report. He did not share the information with his new squad supervisor, Jim Ring, even if only to discuss how to handle the accusation against two of their secret informants. Instead, on his own, Connolly decided that extortion by Bulger and Flemmi was not going to be any of the bureau’s business, a decision that was certainly not his alone to make. “I would definitely have expected him to come to me,” Jim Ring said later. “That’s his entire job. There was an allegation that there was an ongoing extortion. That’s what he’s supposed to do. He’s supposed to come and talk to me. He doesn’t have the authority to go out and handle that on his own.”

  Connolly did share what he knew with one person, though. He told Whitey.

  Following his breakfast with Connolly, Lundbohm called Julie Rakes and told her that, even though he’d rejected Connolly’s idea to have Stephen wear a body wire, the matter was now in the FBI’s hands, and the FBI would be in touch.

  But just days after Lundbohm’s meeting with Connolly, during a vi
sit to the Lundbohm home, Stephen Rakes pulled Lundbohm aside, out of earshot of Julie Rakes and Lundbohm’s wife. Rakes was nervous as he huddled with his wife’s uncle.

  “Whitey said to back off,” Rakes told Lundbohm. Whitey, a shaken Rakes continued, had stopped him in the street in South Boston and said, “Tell Lundbohm to back off.”

  In an instant, Lundbohm had a single thought: Bulger knew about his talk with Connolly. And more than ever Julie and Stephen were in jeopardy. The truth smacked them in the face—all roads led to Bulger.

  Stephen Rakes folded soon after the warning. Bulger summoned him to the liquor mart several times during the weeks that followed, and Rakes signed the documents so that the takeover of their liquor mart appeared on the up and up. Rakes at one point had the gall to mention the additional $25,000. Bulger began screaming at him, and the money was never mentioned again. The conveyance was made out to Kevin Weeks alone, although Weeks filed documents later listing an equal ownership to Bulger and to Flemmi’s mother, Mary. Stevie Flemmi later said that the liquor mart was proof he and Bulger were in a legitimate business—an absurd claim that was almost humorous if not for the dark extortion behind the takeover.

  Even before the actual passing of the papers, Weeks showed up in the store and took over behind the counter, Bulger hovering nearby. The sign out front was soon changed from Stippo’s to the South Boston Liquor Mart. Then a large, green shamrock was painted on the cement exterior. Eventually, on a referral from John Connolly, the FBI in Boston began buying liquor for its Christmas party from Bulger’s liquor mart.

  Rumors spread quietly through South Boston. There was hushed talk that Stephen Rakes had been held from his ankles over the Broadway Bridge. There was a rumor about a gun being put to Stephen’s head, a rumor that he’d lost the store in a card game. But Rakes now mostly brushed off all the gossip and just kept his head down.

  To support themselves, Stephen and Julie dipped into the paper bag full of cash hidden in the hope chest at Julie’s mother’s house. They treated their wounds with a few splurges—a new Dodge Caravan, a road trip to Disneyworld, and the next year they used some of the cash as part of a down payment to get out of South Boston and purchase a home in suburban Milton. Their son Colby was born on June 5, 1984. Stephen Rakes had taken heed; he’d backed off.

  While the Rakeses were in Florida, a rumor started that Bulger had killed Rakes. Weeks tracked Rakes down at Disneyworld and ordered him back. Rakes left his family, flew home, and, to quiet the talk, stood next to Bulger, Flemmi, and Weeks at a busy intersection so that passersby could see he was alive.

  Rakes fell into line, behind so many others in Southie. He was eventually summoned before a federal grand jury investigating extortion and money laundering at Bulger’s liquor store. He was called twice, in 1991 and 1995. Within days of the latter, Bulger pulled up next to him as he was walking in South Boston and called out of the passenger’s window: “Hey, I’m watching you.” But Whitey actually had little to worry about from Stephen Rakes. In both appearances before the grand jury he described how he’d happily and voluntarily sold his store to Kevin Weeks just a few days after opening it up. The reason? Rakes, under oath, said he was in over his head, had fallen too far in debt, and didn’t like the many hours he had to log in order to run the business. He testified that Weeks paid him $5,000 and that he took out another $20,000 he’d put into the store, for a total of $25,000. They were silly lies that no one believed, despite Rakes’s best effort to sound relaxed and convincing. And the lies came with a price.

  Rakes was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, and in 1998 he was convicted of both in U.S. federal district court. For Rakes it was the ultimate double jeopardy—the government that did not protect him went after him, while Whitey walked away. But it was a fate Stephen Rakes had come to prefer to facing Bulger.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Bulger Myth

  Detective Dick Bergeron of the Quincy Police Department pulled himself closer to the manual Royal typewriter that sat atop his gunmetal desk. Typing was not his calling in life; working the streets, stalking gangsters was. He shifted uneasily in the chair and then pecked at the keyboard.

  The detective typed the words: “TOP SECRET.”

  He typed the words: “SUBJECT: Proposed Targets of Investigation for Sophisticated Electronic Surveillance.”

  He typed the names of the two targets:

  I. James J. (AKA “Whitey”) Bulger.

  D/O/B: 09-03-29.

  SSN: 018-22-4149.

  II. Stephen Joseph (AKA “The Rifleman”) Flemmi.

  D/O/B: 06-09-34.

  SSN: 026-24-1413.

  It was June 19, 1983, and scattered across Bergeron’s desk were stacks of notes and surveillance reports. Bergeron was shuffling through the material to compose a seven-page, single-spaced report for his Quincy police superiors about the two “notorious organized crime leaders.” The time had come for the cops to do something about them.

  Bergeron had been watching Bulger and Flemmi for months. Bulger, he had learned, was not just the boss of illegal rackets in South Boston but now controlled organized crime in the city of Quincy and “beyond into the South Shore.” Moreover, by following Whitey, Bergeron and the other detectives in his organized crime unit had learned that Bulger had now moved right into their midst. As Bergeron wrote: “Subject Bulger is residing in a condominium at 160 Quincy Shore Drive, Quincy, which is located in a luxury apartment complex called Louisburg Square. The apartment or unit number is 101.” The condo, he’d found, was not listed in Bulger’s name. The owner was Catherine Greig, a Bulger girlfriend. The purchase price for the unit in 1982 was $96,000—cash, no mortgage. “The shades in said unit are usually pulled down, and cardboard is taped to the small windows in the outside entry doors.”(Unknown to Bergeron at the time was the condo’s eerie proximity to a gravesite. The new address was just about a hundred yards away from where Bulger and Flemmi, eight years earlier, had buried the corpse of Tommy King along the banks of the Neponset River.)

  The cops had learned that Bulger ran the rackets in Quincy and was now often spending his nights there—reason enough to take action against him. But Bergeron had come up with an intriguing and altogether new twist about the crime boss. By consulting with his own network of underworld informants, Bergeron had learned that Bulger and Flemmi “now appear to have broadened their horizons into drug trafficking.” With their “expansion into the drug market,” wrote Bergeron in flat, official prose, “they will be helping people destroy their lives.”

  Bergeron finished typing his report, handed it off to his boss, and returned to the street. He and other detectives continued to follow Bulger as the gangster moved between their city and South Boston and as he met regularly with Flemmi, a few other select gangsters, and George Kaufman, the associate who often served as a front for them as the owner of record of their garages. In early 1984 Bergeron watched Bulger and Flemmi replace the sign out in front of the liquor mart at the rotary with a new one: South Boston Liquor Mart.

  Eventually Bergeron’s written proposal worked its way through various law enforcement channels, landing at the federal agency specializing in drug cases, the DEA. Bergeron’s report was consistent with the DEA’s own intelligence. The DEA had busted a major drug dealer, Arnold Katz, who had told DEA agents about Bulger’s business ties to another major drug trafficker, Frank Lepere. Lepere was the dealer the state police had seen with Bulger at the Lancaster Street garage during surveillance in 1980. Now Katz was disclosing to the DEA that during the early 1980s Lepere had forged an “alliance with Whitey and his partner, Stevie Flemmi, in which Lepere agreed to pay Whitey and Stevie whenever he smuggled a load of narcotics in return for protection.” Katz said Lepere had told him all about the deal himself, including how he delivered cash payments to Bulger in a suitcase.

  The DEA had more. Early in 1981 a confidential informant had reported that Bulger and Flemmi were on the move—“attempting to control dru
g trafficking in the region by demanding cash payments and/or a percentage of profits for allowing dealers to operate.” With the arrival of the secret Quincy police report, two DEA agents, Al Reilly and Steve Boeri, were assigned to work with Bergeron. Reilly and Boeri quickly added to the growing pile of Bulger intelligence. In February 1984 Reilly met with one of his informants, named “C-2” in DEA reports, who told him that coke dealers were complaining about having to “pay protection money to Whitey.” The informant identified a pub owner in South Boston who paid Bulger for the right to sell “small quantities of cocaine and heroin from the bar.” Then agent Boeri met with one of his informants, named “C-3,” who’d known Bulger for two decades and said the ambitious gangster “most recently” had taken control of “drug distribution in the South Boston area.”

  The drug theme was reiterated by “C-4,” as well as by other underworld sources, and by early 1984 the pieces were falling into place for a joint investigation into Bulger’s drug activities. The case, called Operation Beans, would mainly involve the DEA and Quincy detectives.

  It had come from bottom-up police work, especially through the often mind-numbingly tedious efforts of Bergeron and his colleagues. Piling up night after night of surveillance throughout 1983 and early 1984, Bergeron had learned a lot about Bulger. Going through the trash at the condo, Bergeron might find a grocery list intact, in Greig’s swirling cursive handwriting—“asparagus, chicken breasts, sherbet, ricotta cheese, olive oil”—but he’d also find Bulger’s papers torn into tiny pieces or burned to ash. He’d learned that Bulger was “habit-oriented”—leaving the condo in Quincy at about the same time each afternoon for dinner at Theresa’s house in South Boston. Then a full night of secret business meetings, mostly at the liquor mart. Then home to the condo. If it was sunny the next day, he’d often appear on the second-floor patio in the early afternoon for a breath of fresh air, sometimes still clad in pajamas.