by Gordon Kerr
Connolly had warned him about the coming arrests and on 23 December Bulger had left Boston in a hurry accompanied by Theresa Stanley, the woman he had lived with for 30 years. He had prepared for this eventuality for a long time. As early as 1977 he had acquired documents in the name of Thomas F. Baxter and he had cash, jewellery and passports stashed in safety deposit boxes across North America and Europe. He is reckoned to have hidden at least $40 million.
Bulger and Stanley first went to Selden, New York, where they spent Christmas, and then travelled to New Oreleans for New Year. After commuting between New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco for the next three weeks, Stanley declared that this was not the life for her. Bulger drove back to Boston and dropped her off in a car park. He collected Catherine Greig, one of his favourite mistresses, and they went on the run together. When Kevin Weeks, shortly to take over the Winter Hill Gang, met him at the car park with Greig, Bulger is reported to have said: ‘Every day out there is another day I beat them. Every good meal is a meal they can’t take away from me.’
When Weeks himself was arrested in 1999, he was horrified to learn that Flemmi and Bulger had been informants. He returned the favour by revealing where all the money was hidden and where the bodies were buried.
Since 1996, Whitey Bulger has been spotted in Louisiana, Wyoming, Mississippi, California, New York and London. He is now 74 years old and Greig is 54. Investigators from the Massachusetts State Police, the FBI, the Boston Police, the Massachusetts Department of Correction and the state Parole Board are actively pursuing him and four members of this task force work full-time on his case.
John Connolly retired in 1990, but was arrested
in 1999 on charges of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice. He got eight years and one month to ten years and one month.
John Morris also retired, in 1995. In 1998, he was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for the story of the relationship he and Connolly had enjoyed with Bulger.
Twelve years on, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger is still at large although recently released footage shows Bulger and his lover in the Sicilian resort of Taormina in 2007. FBI officers are now seeking help from Scotland yard in their hunt for Bulger, who has reportedly been sighted several times in London.
James Burke
Sometimes you can almost understand why some people turn to a life of crime. The hand dealt them by life is so bad that you can see why they would want to take revenge on everyone else. Jimmy ‘The Gent’ Burke is one such person, but there can be no excuse whatsoever for the carnage he wrought on the world.
Born in New York City in 1931, he was fostered at the age of two, never to see his natural parents again. As is often the case, his early years were turbulent and unstable as he spent time in numerous orphanages, children’s homes and foster homes. Throughout, he was both physically and sexually abused by other inmates, as well as foster fathers and foster brothers. At the age of 13, Burke was in a car with his then foster parents, when his father turned round to hit him for some misdemeanour. His father lost control of the car and died in the subsequent crash. Burke’s foster mother never forgave him for causing the accident and beat him relentlessly while he remained in her care.
As he got older, Burke became involved with the Upper West Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen Irish mob. Gangster Hughie Mulligan taught him the ropes, and he was connected to Lucchese underboss Paul Vario. But he spent increasing amounts of time in prison, including a sentence of five years for forgery in 1949, when he was 18. It was the making of him, as he proved he could be trusted by fellow criminals and also came into contact with a number of Mafiosi who were incarcerated with him. They called him ‘the Irish guinea’, but he could never become a full, ‘made’ member of the Mafia because of his lack of Italian blood. However, the Mafia were always happy to work with people from other ethnic backgrounds, as their associations with killers of Jewish descent such as Meyer Lansky and Abe Reles proves.
Burke was a big man that you would not have wanted to be on the wrong side of. As his associate Henry Hill said: ‘He was a big guy and knew how to handle himself. He looked like a fighter. He had a broken nose and had a lot of hands. If there was just the littlest amount of trouble, he’d be all over you in a second. He’d grab a guy’s tie and slam his chin into the table before the guy knew he was in a war . . . Jimmy had a reputation for being wild. He’d whack you.’
Even being his friend could be problematic, as most of the people involved with him in the famous and lucrative Lufthansa heist in 1978 would attest. Hill said: ‘Jimmy could plant you just as fast as shake your hand. It didn’t matter to him. At dinner he could be the nicest guy in the world, but then he could blow you away for dessert.’
In 1962 he married and had a daughter, Catherine, who would go on to marry Anthony Indelicato, a member of the Bonanno Crime Family, and two sons, Frank James Burke and Jesse James Burke, named after the famous outlaws.
Around the time of his marriage, an ex-boyfriend of his wife’s became a bit of a nuisance. Not a good idea around Jimmy ‘the Gent’. He murdered him, dismembered him and left the body in pieces inside his car. All apart from the head. He gave that to his wife as a present.
Burke based himself in Ozone Park, Queens, and his main business was the hijacking of trucks leaving Kennedy Airport. He had a method all of his own. He would always take the driver’s licence or union membership card to impress on the driver that he now knew where he lived and could take action if the police came looking for him. Sometimes Burke or a colleague would give the driver a punch, to add authenticity. Burke would always apologise for this, but soon the drivers just let him have the trucks anyway. These were called ‘gimmes’ and Burke would usually match the driver’s weekly pay in the form of a bribe. It is from that that his nickname ‘The Gent’, arose. Part of his crew were Thomas ‘Two Gun Tommy’ DeSimone, nephew of the Los Angeles Mob boss Frank DeSimone and the Irish–Italian Henry Hill, two young crooks on the make for whom Burke became something of a father figure.
All the time, Burke was keeping in touch with what was happening on the street, bribing corrupt cops who kept him up to speed with potential witnesses and informants. Every year, a dozen or so bodies would be found tied up, strangled and shot, in the boots of abandoned stolen cars in the car parks around Kennedy Airport. It did not pay to inform on Jimmy ‘The Gent’.
Burke also owned a bar, Robert’s Lounge Bar, in Ozone Park, where he could indulge his passion for loan sharking and bookmaking. Robert’s became a hang-out for the area’s low life.
He went to prison for ten years in 1972, after he and Henry Hill beat a man up in Tampa, Florida who owed a friend of theirs a large sum of money. Paroled after six years, he went into drug-trafficking in the company of Hill, who was released around the same time. The Mafia, of course, famously say that its members should not deal drugs. The truth is that its members should not get caught dealing drugs. The Crime Families were worried by drug-dealing principally because the sentences, if they were caught, were very long and that most people became informants in return for a reduction in their sentences. The Mafia probably began to use Jimmy Burke to carry out hits for them sometime in the 1950s and it is thought that, as well as selling untaxed cigarettes and whiskey, he also carried out a number of hits for them at that time. The FBI reckons that he was involved in at least 50 murders and he had no hesitation in including the spouses and even the children of his victims in his mayhem. At one point he even kidnapped and threatened to kill Karen Hill, the wife of his partner Henry Hill, and their two children when he suspected Hill of being a grass.
One of his specialities was locking his victims, and more often their young children, in refrigerators. He would pick the child up in one arm, open the fridge and lock the child in there until he got his money or whatever it was he was after.
The Lufthansa Heist, the largest robbery in American history at the time, was a prelude to his most
extraordinary killing spree.
The planning for it began when bookmaker and Lucchese Family associate Martin Krugman told Burke that millions of dollars in untraceable money was flown into Kennedy Airport from Germany once a month to be stored in a vault in the Lufthansa terminal. Burke sought permission from crime boss Paul Vario, whose Lucchese Family ‘controlled’ the airport.
While living in a halfway house after leaving prison, Burke and Hill put together an elite team consisting of Tommy DeSimone, Angelo Sepe, Louis ‘The Whale’ Cafora, Joseph ‘Joe Buddha’ Manri, Robert ‘Frenchy’ McMahon, a Lucchese mobster, and Paolo LiCastri. Frank James Burke drove a ‘crash car’ to prevent police from following the robbery van. Parnell Steven ‘Stacks’ Edwards was supposed to dispose of the van used in the robbery at a car-wrecker’s in New Jersey where it was compacted. The robbery took place in the early hours of 11 December 1978 and they got away with $6 million in cash and jewels, very little of which has ever been recovered.
Burke personally walked away with $2 million. Another $2 million was kicked upstairs to Paul Vario, and the rest was split amongst the team, some getting as little as $10,000.
When he realized how much money was involved, Burke became wary of his fellow robbers. He realised that the authorities would pursue the perpetrators with a vengeance and the chances of his associates informing on him were great, especially as a number of them were complaining about their share of the proceeds. As far as he could see, there was only one thing he could do to safeguard his freedom – he launched a killing spree, which would knock off most of the members of the crew that had carried out the heist and a few others, just in case. Parnell Edwards was first to go. He was gunned down in December 1978 for getting high and forgetting to get rid of the van used to transfer the cash.
Tommy DeSimone was reported missing in January 1979. Henry Hill claims that when Burke killed DeSimone it was the only time that he saw him cry. It is possible that DeSimone was killed for his part in the killing of Gambino member William ‘Willy Bats’ DeVino, rather than anything to do with the heist.
Martin Krugman disappeared that same month and has never been seen again. Krugman stood to make $500,000 for providing the initial tip-off, but Burke was, of course, reluctant to cough up. Killing him meant that Burke got to keep Krugman’s share.
Theresa Ferrera, cocaine-dealing daughter of Milwaukee Mob boss Joseph Ferrara and one-time mistress of both Tommy DeSimone and Paul Vario, had made the fatal mistake of becoming an informant. She was summoned to a meeting in February at a Long Island diner not far from her beauty salon. She never returned and her dismembered body was discovered on a beach in New Jersey in May 1979.
Louis Cafora went missing with his wife in March 1979 and has never been seen again. They were probably killed, dismembered and laid to rest in one of Burke’s burial grounds – under the basement of Robert’s Lounge or in the basement of the now demolished South Side Inn located in South Ozone Park. When Henry Hill later told the FBI about these places, it is probable that Burke exhumed the bodies and re-buried them elsewhere.
Next up were Robert McMahon and ‘Joe Buddah’ Manri, shot dead in a Buick Riviera in May 1979. It is believed that Paolo LiCastri was paid $50,000 by Burke for the hit on the two men.
Paolo LiCastri’s bullet-riddled, shirtless and shoeless body was found on a vacant lot on a smouldering rubbish dump in Flatlands, Brooklyn in June 1979. He was burned so badly that forensic scientists were unable to tell the body’s age, race or even sex. He was later identified by dental records.
He also murdered a close friend, a Lucchese mobster known only as Remo, because he had become an informant and had contributed to Burke being arrested on a truck-hijacking charge. His body was buried under the bocce court behind Robert’s Lounge. Whenever he played there, Burke would exclaim: ‘Hey, Remo. How’re you doing?’
Henry Hill became an FBI informant following his arrest for drug offences in 1980. And he was joined by Louis Werner, the man on the inside on the Lufthansa job and the only person actually prosecuted for it. He was hoping to knock some time off his 15-year sentence.
A judge issued a search warrant for Robert’s Lounge, but Burke was one step ahead of them, already having re-located the bodies he had buried there – Remo and 16-year-old bartender Michael ‘Spider’ Gianco, who had been shot by DeSimone for insulting him and who had been buried beneath the basement floor.
However, the testimony of Hill and Werner was enough to have Burke arrested on 1 April 1980. In 1982, he was convicted of fixing college basketball games and was sent to prison for 20 years. The police did not have enough evidence to convict him of the Lufthansa job, but at least they had succeeded in getting him off the streets.
He was eventually only convicted of one of his 50 murders – Richard Eaton, a con artist. Burke had been careless in disposing of Eaton’s body. After beating him and strangling him, he had dumped the body in an abandoned tractor trailor on a piece of waste ground in Brooklyn where it was found by some children a few days later. In a pocket sewn into the lining of his jacket, police found a small notebook containing Burke’s name, address and telephone number. Henry Hill’s evidence resulted in conviction for Burke. Hill told the court that Eaton had persuaded Burke to invest $250,000 in a cocaine deal, but Eaton had hung on to the money for his own use. When Hill asked Burke where Eaton was, having not seen him for some time, Burke replied: ‘Don’t worry about him. I whacked the fucking swindler out.’ Burke finally got life.
He was sent to Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, New York, where, a number of years into his sentence, he was found to have lung cancer. He died on 13 April 1996, aged 64. Had he lived, he would have been eligible for parole just eight years later, in 2004.
Part Three: Sicilian Mafia Killers
Michele And Giuseppe Greco
Michele Greco could have carved out a career as a diplomat. His inate ability to mediate between warring Mafia Families led those who knew him to nickname him ‘The Pope’. However, too often it was murder and not peace that was on his mind.
The Greco Mafia Family was made up of two separate warring factions in the first half of the 20th century. Grecos from Ciaculli fought Grecos from nearby Crocoverde Giardini. In the 1940s, however, the two sides amalgamated to become one Family.
Michele Greco was born in 1924 and gained control of the territory of the Crocoverde Giardini territory or mandamento on the death of his father Giuseppe Greco, also known as ‘Piddu u tinenti’. On his estate, La Favarella, Michele would entertain politicians, financiers and public officials. At the same time, it served as a bolthole for fugitive Mafiosi as well as a heroin laboratory.
Money rolled in from various scams and rackets. European Union subsidies were earned from destroying crops that he had never grown; he, like many other Mafia Families, controlled the Sicilian water supply. They made sure that water was always in short supply and squeezed cash out of public coffers for use of their wells.
In 1978, The Pope was elected head of the Sicilian Mafia Commission, known as the Cupola, and when Stefano Bontade was murdered, he took control of his family and wiped out 11 of Bontade’s allies in a massacre at La Favarella after inviting them there for a meeting.
The authorities learned of Michele Greco’s status in the Mafia through a man who, wisely, chose not to attend the meeting. Salvatore Contorno went into hiding and started to write anonymously to the police, giving information about Mafia activities and personnel. He was almost caught in an ambush set by Michele’s nephew, Pino, and was probably fortunate in that case to be arrested in 1983. He became a pentito and started to talk, apparently surprising police with the information that Michele Greco was a high-ranking Mafioso and not a wealthy landowner, as they had thought.
Greco, however, was on Totò Riina’s pocket and did his bidding. Pentito Tommaso Buschetta described meetings where Greco merely agreed with everything Riina said, supporting him on every decision that was made.
Salvatore Contor
no’s information led to carabinieri chief Antonino Cassarà compiling a list of 162 men who were wanted in connection with Mafia activities. It was known as the ‘Michele Greco + 161’ report. Cassarà had made too much progress, however, and was assassinated along with one of his bodyguards in front of his wife by as many as 15 gunmen. His report laid the groundwork for the famous Maxi Trial of 1986/7 where hundreds of Mafia members were brought to justice.
Prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, later assassinated by a car bomb, indicted Michele Greco, and others, for the assassination of Police Chief General Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa in 1982, but it took them four years to find him. In 1986, they learned that he was holed up in a farmhouse at Caccamo in Sicily. Four hundred carabinieri surrounded the building and a couple of police helicopters hovered overhead. At just after dawn, they burst into the farmhouse, finding two men inside. One of them said he was Giuseppe di Fresco when questioned, producing identity papers confirming this fact. The police, however, knew he was actually Michele Greco. After several hours of interrogation, he wilted, saying: ‘You are behaving like gentlemen and I don’t want to waste your time.’
He was charged on 78 counts of murder, including the killings of anti-Mafia magistrate Rocco Chinnici, two bodyguards and a passer-by in another car bomb in 1983.
Like all the defendants in the Maxi Trial, Greco denied all knowledge of something called the Mafia, insisting on his innocence. He listed all the influential people he had welcomed to La Favarella – the policemen, businessmen and even a former chief prosecutor. He described how he had entertained Mafia boss Stefano Bontade there just a few days before what he called his ‘misfortune’, or as others described it, a few days before he was ruthlessly machine-gunned in the face, very probably by Greco’s killing machine of a nephew, Pino Greco.
