All Souls (28 page)

She didn't tell the little kids they were moving away for good. She thought it would break their hearts to leave what they thought was the best, and the only, place in the world. She told them they were going on a trip and that she'd be joining them. Ma sent the kids along with Kathy, talking to herself, on a plane to Colorado. When Joe sent money for her airfare, Ma left for Colorado too. She snuck out the back door that day so she wouldn't have to answer all the questions from the ladies on the stoop. She said goodbye to Mrs. Duggan, who she'd always respected, and walked out of Old Colony Project. With Maria in one arm, her accordion over the other shoulder, and two trash bags full of pots, pans, clothes, and religious pictures that had hung on our walls since the day we first moved in, she carted away all that was salvageable from 8 Patterson Way.

She flagged down a cab and made the driver stop off at the wall on Broadway to say goodbye to the homeless guys before taking her to the airport. All Ma had left to give from her trip to Fatima was the scapula around her own neck. She took it off and put it around the neck of one of the guys. Then she went back to the cab and pulled out her crumpled picture of the Divine Mercy and gave it to another man who looked like he wanted something too. Ma held his hand and told him that the picture of the risen Christ had got her through every single morning since the kids died. Ma told them all she'd never see them again, and they all waved goodbye to her cab, calling her “Mother Helen.” The cab drove Ma away from Southie and on to the airport.

Early one morning in August 1990, law enforcement agencies woke up some of the town's top businessmen in the cocaine trade. Fifty-two in all were taken from their homes and charged in a criminal conspiracy in South Boston. Stories abounded that day about shotguns to the face and the surprised look of groggy gangsters waking up to squadrons of armed agents in their bedrooms and relatives being taken away by “the bad guys.” The televised news reports showed many of my handcuffed neighbors filing into police trucks with T-shirts pulled over their heads, many wearing flip flops and gym shorts on the hazy August morning. “There's Pole Cat Moore! They got Tommy Cronin, and Eddie McGlaughlin! Andre! Little Red Shea!” I was telling Ma on the phone from Colorado everything I was seeing on TV. We both felt bad about the arrest of Joey Earner, who was like a MacDonald to us.

I watched the replays of news reports all day. That line of neighbors filing into police trucks was a who's who of the Southie drug world. Police said their biggest catches were Tommy Cronin, who used to hand out twenties to my little brothers; Red Shea, who they said was making coke runs down to the Colombian connections in Florida; and Paul Moore, who worked for the BHA. They panned shots of 8 Patterson Way, where Paul Moore ran his business. Then there were the little guys, like Joey Earner, who'd been used by the boys since childhood. I kept watching, wondering which one was Whitey Bulger, who I'd still never laid eyes on. But as I later found out, Whitey wasn't arrested in the roundup at all.

That elusive Whitey Bulger! What a mystery! Always staying out of trouble and keeping his hands clean. Some newspaper articles commented on Whitey's absence among the suckers who got caught, another chapter in the saga of the gangster genius, an Irish leprechaun playing tricks on the most powerful law enforcement agencies federal, state, and local government could muster. It seemed as if every law enforcement agency in town was at the bust: guys wearing jackets that said DEA, ATF, BPD, and even some state troopers were there to help usher Whitey's boys into the trucks with caged windows. Every kind of cop under the sun—except for the FBI.

Then the rumors started, reaching into every crevice in South Boston, from City Point down to the buckled concrete of the Lower End. And the whole neighborhood tried to shield itself from the ugly truth. Which one among us wanted to believe that the man who'd epitomized the Southie code, who'd mouthed the familiar words about loyalty that we desperately wanted to be true, would turn out to be the biggest snitch of all. Kevin Cullen at the
Globe
had been working on stories since 1988 suggesting that Whitey Bulger was one of the FBI's most prized informants, that he'd helped lock up the Italian mob across town, even as he killed our own families with his drugs and his violence and his Southie code. As much as I'd hated Whitey for what I'd seen happening to my neighborhood, it was nothing compared to the rage I felt when I realized that agents of the U.S. government had turned a blind eye while we were slaughtered.

Most of my neighbors continued to grapple with the revelations about Whitey. One Boston Police detective said anonymously that he believed there was more cocaine in Southie, per capita, than in any other neighborhood in the city. “For years the Bulger organization has told the people of South Boston they were keeping drugs out of their community,” a DEA agent said. “The people of South Boston have been had.” But none of that was news to me, or to all the others who'd seen their families decimated. What was news to me was that the FBI had sponsored the parade of caskets that passed through the streets of Southie.

I'd thought Ma was losing it sometimes with all her talk of conspiracies, and now I thought I might be going crazy. I began to wonder for the first time what my brothers might've looked like if they'd been given the chance to grow into manhood. But then the memory of all that blood overwhelmed me, and I simply gave up trying to picture the kids getting older. I got angry, angrier than I'd ever known I could be.

The people of South Boston
have
been had, I thought. But not simply by a local gangster. He had a little help—from one of the most powerful agencies in American government.

C H A P T E R   10

J U S T I C E

I
T WAS JUST ME NOW AT 8 PATTERSON WAY, AMONG THE
abandoned wreckage of mattresses, collapsing bureaus, and a generation's worth of kids' clothes—whatever Ma hadn't been able to fit into her bags—piled in a heap on top of Coley's wooden couch that looked like a coffin. It was spooky coming home now to the ten-room apartment, which had once seemed too small for the excitement coming and going through those heavy steel doors. The doors squeaked whenever I opened them, and I tried to remember when that had started or if I'd just never noticed the sound before.

Every time I came up those stairs on a Friday night after passing by the parties on front stoops, I knew for sure my family would be there, all together again in the apartment. Ma, all dressed up to go to the Emerald Isle, would be bent over the washer doing her last load of laundry, holding the hose in place to keep the machine from rattling like thunder. Seamus and Stevie would be watching “World Wrestling Federation” and practicing Hulk Hogan moves on each other. Davey would be pacing the floors and smoking cigarettes. Mary and Jimmy and their two kids might be over with Chinese food for everyone. Joe would be waiting for Frankie to finish devouring every last bit of protein in the house, before the two headed out to meet girls. Kevin wouldn't be there, but there'd at least be a story going around about his latest exploits. Johnnie would be calling in from some undisclosed location with the Navy Seals. And Kathy would be all dolled up and sneaking out the front door, as sure-footed and determined as she once had been. But the door creaked shut, and the screams, sirens, and laughter from the street overwhelmed my memories. I wasn't home. I knew I never would be again.

I started sleeping at friends' houses all over Boston, coming back every day just for a change of clothes. I came and went fast, so that I wouldn't have time to sit and wonder what had happened to the family that had once surrounded me. I kept all the windows shut, and the air in the apartment was so thick and heavy that I felt I was swimming through ghosts. I changed my clothes and fled out the door every day.

Johnnie took the apartment after leaving the Seals. Never did I think I'd see the day he'd have anything to do with the Old Colony Project. He was the one who'd “gotten out.” He'd never spent much time in the project before. He was always at Latin School, playing football in the afternoons, and studying at the library at night. He'd gone right from Latin to Tufts University, and then straight into the Navy to become a lieutenant. The only time Johnnie came home was when he was on leave for a funeral, taking his position as a pallbearer, investigating the details of the kids' deaths, and leaving dents with his fist in our concrete walls when nothing seemed to make any sense. But now Johnnie was back. He found the cleanest mattress in the rubble of someone's old bedroom, and made a spot for himself in a corner of the parlor.

Johnnie was immediately welcomed back into Southie, especially by Frankie's old gang. He knew a lot of them from his own days at McDonough's Gym. He started working as a bouncer at some of the gin mills and drug dens on Broadway, owned and run by gangsters and boxers. Johnnie and I hardly crossed paths in Southie. I wanted nothing to do with the town, and he was getting more into it. One night, though, I was starving and came to Southie to borrow ten dollars from Johnnie. I went to find him where he was working at Connolly's Cafe, Eddie McGlaughlin's hole-in-the-wall bar on Broadway. It was all boarded-up looking, except for the window with a blinking Budweiser sign between some dirty country-kitchen curtains. Word around town was that Eddie had defrauded Tim Connolly out of ownership of the bar, now known to be a front for guns and drugs. I walked into the smoky narrow room looking for Johnnie. I passed a woman wheeling a baby carriage through the tavern and bumming spare change, and then by two older men “offering each other out,” the way we used to do as little kids in the tunnels of Old Colony. The guy working the front door was leading me through the crowd; he knew me to be a MacDonald. He pulled up a barstool for me, and once again I was surrounded by muscled tough guys recounting Frankie's championship fights. Johnnie was sent for, and when he showed up, the muscle men brought him into the boxing tales too, with a few funny stories thrown in about Kevin being a hell of a con artist. Johnnie's face lit up as he listened to stories about his brothers.
That's what he's doing here, back in Southie,
I thought, and I couldn't blame him after hearing my brothers kept alive like that.

Johnnie had someone give me a twenty from the register behind the bar, and I walked back down Broadway to the train station, passing through the once colorful boulevard that my family had loved, now gone dark and busy with suspicious characters darting in and out of bars, stuffing things into pockets, and looking over their shoulders.

Ma swore she'd never look back. The kids told me they hated Colorado though. They missed their friends. They missed saying they were from Southie, and having it mean something. In their Colorado trailer park they wore the shamrocks, Notre Dame gear, and Southie T-shirts. But it meant nothing. They were in an all-American world out west, where kids their age took buses for miles to hang out on fake street corners at the indoor shopping malls. There was no front stoop excitement. There wasn't even a front stoop. And Seamus and Stevie commented on how poor everyone in their trailer park looked—as if they'd never met poor people. But when I visited them out there, I saw what they were talking about. These weren't just poor people; they were poor people living on the edge of a godforsaken highway. There was no pretending you were anywhere else, no pretending you weren't poor, and no pride about being from the Federal Heights Trailer Park.

I could tell Ma didn't like Colorado much either, although she talked it up and begged all her old friends from Southie to come out west and move into Federal Heights. “We'll call it the New Colony,” she said. She must have promised airfare to about ten different friends, who'd stop me on the street to show me her letters. When I was out there, I could see Ma was trying to find ways to make conversation with the Colorado people. She was thrilled to see this one redheaded guy walking by her tiny kitchen window. “Ohhhh, for Chrissake, are you Irish?” she said to him, opening her window. “Mother of God, he looked at me like I had two heads and he just kept on moving,” Ma said in defeat. But she continued to look for any signs of home, pointing out to me the boarded-up highway bar named McIntyre's, and a town alderman named O'Reilly. But the few Irish names were nothing more than names, passed down through generations. In the end, Ma could only point to the green foothills of the Rockies, and say they were more beautiful than Ireland itself. That's when she talked Joe into hauling the trailer to a town called Golden, surrounded by the green foothills.

But Golden still wasn't home. “It's just the people!” Ma decided. “There's no hell-raising to them at all.” Ma talked about missing “the craic,” as the Irish called a good time. “With the long pusses on them, you'd think they just came from a funeral.” Ma said Golden was full of Germans. “That explains it!” she said. Joe bought a house dirt cheap in Golden. It looked like a shack compared to the Swiss-style chalets that surrounded it, with floors that Ma complained made her feel she was walking up and down hills. There was a huge yard, though, for Maria to play in, and a picnic table for Kathy to sit at smoking cigarettes and going at her new hobby of scrawling endless words onto piles of lined paper. Ma didn't want to give up the trailer, so she had Joe plop it into their backyard. The town was up in arms about that one, saying the trailer was an eyesore. They passed an ordinance and made Ma and Joe build a high fence to conceal the trailer.

Ma stopped calling me once her phone was blocked for long distance calls. When I called her, she said Stevie had rung up a big bill calling his friend Tommy Viens in Southie. The two little kids were begging Ma to send them back to Southie that summer to see their friends. Ma swore she'd never look back, but with a place like Southie, it was hard not to. Johnnie was living in the apartment, and she knew I came by each day for a change of clothes, so Ma gave in and sent the kids for a two-week visit. There's no place like Southie. And at the ages of thirteen and fourteen, Stevie and Seamus knew that better than anyone.

It only took a few days of the little kids' visit back home before our world fell in on us again. Mary was working in the operating room at the City Hospital when she was told Tommy Viens was downstairs with a gunshot wound to the head. “I was a nervous wreck,” she told me on the phone. “I thought I'd have to dismiss myself from the case.” Mary told me all she knew: that Tommy had gotten hold of one of Johnnie's guns. That Stevie had found his best friend, face up under a big swivel bamboo chair. Tommy's eyes were open and blood was streaming from the back of his head. “Stevie's still shaking,” she said. “Eighteen cops held him for two and a half hours in the apartment right next to where it happened.” The detectives hadn't allowed Johnnie into the house for the interrogation. In the end, they let Stevie leave the apartment to the crowds that had gathered, and to Johnnie. “Oh, one more thing kid,” Detective O'Leary said to Stevie, throwing his head up in a quick laugh, “your buddy's Ocean Kai.” Ocean Kai was the local Chinese food restaurant, and Stevie didn't know what he meant. “Your friend's dead,” O'Leary clarified.

We spent the night and the next day at Mary's. Steven was wearing the same clothes from the day before, and couldn't stop crying. He looked worn out and numb, and kept asking: “When can I go see Mr. and Mrs. Viens?” Seamus was watching cartoons with Mary's two sons when Steven wandered into the kitchen and saw the headline “Cops Say Teen May Have Pulled Trigger on Himself” and the picture of Tommy being brought out on a stretcher, with neighbors covering their mouths in shock. Steven was staring in a daze at Tommy's picture. I grabbed the newspaper and got rid of it. Within the hour Detective O'Leary showed up to take Steven to the homicide unit for more questions.

Johnnie went in the cruiser with Steven. When I arrived at homicide with Mary and Seamus, TV cameras filmed us going in. The homicide detectives were now praising themselves for arresting the alleged “child slayer.” Mary's downstairs neighbor, Detective O'Leary's girlfriend and secretary, led us into the detective's office, and there we found Stevie crying in a chair and shaking his head in disbelief at the news O'Leary was telling him, about him being a murderer.

“You want a Pepsi or something kid? Your mouth is gonna get dry.” O'Leary looked like he was tired of his job. When the detective left the room, Stevie asked me why his mouth would get dry. I didn't know the answer. He wondered if they'd soon be shining a big bright spotlight on him and interrogating him, like he'd seen in old movies. I felt relieved to be reminded of the innocent child Steven still was through everything he'd seen in life. “How come? … How could they think? …” Steven started crying too hard now to finish his sentences. He looked at us, trembling all over. O'Leary came back in and let out a big sigh, “Your mouth getting dry yet, kid?” He explained that people's mouths get dry when they're charged with murder. “He was my best friend,” Steven said to O'Leary, hyperventilating between each word. “Ask his mother, she'll tell you!”

“Hey, I would advise you to stay mum until a lawyer shows up,” O'Leary said, pointing his finger at my thirteen-year-old baby brother about to be formally charged with murder. I wanted so badly to tell O'Leary to fuck himself. Better yet I wanted to grab the broken pipe hanging from the ceiling and beat him to death for what he was doing to my scrawny helpless brother. I wanted to make the pig bleed through every one of his despicable orifices. I'd never felt that way before, but if I could've gotten hold of the gun in O'Leary's holster I would've shot him dead, and gladly gone to prison for it. I helped raise Seamus and Stevie; I changed their diapers and saw their first steps. The hate building up inside me was enough to chase every demon out of hell. But O'Leary had the power of the entire Boston Police Department and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts behind him, and Stevie was just a kid from the projects.

Detective O'Leary was famous in Boston that year. Not for passing out upside-down in stairwells outside his girlfriend's subsidized project apartment—that we knew about after many nights of having to step over his big belly, although it never made it into the papers. But O'Leary, along with Lieutenant Detective Eddie McNeely, was at the center of one of the most racially explosive murder investigations in the history of Boston. Charles Stuart, a suburban white man driving his wife from birthing classes at Brigham and Women's Hospital, called police from his car phone to report that he and his wife had just been shot in the mostly black section of Mission Hill. His pregnant wife had been killed, and he was bleeding from a minor gunshot wound. Stuart said he'd been carjacked by a black man who ran into the Mission Hill Housing Project. In following days, Mayor Flynn and Police Commissioner Mickey Roach dispatched police into the project. That Mrs. Stuart was pregnant might have had something to do with the mayor's promising to leave no stone unturned until the killer was brought to justice. But black ministers, who hadn't seen this kind of attention paid to the neighborhood's black murder victims, were wondering if race also played a part.