Hitman (57 page)

But there was a roadblock—the state rep from Southie, a former ironworker named Steve Lynch. Lynch boldly jumped into the special election to fill Billy's senate seat. Still, the Bulgers seemed to have everything going for them: at his final St. Patrick's Day breakfast as senate president in 1996, Billy insisted that everyone, including U.S. Senator John Kerry, wear a green Billy Bulger Jr. campaign button. Billy Senior worked the Red Line stations at rush hour with his son, an undistinguished attorney and even more lackluster candidate.

It was the first time since 1964 that Whitey hadn't been moving around Southie on election day. When the votes were counted, Lynch had crushed Billy Junior by a two-to-one margin. Billy Bulger Sr. couldn't even carry his own home precinct for his son. It was the end of the Bulgers in Massachusetts politics. None of them would ever run for public office again.

*   *   *

OF ALL
the organized-crime types in Plymouth, Stevie Flemmi was the only one who had never done any time, not even a few months in the House of Correction. And at the age of sixty, he was not doing “good time.”

Stevie kept waiting for someone—anyone—to ride to his rescue. But nothing ever happened. He began covering his bed with pictures of the saints. Soon he took up with a burglar who was a Jehovah's Witness. For hours Stevie would lie on his back in the cell, softly moaning as the Jehovah's Witness massaged his feet. When he wasn't attending religious services of the Jehovah's Witnesses, he would spin out endless tales to his codefendants, often about Whitey and the FBI.

He told them Whitey's stories about LSD experiments in Atlanta were “bullshit,” and that it was H. Paul Rico who'd made sure Whitey got time off for good behavior. He claimed the FBI had its own hit squad. He mentioned how Whitey always carried tiny tape recorders that he used to record all of his conversations with the FBI. Stevie talked about the Sunday-afternoon dinners at his mother's house, a few feet from the sunporch where the gang's machine guns were stashed, and where Debbie Davis was murdered. Stevie told them how any number of FBI agents, not just Morris and Connolly, had stopped by to dine with him and Whitey, and how Billy Bulger had joined them “plenty of times,” a claim Billy would later unconvincingly deny.

The more Stevie talked, the more the other guys wondered. But at first, they couldn't even articulate what they were starting to suspect. Or maybe they just didn't want to.

*   *   *

WHITEY HAD
been gone from Boston for over a year. His Louisiana home, Grand Isle, was too deserted in the winter for Whitey's liking, so he and “Helen” went back on the road, only to return in May 1996. He again rented a house near his Cajun friends. Whitey continued paying his rent with $100 bills, and he still passed on his monthly copy of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine to his friends. But there had been a change in his favorite Cajun family since he left. Their father-in-law was living with them now, and he and “Thomas Baxter” didn't get along.

The father-in-law was appalled that Tom would brag in front of Helen that “I have control of my women.” The two men also squabbled over the value of work, with the father-in-law bragging that he'd worked every day of his life since he turned fifteen.

“I never had to work,” Whitey retorted. “I had people working for me.”

*   *   *

IN 1996
, the FBI finally got around to interviewing Teresa Stanley and she gave up Whitey's alias. Kevin Weeks found out and got word to Whitey that he needed new IDs. In July 1996, Whitey and Catherine left Grand Isle and drove north, finally ditching the Mercury in Yonkers, New York. The feds soon had it staked out, but Whitey never returned. When it was impounded, the feds discovered that Whitey had put 65,000 miles on it in the eighteen months he drove it.

By then, Whitey was holed up in Chicago, where one of his fellow former Alcatraz inmates was working for a mobbed-up local union. Whitey needed new IDs, and first Weeks posed Whitey's youngest brother, the court clerk Jackie, for the photos. But they weren't close enough, so Weeks flew out to Chicago to get new pictures of Whitey. Later Weeks shook a state police tail and got the new IDs to Whitey in Chicago.

Whitey and Catherine flew to New York, and then caught a plane to Europe. Neither has been seen in the United States since 1996.

*   *   *

THE JUDGE
who'd drawn the racketeering case was Mark Wolf, and every time he had all the defendants in court together, he would ask the prosecutors if there were any “surprises” they were holding back. It was almost as if he were trying to drop a hint, and finally someone on the defense team picked up on it.

Before being appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, Wolf had been the first assistant U.S. attorney in Boston under Bill Weld. In other words, he'd been around in the office when the Dog House bugs were installed, and for at least a few of the occasions when Jeremiah O'Sullivan had gone out of his way to protect Whitey and Stevie.

Maybe Wolf knew something that he couldn't come right out and say. So finally, in early 1997, Frankie Salemme's lawyer filed a motion listing a number of names, asking the government to acknowledge whether any of them had been used as informants. The most important name on the list was Whitey Bulger. How could the government allow one of its own informants—one of its own employees—to take part in crimes with impunity, while arresting others who were involved in the same conspiracies? It was one of the lawyers who first mentioned the Fourteenth Amendment, but pretty soon everyone in Cellblock H couldn't stop talking about the Constitution's equal-protection clause.

At this point, Judge Wolf called everyone back into his courtroom and asked whether they were asking if just the names on their list were informants, or if they would prefer to have the names of all the informants the FBI had used in building its case? Now he was dropping an even broader hint.

The defendants immediately asked for all the names.

It was right about this time that the feds offered us a blanket deal. It could be they knew what was going to come out, or maybe they just figured it would be easier this way, for everybody. The way one of these deals works is, everybody in the indictment has to agree to plead guilty. The guys at the top end of the indictment, who are looking at the longest sentences, get a few years cut off. And the guys at the bottom get some time added on. But at least it's done, and you can get down to just doing your time and getting it over with.

So we all sat down, among ourselves, and everybody agreed to the blanket deal. Everybody except Stevie. He was adamant. He said, “I'm not going to prison.” I said to him, “Where exactly do you think you are now, Stevie?” But I guess he knew he couldn't go into the federal system, because of all the people he'd be running into that he'd ratted out over the years.

So in the end there was no deal. It looked like we were going to trial.

As part of discovery, the FBI was already providing some ancient 209s and 302s to the defendants. With little else to do in Cellblock H, Johnny Martorano and Frankie Salemme in particular pored over the old documents. After all, they had both lived through the events described.

Frankie noticed one particular 209 from 1967. Rico had written it. It contained a lot of “information of a singular nature,” which was what the FBI always stamped on the bottom of the reports back in those days. They'd redacted the informant's name—blacked it out—but Frankie could put it together, because he was there back when it happened. So he says to Stevie, “You're the only one who could have known this, and that's your name that's blacked out up top as the informant.” And Stevie goes, no no no, that ain't my name, that's Wimpy's. You know Wimpy was a rat, Frankie, that's why we killed him. And Frankie gives him this look and he says, Stevie, look at the date on this 209. It's April 1967. We killed Wimpy in January. Stevie just kinda hung his head.

Johnny Martorano's mother Bess was going downhill fast. One day in early 1997, he and his brother Jimmy were shackled together and driven to a nursing home in Quincy. She had Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. She looked at Johnny and smiled and said, “You're still the quiet one.”

Two weeks later she was dead. Johnny asked to be allowed to attend her funeral, but was told that prisoners only got to see their dying parents once—either before or after they passed on. He hadn't known he had a choice.

Joe McDonald was the next to go. He died a free man, in his own bed, in Somerville, at age eighty. When he was released from prison, he'd tried to find out what happened to his partner, Jimmy Sims, who had vanished in 1987. Joe Mac never did solve that final mystery, nor has anyone else. Jimmy Kearns, ratted out by Whitey Bulger when he was a fugitive in Las Vegas in 1979, died in federal prison.

The old In Town crew was dying off as well. Larry Baione passed away at age seventy-five from an intestinal disorder in 1996 at the federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. Two years later, at the same hospital, Joe Russo died of throat cancer at the age of sixty-seven.

Johnny, meanwhile, sent a message to Patty in Florida, asking her to come up to Plymouth some visiting day soon, because he had something to tell her, and he wanted to say it to her in person, face-to-face.

I told her, you've been a great girl all these years, but it looks like I'm gonna be here for a while. You gotta get on with your life. She started dating a guy, married him, a good guy, he took wonderful care of her and Jimmy. She still lives in Florida, never left. It was tough, I loved her. I still do.

Patty still comes up to Boston every summer to visit her family. After I got out of prison, that summer she and her husband and Jimmy were staying at the Long Wharf Marriott. I asked Jimmy, “Can you bring your stepfather down to the lobby tomorrow, because I want to meet him.”

See, when he started dating Patty, I don't think he knew about my … reputation. So it meant a lot to me for him to understand that I'm not Jack the Ripper. We met and shook hands and I thanked him for taking such good care of both Jimmy and Patty. Jimmy was really happy.

One day in 1997, they all filed back into Judge Wolf's courtroom for another day of hearings. The defendants—Johnny and Jimmy Martorano, Stevie Flemmi, Frankie Salemme, and Robert DeLuca—all sat together in the jury box.

This day, Wolf announced he would like to see Flemmi and his lawyer, Kenny Fishman, alone in his chambers. In private, the judge told Stevie that the next day he was going to release his name—as well as those of Whitey and Sonny Mercurio—as informants. Wolf told him that this would be his final opportunity to work something out with the government, that is, to agree to testify.

That night, everyone climbed wearily onto the bus back to Plymouth—everybody except Stevie. They all thought he was gone for good. But after dinner, Flemmi bounded back into Cellblock H and announced that he needed to get everyone together because he had an announcement to make. They filed into a small room next to the visitors' area.

“I was an informant for over thirty years,” Stevie said. “And so was Whitey. Wolf's going to tell you that in court tomorrow. But I wanted you to hear it from me first, because it's not what you think it is. Me and Whitey gave them shit and got back gold in return.”

I was crushed. I mean, I loved that guy. Now I wanted to kill him and at the same time I was heartbroken. I know “mixed emotions” is a cliché but that's what I felt. Stevie said he gave them “shit”? We had the diagrams he gave the FBI of the Dog House so they'd know where to place the bugs. That wasn't shit. Neither was setting up Barboza to perjure himself about innocent guys—the ones who hadn't died in prison were still in the can at that point, thirty years later. It wasn't shit to get himself and Whitey cut out of the race-fixing indictment when all the rest of us went down.

Yeah, he and Whitey gave 'em shit all right—and I was the shit. Me and my brother and Howie and all the rest. And these two guys were the godfathers of my sons!

Stevie just kept trying to talk his way out of it. He'd come up with one lie after another. He started saying, well, I never hurt nobody but the Italians. I said, what about them fifty drug dealers in Southie? Remember, we were getting more 209s every day, I still haven't seen all of them, but these two guys were ratting out everybody, and not just gangsters either. And if Whitey didn't have anything on you, he'd just make something up, something bad, like he saw you snorting coke. And Zip would write it all down.

Stevie was dancing, but it just wouldn't fly no more, not after we started getting the 209s. He hurt everybody. At one point Stevie was complaining, he was supposed to get paid for all these reports, but Rico was stealing the money. And then a few minutes later he's saying he's not a rat. Him and Whitey, they were men without a country now. Billy Bulger's probably the only friend Stevie's got left.

It was killing me, thinking about what they'd done. Then on top of everything else, I started feeling guilty. This was all my fault. It was me who brought them both into the gang. Whitey came to me; I'm the one who introduced him to Howie. If I don't help him out 'cause I owed Billy O a favor, maybe the Mullens would have killed him and none of this happens. And then Stevie—sure, Howie helped him come back from Montreal, too, but I was the one who was pushing Howie to do it, whispering in his ear every day. If I'm not so hot to get Stevie back, the FBI wouldn't have been able to make it look like they had nothing to do with it. They're the ones who really brought him back, and that would have been obvious if Howie and I hadn't been hiring lawyers and bail bondsmen and arranging which cops he'd surrender to. I provided the cover for the FBI to bring him back to destroy us. It's all my fault, that's what I was thinking.