Howie Carr (16 page)

As always, Whitey was thinking ahead.

CHAPTER 8

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1976, Majority Whip Billy Bulger got the break he’d been waiting for. Senate Majority Leader Joe DiCarlo was finally indicted for extortion, after years of fitful investigations by the FBI. Within fifteen months, the scandal would destroy the careers of the only two men who stood between Billy and the Senate presidency.

DiCarlo was charged with taking payoffs from McKee-Berger-Mansueto, the New York consulting firm that had managed the construction of the new University of Massachusetts campus at Columbia Point in Dorchester. Just a year earlier, U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill had assured DiCarlo that he was in the clear. But the turning point in the long probe came when the Boston FBI office abruptly moved two of its older agents—Condon and Sheehan—off the case. Two young go-getters named Connolly and Morris were temporarily transferred from the organized crime unit and sent to Lubbock, Texas, to reinterview two former MBM underlings.

As his lawyer, DiCarlo hired a lobbyist, Walter Hurley. Hurley worked for Tom Joyce, a Beacon Hill power broker who was a close friend of Billy Bulger’s. Every morning, the defense team would meet in Joyce’s office across Beacon Street from the State House—the defendants, their lawyers and aides, along with Joyce, Harrington, and one other person: Billy Bulger.

On January 23, 1977, after a four-week trial, DiCarlo and his bagman—Republican senator Ron MacKenzie of Burlington—were convicted on all eight counts. On February 28, Billy was appointed majority leader, but the MBM scandal turned out to be the gift that just kept on giving. In late 1977, DiCarlo and MacKenzie’s new lawyers filed an appeal for a new trial, charging that their previous lawyers had mishandled the case by not introducing as evidence important details implicating other prominent politicians in the scandal, among them Senate President Kevin Harrington.

According to documents included in DiCarlo’s desperate appeal, his onetime mentor Harrington had received a $2,000 corporate check in 1970 from MBM. Harrington, who was struggling to mount a campaign for governor against Dukakis, offered the feeble defense that he had “no memory” of receiving the check, which he had not deposited, but cashed, in a bank in his hometown of Salem.

Kevin Harrington was never charged with any crime, but he was finished, both as a candidate for governor and as Senate president. It was just a matter of time now until Billy inherited the gavel.

As for the defense lawyers for the two convicted senators, both would be appointed to state judgeships by Michael Dukakis. Joe DiCarlo has remained silent about his downfall, and its aftermath, for more than twenty-five years, but his friends never fail to mention the judgeships for the defense lawyers. Or that DiCarlo’s lawyer, Walter Hurley, was eventually forced to retire from the bench with a special sweetheart pension deal approved by the Governor’s Council. Hurley’s ouster came after he was implicated in a low-grade scandal involving preferential treatment for some lawyers at the Boston Municipal Court. Among those connected lawyers was a former state senator, George “Gigi” Kennealley, who also had a job at the State House as counsel to the Senate. Among Kennealley’s employees: Jean Bulger Holland, Billy’s oldest sister.

In August 1978, after the year’s budgetary work was completed, Harrington announced he was quitting, and Billy, his number-two man, was quickly confirmed as his successor by the Democratic caucus. Normally, Billy would have appointed his own majority leader, but his support was shaky, especially among the suburan liberals, who remembered with distaste his endless anti-busing harangues. So, in an unprecedented move, Harrington dropped down, from president to majority leader. That way, the dissidents could not coalesce behind someone who might threaten Billy in January 1979.

Billy then selected one of the Senate liberals, Chester Atkins of Concord, as his Ways and Means chairman. Not only was Chester a liberal, he was a Yankee. It was a sop both to the liberals in the Senate and to the Yankees at the
Globe
.

Meanwhile DiCarlo’s appeal went nowhere. The only thing accomplished by DiCarlo’s public revelations about Harrington’s $2,000 check was the demolition of the career of his old friend. The only two people who had stood in Billy’s way had turned on each other, both had been destroyed, and only Billy was left to fill the vacuum of power.

Tom Finnerty, Billy’s original law partner, had been elected district attorney of Plymouth County in 1974, but now he was having a tough time making ends meet on a prosecutor’s salary. He knew he could make more money in private practice. Still, county prosecutors had wide discretion over how criminal cases were handled and they also controlled large numbers of patronage jobs. District attorney was not a job any political organization would relinquish easily, especially not one in which Billy Bulger had a say.

But there was an obvious solution, so obvious that it would be used again and again by Billy’s cronies through the years. As the filing deadline for candidates in the district attorney’s race approached in the spring of 1978, Finnerty gathered the signatures on his nomination papers. But his top aide, William O’Malley, was quietly informed that his boss would not seek reelection, and that he should start getting his own signatures.

On the final day to file, with only a few hours before the deadline, Finnerty called reporters into his office and announced he wouldn’t be running. O’Malley then filed the nomination signatures he’d surreptitiously gathered, and ran unopposed in the Democratic primary.

Now Billy Bulger’s allies would continue to control the district attorney’s office in Plymouth County, and all its jobs, and Tom Finnerty, Billy’s old partner, could return to the private practice of law.

Edward J. King was the longest of long shots to upset Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1978 Democratic primary. The former chief of the Massachusetts Port Authority, King was fifty-two and a member of the postwar generation at Boston College that included, among others, H. Paul Rico and state treasurer Bob Crane. King had a thick Boston accent and was a daily communicant at Mass—Michael Dukakis, needless to say, couldn’t stand him, and had in fact fired King from his beloved Massport post in 1975, almost as soon as he became governor.

On the stump, King was stiff, wooden. But it didn’t matter. Dukakis had made too many enemies. He had raised taxes, he was arrogant, he was against the death penalty, and he hadn’t rewarded his supporters with the sorts of patronage jobs many had been expecting when they backed him as an underdog candidate in 1974. On primary night 1978, liberal Massachusetts was stunned as King took 50 percent of the Democratic vote to Dukakis’s 43. At the victory celebration at Anthony’s Pier 4 in South Boston, King’s street manager, a former state legislator from Hyde Park, put it succinctly: “We put all the hate groups into a pot and let them boil.”

King crushed a liberal Yankee Republican legislator in the final election. He was sworn in as governor in January 1979, the same month Billy was elected to his first full term as Senate president.

Philosophically, Ed King and Billy were simpatico, but there was a wariness to their relationship. King was an Irishman from East Boston, and it was the old story with Billy: He could get along better with Republicans—and even liberal Democrats—than he could with his own kind. His own kind held him to higher standards than the Republicans and liberals.

Once King was sworn in, one of Billy’s first chores was to set up his younger brother in a job that didn’t involve any heavy lifting. Jackie was the runt of the litter, average in every respect, with a pair of brothers who were not, to say the least, average. Jackie worked at the MBTA, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, once known as the MTA but now most commonly referred to simply as “the T.” He supplemented his income by working part-time at a fish store in Roslindale Square. But he wanted more, and soon Jackie had a job at the Boston Juvenile Court, just a block or so away from the State House. Next Jackie wanted a promotion to clerk. It would mean extra money, and behind that, a larger pension. There was only one problem for Jackie: the Juvenile Court already had a clerk. But that logjam was eliminated when Governor King appointed the clerk to a judgeship and then filled the vacancy with Jackie Bulger, Boston English High School Class of 1956.

On the day of Jackie’s pro forma confirmation hearing before the Governor’s Council, Billy walked across the hall and presented himself to the Governor’s Council.

“Never have I seen a person so qualified,” Billy said, “a person so deserving, a person so capable in every material respect, a person so clearly without peer as the candidate in whose behalf I speak today: probably the most brilliant choice ever to come before this council—my brother!”

The vote to confirm was 8–0.

Whitey and Billy’s mother, Jean, died in January 1980. All the children gathered for the wake—all, that is, except Whitey. He had to wait until after visiting hours to join his siblings mourning in the parlor of the funeral home. Neither Billy nor Whitey wanted an errant snapshot of the brothers together appearing in the paper.

Soon after Jean’s burial, Sonny McDonough suddenly checked himself into the hospital. Billy’s beloved mentor was dying of cancer. As he reached what Billy always called “the checkout counter,” he requested that Billy take care of his son, Patrick Jr. He hadn’t even graduated high school, but so what? Like Jackie Bulger, he too wanted to be a clerk, and he had his eye on the Boston Housing Court, which was presided over by Judge E. George Daher.

There was only one hitch: Eighteen other candidates had applied for the clerk’s job, all of them attorneys, and one in particular stood out: a black lawyer named Robert Lewis. Lewis got the clerk’s job, and then, according to newspaper accounts, he was supposed to appoint Patrick as his assistant. If the Jackie Bulger scenario could be repeated, and why shouldn’t it have been, then soon Lewis would be a judge, and Patrick would have the clerkship Billy had promised his old man.

Lewis got the job, but then declined to appoint young McDonough. And Judge Daher backed him up. There would be trouble, and it wasn’t long in coming.

As Daher later recalled, one court administrator pointed a finger at him and said, “What the Senate president gives, he can take away.”

On a courthouse elevator, a judge was even blunter with Daher: “Don’t fuck with Billy Bulger on this one, okay?”

But he did, and it wasn’t okay. The next budget contained an “outside section” that folded the Boston Housing Court, which had been independent, into the Boston Municipal Court. That meant that Daher was no longer a presiding judge—his pay was automatically cut $2,500—and his support staff was eliminated.

Governor King vetoed the reorganization, but the pay cut stood. The judges had learned the lesson from one of their own: Don’t fuck with Billy Bulger.

And there was one other lesson everyone learned: Billy could hold a grudge.

A few years later, at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, one of Billy’s allies joked that Judge Daher had been reduced to “holding court in a Winnebago,” and that he desperately needed an increase in his budget. Billy smiled and leaned in close to the microphone.

“He’ll have to wait,” Billy said, “until I hear from Sonny.”

In 1980, the voters of Massachusetts overwhelmingly approved a referendum question that capped increases in local property taxes at 2
¹
⁄2 percent a year, unless the voters, rather than elected officials, approved an override. Because of the mandated percentage, the new law became known as Proposition 2
¹
⁄2, and it changed politics in Massachusetts profoundly, by making the cities and towns more reliant than ever on financial aid from the commonwealth. Suddenly, state government was playing a larger role than ever in the daily lives of the population.

Then the city of Boston was dealt another financial body blow. For years, it had been assessing commercial property at a higher rate than residential. Finally, however, the commercial interests had gone to court, and prevailed. The city owed millions in rebates, and, because of Prop 2
¹
⁄2, had no way to raise the money it needed to pay off the court judgment.

In 1981, the fiscal crisis in Boston gave Billy the opportunity to bail out the city and simultaneously concentrate still more power in his hands. The plan was developed not by Billy, but by the staff of his Ways and Means chairman, Chester Atkins. No one called Chester a liberal anymore. Bob Crane, the state treasurer, used to say, “When the boys from the suburbs go home, the boys from Boston go to work.” Chester, the Yankee from Concord, was now one of the boys from Boston.

Since Billy had become president, in fact, Chester had been the Bulger team’s MVP. He had a keen eye for talent, and he soon brought on a young man named Mark Ferber. He was Jewish, which meant he didn’t have much in common with Billy, but he was smart, and Billy did appreciate that, at least in his aides who did not represent a potential threat to his power. It was Ferber who came up with the idea of how the city could pay off its court-ordered settlement to the commercial-property owners.

The city would sell some of its prime real estate to the state, for cash. The Hynes Convention Center on Boylston Street in the Back Bay was the obvious choice—the city needed a new hall, and couldn’t afford to build one. But the state government could issue bonds to pay for the new hall, and the resulting debt could be paid off with revenue from the city’s most successful cash generator, the parking garage under the Boston Common.

To build and then oversee the new convention center on Boylston Street, the state would set up the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA). Under the informal agreement worked out with Mayor White and Governor King, Billy’s appointees would dominate the MCCA board, and with that power came control of the jobs.

The MCCA would provide jobs for friends of both Billy and Whitey. The fact that it was an “authority” made its financial records, not to mention its payroll, less accessible to the press. And the money, through the garage and later a hotel-motel occupancy tax, would flow endlessly.