Howie Carr (36 page)

The only real effort to generate any kind of buzz came at what turned out to be Billy’s final St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. All the politicians seen on the TV newscasts that night, and in the next morning’s papers, were wearing Junior’s campaign buttons. Even Senator John Kerry, who showed up in an election year with his new wife, Teresa Heinz, pinned one on his lapel.

But the race was over even before the polls opened on election day, and Billy knew it. Lynch had always been respectful, and just before the election, one of the Bulgers reached out to tell him, “Even though we’re on different sides, if you win, don’t worry, you don’t have a problem.”

On March 28, 1996, Junior managed barely 35 percent of the vote, while Loftus couldn’t even break into double figures. Lynch even carried the Bulgers’ home precinct, 332–296. Only in Chinatown did the Bulgers hang on, thanks to Billy’s old army buddy, Frank Chin, the precinct captain. But even a four-to-one majority in Chinatown’s precinct 3-8 wasn’t nearly enough. It was the first election in South Boston since 1964 in which Whitey had not been lurking in the shadows, and it was the first time a Bulger had ever been defeated, let alone crushed. No Bulger would run for any elective office again.

Whitey and Catherine Greig, “Tom and Helen from New York,” as they called themselves, returned to Grand Isle in November 1995. They holed up in a motel for a while, then rented a duplex on the beach called It’s Our Dream, and soon met and befriended a financially struggling Cajun family, the Gautreauxs.

The Gautreauxs quickly benefited from the largess of “Tom and Helen.” “Tom” bought them a stove, refrigerator, and freezer, paying $1,900 in new $100 bills. According to a later story in the
Globe
, when Whitey reached into his pouch for the cash, the clerk at the hardware store noticed that he also had a pearl-handled knife inside.

In that newspaper account, the fugitives were portrayed as Good Samaritans, pining, apparently, for their two poodles, Gigi and Nikki, back in Southie. Whitey kept a bag of dog biscuits in the trunk of his car for strays. When Penny’s husband had to put down a puppy by shooting it, Whitey wept.

But as time passed, Whitey reverted to his old, overbearing self. He lectured Penny’s husband, Glenn, on the value of a work ethic, telling him: “Get off your lazy butt. You need to make something out of your life.”

Sometimes, “Tom and Helen” would drive to the Wal-Mart superstore in Galliano, forty miles away. It was open twenty-four hours a day, and it had a pay phone, which Whitey used to reach out to at least five of his fellow former Alcatraz inmates, most of them ex–bank robbers like himself. He asked most of them for assistance in getting new identification. As always, he was planning ahead.

“Tom and Helen” hit the road again in the winter of 1996. Grand Isle was basically a resort community, and in the winter, the population dwindled a little too much for Whitey’s liking. They stayed on the road until May 1996, when they rented a two-bedroom house near the Gautreauxs. Whitey paid his new landlord with the usual $100 bills, and always passed on his monthly issue of
Soldier of Fortune
magazine.

But things had changed at the Gautreaux household since “Tom and Helen” had last visited. Glenn’s ex-father-in-law, Thomas Rudolph, had moved in, and he and Whitey didn’t get along. Rudolph didn’t like his bragging in front of “Helen” that “I have control of my woman.” The two old men also argued over the value of work.

“I worked every day of my life since I was fifteen,” Rudolph told him.

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

In July 1996, Tom and Helen left Grand Isle. In Boston, the FBI had, finally, interviewed Theresa Stanley, and she had given up Whitey’s “Thomas Baxter” alias. Kevin Weeks soon learned what she had done, and he immediately called Whitey in Louisiana. Whitey drove north and ditched his car in a nondescript commercial district in Yonkers, New York. The feds soon had it staked out, but Whitey never returned for it. When it was finally impounded, the FBI discovered that “Tom and Helen” had put 65,000 miles on the car in the eighteen months since he’d vanished. In the glove compartment, they found receipts for businesses in Grand Isle.

Meanwhile, back in Boston, Fred Wyshak, the federal prosecutor who had cobbled together the indictment against Whitey, got a call from a local forger.

The forger said he had been approached by Kevin Weeks, who was in dire need of new IDs. The forger said Weeks told him that he would provide him with mug shots and blank Massachusetts driver’s licenses, and the forger would be expected to fashion everything together into passable IDs.

Wyshak handed the tip-off to the combined DEA–State Police task force, and they met the forger in a local hotel (as two FBI agents, one of whom was Charlie Gianturco, sat in the lobby downstairs).

The State Police decided the forger was not a reliable source, and sent him on his way. Weeks, in the meantime, had posed Whitey’s younger brother Jackie for a series of mug shots in which he wore a false mustache. Weeks then delivered the mug shots and blank driver’s licenses to the forger, who, before returning the finished products to Weeks, showed them to the State Police.

Incredibly, the State Police task force did not recognize Jackie Bulger. They did, however, put Weeks under surveillance, but he quickly slipped his tail and flew to Chicago, where he delivered the new IDs to Whitey. Whitey was so unhappy with the photos that he ordered Weeks to get a new Polaroid camera and retake the pictures—this time of Whitey himself. Weeks flew back to Boston with the snapshots while Whitey remained in Chicago, where he felt safe, thanks to the assistance he was getting from his old bank-robbing pal from Alcatraz, Barney “Dirty Shirt” Grogan, who now had a shaved head and a job with an Outfit-connected union.

Back in Boston, Weeks went straight to the forger. He said Whitey now wanted a Massachusetts driver’s license with the name “Mark Shapeton,” as well as three more, with names that could be backed up with birth certificates. It was the sort of research that was simple enough to do, either through searching birth notices on old newspaper microfilm available at most public libraries, or by visiting the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. That was how Whitey, in 1977, had come across “Thomas Baxter,” a Woburn man born in 1929, the same year as Whitey.

But now the heat was too much, so Weeks instructed the forger to come up with the new aliases himself, and the birth certificates. The forger once more called the State Police, showed them the new photos of Whitey, and asked what he should do about the other names.

For reasons that still remain inexplicable, the State Police decided they would select the new aliases for Whitey, and sent a trooper over to the Bureau of Vital Statistics to pick them out. He selected the names Evers, Boudreau, and Henson. They were then turned over to the forger, who produced the counterfeit driver’s licenses and turned them over to Kevin Weeks for $10,000 cash.

The State Police again put a tail on Weeks, but then, astonishingly, broke it off. That left Weeks free to rendezvous with Whitey for the last time, in New York, where he provided him with bogus identification produced with an assist, unbeknownst to either Whitey or Weeks, from the State Police.

With all the new IDs in hand, Whitey quickly returned to Chicago, picked up Catherine Greig, and then left with her on a commercial flight out of O’Hare Airport to New York. It was September 1996. There has not been a confirmed sighting of Whitey Bulger in the United States since.

According to court records filed in the Jackie Bulger perjury case, an unidentified Southie man received at least two telephone calls from Whitey in 1996, shortly after he left the country.

Whitey said he was fine, asked how his two brothers were doing, and told the friend that if he saw Billy he should tell him he was all right. A few weeks later, the man ran into Jackie and passed on the message.

“I’m relieved to hear that,” Jackie said.

Back in Louisiana, the feds used the receipts they found in the glove compartment of Whitey’s car to track down the Gautreauxs. They were twice subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Boston. Penny Gautreaux was unrepentant about her friendship with the man she knew as “Tom Baxter.”

“How could you not love him?” she said.

Awaiting trial at the Plymouth County House of Correction, Stevie Flemmi was losing it. He may have been a big man out on the street, but he’d never done time. Now he was waiting impatiently for Zip and Whitey to ride to the rescue before his racketeering trial began.

Kevin Weeks began visiting Stevie regularly. They discussed the “other guy,” Whitey, and both agreed they hoped he never came back. Stevie used Weeks to reach out to Zip. The conversations between Weeks and Zip became more and more involved. With Whitey gone, everything seemed much more complicated. There were so many issues—how to get money from the X fund to Johnny Martorano, and what to do about the arsenal that was still stashed on Mrs. Flemmi’s sun porch. And then there was the problem of the Italian hoods who had taken to slowly cruising through Kevin’s neighborhood in Quincy. They also had to speak frequently to Stevie’s lawyer, Kenny Fishman.

Stevie had believed he had protection—not immunity, but protection. But as 1995 faded into 1996, it began to dawn on Stevie that no one was going to bail him out, figuratively or literally. Stevie took up with a Jehovah’s Witness, a burglar. The other guys would walk by his cell, and Stevie would be moaning, clad only in his underwear, as the burglar massaged his feet with oil.

When he wasn’t attending Jehovah’s Witness services, Stevie began spilling his and Whitey’s secrets to his fellow inmates and co-defendants—Frank Salemme, the Martorano brothers, Johnny and Jimmy, and Rhode Island mobster Robert DeLuca.

Silent for decades, Stevie now couldn’t stop talking. Stevie claimed Whitey had worn a wire for many of his meetings with various FBI agents, and bitterly added that he was now kicking himself for not obtaining his own copies of the tapes. If he had the tapes, Stevie said, he could cut his own deal to get out.

Stevie told them how Zip was like a son to Billy, and how Billy joined them “plenty of times” at the Sunday afternoon get-togethers at Mrs. Flemmi’s house, allegations Billy would deny at the congressional hearing years later. Stevie told them that all the stories about Whitey taking LSD were “bullshit,” and that it was FBI agent H. Paul Rico who had arranged for him to get good-behavior credits to reduce his sentence. He said the FBI had its own “hit squad,” although he never mentioned any specific murders they’d committed.

Stevie took to covering his bed with pictures of the saints. And all the while, he watched his back. Many of the local inmates were from Southie; they knew the girls he and Whitey had raped, and now some of them were looking for payback.

The pretrial hearings continued for Whitey’s five co-defendants, but one concern continued to nag at Judge Mark Wolf, Bill Weld’s former top assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. More than once Wolf asked federal prosecutor Fred Wyshak and his top deputy, Brian Kelly, if the government knew anything else about Whitey that they weren’t sharing with the court and the defendants. Wyshak and Kelly always said no, and Wolf would warn them that he would hate to start the trial and have Whitey suddenly pop up and take the stand and send everything back to square one.

Eventually, the other defendants realized what Wolf was getting at, without actually coming out and asking the question: Were Whitey and Stevie federal informants?

In all of his rants, Stevie had never directly admitted it, but most of his co-defendants had concluded early on that Stevie and Whitey were both snitches for the FBI. Soon, as they went over every detail of the case with their lawyers, it dawned on the other hoods that if they could prove that two of their co-defendants had been working for the government while they were all committing crimes together, they might have a shot at getting their own indictments thrown out. After all, how could the government permit some people to commit crimes, while prosecuting other participants in the same conspiracy? Their lawyers may have brought the Fourteenth Amendment to their attention first, but soon the hoods themselves were asking one another, what about our rights under the equal-protection clause?

Tony Cardinale was the lawyer for both Frank Salemme and Robert DeLuca. In March 1997 Cardinale filed a motion asking the government to reveal the names of all the informants, including the defendants, that it had used in building the case. Among those he suspected of being informers, Cardinale named Whitey, but not Stevie. Cardinale was afraid Stevie would flip and screw Frank one final time by testifying against him.

A few weeks after Cardinale filed his motion, Wolf asked the defendants if they were just interested in only the potential informants they’d listed in their motion, or in all the informants?

In other words, in addition to Whitey, did they want Flemmi too?

The answer was, yes.

A couple of weeks later, at the end of another hearing, Wolf called Stevie into the judge’s lobby and told him that he had received more FBI documents, and that he now knew that Stevie was an informer. Stevie shrugged. A federal prosecutor came in and told Flemmi it was time for him to flip. Flemmi just shook his head.

That afternoon, Flemmi was not on the bus back to Plymouth with the others. His co-defendants figured he was gone, permanently. Their gambit had failed, and now there would be yet another witness against them—Stevie Flemmi. But around 7:30, Flemmi reappeared in the cell block and said he had an announcement to make to everyone. All the remaining defendants—Flemmi, Salemme, DeLuca, and the Martorano brothers—filed into a small room next to the visitors’ area.

“I was an informant for over thirty years,” Stevie said. “And so wasn’t Whitey. Wolf’s going to tell you that in court. But I wanted you to know, it’s not what you think it is. Me and Whitey gave them shit and got back gold in return.”

The others would always remember that last line, because they knew what Stevie meant by the “shit” he’d given the feds. He was talking about them, his co-defendants.