Howie Carr (38 page)

Zip Connolly was living on borrowed time. In the wake of Judge Wolf’s hearings, a new prosecutor, John Durham, had been appointed to investigate FBI corruption in Boston. He worked out of Worcester, rather than Boston, but his imported, out-of-town FBI agents soon raided Zip’s offices at Boston Edison. They seized his computer, and on its hard drive, along with early drafts of his unsold screenplay, they found a copy of an anonymous letter that had been sent, on Boston Police Department stationery, to Judge Wolf two years earlier, alleging misconduct by the FBI, the DEA, and the Massachusetts State Police.

It was purportedly written by three BPD detectives, but now it was obvious Zip had composed it. Also in his office, the agents found stacks of blank stationery from both the BPD and the
Globe
. They had also located witnesses, acquaintances of Zip’s, who were willing to testify that he had shown them early drafts of the letter, before he had mailed the final version to the judge. With incontrovertible evidence that Zip had written the letter to Wolf, the feds had Zip cold on an obstruction-of-justice count. Now the only question was how much more they could pin on him, and who he could take with him if he rolled.

Nineteen ninety-nine was a terrible year all around for the old gang. In September, Judge Wolf issued a 661-page opinion castigating the FBI, in which he concluded that “someone” in the FBI had leaked the information to Whitey about Brian Halloran’s overtures to the FBI. Two weeks later, Martorano pleaded guilty to ten murders, including Roger Wheeler’s in Oklahoma. Tulsa now had at least one witness against Whitey, if he were ever captured. In December, Frank Salemme pleaded guilty to racketeering, loansharking, and extortion, in exchange for the dropping of the murder charges. He would now be a witness against Zip.

Meanwhile, Stevie’s mother finally died, and two of his illegitimate sons by Marion Hussey decided to case the gang’s old “clubhouse” on East Third Street. They found $500,000 in cash, which they blew through in a six-month spending spree, as one of them later testified.

Of course, not everything had changed in the world. Four years after Whitey had vanished, the FBI belatedly put pen registers on his two brothers’ phones, which allowed the feds to trace the origin of all incoming calls.

But then a female telephone company employee told her father, a bookie, about the wiretaps, and he immediately told Kevin Weeks, who told Jackie Bulger. The pen registers provided no usable leads.

That was to be Kevin Weeks’s final service to the Bulgers. He couldn’t handle this new, post-Whitey world. When he tried to shake down drug dealers in Somerville they told him to go fuck himself. He was roughed up in Southie bars. His mother, Peggy, was dying. His only relaxation came when he took off for paintball tournaments, but whenever he left, he would be trailed by FBI agents who thought he was delivering cash, or still more IDs, to Whitey. He tried to keep up appearances, of course—when the premiere party for the Boston movie
Good Will Hunting
was held at his favorite local watering hole, the L Street Tavern, Weeks showed up wearing a tuxedo. Also in attendance that evening was a local Teamster official who’d had a cameo role in the film as a judge. It was Jimmy Flynn, who had been tried, and acquitted, of the murder of Brian Halloran in 1982.

But time was running out for Weeks. In 1999, the feds found the man they needed in order to reel him in. Kevin Hayes was a City Hall hack who had a cushy job as the custodian of the voting machines of the city of Boston. He was also a bookie, and Weeks had kidnapped him in the early 1990s for not paying “rent.” Now, in deep trouble over his “job” at City Hall, the feds subpoenaed him to testify about Weeks under a grant of immunity.

On November 17, 1999, Kevin Weeks and Mob money-launderer Kevin O’Neil were both arrested. The next day, Weeks’s mother died. The papers began speculating which of the Kevins would flip first—O’Neil or Weeks. They were shipped out to Central Falls, Rhode Island, away from Flemmi and what was left of the gang down in Plymouth. In cell block H3, Robert DeLuca took pen to paper to commemorate the end of what was left of the Bulger gang with a poem that recalled Catherine’s Greig’s abandoned poodles, Nikki and Gigi. When she went on the lam in 1995, Catherine Greig had left the dogs with her twin sister, Margaret McCusker. But McCusker herself had been indicted earlier in 1999 for perjury after she lied about receiving telephone calls from her twin. After being sentenced to six months of house arrest, McCusker had both poodles put down. But DeLuca nonetheless entitled his poem “Who’s Minding the Puppies?”

Who’s keeping tabs on Broadway,

Now that Weeksie’s landed in court?

Who’s gonna clean the rifles?

Who’s gonna put out the hits?

Who’s gonna pull the trigger

Now that Stevie’s hit the pits?

Who’s shaking down the bookies,

And who’s gonna deal the drugs?

Who’s gonna sell the hot stuff

From TV’s to Persian rugs?

Who’s gonna travel the whole world

Disguised as a couple of yuppies?

And while Whitey’s with the Greig girl,

Who’s taking care of the puppies?

The feds asked Kevin Weeks how old his kids were—sixteen and fourteen. If you go down on these charges, they told him, your oldest son will be your age, forty-three, before you get out. You’ll be seventy. Weeks cut a deal, and his nickname instantly became “Two,” as in Two Weeks, which was about how long he’d held out.

On December 12, 1999, Zip was indicted on racketeering and obstruction-of-justice charges. By then, it was common knowledge that Weeks had flipped, and in mid-January, the State Police began unearthing the first death pit, at Florian Hall in Dorchester.

When he pleaded guilty, Weeks read a statement to the judge about how both of his brothers had gone to Harvard, while he had never gotten beyond South Boston High. Yet, Weeks said, his late father, an ex-boxer, had been prouder of him than either of his Harvard-educated brothers, one of whom had been elected a selectman in a suburban town, while the other had become a trusted aide to Governor Michael Dukakis.

Kevin Weeks said his father had always bragged about him, not his brothers, Bill and Jack. The thing his father was proudest of, Kevin Weeks said, was the fact that his youngest son worked for Whitey Bulger. In his father’s eyes, Kevin Weeks said, that made him a big man in Southie.

Despite everything, Billy was able to land one prestigious event for the University of Massachusetts.

Presidential debates are always haggled over and arranged at the highest levels, and Billy knew that in this election year, he had both sides covered. On the Democratic side, there was Ted Kennedy, his old foe, now a friend. Soon Billy would be negotiating with the senior senator to turn his papers over to UMass. And UMass Boston was next door to the JFK Library in Dorchester. Any debate in Boston, especially the first one, would entail a week of media genuflection at the memorial to Teddy’s slain older brother.

On the other side, the Bush family still felt warmly about Billy, and his surreptitious tips during the 1988 presidential campaign against Dukakis. And so the first debate of the 2000 campaign took place at UMass Boston, and Billy enjoyed a brief moment in the national spotlight as he welcomed everyone both to his city and his school.

Unbeknownst to Billy, however, Kevin Weeks had just told his law enforcement handlers about another of the death pits, and as George W. Bush and Al Gore flew to Boston to debate the great issues of the day, just south of the campus on Columbia Point, within easy view of the candidates and the national press corps, the State Police were exhuming the remains of Catherine Greig’s late brother-in-law, Paulie McGonagle, whom Whitey had murdered a quarter-century earlier, with help from Tommy King, whose murder Whitey had ordered a year or so later, after which he was buried next to McGonagle.

In early 2001, Billy was subpoenaed to testify before the Boston grand jury. Once Weeks flipped, it had been only a matter of time. It was Weeks who in January 1995 had arranged Whitey’s phone call to Billy at the Quincy home of his longtime employee (and driver), Eddie Phillips, whose son was now on Billy’s UMass payroll.

Billy admitted taking the call, but acknowledged little else. “I don’t feel an obligation to help everyone catch him,” he said. “I do have an honest loyalty to my brother, and I care about him, and I know that’s not welcome news, but it’s my hope that I’m never helpful to anyone against him.”

Did he urge Whitey to surrender?

“I doubt that I did because I don’t think it would be in his best interest to do so.”

It would have been devastating to Billy’s career if his testimony had been made public and the taxpayers had learned that the highest paid employee of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not to mention an officer of the court, felt no compunction to assist the authorities in capturing a serial killer and cocaine dealer. But Billy made his admissions in the secret proceedings of the grand jury, and they did not leak, at least immediately.

In Tulsa, the investigation into the 1981 murder of World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler remained open, even after Johnny Martorano pleaded guilty to being the hitman. The lead detective remained Mike Huff, who would occasionally fly in to Boston to pursue his latest leads.

Once, shortly before Zip’s indictment, he had dropped in on the crooked ex-agent in his Boston Edison office in the Prudential Center. Zip spent much of his time toiling on his screenplay about the 1989 bugging of the Mafia initiation in Medford. The working title: “Only the Ghost Knows.” Zip’s secretary typed and retyped draft after draft, as she later resentfully explained at his racketeering trial.

Zip ushered Huff into his plush inner office. Huff sat down and immediately hit Zip with the $64 question.

“What do you know about Bulger and Flemmi?”

Zip ignored the question. “Do you know HBO is going to make a movie about me?”

“I know they set it up,” Huff continued. “But nobody here will help me.”

“Do you understand what I did?” Zip said. “I mean, do you really understand? I took down LCN. I took down twenty-eight guys, man, I’m proud of what I did. You guys, you just don’t know what it’s like. That’s why I have to write the screenplay. I’m the only one who can do it.”

Finally, in 2002, Huff had had enough of the runarounds. He put out a wanted poster of Whitey, describing him as a man with “extreme bad breath” who “may be found in homosexual communities/resorts or nudist facilities.”

With the case heating up again,
America’s Most Wanted
ran three segments on Whitey in 2002—on January 29, March 11, and September 23. That made seven in all, so far.

Next it was Congress’s turn to make a run at the Bulgers. Congressman Dan Burton was the chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, and what in the federal government could possibly need more reforming than the Boston FBI office?

The committee members had been following the developments in Boston as far back as 1997, when Governor Weld pardoned Joe “the Horse” Salvati, one of the four innocent men convicted in 1968 of the murder of Teddy Deegan on the perjury of FBI informant Joe Barboza.

As the FBI began releasing documents from the files of Stevie Flemmi, it became clear that the FBI had known the identities of the real killers hours after Deegan’s murder in 1965, and had in fact known before his slaying that he was about to be killed.

Burton subpoenaed still more FBI documents, but the Justice Department balked. When Burton threatened to cite Justice Department officials for contempt of Congress, the administration quickly folded, and turned over yet more previously classified reports. In May 2001, in Washington, Congressman Burton’s committee held its first hearings into the thirty-year pattern of FBI corruption in Boston. Joe the Horse was a particularly compelling witness, as was his wife, Marie. Soon they would be featured on

60 Minutes
, like Billy Bulger before them.

Nothing in the Deegan case directly involved Whitey, but any even moderately thorough investigation of the Boston FBI office could only lead directly to him.

Perhaps the most damning testimony in that first hearing came from former agent H. Paul Rico. Surly, monosyllabic, claiming memory loss, the seventy-six-year-old Rico practically snarled his way through a brief appearance. Asked about Salvati’s thirty years in prison for a crime Rico had known he didn’t commit, the old fed shrugged.

“What do you want from me?” Rico asked Burton. “Tears?”

The Bulgers’ old neighbor, Congressman Joe Moakley, died on Memorial Day 2001. During one emotional interview, Billy recalled how an ailing Moakley had made a point of sitting with him in a public place during some of the worst of the revelations about Whitey, as a way of showing his continued support for the Bulgers.

Another linchpin had been knocked out from under Billy’s base of support.

Had Moakley lived, the congressional hearings might not have gone quite so badly for Billy. Moakley was well liked on both sides of the aisle, and although he couldn’t have halted the hearings, he might have at least been able to . . . guide the membership with some relatively gentle questioning of his old pal.

But now that was impossible. In a special 2001 election, five state senators—four Democrats, one Republican—squared off to succeed Moakley. The winner was Steve Lynch, of South Boston.

Zip Connolly had expected to be represented at trial by R. Robert Popeo, who had successfully defended a number of local politicians, including Billy Bulger. But Popeo didn’t like losing, especially when he wasn’t being paid much. Zip’s dwindling band of cronies had organized a Friends of John Connolly group to raise money for his defense, but the dollars dried up as one death pit after another was excavated. Popeo handed off the case to one of his lesser partners.

In the courtroom, a parade of witnesses exposed Zip not only as a scheming gangster, but also as an utterly inept crook. For instance, when calling Steve Flemmi’s lawyer, Ken Fishman, to strategize on Flemmi’s defense, Zip would use a pay phone near his house on the Cape. But after taking the precaution of leaving his own home in order to avoid having his calls traced, he would then charge the calls to his Boston Edison credit card, thereby creating the paper trail that he was using the pay phone to avoid. The prosecutors even produced a former FBI staff assistant who testified that once, when she’d opened the top drawer of Zip’s desk, she had seen “at least ten” uncashed pay checks. When Whitey was taking care of you, who needed a paltry government paycheck?