Howie Carr (4 page)

“There is,” he told Burton, “a tendency to forget.”

CHAPTER 1

I
T WAS AN AVERAGE
-
SIZED
family by pre–World War II South Boston standards—six children. And the Bulgers, like most families, harbored a secret. A seventh child, born soon after Jimmy, on September 3, 1929, and before Billy, on February 3, 1934, had died almost immediately after his birth in 1931. Infant mortality was not unknown in those grim Depression days. But the tight-lipped Bulgers told so few of their neighbors about the brief life of their seventh sibling that as late as 2004, it was one of the few facts that the FBI’s task force hunting Whitey across Europe refused to reveal to the public.

“If Whitey ever calls,” one agent explained, “the one way I can know positively that it’s him is if I ask him some questions about his dead sibling, and he knows the right answers, the ones only a Bulger could know.”

In almost every other way, the Bulger family did not stand out among their neighbors in South Boston. Although Whitey and Billy would later become the faces of South Boston, and of the last days of the Irish-American hegemony in Boston, they themselves were not natives of the city’s most Irish neighborhood.

Their father, James, was raised in Boston’s North End, where many of the city’s Irish immigrants initially settled, among them the Fitzgeralds, whose daughter Rose would someday marry Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s father. Jim Bulger’s wife, Jean, was twenty years younger than her husband. She was from Charlestown, just across the bridge from the North End, a neighborhood that remained Irish throughout the twentieth century.

Like most of their neighbors, the Bulgers were poor. As they grew up, all of them, even Whitey, would seek jobs with the government. The Bulgers distrusted all types of private enterprise, perhaps because of a railyard accident in which their father, a third-generation laborer, caught his arm between two boxcars and had to have it amputated.

As Billy would explain bitterly in his memoirs: “A straw boss explained that a one-armed laborer was of no further use and fired him. The railroad calculated the wages due him—up to the time he had fallen, mangled, to the cinder bed—paid him, and forgot him. He acquired a prosthetic arm, crude by today’s standards, which he fruitlessly tried to conceal by keeping the wooden hand in a pocket.”

James Bulger Sr.’s predicament was a common-enough occurrence in those days. Many Irish politicians were raised in homes where the father was either dead or maimed after an industrial accident. Jean McCarthy Bulger’s father—the grandfather of Whitey and Billy—had been killed in a shipyard accident in Charlestown.

At that time, there were no disability pensions, no workmen’s comp, no doles of any sort. Life insurance was for the wealthy. If you were unable to work, your family was consigned to a life of poverty.

After the accident, the Bulgers drifted from one apartment to another in Dorchester until 1938, when they heard about a new public housing project in South Boston called Old Colony Harbor, the second such public housing project in the nation. It was the brainchild of Congressman John McCormack, who hoped that a plentiful source of inexpensive housing might defuse the class tensions that had boiled over during the 1936 elections in Southie, when third-party candidates backed by the radical anti-Semitic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin had done unexpectedly well.

The projects were a boon for the Bulger family. Jim Bulger was fifty-two, and jobs for a one-armed man weren’t easy to come by. The Bulgers were among the first families to move in. At the time, there were three surviving children—Jean, the oldest, born in 1927, and Whitey and Billy. Three more children would quickly follow—Carol, Jackie, and Sheila—although the older siblings would always dominate the family. In the projects, the Bulgers had three bedrooms—one for the parents, one for the boys, and one for the girls.

The address was 41 Logan Way, Apartment 756. It was on the top floor, the third. The rent was $29 a month.

There had been Irish in Boston almost since the beginning. But they did not begin arriving en masse until the 1840s, when the Irish Potato Famine began. Between 1850 and 1855, the Irish population of Boston tripled. Most were from the west, beyond the Pale as it was known. They were tolerated, briefly, but as they continued swarming into Boston’s slum districts, the native Protestant population galvanized into what became known as the Know-Nothing Party. In 1854, the Know-Nothings took over the state government in an electoral landslide unprecedented in state history.

The Know-Nothing governor, Henry J. Gardner, in his inaugural address, vowed to “Americanize America.” He proposed, among other things, an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting public aid to parochial schools, which 140 years later Billy Bulger would unsuccessfully attempt to repeal.

The Know-Nothings vanished just as completely in the next election, sinking under the weight of their own scandals—including one legislative chairman who charged the state for the services of two prostitutes in Lowell and also made “suggestive remarks” to a pair of nuns in Roxbury.

It was an early lesson in “reform” for the Irish immigrants, and Billy was nothing if not a student of history. As Billy Bulger would say at his annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast all those years later, “Show me a reformer, and I’ll show you someone who won’t be back.”

By 1874, when James Michael Curley was born in a Roxbury tenement to a young Irish couple from County Galway, the Irish were almost the majority in Boston. But they were still treated with contempt by the ruling Protestant classes in the Athens of America. In the view of many of the Yankee natives, they had forever ruined “the once orderly and peaceful city of the Pilgrims,” as the Brahmin Ephraim Peabody put it.

As far as the proper Bostonians of the day were concerned, James Michael Curley would come to be the most vexatious Irishman of them all. Almost a half-century after his death, for Bostonians, if not for the nation as a whole, it is Curley, not John

F. Kennedy, who is the quintessential Boston Irish politician. And it is Curley who was truly Billy Bulger’s political model.

For the first half of the twentieth century, all politics in Boston, and sometimes in the entire state, seemed to revolve around Curley. At the turn of the century, Curley went to jail briefly for taking a civil service examination for a constituent. That stretch produced one of his first electoral slogans: “He did it for a friend.” Ideology mattered little, at least when compared to jobs.

For Curley, as for Billy Bulger two generations later, politics was the only way out. As the fictional Curley says in Edwin O’Connor’s novel
The Last Hurrah
: “I wanted a job with a suit that didn’t come equipped with a chauffeur’s cap.”

He got his wish, but the price was steep. He was elected governor once, a congressman twice, and mayor four times, and went to jail twice, the last time to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, after a mail fraud conviction in 1946. He outlived all but two of his nine children.

Whether he won or lost, though, Southie remained one of Curley’s strongholds to the day he died in 1958, even though on occasion he would deride the residents of Southie as he campaigned from the back of a flatbed truck.

“You are nothing but a pack of pickpockets and second-story workers,” he bellowed at a crowd of hecklers on Broadway one night. “You are a bunch of milk-bottle robbers and doormat thieves.”

The Southie voters ate it up. South Boston was Curley country.

In the Bulger boys’ youth, the avenues out of poverty and into the middle class were few. One was the church. There was always a need for more priests—in Southie alone there were seven parishes, and each of them had at least two priests, not to mention a full complement of nuns who taught at the parochial schools. Another accepted career path was the police department, though it didn’t pay particularly well, not since Governor Calvin Coolidge broke the Boston Police Strike of 1919. In Southie when people said they wanted a job with “no heavy lifting,” it was a literal as well as a figurative expression.

Other than running funeral homes and saloons, virtually no opportunities existed for the Irish in business above the level of clerk. The signs that are still sold at the John F. Kennedy Library at Columbia Point—No Irish Need Apply—did in fact exist. When the Irish began arriving in the 1840s, they brought with them no native entrepreneurial skills. They were subsistence farmers in a one-crop economy. Generations after the potato blight, successful businessmen like Joseph P. Kennedy were few and far between, and Kennedy himself felt so ostracized as a millionaire Irishman in Boston that he moved his growing family to New York. As a Harvard graduate, he was also an outsider; in the Irish districts, if a promising high school student was by some strange quirk admitted to the quintessential Yankee institution across the Charles River, he might expect to be lectured from the pulpit by his local parish priest about the “duty” of Roman Catholics to attend a school more in line with the teachings of Holy Mother the Church. In 1937, when one of Jim Curley’s sons was admitted to Harvard, Curley intercepted the acceptance letter and destroyed it, forcing George Curley to matriculate at Holy Cross.

This was the world into which Billy and Whitey were born— a clannish, suspicious society that viewed success as somehow un-Catholic, un-Irish. The Boston Irish distrusted outsiders; few even had bank accounts. Those who dreamed of rising above their station were derided as “two-toilet” Irish. It was a world of small-timers, and that was what the Bulgers were, even in their heyday. It was their legacy, that of a parochial up-bringing in a parochial city.

People who knew James Bulger Sr. remember him as a taciturn sort. Like his sons, and unlike so many others in Southie, he wasn’t a heavy drinker. But as he grew older, James Bulger became morose, self-pitying. Jim Bulger’s wife, Jean, it is said, was the one in the family with a personality more like Billy’s, relying on quick wit and pointed barbs. Unlike her husband, who seemed resigned to his fate, she dreamed of something more for her children.

Whitey was more his father’s son, always keeping to himself on those rare occasions when he was with the rest of the family, stand-offish to the point of surliness. Whitey was seldom at home in the evenings, even as a boy. Billy retired to his room at the prescribed time, but always took a flashlight to bed with him so that he could read after lights out. Walking by outside, passersby could see the light in the boys’ darkened bedroom. Soon, in recognition of the flashlight, Billy became known in some circles as “the Beam.”

The projects then weren’t what they have since become. The families were intact, and almost everyone had employment of some sort. There were no drugs, no unwed mothers, and next to no welfare. And in “the Town,” everyone seemed connected to everyone else in one way or another. Just down the street from the Bulgers, at 51 Logan Way, lived young Joe Moakley, a year older than Whitey. Moakley would lie his way into the merchant marine at age fifteen during World War II. Later Billy would succeed him in the state House of Representatives, and ten years later, the state Senate.

On the other side of Logan Way, at number 38, lived a young boy named Francis “Buddy” Leonard, the same age as Jackie Bulger. Buddy’s family would later move to the D Street projects, and Whitey would shoot him twice in the head as he consolidated his control over the Southie rackets in 1975.

Another resident was John “Zip” Connolly, born in 1940, son of an Irish immigrant known as “Galway John.” Whitey had nicknames for everyone—besides Zip, the future FBI agent and gangster would eventually answer to “Elvis,” because of his thick black hair, and also to “Neighbor,” because of his early years in the project. Decades later, Connolly loved to recount for reporters his first memory of Whitey, when he used some of his ill-gotten gains to buy ice-cream cones for all the young boys swarming around him in adoration. Kevin Weeks’s family would move in later, and his two brothers would go to Harvard, without having to endure the reproaches of their local parish priest.

No one in the projects had a lot of money, but with living expenses so low, not much was needed. Turnover was next to nothing. The projects in those days were considered a godsend, not a blight.

South Boston was a place not much thought of, one way or the other, by the rest of the city. It was a peninsula, but it may as well have been an island. There were pockets of Lithuanians and Poles here and there, as well as the occasional Italian, like Joe Moakley’s mother, for instance. Almost everybody was Catholic. A handful of Protestants survived, unmolested, but there were virtually no Jews, though by age twelve Billy had a job working at a grocery store owned by a family of Russian Jews, the Karps. For many years, people in Southie bragged that their neighborhood had the lowest crime rate in the city, and in those days, before Whitey turned cocaine distribution into an industry, it did. It was old-fashioned—a writer for
GQ
magazine said that even in the early 1990s, crossing the Broadway bridge was like going back a generation in time. As recently as the late 1960s, Southie boys who had impregnated their underage girlfriends were often given a choice by the local judges—marry her or join the marines. An abortion, of course, was unthinkable. Everyone went to Mass on Sunday, and if you didn’t, you would be noticed, and watched hence-forward.

It was Whitey rather than Billy who first went to Catholic school, before the family moved to South Boston. Whitey attended St. Mark’s in Dorchester for the first grade, then switched over to St. Margaret’s for three years. It wasn’t until the family moved to Southie in 1938 that he entered the public schools.

According to his fifth grade transcript, in 1939–40, Whitey’s conduct marks dropped from month to month, from C to C– to D, and then, it appears, someone changed his E (“Very Poor”) in March-April into an A (“Best Work”).

Billy started first grade in public school. By the fourth grade, Billy was an above-average student, but his report card was not dotted with straight As. His only A for the year came in spelling.