Howie Carr (40 page)

In January 2003, Stevie Flemmi’s brother Michael, now a retired Boston cop, also pleaded guilty to selling a load of his brother Stevie’s stolen jewelry for $40,000. The major witness against him was his nephew, William St. Croix, formerly known as William Hussey, Stevie’s bastard son by Marion Hussey. St. Croix had turned against his father after learning that Stevie and Whitey had strangled his half-sister, Deborah Hussey.

Franny Joyce, handpicked executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, was forced out with a golden parachute that included $72,000 for thirty-eight weeks of unused vacation, an $80,000 bonus, and a retroactive $24,000 pay raise, to $150,000, which also raised his annual pension to $75,000.

Bernard Cardinal Law was the next friend of Billy’s to go, after more than a year of newspaper accounts of pedophile priests running amok in his archdiocese. Law was “reassigned,” first to Maryland, then to Rome.

Billy had lost yet another person with whom he could commiserate over the decline of morality in American society. Fortunately for Billy, John Silber, nearing eighty, still endured at Boston University. He urged Billy to hang in as president of UMass, that it was his “destiny” to lead.

Negotiating with the Congressional committee, the most Billy’s lawyer could arrange was a grant of immunity from prosecution for his sworn public testimony. That meant that Billy could not be prosecuted for anything he admitted to under oath. But if he lied, he could be charged with perjury. The stakes were high as Billy reached Washington on June 19, 2003, to testify about an organized crime faction that had for all practical purposes ceased to exist.

Billy’s position, he knew, was untenable. He had been summoned to Washington to be pummeled, humiliated. And if he lied, he would be indicted for perjury, like his brother Jackie.

He had prepared to some degree. His attorney provided a number of produced affidavits for the committee and the press. Harold Brown said no one, i.e. Whitey, had threatened him in the 75 State Street scandal. Mike Barnicle, the disgraced former journalist and longtime apologist for the Bulgers, said Billy had never told him that Whitey taped his conversations with FBI agents. An executive from Boston Edison, now known as NSTAR, wrote that Billy had never intervened to get Zip Connolly a job. And on it went.

The congressmen, though, seemed more interested in that morning’s front-page story in the
Herald
, headlined “Club Whitey,” in which it was reported that two perpetually destitute South Boston hangers-on had somehow scraped up the cash to purchase a ramshackle inn in the Caribbean. One of the buyers admitted knowing Whitey, whom he called Seamus, which is Gaelic for James. His name was Concannon, and his brother worked in the probation office, with Billy’s son Chris. The other buyer was a Boston police officer who had recently returned to active duty after twenty-nine years on disability.

Workers at the club said that soon after the place was purchased by the Southie men, a strange-acting priest took up residence.

“He was wearing a collar, but he didn’t act like a priest,” the bartender said of the strange, Whitey Bulger–like cleric. “He had a foul mouth and a bad temper.”

Billy’s lack of memory did not play well with either the congressmen or the public. The Massachusetts congressmen stuck mainly with specific lines of questioning—Lynch, for instance, questioned Billy at length about which FBI agents he had known, and took pains to point out the well-paying jobs they had landed upon their retirement.

Chairman Burton, meanwhile, worked the broader themes, as in this exchange.

Burton: “There are people who say Whitey came up to them and said, ‘Do you know who I am and if you don’t leave my brother alone you’ll regret it.’ You don’t know anything about that?”

Billy, after a pause: “I don’t know much about it, no.” Burton: “Do you know who the people were who were threatened?”

Billy: “No.”

Burton: “You had no connection or relation—”

Billy: “I can assure you, I would never never authorize or ask for such a madcap kind of conduct on his part or anyone’s part.”

At other times, Burton did inquire about specific incidents, such as a rider anonymously attached to the 1982 state budget that would have forced the retirement of several high-ranking members of the State Police, one of whom was Lieutenant Colonel Jack O’Donovan, Whitey’s sworn enemy who had blamed the FBI for the blown Lancaster Street garage bugging operation. After word of the budgetary attack on O’Donovan got out, Governor King had immediately vetoed the outside section. At one point during the hearing, Billy suggested that perhaps a State Police union had managed to insert the rider. Later that year, congressional investigators would be dispatched to Massachusetts to pore over the ancient budgetary records and to interview the legislative leaders of the time. But no fingerprints—of anyone—were ever found.

Still, Burton questioned Billy relentlessly about the surreptitious attempt by someone to sack a cop who was hot on the trail of Whitey Bulger.

Burton: “You had nothing to do with it and you don’t remember?”

Billy: “Well, the premise is not true that such people were penalized.”

Burton: “Well, what did the amendment do?”

Billy: “I’m uncertain of that.”

Burton: “To say it wasn’t penalizing you must know what it did.”

Billy: “But it never became law, Congressman.”

Burton: “If you don’t remember it, how do you recall it didn’t take effect?”

Billy: “Because subsequent to that, it’s been written about.”

Burton: “Oh, I see. You picked it up from the newspaper.”

At the end of his disastrous day in the District, only one or two new-breed
Globe
sycophants were willing to deny the obvious: that Billy had damaged himself beyond repair. Of course, he still had his handpicked university trustees behind him. After the hearing ended in mid-afternoon, Grace Fey, the chairman of the UMass board, issued a statement saying she had “never been prouder” of Billy.

Both Republican Governor Romney and Democratic Attorney General Tom Reilly, a longtime Bulger ally who had once taken a $100 campaign contribution from Zip Connolly, expressed their disbelief that Billy would try to stonewall a congressional committee. Romney, moreover, decided to do something about it. Fey’s husband had at least one contract with the university, so the Republican State Committee quickly filed a complaint with the State Ethics Commission, charging her with a conflict of interest. Embarrassing headlines appeared in both newspapers, and it would cost her thousands of dollars in legal fees to contest the charges. Billy had deliberately picked trustees who could be controlled, like the state senators he’d once dominated. With his shot across Fey’s bow, Romney had made it clear that he was not averse to trashing the trustees’ reputations or their bank accounts, if they were unwilling to vote to fire Billy.

When, on June 26, the trustees again gave Billy another ringing endorsement, the Romney forces decided to go a different route. They would pack the board with Billy’s “foes.”

Three vacancies were opening up in September. Romney’s operatives began talking up three people: Alan Dershowitz, Judge E. George Daher, and a
Herald
columnist—the author of this book—who had sat behind Bulger at the hearings. All expressed willingness, indeed eagerness, to join the board.

One Sunday night in late July, Billy and his wife, Mary, dined at Baxter’s in Hyannis, enjoying the same treat they’d shared on their first date, almost a half-century earlier, fried clams. When Billy spotted a former UMass trustee and his wife, he invited them over to his table, and talk quickly turned to the ongoing struggle with Romney.

“I think it’s pretty well blown over,” said Billy. “Don’t you?” “I don’t think so,” said the former trustee. He then named the three men Romney planned to appoint.

“He wouldn’t dare,” Billy said.

Two weeks later, in Lowell, Billy resigned as president of UMass. Ted Kennedy issued a statement saying that he was “saddened” by the news. Bill Clinton, who had phoned Billy at a couple of the later St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts, called from Chappaqua with his condolences. The settlement of the deal the trustees had negotiated with him cost Massachusetts taxpayers more than $960,000.

And Billy got a pension too. He took the survivor’s option, which assured that Mary would continue to receive the kiss in the mail even if Billy predeceased her. After taxes, his monthly check from the commonwealth came to $11,312.29 a month.

But even that wasn’t enough for Billy. In his final hours on the job, he ordered one of his lackeys to send over more documents to the State Retirement Board, claiming that his “housing allowance” and his annuities, which amounted to another $40,000 or so a year, should also be included in calculating his pension, thus adding another $32,000 a year to what was already by far the largest public pension in state history.

The
Herald
led its next edition with the story—and a photo of a grinning Bulger next to the headline, “Back for More.”

One of the few anti-Bulger trustees on the board told the newspapers, “[He’s] going out the door, grabbing everything but the pictures on the walls. It’s supposed to be public service, not self-service.”

It was a concept the Bulgers never did grasp.

EPILOGUE

I
N
O
CTOBER
2003, S
TEVIE
Flemmi pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Boston to ten counts of murder. He made the decision as part of a deal to reduce the sentence for his brother Michael, the former Boston cop, who was not scheduled to be released from prison until 2010. In open court, prosecutor Fred Wyshak read aloud Flemmi’s agreed-upon statement, and as Wyshak reached the paragraph about the 1981 murder of Debra Davis, one of her brothers stood up in court and screamed at Stevie, “Fuck you, you fucking piece of shit!”

At a single hearing, the State Retirement Board heard the appeals of both Billy and Jackie Bulger. Billy’s attorney argued that his client’s pension should be increased by another $32,000 a year. Jackie’s lawyer contended that his client’s $44,000-a-year pension should be restored, because although Jackie did commit multiple felonies while a public employee, he’d resigned from his job and applied for a pension before he was indicted.

On separate 5–0 votes, the board turned down both Bulgers. In November, Frank Salemme led police to the Hopkinton Sportsmen’s Club, where he said he and Stevie had buried the bodies of Wimpy and Walter Bennett in 1967. After days of digging, the police abandoned the search, claiming that the topography of the area had been changed by the dumping of millions of tons of dirt from the Big Dig, the $15 billion public works boondoggle in downtown Boston that was now the subject of multiple federal and state corruption investigations.

In December 2003 the city of Somerville began foreclosure proceedings on the old Marshall Street garage out of which the Winter Hill Gang once operated. According to city officials, Howie Winter, now seventy-four and living in Millbury, owed more than $11,000 in back property taxes.

In December 2003, former FBI agent H. Paul Rico answered a knock at his front door in Miami and admitted several police officers to his house. When they told him they were there to arrest him on a murder warrant from Oklahoma, he asked them if they were joking. When he realized they were serious, and that he was going to be taken away to jail, Rico defecated in his trousers.

In January 2004 Rico was extradited from Florida to Oklahoma to stand trial on charges of arranging the 1981 murder of his boss, World Jai Alai owner Roger Wheeler. From a wheelchair, Rico pleaded not guilty at his arraignment at the county jail.

On January 16, 2004, H. Paul Rico died in a Tulsa hospital room, as armed jail guards stood outside his door. He was alone when he died.

In January, federal agents arrested a Winthrop man named Graham Bulger for allegedly burglarizing a telephone company building in Waltham a month earlier. In its press release, the Secret Service said Bulger was a relative of Whitey Bulger’s. The headline in the
Herald
the next day read: “Bulger Kin Charged in Thefts of Equipment.”

Graham Bulger’s sister fired off an e-mail, denying that she and her brother were related to any other Bulgers. She said her family was a victim of “Unjust Surname Profiling.”

In February, on the day of the New Hampshire primary, when few reporters were in Boston, Billy appeared in a charcoal-gray business suit and topcoat at the Social Security office at the Tip O’Neill Building in the West End and filed his application for Social Security.

In March, the Boston Public Library hosted a black-tie “Celebration of Service and Leadership 70th Birthday Tribute to William M. Bulger.” The master of ceremonies was former Governor William F. Weld.

In the spring of 2004, the family of Billy Bulger was again questioned by federal investigators, this time about a call that was placed to their home on East Third Street by Barclays Bank in 1997 when the branch where Whitey had stashed $50,000 and the key to another safe-deposit box in Dublin was moved. According to bank records, a woman answered the phone and was asked if she knew where the bank could reach James Bulger.

“His current whereabouts are unknown,” the bank recorded the woman as replying.

On April 1, Jackie Bulger was released from the minimum-security federal prison in Ayer, Massachusetts, after serving four months with, among others, Mafia underboss Gerry Angiulo.

On April 17, 2004,
America’s Most Wanted
ran its twelfth segment on Whitey Bulger. None of the tips Fox received after the show’s airing proved of worth to investigators.

In May 2004 imprisoned ex-FBI agent Zip Connolly was transported from a federal penitentiary in North Carolina to testify before the federal grand jury in Worcester that was continuing its investigation of FBI corruption and organized crime in Boston. In prison, without benefit of dye, Zip’s black hair had turned gray. During the interrogation, he guzzled glass after glass of ice water. Whenever a difficult question was asked of him, he would look up at the prosecutor and ask, “Can I go to the little boys’ room?”