Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (25 page)

There was another money stream. Flemmi says he and Whitey gave Connolly about $235,000 over the years. Whitey usually handed Connolly large lump sums twice a year: $5,000 when Connolly was going on vacation and $10,000 for Christmas. When they made a particularly big score, such as extorting a major drug dealer, Connolly was occasionally given a share. According to Flemmi, after Connolly accepted a $25,000 kickback that came from the shakedown of a drug dealer in 1983, Connolly joked, “Hey, I’m one of the gang.”
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Connolly insists he never accepted money from Whitey or Flemmi.

Whitey’s peculiar zeal for relationships,
and his loyalty in friendships, was never more apparent than in his efforts to keep track of his old prison mates. In some deep place, he stayed connected to those people and those years. While he had vowed never to go back to prison, he couldn’t resist the draw of Alcatraz when it was converted to a national park and opened to visitors. In 1977, with Teresa Stanley by his side, he blended in with hundreds of other tourists as he walked through the old cellblock, the dining hall, and the recreation yard. He breathed in the sights and smells and sounds that reminded him of the three years the island prison was his home.
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He tugged at Stanley during the tour, pointing out his old cell across from the library. He confided to a park ranger that he was a former inmate, which gave him instant celebrity status. The ranger pulled him from the group tour and gave him a private one. The ranger led Whitey up some stairs to the third level of the cellblock, cranked a large lever, and the heavy metal bars of cell C-314 slid open. Whitey stepped inside the tiny cell he had lived in for nearly three years, stretching his arms out and touching the familiar cold concrete.

Whitey returned to Alcatraz at least two more times. He hated prison but he loved The Rock, or at least the idea of being part of a fraternity that had lived in America’s most notorious prison. On Broadway, the central walkway between the B and C blocks, he had forged bonds and loyalties as strong as those along Broadway in Southie. Whitey’s 1977 visit to Alcatraz triggered a nostalgia that led him to begin tracking down friends who had done time with him. He yearned to talk about the prison years with other Alcatraz alumni, and he wanted to know what had happened to them. Richard Sunday, who had followed Whitey from the Atlanta penitentiary out to Alcatraz, was a property manager in Virginia when Whitey called him out of the blue in the early 1980s. The two hadn’t spoken since Sunday had left Alcatraz in 1961.

“Sunday!” Whitey said warmly. He was calling from Boston but hoped to come visit sometime soon and take his old friend to dinner. Sunday was grieving the death of his thirteen-year-old son. He was married, working a legitimate job, and didn’t want any trouble. “How are you doing?” Sunday asked. “Are you going straight?” Whitey said he was working construction—a lie, of course—and that he was being unfairly targeted by the FBI. “Don’t say nothing,” Whitey said. “My phone might be tapped.”
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Whitey told Sunday that he was trying to find some old friends from prison and, in particular, that he was looking for a friend he had served time with in Atlanta named David Comeaux. Sunday knew that Comeaux was living in Biloxi, Mississippi, so Whitey grabbed Teresa Stanley and they flew south. When they found Comeaux, he was poor and sickly, struggling to pay his bills while undergoing dialysis treatments. Whitey gave Comeaux money to pay his rent and buy some clothes. He gave Comeaux a small car to drive to and from his treatments, and he took him to dinner. On another of their cross-country trips, Whitey and Stanley went to visit Comeaux again but found he had died in 1986 at age fifty-four.
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Whitey called Comeaux’s sister, saying he wanted to drop by and visit Comeaux’s mother and place some flowers on his old comrade’s grave. She told him not to and abruptly hung up. He was miffed.
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When Whitey found out that another friend from Alcatraz, Clarence “The Choctaw Kid” Carnes, had died and been buried in a pauper’s grave, he resolved to do something about it.
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Whitey had looked up to Carnes and considered him a victim of government connivance. Carnes, a Native American from Oklahoma, had been convicted of murder at sixteen after his accomplice had killed an attendant while they were robbing a gas station. Carnes had tried to escape from prison a couple of times, earning a transfer to Alcatraz when he was just eighteen. In 1973 he was paroled, and, like Whitey, he returned to Alcatraz a free man, serving as a technical adviser on a film about his eighteen years in the prison. He got a job as a counselor at a halfway house in Kansas City, Missouri, but couldn’t stop drinking and was sent back to prison for violating his parole.

Whitey was fond of Carnes. During their prison days, while delivering books to Whitey on the library cart he pushed around Alcatraz, Carnes had shared with Whitey lore about the Native American afterlife and his desire to be buried on Choctaw land in Oklahoma. Whitey was eager to help and rented him an apartment in Kansas City just before Carnes was scheduled to be released.
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But Carnes never got to move in. The sixty-one-year-old died in federal prison in Missouri on October 3, 1988. Prison authorities could not locate any of his relatives and buried him without ceremony. Whitey was furious, believing that Carnes had been wrongly treated in life and in death. He paid ten thousand dollars to have Carnes exhumed and given a proper Choctaw burial in his hometown, Daisy, Oklahoma.
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Whitey called from Boston to make the arrangements and told the funeral director to spare no expense on the graveside service at the small Indian cemetery in which Carnes was buried alongside his relatives. He bought a four-thousand-dollar top-of-the-line bronze casket and a headstone of Texas rose granite with a bronze plaque. He and Teresa Stanley flew to Dallas, where they rented a Lincoln Continental and drove 153 miles for the service in Daisy on November 17, 1988. Shortly after arriving, Whitey discovered that Carnes had a great-nephew in jail in Tulsa. He raced to bail him out and brought him back for the burial. Whitey had given his old Indian friend his wish to come home. He paid for everything in cash, raising eyebrows when he pulled out a roll of bills “thick enough to choke a horse,” said former Atoke Funeral Home director Robert Embry. He tipped the preacher and singers fifty dollars each and gave Embry a hundred dollars for making the arrangements and a few hundred more for picking out the headstone. “If you ever hear I’m Irish Mafia don’t believe it,” Whitey told Embry.
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“I own a couple of liquor stores.” Whitey told Embry that if he’d ever like to relocate to Boston, he’d buy him his own funeral home. Embry politely declined.

When Whitey learned that another former inmate of Alcatraz, Leon Thompson, had written a book and was trying to get it published, he looked up his number and called him in California. Their years on Alcatraz overlapped, but Whitey couldn’t remember Thompson, a bank robber, even though his nickname was also Whitey. When Thompson started relating names and events, Whitey began correcting him, offering his own version. He noticed that Thompson had grown quiet. Annoyed, Whitey accused him of taking notes on the conversation.
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Thompson changed the subject and talked about his wife, a native of England. She had left after World War II and never got back, and Thompson said he hoped to be able to afford to send her for a visit if his book sold well. Whitey asked to speak to her. He immediately took a liking to Helen Thompson, who shared his love of animals and had a charming accent. He offered to pay for her trip home and told her to check the price of a round-trip ticket and he’d call back in a couple of hours. “Don’t forget twenty dollars for the book!” Leon Thompson shouted in the background. Whitey kept his promise. He sent Helen Thompson the airfare and twelve hundred dollars in spending money. He confided to some of his friends that he also sent Leon Thompson a significant amount of money to help publish his book.
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In the summer of 1988, Thompson sent Whitey an autographed copy of his biography,
Last Train to Alcatraz
, and tucked a note inside: “If and when you get out to the west coast, be sure to get in touch with Helen and I. It would be a real pleasure to see you. Take care now. Best wishes! Leon and Helen.”
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Whitey, however, was livid when he read Thompson’s account, which he thought was full of distortions and errors. He was particularly upset at the portrayal of some of his old Alcatraz pals. “The author has done a disservice to the guys who were on the Rock by lying about individuals, conditions, events, etc.” Whitey scribbled on the front of the book, underneath an inscription Thompson had written wishing him well. “This book is strictly fiction.” Thompson had quickly gone from friend to foe. Whitey never received a thank-you note from Thompson’s wife and was convinced Leon Thompson had pocketed the money meant for her trip to England.
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He decided to pay Thompson a visit, but not a friendly one. Whitey and Teresa Stanley traveled to San Francisco twice looking for him. “Intended to confront him and call him a liar and maybe give him a broken jaw,” Whitey wrote.
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Like other former Alcatraz inmates and guards who had gone on to write books about their time at the prison, Thompson was in demand for book signings on Alcatraz. Whitey lurked around Pier 41, where the ferries left for Alcatraz, hoping to confront him. “He came here five days straight looking for him,” said Peter Dracopoulos, who has been selling books and souvenirs from a small shack on the pier since the 1970s. “He wanted to beat the crap out of him. I believe he was so angry he would have knocked him out right on the pier.”
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Once expelled from one of Whitey’s circles, you were never allowed back in.

The last and in many ways the smallest
of Whitey’s circles was the one reserved for his women. He took much from them in the way of domestic life and companionship, and gave them much in return, but they were never entrusted with the concerns and details of his violent business. All were astonishingly blind to his dark side and professional activities.

Teresa Stanley and Cathy Greig were the principals, Whitey’s most enduring mistresses, even though he had frequent flings with other women. But they were very different people. Greig was from South Boston but not completely of it. She was better educated and more worldly than Stanley. Greig, who never had children, preferred the company of animals, especially dogs. That was fine by Whitey, who often said he liked animals better than people.
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Greig fought constantly with Whitey over his relationship with Stanley; Stanley was entirely unaware of Greig’s existence and of Whitey’s domestic partnership with her. Stanley had no idea that when he left her house he drove six miles to Quincy, where he and Greig lived together. But Stanley provided Whitey with a level of domestic normalcy that balanced out his stressful work as a criminal and FBI informant. He treated her children as his own, even walking Stanley’s daughter Karen down the aisle and paying for her lavish wedding to professional hockey player Chris Nilan—a man famous for his on-ice brawling. Whitey took a shine to his surrogate son-in-law. He had never been much of a sports fan, but when Nilan played for the Montreal Canadiens, Whitey frequently traveled to Montreal with Stanley to attend games. After the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup in 1986, a smiling Whitey proudly posed for a photo with Nilan and the Cup.

Even though she hated sharing Whitey, Greig was tolerant of his infidelties. When she and Whitey shared a condominium at Louisburg Square in Quincy, he brought another woman back one night when Greig wasn’t home. The next morning, Greig arrived and was in the kitchen making breakfast when the other woman walked in and asked, “Are you the maid?” Greig replied, “No. You’ve been fucking my boyfriend all night.”
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Greig’s response to Whitey’s wandering eye was to make herself more attractive. She worked out daily. She got her teeth cleaned monthly. She had breast implants, a facelift, liposuction, and eyelid surgery.
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The girl who had been voted best-looking in the Southie High class of 1969 had a complete makeover, all of it paid for by Whitey.

And despite all, she doted on Whitey. He would show up in Quincy at all hours of the night and early morning, and she would get up to cook for him. He became increasingly devoted to Greig, who gave up her dental career to take care of him. Her decision to stop working was heavily influenced by the 1984 suicide of her twenty-six-year-old brother, David, who had struggled with drugs. David Greig shot himself at the family’s South Boston home, a deeply traumatizing event for Cathy. Whitey told her she didn’t have to go back to her job; he’d take care of her. In 1986, Whitey bought her a split-level ranch house in Squantum.

With Stanley, Whitey was a family man. But when he was with Greig he expected her undivided attention, and he didn’t like it when Greig put her beloved French poodles before him. Once when DEA agents were listening in on a wiretap on his cell phone, they overheard him screaming at Greig, “You care more about the fucking dogs than you do about me!” Like Stanley, Greig never wanted for anything when Whitey was around; he paid all the bills. He kept a globe in the middle of the dining room of Greig’s home. It was designed to hold liquor, but Whitey used it as an ATM, stuffing it with hundred-, fifty-, and twenty-dollar bills. When Greig wanted anything, she’d open the globe and help herself. Greig’s twin sister, Margaret McCusker, was amazed when she watched Greig open the globe one day and peel off bills. “Oh my God, do you know how much you’re spending?” McCusker asked her. “Do you even know?”
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It didn’t matter. The money was rolling in, and Whitey was in control. He had many balls in the air, balancing two ongoing domestic relationships even as he eliminated rivals either with his gun or his informant reports. It was complicated, but he was managing it. As long as Whitey stayed inside Whitey’s world and kept each circle in its place, his empire seemed as solid as the walls of Fort Independence on Castle Island. But once he stepped outside the careful choreography of his life and started to break his own rules, he was asking for trouble. And found it.