Bulger Whitey - The brothers Bulger: how they terrorized and corrupted Boston for a quarter century

Copyright 2006 by Howie Carr

All rights reserved.

Warner Books

Hachette Book Group

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First eBook Edition: February 2006

ISBN: 978-0-446-50614-4

For Kathy and my father

First, Id like to thank my beautiful wife, Kathy, and our three lovely daughters: Carolyn, Charlotte, and Christina.

Without the help of everyone at the Boston Herald, where I have worked for so many years, I could never have written this book. Thanks especially to publisher Patrick Purcell, editorial director Ken Chandler, former editors Andy Costello and Andrew Gully, and to all the reporters, photographers, columnists, and editors going back to the days of Hearst, especially Joe Heaney. My gratitude as well to the Heralds peerless library staff, especially, in recent years, Al Thibeault, John Cronin, and Chris Donnelly.

Thanks to my literary agents, Larry Moulter and Helen Rees, and to my editors at Warner Books, first Rick Horgan, now at Crown, and later Les Pockell. Also, thanks to my book doctor, Jeff Kellogg, whose assistance was invaluable. My researcher, Stuart Horwitz, also did fine work, obtaining interviews from people who might not have spoken to me, and he always persevered, despite the occasional brush-off.

Also, I owe much to some reporters at the Boston Globe with whom I have worked (and competed against), although I wont name them for fear of damaging their future prospects. But I must single out two people who no longer work on Morrissey Boulevardformer Globe staffers Dick Lehr and Gerard ONeill. In many ways their 1999 book Black Mass lit the path for others to follow. In particular, their work on the 75 State Street scandal, first for the newspaper and then in their book, cannot be overpraised.

The information provided to me in the preparation of this book came from more people than I could ever hope to list, even if they wanted me to, which I believe most of them dont. They know who they are, and they know how much I am in their debt. Thanks to one and all, especially to the survivors, and that is not too melodramatic a word to use when considering what so many people involved in this sordid story have endured over the past forty or so years.

I would also like to express my appreciation to, in no particular order, and for various reasons: Chris Lydon, Nancy Shack, Larry Bruce, Michael Goldman, and Jon Keller, and among those who are now gone, Jerry Williams, Paul Corsetti, Jackie McDermott, and Fred Langone.

If I have neglected to mention anyone by name who wanted to be so identified, I apologize. Better safe than sorry, even now.

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN based upon material gathered from both the public record and interviews I have conducted and documents I have procured during the last twenty-five-plus years, working as a reporter and columnist for the Boston Herald, a reporter for several Boston TV stations, and as a radio talk show host.

None of the incidents or dialogue in this book are imagined. This is a work of nonfiction. Much of the information came from bugs and wiretaps, among them the 1981 FBI recordings of the Angiulo brothers conversations with their associates at the gangs headquarters at 98 Prince Street in the North End. Another source of material came from the FBI recording of the Mafia initiation ceremonies in Medford in 1989. Other material came from various criminal trials and filings in court cases. Large portions of this book are based on testimony during U.S. District Court Judge Mark Wolfs hearings in 1998 in the case of U.S. v. Francis P. Salemme et al. Other material comes from earlier books that have been written about some of these events, and I have tried to cite those works in this book whenever it was appropriate.

During Judge Wolfs hearings, hundreds of previously classified FBI documents were turned over to the defendants and/or made public, and these were made available to me during the writing of this book. I have also had access to previously unreleased documents, including videotapes, police reports, Whitey Bulgers military records, and his complete writings on the LSD experiments in which he took part at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in the late 1950s.

Some of the dialogue comes from the St. Patricks Day breakfasts that William M. Bulger hosted every March through 1996. I have also read most of the Boston Herald s newspaper clipping files on the major characters in this account. Those files include reports from both major daily newspapers in Boston, as well as, in earlier years, stories in such now defunct newspapers as the Record American, the Sunday Advertiser, the Traveler, and the Evening Globe.

I was present at both congressional committee hearings to which William M. Bulger was subpoenaed to testify in 200203.

Full disclosure: The lawyer at various points for both William M. Bulger and corrupt FBI agent John Zip Connolly was R. Robert Popeo, who has also represented me in two investigations of my tax returns, one by the Internal Revenue Service and the other by the Massachusetts Department of Revenue. I have always maintained, and continue to do so, that both probes were politically motivated, and no charges were ever filed.

Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz, who is mentioned here in connection with the appointment of William Bulgers aide Paul Mahoney as a district court judge in 1990, represented my wife in a 1998 libel action against two broadcast networks and radio talk show host Don Imus. That lawsuit was settled out of court.

When Steven Stippo Rakes, whose story is told in chapter 13, was convicted of perjury in U.S. District Court, at his request I, along with many others, including the late Congress-man J. Joseph Moakley, wrote to his judge before sentencing. I asked the judge to consider the unusual circumstances of Rakess action, and urged him to impose a lenient sentence. I would write the same letter again. (Rakes received probation.)

During the heyday of the Bulger gang, I was indirectly threatened several times by Whiteys minions. At one point in the late 1980s I worked at a TV station in Dorchester near the South Boston Liquor Mart, Whiteys store. One of my coworkers, the son of a former mayor of Boston, often stopped in at the store. A store employee once inquired of my colleague why, although I drove by the store almost daily and often saw Whitey and Stevie Flemmi conducting business outside, I had never once pulled into the parking lot, let alone entered the store. My friend nervously said he had no idea why I preferred to patronize the package store in Andrew Square.

Tell him we got a Dumpster out back waiting for him, the unidentified gang member told my colleague. Itll be another Robin Benedict.

Robin Benedict was a prostitute in Bostons red-light district, the Combat Zone, who was murdered by an infatuated Tufts University professor; her body was never found.

After Whiteys flight, a photographer for the Herald ran into Kevin Weeks at a tanning salon in Framingham, and Weeks informed him that the gang had once known where I lived next to a graveyard in Acton.

On another organized crime wiretap, a gang associate was recorded as saying Whitey was henshit at me after Boston magazine, for which I freelanced at the time, estimated his net worth at $50 million. Whitey, according to the associate, concluded (erroneously) that I was trying to set him up for a snatch by Italian gangsters.