Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (13 page)

“You get more bees with honey,” Johnny Connolly always said.

Connolly was lost in thought when the passenger door swung open and Whitey plopped himself in the front seat. His recollection of the conversation that followed remains vivid.

“What the hell did you do? Parachute in?” Connolly said, still startled.

Whitey shrugged.

“I was waiting for you by the water,” Whitey said. “I just walked up.”

Whitey had parked his car on a side street, not even chancing that someone might see it parked in one of the lined spots on the beach.

“I just want you to hear me out,” Connolly said.

“I know who you are,” Whitey said. “You’re a friend of my brother’s.”

Connolly nodded.

Whitey wanted to let him know just how much he knew, so he referred to Connolly’s arrest of Frank Salemme three years earlier. “That was a good pinch in New York,” Whitey said. “You’ll endear yourself to Jerry with that.”

Connolly was glad that Whitey brought up Jerry Angiulo, because it was the simmering feud between Angiulo’s Mafia faction and Winter Hill that was at the heart of his pitch. Connolly said his sources claimed that Angiulo’s right-hand man, Larry Baione, was telling people Winter Hill was willing to go to war with the Mafia over the vending machines. Whitey replied that if Baione opened his mouth, Winter Hill would take him out. He didn’t trust Jerry Angiulo, or any of the Italians, for that matter.

“I hear Jerry is feeding information to law enforcement to get you pinched,” Connolly told Whitey. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to go to war with the Mafia.”

Whitey turned sharply.

“You don’t think we’d win?” Whitey asked.

“Oh, you could win,” Connolly replied. “But I don’t think they have any intention of taking you people on.”

Connolly explained his theory: Angiulo was too cute to get into a shooting war with a bunch of crazy Irishmen, not to mention Flemmi and his fellow Winter Hill hit man Johnny Martorano. Instead, Angiulo would “whittle you down,” using his police contacts to “send you all to the can.” Whitey agreed that that was the real risk. Angiulo had cops in his pocket, and he was using them to go after any outfit that cut into the Mafia’s turf. Whitey was particularly worried that Angiulo had been able to plant a gun in the car of Joe Barboza, a hood who used to carry out hits for the Mafia but had become an unpredictable renegade. The planted gun forced Barboza, desperate for clemency, to become a government witness, the ultimate humiliation for a criminal. Whitey worried that Jerry Angiulo would use his corrupt allies in law enforcement and put him in a compromised position like Barboza.

“What if three cops stop me at night and say there was a machine gun in my car,” Whitey said. “Who is a judge going to believe? Me? Or the three cops?”

Whitey shook his head. Connolly nodded, commiserating, and let Whitey talk on.

“Jerry pried the lid off a very dangerous pot,” Whitey said. But Whitey reluctantly admired Angiulo’s ability.

“You can’t survive without friends in law enforcement,” Whitey said, almost wistfully.

Connolly saw his opening.

“I have a proposal,” he said. “Why don’t you use us to do what they’re doing to you? Fight fire with fire.”

Whitey said nothing.

“Why not use the same tactics,” Connolly went on. “You take out a Mafia family and you would be the talk of the country.”
¹²

Whitey was intrigued. He said he had to run the offer by his Winter Hill partners. “I know you know my brother,” he said. “But I don’t believe you owe me. I’m a big boy. I chose this business.” He opened the door and left as quickly as he’d arrived, walking in the moonlight.

In his bid to recruit Whitey, Connolly had a distinct advantage. He not only was a Southie guy, he was an Old Harbor guy. He not only knew the Bulger family, he was considered a family friend. And he told anybody and everybody who would listen that he wouldn’t be where he was without Bill Bulger, who was not only Whitey’s little brother but Whitey’s biggest hero.

Whitey knew that even being seen talking with an FBI agent could trigger fears that he was a rat. The story he took back to his Winter Hill partners was that Connolly was working for him, not the other way around. He told them the agent offered to leak him information and protect him from prosecution as a favor to Whitey’s brother Bill, who had guided him on the path to college and helped him make something of himself.
¹³

Whitey said Connolly told him he had asked Bill Bulger, “What can I do to help you in return?” and Bulger had responded, “Just keep my brother out of trouble.”

Two weeks later, Whitey sent word for Connolly: same time, same place.

“They went for it,” Whitey said of his meeting with his Winter Hill partners.

Connolly smiled, but Whitey put his hand up, as if to say he wasn’t finished.

“Here’s the deal. I don’t want your money,” Whitey said. “I’m no fucking informant. I’m the liaison for Winter Hill. We’re not going to hurt any of our friends. Any discussion of the IRA [Irish Republican Army] is off the table.”
¹⁴

But he was willing to hurt the Mafia, and that’s all that mattered to Connolly, because the FBI’s national policy was to take down La Cosa Nostra. “I’ll only consult with you on these fucking people,” Whitey said. “They’re enemies.”

It was an extraordinary soliloquy. Whitey had essentially signed up for tribal warfare, the Irish vs. the Italians. He would not only be protecting himself and his friends in Winter Hill, he would be avenging the Italian-driven demise of the Gustin Gang a half century earlier. And an FBI agent had sat there and let a gangster dictate the conditions of the FBI’s relationship with him.

Whitey’s conditional embrace of his role with the bureau, even his preference for the word
liaison
instead of
informant
, underscored that, from the very beginning, he was calling the shots. His criminal activities would go unimpeded; indeed, only one ground-rule condition would be set, halfheartedly and not for some years: Just don’t clip anyone.
¹⁵
He was never cautioned or told to thank his lucky stars the FBI was reaching out to him. His conditions were accepted, no questions asked.

And Whitey had one final condition. His brother Bill couldn’t know.
¹⁶

Whitey had probably always intended
to kill Tommy King, the brawler who had been his onetime counterpart and rival. Once Whitey became an FBI informant, it was just a matter of time. He didn’t need a reason to kill King, but King gave him one. And his new role with the FBI helped him get away with it.

Tommy King’s clenched fist never left his side. But Whitey saw it. They were having words at the far end of the old Transit Cafe, which had been reinvented as Triple O’s. The Killeens were gone: Donnie dead, Kenny retired. Whitey Bulger held court now, and his throne was at the back of Triple O’s. King, a former Mullens guy who had become a combustible member of Whitey’s emerging group, always said too much when he drank too much, and he always drank too much. He had fists the size of toasters and was known for his sucker punches—wild, looping haymakers that came out of nowhere and left their targets unconscious. Whitey glanced at King’s right hand and saw it balled up, ready to fire. “Knock it off, Tommy,” he said.

King unclenched his fist and picked up the longneck Budweiser in front of him. But it was too late. He was as good as dead. Whitey had seen the fist, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last one, so it would have to be the last one.
¹⁷

The fist wasn’t the only issue. King had been talking about killing Eddie Walsh, a cop from Southie who kept pulling Whitey and his boys over, looking into their car, taking mental notes of who was who and who was with whom. Walsh wasn’t good at taking notes and writing up reports, but he remembered faces and names with uncanny precision. He was also Connolly’s liaison in the Boston Police Department, the one to whom Connolly gave his informant reports known as 302s. After that agreement in the car on Wollaston Beach, almost every 302 about criminal activity in South Boston that Connolly gave to Walsh was based on the uncorroborated, and often blatantly untruthful, words of Whitey Bulger.

King’s animosity boiled over one day when Walsh pulled Whitey’s car over near Carson Beach.

“What are you boys up to?” Walsh said, leaning over, looking into the back of Whitey’s Malibu, taking a mental inventory of the passengers, nodding at Whitey in the driver’s seat.

“Fuck off!” King barked, and Whitey turned to cast a cold, hard look at him.

“That’s no way to talk to a police officer, Tommy,” Walsh said.

Later, as they drove away, King went off in the backseat. “We don’t need to take that kind of shit,” he said. “I’m going to kill that fuckin’ bastard. I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him.”

“Hey!” Whitey snapped glaring at King in the rearview mirror. “You’re not fuckin’ killing anyone. And you’re not killing a fuckin’ cop any time.”
¹⁸

The night after the clenched fist at Triple O’s, King showed up at the front door of Whitey’s mother’s apartment in the project. He was hung over, his hair more tousled than usual, his tongue sandpaper.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” he said, as soon as Whitey opened the door. “I was out of line last night. Out of line.”

Whitey looked back over his shoulder, stepped into the hallway, and closed the door behind him. King was not coming into his mother’s place.

“Forget about it, Tommy,” Whitey said, knowing more than ever he would kill him. “It’s done. It’s over.”
¹⁹

They shook hands.

Tommy King would be dead in a week.

Pat Nee and Howie Winter believe Whitey had always intended to kill as many Mullens as he could after the truce Winter negotiated between the Mullens and the Killeens ended the gang war.
²⁰
And the way Whitey went about setting King up was ingenious and cynical. He used King, blaming him for the murder of the Mullens’ titular leader, Paul McGonagle, a murder Whitey had made his priority. “It was deviously clever,” Nee said. “Because not only did Whitey get rid of Paulie, but the rest of us Mullens never looked at Tommy the same way again. Whitey isolated Tommy. And after it was clear that he was cut off from the rest of us, at least in our minds, he took out Tommy.”

For Whitey, killing Paulie McGonagle had been unfinished business. In a perverse way, he blamed Paulie for his having killed Donald McGonagle by mistake in the middle of the gang war. Whitey figured that eventually Paulie was going to avenge his brother’s murder, so he made a preemptive strike.

According to Flemmi, Whitey tricked Paulie into getting into the back of a car with him by saying he had a suitcase of counterfeit money to show him. Tommy King set him up, telling Paulie it was a good score. Paulie climbed into the back of the car outside the Mullens clubhouse. Whitey opened the suitcase, pulled out a gun, and shot him.
²¹

Up to that point, it had been the underworld’s calling card to leave bodies where they fell or to stuff them in trunks. It was the rule of the jungle, to humiliate the vanquished and display the trophy of the hunter. But after he killed Paul McGonagle, Whitey turned that rule on its head. Paulie would go into the ground. There would be no funeral, no mourning, no absolute proof he was even dead. In the absence of the ritual of death, the chance of retaliation by the dead man’s friends was greatly reduced. With the absence of a body, the chance of a criminal charge was almost entirely eliminated.

They took Paulie to Tenean Beach, a couple of miles away in Dorchester, and dug a grave in the moonlight. King refused to take part in the burial. That didn’t stop Whitey from telling all the Mullens that King had killed McGonagle.
²²
King was such a hothead that they believed him.

Whitey let a year go by with Paulie’s body in the Dorchester sand before moving on King. The Mullens had been stewing over Paulie’s murder, and King was growing ever more erratic and isolated. It wasn’t any one thing. Whitey told the Winter Hill crew that King had to go because he had said something inappropriate to a little girl.
²³
He told the Mullens that King’s threatening Eddie Walsh was going to get them all locked up. Even Howie Winter, who liked King, agreed that threatening a cop was stupid and bound to bring heat.
²⁴
And, in the back of Whitey’s mind, there was that clenched fist in the back of Triple O’s.

Whitey pulled up outside of the Mullens club one afternoon and King walked over. “We need you,” Whitey said. “We’re looking for Suitcase. We’ll be back in a couple of hours. Be at the nursing home.”

It would be entirely plausible that they were going to kill Alan “Suitcase” Fidler, a rival gangster. But in fact they weren’t hunting Suitcase. It was a ruse, an excuse to get King in the car. A couple of hours later, when Whitey pulled into the parking lot in back of a nursing home on Columbia Road, King willingly hopped in the front passenger seat.

Johnny Martorano was in the back, directly behind King. Sitting with your back to Martorano, anytime, anywhere, was dangerous, but King sensed nothing. Flemmi was driving a backup car and nodded to King. Whitey took some guns and walkie-talkies out of a duffel bag and handed them out. The gun Whitey handed King was loaded with blanks. As Whitey drove down Day Boulevard, past Carson Beach, King started talking excitedly.

“Where we lookin’?” King asked.

“Everywhere,” Whitey replied. “We’ll head over to Savin Hill first.”

“If we can’t find Suitcase, we can always test this out,” King said, rapping his knuckles on the bulletproof vest he was wearing.

Whitey smirked, and Martorano leaned forward and put the muzzle of his gun a few inches from the back of King’s skull and fired. He then reached from behind, grabbed King’s shoulders, and slid him over, so that King’s right shoulder was propped against the door. He placed a baseball cap on King’s head and tilted the visor down a bit. It looked like King was sleeping.

Whitey slowed, about to make a U-turn at the causeway that heads out to Squantum, an isolated part of Quincy, but Martorano asked him to pull into the Dunkin’ Donuts on the other side of the road. “I’ve got to check a race,” Martorano said, as if leaving a dead body in the front seat of a car while he made a call from the phone booth outside the Dunkin’ Donuts was the most normal thing in the world.