Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (15 page)

Bulger, with such remarks, was borrowing a page from the playbook of his political hero, James Michael Curley, portraying the city’s biggest ethnic group, the Catholic Irish, as being put-upon by the moneyed classes. But he had a point: Many of busing’s staunchest defenders did not have to live with its consequences. Under state law, a school where more than 50 percent of the students were minority was deemed racially imbalanced. The suburbs simply didn’t have enough nonwhite pupils to trigger the law’s tough remedies. In Southie, that seemed like an arbitrary and convenient distinction, and the resentment against the white suburbs of Boston ran deep. Which is why, a few days before the first buses carrying black students arrived at South Boston High in September 1974, Whitey Bulger drove under the cover of darkness to Wellesley, an affluent suburb west of Boston, and Judge Garrity’s hometown.

Wellesley and Southie had long stood on opposite sides of the class divide that busing exacerbated. In Southie, they derisively called it Swellesley. With its stately homes and manicured lawns, it represented everything Southie was not, and Whitey had felt that way long before busing. He had once urged two Southie hoodlums who had broken into a South Boston home to move their burglary business to Wellesley.
¹¹
Whitey was furious that Southie students were being shipped to worse schools in a high-crime neighborhood. “Social Engineering by a bunch of politicians . . . and [a] federal judge from rich Wellesley,” he later wrote to a friend.
¹²

Whitey’s analysis, thick with class envy and Southie Pride, was ironic on the matter of crime, coming from someone who had used murder and menace to become the kingpin of his neighborhood rackets. But it also was shrouded in prejudice, infused by his belief that he was a fair-minded gangster who presided over an underworld where there were rules—that Southie criminals had scruples that were lacking in other, especially black, neighborhoods. Whitey used the word “nigger” liberally, and he frequently denigrated blacks in conversation. Some of those who knew him well considered him racist.
¹³
Whitey believed he was striking a blow for Southie when he drove to Wellesley that night, just a few days before busing became a reality. His mission was to send a message to Judge Garrity, but if Whitey was angry, he wasn’t stupid. He knew the judge’s house in the Wellesley Hills neighborhood was under twenty-four-hour guard, so he chose a proxy target, an elementary school a half mile from the judge’s house. Whitey approached the Kingsbury Elementary School with a Molotov cocktail in hand. He broke a window and tossed the firebomb in.
¹⁴
Two classrooms were destroyed before firefighters doused the blaze. The next day, he called the Wellesley fire station. He didn’t say who he was, but he did say where they could find the gasoline can he used to fill the Molotov cocktail. “I’m gonna burn down every school in Wellesley,” Whitey said. “Even if it takes me thirty years.”
¹⁵
Wellesley Fire lieutenant Joseph Keough said investigators never identified the arsonist, but the caller made his motive clear. “He said if the kids in Southie had to be bused, then the kids in Wellesley were going to have to be bused,” Keough recalled.
¹⁶
There was talk all over Southie that Whitey had done it, but the police couldn’t prove it. Whitey got his wish, at least temporarily. About forty Wellesley students were bused to nearby schools for a couple of months while construction workers fixed their two fire-damaged classrooms.

Ground zero of the busing controversy
was South Boston High School, a three-story, yellow brick building next to Dorchester Heights, where the colonists had used cannon to scare off the British fleet in 1776. Because it sat on a hill, the high school looked like a citadel, and in September 1974 it became one. Southie High had about two thousand students, and between 1964 and 1974 only three black students attended, two of them sisters.
¹⁷

Jim Miara was working for the Social Security Administration in downtown Boston when his boss announced that they were looking for volunteers to ride the school buses as monitors when desegregation began. On the morning of September 12, 1974, Miara boarded a bus in Roxbury, headed for Southie. He and the driver were white; all the children were black. “The bus was about half full,” Miara said. “It was mostly little girls, ninth graders. Almost no boys. They all looked scared. They all were nervous. None of us knew what to expect, but we didn’t expect to be welcomed, that’s for sure.” The bus cruised past Carson Beach before turning on to G Street for the short ride up the hill to the high school. The bus crept past the signature three-deckers and sidewalks choked with people shaking their fists.

“Right in the middle of the street, someone had painted ‘Niggers Go Home’ in huge letters,” Miara said. “At some point, there was a backup at the high school so we were stopped on G Street, waiting to move. The street was lined with people, and they moved toward the bus. There were all these middle-aged people, men and women, beating on the bus, yelling, ‘Nigger’ and ‘Niggers go home.’ They were pounding on the bus. There were cops all over the place but they didn’t do anything. They never intervened. The kids had this look on their faces, like, What’s happening? We’re not going to get killed, are we? The kids weren’t crying. They were silent. They were cowed. As was I. I will never forget the look of the people who were pounding on the bus. Their faces were contorted in anger and hatred. The hatred on that street was palpable.”
¹⁸

Whatever moral high ground Southie had gained as a neighborhood suffering under judicial fiat was lost as the scenes around the high school were broadcast on national TV. Southie was soon widely derided as a racist Boston backwater. Those images infuriated Bill Bulger, because he considered them cruelly unrepresentative, and he thought the show of anger, while unfortunate, was a predictable by-product of Garrity’s heavy-handed order. He regularly stood with his constituents outside the high school, and he prided himself on never losing his cool. But he lost it one day when he confronted Boston police commissioner Robert diGrazia outside Southie High. The Tactical Patrol Force (TPF), a special mounted unit formed to contend with the busing disturbances, lined the streets, ordering residents back to their houses.

“Get this Gestapo out of here,” Bulger yelled, according to diGrazia.
¹⁹

DiGrazia saw Bulger as one of the politicians who had helped make the busing crisis inevitable by obdurately refusing to act, even after the schools were found in violation of the state’s racial imbalance law.

“Bulger,” diGrazia fired back, “if you had any fucking balls we wouldn’t be in this position. If you did your job we wouldn’t be here. You had ten years. If you had any guts, you’d tell these people to get their kids into school.”
²⁰

Bill Bulger felt the veins pulse in his neck. He was walking away, but he wheeled and strode up to diGrazia, leaning in so that their faces almost touched. “The community has a message for you, Commissioner,” Bill Bulger hissed. “Go fuck yourself.” Then he stormed off, regretting what he had said before he got to the bottom of G Street.

Bill Bulger accused diGrazia in particular and police in general of cooking up grand conspiracy theories involving the people of South Boston and what they were plotting. He believed the police had floated a rumor that his brother Whitey wanted to kill Mayor Kevin White, who had steadfastly promised to implement the integration order.
²¹
But if Bill Bulger considered that a malicious rumor, the mayor himself considered it a very real possibility. The mayor told many of his friends that he believed Whitey was looking to kill him, and he became paranoid about it. One night after playing a few sets of tennis, the mayor was suddenly gripped with fear as he was about to leave his South Boston health club. The club was on the edge of Southie’s gritty industrial waterfront, and the mayor imagined Whitey lying outside with a gun, waiting to ambush him.
²²

The mayor believed not only that Whitey shared the neighborhood’s vehement opposition to forced integration but also that busing was cutting into Whitey’s racketeering profits by causing so much disruption. During the campaign the following year, the mayor was more worried about losing his life than losing the election. “In the ’75 fight, everybody knew the mob was out to get me,” the mayor told the journalist Christopher Lydon in 1978 during an off-camera conversation after filming an interview for public television. “Whitey takes me out, and they win all the marbles.”
²³

Whitey, the mayor insisted, was just crazy enough to do it. But Whitey knew killing the mayor of Boston would have brought unrelenting heat on him and every other criminal in Southie. As much as he may have wished the worst on White and the other busing supporters, he had to know that killing him would ruin him.

DiGrazia and other law enforcement officials of that era claim, in fact, that Whitey did his best to keep the violent opposition to busing controlled, because the disruption was indeed costing him money. It was largely a myth, part of the “good Whitey” image the gangster had begun to cultivate. Whitey was doing more than the police commissioner could have imagined, and none of it had anything to do with keeping the peace. He used the police preoccupation with busing to settle some old business. Two months after the first phase of busing started, he had shot and secretly buried Paul McGonagle, the old Mullens gang leader. A year later, as the second phase of busing was implemented, he had lured Tommy King, another Mullens rival, to his death. But that was after John Connolly and the FBI had entered the picture. For now, the police were so distracted by the turmoil on the streets and in the schools that they barely took note of stray gangland disappearances.

Bill Bulger considered Judge Garrity,
Senator Kennedy, and the
Boston Globe
hypocrites—for the court order and the defense of it, and for the way the crisis was covered in the pages of the city’s dominant daily newspaper. “As a parent, I felt it was the natural right of the parent to make these decisions,” Bill Bulger said. “I never saw anyone from the [
Boston
]
Globe
, in all that time, I never saw anybody from the United States Senate, I never saw anyone, no clergyman, no priest, no minister, no rabbi, not one of those critics who came in heavy on us from the outside ever said to their congregation, ever say to their children, ‘Now, we are going to put you at the disposal of a federal judge.’”
²⁴

The way the press covered busing fueled a persecution complex that was widespread in Southie, where people believed the media deliberately overemphasized the intolerance of whites while downplaying retaliatory violence by blacks against whites. After a black student stabbed and nearly killed a white student in Southie High in December 1974, many in South Boston complained that the media, especially the
Globe
, underplayed the stabbing, and claimed it would have been a bigger story if the roles had been reversed.
²⁵
Bill Bulger complained that the
Globe
was relentless in its search for bad news about South Boston, that Southie was portrayed simplistically as a home to bigots, and that he was regularly singled out as chief bogeyman.
²⁶
But Bill could only aim tough words at the
Globe
. A month after busing started, Whitey decided to take direct action. In a letter to a friend explaining why he attacked the newspaper, he complained that the
Globe
was hostile to Southie and had labeled its people as racists. He claimed that most of the newspaper’s journalists enrolled their children in private schools. And for Whitey, it wasn’t just his home neighborhood that was unfairly tarnished, it was the treatment of his brother that riled him the most. “The
Globe
has always savaged my brother through its editorials,” Whitey wrote.
²⁷

The
Globe
building on Dorchester’s Morrissey Boulevard is just a mile away from the streets where Whitey grew up. Historically, the newspaper had been the champion of the poor and immigrants. Many people from Southie worked at the
Globe
, but few were reporters. More often they printed and delivered the papers or worked as secretaries, custodians, and other support staff. In Southie, the
Globe
’s owners, part of an old New England Yankee clan, were viewed with suspicion, which grew into full-blown hostility after the paper editorialized in favor of busing.

Whitey had little trouble talking Pat Nee into being his wingman on an attack against the newspaper. Nee had briefly worked at the
Globe
after returning from the Vietnam War. He left his job after smashing a custodial supervisor with a mop. Like Whitey, Nee hated the
Globe
, seeing it as deeply biased against South Boston. Some people in Southie had taken to using their cars to block
Globe
delivery trucks from distributing the newspaper. But Whitey wanted to up the ante. He loaded a 12-gauge shotgun with deer shot and climbed behind the wheel. It took Whitey and Nee five minutes to drive from the Mullens clubhouse in City Point to the
Globe
. It was after midnight when Whitey stopped his car on Morrissey Boulevard, directly in front of the newspaper. They stepped from the car and opened fire.

A security guard sitting in a booth at the entrance to the newspaper’s parking lot made eye contact with Whitey and hit the ground when he saw him level the shotgun.
²⁸
But Whitey wasn’t aiming his way. Instead, he fired toward the glass doors of the
Globe
’s front lobby, narrowly missing an eighteen-year-old security guard sitting behind a desk. Whitey says he missed on purpose, firing above the guard’s head.
²⁹
Three more shots pierced the plate glass windows in the press room. The next night, as police stood guard out front, Whitey and Nee returned and went to the other side of the
Globe
building, shooting at the newspaper plant from a car on the Southeast Expressway. Whitey bragged that he tracked in his sights a man running through the
Globe
newsroom, purposely firing in back of him as he ran.
³⁰
And he took great satisfaction in learning that the
Globe
spent tens of thousands of dollars to replace the plate glass windows in its building with bulletproof glass. “Globe knew it was me,” wrote Whitey, boasting that his handiwork had “created jobs”—that the
Globe
was forced to hire twenty-four-hour security and put in surveillance cameras. “Those bastards spent a fortune because of me.”
³¹