Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (22 page)

Sarhatt pushed for a meeting with Whitey to satisfy himself that he was worth the trouble. Perhaps because Whitey’s charisma had won them over so thoroughly, Connolly and Morris were certain that if Sarhatt met him, he would be suitably impressed. The meeting was highly unusual. Special agents in charge rarely sit down with informants. They met, two days before Thanksgiving, 1980, at the Hilton at Logan Airport. Connolly paid thirty-seven dollars for the room. The meeting lasted four hours. Whitey was his usual confident self, plopping his cowboy boots up on a table. Sarhatt’s account of the meeting is extraordinary in that he seems to have accepted Whitey Bulger’s self-serving narrative without challenge. In it, Whitey insists he became an informant because his family was treated so well by FBI agent Paul Rico, who arrested him for robbing banks in 1956. “His family indicated to him that SA Rico was such a gentleman and was so helpful that he, informant, changed his mind about his hate for all law enforcement,” Sarhatt wrote. “Additionally, he has a close feeling towards SA John Connolly because they both grew up in the same neighborhood in Boston and had the mutual childhood problems, as well as his deep hatred for La Cosa Nostra.”

Whitey told Sarhatt that he knew the state police believed he was an FBI informant but that he wasn’t worried about his safety because, as Sarhatt described it in a follow-up memo, “no one would dare believe that he is an informant. It would be too incredible.” More incredible still was Sarhatt’s acceptance of Whitey’s rationale for not naming the Massachusetts State Police mole who tipped him off. “Informant was asked whether he would divulge the identity of the State Police source that has been furnishing information to him and he stated that he would not because this source is not doing it for monetary benefit but as a favor to him because of his close association with him.”
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And that was as far as it went. The head of the FBI in Boston allowed Whitey to keep his secret. And Whitey had demonstrated again how adroit he was at stroking the FBI. “With respect to his association with Colonel O’Donovan,” Sarhatt said of Whitey, “he stated that he has met him on some occasions especially one in which [O’Donovan] made very disparaging and derogatory statements about the professionalism of FBI personnel to which [Whitey] took great umbrage inasmuch as his association with the FBI has been nothing but the most professional in every respect.”
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The week after the hotel meeting,
Connolly wrote, at Sarhatt’s request, a justification memo, a response to the Lancaster Street controversy that embellished Whitey’s importance as an informant and gave Sarhatt plenty of cover to keep Whitey on the books. He gave Whitey credit for saving the lives of two undercover FBI agents in separate investigations, claims that were deeply suspect. He also gave Whitey credit for providing the names of those who took part in a high-profile bank robbery in Medford, just outside Boston, in 1980—again, a dubious claim because those names were known to police almost immediately.
¹⁰
But the pièce de résistance was this: Whitey, he said, was helping them get inside the Mafia headquarters in the North End.

This was fiction—the browbeaten bookies were the crucial source—but Sarhatt couldn’t know that. He was not from Boston. Like all the supervisors who rotated in from out of town, he had to rely on field agents like Connolly. And Connolly knew exactly what to say and how to say it. The FBI, as a national organization, was in the midst of building cases against La Cosa Nostra families across the United States. Sarhatt was sensitive to any suggestion that shedding an informant might compromise the FBI’s ability to build a case against the Mafia. Measured against Mafiosi, Whitey was small game.

Connolly and Morris were successful in getting their boss to back off the idea of closing out Whitey, and they had managed to ride out the nearly disastrous fallout of the Lancaster Street garage investigation. But the FBI’s blatant protection of Whitey had inflamed members of the Massachusetts State Police. The Staties were more determined than ever to get Whitey. To do so, they now knew with even greater certainty that they would have to work around, not with, the FBI. The war against organized crime in Boston was reaching its climax, and, through it all, the FBI and the state police were at war with each other. Whitey had not orchestrated this war, but he was, for now, the main beneficiary of it.

A month after Connolly and Morris persuaded Sarhatt to keep Whitey on as an informant, the FBI bug planted inside Jerry Angiulo’s office began picking up conversations that did more than expose Mafia crimes. Angiulo and his henchmen spoke glowingly about Whitey and Flemmi, placing them firmly in the highest echelons of criminality.

“Whitey’s got the whole of Southie,” Angiulo was recorded saying. “Stevie has got the whole of the South End.”

Angiulo implied that Whitey and Flemmi worked as subcontractors for the Mafia.

“I’ll tell you right now,” Angiulo told the assembled Mafiosi, “if I called these guys right now they’d kill any fuckin’ body we tell ’em to.”

Larry Baione, the consigliere, also gushed, praising them as lethal problem solvers.

“These are nice people,” Baione said. “These are the kind of people that straighten a thing out.”
¹¹

The recordings would not be played in court for another four years. When the tapes were heard, state police investigators said they proved that the FBI had been protecting killers.

By then, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had formed an alliance with the state police, as well as the police in Boston and Quincy, to target Whitey for his most lucrative trade, extorting money from drug dealers. The posse chasing Whitey was getting larger and smarter, all because of the Lancaster Street garage investigation.

The great irony in all this is that the person who compromised the entire operation was a state police officer, not an FBI man like Connolly or Morris. But the scandal the leak touched off reordered the law enforcement landscape in Boston, so that within a few years every agency wanted to put Whitey in prison. Every agency but one, the FBI.

9

Circles Within Circles

I
n the fall of 1982,
Whitey Bulger strolled into the Dining Room at the Ritz, which overlooked the finely manicured Public Garden in Boston’s Back Bay. Gone today, it was then the most elegant dining room in the city, playing host to the rich, the beautiful, and the powerful. Whitey felt he belonged there. He was as much a captain of his industry as were the financiers and lawyers who sat at the tables draped in crisp white linen. He had brought along his protégé, Kevin Weeks, a boxer he had groomed to be his man Friday. Their women stood a step behind them as they waited to be seated. Weeks hailed from the housing project in Southie across the street from the one where Whitey grew up. Project rats didn’t eat dinner at the Ritz. But they weren’t project rats anymore. They were princes of the city.

“Look at this,” Whitey said, almost to himself.

Chandeliers glistened overhead. Exquisite pale blue draperies framed the wide plate glass windows that afforded one of Boston’s most sumptuous views. From the best tables, diners could see Beacon Hill rising beyond the garden where a bronze George Washington presided on horseback and the famous swan boats offered rides through a man-made lagoon. The dining party was led to their table and Whitey took the seat next to Teresa Stanley. Weeks sat with his wife, Pam.

“We’ll start with the Dom Perignon,” Whitey told the tuxedo-clad waiter. He ordered for the table. Caviar. Lobster. Filet mignon. He made a selection of French wine, instructing the sommelier to decant the reds and to put the whites in an ice bucket. Whitey’s dining companions sat back and breathed in the extravagance.

“Who deserves this more than us?” Whitey said, turning to Weeks.

Whitey pointed at the next table.

“Does that guy deserve it? Why shouldn’t we have the better things in life? Why should that guy have this and we don’t?” Whitey said.

It sounded like a soliloquy, or the start of one, on his hard road from poverty and obscurity to wealth and infamy. The women didn’t get it and just laughed. But Weeks nodded. He had heard this speech before. He also knew what it meant that he, Kevin Weeks, had come to live in Whitey’s world.

When the bill came, Whitey picked it up. Weeks glanced over and saw it had been rounded off to twenty-seven hundred dollars.
¹

Whitey left a good tip, too.

He paid for everything in cash.

As the 1970s melted into the 1980s,
Whitey was an undisputed power in the Boston underworld. He and Steve Flemmi had the Winter Hill empire to themselves, with their partners on the run or in jail. John Connolly and the FBI had their back, and their main competition, the Mafia, was about to talk themselves into prison. Whitey’s gambling business in Southie was still robust. But he and Flemmi were not content with their monthly collections from bookies. And they were preparing to launch their most lucrative business venture yet: extorting rent from drug dealers who operated in and around Southie.

One of the keys to Whitey’s long-running success, and survival, had been his ability to keep his profile relatively low, to stay within his limits. Whitey’s world stretched just a few miles, from the hidden graves of the Neponset River in Quincy to Southie, where he held court at Triple O’s. During the day he would visit Castle Island at Southie’s seaside tip to talk business out of electronic earshot. Most nights he ate dinner with Teresa Stanley and her kids at her house on Silver Street before retiring to the place he shared with Cathy Greig in Quincy. While he was widely known and feared in Southie, word of mouth rarely carried his reputation beyond its borders. His name was seldom in the newspapers, even after his brother Bill became the president of the Massachusetts Senate in 1978. Whitey kept a small circle of trusted friends and associates. Some were criminals, some were FBI agents. Some were family, some were lovers. All were in his thrall, caught up in his intoxicating, intimidating aura. He was the tough guy they wanted to be. Or the rich man who provided the lifestyle they dreamed of. Being in his circle was a vicarious thrill, though there were also some very tangible benefits. For the criminals, it was money. For the women, it was money and his charisma, his handsome bad-boy looks, his undeniable power. For the FBI agents, it was the proximity to that power, not to mention the institutional status and merit raises and promotions that came from being the bearer of tips from a top-echelon informant. But it was also, in some cases, money. They were all corrupted, to one degree or another, by him.

Whitey’s inner circle was a set of concentric circles. He self-consciously compartmentalized his life as a way to control its complexities, and understanding him requires understanding how he stitched his world together, what he demanded of himself, and others, in friendship, and where he drew the line in his loyalties. His family, especially his brothers Bill and Jack, occupied one of those circles, offering unconditional love and support and getting it in return. His family looked the other way when it came to Whitey’s day job. Bill, in particular, took the most abjectly benign view of his older brother’s criminal exploits. He saw Jimmy as the man who stood with the FBI in bringing down the Italian mob, not as a casual and ruthless killer. The women most constant in Whitey’s life, Stanley and Greig, occupied separate circles, close to the core, though there were other women kept at a more distant remove, welcomed into his bed but never into his confidence. The men with whom Whitey served prison time were part of another distinct circle. Whitey stayed in contact with some of them, especially those from Alcatraz.

Besides Flemmi, no one was closer to Whitey than Kevin Weeks. If Weeks looked up to Whitey as the man he wanted to be, deeply feared and utterly respected, Whitey looked at Weeks as the one-punch wonder he had aspired to be in his youth. Weeks was born to be a fighter. His father, a professional boxer, trained him, if you can call smacking a little boy in the face training. Sometimes his father beat Weeks for blinking too often. He thought that he was doing his son a favor. Southie was rough; the Old Colony projects Weeks grew up in were rougher. If you could fight, you could survive. “My father was the kind of guy who would take two punches to land one,” said Weeks.
²
That’s exactly how a Boston police officer once described a teenaged Whitey.

Like Whitey, Weeks was one of six siblings, in a family where only one became a criminal. They both had humble beginnings and had brothers who had prospered professionally without the help of a gun. Weeks’s two brothers went to Harvard; one became a lawyer, the other a respected political operative who played a key role in Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis’s failed campaign for president in 1988.
*
Whitey saw the common thread in their lives, and his relationship with Weeks was almost familial. When Weeks’s father died, Whitey paid for the funeral, but, as was his pattern, he didn’t attend. He was never one for such public rituals, though he made an exception when his mother died in 1980. Even then, however, he filtered into the funeral home after the wake was over to pay his final respects. Whitey avoided events like funerals because he worried about being photographed, something he always assumed was just another way for the newspapers to embarrass his politician brother.

Weeks went to Boston College High School for ninth grade, just as Bill Bulger had. But where Bill Bulger had succeeded at BC High, Weeks only lasted a year. He missed the last week of school after he was suspended for punching a kid who referred to his mother, Peg, whose arthritis forced her to use crutches, as Peg Leg. He left BC High for Southie High, graduating in the spring of 1974, the year before court-ordered busing began and the school descended into chaos. Weeks would nevertheless wind up in the middle of the integration drama, not as a student but as a security aide at the high school. His reputation for toughness preceded him, and school officials hoped his presence alone would make some troublemakers think twice. Almost inevitably, given his Southie roots, Weeks got caught up in the running disputes in the classrooms and hallways between black and white students. Black students accused him of favoring the whites, and one of them accused Weeks of punching him. Weeks denied it, but he was fired. He was also charged with assault and battery after he slugged the father of a black student, and it was while waiting for his case to be called at South Boston District Court that Weeks got talking to Billy O’Neil, who was in court for beating up a black taxi driver. O’Neil and his two brothers owned Triple O’s. He and Weeks commiserated, and O’Neil offered Weeks a job as a bouncer at the bar.

Triple O’s was typical of Southie dives: longer than it was wide, dimly lit, smoke hovering like a low cloud, with booths on one side, stools and the bar on the other. The O’Neils had some local artists paint the walls with images of the Seven Dwarfs and other Disney characters, an incongruous choice given the type of people who drank there. One St. Patrick’s Day, Weeks put down some beer and ice he had carried up from the basement and knocked out, with two punches in quick succession, a pair of men who were fighting. It was the first time Whitey, a regular at Triple O’s, had taken notice of the burly bouncer. “I didn’t know it at the time, but Jimmy was sizing me up,” said Weeks, who always called his boss Jimmy. “He wanted to see if I was capable, how I handled myself.”

Triple O’s provided many opportunities for such demonstrations. Fights were common, especially on weekends, when some people would come in just to see who might start something. Weeks was known for ending the scuffling before anything in the bar got damaged. Whitey had a favorite spot, at the end of the bar, his back to the wall. He could see everything and everyone, and could slip out the back door if he saw trouble coming in the front. He was usually clad in denim jeans and cowboy boots and, when it wasn’t summer, a leather jacket. Whitey started engaging Weeks in small talk, exhorting him to stay out of trouble, to read books, to stay away from booze. “Boozers are losers,” Weeks remembers Whitey telling him.

There was a fight outside the bar one night, and a biker got stabbed. When Weeks came outside to see what was going on, someone handed him a bloodied knife. He took it wordlessly and walked back into the bar with it. Kevin O’Neil, who managed the bar, flipped out. “You bring that knife in here?” O’Neil bellowed. “I’m gonna lose my fucking license.”
³
Weeks said nothing, and Kevin O’Neil continued to ride him about his stupidity. A few weeks later, Billy O’Neil told his older brother to lay off Weeks. Billy said it was he who had stabbed the biker; he had handed Weeks the knife to get rid of it.

Whitey, standing at the end of the bar, heard the whole exchange and was impressed that Weeks had kept his mouth shut despite being falsely accused. He would watch Weeks for almost three years before he approached him and said, “Let’s take a ride.” They weren’t in the car for more than a few minutes before Whitey pulled over outside a bar on East Broadway and a man in his twenties whom Weeks didn’t know climbed in. It looked to Weeks like it was all prearranged. Whitey started screaming at the guy, accusing him of smacking his niece, and then he pulled over to the curb at M Street Park and continued his harangue. Whitey searched the guy, found a knife on him, and dragged the blunt side of it across his neck. It didn’t draw blood, but the guy thought his throat had been slashed. His eyes were wide with panic. Whitey looked at Weeks, who had been sitting there wondering what was going on. Without a word, Weeks started punching the guy. His first punch broke his nose. His second broke some teeth. Whitey pulled out a sap and started beating him with it. Then they drove him back to the bar where they had picked him up and dumped him on the sidewalk. The guy stumbled into the bar and a group of his friends ran outside. Weeks was waiting for them and knocked the first one out with one punch. The others stopped dead in their tracks. “Anyone else want to bother my niece?” Whitey asked.

There were no takers. A couple of days later, Whitey told Weeks he had made a mistake. The young guy they had so savagely beaten had, in fact, slapped a girl, but it wasn’t Whitey’s niece. That was, to Whitey, a distinction without a difference. The guy had beaten up a girl, Whitey explained to Weeks, so he deserved what he got. Whitey praised Weeks for breaking the guy’s face and handed him a thousand dollars in cash. It was official: Kevin Weeks was in.
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Some people around town assumed Weeks
was Whitey’s driver, but Whitey drove himself everywhere; he didn’t trust anybody else at the wheel. Weeks always sat in the passenger seat as they motored around the Town. Whitey liked Lincoln Continentals. He had a four-door and a two-door in midnight blue. He liked Chevys, too; Malibus, especially, and Impalas. He had a few of them. Whitey also had a forest-green Jaguar XJS, a luxury sedan he seldom drove. When Weeks bought it from him some years later, it had only two thousand miles on the odometer. The Jaguar didn’t exactly match the image Whitey was trying to maintain in Southie, as a man who had risen without losing track of his roots.

With thick forearms and huge hands, Weeks was Whitey’s pit bull. Whitey sicced him on anyone who displeased him, and Weeks obligingly punched, no questions asked. Whitey urged him to reserve his fighting for business and to avoid barroom brawls. He told Weeks he didn’t realize how lethal his fists were. “You’re one punch away from jail,” he warned him once. One day, a teenager whose car blocked their path on a narrow Southie street ignored Whitey’s plea to move. Worse, the kid told Whitey to go fuck himself. “Kevin,” Whitey said, and that’s all he needed to say. Weeks got out of the car, walked to the driver’s side and punched the kid in the teeth, breaking a number of them. The kid’s father was a police officer, his mother a crossing guard. They complained and demanded compensation. Whitey handed over sixteen hundred dollars to pay for the dental work. He then admonished Weeks.

“Why did you hit him so hard?”

“You told me to hit him,” Weeks replied.