Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (23 page)

“Yeah, well, I didn’t tell you to hit him that hard,” Whitey replied.
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When a guy sitting in a car near the Triple O’s was dumb enough to give Whitey the finger, Weeks walked over and punched him through his open window. Later, Weeks noticed that the punch had dislodged a diamond on his pinky ring. Whitey bought him a new one. “It was the only time he gave me jewelry,” Weeks said. “The ring had a solitaire five-carat diamond. It was worth more than $100,000.”

Weeks, in his rough fashion, was also crucial to Whitey’s efforts to create a persona as a benevolent wiseguy. If you did something in Southie that Whitey disapproved of, there was the chance of a beating or worse. But Weeks insisted he and his boss performed a public service, too. He compared Whitey to a rogue sheriff in a lawless town, using vigilantism to create equal measures of fear and security. Southie had the reputation for being among the safest of neighborhoods in Boston in terms of street crime. It was comparatively safe because it was so dangerous. If you stepped out of line, there was a chance you’d have to deal with Whitey, which meant you’d make acquaintance with Weeks’s fist. Weeks claims that he and Whitey chased heroin dealers out of Southie, and that Whitey gave money to families down on their luck. He admits it was a combination of a public relations pose and genuine philanthropy. “Jimmy really was a good bad guy,” Weeks said.

The good bad guy. That was how Whitey described himself, even to law enforcement agents. In 1985, the DEA succeeded in planting a bug inside the door of Whitey’s car. It picked up snippets of conversations Whitey had with Flemmi and Weeks, but not enough to bring charges. Weeks did routine sweeps of Whitey’s cars with a device that could detect bugs, and after he got a high reading on the device, he and Whitey brought the car to a garage near their liquor store in Southie. The mechanic pulled the door panel out, and Weeks removed some wires. The DEA agents who had been monitoring the bug from a van parked nearby rushed to the garage to retrieve their electronic equipment. Whitey tried to put the agents at ease. “We’re all good guys here,” he said. “You’re the good good guys, and we’re the bad good guys.”

Growing up poor had had a profound impact on Whitey. Not long after Weeks joined him full-time, Whitey steered his blue Lincoln Continental slowly down a narrow street in Dorchester and pointed up at one of the three-deckers. From the passenger’s seat, Weeks craned his neck to see.

“There,” Whitey said. “We lived there.”

He didn’t stop the car. The house the Bulger family had called home before they moved to Logan Way in Southie held only faded memories, none of them fond.

“We didn’t have hot water,” Whitey said. “It was always cold.”
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Whitey hated being poor, he told Weeks. But he was also conscious of being seen as too obviously rich, though he liked to splurge occasionally on jewelry and clothes. The ring he gave Weeks was almost identical to the diamond pinky ring Whitey wore on his right hand. Around his neck, he wore a gold Jesus Christ medallion. On his wrist, he wore a gold Patek Philippe watch that his buddies in Winter Hill had given him. On his left pinky, he wore a diamond claddagh ring, the traditional Irish token of friendship or love. His key chain was emblazoned with the words “Born to Raise Hell.”
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Whitey preferred cowboy boots with an ample heel. Some suggested this was because he was self-conscious about his height, which he was, but the boots also helped hide the knife he kept in a sheath strapped to his calf. He insisted on R. J. Foley boots, a premium brand. In the mid-1980s, Weeks watched him pay twenty-five hundred dollars in cash for a pair of black alligator-skin Foleys at the El Paso store on Newbury Street, Boston’s most fashionable shopping district. Whitey bought his suits, and was friendly with the staff, at Louis, the most expensive men’s shop in Boston. Everything Whitey bought was with cash. Nothing was in his name. The cars he drove were owned by straws. He also spent a lot of money on good food, in fine restaurants, and at home. He’d send Teresa Stanley across the Charles River to Cambridge, to Bread & Circus, a natural foods supermarket, gladly paying much more than he would at Flanagan’s, the neighborhood supermarket on East Broadway.
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Weeks spent more time with Whitey than Flemmi did. He was, for all intents and purposes, his shadow. But while Weeks was twenty-four and Whitey was fifty-one when they began working together on a daily basis, he bristles at suggestions that they were like father and son, or even mentor and protégé. “Jimmy treated me like a partner, an associate,” Weeks said.

They had a routine, and it was, by Weeks’s admission, mundane. Whitey stayed up most of the night and slept late in the day. He drove into Southie in the middle of the afternoon to pick up Weeks, and they would drive around and do their business: collecting rent from bookies and drug dealers, handing out money to their loansharks. They met Flemmi every day at one of the various fronts they used—a bar, a furniture store, a liquor store—but they never talked business there; they assumed those places were bugged. Anything criminal was discussed outdoors. On most days, Whitey and Weeks walked around Castle Island, a scenic, twenty-two-acre park at the easternmost extremity of the Southie peninsula. They met there even in the dead of winter when it was numbingly cold and wind whipped off the water, bundling themselves in thick air force jackets to keep warm. Their daily constitutional served more than one purpose. First, it was good exercise in a beautiful setting: The looping waterfront walkway circled the imposing pentagon-shaped Fort Independence. Walking around the fort afforded spectacular views of Boston Harbor on one side, the docks and the skyscrapers of downtown on the other. When they were on the Sugar Bowl, the walkway that connects Castle Island to the beach at Pleasure Bay, they could look across the water and see the faint outlines of the shoreline in Quincy where the bodies of Debra Davis and Tommy King lay buried. Castle Island’s physical isolation, and the huge edifice of Fort Independence, also allowed Whitey and Weeks to discuss business without the fear of electronic surveillance. Not that law enforcement didn’t try. DEA agents and Boston police at one point buried a listening device in a patch of dirt where Whitey and Weeks regularly stopped on their jaunts around Castle Island, but the bug malfunctioned, picking up the frequency of a local all-news radio station.
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The huge granite walls of the fort also made it impossible for police, parked in unmarked cars nearby, to use long-distance microphones to listen in.

On most days, Whitey and Flemmi rarely spent more than an hour together. Weeks, however, spent what amounted to shifts with Whitey. Every night, usually around five or six, Whitey retired to Teresa Stanley’s house for dinner with her and her kids. Then he picked up Weeks and they drove around, usually in silence, listening to police activity on a radio tuned to the various law enforcement frequencies. Sometimes when they noticed an undercover police tail on them, Whitey would turn the car around and follow the cops, just for fun.
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Whitey and Weeks had a nightly habit of stopping at the Store 24 convenience store on West Broadway around midnight to pick up the first editions of the
Boston Globe
and the
Boston Herald
, and they went straight for the crime stories, offering critiques that were rarely complimentary of the Boston press corps. “Jimmy always said the press never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” Weeks said.

After catching up on the news, Whitey would drop Weeks off and drive the ten to fifteen minutes it took to get to Cathy Greig’s place in Quincy, where he spent the night. The routine—broken up by the occasional burst of violence—was always about the same, six days a week. “Jimmy took Sundays off,” Weeks said. “He was very traditional like that.”
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Whitey trusted his gut on who came
within his favored circles and how close they got. If Weeks and Flemmi were trusted inherently, others were not. Pat Nee was a classic case. Whitey and Nee began as rivals: Whitey as an enforcer for the Killeen gang, Nee as a gunman for the Mullens. They tried to kill each other several times, but they put that animosity aside after the Killeens and the Mullens called a truce and became a subsidiary of Winter Hill. There was a grudging mutual respect, but there was also an unmistakable mistrust between the two. Whitey called Nee “cement head” behind his back.
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Nee constantly tried to embarrass Whitey around other gangsters, poking fun at his idiosyncrasies. Once, when Whitey dropped by a cottage on Cape Cod where Nee and a group of gangsters from Charlestown were drinking and playing cards, Nee instructed his friends to make a point of smoking cigarettes and shaking Whitey’s hand when he came and left. Whitey hated cigarette smoke and rarely shook hands, even with his close associates, as he had a phobia about germs. “I knew it would drive him crazy,” Nee said.
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Nee believes Whitey was jealous of his combat record as a marine in Vietnam. When he was in the air force, Whitey never left the United States. Nee also believes that Whitey resented his status among Irish Republican Army operatives who came to Boston, either to hide out or secure weapons. Nee was born in Ireland, and the IRA men took to him easily. When Whitey traveled to Ireland in 1986, he tried to meet with IRA operatives. “They blew him off,” Nee said. “They thought he was too full of himself.” While most of Whitey’s criminal associates deferred to his intellect, Nee would not. Once, sitting around the old Mullens clubhouse, Whitey held up a book written by Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist.

“
The Art of War
,” Nee said. “I’ve read it.”

Whitey mentioned Machiavelli.

“
The Prince
,” Nee said. “I’ve read it.”

Whitey figured he could stump him by mentioning the martial arts title
A Book of Five Rings
. Nee told him that the author, Miyamoto Musashi, was the greatest samurai.

Whitey just glared. And yet, despite the friction at the edges of their relationship, Whitey entrusted Nee with sensitive assignments that ranged from shooting to grave digging. “I can’t explain it,” Nee admitted. “We worked with each other even as we didn’t trust each other. He knew I was capable. I knew he was capable. That’s how it worked in the criminal world.” Nee knew he was in the circle just outside the one that included Whitey, Flemmi, and Weeks. That meant, among other things, that whenever he was summoned to a meeting, he always assumed they might kill him. If Weeks called him and buzzed like a mosquito, that was code to meet them at a small park on East Fourth Street. If Weeks croaked like a frog, that was code to meet in back of the Tynan Elementary School, where outdoor tables are held up by supports shaped like frog legs. Nee always went armed. But they never made a move on him.

Not that Whitey didn’t consider it. In the mid-1980s, without citing a reason, he abruptly urged Weeks to kill Nee. Weeks was stunned by the suddenness and specificity of the request. Whitey suggested that Weeks drop in on Nee and ask for a cup of tea. Nee would always offer guests a cup of Irish tea. When Nee turned his back to brew it, Whitey said, Weeks could pull a gun and shoot him. Weeks liked Nee and had gone to martial arts competitions with him. He was relieved when Whitey dropped the idea of killing Nee as suddenly as he had raised it.
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Unlike Nee, Weeks saw much to admire in Whitey. He found him a fascinating boss, a student of the human condition. Whitey routinely struck up conversations with strangers he was sure neither knew nor cared about him. One of his favorite spots was the Public Garden near Boston Common. “He’d sit on a park bench and talk to people for three hours,” said Weeks. “He had two different personalities. Business was one thing and everything else he was just a regular guy. He was always trying to figure out what made people tick. It was more than curiosity. It was so he could be a step ahead.”

He was, as well, a student of the art of crime. Whitey listened to weather forecasts closely, especially when planning a move that carried with it an above-average risk of being observed. When it came to moving guns, hurting someone, or meeting somebody who might attract law enforcement attention, Whitey preferred to do it when it was raining or snowing. People had their heads down, or they were in a rush when it was wet—much less likely to notice the hoodlum nearby.

Whitey’s apologists, including his brother Bill, would sometimes cite the lasting after-effects of the LSD experiments in prison when defending him. His experience with LSD had altered his mind, they said, and was one of the reasons Whitey was so opposed to drugs, and why he worked to keep narcotics out of Southie. This was pure mythmaking. Drugs were everywhere in South Boston; epidemiological studies in the 1980s showed that the neighborhood had a disproportionate number of young abusers. And Whitey was hip-deep in the trade. Weeks estimated that Whitey made about thirty million dollars over the nearly twenty years he was with him, most of it from shaking down drug dealers to let them do business on his turf. Only rarely did they get more directly involved in the trade. One day, Flemmi was upset when he climbed into a car with Whitey and Weeks, only to learn that they were delivering a kilogram of cocaine to a dealer near one of Southie’s housing projects. Whitey was sanguine, even though he knew he was being targeted by the DEA at the time, because he felt “exceptionally comfortable’’ in his hometown.
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Weeks said it was the only time they ever personally delivered drugs. Weeks says Whitey made distinctions between types of narcotics. He insists that they regularly chased heroin dealers out of South Boston, even as they tithed local cocaine and marijuana distributors. Weeks said the heroin dealers usually left after the first warning. Whitey hit one slow learner with his car, putting him in the hospital. “He left after he got out of the hospital,” Weeks said.

Federal drug agents scoff at the notion that Whitey distinguished among drugs and drug dealers. “Whitey took money from people no matter what they sold,” said Paul Brown, who was second in command of the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Boston and who oversaw a DEA targeting of drug dealers who paid Whitey tribute. “The idea that he kept drugs out of Southie is a joke. He allowed it and he made money off it.”
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