Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (28 page)

Connolly theorized that Halloran was offering Whitey and Flemmi up so he could later shake them down in exchange for recanting his story. It was a considerable stretch. The idea that Whitey and Flemmi would pay off somebody who was shopping them to the law made no sense at all. It was far more likely they would kill him. Brunnick and Montanari were understandably skeptical of Halloran and pleaded with him to take a polygraph. Halloran refused. Then they put a wire on him and sent him out fishing. When Connolly found out, he called Whitey.

“Brian Halloran’s wearing a wire,” Connolly told Whitey.
³³

In the end, it was Jerry O’Sullivan’s call
. O’Sullivan, chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force in Boston, was preparing the biggest case of his life, going through the tapes the FBI had recorded of Jerry Angiulo and the rest of the Boston Mafia talking about business in their North End headquarters. Now Brunnick and Montanari wanted protection for a hoodlum who had implicated two of the informants at the heart of the Mafia case in the murder of a Tulsa businessman. O’Sullivan decided that Halloran’s credibility, or lack of it, made him a lousy witness. He had no corroboration for his claims. People said he was a drug user. A drunk. O’Sullivan ruled out the witness protection program. Then Bob Fitzpatrick, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, made a special appeal to O’Sullivan, asking him to reconsider. Brunnick and Montanari had put Halloran and his family in a safe house in Falmouth, on Cape Cod. They told Fitzpatrick they didn’t think Halloran would last on the street very long, but O’Sullivan wouldn’t budge.

Halloran was bored to tears in the safe house. He was stuck there with his wife and their two sons, twenty-two months and five months old. He was going stir-crazy. He told his wife that the FBI was stringing him along, that he was going to Boston to get a car, and that they would then leave Massachusetts. On Tuesday, May 11, 1982, he took the bus up from Falmouth. He got off at South Station and started walking toward the Topside Lounge, a bar at the Pier restaurant he knew well.

It opened around four in the afternoon. Halloran pulled up a stool right next to the plate glass window that looked out onto Northern Avenue, the cobblestone street that was the main thoroughfare on the grimy South Boston waterfront. At 4:30, he got up to use the pay phone. He called the FBI office looking for Leo Brunnick, but Gerry Montanari got on the line.

“Gerry, it’s Brian Halloran.”

“Where are you?”

“Downtown,” Brian Halloran lied. “Leo’s looking for me.”

He left a number and within minutes Leo Brunnick called him back.

“What’s up?” Brian Halloran said. “I hear you’ve been looking for me.”

Brunnick said he wasn’t and that it was crazy for him to be running around Boston. “Go back to your family,” Brunnick said. “Stop bouncing around.”

Halloran said he had to go, and he hung up.

He went back to the bar. It was his round.
³⁴
And he needed a ride home.

That same morning,
Patricia Donahue was getting ready to leave for work at a small salon in Fields Corner, a half mile from her house on Roseland Street in Dorchester. She usually worked downtown, but she helped out at a friend’s Fields Corner salon once in a while. “You need a haircut,” she said to her husband, Michael, over breakfast. “Why don’t you come by this afternoon? I’m just up the street today.”

As she cut his hair, Pat Donahue went over all the things they had to get done that day. Michael was heading down to the Fish Pier to see someone about some bakery racks they needed for the shop he and his wife were about to open. He was also planning to pick up bait for the overnight fishing trip to Maine that he had promised his eight-year-old son, Tommy, as a present for his First Holy Communion. Tommy was going to be allowed to miss a day of classes at St. Mark’s School to go fishing, making him the envy of his older brothers, Shawn, 11, and Michael Jr., 13. Michael Donahue looked in the mirror, turning from side to side, before pronouncing his verdict on his wife’s hairstyling skills.

“You’re an artist,” he said. He kissed her and was out the door.

“I’ll call you,” he yelled over his shoulder, and he was gone.
³⁵

As Halloran drank
and the Donahues went about their day, Whitey and Kevin Weeks were in Broadway Furniture in Southie, waiting for Flemmi to join them, when John Hurley walked in. Hurley, a squat, balding man with Popeye forearms and a bulbous nose, was a survivor of the Charlestown-Somerville gang war and had become the IRA’s biggest fund-raiser in Boston. Like everyone else in the underworld, Hurley knew Halloran was a dead man walking. And he knew that what he was about to say would endear him to Whitey Bulger. “Brian Halloran is down by the Pier restaurant,” Hurley said.
³⁶

The Pier was popular with fishermen, longshoremen, and truck drivers. It was the spot where Callahan had confided to Halloran the particulars of the Wheeler hit. In that instant, Whitey decided that it would be where Brian Halloran would die. “Thanks, John,” Whitey said, smiling. “Thanks a lot.”
³⁷

Hurley’s news put Whitey in mission mode; he began looking for Flemmi, then Pat Nee.
³⁸
He told Weeks to go to the old Mullens clubhouse on O Street and wait for him there. Twenty minutes later, Whitey pulled up in the Tow Truck, their nickname for a car purposely built for hits. The blue Chevrolet Malibu had been fashioned into a James Bond–like gadget vehicle, complete with devices that dispensed an oil slick and smokescreen to aid getaways. The car had been souped up so that it could go as fast as 200 mph.

Whitey climbed out of the Tow Truck wearing a dirty-blond wig and floppy mustache. Flemmi hadn’t answered his beeper.

“Go to Jimmy’s Harborside and wait for me,” Whitey told Weeks.
³⁹

Weeks climbed into his car, an Oldsmobile Delta 88 he had bought from John Connolly, and made the five-minute drive to the popular restaurant, which was just up the street from the Pier. Whitey pulled up in the Tow Truck and handed Weeks a walkie-talkie. A man in the backseat, his face covered by a ski mask, sat up and waved.

“Go to Anthony’s,” Whitey said, referring to Anthony’s Pier 4, the biggest seafood restaurant in the city, across the street from the Pier. “Just park there, and when Balloonhead gets up, let me know.”
⁴⁰
Balloonhead was Whitey’s nickname for Halloran, a reference to his unusually large head, puffy from years of booze.

It was getting close to dinnertime,
and Pat Donahue wondered when Michael was going to call. At 6:00, the phone rang in the kitchen of the Donahue three-decker on Roseland Street.

“I’m just leaving,” Michael Donahue said. “I’ll be home in ten minutes.”

Pat had the phone tucked between her shoulder and cheek as she stood over the stove.

“We’re having pork chops,” she said. “We’re just waiting for you.”

“Ten minutes,” he repeated, which was a bit of a fib, given that he was almost six miles away on the waterfront.

Besides, he had agreed to give Brian Halloran a ride home, and Halloran was taking his sweet time. Halloran’s father lived right around the corner from the Donahues, in the house where Halloran had grown up. Donahue thought he was giving a ride to an old friend from the neighborhood, not a marked man. Other people in the bar recall that Michael Donahue was antsy, waiting for Halloran to drink up. He was pacing. He wanted to get home for dinner.

Weeks wasn’t in his surveillance spot
for long before he saw one of the people who had been sitting with Halloran get up and walk out to the sidewalk. It was Michael Donahue, on his way to the small blue Datsun he had borrowed from his father for the day. Halloran had asked Donahue for a ride back to Dorchester, reasoning that those who wanted to kill him would not risk killing somebody else. He knew that was one of the rules of the road for gangsters—leave the innocents out of it. He couldn’t know that Whitey and his comrades were breaking their own rules these days; that their trademark circumspection had been replaced with arrogance and now, with Halloran spreading his story, a certain desperation. As Donahue pulled the Datsun in front of the bar, Weeks saw Halloran rise from the table inside.

“The balloon is rising,” Weeks said into the walkie-talkie. “The balloon is in the air.”

Halloran had just climbed into the passenger’s seat when Whitey pulled alongside in the Tow Truck and leaned out the driver’s-side window with a carbine rifle.

“Hey, Brian!” Whitey yelled.

He didn’t wait for an answer, unleashing a volley. Whitey had turned off the automatic mechanism, allowing him to aim and place shots.
⁴¹
The masked man in the backseat started firing, too, but his shotgun jammed quickly. Donahue’s car, stuck in neutral, drifted slowly across Northern Avenue and came to rest against a parked car. Whitey made a U-turn on the wide street. Halloran had climbed from the car and was lying in the middle of the street. Whitey leveled his gun out the window and fired some more. From across the street, Weeks could see Halloran’s body twitch as the bullets entered him. The Tow Truck then raced away, one of its shiny hubcaps bouncing off on the viaduct that led from the waterfront to Summer Street, the main road into Southie.

A judge would later conclude that Whitey had purposely fired at Halloran’s extremities, in an attempt to cause maximum suffering before death. An autopsy showed that Halloran was shot twenty-two times: five in his legs, four in his arms, four in his groin and abdomen. A headshot only grazed him.
⁴²
Donahue was gone, mortally wounded. But when police arrived minutes later, they found that Halloran was somehow, improbably, still alive. “Get me the fuck out of here!” he yelled at the first two police officers who arrived. “I don’t want to die! Get me to a fucking hospital!”
⁴³
Halloran was delirious, fighting with the EMTs who tried to put him on a stretcher. Sergeant William “Bo” Mullane of the Boston police was a Southie guy, and he knew all the wiseguys. He recognized Halloran, lying in the ambulance, the blood and the life draining out of him. Mullane climbed into the ambulance.

“Brian,” Mullane said, “who did this to you?”

Mullane leaned down so he could hear Halloran’s raspy last words.

“Jimmy Flynn,” Halloran said.

It made sense. Halloran had told the FBI that Jimmy Flynn, a Winter Hill associate, was looking for him, believing correctly that Halloran was talking to the FBI about him.
⁴⁴
The blond hair, the thick mustache he’d seen on the shooter looked just like Flynn’s. Whitey hadn’t purposely tried to impersonate Flynn. It was just his good fortune that Halloran thought that that’s who his killer was.
⁴⁵

After the shooting, Whitey was euphoric. And hungry. He went to Teresa Stanley’s house for dinner. As Stanley cooked dinner for her kids, Whitey was still wondering why Flemmi hadn’t shown up for the hit. He sent out another voice message to Flemmi’s pager: “The balloon has burst.”
⁴⁶
As soon as he heard it, Flemmi knew Halloran was dead, and he started cursing: he had missed out on all the fun.
⁴⁷

Around 9:00 p.m., a few hours after the murders, Weeks picked up Whitey at Stanley’s house and they drove over the viaduct to look for the hubcap that had fallen off the Tow Truck. They found it by the curb. Then they went to meet Flemmi at Flemmi’s mother’s house, right next to Bill Bulger’s house. While Mary Flemmi stirred her tomato sauce in the kitchen, Whitey regaled his partner with all the gory details in the living room: how Halloran turned when Whitey called him, how the first shots blew out the windows, how Halloran’s body bounced as the rounds hit him on the street.

“Shit, I wish I was there,” Flemmi kept saying. “I wish I was there.”
⁴⁸

They sat down in the kitchen for a late dinner—spaghetti and veal and eggplant parmesan—and Whitey kept telling Mary Flemmi how good her cooking was.
⁴⁹
After dinner, Whitey, Flemmi, and Weeks went for a long walk down to Castle Island, talking about the murders like it was an unforgettable baseball game, the memory of a lifetime.

Pat Donahue had turned down the heat
on the pork chops, waiting for Michael. The six o’clock news was on TV in the other room, and she could hear the anchor excitedly talking about a shooting on the waterfront. The anchor said it was a gangland shooting. She wondered if Michael had heard anything.
⁵⁰

“Where the hell is Michael?” she said aloud, as she turned down the heat even more so the pork chops wouldn’t dry out. Then she heard, from the TV, that they had pictures of the car the men who were shot on the waterfront were driving. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen, holding a spatula in her hand, looking at the TV in the living room, and said, “That’s Michael.”

Her husband had borrowed his father’s car, and there it was on the TV screen, its windows blown out, its side pockmarked with bullet holes. She went to the second floor, where Michael’s father, a police officer, was sitting in a chair. “Michael’s been shot,” she told him, and the old cop sat there, dumbfounded.

The TV said that one of the men was dead and the other was in the hospital. She went to the phone and methodically called every hospital in Boston. No one could tell her anything. No one said they had Michael. Word spread in the neighborhood, and soon the house was a beehive. Neighbors brought food and tried to shield the three boys from the news because nobody knew what was going on. Was Michael dead or alive?

The police didn’t show up until 10:00, four hours after the shooting. They drove her to Massachusetts General Hospital but wouldn’t tell her whether Michael was dead or alive. Then one of the doctors said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Donahue,” and she knew. They asked her to go into a room, to make a formal identification, and she stood at the doorway, summoning the nerve. She went over in her head what she would do: She would sit down and talk to Mike, say some final words. When she went into the room, her husband’s body was propped up; he looked like he was sitting up. His head was bandaged, his eyes closed. It almost looked like he was sleeping. Pat Donahue looked at her dead husband, and all her plans to tell him how much she loved him went out the window. Pat quickly left the room. She couldn’t bear to see him like that.