Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (30 page)

As for their getting a skim from World Jai Alai, Whitey said that was nonsense. He cried poormouth, saying that he and Flemmi had inherited from their Winter Hill partners a $250,000 gambling debt to the Mafia but were only paying the juice, or interest, of $2,500 a week. If they were getting money from World Jai Alai, Whitey said, they would have paid that debt back in full by now.

He also reminded them that there was a long line of people who wanted to kill Halloran, who had habit of robbing people and was completely unreliable, coked up half the time, drunk the other half. And even as he denied being responsible for Michael Donahue’s murder, he tried to justify it. He claimed that Donahue was Halloran’s getaway driver after Pappas was shot in the Chinese restaurant, waiting for him outside in a van that took him to Donahue’s house. That was a lie, spread by Whitey, repeated by others, including Connolly, to muddy Michael Donahue’s name, to suggest he wasn’t just a bystander who gave a guy he knew from the neighborhood a ride home. Whitey ended the interview by refusing to take a polygraph, saying he didn’t trust the results. Once again, he was setting the terms.

Connolly, too, seemed to come out of it clean. His informants were implicated in the murder of four men, one a businessman, one an innocent bystander, the other two potential murder case witnesses who could expose the FBI’s arrangement with Whitey and Flemmi. But Whitey’s handler was flying high. He had normally received excellent performance evaluations, but in the wake of the murders of Wheeler, Halloran, Donahue, and Callahan, John Connolly’s annual evaluation was positively effusive. Not surprisingly, it was written by John Morris. “Connolly’s performance in this area substantially exceeds the performance standards of superior and is truly exceptional,” Morris wrote in November 1982. “He independently has developed, maintained and operated a corps of extremely high level and productive informants. His direction and their resultant information has brought about results exceeded by none in the Boston Division’s Organized Crime Program. . . . His performance has been at the level to which all should aspire to attain but few will realistically reach.”

John Connolly, Morris was saying, was the FBI’s poster boy—the model agent, the quintessential G-man.

In the end,
the plan to take over World Jai Alai had led to three separate, cold-blooded shootings that left four men dead: Roger Wheeler, Brian Halloran, Michael Donahue and John Callahan. Whitey called the hits the Holy Trinity, and he looked back on them with regret.
⁷¹

But he had been right about one thing. Killing Roger Wheeler was a mistake. It led to other mistakes. And it was making it harder and harder for the FBI to justify protecting Whitey. In reaching for some easy money, Whitey had overreached. He had put his empire and himself at risk.

And he knew it.

*
In 1985, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts threw out Salemme’s conviction for the murder of George Pappas.

11

The Wrong Man

W
hen he made his historic deal
with John Connolly in 1975, Whitey Bulger set only three conditions. Two had been predictable; one came out of left field. The first was that he would never give up his friends, meaning his closest gang comrades. He said that his brother Bill should be kept entirely out of it. And then, unexpectedly, he insisted to Connolly that he would never give up the IRA.

This came as a surprise, because Connolly had never mentioned the slightest investigative interest in the Irish Republican Army, whose illegal activities in the United States were ostensibly under the FBI’s purview. IRA sympathizers in Boston regularly raised money and procured weapons for the group, but that wasn’t Connolly’s concern. His entire focus was on the Mafia—on information that could help infiltrate and devastate the Italian criminal organization. He had no problem excusing Whitey from responsibility to provide information about the IRA, because it wasn’t a priority, and perhaps because Connolly himself was sympathetic to, or at the very least ambivalent about, the IRA.
¹

Whitey was more than sympathetic to the cause; it was a passion, like his patriotism. From the outbreak of civil unrest in Northern Ireland in 1968, Whitey had taken a keen interest in the conflict known as the Troubles. Like many others in Southie, he instinctively sympathized with Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland, seeing them as an oppressed minority and the IRA as their righteous defenders. The fact that they were also killers—well, that was the price of war. “Jimmy got me involved in Ireland,” said Kevin Weeks. “He read a lot of books on it. He understood it. Jimmy considered it noble. It wasn’t doing crime. It was helping the cause.”

In South Boston, being Irish was an essential element of identity, one that conferred a certain standing in the neighborhood. It was part of the attitude that sustained Southie exceptionalism, that the Irish were special and this place was theirs. While there were plenty of Italians and Lithuanians and Polish in the neighborhood, the Irish ruled the roost. They held almost every elected and appointed position. Most of the cops and firefighters in Southie were Irish. The neighborhood’s unofficial mascot was a leprechaun, his two fists balled up, itching for a fight. Its annual rite of ethnic unity was and is the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. “In most South Boston schools, there was also a special emphasis on the social and cultural heritage of the Irish race,” said the historian Thomas H. O’Connor. “Irish songs and stories were an integral part of the instructional program; Irish saints and Irish feast days were usually celebrated with extra enthusiasm; and at St. Augustine’s School romantic scenes from the Irish countryside were painted on the walls of the auditorium.”
²

Irish rebel songs like “The Rising of the Moon” and “A Nation Once Again” were also ubiquitous in Southie, not just in its many barrooms but at virtually any neighborhood celebration. When Bill Bulger became the state senator for Southie in 1970, he presided over the annual St. Patrick’s Day political roast, at which it was considered de rigueur for politicians, after offering a tired joke and exposing themselves to the emcee’s astringent wit, to warble a rebel song.

Beyond the surprise, there was also an unacknowledged irony in Whitey’s declaring the IRA off-limits even as he agreed to become an informant. There is nothing worse in the Irish consciousness than being a snitch. Informers have been the bane of Irish revolutionaries for centuries, their treachery ruining countless uprisings and rebellions against the British. And in Southie, in particular, there was an unforgiving attitude about snitching. Some said it was worse than being a murderer. Again, an Irish thing. “In Southie, there was nothing worse than being a rat,” said Weeks. “Jimmy said that all the time. He never forgot that one of his partners gave him up in those bank robberies.”
³
Weeks didn’t know, of course, that Whitey had given up his accomplices, too.

It was an ethic inculcated in early childhood. Whitey’s brother Bill said that the hostility to informers was writ large in the Old Harbor housing project during his and his older brother’s formative years. In his memoir, he recalled a time when one of the neighborhood kids broke a streetlight and police were hunting down the offender.

We were told that a recently impounded baseball would not be returned unless we identified the lamp breaker. We were disgusted with the miscreant, since essential equipment was being held hostage because of him. But we loathed informers. It wasn’t a conspiratorial thing—our folklore bled with the names of informers who had sold out their brethren to hangmen and worse in the lands of our ancestors.
⁴

The truth was that, on the night Whitey signed on as an informant, there was very little he could have given Connolly on the IRA. Up to that point, he had merely donated relatively small amounts of money to the Irish Northern Aid committee, or NORAID, the IRA’s main support group in the United States. But once he had the FBI in his pocket, his involvement quickly intensified. It became more than giving cash—it became a hands-on thing. Whitey first sent a small consignment of weapons to the IRA and then prevailed upon a friendly FBI agent to acquire C-4 explosives, according to Steve Flemmi. Finally, in 1984, Whitey sanctioned and helped organize the biggest-ever shipment of weapons from the United States to the IRA. He considered the mission his crowning achievement, an interlude of honor in his long criminal career. It was an audacious project, but one that was doomed to failure because of that bane of Irish revolutionaries, the informer.

With help from Connolly, Whitey would identify who had given the mission up and set out to kill him. But, as happened during the Southie gang war when he shot Donnie McGonagle thinking it was Paulie McGonagle, Whitey got the wrong man.

Joe Cahill was accustomed
to doing business in barrooms, but his haunts were usually in his native West Belfast, not South Boston.

Still, there was a war on, and Joe Cahill would go anywhere to get weapons for the Irish Republican Army. So there he was, in the private room on the second floor of Triple O’s, Whitey Bulger’s redoubt on West Broadway. Cahill nodded approvingly at the Irish tricolor strung across the bare brick wall. There was a TV propped up on the bar, and Cahill pulled a videocassette out of a shopping bag.

His short stature, thick eyeglasses, and retiring, grandfatherly manner belied a certain ruthlessness that fit in with the men grouped around him at Triple O’s. There was Whitey, whose reputation preceded him. There was Pat Nee, the Irish-born Mullen gang survivor who had gone from hunting Whitey to hunting others with him. And there was Joe Murray, Whitey’s newest associate, the biggest marijuana trafficker in town.

They were mere racketeers; Joe Cahill was a revolutionary. He was also a legend.

When he was twenty-two, Cahill had been convicted of killing a policeman in Belfast during one of the IRA’s short-lived campaigns of violence in the 1940s. Cahill and his three friends were sentenced to death. His friend and co-conspirator, Tom Williams, was hanged. But the Vatican intervened, asking the British government to spare the other three Catholics facing the hangman. The British would come to regret the mercy they showed Joe Cahill, first in sparing him the noose, then in releasing him after just eight years in prison.

Cahill continued to fight in the IRA’s sporadic, quixotic uprisings. He resigned from the organization briefly in the 1960s, accusing its leaders of going soft and focusing too much on the far-left ideology that was spreading across Europe. He believed that they weren’t concentrating enough on their own immediate struggle. His warnings proved prophetic. When marauding bands of Protestant thugs tore through Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast in 1968, the IRA was impotent, its small, pathetic cache of rusty guns useless at stopping a pogrom. Some took to daubing walls in West Belfast with the taunting slogan “IRA—I Ran Away.” Cahill rose from that humiliation, pushed the politicos aside, and reasserted the muscular tradition of physical-force republicanism. He became one of the founders of a new, more aggressive reincarnation of the republican movement’s military wing, the Provisional IRA.

In the early 1970s, as the IRA took the fight to the British, Cahill went looking for weapons abroad. In 1973, he was captured off the coast of Ireland on a ship loaded down with five tons of guns and explosives, a gift from the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who hated the British almost as much as Cahill did. When the judge who heard the case described Cahill as the ringleader of the gunrunning scheme, Cahill stood, bowed gallantly toward the judge and said, “You do me an honor.”
⁵

Cahill served three years in prison. As soon as he was released, he again began looking abroad for weapons, and it was inevitable that his quest would take him to Boston. In the working-class enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown, it was common to see pro-IRA graffiti painted on the walls. In Southie, a liquor store owner had a huge mural painted on the side of his West Broadway storefront, proclaiming, “Ireland Unfree Will Never Be at Peace.” It remains there to this day. A mechanic painted a towering mural over the entrance to his Lower End garage with the words “Óglaigh na hÉireann,” which meant nothing to most passersby but which was appreciated by Joe Cahill: It means “Irish volunteers” and is what the IRA calls itself in Gaelic, the Irish language. In other neighborhoods, expressing solidarity with an outlawed group would be considered strange, even scandalous. In Southie, it was good for business.

Cahill noticed. “When they drove me around Southie, it reminded me of West Belfast,” he said.
⁶

It was common for hats to be passed around the myriad Southie barrooms, collecting for a relief fund for the families of IRA prisoners. Some bars also had permanent jars for donations to NORAID. The debates over where the money went were irrelevant: Even if it didn’t go directly to buying weapons—and there was considerable evidence that some of it did just that—it went to prisoners’ dependents, allowing the IRA to spend its funds elsewhere.

One of NORAID’s leaders, John Hurley, had survived the Charlestown-Somerville gang wars to become a Winter Hill Gang associate, but he spent most of his time raising money, and finding guns, for the IRA. It was Hurley who told Whitey in 1982 where he could corner and murder Brian Halloran, the Winter Hill leg breaker who shopped Whitey and Steve Flemmi to the FBI. And it was Hurley who urged Joe Cahill to meet with Whitey Bulger.
⁷
Hurley knew that if Boston’s Irish criminals were going to coalesce to help the IRA, Whitey had to sign off or it wouldn’t happen. Whitey had contributed to NORAID regularly, taking the money from his gang’s expense fund, but he styled himself more than just a barstool patriot—he styled himself Irish. He obtained Irish citizenship through his maternal grandmother, Jane O’Brien McCarthy, who was born in Cork City in 1866. Whitey acquired his Irish passport in 1987.
⁸
Beyond its sentimental value, he knew that the passport would be an asset if he had to go on the run.

But while Whitey always supported the IRA, it was Joe Cahill’s visit to the Triple O’s that dramatically escalated his involvement. Whitey idolized few people, but Joe Cahill was one.
⁹
And when Cahill insisted on going to South Boston to meet him, Whitey was flattered. “Jimmy really looked up to Joe Cahill,” said Kevin Weeks. “Cahill was a legend.”

As a convicted killer and gunrunner, Joe Cahill was barred from entering the United States. But he was not barred from entering Canada, and the Boston gangsters perfected a scam for sneaking him across the border. The IRA was told to send Cahill to Canada during the winter, so that the trips coincided with when the Boston Bruins hockey team was playing the Canadiens in Montreal. IRA sympathizers in Charlestown and Southie then chartered a bus to bring Bruins fans to the games. Cahill usually traveled with three companions, so four Boston hockey fans were induced to stay a few extra days in Canada; Cahill and his traveling party took their place on the bus. Border inspections were perfunctory at the time; as long as the number of heads on the bus heading south was the same as the number that had been counted heading north, the men were waved through the checkpoint. On four different occasions, Joe Cahill was smuggled into the United States this way.
¹⁰

After one such border crossing, Joe Cahill headed for the second floor of Triple O’s. Whitey insisted that no alcohol be served; this was business. He took a seat with Pat Nee, Joe Murray, John Hurley, and Kevin Weeks and watched the videocassette that Joe Cahill brought with him from Belfast. It was a documentary, showing British soldiers and members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary firing plastic bullets into the middle of roiling crowds in Northern Ireland. “The movie had pictures of little girls, dead,” said Weeks. “They had been shot in the head by plastic bullets.” The inflammatory video bordered on propaganda and had exactly the effect Joe Cahill desired.

When the movie ended, Cahill flicked off the power on the TV and stood to face the assembled gangsters. “Lads,” he said, folding his hands in front of him, as if he were in prayer, “we need your help.”
¹¹
With that, the founder of the Provisional IRA convinced the Irish mob in Boston to act as weapons procurers for the cause. It was a task the gangsters took on enthusiastically, even if their association was one the IRA was loath to admit and determined to keep secret. The British government, in concert with the Irish and American governments, had spent years trying to paint the IRA as nothing more than a criminal gang using the conflict as a cover to engage in ordinary robbery and murder. So cautious was the IRA about preserving its reputation among civilian sympathizers who provided safe houses and looked the other way during IRA operations that Cahill refused to let his operatives employ car thieves to steal the cars the IRA often used to mount attacks, move guns, and carry bombs.
¹²
He insisted IRA men steal the vehicles themselves, and some of them were utterly useless at it. Better they fail at boosting a car than be seen relying on common criminals, Cahill reasoned.