Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (31 page)

Yet three thousand miles away, Cahill was content to sit in a room with some of the most notorious criminals in Boston. The IRA’s association with Murray, the marijuana and cocaine importer, was even more astonishing. If Murray had sold drugs in Belfast the way he did in Boston, his friends in the IRA would have felt duty-bound to shoot him; they viewed drug dealers and their customers as vulnerable to a squeeze by police because of the stiff sentences they often faced and thus more likely to become informers than other criminals. Whitey shared the IRA’s reservations. The only thing he liked about drug dealers was the cash he could extort from them.

He had only recently hooked up with Murray. After learning that Murray had used a warehouse in Southie to store a boatload of marijuana, Whitey arranged a meeting in a park in Charlestown. They met near the Bunker Hill Monument, an iconic structure that looms over the city’s northern skyline. The monument commemorates a Revolutionary War battle that the colonists lost but recalled as a victory because they had killed so many British. As they sat beneath the 221-foot white obelisk, Whitey explained the niceties of Boston’s geography. By impinging on Southie, Joe Murray had crossed a line and incurred a debt. “You’re being fined,” Whitey told Murray. Still, he let him off relatively easy, extracting from Murray sixty thousand dollars and a promise to give Whitey a cut of his future transactions in Southie.
¹³

The IRA was willing to overlook Murray’s drug dealing because Murray routinely did favors for them. He was a generous donor. His seedy Charlestown bar, the Celtic Tavern, was a veritable bed and breakfast for IRA men on the run. It was Murray and the Charlestown crew who had the strongest connection with the IRA. But when Joe Cahill came to Boston, he went to Whitey Bulger’s place to make his pitch. He knew where the power center was.

In the early 1980s, Whitey bought a van and Weeks brought it to a garage in Southie where a young mechanic was enlisted to build a hidden compartment—a hide, as they called it—in the van’s chassis. In it, Whitey stashed guns and a block of C-4 plastic explosives.
¹⁴
Flemmi claimed the explosives were a gift from John Newton, an FBI agent introduced to Whitey by John Connolly.
¹⁵
He said Newton, a former Green Beret, had invited him and Whitey to his house in Southie, saying, “I’ve got something for you.” Whitey and Flemmi were excited, according to Flemmi, when Newton gave them a gray wooden case with rope handles loaded with forty pounds of the plastic explosives. Just a couple of pounds of it could take out a truck. Newton told them he had obtained the C-4 while training at Fort Devens, northwest of Boston, according to Flemmi.
¹⁶
Newton denies having given the gangsters C-4, saying he did not have access to such explosives. He added that they were tightly controlled and that it would have been impossible to sneak them out of Fort Devens.
*
Newton never faced criminal charges stemming from Flemmi’s allegation.

The van with the weapons was shipped overseas, and the smuggling operation proved successful. Whitey was disappointed, however, when he learned that the IRA had torched the van after retrieving the guns and explosives. “What a waste,” Whitey told Weeks. “That hide was a thing of beauty. We could’ve used it.”
¹⁷

The IRA was impressed that Boston gangsters had been able to ship weapons across the Atlantic so easily. But by the end of 1983, the IRA was looking for much more than could be stowed in a van. Joe Murray had the boats to take over a large shipment. He had been using fishing trawlers to move marijuana and cocaine up and down the East Coast for years, amassing a fortune. Murray was all for arming the IRA, though he wasn’t as quick to sign on to the audacious idea to send over a large load of weapons on one of his ships. “We convinced Joe he should be a good Irishman, that it would be good for his business,” says Nee.
¹⁸
For all their influence, the Irish mob in Boston did not have a navy. Murray, on the other hand, had a fleet.

The idea was to use the
Valhalla
, one of the trawlers Murray had been using to smuggle pot, to load it down with weapons and head to sea under the cover of a fishing trip. The American ship would meet the
Marita Ann
, an Irish boat controlled by the IRA, in international waters. The arms on the
Valhalla
would be transferred to the
Marita Ann
, and then both ships would head back to their respective ports, pretending they had just gone fishing.
¹⁹

The IRA liked the idea and sent one of its operatives, John Crawley, to Boston to coordinate the mission. At the time, Crawley was twenty-six, a stocky, muscular man with something of a baby face. He was perfect for the assignment, as he did not hail from a traditional Irish republican family, so he wouldn’t be flagged boarding a transatlantic flight. He had not, like so many, been radicalized by beatings at the hands of police or British soldiers on the streets of Belfast and Derry. Rather, he was born in New York and had grown up in Chicago. His parents moved back to their native Ireland when Crawley was fourteen, just as the Troubles were starting. Living in the sleepy Dublin suburbs, Crawley became fascinated with the conflict to the North when it was the lead news story day after day.

In 1975, he moved back to the United States so he could join the US Marines. He served for four years and was trained in explosives and specifically trained to plant bombs in electrical plants behind enemy lines, useful skills for a budding Irish radical. When he returned to Ireland in 1979, Crawley joined the IRA, bringing with him something valuable—his intimate knowledge of weapons and explosives. He also brought something invaluable—American citizenship. Given the sensitivity and size of the proposed gunrunning mission, the IRA’s ruling Army Council handpicked Crawley for the task because of his American background.
²⁰

He wasn’t, however, keen on the idea of working with criminals, and he was especially wary of Joe Murray and Whitey Bulger, according to Pat Nee. “Sean,” as Nee called Crawley, “didn’t like or trust Whitey. He thought Whitey was full of himself. Whitey tried to suggest to Sean that the IRA start firebombing civilian airplanes while they were on the ground, and Sean looked at him like he was crazy. Whitey didn’t understand how the IRA worked. The IRA knew that killing civilians hurt their cause. Whitey didn’t care. Sean didn’t like Joe Murray because Joe was arrogant, but Sean would just shrug and say, ‘He’s got the money and the boats, so we’ll have to deal with him.’”
²¹

According to Nee, they raised the one million dollars needed to buy the weapons for the mission by shaking down drug dealers in South Boston and Charlestown. Whitey signed off on the shakedowns, viewing them as almost charitable in nature. “To be honest, once we explained what it was for, most of them were glad to contribute. We didn’t have to threaten anybody. I guess they felt like they were doing something useful or honorable,” Nee said. “There is such a thing as honor among thieves.”

The crew would be unpaid. A trio of Boston-based IRA sympathizers volunteered to serve in the role, even though none of them knew the first thing about boats.
²²
Murray prevailed upon Bob Andersen to captain the
Valhalla
. Andersen had sailed ships smuggling Murray’s drugs up and down the eastern seaboard for years. Murray also convinced one of the mules who doubled as an engineer on his drug boats to make the trip: John McIntyre.

McIntyre was the son of an Irish American father and a German mother. During World War II, his father served in the army intelligence unit that would later become the Central Intelligence Agency. He grew up in Quincy and enrolled at Northeastern University, hoping to become an engineer. But in 1970, McIntyre stunned his parents by announcing that he would walk away from his draft deferment, dropping out of college to join the army. “He wanted to go to Vietnam because his father was a very good patriot and he idolized his father,” his mother later testified.
²³
But his army career fizzled quickly and he was soon back in Quincy.

McIntyre got back into Northeastern in 1974 but dropped out after only a month. He drove a cab, then tried his hand at underwater construction and asbestos removal, both hard, dirty jobs that didn’t pay well. As much as he struggled on land, McIntyre was gifted once he stepped onto the deck of a boat. He could make any engine work. He was a struggling fisherman, in and out of work with an asbestos crew, when he stumbled into a salvage yard in Chelsea, just north of Boston, looking for parts. Somebody noticed him tinkering with engines and asked if he’d like to make a lot of money. He began hanging out at Heller’s, a Chelsea dive that, despite its down-at-heels appearance, was the bank for local bookmakers. In no time at all, John McIntyre was Joe Murray’s engineer.

McIntyre started drinking at the Celtic Tavern, Murray’s bar, and his mother remembers he suddenly developed an interest in his Irish ancestry. He started talking about how Catholics were being mistreated in Northern Ireland. John McIntyre was, overnight, a starry-eyed Irish patriot. “It came out of nowhere,” his mother said.

The captain, Bob Andersen, was sympathetic to the IRA cause, but his involvement was mostly professional. Murray told him he could keep the proceeds of any swordfishing they could manage after transferring the arms shipment on the high seas. Andersen was an experienced skipper, and he and McIntyre knew the limits of the
Valhalla
, which was relatively small for a transatlantic crossing. They hesitated when Murray told them the gunrunning mission was planned for the middle of September—high hurricane season.

Andersen argued that they were pushing their luck already, using an eighty-seven-foot boat to cross the Atlantic, but Murray and Nee were anxious to complete the mission before winter set in. So was Whitey, who, while Nee was doing the bulk of the legwork, was quick to tell everyone he had approved the whole thing. They thought the storm threat would actually enhance their cover: What gunrunner would be crazy enough to sail in the middle of hurricane season?

They had six months to gather the weapons. Crawley was incredulous when Pat Nee explained that they could obtain most of what they needed by buying munitions legally, in parts, through a magazine called
Shotgun News
.

“How can this be legal?” Crawley asked.

“Relax, Sean,” Pat Nee told him, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “You’re in America.”

Nee arranged to have the gun parts mailed to him at the Columbia Yacht Club in South Boston, under his cheeky alias: Patrick Mullen. “Once a Mullen,” Nee said, “always a Mullen.” Nee didn’t clear the alias with Whitey, convinced that he would not see the humor.

Between April and August of 1984, Nee spent more than five hundred thousand dollars of Joe Murray’s money on weapons and weapons parts, all of it purchased legally, all of it mailed via UPS, all of it delivered to an unpretentious boat club on the South Boston waterfront. “The easiest thing we bought was the antiaircraft stuff,” Nee said. “Just mail order.”
²⁴

The shipment was supplemented by many gangsters, including Whitey, who donated some of their own weapons. Whitey liked the idea that guns he had used in South Boston would be used to kill British soldiers and policemen in South Armagh, an area in Northern Ireland that he admired for its nickname: Bandit Country. “It was like a status symbol to have one of your guns on the
Valhalla
,” Nee said. “Guys were lining up to donate guns. Whitey put in more than one.”

Whitey even enlisted Stevie Flemmi, who had nothing Irish about him, to help. Flemmi asked his brother Michael, a Boston police officer, how they could acquire bulletproof vests that presumably would be worn by IRA assassins when they set out to murder police officers in Northern Ireland. Michael Flemmi reported his bulletproof vest stolen from his car. It was soon in the hold of the
Valhalla
, waiting to be shipped to the IRA.

As night fell on September 13, 1984, Crawley and Nee led a caravan of six vans to Gloucester Harbor, one of the busiest fishing ports in the United States and just north of Boston. Whitey drove his Malibu to the top of a hill overlooking the harbor. He and Weeks sat there with binoculars, monitoring police frequencies, making sure that the loading of the weapons onto the
Valhalla
went smoothly and without detection. “How great is this?” Whitey murmured, holding the binoculars to his eyes.
²⁵

His enthusiasm was justified. He and a band of Irish American gangsters had assembled the biggest cache of weapons ever shipped to the IRA. And after just a few hours, the load was secure: ninety-one rifles, eight submachine guns, thirteen shotguns, fifty-one handguns, eleven bulletproof vests, seventy thousand rounds of ammunition, plus an array of hand grenades and rocket heads. Captain Bob Andersen also ordered twenty tons of ice and more than three tons of bait, so that it would appear to anyone who might inquire that the
Valhalla
was off to catch swordfish.

They set sail just after midnight. McIntyre looked over the engine while a crew of hoodlum landlubbers prepared for their first journey on the high seas.

Pat Nee stood on the dock and waved one final time to Crawley, who waved back. From the hill overlooking the harbor, Whitey put down his binoculars and turned the ignition.

“Let’s get out of here,” he told Weeks.

With hangdog eyes and a lilting accent,
Sean O’Callaghan did not fit the stereotype of an IRA assassin.
²⁶
He grew up in a staunchly republican family in Kerry, the most pro-IRA area in the Irish Republic. His father had been an IRA man in the 1940s, jailed without trial, so Sean was considered a legacy. Joining the IRA was expected of him, but he only made the decision after watching televised images of Protestant thugs burning Catholics out of their homes in Belfast in 1969. He was fifteen.

He grew up in Tralee, a sleepy harbor town in Kerry, and when young IRA recruits from the North started showing up there to train in weapons and explosives, O’Callaghan eagerly joined them. He was seventeen when a bomb he was assembling exploded; he wasn’t badly hurt, but he was arrested for subversive activity and spent six months in jail. In 1974, he was sent to join an IRA unit in Northern Ireland and took part in an attack on a local army base. A woman serving with the local national guard was killed.