Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (38 page)

Still, there was no sign of Whitey. An FBI agent had knocked on the wrong door on Silver Street, but even when they found the right one, the house was empty.
¹⁸
At that moment, Whitey and Stanley were somewhere on Interstate 95, heading north. Tom Foley and state police detective lieutenant Pat Greaney drove out to Cathy Greig’s house in Quincy to see if Whitey was there. Greig walked into the driveway even before they got near the door. Her arms were folded.

“You got a warrant?” she asked.

“We just want to talk,” Foley told her.

“Get the fuck off my property,” she said.

“We just want to ask you some questions,” Foley said.

“Go fuck yourselves,” Greig replied.

She started yelling, so Foley turned back to the car. Greaney shook his head. “You don’t know how to talk to women,” he whispered to Foley. “Watch this.”

Greaney had only taken a few steps toward the house when Cathy Greig lit into him. “What are you? Stupid?” she barked. “I told you to get off my property.” A sheepish Greaney got back in the car and Foley suppressed a smile.
¹⁹

Weeks, meanwhile, was playing cards in the L Street Tavern in Southie, sitting in the booth next to the jukebox, when Steve Flemmi’s brother Michael, the Boston cop, walked in and motioned him outside. “They just pinched Stevie,” Michael Flemmi said. Weeks shook his head. “I told him to take off two weeks ago,” Weeks said. After Michael Flemmi left, Weeks noticed cars driven by men in suits circling the block.
²⁰
He slipped out the back door of the bar, jumped in a friend’s car, and raced away, not knowing there was no arrest warrant for him because investigators had yet to gather enough evidence to charge him.

Whitey and Stanley were somewhere in Connecticut when the news of Flemmi’s arrest came over the radio. Whitey immediately turned around and headed south for Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel.

Frank Salemme had also managed to slip away after learning of Flemmi’s arrest, but he had done no contingency planning. His flight path seemed haphazard. He went to Florida, not exactly an unheard-of destination among wiseguys, and was captured seven months later in West Palm Beach, living in a six-hundred-dollar-a-month town house five miles west of the walled mansions of Donald Trump, Jimmy Buffett, and Rod Stewart.

Whitey was much better prepared. As soon as he turned his car south, he became someone else: Thomas F. Baxter, of Selden, New York, a town on Long Island. He had acquired the alias even before the real Thomas F. Baxter, who lived in a suburb north of Boston, died in January 1979. Whitey obtained a Massachusetts license with his own photograph and Baxter’s name, birth date, and Social Security number and renewed it every four years. In 1990, he also obtained a New York driver’s license as Baxter, then renewed it in 1994, using the Long Island address of Weeks’s cousins. His trump card was fifteen years old before he had to pull it.

Even as the state police were preparing
to fan out and arrest Whitey and Flemmi, Tom Foley let two of his best investigators leave for Florida: There was a chance they had found John Martorano. Foley decided to expend the much-needed manpower because he hoped to press the Winter Hill hit man to turn against Whitey, his old partner. Like Bulger, Martorano had been a source of bitter friction between the FBI and the state police, with the Staties determined to find him, while the bureau showed little interest. Martorano had not only extorted bookies with Whitey but had been with him on several murders. If they found Martorano, they might be able to squeeze him, to get him to pin the killings on Whitey.

Steve Johnson, a state police detective, had an idea of where to find him. Johnson had been tracking another fugitive, a bookmaker and loanshark close to Martorano. Culling through a long list of calls to and from the bookmaker’s cell phone, one number kept jumping out at him. Johnson traced the cell phone’s billing information to an address in Boca Raton. “I think it might be Johnny Martorano,” Johnson told Foley.

It was more hunch than anything, but Foley thought Johnson was onto something and authorized him to fly to Florida along with Trooper Michael Scanlan. They drove their rental car out to the address in Boca and had been sitting on the house for only a couple of hours when Martorano walked outside. He hadn’t bothered to change his appearance at all. The FBI had been “looking” for John Martorano for sixteen years. The Massachusetts State Police found him in less than a day.

Foley told Ed Quinn, the FBI supervisor, of Johnson and Scanlan’s success. Quinn was stunned. This was shaping up as a major embarrassment for the FBI. The bureau had to have a piece of the arrest if only to save face. Johnson and Scanlan were told to hold off until an FBI agent could fly down from Boston with a new arrest warrant. Johnson’s worst fears were confirmed when the agent bearing the new warrant turned out to be Mike Buckley—a friend of John Connolly’s, part of the organized crime squad that had protected Whitey for years. Johnson told Buckley they had been following Martorano for three days and that he was worried that Martorano would recognize their rental car. He asked the agent to rent a different one, but Buckley just shook his head. “I’m just here to keep an eye on you guys,” he told them.
²¹

Martorano had taken his nine-year-old son and a playmate out for a treat at an ice cream parlor and was outside the store with the boys when Steve Johnson called his name. Martorano didn’t resist—he wasn’t about to make a scene in front of the kids. Then, with Martorano on his way to the county jail, Johnson, Scanlan, and Buckley drove back to the gangster’s house. Scanlan interviewed neighbors. Johnson sifted through the trash. Buckley sat in the car doing nothing.

Johnson found some burnt papers in the trash outside and was trying to piece them together when Martorano’s girlfriend, sopping wet from the shower, burst from the house wearing just a towel. She started grappling with Johnson. “You have no right to go through our stuff!” she yelled, flailing at Johnson, who towered over her. Johnson held her back with one hand and held the burnt papers with the other, trying to explain the legal concept of abandoned property and his right to examine it. Buckley watched the scuffle from the car and didn’t move a muscle. A few hours later, Johnson and Scanlan flew back to Boston. Buckley remained behind to help with the press release, which unsurprisingly gave the FBI equal billing in the arrest of John Martorano.
²²

A few days after a warrant was issued
for Whitey Bulger’s arrest, an FBI agent was turned away from the State House office of Senate President Bill Bulger.
²³
He left his card and phone number with the receptionist. Shortly afterward, on January 9, 1995, Bill Bulger called the agent, John E. Gamel, at the FBI. It was a brief conversation. He said he didn’t know where his brother was, didn’t want to talk about him, and wasn’t interested in answering any questions. “Well,” Gamel said, “if you hear from him, please advise him to give me a call and we’ll work out an arrangement for surrender.”

The senate president told Gamel what he wanted to hear: that he’d consider the request. But Bill Bulger’s loyalty to his brother trumped any obligation he might have felt to either the FBI or the public good in general. He had no intention of calling John Gamel back. He did, however, have every intention of talking to his brother. A couple of weeks after Whitey had fled, Weeks told Bill that Whitey wanted to talk to him. By then, Whitey and Flemmi had been indicted on federal racketeering and extortion charges for teaming up with the Mafia to shake down bookies. Assuming his own phones were tapped, Bill arranged for Whitey to call him at the Quincy home of Eddie Phillips, a friend who worked at the State House and had served as his driver for years.
²⁴
He arrived at Phillips’s home just as the Phillips family was sitting down for dinner. The house was bustling. Bill Bulger waited alone in a room for his fugitive brother to call.

They didn’t talk long. “He told me that he’s doing fine, that he’ll be okay,” Bill Bulger later told a grand jury investigating Whitey’s disappearance. “I told him I cared about him deeply, and I still do. And that I just hoped that it would have a good ending.” But Bill Bulger did not convey Gamel’s request to his brother. He wasn’t going to help talk Whitey into surrendering. Bill said he gave his brother legal advice but did not suggest he turn himself in “because I don’t think it would be in his interest to do so. . . . I do have an honest loyalty to my brother, and I care about him. It’s my hope that I’m never helpful to anyone against him.”
²⁵

Whitey did, in fact, briefly consider
turning himself in. He had Weeks reach out to John Connolly to discuss the possibility. Weeks told Connolly, “Somebody wants to talk to you.” He told Connolly to go to the office of a mutual friend, Franny Joyce, who, like Connolly, was a Bill Bulger protégé. Connolly’s and Joyce’s offices were near each other in the Prudential Center, where the retired agent was working for the Boston Edison power company, and where Joyce, with Bill Bulger’s patronage, had been ensconced as the head of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.
²⁶
When the phone rang, Connolly said he picked it up, thinking it would be Flemmi, calling from jail. Instead, it was Whitey, and he was furious.

Whitey was hot because the indictment against him and Flemmi was all about the gambling business the FBI had authorized them to conduct as long as they fed the bureau information about the Mafia. Whitey was right on this point, and he had every reason to be livid. As he listened to Whitey rant, Connolly suddenly grew worried about his own safety and that of his wife and three sons. He knew what Whitey was capable of, especially if he thought someone had betrayed him. “Jimmy,” Connolly said, “you know I did not do this.”
²⁷

Connolly promised he would testify in court that Whitey and Flemmi had been authorized, if not encouraged, to engage in gambling and loansharking activity to enhance their cover with the mobsters they were ratting on. Whitey believed that his deal with the FBI protected him from the charges he faced, and he was prepared to turn himself in, but only if he had a guarantee that he and Flemmi would be released on bail to await trial. After his Alcatraz years, he had resolved never to go to prison again. “I don’t think that’s possible,” Connolly replied. “It would depend what your lawyer could do for you.”

Whitey thought for a moment. “Who should I get?” he asked.

They agreed to talk again, a week later, and when Whitey called back, Connolly gave him the names of three lawyers. Two of them had been prosecutors. He could hear Whitey writing the names down.

“Good luck,” Whitey told his former handler.

“Good luck to you,” Connolly replied.
²⁸

They haven’t spoken to each other since.

Whitey made other phone calls
during those first months on the run, trying to find out what was happening. The case against him soon expanded to include new charges that he had extorted money from drug dealers. No call was more personal than the one he made to John Morris at the FBI in Quantico, Virginia. Morris, a month shy of his fifty-first birthday, was nearing the end of his FBI career. Despite having been censured for leaking information to the
Boston Globe
for its 1988 series on the Bulgers, he had been promoted to director of training at the academy. It was a soft landing given his former position and the nature of his transgression. But things were taking an ominous turn. Someone kept leaving messages. “Tell him Mr. White called,” the man told the secretary. “Tell him I’ll call back.”
²⁹
Finally, Mr. White got through, and Morris knew who it was even before the first threat crackled down the line. “John,” Whitey began, “I figured it out. You were the one who tried to get me killed with the story ‘Whitey Bulger is a paid FBI informant.’”

“I’m sorry,” Morris replied. “I made a mistake.”
³⁰

“You were my paid FBI informant, you motherfucker,” Whitey snarled. “If I had known it then I’d have blown your fucking head off. You were my informant. I bought information. I didn’t give information or sell it.”
³¹
He added, “You took money from me, and if I go to jail, you’re going to go to jail.”
³²

Whitey gave him an ultimatum. Call his contacts at the
Boston Globe
and get the story describing Whitey as an informant retracted. Tell them it was just a ploy to discredit Whitey and his brother. Tell them it was all untrue. Morris said that wasn’t in his power, but Whitey ordered him to use his “Machiavellian mind” to remedy the situation.
³³

At that moment, Whitey heard a thud and the phone went dead. Morris had collapsed and was rushed to a hospital. He was revived on the operating table. “He had a heart attack!” Whitey boasted, recalling the exchange years later.
³⁴

In a letter to an old friend from his prison days, Whitey was insistent that he wasn’t an informant, and that he felt smeared by Morris and the
Globe
. “[T]he guy in the FBI I protected by my silence . . . was the person who told the press to get me killed—what a plot! Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have thought that up!”
³⁵

When Weeks told Connolly about Whitey’s threatening phone call to Morris and Morris’s terrified reaction, Connolly started chuckling. “He died twice on the table,” Connolly told Weeks. “It must have been some phone call.”
³⁶

As they turned around on I-95
in Connecticut and headed back to Manhattan on the night of Steve Flemmi’s arrest, Whitey tried to reassure Teresa Stanley that they were just on an extended vacation. But after a month on the road, she had had enough. She was homesick and also still miffed over Whitey’s affair with Greig. She had felt flattered, at Christmas, that Whitey had chosen her to accompany him, but now it was February, and a life in hotels and motels and who knew where else was not appealing. “I want to go home,” Stanley said. Whitey didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t fight with her or browbeat her as he usually did to get his way. Instead he called Weeks and told him he wanted Greig to join him on the run.