Boston
It’s the trial of the decade in New England — notorious South Boston mobster Whitey Bulger finally brought before the bar of justice after 16 years on the lam to face charges including 19 murders in three states.
But the 83-year-old Alcatraz alum isn’t the only one on trial in the federal courthouse a few hundred yards west of where Whitey once machine-gunned two men as they sauntered out of a waterfront gin mill one sunny spring afternoon.
The local FBI office, which aided and abetted Whitey’s reign of terror, is also in the cross hairs. So is the state’s Democrat political establishment, which Whitey’s younger brother, Billy, once ruled with an iron fist in his almost two decades as the state Senate president.
Young Billy Bulger was an acolyte of US House Speaker John McCormack of South Boston, one of whose closest allies in DC was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
McCormack kept close watch over Whitey during his 1956-65 stint in prison for bank robbery (when he took massive amounts of LSD in the CIA’s infamous drug experiments). And when Whitey got paroled, “the director” sent a memo to the Boston FBI office ordering them to recruit Whitey as an informant.
Boston isn’t the only place where FBI agents have “gone native” with local mobsters. But the Bulger case is Scarpa-DeVecchio on steroids. One ex-Boston FBI agent died in a prison hospital in Tulsa awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges involving a Bulger hit on a millionaire businessman. The FBI’s one-time national director of training, who’ll be testifying, has admitted taking $7,000 in bribes from the gangsters.
Then there was FBI agent Zip Connolly, yet another South Boston native. In 1968, McCormack wrote a personal letter of recommendation for him to J. Edgar Hoover. Zip is now serving 40 years for murder in a Bulger-arranged gangland hit.
It wasn’t an underworld bloodbath that removed Whitey’s mob rivals; it was the FBI. First to go were Bulger’s ostensible allies in the Winter Hill gang, on race-fixing charges. The local Mafia was then rounded up on wiretap evidence — with Whitey and his buddy Stevie “the Rifleman” Flemmi listed as immunized informants on the bugging warrant.
By the mid 1980s, the Bulgers’ grip on Boston was so tight that a decorated state trooper at Logan Airport who stopped Whitey from taking $100,000 out of the country was summarily transferred the next day after refusing to hand over the incident report to an appointee of then-Gov. Mike Dukakis.
There was no “protection” for anyone, on either side of the law. As one imprisoned mobster summed it up in a report to outside FBI agents, “Whitey BULGER and Stevie FLEMMI have a machine and the Boston Police and the FBI have a machine and he cannot survive against these machines.”
The citywide reign of terror lasted into the 1990s, when a new generation of honest cops began flipping the gang’s bookmakers. Whitey fled ahead of the indictments, and remained on the FBI’s Most Wanted List until June 2011. That was when he and a girlfriend (whose two brothers-in-law Whitey is suspected of murdering) were arrested in Santa Monica.
In the courtroom, Bulger seems resigned to his fate. He tells people his two goals are to prove that he wasn’t an informant and that he didn’t strangle two of Flemmi’s young girlfriends.
In his opening statement, Whitey’s lawyer claimed, “Jim Bulger could not be an informant because he is Irish.” Huh? In the 1980s, Billy Bulger gave out an annual booby prize to the local pol who double-crossed him — named the Gypo Nolan Award, after the title character in Liam O’Flaherty’s famous novel “The Informer.”
The trial is already providing some of the best entertainment in Boston. On Friday, a retired bookie in a wheelchair described how one of his runners had decided to go straight. Summoned to meet with Whitey and the bookie, the runner told Whitey he wanted to start another business.
“We have another business, too,” Whitey said.
“Oh, yeah?” said the runner. “What’s that?”
“Our other business is killing [expletives] like you,” Whitey replied.
Driving away from the meeting, the bookie asked the runner where he wanted to be dropped off. “Someplace I can get a drink,” he said. It was the first time in the trial that Whitey smiled.
The real fireworks start today, as Johnny Martorano, another leader of the Winter Hill Gang, who’s confessed to 20 murders, takes the stand. He and Whitey used to be so close that Martorano named his youngest son James, after Whitey. Now Martorano has said, on “60 Minutes,” that he’d like to garrote his old partner.
Meanwhile, Billy Bulger has yet to appear in court. The seats reserved for Whitey’s family go unoccupied day after day. Apparently, it’s every Bulger for himself now.
Howie Carr is a columnist for the Boston Herald. His latest book on the Boston underworld is “Rifleman.”