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Boston's Brother Bosses

By Lawrence Henry on 2.24.06 @ 12:07AM

The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
by Howie Carr
(Warner Books, 352 pages, $25.95)

Who knew Howie Carr could write like this?

Boston's veteran wiseacre talk show host and newspaper columnist can turn a sharp short commentary. Everybody knew that. But now, with the publication of his book, The Brothers Bulger, Howie Carr proves he can write a modern political history book that reads like a first-rate crime novel, full of rich social insights and -- most important -- facts that nobody else ever wrote before, and maybe no one person ever knew.

The intertwined stories of Boston politician William Bulger, longtime president of the Massachusetts Senate, and his brother James "Whitey" Bulger, mob boss and multiple murderer, loop around virtually every stratum, nook, and cranny of New England society.

Carr said on his radio program last week that he had thought of including in the book a "tree," or family and associate diagram of the Bulgers. "But it would have been a kudzu."

Many a non-fiction book flounders on the author's inability to keep relationships straight in the reader's mind. Carr proves that the best way to unravel a kudzu is to tell a good story, and to tell a good story well.

"I'M JIMMY BULGER AND I KILL PEOPLE."

So did James "Whitey" Bulger introduce himself to Boston Herald reporter Paul Corsetti. Forget any romance about the rackets. Whitey Bulger made his career by murder. He did it personally and repeatedly. He got his hands right in the gore, cut up his own victims, pulled their teeth to avoid identification, and buried them. Through murdering some and ratting out others, he destroyed the old Winter Hill Gang, the Irish Mafia of Somerville. Then he did the same to the Italians in the North End. Together with his accomplice, Stevie Flemmi, he killed more than two score people in about 15 years, through 1985.

They didn't limit themselves to crime rivals. They killed no-longer-useful girlfriends, for one, several times. And they had plenty of those. Both Flemmi and Bulger fancied raping teenage girls -- and Whitey liked boys, too, from time to time.

They made their money -- some $50 million in net worth for Whitey by the time he went on the lam -- mostly by straight extortion. People knew Whitey and Stevie killed people, so they paid them.

And they did it all under the protection of the local FBI office, which, over decades, they completely suborned and corrupted. When Whitey's empire finally collapsed, former FBI agent John "Zip" Connolly went down for a long jail sentence right along with Whitey's hoods. Carr describes Connolly's replacement, John Morris, tormenting himself with guilt in his office in 1988: "When Morris had been transferred to the Boston office, he had considered himself an honest man, a decent human being. Now, like almost everyone else he knew in Massachusetts, he was a crook and a drunk and a cheat. He had gone native."

BILLY BULGER, TOO, SUCCEEDED FROM THE BEGINNING by blunt force in a corrupt environment -- the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as the state legislature is styled. Open seats don't come along very often. When Joe Moakley ran for State Senate and did not defend his representative's slot in South Boston, it gave the young, still half-educated Bulger his chance.

"One Suit Bulger," his opponents called him, because he literally had only one suit. Carr tells how Bulger simply outworked all his opposition. He was sworn in an as representative in 1961, and he did not leave the legislature for 34 years, eventually rising to become Senate President and, effectively, governor. How? The Senate controlled the budget. With a veto-proof Democratic majority except for two years, from 1990-1992, Bulger called all the shots.

There were three rules in the State House when young Bulger took office, writes Carr: 1. Nothing is on the level; 2. Everything is a deal; 3. No deal is too small. Carr quotes Edwin O'Connor from The Last Hurrah: "Corruption here had a shoddy, penny ante quality...Everything was up for grabs and nothing was too small to steal."

Over the years, Bulger stuffed the state with cronies, judgeships and court clerkships being specially favorite slots. But no job was too small for the President to notice. When, in a budget crunch, Mayor Kevin White contemplated closing the L Street Bathhouse in South Boston, where Bulger and his pals had hung out as kids, a new state agency magically appeared, with a $280,000 appropriation, to run the bathhouse and keep the place open.

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Bill Clinton, Environment, Books, Law