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.
That kind of machination doesn’t even begin to approach the
wholesale legislative giveaways Bulger engineered. Anticipating the
Big Dig, in 1981, he created the Massachusetts Convention Center
Authority to buy the decrepit Hynes Convention Center from the city
of Boston, then renovate it. Staffed with Bulger cronies from top
to bottom, the MCCA project came in $200 million over its original
$450 million budget — and most of the time the old barn sits
empty, except for small-bore rentals. It has recently been
appraised at $35 million.
Bulger engineered the MCCA project to raise cash for Boston to
pay off a court-ordered tax rebate to the city’s commercial
property owners, who had sued, and won, after years of being
over-assessed to line the city coffers.
THE MCCA SWINDLE ALSO DEMONSTRATED how Billy Bulger’s realm
intermingled with that of his brother.
Longtime Bulger aide Francis Xavier (Franny) Joyce got the plum
job, manager of the MCCA’s daily operations, at $75,000 a year.
“One of Joyce’s first hires,” Carr writes, “was Nancy Stanley,
daughter of Whitey’s girlfriend Theresa Stanley. Another early hire
was Lisa Martorano, the eighteen-year-old daughter of [Bulger
contract killer] Johnny [Martorano], who was already on the lam.
She soon stole $21,000 in MCCA funds; her uncle, Jimmy, who was out
of prison by that time, had to reimburse the agency. The payments
were renegotiated between Jimmy and an MCCA executive named Bob
Sheehan, [a] former Boston FBI agent. [Whitey controlled the Boston
FBI, remember.]”
So it went. And so it goes in Massachusetts to this day, though
the Brothers Bulger are, finally, gone.
CARR TELLS THE STORY OF THESE TWO CHARACTERS, largely unknown
outside Boston, with vigor and flair — including using “f**k” and
“s**” in his own narrative, where, one must say, it seems quite
natural, given the subject. His blending of the two stories verges
on masterful, especially in the opening scene, where Whitey puts
together his final escape from the United States and from
prosecution and Billy hems and haws in humiliation before the House
Government Affairs Committee. Whitey has not been seen since
September of 1996. He is now the number two man on the FBI’s “Most
Wanted” list (after only Osama bin Laden) and has been featured on
America’s Most Wanted a number of times. Billy, after
engineering a posh appointment as President of the University of
Massachusetts and feathering that nest to luxurious proportions,
was forced into retirement by Governor Mitt Romney — with state
pensions totaling some $11,312.99 a month. His retirement
settlement itself cost the taxpayers $960,000.
The only thing Carr neglects is how this kind of corruption gets
its start. It continues to flourish today, not only in
Massachusetts, but in other single-party states like Rhode Island,
Maryland, and Louisiana. And only recently did the Republican
revolution put an end to several other such fiefdoms in the South,
including Bill Clinton’s Arkansas. Carr notes that Irish immigrants
in nineteenth century Boston brought “no native entrepreneurial
skills,” and were deeply suspicious of authority and private
enterprise. (The Bulgers’ father lost an arm in an industrial
accident.) So they looked to government for the source of
everything: jobs (with “no heavy lifting,” literally), favors,
contracts, emoluments, cash outright, places to park no-good
relatives. On his radio show, Carr regularly digs into disability
and pension fraud, a racket so widespread in Boston that everybody
knows some able-bodied prime of life former cop, bus driver,
fireman, or construction worker spending his days at home or at the
local muni golf course or corner tap.
Was it Tocqueville who warned against the day when citizens
should realize that they could vote themselves a portion of the
Treasury? That’s the way things work in Boston. Howie Carr has told
the story of the Bulgers beautifully, neglecting only to point out
how close we have come to the same kind of corruption on a national
level — and for the same reasons.
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover,
Massachusetts.
