Hitman (12 page)

His name was James J. “Whitey” Bulger.

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GROWING UP
in the public-housing projects of South Boston, Whitey Bulger had always been a bad kid. In his teens, after dropping out of high school, he turned tricks as a male prostitute in the bars of the neighborhood later known as Bay Village. Until he disappeared after his 1994 indictment, virtually no one in his future life would ever know this side of Whitey. “If all that was true—and I'm still saying if—it was a well-kept secret,” Martorano says, “just like his being a rat.”

Whitey rolled drunks, and committed various other petty crimes before enlisting in the air force in 1949. In 1950, he was charged with raping a woman in Montana. That charge was dropped, but he continued to be a disciplinary problem. One of Bulger's superior officers eventually warned him that if he got a dishonorable discharge he wouldn't be able to find a job in civilian life. Whitey just laughed and, according to his military records, replied, “I could go back to the work I used to do, no matter what kind of discharge I get.”

In 1952, Whitey Bulger was honorably discharged from the air force. He returned to Boston and quickly went back to hustling in the gay clubs. There he met a young FBI agent named H. Paul Rico, who trolled the bars at night claiming he was cultivating “sources.” Even then, as he turned tricks, Whitey was determined that someday he would be a big shot. Shortly after being arrested for trying to steal a beer truck in the Back Bay, Whitey fell in with an older crew that was planning to rob some banks.

In May 1955, Whitey's new gang stuck up a bank in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, taking $42,000. Whitey's one-third cut financed a long vacation to Florida with his new girlfriend—his evenings of rolling gays outside the Punch Bowl and the Sail Aweigh were finally behind him. In October 1955, the gang hit a bank in Hammond, Indiana, but this time the take was less than $13,000.

On January 4, 1956, a federal warrant was issued for Whitey's arrest. He fled to California, then returned to Delaware to pick up his girlfriend, after which he took off again, driving across the country. Eventually the woman became homesick, and after less than two months on the lam, Whitey returned to Boston.

“To avoid apprehension,” his FBI presentencing report later stated, “BULGER dyed his hair black, adopted the wearing of horn-rimmed glasses, changed the style and color of his clothing, and assumed the practice of carrying a cigar in his mouth to distort his facial features.”

None of Whitey's ruses did him any good. In March 1956, Rico got a tip that his old acquaintance had been hanging out at a nightclub in Revere with an ex-con named DeFeo. Rico volunteered to handle the stakeout, and a couple of nights later, after a brief scuffle, Rico arrested Whitey as he left the club. It was a typical Hoover-era FBI public-relations extravaganza: newspaper photographers had been invited along to record the pinch of the black-haired Whitey.

The next morning, in federal court, the prosecutor asked for high bail, describing Whitey as “a vicious person, known to carry guns, and [who] by his own admission has an intense dislike for police and law enforcement officers.”

Bail was set at $50,000, and, after a brief trial in June 1956, Whitey was convicted. In his presentencing report, Rico wrote that the Boston FBI office knew Whitey well “because of his suspected implication in tailgate thefts. We knew of his extremely dangerous character, his remarkable agility, his reckless daring in driving vehicles, and his unstable, vicious characteristics.”

Whitey Bulger, his hair dyed black, resisting arrest by the FBI in Revere, 1956.

The judge sentenced him to twenty years. Whitey Bulger would not set foot in Boston again for nine years—until March 1965, a few days after Teddy Deegan's murder in Chelsea.

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THE GANG
war was not going well for the McLaughlins. Unlike Buddy McLean's crew in Somerville, the Charlestown outfit was not a diversified criminal organization. They were no longer getting paid for murder contracts, since in the ongoing anarchy every mob was handling its own work. It was likewise tough for the McLaughlins to make their loan-shark collections, since any barroom or dock where they were known was now likely to be staked out by hit squads from Winter Hill. The longshoremen had no loyalty to the McLaughlins for many reasons, not the least of which was that in the underworld, death almost always cancels a debt.

Hard up for cash, the McLaughlins began robbing bookies, many of whom were protected by Jerry Angiulo or other mobs. Then they started doing home invasions like the one that possibly cost Teddy Deegan his life. The McLaughlins' enemies multiplied.

Their other problem was a familiar one—alcohol. In March 1964, Georgie McLaughlin turned up drunk again, this time at a christening in a Roxbury housing project. For no apparent reason he shot and killed a twenty-one-year-old bank teller as he left the party.

Georgie took it on the lam. Suddenly, at the age of forty-eight, Punchy McLaughlin was the head of the gang. And it was a mob ever more desperate for cash, as Georgie learned what Johnny Martorano would one day discover: that everything costs at least twice as much when you're a fugitive. It's hard to haggle over price when there's a bounty on your head.

In the summer of 1964, the Hill got a tip that two McLaughlins were holed up in an apartment in Bowdoin Street in Dorchester, way outside their territory. So a five-man Hill squad broke into the apartment and awaited the return of the McLaughlins. Once captured, the two hoods, a fifty-four-year-old hitman and a twenty-seven-year-old rapist from South Boston, were driven back to Somerville. One of them was stripped, and then the Hill executioners took an acetylene torch to his testicles. No quarter was given, or expected. Finally the Somerville crew strangled the McLaughlins and threw their bodies into the harbor.

A couple of months later, in November 1964, an old-time Roxbury hoodlum named Earl Smith arranged to meet Punchy in a parking lot at Beth Israel Hospital. A future score had been mentioned, an easy payday to relieve some of the pressure of Georgie's enormous on-the-lam overhead.

Punchy trusted Smith. They'd done at least one hit together, back in 1962, clipping yet another shylock who'd made the mistake of loaning Wimpy Bennett $25,000. For the price of $5,000 to Smith and McLaughlin, Wimpy permanently erased another debt—and another loan shark.

Two years later, Punchy was waiting in his car for Smith when suddenly he saw two men dressed as Hasidic rabbis walking rapidly toward him. It was Stevie Flemmi and Frank Salemme, one armed with a revolver, the other with a shotgun. A blast from the shotgun shattered Punchy's jaw, but they couldn't finish the job. There were too many people around. The rabbis were last seen fleeing in a car with Rhode Island plates. After Punchy was brought into the hospital, police searched his car. In the backseat they found a paperback book:
Mafia
.

Earl Smith set up his old pal Punchy McLaughlin in 1964.

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BY EARLY
1965, In Town had had enough. The war had gone on too long. Nobody was making any money. A summit was called for the Ebb Tide in Revere Beach, where the Deegan hit would soon be planned. Both the McLeans and the McLaughlins were expected for a sit-down, at which Henry Tameleo, Patriarca's personal representative in Boston, would mediate the dispute. There was only one precondition: no guns. Speaking for the Office, Tameleo guaranteed everyone's safety. The Somerville crew arrived first—unarmed. A few minutes later, the McLaughlins arrived, carrying paper bags. They didn't trust In Town, or the Office. Tameleo started screaming and threw them out. From that moment on it was the McLaughlins against the entire Boston underworld.

By March 1965, the FBI was closing in on Georgie McLaughlin. Rico showed up at the garage and said he needed a throwdown—an untraceable handgun. Stevie asked why. Rico smiled and said, “Because we know where Georgie is, and when we bust in, we're going to shoot him, but we need a throwdown that we can say he drew on us first.” Stevie nodded, and an hour or so later, Rico picked up his gun.

The Hughes brothers of Charlestown, Connie and Steve.

The next day, Georgie McLaughlin was finally captured, alive, hiding in a Mattapan apartment with another gang member, Spike O'Toole, the guy who'd killed Henry Reddington after believing a false rumor from Wimpy Bennett. The
Record-American
reported that Georgie had been traveling the country as a woman, in drag, “with tight slacks, kerchiefs and the ever present lipstick and makeup.” But the shootout Rico had envisioned never occurred.

A day or so later, Stevie asked Rico why his G-man raiding party hadn't shot McLaughlin. Rico shook his head sadly and explained that of the five agents, four had been on board with the plan, but that they hadn't been sure about the fifth fed, so they decided not to take the chance. Georgie was quickly indicted for murder, and the McLaughlins were down to three capable men: Punchy and the two Hughes brothers, Steve and Connie.

By now even his home base of Charlestown was too hot for Punchy. He fled to Canton, where he shacked up with his girlfriend. The various hit squads from Winter Hill, Roxbury, and In Town continued searching for him, but could never quite nail down his girlfriend's address. Finally, in August 1965, Flemmi and Salemme decided to ambush him in Westwood as he drove along what was then a rural road. Flemmi was perched in a tree when he opened fire on Punchy's car with his trademark rifle. Many of the bullets from Flemmi's high-powered rifle ricocheted, hitting a couple of nearby farmhouses. Punchy again survived the assassination attempt, but this time he was shot in the right hand, which doctors in the emergency room were forced to amputate.

The next morning, FBI agent H. Paul Rico showed up at the garage in Roxbury and struck up a conversation with Salemme. In his testimony before congressional investigators in 2003, Salemme recalled how Rico brought up the botched hit: “Paul was a very shrewd individual … he'd have the papers and say, ‘Boy, what a sloppy piece of work that was, other people could have got hurt.'”

After some small talk, Salemme came clean with Rico about why they couldn't seem to finish Punchy off: “The bottom line is, Paul, I don't have his address, he's a tough guy to pin down, but I don't know where his starting point is.”

Rico nodded and left. A couple of days later, Rico returned to the garage.

“He'd just be patting my shoulder like he usually does, and he hit my hand … he kept walking, and [I saw] there was a piece of paper with an address, and I didn't have to ask anymore. I knew who it was. It was Helen Kronis, Punchy's girlfriend or common-law wife or whatever. So I went out and started to work on that.”

Georgie McLaughlin's trial for the murder of the bank teller in Roxbury got underway in Pemberton Square in October 1965. No longer able to drive, the one-handed Punchy would get a ride every morning from his girlfriend to the Spring Street bus turnaround in West Roxbury. There he would catch a bus to the Orange Line station in Forest Hills, where he'd board the subway that would take him downtown to the courthouse. In his one remaining hand, he carried a plain, brown lunch bag with a loaded revolver inside.