Hitman (23 page)

Tommy King offered the cops a deal. If he prevailed, he said, the cops would lay off the kid. If the cop decked him, King would give up the name of the Southie guy who got away.

As another Southie mobster recalls the story:

So the captain figures he's got a guy who's never lost a fight, a sergeant. They send him into the cell with Tommy, but King takes him—can you imagine anything remotely like this happening today? Well, when it's over, the sergeant limps out of Tommy's cell, and now the captain is pissed, and he tells his guys to start really working over the kid with the broken jaw. But the sergeant intervenes and says to the captain, hey we had a deal with this guy, he won fair and square. So they lay off the kid, Paulie McGonagle gets clean away, and Tommy King does a couple of years. That was Tommy King. He was tough.

There were other Mullens, too, including one who would go on to be elected president of the Boston City Council. As they grew older, other Mullens would become ward bosses, or bus drivers, or barroom owners. In short, the Mullens were a true cross-section of South Boston, but in the early 1970s the only thing that mattered to Donald Killeen was that they were young and tough and that there were too many of them.

Killeen figured his best play was to eliminate the Mullens' leader—Paulie McGonagle. Whitey got the assignment. He knew the make, model, and license number of Paulie's car, a Volkswagen. On November 18, 1969, Whitey spotted the car and opened fire, killing the occupant as he pulled into a parking space outside the McGonagles' home on East Fourth Street. It was Paulie McGonagle's twin brother.

Next one of the Mullens, Mickey Dwyer, had a few drinks and went over to the Transit Café. Donald Killeen's brother, Kenny, soon stumbled out of the barroom, and Dwyer jumped him. In the ensuing struggle, Kenny Killeen bit off Dwyer's nose. The maimed Mullen ran off screaming toward the Broadway station as Killeen spat out his nose into the West Broadway gutter and then unsteadily made his way back into the Transit Café for a celebratory round.

The party was in full swing by the time Donald Killeen returned. After he was told what had happened, his first question was: What happened to the nose? When none of his crew seemed to know, he ordered them outside to find it, which they eventually did, covered with dirt and grime in the gutter.

They gingerly brought Dwyer's severed nose back inside, and Donald Killeen told his bartender to wash it off in the bar sink. Then Killeen filled a Styrofoam cooler with ice, wrapped the nose in a couple of cocktail napkins, and tossed it on top of the ice. Finally Donald Killeen called a cab and told him to take the cooler down to the emergency room at Boston City Hospital, hand it to somebody, and say that “Mickey's nose” was inside. They'll know what to do, Killeen assured the cabbie.

Donald Killeen went back inside the Transit and took a second gun out of the desk in his second-floor office. After this, he knew, there would be even more trouble.

Mickey Dwyer, a Mullen whose nose was bitten off by Kenny Killeen, and then reattached at Boston City Hospital.

*   *   *

THE FBI
was aware of all of this. Flemmi was gone, on the lam, but Whitey Bulger had filled in FBI agent Dennis Condon. In January 1971, J. Edgar Hoover had personally sent a memo to the FBI office instructing his Boston office to develop Whitey as an informant.

At the time, Whitey was still legally residing with his mother in the South Boston projects. In reality, he spent most of his evenings with his girlfriend, Teresa Stanley, who had four towheaded children by a Southie street drunk. Like Billy O, Whitey had a no-show public job—he was on the Suffolk County payroll as a courthouse custodian for $76 a week. He was barely known outside the South Boston underworld. Yet J. Edgar Hoover had taken an unusual interest in Whitey. He always took personal care of any requests from House Speaker John W. McCormack, just as he had when Zip Connolly wanted to join the FBI a few years earlier.

The Speaker was no stranger to the Boston underworld. In the 1920s, as a state senator, he'd sued the Boston Police Department on behalf of his clients, the Gustin gang of bootleggers. McCormack's brother Eddie, better known as “Knocko,” was a 300-pound bookie who owned a block-long barroom in Andrew Square.

Facing an air force court-martial in 1952, Whitey had so brazenly dropped the name of the then house majority leader McCormack to his commanding officer that the captain wrote it up in a report that went into Bulger's permanent military file. During his nine years in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it was Speaker McCormack who had made sure that the wayward son of Southie never got too deeply into trouble as he was transferred from Lewisburg to Atlanta to Alcatraz to Leavenworth.

Throughout his forty-six years in Congress, Speaker McCormack had always been a friend of the Bureau, voting to extend its investigative and arrest powers across state lines, then later protecting its budget in good times and bad. As he retired in January 1971, McCormack only needed one or two more small favors from the director. One was to keep an eye on Whitey Bulger, his bank-robbing constituent. Whitey's younger brother Billy, after serving eight years as a state rep, had just been elected the new state senator from Southie—the position that had earlier been held both by the future Speaker McCormack and later by the brother of early Southie gangland boss Dan Carroll. The boyos were keeping the seat in the family.

*   *   *

AFTER THE
nose-biting incident at the Killeens' bar in February 1971, Buddy Roache of the Mullens arranged a sit-down at the Colonial Lounge on West Broadway with Billy O and Whitey. Whitey later told Dennis Condon how Buddy Roache had brusquely informed them that Donald Killeen was finished and that if they didn't switch sides, he and Billy O would be killed as well.

A violent argument ensued, ROACHE drew a weapon and was thereafter shot by O'SULLIVAN. ROACHE was seriously wounded and hospitalized. After this shooting, BULGER and O'SULLIVAN had expected retribution on the part of ROACHE's associates. BULGER had been extremely cautious but O'SULLIVAN underestimated the group.

In the aftermath of the Roache shooting, the Boston police got an early indication of just how much political protection Whitey already enjoyed. Detectives took the glasses that had been on Roache's table before the gunplay and dusted them for fingerprints. They found those of two ex-cons—Whitey and Billy O.

The detectives went to South Boston District Court, where Billy, by his own admission, already wielded considerable influence, to obtain arrest warrants. But the clerk-magistrate refused to issue them. The cops were amazed, and wrote up a report, much of it in capital letters, to indicate their dismay. It was sent directly to the police commissioner, who happened to be an ex–FBI agent himself.

Whitey was never charged in the Buddy Roache shooting. It was the beginning of a pattern.

*   *   *

A MONTH
or so later, on a Saturday night in March, Billy O had dinner at Jimmy's Harborside with his wife. Afterward, Billy O dropped her off in front of their house on Savin Hill Avenue in Dorchester and parked his car on the street. As he walked back toward his house, Billy O noticed a group of younger men walking rapidly toward him. They all had their hands in their pockets. Billy O knew what that meant—they were carrying.

Unarmed, Billy O turned and ran into the street. So did his pursuers. Billy O was heading for a vacant lot, and he almost made it. But he tripped on a manhole cover in the street and fell to the pavement. The Mullens caught up with him, pulled guns as he struggled to get up, and shot him four times in the head.

The next day Billy O's wife told reporters she had “no idea” who might have murdered her forty-three-year-old husband. Sure, she said, he enjoyed a wee small taste of the creature now and again, but never at home. And although Billy O sometimes muttered about these long-haired hippie types you saw on the Common nowadays, she told reporters that as far as she knew her late husband had “no enemies.”

*   *   *

KENNY KILLEEN,
Donald's brother, was known to the Mullens as “Balloonhead.” But he was capable enough, and he didn't mind delegating authority. After Billy O's demise, Balloonhead decided to bring in more outside talent. This time he and his brother went to an old-time South Shore hood named Ben Tilley and hired him to make a bomb to plant under the hood of one of the Mullens' cars.

The Mullens got a tip and paid Tilley a visit at his house in Quincy. He was outnumbered and outgunned, so he immediately turned over the bomb to them and apologized.

“Nothing personal, guys,” Tilley said. “It was just business.”

They took the bomb, disabled it, and then left most of it, still looking quite ominous with all its dangling wires, on the porch of Kenny Killeen's bayfront home on Marine Road. However, he didn't seem to get the message, so the Mullens decided to take sterner measures.

On weekend mornings in the summer, Balloonhead would take the morning papers out onto his back porch and enjoy the fine weather while reading the papers and watching the boats. Soon the Mullens had their own boat in the harbor, monitoring the Killeen porch. The Mullen Navy had a walkie-talkie, which was used to communicate with the Mullen Army back on dry land. The Mullens had two cars parked on N Street, within shooting distance of Kenny's porch. One car was legit, and that was where the shooters sat, smoking cigarettes as they waited for Balloonhead to go outside onto his porch. The second car was stolen, wiped clean of prints, and parked directly in line to the porch. In the backseat of the second car was a rifle, a 30-ought-6, and a sandbag the sharpshooter could use to balance it on while drawing a bead on Killeen's head.

“We'd get the word from the boat that Balloonhead has come out onto his porch, and we'd run to the other car, wearing gloves,” one Mullen said. “Twice we had him in our sights, but each time one of his kids came out. The third time, we had him cold. I fired, but the bullet hit the wrought-iron rail fence outside his house. He was hit by bullet fragments in the hand and somewhere else, but he was a marine, he knew what to do. He dropped and stayed down. But that was the end of him in the gang. He announced his retirement, instantly. He never left the house again for months. We stopped calling him ‘Balloonhead.' Kenny's new nickname was ‘Ben Bolt,' because he was bolted to his house.”

*   *   *

FBI AGENT
Dennis Condon kept reaching out to Whitey Bulger, but the feds' courtship of him seemed to be going nowhere. In terms of inside information, he was no Stevie Flemmi. On July 7, 1971, Condon reported that Whitey “still has some inhibitions about furnishing information … if his productivity does not increase, consideration will be given to closing him out.”

Whitey had more pressing matters on his mind than cultivating a relationship with the FBI. The Mullens were still hunting him and Donald Killeen, and Whitey told Condon he “was convinced if they did not make a move, they would be eliminated.”

Whitey knew who he needed to see about making a move of his own, and it wasn't J. Edgar Hoover.

*   *   *

JOHNNY MARTORANO
was now hanging out in a new joint. Basin Street was history. His new place was a small bar on Columbus Avenue in the South End, Duffy's Tavern. It was a temporary headquarters, because next door his brother Jimmy was constructing a new club with Howie Winter that they had named Chandler's. Buildings on Columbus Avenue cost next to nothing in 1972, because the South End was still mostly slums, its property values depressed by both the nearby public-housing projects and the rooming houses that attracted alcoholics slowly drinking their way to the bottom—the Pine Street Inn, the last resort of homeless winos in Boston.

Jimmy and Howie had been able to purchase a large building from the Boston Redevelopment Authority on the corner of Columbus and Dartmouth streets. In what would eventually become one of the city's more fashionable neighborhoods, they planned to open a club on the ground floor. On the four floors above their planned restaurant/lounge, they were putting in twenty-eight high-end apartments they planned to rent. When they bought the old building, one of the tenants was a barroom, and they quickly snapped up the liquor license.

As convicted felons, neither Jimmy nor Howie could own a liquor license, and even though Johnny could have held it in his name, that didn't seem wise, either. So the license for Duffy's Tavern, which would be transferred to Chandler's after the construction was complete, was held in the names of Jimmy's wife and Howie's daughter.

While the main part of the building was being renovated, the partners decided to keep the bar going. Duffy's Tavern was a small place, with maybe fifteen barstools and a handful of tables. One night in the spring of 1972, Johnny was sitting at one of the tables in Duffy's by himself, killing time, when he noticed someone walking across the room toward him.