Hitman (51 page)

Excited, the photographer returned to the
Globe,
quickly developed the shots, and turned the prints in to the photo desk. He expected them to run in the next day's paper—probably on the front page. But nothing happened. The blue-bloods at the
Globe
had their own code of omerta when it came to Whitey. The days went by and the photos never appeared.

A few weeks later, the photographer bumped into an honest FBI agent he knew. He gave him an extra set of the South Boston Liquor Mart photos that he had in his car, and the agent, as excited as the photographer had been, quickly returned to the FBI offices and showed off the photos … to John Morris. Morris quickly summoned Zip Connolly for a crisis meeting.

The next morning, the
Globe
photographer was again driving by the South Boston Liquor Mart when he noticed a new work crew in the parking lot. It was from a private company, and it was removing the curbs that the city crew had installed a few weeks earlier.

During one of the later trials, Kevin Weeks was asked how it was possible that for twenty years someone like Whitey Bulger could get away with committing so many crimes, up to and including murder? How, the prosecutor inquired, could such a scandal ever occur in America?

“We weren't in America,” Weeks replied. “We were in Boston.”

*   *   *

THERE WAS
just too much money in drugs, especially cocaine, to settle for a mere “protection” racket. Soon Whitey and Stevie were setting up their own networks of dealers. Eventually there would be four “rings” in Southie, all controlled by Whitey, at arm's length of course. If he wouldn't talk to Johnny Martorano, he certainly wasn't going to issue orders directly to some junkie out of the projects.

Almost all of Whitey's dealers ended up on some public payroll or another. Some had two public-sector jobs, one on the day shift, where they were never seen except on pay day, and another on the overnight shift, which they would sleep through. Jobs on the MBTA were particularly prized—and costly to obtain. Not only did a T job mean you had a reason to be in various stations, where dealing drugs was easy, but the perks of a T job also included retirement on a full pension with full health benefits after only twenty-three years. Or you could just buy a job and immediately “take a fall” and go out on full disability. That only provided 72 percent of an employee's final salary, but it was tax free.

Soon, on federal wiretaps, agents would hear Whitey's cocaine dealers calmly discussing which option was preferable, the immediate phony disability pension at 72 percent, or a twenty-three-year no-show job with 80 percent at the end. The feds soon noticed the astonishing numbers of able-bodied younger and middle-aged men loitering on Castle Island in Southie during the warm-weather months. Why weren't they working? the agents would ask one another, until they realized most of them were “retired” from hack public-sector jobs.

Shocked by the sudden rise in cocaine use in Southie, in 1987 the DEA made a run at Whitey. They put a bug into the driver's-side door of his new Chevrolet Caprice. The quality of the audio wasn't great, but they did pick up snippets of him dismissing his old mob—“there is no Winter Hill Gang,” he said.

It was the same thing Whitey was telling Zip. Howie Winter had just been paroled, and Whitey dismissed his old partner as “strictly a leftfielder” who expected to be paid for “protection” he couldn't deliver—a complaint many of Whitey's drug dealers would later make about their boss, not too loudly of course. On the DEA tapes, Whitey also complained about having to continue to send money south to Johnny Martorano.

LAWYER:
Do you remember about how much money it was that you would receive every month?

MARTORANO:
It was always different. Whatever I needed.

LAWYER:
Was it like $500 a month or $700 a month?

MARTORANO:
Probably ten thousand a month.

LAWYER:
And did it remain a constant amount or did it fluctuate?

MARTORANO:
It kept going down.

I had no control over anything. It was tough still being on the lam. The other guys had done their time and were out. Even Joe Mac didn't get a long sentence. See, my theory was proven correct—if you stay out for a while, they'll always cut you a deal for less time. But for me, something was always coming up; I was still out there. I always said, I did sixteen years, one year at a time. I couldn't afford to go to prison, even for a couple of years, because I had all my families to support. Sometimes I'd want to turn myself in, and Whitey and Stevie would say, oh no, it's a bad time. Bad time for them, they meant—they needed me out there, to keep the Mafia at bay. Then they'd say, maybe you can come in—that's when they were tired of sending me money. But I'd have all these bills to keep paying, so I just stayed out. They were getting rich, and I was getting poor.

I never really understood how much money they were making in drugs until one time Stevie was down in Florida on vacation. We went to the Boca Mall, and we were in this specialty shop where they had these ceramic bulls by the Mexican artist Sergio Bustamante. It was the kind of thing Stevie liked, and it was his birthday or something, so I pointed at one of the smaller Bustamante bulls, it was worth about a grand or $1,500. I was thinking of getting it for him, so I asked him if he liked it. He said yeah, it's okay, but there's a much bigger one, which goes for about 10 grand. He said Whitey had given that big one to him—the one that went for 10 grand. At first I was kind of embarrassed, that I'd been thinking of getting him the smaller one. But then I started thinking—10 grand? For a ceramic bull? For a guy?

LAWYER:
Later you learned that their business kept growing and growing, isn't that right? You learned they cheated you, in effect, right?

MARTORANO:
Sure, but that's not my reason for being here because I could care less. I was happy with whatever I was getting.

LAWYER:
Whatever you got, you still were upset with Mr. Flemmi for getting you less than you thought you should get, right?

MARTORANO:
I was a fugitive. Whatever I got I was thankful for.

LAWYER:
Well, didn't you have an agreement with Mr. Flemmi that he would share a certain amount of profits, correct?

MARTORANO:
Yeah, but those agreements don't usually last after you're a fugitive.

LAWYER:
You were never told by Mr. Flemmi that the Winter Hill Group was collecting money from extortions, isn't that right?

MARTORANO:
He told me that they were ripping off drug dealers, not setting them up.

In Boston, the DEA was still trying to figure out how to improve the reception on their $50,000 state-of-the-art bug in Whitey's car when they suddenly heard him and some of the others trying to rip it out of the car. The agents quickly rushed down to the South Boston Liquor Mart to retrieve it.

Whitey and Stevie were very gracious to the cops. Stevie suggested if they needed information from anyone, just let them know “and we can wrap a rope around their necks.” He didn't mention their expertise in wrapping ropes around people's necks, especially girlfriends.

“We're all good guys here,” Whitey amiably explained to the DEA agents. “You're the good good guys and we're the good bad guys.”

Every Christmas, the payoffs to the local constabulary escalated. Looking the other way for Whitey and Stevie was turning into a cottage industry for bent cops in Boston. One Christmas Eve, Whitey was sitting at a table in the back of the South Boston Liquor Mart, counting out cash from a huge wad and placing the large bills into envelopes that would be going out that evening.

He looked up at one of his gunsels and smiled.

“Christmas is for cops and kids.”

*   *   *

GEORGE KAUFMAN
told Johnny about a younger guy, a kid from “the Lake” in Newton named Joe Yerardi—Joey Y, they called him. A tough kid, George said, good with his hands. He was doing some collection work for Chico Krantz, one of the Jewish bookies who paid “protection” to Whitey and Stevie. George was the liaison to the Jewish crowd, which was how he met Joey Y. Joey Y had another link to Johnny—he was working with the ex–Medford cop that Johnny had rented an apartment from when he first went on the lam.

George said to me that if I had 50 grand I could spare that Joey could use it. He'd been borrowing money from Stevie, and from George, so they just took my 50, settled up with him, and from then on Joey Y was my guy. I just kept giving him more and more—he could always keep up the vig, a point a week. At the end he owed me $365,000—that's almost $4,000 a week in interest he was paying me. Of course by then he couldn't pay. He wasn't a bad guy, just a lousy businessman. If you're gonna be a shylock, you have to have an instinct about who you can lend money to, and who to stay away from. It's not that much different than a bank, except the interest rates are higher.

Joey Yerardi, Newton hoodlum, borrowed $365,000 from Johnny.

At one point, I spoke to Stevie, and I told him, I didn't mean to steal your guy. If you ever want any of this action, just let me know. But he wasn't interested. I wonder now if he knew even then that the feds were keeping an eye on Joey Y.

Anyway, I did get to know Joey Y fairly well as time went by, and I invited him and his family down to Orlando to meet me and Patty and Jimmy at Disney World. We used to stay at the Contemporary. And I meet his wife, this Iranian woman who acts like she's a princess, and I immediately notice she's wearing a seven-carat diamond ring. And then he starts telling me how he's living at the Four Seasons. And I said to him, “Joe, she's got a seven-carat diamond ring, you live at the Four Seasons, and you owe me 300 grand. There is no way this is going to end well.”

By 1988, the two Bulger brothers were on top of their respective games. With Governor Mike Dukakis running for president, Senate President Bulger had become the de facto governor of Massachusetts. In 1988, four presidential candidates, of both parties, attended his St. Patrick's Day breakfast in South Boston.

During the presidential campaign, Billy Bulger's imperious control of state government began to be noticed. A reporter interviewed the judge whose court was gutted after he refused to hire one of Billy's cronies. Asked what kind of president he thought Dukakis might be, the judge replied, “How can he stand up to the Russians if he can't stand up to a corrupt midget?”

He was referring to Billy Bulger. Unlike Whitey, Billy did not use lifts in his shoes. He was five feet, five inches tall.

Joe Murray, the Charlestown drug dealer, was now in federal prison in Connecticut, convicted of gunrunning in the
Valhalla
case. In early 1988, he began calling Bill Weld, the former U.S. attorney who would be elected governor as a Republican in 1990. Weld was working in Washington as an assistant attorney general when Murray began calling him. Murray would leave him cryptic messages, always accurate, about who was doing what to whom in the Boston underworld. One day he named Brian Halloran's killers. He even mentioned a witness to the Halloran murder “who sits in a bar all day drinking and talking about it.” Weld would pass the information along to the FBI, and back in Boston there would be no follow-up.

Finally, though, the Boston FBI office felt compelled to interview Murray. He was brought to Boston from Danbury for a debriefing. But at the direction of Connolly and Morris, the agents dismissed Murray's information as “unsubstantial and unspecific allegations.” They did, however, put into the record Murray's description of the situation in Boston:

MURRAY said that 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 Mafia was still reeling. The Angiulos and Larry Baione were gone, sentenced to long prison terms. Now In Town's mantle of leadership, such as it was, had fallen to a younger generation. They set up shop in a bakery in the Prudential Center called Vanessa's and Stevie Flemmi telephoned Zip Connolly. It had gotten almost too easy. Joe Russo was one of the wiseguys who used the bakery as a base of operations, but his old friend Whitey didn't think of giving him a heads-up. Business, after all, was business.

The feds bugged the back room of Vanessa's and soon they overheard the arrival of Doc Sagansky, the ancient bookie, and his seventy-five-year-old bodyguard of sorts, Moe Weinstein. The younger Mafia guys, with names like Vinny the Animal and Champagne Dennis, told Doc the days of paying a token $1,500 a month to Jerry Angiulo were over. So Doc Sagansky patiently tried to explain to them how the state lottery had destroyed the old numbers racket.