Hitman (54 page)

But this time, what was even more significant was what didn't happen. The banker who had gone to the cops wasn't robbed or whacked or put in a hole or thrown in jail as a feather in somebody's cap. Whitey's grip on Southie was starting to slip.

I began to hear the word “amalgam.” At first I didn't even know what it meant. But then I found out, and I became even more concerned. They were going to use some of those tapes from 1981, when Larry Baione was saying, “We're the Hill and the Hill is us.” It all went back to 1972, when the Winter Hill Gang was formed, and Howie and I sat down with Jerry and decided there weren't going to be any more independent bookies, that they have to go with either us or In Town.

So they got those tapes, from '81, and now we find out, they've also been bugging Heller's Café, and they have these wiseguys from In Town saying to the bookies, you either gotta go with Whitey and Stevie, or Vinnie the Animal. They got one Mafia guy on tape saying, Stevie can't carry Vinnie's jockstrap.

Once we know the questions they're asking in the grand jury, it's pretty obvious where the feds are going with their theory. They're going to say that the Hill and the Mafia are “amalgamated,” that since '72 it's really just one gang. That means this time everybody's getting indicted, not just the Mafia, or us guys from Somerville. Looks like Whitey and Stevie could finally have a problem.

But still, I'm laying back. I mean, at that point all they got on me is the race fixing.

Whitey had always understood the necessity of staying out of the limelight. After threatening
Herald
reporter Paul Corsetti in 1981, he'd been pretty much left alone by the media until the
Globe
series in 1988. He and Stevie often did business standing on the sidewalk at the traffic rotary outside the South Boston Liquor Mart, but no media ever took their pictures. The cops knew what he looked like, as did a few reporters, but to the general public beyond the Broadway Bridge, Whitey was a wraith, a phantom, a legend.

No pictures, no story, or at least not nearly as much of a story—Whitey had long benefited from that journalistic fact of life. But his instincts finally failed him. In the summer of 1991, with so many of his bookies and drug dealers looking at serious prison time, Whitey should have been somewhere far, far from Southie.

But then one of his old associates won $14.3 million in the state lottery's Mass Millions drawing. It has never been clear exactly how Whitey engineered it, but he ended up with a one-sixth cut of the winning ticket, good for $120,000 a year before taxes. Every year for the next twenty years, Whitey would get a check from the state on July 1 for just over $89,000.

Not a bad “kiss in the mail,” as the boyos on Castle Island would say. It wasn't a phony disability pension—white man's welfare, as such pensions were called in Boston's blue-collar neighborhoods. But the annual lottery payout would serve as the white man's welfare. Whitey's sycophants at the
Globe,
sullen and silent since the cocaine busts eleven months earlier, sprang deliriously back into action. One even recounted the fable about how Whitey “has delivered … beatings to people accused of dealing drugs in South Boston.”

The downside to this latest score was that Whitey had to go to lottery headquarters in Braintree and present himself as a winner. The lottery had surveillance cameras in the lobby, and suddenly, thanks to the new Republican state treasurer, every TV network in the country had video of Whitey. His picture—in sunglasses and a white Red Sox hat—appeared on the front page of
USA Today
.

Now everyone in the country would know what Whitey Bulger looked like.

Surveillance photo of Whitey at the lottery headquarters in Braintree, claiming his Mass Millions winnings in 1991.

*   *   *

BILLY BULGER
began a public-relations campaign to rehabilitate his image. No longer the all-powerful de facto governor, he now had to deal with someone in the Corner Office at the State House who was not a rubber stamp. Bill Weld, the former U.S. attorney, had been elected governor after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his private fortune on TV ads that morphed his Democratic opponent into Billy Bulger (and, by implication, Whitey).

Billy could no longer rely on the Boston press to restore the luster to his tarnished reputation. Outside the
Globe,
many in the local media were now too wary of either Bulger brother to cozy up to them. As for those who had spent decades cheerleading for them, their credibility was shot. So Billy had to seek out the national press. His first score came in the October 28, 1991, issue of
The New Yorker
magazine. The trials of Whitey's cocaine dealers were going on as the story was written, but no mention was made of the wiretapped complaints by drug dealers about the poor quality of the “snow” that someone named “Whitey” was peddling.

The
New Yorker
piece was picked up by
60 Minutes,
and in March 1992, CBS cameras recorded Billy's St. Patrick's Day breakfast, complete with the senate president joking about his brother's lottery win the previous summer. On September 17, 1992, almost 20 million Americans watched
60 Minutes
's puff piece on Billy Bulger, complete with a fleeting reference to Whitey, so that Billy could say: “He's my brother. I care about him. I encourage him to come by all the time.”

*   *   *

DICK O'BRIEN
, the South Shore bookie who had done three months with Johnny back in 1978, had by now also moved down to Boca Raton. He and Johnny saw a lot of each other socially. Soon the feds were looking for him, too, as part of their expanding bookie investigation. Stevie called Johnny and told him he needed to talk to O'Brien. They all agreed to meet at the Cracker Barrel in Okeechobee.

I heard people say later maybe Stevie wanted to make a move on Dick, or me, or both of us, but I never thought so. He just wanted to get an idea what Dick was going to do when he got called to testify before the grand jury. Dick told him he'd go to jail, and I told Stevie, you can count on Dick. And they could—he ended up in Plymouth with the rest of us later, for contempt of court for refusing to testify. Obviously, though, Stevie had to be getting very concerned, to come to Florida to sit down with the both of us.

Later on, there was speculation that as the noose tightened around them, Whitey and Stevie had been on the verge of hatching another scheme, one that would have eliminated almost everyone who could testify against them in all of the murders that were still officially listed as “unsolved.”

According to this version, widely circulated in the underworld, Whitey and Stevie first planned to take out Howie Winter. Since his release from prison on the race-fixing charges, Howie hadn't had much luck, getting involved in one ill-fated criminal venture after another. The fact that he would never rat on any of his codefendants did a lot toward solidifying his gangland stature as a stand-up guy, but it didn't help his prospects for shorter time whenever he came up for sentencing.

By 1994, Howie was broke and way behind in his taxes on the long-shuttered old garage in Somerville. He was living in Millbury. Meanwhile, Frankie Salemme was still moving around the city, hustling, trying to make up for his seventeen lost prison years. According to the supposed plan, Whitey and Stevie would first kill Howie, then call Johnny in Florida and tell him that Frankie had done it. They could always concoct believable stories as to why someone had to go.

Then Johnny would rush up from Florida, pick up some guns in Southie, and quickly eliminate Frankie—with the help of Whitey and Stevie, of course. Then, as soon as Frankie was dead, and a hole was dug for the body, Whitey and Stevie would shoot Johnny, too, and dump him in the hole on top of Cadillac Frank's body. That was another thing Whitey and Stevie had gotten quite good at over the years—burying multiple bodies in one location.

In one weekend, they could have eliminated the witnesses to all but a couple of their murders. Then they could have gone into court and pleaded guilty to racketeering, done three years, and ridden off into the sunset with their saddlebags stuffed full of all their millions in ill-gotten gains.

I don't know for sure if they ever planned anything like that, but it's certainly a plausible theory. They'd kill anybody to protect themselves, they'd long since proven that. And it would have tied up the loose ends, once and for all. But even if they had wanted to kill us all, by then events were moving too fast for them.

By 1994, it was clear that the feds were about to make their move. Whitey spent much of the year shuttling back and forth to Europe, stashing cash across the continent in various safe-deposit banks. One of his final public appearances came on election day 1994. Billy was being challenged for the senate presidency by a younger Democrat, Senator Bill Keating of Sharon, an old acquaintance of Eddie Connors of all people. Whitey held a sign on election day in Norton, down on the Rhode Island border, for Keating's Republican opponent. Whitey's candidate lost.

*   *   *

AT NIGHTS
now, in his apartment in Quincy, with the bulletproof steel plate on what had originally been a sliding plate-glass door to his back patio, Whitey would sit at his kitchen table. In his neat Palmer-style longhand, he would write in his journals about the LSD experiments he had taken part in as a federal prisoner in Atlanta. He had written to Emory University in Georgia seeking copies of the medical records. It was clear that if he was arrested, this was going to be one of his defenses—that the feds had made him what he was today, with all their drugs.

“We were recruited by deception,” Whitey wrote. “We were encouraged to volunteer to be human guinea pigs in a noble humanitarian cause—searching for a cure for schizophrenia … I was a believer in the government to the degree they would never take advantage of us.…”

The poor, innocent Whitey. He thought everything was on the level, or so he would have everyone believe now.

“It's 3
A.M.
and years later, I'm still effected [
sic
] by L-S-D in that I fear sleep—the horrible nightmares that I fight to escape by waking, the taste of adrenaline, gasping for breath. Often I'm woken [
sic
] by a scream and find it's me screaming.”

*   *   *

DESPITE THE
ominous turns the investigation was taking, Stevie seemed strangely unconcerned. He stashed some money offshore in the Grand Caymans, but he basically stuck to his usual routine, taking his annual summer trip to Montreal, knocking up a teenager, and helping one of his sons by Marion Hussey open a bar downtown.

*   *   *

IN THE
fall of 1994, Whitey showed up unannounced in Pompano Beach. Whatever the reason for his trip, it wasn't a social call. Johnny only found out about his visit when the father of a woman he knew bumped into Whitey on a staircase at a beachfront motel. He introduced himself as “Whitey from Boston.” Johnny was perplexed that his partner hadn't called ahead to say he was coming down. So he phoned Stevie in Boston and asked him why his old pal was giving him the swerve.

Stevie said, “Whitey doesn't want to bring any heat down on you.” What heat? I said he's never seen his godson, this might be a good time. But Whitey wasn't interested. I wondered later if he was afraid I might try to kill him. Not then I wouldn't have, I didn't really know anything at that point.

Now would be a different story. Wouldn't matter what the weapon was. I'd use anything that was in front of me, and if there wasn't anything, I'd strangle him with my bare hands.

Zip was earning a six-figure salary as a vice president of Boston Edison. His only headache was that his secretary didn't seem to like typing up the revisions he was constantly making to his screenplay. He and his growing family lived in a new mansion on a cul-de-sac in Lynnfield that he shared with his gangster brother-in-law. Summer weekends Zip spent at his second home on the Cape.

One day he ran into Frank Salemme on the street, again, and invited him up to his office in the Prudential Center. Sitting across a desk from the gangster he'd arrested on the east side of Manhattan back in 1972, Zip promised to warn Salemme as soon as the indictments came down, just as H. Paul Rico had done a quarter century earlier, so that Cadillac Frank could flee once more.

Among the first charged was Joey Yerardi. It wasn't part of the larger indictment; he'd just been named by some of the Jewish bookies as their collector. Before the cops could arrest him on extortion charges, Yerardi called Johnny in Florida and told him he was flying down.

By now, Joey Y owes me $365,000. He was panicking; he'd been calling people who owed him money from ten years earlier, that's how desperate he was. He'd told me he might be going on the lam, and sure enough, he does, and of course he comes to me for help. What can I do? I feel sorry for him. He told me he was broke, and at that time I was a little short myself. So I just took off my diamond pinkie ring and gave it to him. He didn't know anybody down there, so he had to take it to a jeweler and he got ripped off. I think he told me the guy gave him 10 grand for it. But what are you gonna do?