Posted on 02/19/2006 1:51:05 AM PST by raccoonradio
First of three parts
It was Dec. 23, 1994, the day that Whitey Bulger vanished.
He had always assumed it would come to this, so in 1977 he began constructing a new identity for himself. The most powerful organized crime figure in New England was about to turn into “Thomas F. Baxter.”
When the cops got around to searching his condo, and his girlfriends’ houses, they would find how-to books about living on the lam. There were almost as many of them as there were World War II books and videotapes. Whitey was into Nazis, so much so that in 2004 the feds would consider staking out the 60th anniversary commemorations of D-Day in Normandy, hoping to catch him traveling on a European Union passport.
The cops would also find his diaries. He’d begun putting his thoughts down a lot just before he left. He would sit at the kitchen table in his condo in Quincy, where he’d replaced the sliding door that led to his back patio with a bulletproof steel plate. Night after night, he’d write in his old-fashioned Palmer-style longhand about the LSD experiments he’d taken part in while in prison in Atlanta in the 1950s.
“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 adrenalin, gasping for breath. Often I’m woken by a scream and find it’s me screaming. I later read while still in prison that LSD can cause chromosome damage and birth defects - that one article determined for me that having children was too risky.”
Would a jury buy it? That Whitey Bulger cared about children? Whitey hoped he never had to find out.
A Southie Christmas
It was late afternoon, and he drove toward downtown Boston, the Christmas lights twinkled in the projects and the three-decker houses of South Boston, where he’d spent his entire life except for a few months in the Air Force and later nine years in federal prison, in Lewisburg, Atlanta, Leavenworth and Alcatraz.
bout to be indicted again, for the first time in 38 years, Whitey would disappear, until he could put the fix in, the way he always had. Something always seemed to happen when the law got too close to Whitey - wiretaps would be compromised, bugs discovered. Cops hot on his trail would find themselves demoted or transferred. Witnesses would disappear, or recant, or forget. Or Whitey would receive a phone call moments before the police raided a warehouse stuffed with marijuana that just happened not to be under his protection.
Surely something could be worked out this time too. And if not, “Tom Baxter” would enjoy his golden years, another retired gentleman on the road with his lady friend.
Beside him in the front seat of the Grand Marquis was his most trusted underling, Kevin Weeks, age 37. Weeks had been with Whitey almost from the day he graduated high school in 1974. Like all of Whitey’s closest associates, Weeks called him “Jim.” Over the years he’d helped Whitey plan his eventual flight. They had beepers and code words and now Kevin would be Whitey’s eyes and ears in the Town, as they referred to South Boston.
In the back seat sat Theresa Stanley. At 57, she was the oldest of Whitey’s girlfriends, and she preferred a more traditional, lace-curtain Irish phrase to describe their relationship. She “went with him,” and had since 1965, when he was a 36-year-old ex-con, fresh out of Leavenworth, and she was a single mother of four young children.
Theresa had been looking forward to Christmas this year. She and Whitey had just returned to Boston after a lengthy trip to Europe, a dry run for the journey they were about to embark on. Whitey had made good use of his time, renting safe-deposit boxes in banks in Dublin, London and Venice, before they finally returned home, at Theresa’s behest, after Thanksgiving.
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=126909
Whitey Bulger wanted me dead.
That’s a given. The question is, how badly did he want me gone?
Here are the facts:
In the mid-1980s, a guy behind the counter at Whitey’s liquor store told one of my TV co-workers that everyone wondered why I never stopped in, and that if I did, they had “a Dumpster out back waiting for me.”
“It’ll be another Robin Benedict,” he said, referring to the dismembered Combat Zone hooker whose body parts were never found.
On one wiretap a gangster was recorded as saying, “Boy, does Whitey hate Howie.” Whitey was said to be “hen(bleep)” because I had written about his alleged $50 million fortune which he believed was an attempt to set him up for a “snatch” by the Italians. My troubles started during the Angiulo brothers’ trial. Whitey’s name kept popping up in the FBI wiretaps, but it never seemed to make the papers. This undoubtedly was connected to something that had happened five years earlier, when a Herald reporter named Paul Corsetti began investigating a Whitey hit.
Paul got an anonymous call one day, telling him if he wanted some information on the hit, he should go to a bar in Quincy Market and wait. He did, and soon a middle-aged gent showed up and, after a few pleasantries, introduced himself by saying, “You’re looking for me, mother(bleeper). My name’s Jimmy Bulger and I kill people.”
Whitey then pulled out a piece of paper and read to Paul his home address, the make, model and license plate of the family cars and the address of the day-care center his young daughter attended.
Paul showed up in the newsroom the next day with a pistol on his hip. And Whitey’s name vanished almost totally from the dailies for five years.
So I thought it was time for a story about the brothers Bulger. I could mention the various pols and judges and state police brass who’d been threatened or punished in the state budget for crossing one or another of the Bulgers. Plus I had all the FBI tapes of the Mafia, including Larry Zannino saying of Whitey and his pals in the Winter Hill crew, “They’re with us. We’re together. We’re the Hill and the Hill is us.”
And most of all I had Mayor Kevin White, on videotape, thanks to Chris Lydon, saying of Billy Bulger: “If my brother threatened to kill you, or you thought he would kill you, you would be nothing but nice to me.”
My story in Boston magazine turned out great. But then I began hearing that I had “a problem.” Working at both the Herald and Ch. 56 on Morrissey Boulevard, I had to drive by Whitey’s liquor store all the time. Standing outside on the sidewalk next to the rotary, Whitey would glare at me as I went by. Boy, could he glare.
I started driving home a different way every night. Occasionally, others would briefly join me on Whitey’s Bleep List. He went crazy one day about Clem Costello, the publisher of The Lowell Sun, after an editorial-page cartoon appeared that showed his brother Billy, the Senate president, casting a giant dark shadow wearing a fedora. The shadow was labeled “Whitey.”
But we all survived, unlike at least 19 others. At the risk of being accused of patting myself on the back, I can look back at my clips from those days and see that I never once wrote that Whitey “kept the drugs out of Southie” or he was “not a bad guy.”
Whitey was - he is - a bad guy. The worst.
Does Howie have a new book out? I hadn't heard. He should mention it once in a while...Geez.
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