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.