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Another death stirs up Whitey Bulger memories
By Howie Carr | Sunday, November 11, 2012 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
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And so it goes. Whitey Bulger gets another continuance, and another one of the people in the accused serial-killing gangster’s sordid past won’t be down for breakfast.

The latest new trial date is June 6 — D Day. And the newly deceased is David W. Davis, a career coat-holder, first for Mayor Kevin White and then Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Davis, who died last week at the age of 80, figured prominently in one of the most outrageous abuses of power in the accused mass-murdering mobster’s rancid career.

It was September 1987, at the pinnacle of Whitey’s power. He and his then-girlfriend Teresa Stanley were undertaking one of their regular chores — ferrying bundles of cash out of the country, this time to Montreal.

They were flying out of the old Delta terminal at Logan airport, presided over by payroll patriot Davis, the Dukakis flunky who at the time was executive director of Massport.

Whitey wasn’t even trying to hide the cash in his satchel. His political clout was such that daring to cross him could, and sometimes did, mean the end of an honest cop’s career, and most of them knew it. But the pre-TSA security guard apparently didn’t recognize the Senate president’s brother. He opened the bag and saw that it was stuffed with wads of $100 bills, the fruit of Whitey’s insidious cocaine racket in Southie.

Whitey grabbed the bag and ran for the exit. Finally, he yelled at a guy, “Kevin!” and then tossed the bag of cash to him.

By this time trooper Billy Johnson, in plainclothes, had arrived on the scene. A Vietnam veteran and one of the most decorated troopers in Massachusetts State Police history, Johnson quickly got into a shouting and shoving match with the foul-mouthed fiend.

Johnson could have arrested Whitey for disorderly conduct, but that would have just put the heat on people further up the line, such as his boss and the district court judge who would have caught the case. So Johnson told the drug kingpin to screw and settled for writing a four-page incident report. Now the story begins to get interesting.

The next day, airport boss Davis showed up at the barracks. He had never spoken to Johnson before and now he was imperiously demanding his report on a known killer and bank robber. Johnson would say later that Davis told him he was there at the behest of Whitey’s brother, Senate President Billy Bulger.

Davis’ feeble response was that he “thought” he hunted down Johnson on his own.

The trooper and the hack went back and forth for a while, with Johnson insisting he wouldn’t hand over the report until Davis gave him a receipt. Finally Davis stalked out. A few days later, Johnson was back in a cruiser, his Logan career over.

In 1998, Johnson committed suicide. He had other problems besides defying Bulger and his overpaid henchmen, but being in effect fired for doing his duty had a lot to do with his premature death at age 50.

In 2003, Billy Bulger was desperately clinging to his $360,000 job as president of UMass. At the congressional hearings about corruption in the Boston FBI office, Bulger’s lawyer handed out copies of a letter from Davis. All these years later, Davis’ new story was that he had not gone over to the barracks and harassed the late hero trooper at Billy Bulger’s behest.

Davis naturally dummied up about exactly who had ordered him to go over. Obviously, it wasn’t the Senate president. As a Massport minion, Davis didn’t belong to the Bulger mob. He was a made man in the Dukakis gang. It was like the Five Families in New York. To reach out to a soldier in another family, even the powerful boss of a rival family had to go through channels.

But it hadn’t taken long for some Dukakis caporegime to get the order to Davis, who didn’t dare sneeze without permission from the State House.

Writing his letter, Davis knew what the follow-up question would be: Who did send you over to the barracks on that errand for Whitey? So Davis’ letter was written on plain stationery, with no address or telephone number where he could be reached to answer the embarrassing questions.

All these years later, they’re dying off quickly, all the links to Whitey’s life of crime. Just in the past few months, first it was his ex-girlfriend Teresa Stanley, then his top Cambridge bookie Tommy Ryan. And now the guy who let trooper Johnson know who the real bosses in Boston were.
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