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Howie’s column from yesterday

You Just Can’t Make Up Stuff like This
by Howie Carr/ Boston Herald
9/30/07

So here is Billy Bulger describing me:

“He’s just so evil. All kinds of things - he just makes it up.”

Makes it up, you say? Name me one thing about you that I “made up,” Mr. Corrupt Midget. Go ahead, what did I make up?

Whitey Bulger’s little brother is featured in a long profile in Boston magazine by Joe Keohane. I had to read the whole thing since I’m a recurring presence, like a snake at the garden party, or herpes. Apparently the CM doesnt like me very much, but at least he remembers my name.

“The name comes up often with Bulger, and when it does, he doesn’t speak it so much as cough it up; occasionally, he swaps in ‘the savage,’ and, better, ‘that excrescence.’ ”

Which is a Latinate word for, well, let’s just say its root is “excrete.” I picked that up from my “top-shelf education,” which according to the story I share with the CM, along with “humble beginnings.”

“And just for the record, we are both immensely intelligent.”

The writer says, “They could be brothers themselves.”

Maybe - if I had a brother who was 18 years older and 7 inches shorter than I am. But I will cop to once being mistaken for the CM’s son. It was at a federal pension-fraud trial of a Kevin White ward boss from Southie. One morning Mrs. Ward Boss comes up with a big smile and says to me, “Oh, I can tell who you are just by looking at you. It was so nice of the Senate president to send one of his sons. Which one -”

At which point her son grabbed her and said, “Ma, that ain’t no Bulger, that’s Howie Carr.”

Did I mention, Billy also calls me a “lying son of a gun”?

Eat your heart out, Alan Dershowitz. He hates me more now than he hates you. I think he loathes me even more than he does Mitt Romney.

He says I make things up, but he told one whopper I can personally call him on. He said he’s never spoken to me. In 2003, I personally asked him down in Washington: Who’d paid for his entourage to fly down for the Congressional hearing? (He walked away in silence.) I also pointed out to the magazine that once, at the State House, I tracked him down with my TV crew at a party for a little book about State House recipes.

The Corrupt Midget is sopredictable, I knew he’d come up with some lame joke if I asked him what his favorite recipe was, and that I could easily top him. So I waited until he was backed up against a column, surrounded by payroll patriots. Then I advanced on him with my cameraman and asked him what his favorite recipe was.

“Roast reporter,” he riposted, as his pantrymen guffawed.

“Really?” I said. “I would have thought it would be strawberry SHORTcake.”

The laughter ceased, Billy slithered around the column to flee, and his last words to me were: “Observe my back.”

Another little fib: He says he “enjoyed it all?” Does that include the last grand jury, Mr. CM? Or 75 State Street? Or that Congressional hearing in 2003?

The great thing about covering the Bulgers is that you don’t have to make anything up. When I was writing my book, I read his. In it he included a heartwarming anecdote about defending future Senate President Tom Birmingham’s father after the old man was accused of improperly OK’ing welfare benefits to the family of an imprisoned con named Suitcase Fidler.

A few months later, I’m reading the confession of Johnny Martorano, a Winter Hill hitman. And under oath, Martorano says Whitey Bulger lured a guy named Tommy King to his own murder by telling King that they had to whack a guy named . . . Suitcase Fidler. I draw no conclusions here, I just report the facts. It’s a small world, isn’t it?

Did I make up the story in my book about the farewell dinner at Tecce’s for imprisoned ex-FBI agent Zip Connolly in 1990 - you know, the G-man who’s about to go on trial for murder in Miami? At the farewell dinner, Zip described Billy as “a special, special person. He taught me the value of public service.”

If you got a problem with that quote, Billy, take it up with your brother Jimmy, because those words come right off his videotape of the party, which you basically hosted. Did I make up the quote from Kevin White describing the true source of Billy’s power: “If your brother threatened to kill me, I’d be nothing but nice to you”?

I only have one regret about my years on the Bulger beat. That day at the State House, instead of mentioning strawberry SHORTcake, should I have asked him if his favorite dish was shrimp wrapped in baloney?