Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (52 page)

“What’s this?” asked Salemme, looking at the paper.

“That’s the address of Punchy’s girlfriend. He’s been living with her.”

Using the address provided by the FBI agent, Mafia hitman Salemme picked up McLaughlin coming out of his girlfriend’s house on October 20, 1965. At a nearby bus stop, Punchy was shot nine times, twice in the genitals and once in the face.
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The killing of Punchy McLaughlin did not stop the bloodletting. On the contrary, eleven days after the bus stop murder, the Charlestown crew struck back and netted the biggest trophy of all—Buddy McLean. They got him coming out of the Tap Royal, his favorite bar. The killers were the fearsome Hughes brothers.

Howie Winter was now the undisputed leader of the Winter Hill Gang. A conciliatory person by nature, it was hoped in many quarters that Howie would try to negotiate some kind of settlement. Winter had himself survived one attempt on his life—a bomb planted under his car that detonated while he was still inside his house. The problem was that negotiating a settlement was not so easy. The Charlestown boys took pride in the fact that they had no “boss,” per se; all of them were equal members of the clan. They resisted appeasement as if it were a sign of unmanliness. Although they had been reduced to just two primary members (two out of three McLaughlin brothers had been murdered, while the third, Georgie, had been convicted of homicide and sent away to prison), these were the most lethal members of the lot: Stevie and Connie Hughes.

Cadillac Frank respected and feared the Irish Hughes brothers, calling them “very capable, very dangerous guys.” He and Barboza stalked the brothers for ten months. They never appeared publicly together and would have to be taken out on separate occasions. And so they were: On May 25, 1966, Connie Hughes was shot multiple times while driving on Route 1 in the suburb of Revere. Four months later, his brother Stevie met an almost identical fate; he was gunned down by Salemme and Barboza while stopped at a red light in Middleton. The legendary Charlestown crew was now completely wiped out.

From the day Georgie McLaughlin grabbed the wrong breast back in 1961 to the death of Connie and Stevie Hughes in the spring of 1966, the killings had rarely let up. It had been a strange and terrifying gangland jitterbug, an Irish version of the Hatfields and McCoys, a backwoods-style vendetta war that had nothing to do with commerce or territory or ethnic rivalry. Perhaps the war represented a kind of internal purging of the Boston underworld, an acknowledgment of a New World Order in the wake of the first Irish Catholic president and all that it represented. But that would suggest a degree of forethought, an awareness of the outside world, when in fact there was none. Rash and impulsive, the killings were based on nothing more than a deeply personal sense of grievance rooted in the dark, inbred nature of the city’s Irish underworld.

Now, with most of the initial instigators of the gangland slaughter either dead or in prison, some believed the city’s long period of violence was finally over. They were wrong.

Boston Gang Wars, Part II

Pat Nee of the Mullin Gang missed the most violent, early years of the Boston gang war. In 1962, not long after forming his alliance with Howie Winter, Nee saw the writing on the wall and opted for a stint in the Marine Corps. The Charlestown-Winter Hill feud was just getting underway at the time, and Nee, fully aware of the relentless nature of the Donegal Irish, sensed there was going to be a high body count. The Mullin leader had formed his partnership with Howie Winter for business reasons, not to become engulfed in a senseless slaughter that would pit Irishman against Irishman; perhaps the only real winner in such a battle would be the Patriarca crime family in Providence, who could sit back, enjoy the show, then feed off the dead carcass of the city’s Irish American underworld. And so, instead of dodging bullets at the bar of the Bunker Hill Athletic Club, Pat Nee found himself with the 3rd Marine Division on a beach in South Vietnam, among the earliest of U.S. troops to set foot in the Land of the Ascending Dragon. Over the years, he took incoming fire at Phu Bai, saw American troop levels quadruple, and then returned stateside in October 1966, trading one impending quagmire for another that was already awash in blood.

For a number of months, Nee tried to live the straight life. Back in his home neighborhood of Southie, the decorated war veteran found work as a laborer. Then his cousin pulled some strings and got him into the printers union. He worked three months as a printer for the
Globe
, but the former street hoodlum found civilian life to be absurdly boring. “I tried, I really did,” he said. “But the straight life just wasn’t for me.”

Still a young man, Nee began looking into reforming his old robbery crew. His hope was to steer clear of the kind of violent underworld carnage that had engulfed Howie Winter’s Somerville operation—Strictly B & E’s, waterfront pilferage, maybe a bank job if the opportunity presented itself. But Boston was an internecine universe; it was almost impossible to be a functioning criminal in the city without stepping on somebody’s toes. New fault lines had been established while Nee was away in Vietnam. He was about to find out that the war that began in Somerville and Charlestown with Buddy McLean and the McLaughlins had metastasized like a cancer. It had engulfed Southie, forcing nearly everyone in the underworld to choose sides whether they wanted to or not.

Paulie McGonigle had been a Mullin Gang member almost as long as Pat Nee. The two men were close enough that they would have died for each other. Fortunately for them, that never happened, but death did become a deciding factor in their relationship when Donnie McGonigle, Paulie’s brother, was gunned down in the street in early 1968. Donnie McGonigle had no connection to the Mullin Gang. He was harmless, a drinker and a lover, not a fighter. A crew of Southie gangsters led by Billy O’Sullivan trailed McGonigle home one night and took him out in a drive-by shooting. O’Sullivan, one of the most feared professional killers in Southie, mistook Donnie for his brother Paulie, who had been marked for death by an old-time group of neighborhood racketeers and mobsters known as the Killeen Gang.

The Killeen Gang was led by three brothers: Donald, Kenneth, and Edward. Donald Killeen was the boss, serving basically the same function in Southie as Buddy McLean had in Charlestown. Donald’s huge head and beetle brows gave him the appearance of a brute, but he had a good head for numbers. Born in 1924, he was a bookmaker and gambling impresario from the old school, with roots going all the way back to the Gustin Gang. There had been at least five Killeen brothers; Donald’s oldest brother, George, had been murdered in 1950 after being questioned by police, following the legendary Brinks Job heist in the North End. Virtually every old-time Irish crook in South Boston was affiliated with the Killeens, as were a couple of younger gunmen—including Billy O’Sullivan, better known as Billy-O.

The mistaken identity murder of Donnie McGonigle touched off the same kind of tit-for-tat pattern of revenge killings in Southie that had characterized Charlestown over the previous five or six years. In an act of vengeance for the McGonigle murder, a crew of Mullin Gang members shot and killed Billy-O in the street. Predictably, the Killeen Gang struck back, shooting and crippling a Mullin gangster named Buddy Roach. In late 1968, Eddie Killeen, the most well-liked of the Killeen brothers, committed suicide under mysterious circumstances that some considered murder…and on and on it went.

To outsiders, the violence in Southie was inexplicable, but to those involved it was the natural consequence of a kind of primitive street-corner code. The Mullin Gang in particular, who had a tradition of military veterans in their ranks, prized loyalty as something worth dying for. The gang was like a platoon; assaults against one gang member were effectively assaults against the entire group. This code, when fused with ethnic identity and a general sense of Southie loyalty, would be manipulated by gangsters, politicians, and community leaders. Southie would eventually become engulfed in race wars, and gentrification wars, and a fair amount of internal self-flagellation. But in the Age of Aquarius, it was mostly Southie boys killing Southie boys, with nary a word of outrage from the police, the press, or the public at large.

In early 1969, Pat Nee stopped into a bar near downtown Boston called the Mad Hatter. Far from Southie, Charlestown, or any of the other gangland hot spots in town, the Mad Hatter was a sort of demilitarized zone where members of various crews could drink and hang out, supposedly without having to worry about taking a bullet in the back of the head. It was on this particular night that Nee first met a well-known member of the Killeen Gang named James “Whitey” Bulger.

Nee knew Bulger by reputation. He was just Jim Bulger back then, before his hair receded and turned prematurely silver, earning him the nickname Whitey. Raised in Southie, Bulger was a stick-up man and bank robber who had gone off to prison at a young age and missed the early years of the Boston gang wars. Nee was intrigued by the veteran bank robber who had done time at Alcatraz prison in California. Nee suspected that Bulger, as a hitman for the Killeen Gang, had taken part in the shooting of a number of Mullin Gang members. The two gangsters from opposing camps eyed each other warily and assessed each other over drinks at the bar, while chatting about growing up in Southie and other neutral subjects.

While they were talking, a member of the Mullin Gang named Mickey Dwyer rushed into the bar. Dwyer, an ex-boxer with a harelip that made him hard to understand, was excitable in the best of times. Pat Nee looked up and did a double take at the sight of Dwyer: His nose had been completely torn off, with blood rushing down his face and all over the front of his shirt. He’d also been shot in the arm and beat up pretty badly. Dwyer was excitedly trying to explain what happened, but with the lisp, the missing nose, the bullet in the arm, and the general beating he had received, nobody could understand a word he was saying.

“Mickey,” said Nee, “slow down, for Chrissake. Tell us what happened.”

Turned out Mickey Dwyer had gotten into a brutal fight with Kenny Killeen at the Transit bar in Southie. Killeen shot Mickey in the arm and then bit his nose off.

“He what!?” exclaimed Nee.

“That’s right, Paddy. The bastid bit my fuckin’ nose off.”

A couple of Mullin gangsters rushed Mickey off to the hospital, while the others said, “Fuck them Killeens. Let’s go get ’em.”

Whitey Bulger had been quietly watching and listening to all of this. As the only member of the Killeen Gang on the premises, he was surrounded by the enemy, although no one seemed to notice.

“You got a car?” Nee asked Bulger.

“Sure,” said Whitey.

“Let’s get over to the Transit.”

Various Mullin gangsters piled into cars and raced toward the Transit bar, which was owned by Donald Killeen. It was only as they were driving there that Pat Nee realized he was with Jim Bulger, a member of the enemy camp. By the time all of them pulled up in front of the bar in Southie, the Killeen brothers were long gone. “Fuck,” mumbled the Mullin gangsters. Revenge would have to wait until another day.

On the street outside the bar, Nee and Bulger said their good-byes. It was an odd moment: The two men from opposing sides of Southie’s underworld divide sensed that the next time they saw each other it might be from the opposite sides of a gun. But they simply shook hands and headed off in different directions.

True to form, the Southie gang war heated up, and Nee and Bulger became enemies. Their next encounter was outside the same bar, the Mad Hatter, where they’d met and conversed on the night that Mickey Dwyer rushed in with blood all over him. This time, Pat Nee was driving by the bar when a fellow Mullin said, “Hey, there’s that prick Bulger.” There had been a number of fresh killings in recent weeks, with the requisite increase in tension.

“Stop the car,” Nee commanded.

It was after midnight, and the street outside the Mad Hatter was poorly lit. Nee was carrying a .38-caliber pistol. “Hey Bulger,” he cried out, then fired off a couple shots in Whitey’s direction. Bulger hit the pavement, grabbed a revolver from an ankle holster and returned fire. After exchanging a volley back and forth, Nee hopped back in his car and sped away, tires squealing.

On other occasions, Nee hid in the shrubbery across from Bulger’s residence at the Old Harbor Housing Project, where Bulger shared an apartment with his mother. Every time Whitey stepped out the door, the Mullin leader cut loose with sniper fire in his direction, chasing the Killeen gangster back into his house. Sometimes Bulger would go weeks without ever leaving his mother’s home, for fear that he would be cut down like a dog in the street.

The tit-for-tat Mullin-Killeen war went on for months. Meanwhile, Pat Nee sought to make a living through the usual assortment of robberies and hijackings. It was a hustle, to say the least, one that was occasionally interrupted by the vicissitudes of the gangster life—a person had be ready to avenge all slights, real or perceived.

One act that required Pat Nee’s immediate attention was the murder of his younger brother Peter. On a night in April 1969, Peter Nee and a friend got into an altercation at the Coachman Bar with three neighborhood guys, two of whom were vets just back from Vietnam. Peter Nee was not a gangster or even much of a tough guy. He wasn’t the one who initiated the drunken argument at the Coachman. Rather, his friend had gotten into a shoving match with Kevin Daly and Daly’s two companions. From there, the fight continued throughout the night; it moved from the Coachman to Cassidy’s Bar, and finally ended up at the Iron Fort, a bar located across the street from Gate of Heaven Church. It was at the Iron Fort that Peter Nee was shot twice in the face with a .22-caliber pistol.

Within hours of the killing, Pat Nee knew who did it. There were numerous witnesses, though none who were willing to violate the neighborhood code by fingering the assailant for the cops. The word came back to Nee: Kevin Daly had pulled the trigger, aided and abetted by two others. All three men were well-known in the neighborhood and came from established Southie families. Nee set out to avenge his brother’s murder.