Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (53 page)

Throughout the summer and fall of 1969, a set of circumstances considerably shortened Nee’s three-man hit list. One of his brother’s killers went crazy and checked himself into a mental institution, where he would stay for at least the next two decades. Another killer, a neighborhood bully who had become a Boston police officer weeks after the death of Peter Nee, was murdered in a totally unrelated barroom altercation. That left Kevin Daly, whom Pat Nee held most responsible for Peter’s death.

On a rainy night in November, Nee got a call from a friend who had sponsored a Marine Corp ball in Southie that night. Kevin Daly, like Pat Nee, had served in the Marines.

“He’s here,” Nee’s friend told him over the phone.

Nee could hear the music and revelry in the background. He knew Daly was a drinker and would be there until closing time. “Okay,” said Pat. “Call me back at midnight, and let me know how he’s doing.”

At midnight, Nee’s contact called again. “He’s still here, getting drunker by the minute. We’ll be closing down here at two.”

“Good,” said Nee. “Thanks for the info.” He hung up the phone.

Nee knew where Kevin Daly lived. Immediately, he called two friends who were to act as his back-up. The three men drove over to Daly’s house, parked a few blocks away, and waited. Nee remembers

The heavy rain made it difficult to see, which worked to our advantage. Me and my back-up guy waited in an alleyway, lying down behind barrels and garbage cans. We had a third guy across the street with a shotgun loaded with buck shot. Daly’s two brothers were Boston cops, living in that same house; we knew that they might come running out once they heard gunfire. When they came out our guy was supposed to spray them with buckshot, chase them back into the house.

I heard Kevin Daly coming; he drove a Volkswagen with a bad muffler, so we heard him before we saw him. As luck would have it, there was a parking spot right there in the alleyway. I heard the engine turn off. With the rain pissing down, I crept up the alleyway. I had a .38 automatic, which turned out to be a mistake. I was more comfortable with a rifle, but that would have been too big for such tight quarters. He was locking his car with the key. When he turned and saw me, I was no more than two feet away. I simply told him, “Now it’s your turn.” And I started shooting. Hit him five times. After he went down I kicked his teeth in and spit on him in the street.

Pat Nee went home that night thinking he had avenged his brother’s murder by killing Kevin Daly. A few days later, much to his surprise, Nee was arrested for assault with intent to kill and taken to Charles Street Jail. Daly, it seemed, had not died. “My brother got hit twice and died. I shot this guy five times—once above the heart, once below—and he lived. Go figure.” Daly had not only survived; just when he thought he was about to expire, he had identified Pat Nee as the assailant.

Two months after the shooting, Nee was escorted into municipal court. Kevin Daly was brought in, in a wheelchair. Having miraculously and unexpectedly survived the brutal attack, Daly was now confronted with his deathbed statement, in which he had fingered Pat Nee.

“Does your client stand by his statement?” the judge asked Kevin Daly’s attorney.

“Your honor,” said the lawyer. “My client now believes that that statement was made under duress, in a delusionary state, and he would like to rescind that statement. The truth is he did not get a good look at whoever shot and assaulted him on the night in question.”

The judge was dumbfounded, and the court was thrown into disarray. Not wanting to let Pat Nee go free, the judge threatened to prosecute Daly for perjury, but that was only a ruse. There was nothing anyone could do. Kevin Daly, a child of Southie, was reneging on his identification of Pat Nee, whose brother he had killed months earlier. Against the court’s wishes, Patrick Nee was set free.

Having dodged a bullet, Nee laid low for awhile. He began to grow weary of the neighborhood’s relentless cycle of violence and revenge. He wasn’t a kid anymore. Through the news media, he began to follow the explosive political situation in the country of his birth—Ireland. There was a rebel war going on in the country’s northern counties, with British troops storming the streets and shooting Catholic citizens dead in their homes. Nee was deeply affected by what he saw and began to wonder whether there was some way to use his daring and underworld acumen for a purpose other than personal gain. More and more, these ideas began to dominate Nee’s thinking. Eventually, he would see himself less as a gangster and more as a revolutionary—a man with a higher calling.
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Meanwhile, the Boston gang wars continued to be the biggest boon to the local funeral business since the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Whitey Makes His Move

Early on the evening of May 13, 1972, Donald Killeen, the Irish mob boss of Southie, celebrated his daughter’s birthday at his home in Framingham, a Boston suburb. At some point during the celebration, Donald got a call. After hanging up the phone, he told his wife and father-in-law that he needed to run a quick errand and would be right back. He left the birthday party and headed outside to his car, which was parked in front of his pleasant $70,000 brick house (it had once been featured in a national magazine as a model suburban home). A few minutes later, Killeen’s five-year-old daughter asked her mother, “Why is daddy shooting off fireworks out by his car?”

Donna Mae Killeen and her father rushed outside and found Donald slumped in the front seat of his car, riddled with bullets and bleeding like a sieve. By the time cops arrived, Donald Killeen, age forty-eight, was dead—the victim of a professional hit. Apparently, as soon as the Irish mob boss had settled into the front seat of his car, somebody had come up behind him with a Thompson submachine gun and opened fire. Killeen had reached for a .38 revolver that was either in the car or on his person; the revolver was found unfired on the car floorboard.

The gangland murder of the Killeen Gang boss was a monumental event in the history of Boston’s underworld. The killing was swift and brutal, but not unexpected. The Southie gang wars had seemed to be heading in this direction. Like many famous, carefully planned hits, the murder would go unsolved, although everyone had a theory. Most neighborhood people suspected that the Mullin Gang, probably acting in consort with Howie Winter and the Winter Hill Gang, had done it

On the surface, the man who stood to lose the most by the murder of Donald Killeen was Whitey Bulger, primary muscle for the Killeen brothers. With Donald out of the picture, it was assumed that other racketeers—most notably the Winter Hill Gang—would be moving in to pick up the pieces of Killeen’s operation. This put Bulger in a vulnerable position. Whitey did not have the manpower to stand his ground against a combination of Winter Hill and Mullin gangsters coming at him from all sides. For Bulger, the situation appeared bleak. But, as he would time and again over the following decades, Whitey Bulger demonstrated an uncanny ability to, in the vernacular of the streets, “turn chicken shit into chicken salad.” He treated the execution of his boss not as a disaster, but as an opportunity. A few weeks after the murder, he reached out to the very men who were believed to be responsible for Killeen’s death and demanded a meeting.

It was a bold move. Aside from Kenny Killeen, Donald’s thuggish younger brother who once bit off Mickey Dwyer’s nose in a barroom brawl, the Killeen organization had been rendered moribund. Most of the city’s gunmen were of a younger generation and had aligned themselves with the Winter Hill Gang or the Italians. Bulger, therefore, was not exactly dealing from a position of strength when he walked into Chandler’s, a legendary wiseguy hangout in the South End, where a meeting of the city’s reigning criminal elite was about to commence. (In the Italian American underworld, such gatherings were commonly known as sit downs, whereas the Boston Irish referred to them simply as meetings—as in, “It’s time we had a meetin’.”)

Present at this particular get-together was Pat Nee, representing the Mullin Gang, Howie Winter of the Winter Hill Gang, numerous mafiosi including an old-time mobster from the North End named Joe Russo, and Whitey Bulger. Over the course of eight hours at Chandler’s bar and restaurant, the city’s multiethnic underworld leadership negotiated a settlement. Priority number one was that the city’s gang wars come to an end and that everyone start conducting themselves like businessmen instead of thugs. In this regard, Whitey Bulger had a card to play. It was believed that Kenny Killeen, Donald’s brother, would resist any and all encroachments on his family’s considerable rackets, which included bookmaking and gambling in the city’s southern wards. If Whitey Bulger could force Kenny Killeen to step aside without further bloodshed, he would have himself a seat at the underworld banquet table.

A few days later, Kenny Killeen, clad in bathrobe and slippers, stepped out onto the patio of his South Boston apartment on Marine Avenue overlooking Dorchester Bay. From somewhere in the distance, a sniper fixed Killeen in his sights. At the moment the sniper fired, Killeen bent down to pick up his morning newspaper. The bullet hit the balcony’s wrought-iron railing and splintered into pieces that hit Killeen in the wrist and torso. Killeen went down, but as it turned out, the balcony’s wrought-iron railing saved his life.

One week later, Kenny Killeen was limping past a car at City Point when a voice called out, “Hey Kenny.” Killeen turned to see the familiar face of Whitey Bulger thrust out the passenger side window; he was holding a gun. “It’s over,” said Whitey. “You’re out of business. No future warnings.” The car drove off.

Bulger’s role in the Boston gang wars became the stuff of legend. It was the beginning of a period in which the Southie gangster would be given credit or blamed for just about everything that took place in the city’s criminal underworld. By the time the full story of Whitey Bulger’s life and times had been recorded and mulled over by a national audience, he would hold a special place in the U.S. gangland saga as the most revered and most vilified Irish American mobster of all time.

Like many professional criminals, Bulger started out as the bad seed in his family. Born on September 3, 1929, and named after his father, James Bulger was the oldest boy in a clan of what would eventually consist of six brothers and sisters. He was nine years old when his family moved from Everett, a Boston suburb, into the Old Harbor housing project in Southie. Bulger’s dad worked as a clerk at the Charlestown Navy Yard across town, while his mother assumed the traditional role of housewife with stoic devotion. From the beginning, there was something different about Jim. The other Bulger children took after their parents—conservative, disciplined, devoted Catholics, solidly middle-class. Jim’s younger brother, William “Billy” Bulger, was an especially diligent student. While Billy was showing early signs of academic achievement and what would eventually be a distinguished career in politics, Jim was already in trouble with the law.

At the age of nineteen, he was arrested for assault, the result of his activities with a Southie street corner gang known as the Shamrocks. By the early 1950s, Bulger had moved on to more serious crimes, including hijackings and bank hold-ups. Whitey never graduated from high school. Instead, he joined the air force, went AWOL in Oklahoma City, and wound up in county jail in Great Falls, Montana on a sexual assault charge. When he returned to Boston, Bulger immediately fell in with a local crew of bank robbers. He was acquitted of several minor larceny charges before setting out on a robbery spree that took him from Massachusetts to Rhode Island and Indiana. After going on the lam for awhile, dying his blond hair black, he was eventually apprehended in Revere, Massachusetts, prosecuted for bank robberies in various jurisdictions, and sentenced to twenty years in federal prison.

Bulger’s first stop was a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, where he was involved in a number of scuffles and spent a total of ninety days in the hole. After two years in prison, he took part in an experimental drug program in exchange for a minor reduction in his sentence. Whitey’s small volunteer unit at Atlanta was part of a CIA project to find out how people reacted to LSD, a program documented in a 1977 book entitled
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
, which exposed medical abuses by the intelligence agency. In exchange for dropping acid and submitting himself to testing, Bulger had three days a month taken off his sentence.

In late 1959, Whitey was transferred to Alcatraz. While incarcerated at the infamous “Rock” in San Francisco Bay, Whitey adopted a lifelong habit of studying World War II and military strategy, reading biographies of Rommel and Patton and dissecting battles from all sides. He also became a physical fitness buff. In July 1962, around the time Alcatraz was closed down, Bulger was transferred to a federal prison in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania before being paroled in March 1965, after serving nine years.

Upon his return to Southie, the thirty-five-year-old Bulger moved back in with his mother in the Old Harbor housing complex where he grew up. His brother Billy, by then a three–term state representative, got him a job as a courthouse janitor that paid seventy-six dollars a week. It was the classic old-style Irish arrangement—one brother pulling strings for another, trying to exert whatever influence he could to help out a loved one in need. Whitey didn’t last long as a courthouse custodian, although it did serve the purpose of keeping his parole officer happy. Within the first year of his release from prison, Bulger was collecting vig and doing hits for the Killeen brothers.

Despite the fact that he was right back where he started as an inveterate Southie hood, by most accounts Whitey Bulger was not the same person he had been before he went to prison. The young Bulger had been a freewheeling, smart-mouthed punk prone to impulsive behavior. The new Bulger was disciplined and taciturn. He had spent his time in Alcatraz reading books on military history, everything from the ancient Greeks to World War II. He was a student of Machiavelli, which was de rigueur for any upwardly mobile mobster. And he had a penchant for cleanliness and overall physical health that bordered on fetishism. Exuding what would later be identified as “the Bulger mystique,” he was exceedingly polite in public, and projected a courtly image even as he pistol-whipped loan shark debtors and executed selected members of the Mullin Gang.