Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (69 page)

A number of gang members, upon hearing of Featherstone’s cooperation, struck their own deals with the government. Billy Beattie became a government informant, agreeing to testify in court against the Westies after pleading guilty to RICO charges. Throughout 1986 and into 1987, state murder indictments were returned against various members of the gang. Then in March, Rudolph Giuliani, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, stepped in and announced a massive federal indictment that would supersede all others. Ten members of the Westies, including those already hit with the state indictments, were charged on fourteen counts of having taken part in a racketeering conspiracy. The RICO charges dated back some twenty years and included extortion, loan-sharking, counterfeiting, gambling, and sixteen counts of murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. These charges, assured Giuliani, would finally bring about an end to what he termed “the most savage organization in the long history of New York gangs.”

The trial began in September, exactly one year after Mickey Featherstone’s cooperation with the government was first announced. On a daily basis, family members of the defendants, residents of Hell’s Kitchen, and other interested citizens filed into Room 506 in Manhattan federal court. They were there, for the most part, to see Featherstone—the once shy, neighborhood kid who became a troubled Vietnam vet, then a feared enforcer for the Westies, and now the unthinkable: a rat, a stool pigeon, an informer.

In the years of the Westies, no single person had personified the West Side Code more than Featherstone. For nearly a decade, he was the one who beat up or warned any neighborhood person who was even rumored to have spoken to the bulls. He enforced the neighborhood’s revered code of silence with an iron fist. His years as a soldier in Vietnam and as a gang member had placed his loyalty beyond question. Even people who were not gangsters or associated with the criminal rackets accepted and admired Mickey. Like most of the Westies, he was not big or physically imposing, but he was always ready to fight, shoot, and kill on behalf of certain longstanding neighborhood traditions. The thought that Featherstone—
Mickey fucking Featherstone!
—was the one who was going to divulge the neighborhood’s darkest criminal secrets to the public at large was too much for some West Siders to bear. They could not believe that it was true, and so they made the trek downtown to the criminal courthouse to see for themselves.

On the stand, Mickey was dressed in a suit and tie. His hair was neatly trimmed, and he had the same sandy-blond mustache that had contributed to his conviction for the Holly murder. In a soft voice that sounded like that of one of the Dead End Kids, he revealed a litany of crimes and events that spanned a lifetime. Throughout four long weeks of direct testimony and cross-examination, he was an unflappable witness. The neighborhood people listened, mostly in hushed silence.

There were many others who took the stand, seventy witnesses in all—gangsters, crime victims, collaborators, coconspirators, cops, federal agents, and organized crime experts—with a mountain of evidence that was presented throughout late 1987 and into 1988. The neighborhood people mostly disappeared during the middle months of the trial, but they returned again for the verdict. When they did, the courtroom was packed to the rafters, with many tough, grizzled Irish faces right out of a 1930s Cagney flick. Sisters, brothers, nephews, mothers, fathers, and neighbors were there to see not only the final adjudication of the core members of the Westies, but also the passing of a way of life.

The Irish hardly existed in Hell’s Kitchen anymore. They had long since moved onward, upward, and assimilated into the suburbs. The Westies represented those who did not have the resources or the inclination to leave the neighborhood; they were a throwback to a different era, when the Irish had been forced to fight, claw, and scheme to survive. The criminal rackets, which they had spawned and fostered for nearly a century, were the last lethal strain of an ecosystem that should have died out long ago.

The verdict was guilty on all counts.

Facing certain extinction, the Irish Mob was now hanging by a thread, down to its final frontier, Boston, and its last boss, a man named Whitey—who would prove to be the most wily and diabolical survivor of them all.

CHAPTER
#
Fourteen

14. southie serenade: whitey on the run

A
ccording to Pat Nee, an early leader of the Mullin gang who was also an occasional crime partner of Whitey Bulger until the late 1980s, the Irish mob boss of Boston once received a call from Jimmy Coonan, leader of the Westies. The overture was made sometime in the mid-1980s, when Bulger was sitting pretty in Southie, and Coonan, recently released from prison, was looking to expand his operation beyond the confines of Hell’s Kitchen. Whitey received word of the overture through an underling, who reported that Coonan had a “business proposition he wanted to discuss.”

Bulger knew who Coonan was, of course. The American underworld was a loosely interconnected private fraternity, like the Moose Lodge or the Shriners, whose regional criminals frequently crossed paths while in federal prison or on the lam. Bulger gave some consideration as to whether or not he should return Coonan’s call and see what he had to say. Apparently, Whitey decided against it. As a regional criminal who had a good thing going in his own backyard, Bulger saw no benefit in forming an alliance with the Irish guys from New York. They might make their own demands, or even worse, jeopardize his secret, unprecedented partnership with the number one law enforcement agency in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Nothing ever came of Coonan’s overture, and the anecdote can now be filed under the heading: What Might Have Been. If Bulger’s Boston operation and the Westies had hooked up, they would have been a major force to contend with in the underworld, particularly in the lucrative northeastern part of the United States. Given the Irish Mob’s penchant for violence, they would have posed a formidable threat to the Mafia and perhaps brought about a bloody crescendo to the war between the dagos and the micks—the longest running rivalry in the underworld. For a variety of reasons, that war never did materialize into the kind of face-to-face showdown that many had expected. One reason was that the Irish Mob had no interest in taking on the mafia’s role as corporate overseers of organized crime in America. Loosely based on a pre-famine clan system in which power was dispersed through regional fiefdoms, the Irish Mob tended to be antiauthoritarian in nature, with little talent for intergang coordination, even when the other gangs were Irish.

In this respect, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and other high-ranking originators of the Syndicate or the Outfit were probably right to exclude the Irish. Experience had taught these men that the corporate structure they had in mind—a Wall Street–style version of centralized power, augmented by a board of directors and a hierarchical system of accountability—would never fly with their Celtic brethren. The Irish Mob had little interest in centralized power (they didn’t trust the concept) and were therefore averse to the kind of organizational approach that might have posed a genuine threat to the Italians. Otherwise, regional Irish gangsters like Whitey Bulger might have seen the value in returning the phone call of a fellow Irish mobster like Jimmy Coonan.

As the leading underworld chieftain in the most Irish city in America, Bulger was doing just fine with things the way they were. Through his ongoing role as a dry snitch and his cozy relationship with FBI Agent John Connolly, Bulger had vanquished all comers. He ruled with a combination of murder and treachery, but also with a total mastery of a neighborhood that was viewed by many as the last bastion of working-class Irish culture in America.

Southie was a tight-knit, proud, insular community, comprised of firemen, cops, priests, school teachers, tradesman, large families, and the occasional gangster. Unlike Hell’s Kitchen, which was a melting pot neighborhood made up of every ethnicity under the sun, Southie was Irish through and through. It was the kind of neighborhood that U.S. politicians always proselytize about: self-sufficient, with a seemingly low crime rate, hegemonic voting patterns on election day, and a fierce sense of internal loyalty that held everything together.

For better or for worse, Southie’s defining moment had come in the mid-1970s when a federal district judge sought to integrate the city’s segregated school system through forced busing, touching off what came to be known as “the busing crisis.” Residents in Southie resented being ordered to take part in a highly disruptive social experiment while more affluent communities in other parts of the city were free to send their kids to all-white schools without recrimination. The racial conflagration that erupted in Southie during the busing crisis received national and even international press. Outsiders saw it as an example of American racism at its worst; Southie residents saw it as a kind of governmental assault on their liberty. They reacted defensively, battened down the hatches, and became even more insular and circumspect in their dealings with the outside world.

Whitey Bulger played a significant behind-the-scenes role in Southie’s resistance to the dictates of the federal government. He harbored teenage kids who were chased by cops for throwing rocks at buses carrying African American school kids into Southie. In addition to his reputation as the neighborhood’s protector, Whitey was believed to be the muscle behind the South Boston Marshals, an armed vigilante group whose slogan “Hell No, We Won’t Go!” became the rallying cry of the antibusing resistance. According to author Michael Patrick MacDonald, whose beautiful, heartbreaking memoir
All Souls
chronicles his upbringing in Southie during and after the busing years, Bulger’s reputation attained near-mythical status in the wake of the crisis.

Whitey stepped up as our protector. They said he protected us from being overrun with the drugs and gangs we’d heard about in the black neighborhoods…. He was our king, and everybody made like they were connected to him in some way…. Everyone bragged about how his uncle was tight with him, or his brother had been bailed out of jail by him, or how he’d gotten them a new pair of sneakers, or his mother a modern kitchen set. All the neighbors said they went to see Whitey when they were in trouble, whether they’d been sent eviction notices from the Boston Housing Authority or the cops were harassing their kid. Whitey was more accessible than the welfare office, the BHA, the courts, or the cops. If your life had been threatened, your mother could always visit Whitey and get him to squash a beef.

On the one hand, the neighborhood’s residents believed in Whitey’s power because they wanted to; on the other hand, anyone who ever dared to speak out against Whitey and “the boys” were intimidated into silence. “I knew there were drugs and even gangs in my neighborhood,” writes MacDonald, “but like everyone else I kept my mouth shut about that one. Whitey and the boys didn’t like ‘rats.’”

It was no small feat: After a long criminal career, a secret role as a Top Echelon informant for the FBI, and, through skillful manipulation of a major civic crisis, Bulger had come to embody the entire history of the Irish American mobster. He was a neighborhood godfather from the Old School, yet his power was not based on nostalgia; he was not relying on the reputation of past gangsters. Whitey was the real deal. He made human beings disappear. And when the bodies washed up on Carson Beach, or were found stuffed in a ten-gallon drum or appeared unceremoniously at O’Brien’s Funeral Parlor, nobody said nothin’. Whitey must have had his reasons. Because Whitey was an honorable gangster. He kept the neighborhood free from street criminals and dope peddlers and made everybody proud.

Of course it was all a lie. Bulger presided from a back office at the South Boston Liquor Mart off Old Colony Avenue. A huge green shamrock was painted on the side of the building, but it was mostly just for show. Like most gangsters, he lived life according to an inverted value system. At the same time that he claimed to be protecting the neighborhood against the ravages of drugs and random crime, Bulger oversaw an infusion of cocaine into Southie, profiting from its sale to poor people living in housing projects and to the teenage sons of single mothers. He recruited underlings from the neighborhood’s play fields and at McDonough’s Boxing Gym, where young men without fathers were especially susceptible to the appeal of the legendary neighborhood boss. Bulger promoted the underworld as if it were all about “manliness” and “togetherness,” while for him it was really about one thing: survival. Whitey’s survival.

Eventually, the mob boss of South Boston’s charade would be exposed for what it was. The public would be the last to know. The first to know was anyone who did business with the man, especially those whose last vision—before being stabbed, shot, or strangled to death—was of the cold, piercing blue eyes of Whitey Bulger.

Shadow of The Shamrock

Brian Halloran was typical of the kind of low-level, working-class schnook who circulated in the Boston underworld of the 1970s and 1980s. A hijacker, bank robber, and leg-breaker from the heyday of the Winter Hill gang, he had been a witness to the phenomenon that was Whitey Bulger. He watched with awe as the man from Southie rose from the ashes of the Boston gang wars by masterfully working the city’s levers of power. Halloran, a high school dropout with a reading disorder, had none of Whitey’s brains and finesse. Tall and hefty, with an unruly mop of jet-black hair, thick black eyebrows, and the beginnings of a double chin, he was sometimes told that he resembled Gerry Cooney—the erstwhile heavyweight contender from the 1980s known more for the sprawling manner in which he hit the canvas after a knockout than for his boxing technique. Halloran was an Irish American palooka with an easygoing manner who tread lightly in the Boston underworld, always trying to stay on Whitey’s good side. The manner in which he crossed over the line from gangster-in-good-standing to hunted animal demonstrated the perils of “doin’ business” in Boston during the Age of Bulger.