Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (73 page)

The Mafia clung to the myth that Flemmi was a stand up guy when, in fact, he’d been an informant even longer than Whitey Bulger. You might rightfully ask how a government informant—a rat—can be a stand up guy at the same time. Only in the underworld would such an ethical perambulation be accepted because in the underworld the myth of the stand up guy is more powerful than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy combined.

As with most gangsters, however, Steve Flemmi’s instinct for survival outweighed all other criminal codes of behavior. In early 1997, after sitting in prison for two years waiting for Whitey to make things better, as he had always done in the past, Flemmi dropped a bomb that would reverberate throughout the underworld and the Halls of Justice for at least the next five years. Through his attorney, Flemmi put forth the defense that he could not be prosecuted for the crimes he and Whitey had committed together because they had been authorized by the FBI to commit those crimes in a trade for underworld intelligence. To support his claim, he began filing sworn affidavits describing his life with the Bureau and the promises he said FBI agents had made never to prosecute him and Whitey Bulger. These claims included details about a multitude of criminal acts, including many murders, that implicated just about every underworld figure in Massachusetts going back to the waning days of the Boston Gang Wars.

Even to those who had always suspected Whitey’s special relationship with the FBI, Flemmi’s revelations were astounding. Had the government actually underwritten one of the most murderous duos in gangland history, making it possible for the Irish Mob to survive in Boston long after it had disappeared elsewhere, so that the government could build cases against the Mafia? It was an extraordinary proposition, the truth of which was about to be dragged into the public domain. U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf, after months of closed door hearings and legal briefs filed by Flemmi’s attorney, granted a defense request for an open evidentiary hearing to determine if Bulger and Flemmi had indeed been “secretly providing information to the government in exchange for criminal immunity.”

What became known as “the Wolf Hearings” were held throughout 1998. In many ways, the hearings were similar to the Westies trial in New York a decade earlier—a final denouement for the Irish Mob in which numerous faces from the past were called forth to bear witness against aspects of the underworld that had been in place for over a hundred years. In this case, most of the people who were subpoenaed to testify were from the government—FBI agents, federal prosecutors, city officials, and various other representatives of the U.S. Justice Department who were compelled for the first time to come clean about what they knew of the FBI’s pact with Bulger and Flemmi. For many who had observed Whitey Bulger’s miraculous criminal career from afar, it was like the Nuremberg Trials; the unearthing of many long-hidden details verified everyone’s worst suspicions about how Whitey had managed to get away with multiple murders and escape prosecution all these years.

Outside the room where the hearings were held, John Connolly held court. The retired FBI agent knew that his reputation, and perhaps his liberty, was at stake. In keeping with his temperament and personality, he waged an energetic counteroffensive, regaling reporters with comments like, “Handling informants is kind of like a circus…if the circus is going to work, you need to have a guy in there with the lions and tigers. My job was to get in there with the lions and tigers.” And later: “All of them, top echelon informants, are murderers. The government put me in business with murderers.”

As to whether or not the deal with Bulger and Flemmi had been worth it, Connolly said, “We destroyed the Angiulos in exchange for a gang of two, Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi. Who wouldn’t make that deal?” And later: “The proof is in the pudding. Look at the decimated New England Mafia.”

Connolly’s defense to aiding and abetting the murderous reign of Bulger’s Irish Mob in exchange for taking out Cosa Nostra was a fitting parting shot in the long-running rivalry between the dagos and the micks. Engineered by the last Irish Mob boss in America, the manipulation of Connolly had been a delirious act of counterespionage, based on the knowledge that the FBI would do almost anything to nail the Mafia. The Mafia had become a victim of its own success, which included a public relations bonanza fueled by Hollywood and embraced by the mafiosi themselves, who no doubt thrilled at the sight of being portrayed by the most dynamic actors in the business. The Mafia had become so big, such a ubiquitous part of American pop culture, that the prosecution of even a small localized Mafia crew was sure to garner national headlines. Some prosecutors, like New York’s Thomas Dewey and Rudolph Giuliani, had even launched political careers through their perceived prowess as mob busters. The FBI was determined to make up for all those years lost to J. Edgar Hoover’s steadfast denial of the Mafia’s existence. The game now was to rehabilitate the reputation of the Bureau on the backs of LCN. If that meant making a backdoor deal with the Irish Mob, who were mostly below the radar and whose prosecution was less likely to bring about major kudos, then so be it.

Paddy must have been laughing all the way to the bank.

Outside the courtroom, John Connolly talked a good game, but when called to testify before the Wolf Hearings, he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination a total of thirty-two times. At his trial in May 2002, he declined to take the stand in his own defense. He was found guilty of racketeering and obstruction of justice and given a ten-year sentence in federal prison.

Afterward, U.S. Attorney Michael J. Sullivan said of Connolly, “He abused his authority and crossed the line from crime fighter to criminal…. Today’s verdict reveals John Connolly for what he became: a Winter Hill Gang operative masquerading as a law enforcement agent.”

Old Bones and Shallow Graves

In the wake of the Wolf Hearings, the rats abandoned the last sinking ship of the Irish Mob. Longtime associates of Bulger’s crew—Steve Flemmi (twenty-one murders), Cadillac Frank Salemme (twelve murders), and John Martorano (nineteen murders)—all cut deals with the government in exchange for testimony, as did numerous members of the Irish Mob, including Kevin Weeks, one of Bulger’s most visible lieutenants in Southie, who admitted to taking part in four murders and gave testimony concerning four others.

Early in the year 2000, the bulky, curly-haired Weeks began to talk, leading investigators to a series of impromptu graves spread throughout the Boston area. The first was a gully alongside the Southeast Expressway in Dorchester, which contained three decomposed corpses. These three murder victims, killed between 1983 and 1985, had originally been buried in the basement of a home on East Third Street in Southie, but they had to be transferred when the house was sold in late 1985. One of the skeletons exhumed belonged to the twenty-six-year-old woman strangled to death by Whitey Bulger. Another skeleton had had its teeth ripped out before being killed, the result of a torture session, also courtesy of the South Boston mob boss.

A few months later, another killing field was unearthed, this one just a mile or two from Bulger’s condo at 144 Quincy Shore Drive. The remains of Tommy King, the Southie hood who bested Whitey in a barroom brawl back in 1975 and got himself killed as a result, were unearthed, as were the remains of Debra Davis, another ex-girlfriend of Flemmi’s.

Another grave was uncovered in September 2000. At Tenean Beach in Dorchester, investigators dug up a pile of bones that, through DNA testing, turned out to belong to Paulie McGonigle, an early member of the Mullin Gang who’d disappeared back in November 1975. Four days after he’d vanished, McGonigle’s station wagon was found in the waters off the docks of Charlestown. With Paulie’s wallet floating nearby, the cops always suspected that Bulger whacked the former Mullin gang member back during the final days of the Boston Gang Wars. Now they had the proof.

It was as if, just below the surface of the city and surrounding area, lay generations of the dead—gangsters, dirty cops, business partners, girlfriends, and others who simply got in the way. Similar diggings in New Orleans, New York, Chicago, Kansas City, and elsewhere no doubt would have unearthed similar victims of the Irish Mob, buried beneath layers of landfill, blacktop, new buildings, train stations, streets, parks, and other examples of civic progress and urban gentrification. The building of these cities often involved aspects of the criminal underworld—construction rackets, corrupt city officials, dirty ward bosses, cops-on-the-take, and, of course, the Irish American gangster who occasionally graduated to the mobster level and became a hidden though immutable aspect of American capitalism in all its many permutations.

By the end of the twentieth century, the Irish American mobsters were mostly all gone, victims of law enforcement, each other, assimilation, and the long inexorable flow of history. The ranks were thinned down to just a few organizations in New York and Boston—the Westies and Whitey Bulger—until even they went through their final stages of self-immolation.

Whitey, of course, remains at large. Through the early years of the twenty-first century, sightings of the wily Irish mobster were numerous. He was known to have lived for a period with his longtime mistress, Catherine Greig, on a small island off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. Other sightings were reported in Fountain Valley, California; Galway, Ireland; the island of St. Vincent’s; and in London, where, it was reported, a man who had met Bulger years earlier at a gym and known him well bumped into Whitey on the street and said, “Hey, Jim, how you been?”

Bulger looked startled. “You must have the wrong person,” he replied and disappeared into a crowd of pedestrians.

After the tragedy of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent passage in the United States of the Patriot Act, which placed new and more stringent restrictions on the use of passports and other kinds of identification—as well as the beefed-up security at airports and train stations—it’s hard to imagination how a seventy-year-old man whose face has been plastered on every law enforcement Web site in America can make it on the run. But then again, Whitey Bulger spent nearly his entire adult life defying the odds.

He was the last of the last, inheritor of a tradition that had once pretended to represent the rising of a people and inevitably degenerated over the generations into a bloody netherworld of treachery, deception, betrayal, wholesale murder, and dismemberment. To some, the story of the Irish American gangster is the stuff of legend, a tribute to the rebellious, defiant, tough-as-nails side of the Irish temperament. To others, the saga is shameful, a best-forgotten example of antisocial behavior at its most homicidal and a desperate survival mentality personified in the diabolical, sociopathic tendencies of Whitey Bulger and his ilk.

Either way, the lives were lived, the bodies buried, and the history remains the same. Out there somewhere, Whitey exists as a living relic, or a ghostly reminder, that no criminal underworld in the history of the United States started as early or lasted as long as the Irish Mob.

epilogue

I
n July 2004, a book was released entitled “
I Heard You Paint Houses,”
an account of an Irish American gangster by the name of Francis “the Irishman” Sheeran. Sheeran had always been suspected by the FBI of being one of the last people to see ex-Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa alive before he vanished way back on July 30, 1975. Sheeran was a close personal friend of Hoffa’s, which meant, in the inverted moral universe of organized crime, that he was a likely suspect in the union official’s demise. As even an amateur disciple of the underworld would know, or should know, when they come to get you, the person enlisted to do the deed will most likely be your closest friend or most trusted associate.

In the late 1990s, Sheeran was ready to come clean about his role in one of the great unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century. The motivating factor had been a meeting arranged by Sheeran’s two daughters between him and a Catholic monsignor. In ailing health and physically disabled, Sheeran listened as the monsignor granted absolution for his sins so that he could be buried in a Catholic cemetery, but the clergyman also hinted that the Irishman would never be at peace with God until he “did the right thing.” Sheeran told his family, “I believe there is something after we die. If I got a shot at it, I don’t want to lose that shot. I don’t want to close the door.” Following his audience with the monsignor, Sheeran contacted a writer and began to tell his story. A few months before the publication of his book, he passed away at the age of eighty-three.

His deathbed confession was a doozy. Sheeran admitted to carrying out numerous acts of violence for Hoffa during his years as Teamster president and also doing contract hits for Russell Bufalino, a legendary Mafia boss. Equally close to both men, Sheeran was a professional bruiser who made his living enforcing the will of his bosses until they turned against one another, and he was forced to make a choice. It really wasn’t much of a decision. The Irishman agreed to carry out a murder contract against Hoffa, his longtime friend and mentor, because he knew that if he didn’t, he too would be whacked. Such was the nature of survival in the American underworld.

The first time Frank Sheeran ever met Jimmy Hoffa, the legendary Teamster boss looked Sheeran over from head to toe, all six foot three inches of brawn and toughness, and said, “I heard you paint houses.” In the mid-twentieth-century vernacular of the underworld, to paint a house meant to whack somebody—the “paint,” in this case, representing the blood of the victim. Sheeran had already done a fair number of paint jobs for the Italians, including the famous gangland murder of Joseph “Crazy Joey” Gallo, which went unsolved for decades. That hit took place at Umberto’s Clam House in New York’s Little Italy in April 1972. According to Sheeran, he carried it out with John “the Redhead” Francis, an Irish-born, New York–based “house painter” with whom he had done other contract jobs in the past.