Read Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster Online

Authors: T. J. English

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #United States, #Social Science, #History, #Non-Fiction, #Biography & Autobiography, #Organized Crime, #Europe, #Anthropology, #True Crime, #Criminology, #Criminals & Outlaws, #Gangsters, #Irish-American Criminals, #Gangsters - United States - History, #Cultural, #Irish American Criminals, #Irish-American Criminals - United States - History, #Organized Crime - United States - History

Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (88 page)

6.
In the late 1970s, Pat Nee was one of the key organizers of a major gun smuggling operation in which guns from the United States were shipped to Ireland aboard the
Valhalla
, a fishing trawler that set out from East Boston. The Valhalla was intercepted at sea, courtesy of an informant inside the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was to receive the shipment of weapons. Nee was arrested and prosecuted on federal weapons smuggling charges; he served eighteen months in prison for the crime.
In 1989, Nee was caught in the act of robbing an armored bank vehicle; he was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison but released early due to a legal technicality after serving eight years. Today, Nee is a retired gangster and ex-IRA gun-runner working as a laborer in South Boston. He is currently working with a writer on a memoir of his criminal years.

7.
Part of the persuasive power of the
Godfather
movies is that the story is told
solely
through the eyes of the Corleone family, with hardly a single outsider’s perspective (Michael Corleone’s wife, played by Diane Keaton, may be the only exception). In this regard, the movies present a striking example of how the insular Italian American mobster viewed, among other things, the role of the Irish in society. Aside from Tom Hagen, the German-Irish consigliari played by Robert Duvall, there are exactly two Irish American characters in
Godfather I
and
II.
In Part I, it’s Captain McCluskey, the venal, corrupt police captain who is shot in the face by Michael Corleone. In Part II, it’s Senator Pat Geary, the venal, corrupt politician who is compromised by the Corleone family, but only after he is revealed to be a soulless, hypocritical degenerate. This trend is continued in
Godfather III,
in which the primary Irish character is Archbishop Gilday (played by Irish actor Donal Donnelly), the venal, corrupt Vatican clergyman who willfully solicits a “donation” from the Mafia and is later murdered.
Taken together, the
Godfather
movies offer a blunt, undistilled interpretation of how the Irish were viewed within the Italian American underworld, with the cop, the politician, and the clergyman—all of them corrupt—fulfilling the roles that had been designated for the Irish, in real life, by Johnny Torrio, Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, and other mafiosi at the 1929 mob conference in Atlantic City. (For an insightful analysis of
The Godfather
and the role of gangster movies in American society in general, see
Crime Movies
by Carlos Clarens.)

1.
A copy of Sullivan’s manuscript, entitled
Tears and Tiers
(penned by him and his wife) was obtained by the author as research for this book. The would-be autobiography focuses mostly on Mad Dog’s prison years, although there are many detailed descriptions of professional killings. Throughout the manuscript, Sullivan attributes his criminal psychosis to a kind of deeply ingrained Catholic guilt (he claims to have been sexually abused at the age of ten by a nun).
Sullivan’s long life of crime continued into the early 1980s, when he was eventually arrested after a bank robbery spree in Upstate New York, but not until after he engaged in a wild shootout with state troopers and FBI agents in which he was shot and wounded. During his tumultuous criminal career, Sullivan managed to marry and have three kids. At the end of
Tears and Tiers
, he offers this small chestnut of hope: “The only saving grace for the maintenance of my often elusive sanity is that, barring the ever-possible freak cruelty of nature, my sons will never have the sins of their father visited upon them. I have told them of my own less-than-noble brand of domestic terrorism, and have never glorified it like I’d care for them to emulate it.”

2.
Spillane’s murder was never officially solved, although most of the participants were identified years later, after the perpetrators were themselves killed in various gangland slayings. One key mystery remains: Whose voice was it on the intercom that lured Spillane down to the street? Obviously, it was someone Spillane knew and trusted, given the former mob boss’s concern about the recent spate of killings of his West Side underlings. Spillane knew these killings had been engineered by the Genovese crime family, and he’d been trying to barter a truce at the time of his death.
Spillane had been trying to use Eddie McGrath as a go-between in his negotiations with Cosa Nostra. His meeting with McGrath at the Thunderbird Hotel in Miami Beach bore little fruit, but Spillane stayed in touch with the old-time labor racketeer who was still on a first-name basis with many of New York’s most powerful mafiosi. The record shows that Eddie McGrath was in New York City attending a funeral and dealing with a legal matter around the time of Spillane’s murder. McGrath, who had been a legendary figure in Hell’s Kitchen during Spillane’s teen years, is one of the few men he would have trusted enough to come outside, unarmed, if he was called. McGrath was never questioned about the murder. Instead, police arrested and charged Mickey Featherstone, who was nowhere near the murder scene that night. Featherstone was later acquitted at trial.

1.
It became part of underworld lore that John Gotti “made his bones” with the killing of Jimmy McBratney. If so, he was not the first mafiosi to do so by whacking an Irishman. Al Capone’s first kill was also of the Celtic persuasion, a Brooklyn dock walloper named William Finnegan.
Gotti did six years for his role in the McBratney murder. After he got out of prison, the future boss of the Gambino family was often heard on government wiretaps bragging about the killing of McBratney, whom he alternately pumped up as a major gangster with big-time connections or denigrated as “a no good Irish lowlife.”

2.
In the movie, Burke is memorably portrayed by Robert DeNiro. The real Jimmy Burke died in an Upstate New York prison from stomach cancer on April 13, 1996.

3.
“The Ballad of Danny Greene” was first published in 1998 in
To Kill the Irishman
by Rick Porrello, a book-length account of Greene’s life and death.

4.
Before all was said and done, Bulger and Flemmi were identified as having perpetrated at least nineteen murders. Among their many victims were two women; one was a girlfriend of Flemmi’s who was trying to break up with him at the time, and the other was Deborah Hussey, the daughter of another girlfriend of Flemmi’s, with whom he was having an affair. Hussey, at the age of twenty-six, was strangled to death by Whitey Bulger and buried in the basement of a Southie home along with two other murder victims. A series of hidden graves throughout the Boston area were filled with the bones of mobsters, ex-girlfriends, former friends, and other unfortunate saps who happened to get on the bad side of Bulger-Flemmi.

1.
Jimmy Flynn was a rare rank-and-file survivor of the Boston Gang Wars, a Renaissance criminal weaned at the knee of the originator of the Winter Hill Gang, Buddy McLean. After Brian Halloran’s murder, Flynn went on the run. He was caught two years later and put on trial. His lawyer was able to show that Flynn was nowhere near the murder scene on the night in question. Flynn was acquitted. Investigators later determined that he’d been set up to take the fall by Whitey Bulger.

2.
Billy Bulger’s testimony on June 19, 2003 before a House Committee on Government Reform in Washington D.C. proved to be his undoing. The committee was interested in finding out if Bulger had in any way aided his brother, who at that time had been on the run for eight years. Bulger was out of state government, having retired from the senate in 1996 and taken on his prestigious new job as President of the University of Massachusetts. His testimony before the committee was widely covered by the Boston media, to whom Bulger had rarely given the time of day. Stoic, defensive, and evasive to the end, Bulger’s long years of walking a tightrope between being a strong advocate for his neighborhood of South Boston and being a mobster’s brother finally caught up with him. In the wake of the hearings, he was forced to resign as president of University of Massachusetts and has since remained retired from public life.

3.
To say that Special Agent Connolly’s actions were solely a product of Irish American underworld history or the internecine culture of South Boston would not be telling the full story. Connolly was also an FBI agent, the product of a law enforcement culture that was not averse to violating internal rules or national laws. Starting with J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program, which involved the illegal wiretapping and surveillance of civil rights leaders throughout the 1960s, the Bureau established a mindset in which subverting the law was well within the bounds of standard operating procedure. The Boston office was perhaps the Bureau’s most corrupt, with a pattern of using informants for conniving purposes going back at least to the murderous H. Paul Rico. Connolly was following in this tradition. The nature of his relationship with Whitey Bulger was well-known within the Boston office, and it went mostly unchallenged even as Bulger cut a huge criminal swath through the city’s underworld. Connolly was aided and abetted by his FBI supervisors. The fact that Bulger was able to play Connolly to the extent that he did is just one example of how the underworld and upperworld occasionally intersect to sustain that long-running American vaudeville act known as organized crime.

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