The Brothers Bulger

Thorndike Press

Prologue

It was June 19, 2003, and the sixty-nine-year-old president of the University of Massachusetts was sitting in a packed hearing room in the basement of the Rayburn Office Building in Washington, D.C. For six months, ever since he'd stonewalled the House Committee on Government Reform in Boston, William Michael Bulger had called in every chit, pulled every string, to prevent this moment from arriving.

But the reality was that despite his $359,000-a-year salary, Billy Bulger was no longer the most powerful man in Massachusetts politics, and he could not defy Congress.

His brother James-better known by his nickname of Whitey-had been on the lam for more than nine years now. He was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, charged with nineteen murders, and two years earlier his wanted poster had appeared briefly in the film Hannibal. But Whitey hadn't actually been seen in the United States since 1996, and he was slowly making his way into the pantheon of vanished legends-Ambrose Bierce, D. B. Cooper, Jimmy Hoffa, Judge Crater ...

Billy had bought a new suit for his appearance before Congress. It was from Brooks Brothers on Newbury Street, to Billy the epitome of upper-crust Yankee respectability. Everyone back in Boston would be watching the C-SPAN feed that was being broadcast on every major TV station in the city.

The committee chairman was Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, Amherst College '71, and Billy had tried to play the Amherst card with him-hey, can't we work something out? In Boston, they had negotiated over a closed-door hearing-no cameras, no damnable reporters. But word had leaked, and now Davis was gaveling the public hearing to order.

The chairman asked Billy if he wished to make a statement before the questioning began. Billy looked down at a prepared text, which had already been distributed to the press.

"I now recognize," Billy said of his brother, hesitantly, without a trace of his fabled cockiness, "that I didn't fully grasp the dimensions of his life."

It was a far cry from what he'd proudly told newspaper reporters of his brother in 1988: "There is much to admire."

Billy was now immunized-nothing he said could be used against him, unless he lied. But he could no longer invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. He was faced with a Clintonian dilemma, and there was only one way out. He would have to ... not remember.

"I am particularly sorry," Billy continued, "to think that he may have been guilty of some of the horrible things of which he is accused."

About the allegations made against his older brother, Billy had written in his memoirs seven years earlier: "I am confident much of it has been circulated as an oblique political attack on me. I know some of the allegations and much of the innuendo to be absolutely false."

But that was before the Massaschusetts State Police recovered six bodies, including those of two twenty-six-year-old women, from the shallow graves Whitey and his underworld partner, another serial killer named Stevie Flemmi, had dug on public property in and around Boston. In his memoirs, Billy had never mentioned that Stevie Flemmi was a pedophile, or that Flemmi's parents had lived next door to him since 1980. Nor did he inform his readers that Flemmi often spent the night at his parents' house, across the courtyard from Billy, and that most Sundays, Whitey and Stevie huddled at the Flemmis' house with the FBI agents they had bribed with cash, jewelry, and wine.

"I do still live in the hope that the worst of the charges against him will prove groundless," Billy Bulger read. "It is my hope."

But the congressmen would have none of it. Although the committee was ostensibly investigating almost forty years of corruption in the Boston FBI office, today's hearing was about the Bulger brothers-Whitey and Billy. Even the Massachusetts Democrats on the committee, playing to the vast television audiences watching in New England, would take their shots. But the most relentless congressman was Republican Dan Burton, the former committee chairman who had pursued Billy for more than a year. Dan Burton was from Indiana-a "jerkwater state," as Billy would have described it at one of his annual St. Patrick's Day breakfasts in South Boston. This was Dan Burton's show, and he couldn't be cajoled or threatened. If Burton had been from Massachusetts, Billy would have known which buttons to push. But he was from Indianapolis, and Billy Bulger was now under oath.

"Mr. Bulger," Burton began, "what did you think your brother did for a living?"

Gone was the glib, gavel-wielding boss of Massachusetts politics. "Well, I know that he was for the most part," Billy stammered, speaking uncharacteristically in sentence fragments. "I had the feeling that he was uh in the business of gaming and and uh ..." He paused. "Whatever. It was vague to me but I didn't think, uh-for a long while he had some jobs but uh ultimately uh it was clear that he was not uh um being um uh you know he wasn't doing what I'd like him to do."

Billy's biggest problem was a phone call he'd received from Whitey in January 1995, just after he'd fled Boston. Though Billy was an attorney, an officer of the court, he had told no one in law enforcement about the conversation until 2000, after one of Whitey's underlings had disappeared into the Witness Protection Program. The feds had called Billy before a grand jury, laying a perjury trap, but much to the feds' chagrin, he'd admitted receiving the call. Angry and frustrated, someone in the U.S. Attorney's Office had leaked his testimony to the newspapers.

"I expected I would receive a call," Billy said, tentatively, mixing tenses. "That was his request. I am sure he would like a private conversation."

Billy had had six months to prepare his answers, but he still couldn't come up with the witty, cutting responses that had so long been his trademark in state politics. In fact, Billy sounded as tongue-tied as one of his majority leaders.

"I never thought we'd still be-that there would not have been a resolution of it. Ordinarily in these cases-"

-the cops catch the guy. Billy stopped himself before he actually said it. The only other time Whitey had been a fugitive, from a bank robbery indictment in 1955, he'd lasted only three months on the lam before the FBI collared him. But in 1994, Whitey was forty years wiser, and perhaps $40 million richer.

"So the tone of it," Billy said, "was something like this: He told me, uh, don't believe everything that's being said about me. It's not true."

But of course it was true. All of it.

"I think," Billy said, slowly, "he was trying to give me some comfort on that level and he-I don't know ..." Billy paused, as everyone stared at him. "I think he asked me to tell everybody he was okay and, uh, and then I told him, well, we care very much for you and um, we're very hopeful. I think I said I hoped this will have a happy ending. At the time there was no talk of the more terrible crimes."

It was December 23, 1994, the day that Whitey Bulger vanished. He had always assumed that it would come to this, so in 1977 he had begun constructing a new identity for himself. The most powerful organized...