Howie Carr (13 page)

Once the state Senate had been a proud deliberative body. Calvin Coolidge had served as its president. But by the early 1970s its membership had degenerated badly. Other politicians occasionally used to ask Harrington why he didn’t appoint better people to committees. Harrington would throw the bird book, the illustrated legislative directory, at the questioner, and snarl: “You find somebody in there!”

Billy still devoted some time to his law practice. Representing constituents has always been considered part of the job, another service to be performed “on the arm”—for free. Still, despite the picture he later tried to paint in his memoir, Billy was far from destitute. By 1974, he had accumulated enough cash to buy a summer “cottage” in Mashpee on Cape Cod, the ultimate status symbol for an up-and-coming legislator. But he could have been making much more had not such a large part of his practice continued to be for short, if any, money. The cases Billy did handle often involved his political cronies. One such case he handled was for the father of the man who would succeed him as Senate president, Tom Birmingham.

Birmingham’s father, Jackie, was a veterans’ agent for the city of Boston. Jackie Birmingham and Billy Bulger were close, perhaps because of something they had in common— both their brothers were gangsters.

According to Billy’s account in his book, his friend Jackie had approved unemployment benefits for one Suitcase Fidler, the Charlestown hood whose name Whitey would drop when he was successfully setting up Tommy King to be murdered.

Suitcase, according to Billy, was indeed a jobless veteran, but was in prison at the time.

Suitcase’s family had needed the money, and now Jackie Birmingham was caught up in a corruption investigation by the Suffolk County district attorney’s office. By his own admission, Billy intervened and “the result was that Jackie never appeared, never had to tell his story, never had to take his hit.”

Billy hadn’t been in the Senate for even a full year when the series of events that would deliver the Senate presidency to him began to unfold.

In 1971, the state auditor issued a scathing audit report of the ongoing construction of the new UMass Boston campus at Columbia Point in Dorchester. He was appalled by the cost overruns of a New York company that was overseeing the entire project—McKee-Berger-Mansueto. The Senate set up a committee to investigate, with DiCarlo as chairman.

MBM’s executives knew they had a problem, and began trying to reach out to the legislators to see if something could be worked out. Eventually an MBM executive got to Republican Senator Ron MacKenzie of Burlington, who was tight with DiCarlo. The MBM executive mentioned something about... contributions. MacKenzie understood, and took the offer back to DiCarlo.

In November 1971 DiCarlo’s Senate committee issued a report exonerating MBM, and two months later, according to court testimony, the MBM executive met Senator MacKenzie in the Point After lounge in the Back Bay and handed him $5,000 cash in $50 and $100 bills. MacKenzie returned to the State House and gave half the money to DiCarlo.

A month later, in the men’s room of the Parker House bar, MacKenzie took another $7,000 in cash. The next meeting was again at the Point After, with a different MBM executive handling the delivery. MacKenzie stuffed the money into his coat and said he’d have to be very careful driving home.

“It would make quite a splash in the headlines,” the Republican senator told the MBM executive, “if a senator was in a car with $10,000 on him.”

The clock had begun ticking down on Joe DiCarlo.

In 1972, the House had amended its rules to change to a system of single districts, doing away with the old system of double- and triple-districts in the cities. The first tangible result was the election of several more black House members who for the first time formed a caucus and began lobbying for the creation of a new black state Senate district in Boston.

In hindsight, Billy was never in any real danger, but what the black legislators were proposing would mean serious changes in his own district, which contained most of what was then black Roxbury. The minority population of Billy’s First Suffolk District amounted to about 30 percent overall, although the percentage of black voters was much smaller.

Among those white liberals pushing for a new black Senate district was a freshman state rep from Beacon Hill by the name of Barney Frank. Billy considered Frank’s efforts to be a personal attack on himself, his career, and his neighborhood.

“What bothered Bulger,” Frank said in an interview in 2004, “was the idea of the people who were involved in trying to change his district—liberals, blacks, a Republican governor from Dover. And busing was coming too.”

In the end, a black Senate district was created, but it would be carved out of the two Jewish districts, one of which had been devastated by white flight in North Dorchester and Mattapan.

Frank now had a problem—he had crossed Billy. And Billy saw to it that any bill with Frank’s name on it was torpedoed in the Senate. If any of his legislation was to have even the slightest chance of passage, Frank had to convince senators to put their names on his bills. Frank’s name alone was enough to assure a bill’s demise. That was how things worked in the Senate, even before Billy became president. If someone in leadership wanted something done, it was. To get along, as the saying goes, you had to go along. Anyone who refused to go along would quickly find himself persona non grata—another Barney Frank. Then, just to add insult to injury, Billy arranged for Barney’s Beacon Hill district to be transferred into the South Boston Senate district, where Irish conservatives outnumbered Jewish liberals by at least a five-to-one margin. Barney couldn’t “move up.” He would forever remain a state rep, or so it seemed.

The decade-long struggle over the integration of the Boston public schools was finally coming to a head. For years the city, the School Committee, and the NAACP had been tangling in federal court, while on Beacon Hill the legislature proposed one unworkable solution after another.

Finally, the case had been taken over by Judge W. Arthur Garrity, a Kennedy liberal who lived in Wellesley. Fed up with the school committee’s foot-dragging, in 1973 Garrity ordered busing to begin in the fall of 1974.

In the city, especially in South Boston, the white working-class population was outraged at the injustice of it all. They well understood that it was they and their children who would have to bear the brunt of a solution imposed by their more affluent neighbors, whose residence in the suburbs shielded them from the crime and racial polarization that increasingly plagued Boston. The suburbs would be insulated from the chaos that they were forcing by judicial fiat on blue-collar Bostonians who quite often worked, in one form or another, as their hired help—as cops, cabbies, teachers, and tradesmen.

At the time, Boston was the sixth largest metropolitan area in the country, but the city of Boston proper was no larger than the twentieth in the nation. In almost any other part of the country, many of Boston’s affluent suburbs would have been part of the city—and any busing plan. If the suburbs had been included in Garrity’s grand design, his neighbors—and Harvard classmates—would have surely brought their economic and social clout to the table to insist on a more equitable solution. But that was not the case, and as the years went by, even many white working-class Bostonians with the wherewithal to flee did. As white flight accelerated, those still stranded in the city saw their political clout dwindle even further, and outside Boston’s declining white neighborhoods, there was no upside for any politician to come to the defense of the beleaguered Irish and Italians in the city. It would have offended the
Globe
. Particularly galling to Southie and Charlestown and East Boston was the sanctimonious posturing of many of the residents of the town of Brookline, which was practically surrounded by Boston.

Brookline had once been predominantly Yankee, and was now heavily Jewish. Many of its residents had been part of the first waves of white flight out of Roxbury, North Dorchester, and then Mattapan. The symbol of Brookline’s smug hypocrisy was former state representative Michael Stanley Dukakis. He had run for lieutenant governor with Kevin White in 1970 and lost, and now in 1974 was seeking the Democratic nomination for governor against Billy’s old friend from Dorchester, Bob Quinn, the former House speaker who was now the attorney general. Quinn was the favorite, but with the Watergate scandal dominating national headlines, 1974 was not shaping up as a good year for conservatives or regulars from either party.

Dukakis was a strong supporter of Judge Garrity and the forced busing plan. For Billy, politics was always personal, and just as he could not quite let go of his grudge against Barney Frank, he never really forgave Dukakis for his stand in favor of forced busing in a city in which Dukakis did not live.

“I could never quite get over the pain of knowing that he harbored such contempt for me and my family that he would want my children shipped to inferior schools,” Billy wrote in his book. “I wondered what the reaction of Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, would have been if told that their children were to be bused into a high-crime area.”

For years Billy had talked about a judgeship, and as the 1974 election season heated up, the embattled Republican governor, Frank Sargent, decided to make a few friends for himself in a Democratic stronghold. Just before the Fourth of July 1974, shortly after the birth of Billy and Mary’s final child, Brendan, the Republican governor nominated Billy for the open judge-ship in the South Boston District Court. He would of course be confirmed by the Governor’s Council; Sonny McDonough would see to that.

Billy was ecstatic at first, but he quickly began to get cold feet. He received a call from former U.S. House Speaker John McCormack telling him how disappointed he was that Billy was giving up politics. His resignation from the Senate would have meant a short, brutal primary fight—potential candidates would have included Louise Day Hicks, who had lost her seat in Congress to Joe Moakley in 1972. Others sure to run included the two state reps, Billy’s friend Michael “Flats” Flaherty and Ray Flynn, a camera-loving former Providence College basketball player whom Billy already detested. For the Town as a whole, the timing of any primary couldn’t have been worse— it would take place the same week that the court-ordered busing began.

There was another problem for Billy. The Governor’s Council had just changed its rules, and now judicial nominees had to make at least limited financial disclosure. Billy didn’t like that one bit. There was no need for his constituents to know how well he’d been doing; it would just give them something else to resent. As Dr. Samuel Johnson observed in 1775, “The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another.” Nothing had changed in two hundred years.

If Billy’s neighbors in Southie found out about the “cottage” in Mashpee, or the real estate deals, many were likely to begin whispering that Billy was putting on airs, trying to rise above his station. He would be castigated for going, as they say, “high-hat.”

The
Globe
soon reported that a Bulger “associate” believed that the new financial disclosure rules, in effect for only a month, should be “waived for a candidate like Bulger, who has been in the Legislature for 14 years.”

There would be no waivers. And so Billy dithered. Few outside South Boston yet knew about Whitey’s rise in his chosen career. But as Billy considered the duties of a judge, he sometimes seemed to be thinking of his older brother, although he would later tell Congress that he never heard any talk of “the more terrible crimes.”

In the
Sunday Globe
of July 14, 1974, he said he wanted to “avoid even the appearance of impropriety....I believe unpopular clients need defense. I’ve always been stubborn about that. They’re entitled to representation. You’re not defending a murderer or a rapist. You’re defending a human being, a person, who has been accused of rape or murder. And they have a right to counsel.

“There are degrees of guilt. Every case is different. Every person is different. I don’t want to say anything now that seems like a blanket statement.”

Still, the reporter noted near the end of the lengthy profile that some in Southie were “skeptical” that he would take the judgeship. Eight days later, Billy hand-delivered a letter to Sargent in the governor’s Corner Office.

“I do not believe it appropriate for me to disengage myself from legislative service at this time,” he began. “You will understand, I hope, the difficulty and strain of reaching this decision, especially in the light of my initial reaction to accept the appointment.”

It was a blow, especially, to Representative Flynn. He was already running for Billy’s Senate seat, and four candidates were running for his seat in the House. Also surprised was the governor, a Republican struggling vainly to win reelection in the wake of Watergate.

Six weeks later, court-ordered busing began in the city of Boston.

Busing changed everything in South Boston, forever. A large part of the Town’s stabilizing influence—its middle class— fled the chaos for the inner suburbs south of the city, while others who could not yet afford to leave everything behind shipped their children out beyond the city limits to live with relatives on the more tranquil South Shore. Among those who remained in Southie, respect for the old traditions gave way quickly. Pathologies that had previously existed only on the fringes—drugs, family breakups, out-of-wedlock pregnancies—rapidly became the norm for ever-growing segments of Southie’s population.

The disaster that unfolded over the next several years also dashed whatever faint hopes Billy might have had of someday running statewide. He became known as an anti-busing zealot, which pushed him further to the margins of the increasingly liberal and suburban Democratic Party in Massachusetts.

The court-ordered busing began on September 12, 1974, and it went smoothly throughout most of the city. But outside South Boston High School, in front of network TV camera crews, angry mobs gathered and chanted, “Niggers go home!” Six hours later, with the buses headed back to Roxbury on Day Boulevard—“that memorial to Louise Day Hicks’ father,” as J. Anthony Lukas noted—crowds gathered to throw rocks and beer bottles at the buses. Nine black students were injured by the projectiles and the broken glass.