Threats Against the Author

           Whitey Bulger wanted me dead.

            That’s a given. The question is, how badly did he want me gone?

            Here are the facts:

n       In the mid-80’s, a guy behind the counter at his liquor store told one of my TV coworkers that everyone wondered why I never stopped in, and that if I did, they had “a Dumpster out back waiting for me.”     “It’ll be another Robin Benedict,” he said, referring to the dismembered Combat Zone hooker whose body parts were never found.

n       On one wiretap a gangster was recorded as saying, “Boy, does Whitey hate Howie.” Whitey was said to be “henbleep” because I had written about his alleged $50 million fortune which he believed was an attempt to set him up for a “snatch” by the Italians.

n       Over the years Kevin Weeks, who played Robin to Whitey’s Batman, has told increasingly embellished tales about how he and Whitey knew that I once lived across the street from a graveyard – as if they were setting me up for a hit.

So yeah, I guess I was on what Whitey’s partner Stevie Flemmi used to call the Hit Parade. But the fact that I’m still around indicates I never reached Number One with a Bullet, as Billboard would put it.

            After all, I never was a witness to any of Whitey’s murders, which was why Tommy King and Brian Halloran had to go. I’d never tried to kill him, which explained Paulie McGonagle’s disappearance. He never owed me money, the way he did Richie Castucci before he got two in the hat.

            My troubles started during the Angiulo brothers’ trial. Whitey’s name kept popping up in the FBI wiretaps, but it never seemed to make the papers. This undoubtedly was connected to something that had happened five years earlier, when a Herald reporter named Paul Corsetti began investigating that murder that Brian Halloran had the misfortune to witness.

            Paul got an anonymous call one day, telling him if he wanted some information on the hit, he should go to a bar in Quincy Market and wait. He did, and soon a middle-aged gent showed up and after a few pleasantries, introduced himself by saying, “You’re looking for me, motherbleeper. My name’s Jimmy Bulger and I kill people.”

            Whitey then pulled out a piece of paper and read to Paul his home address, the make, model and license plate of the family cars, and the address of the day care center his young daughter attended.  Paul showed up in the newsroom the next day with a pistol on his hip. And Whitey’s name vanished almost totally from the dailies for five years.

            So I thought it was time for a story about the brothers Bulger. I could mention the various pols and judges and State Police brass who’d been threatened or punished in the state budget for crossing one or another of the Bulgers. Plus I had all the FBI tapes of the Mafia, including Larry Zannino saying of Whitey and Stevie, “They’re with us. We’re together. We’re the Hill and the Hill is us.”

            And most of all I had Mayor Kevin White, on videotape, thanks to Chris Lydon, saying of Billy Bulger: “If my brother threatened to kill you, or you thought he would kill you, you would be nothing but nice to me.” Then he went on to tell a story about cowering in an athletic club in Southie worrying if Whitey would shoot him as he walked out the door “’cause I figured if they pump me out – which, why not? Whitey would be crazy enough to do it even then… And if they shoot me, they win all the marbles.”

            The story in Boston Magazine turned out great. But then I began hearing that I had “a problem.” Working at both the Herald and Ch. 56 on Morrissey Boulevard, I had to drive by Whitey’s liquor store all the time. Standing outside on the sidewalk next to the rotary, Whitey would glare at me as I went by. Boy, could he glare.

            Of course I wasn’t the only “civilian” he hated. He used to sit on a barstool at Triple O’s watching the evening news, fulminating against U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, his brother’s old State House foe. Whitey would mutter and curse and call Barney a – well, you know what he’d call him. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

            But the thing about Barney Frank was, Whitey never saw him in person. Me, I was around, close by, even if it was just driving by the package store.

            I started driving home a different way every night. There were no more long evenings at J.J. Foley’s. You don’t want to get caught flatfooted coming out of a barroom at midnight.

            Occasionally, others would print something about him, and they would briefly join me on Whitey’s Bleep List. He went crazy one day about Clem Costello, the publisher of The Lowell Sun, after an editorial-page cartoon appeared that showed his brother Billy, the Senate president, casting a giant dark shadow wearing a fedora. The shadow was labeled “Whitey.”

            Later, there was the Globe reporter who was working on the excellent 1988 series that included references to Whitey’s FBI ties. Right before the story ran, the reporter got a dubious heads-up from an FBI agent about Whitey might try to make a move against him. The fed claimed he’d gotten the information from a guy in the Witness Protection program – how convenient, that the guy couldn’t be reached to confirm his story.

            But we all survived, unlike at least 19 others, and probably a whole lot more. And at the risk of being accused of patting myself on the back, I’m glad I can look back at my clips from those days, and see that I never once wrote about how Whitey “kept the drugs out of Southie,” or that he was “not a bad guy.”

            Whitey was – he is -- a bad guy. The worst.

"On page 60, the MSP outlined the threats members of the gang had made against Howie Carr."