Howie Carr Read Free Page A

Town, as they referred to South Boston.
    In the back seat sat Theresa Stanley. At fifty-seven, she was the oldest of Whitey’s girlfriends, and she preferred a more traditional, lace-curtain Irish phrase to describe their relationship. She “went with him,” and had since 1965 when he was a thirty-six-year-old ex-con, fresh out of Leavenworth, and she was a single mother of four young children.
    Theresa had been looking forward to Christmas this year. She and Whitey had just returned to Boston after a lengthy trip to Europe, a dry run for the journey they were about to embark upon. Whitey had made good use of his time, renting safe-deposit boxes in banks in Dublin, London, and Venice, before they finally returned home, at Theresa’s behest, after Thanksgiving.
    On this day, Whitey and Theresa had been planning to drive to Copley Square and finish their Christmas shopping at Neiman Marcus. But around 4:00 p.m., dusk on one of the shortest days of the year, Kevin Weeks had beeped Whitey and asked where he was.
    “Theresa’s,” Whitey said. “We’re just going out.”
    “We need to talk,” Kevin Weeks said. This was one of Whitey’s rules: Never talk on the phone if you didn’t have to, and if you had to, always keep it vague.
    Weeks had gotten a tip from John Connolly—“Zip,” as Whitey called him—about an hour earlier. Zip, a retired FBI agent who’d been raised in the same public housing project as the Bulgers, had been feeding Whitey information for years— about informants, indictments, investigations, and wiretaps. And now, in addition to his FBI pension, Zip had a six-figure job at Boston Edison, compliments of Billy, Zip would always tell his friends while he and Billy both denied it publicly.
    Five minutes after Weeks’s call, Whitey’s Grand Marquis pulled up in front of the South Boston Liquor Mart at the rotary on Old Colony Avenue, the gang’s headquarters for the last decade or so.
    Weeks hopped in, but said nothing. That was another one of the rules. You didn’t talk in the car, not since the Drug Enforcement Administration had put the new door on Whitey’s car back in 1985 as part of Operation Beans. It had been yet another attempt to bring down Whitey that had failed after he received a propitiously timed tip.
    At sixty-five, Whitey was not the stereotypical elderly driver. Years later, on the witness stand, Weeks was asked how they could get from South Boston to the Back Bay so quickly during rush hour two days before Christmas. Could Whitey make cars magically move and disappear?
    “Jim Bulger could make a lot of things magically move and disappear.”
    Whitey pulled the Mercury into the tow zone in front of Neiman Marcus. Then all three of them—Whitey, Kevin, and Theresa—got out of the car and Whitey told Theresa he’d be right with her. She waited at the entrance to Neiman Marcus, eyeing them nervously, as Kevin Weeks passed on the information he’d received from Connolly, that the indictments had come down, that they were sealed, and that the feds were planning to round up everybody over the holidays—including Whitey, his partner Stevie Flemmi, and Frank Salemme, the boss of the local Mafia.
    “Have you told Stevie yet?” Whitey asked.
    “I haven’t seen him,” Weeks said.
    “Make sure you tell Stevie.”
    Whitey called Theresa back over to the car and told her, “We’re going away again.”
    Their first night on the road, Whitey and Theresa checked into a hotel in Selden, Long Island. They would be visiting a cousin of Kevin Weeks’s named Nadine, and her husband. Later Nadine and her husband would tell the FBI that they had no idea that they were entertaining a powerful, well-connected mobster. To them, they said, he was just Tom Baxter.
    Theresa and “Tom” stayed in Selden for four days, then drove to New Orleans for New Year’s, where Whitey registered at a French Quarter hotel using his real name. No need to become “Tom Baxter” if this was all just a