Black Mass

SSN: 018-22-4149.

II. Stephen Joseph (AKA “The Rifleman”) Flemmi.

D/O/B: 06-09-34.

SSN: 026-24-1413.

It was June 19, 1983, and scattered across Bergeron’s desk were stacks of notes and surveillance reports. Bergeron was shuffling through the material to compose a seven-page, single-spaced report for his Quincy police superiors about the two “notorious organized crime leaders.” The time had come for the cops to do something about them.

Bergeron had been watching Bulger and Flemmi for months. Bulger, he had learned, was not just the boss of illegal rackets in South Boston but now controlled organized crime in the city of Quincy and “beyond into the South Shore.” Moreover, by following Whitey, Bergeron and the other detectives in his organized crime unit had learned that Bulger had now moved right into their midst. As Bergeron wrote: “Subject Bulger is residing in a condominium at 160 Quincy Shore Drive, Quincy, which is located in a luxury apartment complex called Louisburg Square. The apartment or unit number is 101.” The condo, he’d found, was not listed in Bulger’s name. The owner was Catherine Greig, a Bulger girlfriend. The purchase price for the unit in 1982 was $96,000—cash, no mortgage. “The shades in said unit are usually pulled down, and cardboard is taped to the small windows in the outside entry doors.”(Unknown to Bergeron at the time was the condo’s eerie proximity to a gravesite. The new address was just about a hundred yards away from where Bulger and Flemmi, eight years earlier, had buried the corpse of Tommy King along the banks of the Neponset River.)

The cops had learned that Bulger ran the rackets in Quincy and was now often spending his nights there—reason enough to take action against him. But Bergeron had come up with an intriguing and altogether new twist about the crime boss. By consulting with his own network of underworld informants, Bergeron had learned that Bulger and Flemmi “now appear to have broadened their horizons into drug trafficking.” With their “expansion into the drug market,” wrote Bergeron in flat, official prose, “they will be helping people destroy their lives.”

Bergeron finished typing his report, handed it off to his boss, and returned to the street. He and other detectives continued to follow Bulger as the gangster moved between their city and South Boston and as he met regularly with Flemmi, a few other select gangsters, and George Kaufman, the associate who often served as a front for them as the owner of record of their garages. In early 1984 Bergeron watched Bulger and Flemmi replace the sign out in front of the liquor mart at the rotary with a new one: South Boston Liquor Mart.

Eventually Bergeron’s written proposal worked its way through various law enforcement channels, landing at the federal agency specializing in drug cases, the DEA. Bergeron’s report was consistent with the DEA’s own intelligence. The DEA had busted a major drug dealer, Arnold Katz, who had told DEA agents about Bulger’s business ties to another major drug trafficker, Frank Lepere. Lepere was the dealer the state police had seen with Bulger at the Lancaster Street garage during surveillance in 1980. Now Katz was disclosing to the DEA that during the early 1980s Lepere had forged an “alliance with Whitey and his partner, Stevie Flemmi, in which Lepere agreed to pay Whitey and Stevie whenever he smuggled a load of narcotics in return for protection.” Katz said Lepere had told him all about the deal himself, including how he delivered cash payments to Bulger in a suitcase.

The DEA had more. Early in 1981 a confidential informant had reported that Bulger and Flemmi were on the move—“attempting to control drug trafficking in the region by demanding cash payments and/or a percentage of profits for allowing dealers to operate.” With the arrival of the secret Quincy police report, two DEA agents, Al Reilly and Steve Boeri, were assigned to work with Bergeron. Reilly and Boeri quickly added to the growing pile of Bulger intelligence. In February 1984 Reilly met with one of his informants, named “C-2” in DEA reports, who told him that coke dealers were complaining about having to “pay protection money to Whitey.” The informant identified a pub owner in South Boston who paid Bulger for the right to sell “small quantities of cocaine and heroin from the bar.” Then agent Boeri met with one of his informants, named “C-3,” who’d known Bulger for two decades and said the ambitious gangster “most recently” had taken control of “drug distribution in the South Boston area.”

The drug theme was reiterated by “C-4,” as well as by other underworld sources, and by early 1984 the pieces were falling into place for a joint investigation into Bulger’s drug activities. The case, called Operation Beans, would mainly involve the DEA and Quincy detectives.

It had come from bottom-up police work, especially through the often mind-numbingly tedious efforts of Bergeron and his colleagues. Piling up night after night of surveillance throughout 1983 and early 1984, Bergeron had learned a lot about Bulger. Going through the trash at the condo, Bergeron might find a grocery list intact, in Greig’s swirling cursive handwriting—“asparagus, chicken breasts, sherbet, ricotta cheese, olive oil”—but he’d also find Bulger’s papers torn into tiny pieces or burned to ash. He’d learned that Bulger was “habit-oriented”—leaving the condo in Quincy at about the same time each afternoon for dinner at Theresa’s house in South Boston. Then a full night of secret business meetings, mostly at the liquor mart. Then home to the condo. If it was sunny the next day, he’d often appear on the second-floor patio in the early afternoon for a breath of fresh air, sometimes still clad in pajamas.

Bergeron uncovered a man leading two lives. It was apparent that Theresa did not know about Catherine. But besides his women, Bergeron was witness to another Bulger double cross—one against his neighborhood. Bulger had an iron grip on drugs moving through South Boston and beyond. He made dealers pay “rent” on every gram of “Santa Claus,” a Southie code name for cocaine. He extorted a share of everything from nickel bags to kilos, loose joints to burlap-wrapped bales of marijuana. Just across from the liquor mart, certain apartments in the Old Colony project, a project near where Bulger had grown up in Old Harbor, had visitors tapping at the door at all hours of the day and night. Young men, even some mothers, were selling drugs out of the homesteads—angel dust, mescaline, valium, speed, coke, and heroin—and nothing moved without Whitey’s okay. (Paul “Polecat” Moore, one of Bulger’s underlings in the drug business, kept a place in Old Colony.) Bulger might often refer to drugs as “fuckin’ shit,” but his disgust didn’t stop him from making big money off the drug trade, which smoked hotter in the two projects at the rotary than it did in the more middle-class streets of City Point. It got to where “P-dope,” a heroin mixture, cost only four dollars a hit—cheaper than a six-pack.