Black Mass

Brown then walked into a trap after being subpoenaed before a grand jury. He did not know he was on tape with the inspector and thought he was up against some bumbling police work. He tried to lie his way out of it, telling grand jurors he never gave anyone a dime and perish the thought. He was quickly indicted for perjury and bribery and just as quickly turned into a government agent, wire and all. He was looking for a plea bargain that would get him out of doing prison time. The prosecutors asked Brown, what do you have? Brown said Tom Finnerty and Bill Bulger.

Brown’s bruising encounter with Finnerty had its origin in the mid-1970s when Brown saw the potential for a skyscraper at the run-down lower end of State Street, one of downtown Boston’s colonial-era boulevards. He began buying up property one decrepit lot at a time. As the state’s largest landlord, with holdings worth between $500 million and $I billion, Brown foresaw the building boom of the 1980s and waited for it to reach him.

The push to develop the site started in 1982 when the city, reeling from the first year of a new statewide reduction of property taxes, found itself stuck with a $45 million bill from tax abatements due commercial property owners. Mayor Kevin White needed help from the legislature to get bonding authority to underwrite rebates, and Bulger pushed it for him—with the proviso that the city would sell property to the state to launch a convention center authority. The new state agency was immediately controlled by Bulger and White appointees.

Another part of the legislation required the city to sell five parking garages, including one that became part of Brown’s project. The garages were not auctioned off to the highest bidder but transferred to the city’s redevelopment authority, which could sell them to developers as it pleased. It was a closed shop, and Bulger was part of the planning process.

After White and Bulger struck their deal, Brown and his partner, a prominent architect, became the odds-on favorites to develop the State Street site. The designer had the endorsement of the Boston Society of Architects, and Brown already had most of the land. Then Brown was approached by a White confidant, former Massachusetts attorney general Edward McCormack. McCormack asked for an outlandish stake in the project in exchange for monitoring the city hall approval process. When that was rejected, Finnerty suddenly appeared as a lesser-known lawyer willing to take less money.

At the time Finnerty began negotiating for a piece of the skyscraper, he was a criminal defense lawyer with no track record in big-time real estate. The crossover is so daunting that it is seldom tried in Boston. The two law specialties require two different skills—low-key urbanity versus hard-nosed advocacy. Finnerty, a former district attorney, was in the brassy South Boston tradition and had little in common with the muted lawyers from white-shoe firms who usually handled downtown developments. Brown danced with Finnerty for months, never saying no, never saying yes, pushing the project along its route in city hall as they talked between late 1983 and February 1985.

When Finnerty saw Brown racing to the finish line on his own, the negotiations became more intense. Brown capitulated in 1985, agreeing to “buy” Finnerty’s self-proclaimed interest that never existed for about $I.8 million. Finnerty never appeared at any design or development hearing on the project and did not represent Brown when another developer sued him over the size of the office tower.

Nevertheless, Finnerty deposited the first installment of $500,000 in July. In a rapid sequence, Billy and Tommy, the two old friends from Old Harbor, split $450,000 in August and $30,000 more in October. But a month later the other shoe dropped for Bulger. In November Brown was indicted by a federal grand jury for bribing the city inspector and “other public officials.” Bulger returned his money to the trust three days later, calling it a repaid loan.

By the time the transactions became a public controversy in 1988, Finnerty had dropped any pretense of being a real estate lawyer for the massive project. He said he had joined the Brown development team to bring it respectability, using his law enforcement background to overcome Brown’s past association with arsonists. His price for respectability was $1.8 million, and he actually filed suit against Brown to get all of the money.

But a few weeks of public clamor about the deal was more than enough for the low-profile landlord. He suddenly folded, settling the suit. Brown called it a pragmatic decision to pay less in the long run. “I am a businessman, and it is not my job to pursue investigations,” he said. He never uttered another word about it.

Despite his defiant public stance, the controversy around the skyscraper at 75 State Street was an intense ordeal for Bulger. When the furor was at its height, the senate president was briefly stalked “by the black dog of melancholy.” At the end of 1988 he slipped out of the State House and walked over to Boston Common, where he sat glumly on a park bench. He watched people eating lunch on nearby benches and, in his disconsolate reverie, became angry at their indifference to media misconduct. He thought: “Don’t any of these people walking our streets or the paths in our parks . . . see what the media are doing in this city?” The episode passed quickly as he realized that strangers had no reason to be aroused by his problems. The angst departed, and he headed back to his office “with a lighter step, ready for whatever awaited.”

Bulger filed an affidavit stating that he borrowed money from Finnerty without knowing its origin. Over time Billy’s version of the scandal became an accepted part of his bloodied but unbowed image in South Boston. Once again Billy Bulger had stood up to outsiders and been victimized by the media for it. As always, he came out on top.

But Bulger’s brief on 75 State Street holds up only if the facts are discarded. Bulger was not the innocent victim. The slumlord was. And just as the FBI had protected Whitey Bulger for fifteen years, the bureau stepped in to keep William Bulger out of harm’s way.

During a federal review of several downtown developments, including 75 State Street, investigators uncovered records that shattered the senate president’s claims. The documents—which remain buried in federal files—show that Bulger actually kept a full share of Brown’s money. Although Bulger “repaid” the loan, Finnerty washed the money back to Bulger through other law firm accounts. Through this circuitous route, Bulger received about half of the original $500,000 down payment.

Moreover, Bulger did not get anywhere near the $267,000 fee he said stood behind the loan as collateral. The law firm records show that he received less than half the claimed amount, or $110,000.