Free Howie Carr by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized, Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century

McCormack, had watched out for him. In his book, Billy described the speaker as the family’s sole source of information about Whitey’s life in prison. As first the House majority leader, and then speaker, McCormack’s inquiries to the Bureau of Prisons were always answered promptly, and McCormack would relay the information back to an increasingly despondent James Bulger Sr., assuring the old man that his eldest son might someday change his ways, if only he could catch a break. McCormack was also close to J. Edgar Hoover, and when the FBI director spoke, Washington listened.
    In short, the speaker had been there for the Bulgers, and now the Bulgers, or at least Billy, would be there for his nephew Eddie. The Kennedys understood, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t make a run at Billy. The approach would be made through Gerry Doherty of Charlestown, another young Boston state rep. Teddy wanted to sit down with him, Doherty told Billy, at Locke-Ober’s, by far the most expensive restaurant in Boston.
    They filed in for lunch, Ted and Billy and Doherty and a few others. Everyone else in the party took their cues from Teddy and ordered light. But Billy ordered the most famous and expensive item on the menu—Lobster Savannah, which cost $10, a fabulous sum for a meal in 1962.
    All through lunch as the rest of the party implored Billy to jump the McCormacks’ sinking ship, he kept shoveling it in. Finally, Gerry Doherty, the Kennedys’ embarrassed emissary, asked Billy to put down the fork long enough to at least listen to their pitch. But Teddy shook his head.
    “I don’t know whether we should try to persuade him,” Teddy said to Doherty. “I know we can’t afford to keep feeding him.”
    Teddy Kennedy easily defeated Eddie McCormack in the primary, despite the attorney general’s sneering comment to him in a televised debate that, “If your name were Edward Moore, your candidacy would be a joke.” Suddenly, though, in October the focus shifted from state politics to international brinkmanship, as the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba, within easy striking distance of the U.S. mainland. President Kennedy demanded their immediate withdrawal, the Russians refused, and a naval blockade around the island began.
    For several days, the world appeared to be on the verge of nuclear war. When the crisis ended, JFK’s poll numbers soared, and not only did his brother Teddy win what had become the family’s U.S. Senate seat, but Massachusetts narrowly elected JFK’s Harvard ’39 classmate, Endicott “Chub” Peabody, as governor. His first order of business was engineering the removal of the Iron Duke as speaker. Thompson had not been cooperative during the Cuban Missile Crisis when JFK had wanted a pro forma resolution of support from his home state’s legislature. Among the rank-and-file reps, the years of frustration were finally boiling over, and several candidates emerged, one of whom was Michael Paul Feeney, a reclusive state rep from Hyde Park who had first been elected in 1938, and whose proudest accomplishment in politics was his two-digit license plate, 54.
    Billy Bulger threw in his lot with Paul Feeney.
    For some who followed Billy’s career, it would be the first example of a problem that would haunt him through the decades—an inability to judge character or talent.
    “Everybody knew what a pious fraud Feeney was,” said a surviving legislative colleague. “But Billy was still right there with him.”
    Feeney’s candidacy went nowhere, but Billy wouldn’t budge. It was his year of lost causes—first Eddie McCormack, then Paul Feeney. On the eve of the vote, in January 1963, he received a phone call from the lame-duck attorney general, Eddie McCormack, asking him to come down the hall to his office right away. As soon as Billy arrived at Eddie’s office, he received a call from Speaker McCormack, asking him to change his vote from Feeney to Thompson.
    Billy was in a quandary. He felt he