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

Hill boss, Buddy McLean, turn over the guys who’d inflicted the beating on Georgie.
    McLean refused. Georgie, he said, had had it coming. Bernie was not accustomed to getting no for an answer, and a few nights later the McLaughlins tried to wire a bomb to the car Buddy McLean’s wife used to drive their children to school. Such a provocation could not go unchallenged. At noon the next day, on the McLaughlins’ home turf of City Square, Charlestown, Buddy McLean shot Bernie McLaughlin in the back of the head in front of dozens of witnesses, none of whom offered to positively identify the shooter for the police.
    The war was on, and before it was over, more than forty Boston hoodlums would be dead.
    At the beginning of the Irish Gang War, the local Mafia watched, amused, as the Irish and their Italian allies who weren’t in La Cosa Nostra slaughtered one another. Soon, however, the Italians realized their rackets were being adversely affected by the bloodshed and the resulting public attention. Individual Mafia members found themselves forced to choose sides, and they usually threw in with the gang whose members they’d been closest to during their last stretch in prison. It was a tangled situation, ripe for exploitation, and during Whitey’s absence from the scene, a new force appeared on the local underworld scene—the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Over the next three decades, the FBI would realize its goal, practically destroying organized crime in Boston. But as it dismantled the competing criminal syndicates, the bureau’s local office too would be devastated by the ethical compromises its agents had to make, compromises that quickly degenerated into outright corruption that included subornation of perjury, bribery, and even murder.
    Until 1957, J. Edgar Hoover had denied even the existence of an American Mafia. But after Robert F. Kennedy was appointed attorney general by his brother, the pressure on Hoover to deliver Mafia scalps became overwhelming. Despite the Kennedy family’s long-standing ties to organized crime, dating from the patriarch Joe’s Prohibition bootlegging to the president’s sharing of a girlfriend with Chicago mobster Sam “Momo” Giancana, Bobby despised the Mob and put the heat on the FBI to crack down. On March 14, 1961, Hoover issued a memo instructing the field offices to “infiltrate organized crime groups to the same degree that we have been able to penetrate the Communist Party and other subversive organizations.”
    In Boston, that task would fall mostly to H. Paul Rico, the Belmont native and Boston College grad who knew Whitey from the old days in Bay Village. Rico’s partner was Dennis Condon, a Charlestown guy, conveniently enough. They had joined the bureau within a month of each other in 1951.
    As the gang war dragged on, a couple of particularly deadly hitmen began to stand out among the crews of underworld killers stalking Boston. Their names were Joe Barboza and Vincent Flemmi (better known as “Jimmy the Bear”), and both of them became so feared that the city’s newspaper photographers, a raffish lot themselves, often attached a note to the back of their arrest photos: “NO credit on photograph!”
    Barboza was a Portuguese-American, from New Bedford, and he dreamed of being the first non-Italian to be inducted into the Mafia. But behind his back, Mafia boss Raymond Patriarca referred to him as “the nigger.”
    By 1964, Patriarca insisted that all of Barboza’s hits be cleared through him. Discussions took place at his headquarters on Atwells Avenue on Federal Hill in Providence. In May 1965 the feds reported to Hoover on a conversation one of their informants had heard between Patriarca and his hitman Barboza, who wanted permission to whack an unidentified, but very hard-to-get, hoodlum whom Barboza had been tracking for months.
    “He lives in a three-story house,” Barboza told Patriarca. “So what I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna break into the basement