The Brother Bulger

“GETUPGETUPGETUP!”

Billy Bulger sits on a shaded bench on the Common, facing the State House, drinking a cup of Dunkin’s coffee. He’s dressed neatly as always, in a navy suit and red tie, though his black oxford shoes are peeling and badly worn. He’s talking about his old nemesis Mitt Romney, and the campaign Romney waged to expunge him from his job as UMass president. Only, he can hardly finish a thought, because a mounted park ranger keeps charging his horse up the hill behind us, howling at the top of his lungs. Up and back, up and back: “Getupgetupgetupgetup!” Bulger is getting perturbed, and also appears to be getting perturbed about being perturbed.

“If I did that everyone would know I’m losing my grip,” he says. “They throw the net over people for less than that.” He pauses as the ranger rides back down the hill. “But he’s happy.” Pause. “Probably boredom.” Pause. “He’s not coming here, I hope.”

But he is. The ranger hauls the beast up the hill again, swings it around to the front of the bench, and gives us a nod. Unlike the two dozen others who have stopped to say hello—including a thickly accented duck boat driver who misidentifies Bulger as “former speaker of the House”—the ranger doesn’t seem to recognize him. “How we doin’?” he says. Bulger greets him politely, then leans over to me and says out of the corner of his mouth, “Wyatt Earp.” The ranger heads back down the hill, and Bulger steers the conversation back over to his accomplishments at UMass, the money he raised, the—

“Getupgetupgetupgetup!”

“It’s a cowboy movie!” He gathers himself. “So Bill Connell [the late Boston businessman and prominent philanthropist]—he went to BC, we were buddies— got up from lunch one day, he says, ‘I’ll give you 500K— “Getupgetupgetupgetup!”

“You mean to tell me the country’s not falling apart?” Pause. “He’s doing no harm.”

While walking around outside, Bulger often appears tense, on guard, like a man expecting at any given moment to be attacked by birds. But get him in the halls he once dominated, and he is full of confidence. As we take a spin through the State House earlier in the day, he is crisp in his speech and movement, holding forth on the history of the building, hobnobbing with some of the countless court officers he hired over the years. He visits the Senate chamber, where he spent 26 years, a record 18 as president, then his grand old office, currently occupied by Senate President Therese Murray. He stops to chat with a couple of Murray’s aides, offering them a few words of advice on keeping constituents happy. Like many others I meet that day, the aides look from Bulger to the notebook in my hand and back with either incomprehension or muted alarm. “He’s a journalist,” Bulger explains, “which makes me very wary. Men of unsleeping malevolence.” Before the tour is over, he’ll call me a man of unsleeping malevolence four times. (During subsequent outings, this will be augmented by “little jerk” and “pissant.”)

Bulger walks into the governor’s waiting room, telling curious Patrick staffers who wander out to see him, “Don’t worry about the curtains. You’re doing fine.” Bulger had some similar problems back in 1988, when he caught hell for spending $160,000 of state money to restore his old office to its historical grandeur, making Patrick’s $10,000 damask drapes look like a trip to Family Dollar. On the wall to the left hangs the notoriously bad portrait of Governor Bill Weld, clad in jeans and a denim shirt and standing in the woods with an armadillo. It stands out in full absurdist contrast against the other, more decorous portraits of former governors, wearing suits and affecting gravitas.

“He’s irresponsible,” Bulger says of his old friend and ally (and choice whipping boy at the annual Southie St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast). When a Patrick staffer mentions he’s heard Weld’s backyard is full of armadillos, Bulger says, “He loves them because they’re so dumb.” Minutes later, Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray walks in with a clutch of aides. After a little small talk, he asks Bulger if he misses it all.

“At times,” Bulger says, and the phrase hangs there in the air for a moment, before everyone snaps back into motion and returns to the business of running the state.

On the way out of the State House, we encounter a pair of severely lost and disoriented tourists. They’re Québecois, a walking explosion of bright colors, windbreakers, hats, and shattered English, and they have no idea who Bulger is. They’re looking for the bathroom. Bulger directs them, joking, “We’ve had people in here for 11 or 12 years, running around like this,” but they don’t know what he’s talking about and immediately get lost again. Next time we see them, they ask, “You have bathroom, water drinkable?”

“We have one of the cleanest harbors in the world, because of the president,” volunteers a nearby court officer. He does it forcefully, dutifully, as if stepping in to deflect a frontal assault. The tourists stand there, blinking.

“Thanks for the commercial there,” Bulger says, a little embarrassed.

“You’re welcome.”

“Okay.” A clipped “okay” is how Bulger terminates mildly uncomfortable exchanges—of which, to this day, he seems to have no shortage.

In the elevator he turns to me and says, “I was part of that harbor cleanup.”