The Brother Bulger

GIVEN THE RANCOR HE’S INSPIRED OVER THE YEARS, you might expect some of the people who run into Bulger to give him hell. Bostonians, after all, are no strangers to the practice of hurling abuse out of car windows at each other. But Bulger insists most people he encounters on the street are respectful to him, and that hostile run-ins are “very rare.” He offers an example. “I’m going to Mass General Hospital the other day,” he says. “The guy doesn’t know I’m with my wife. These are his exact words: ‘How ya doin’, good luck, and fuck Howie Carr.’”

Howie Carr: for years Bulger’s bane, his tormentor, his new terrorist. The name comes up often with Bulger, and when it does, he doesn’t speak it so much as cough it up; occasionally, he swaps in “the savage,” or, better, “that excrescence.” The dynamic between Bulger and the popular Herald columnist and talk show host is what Moby Dick would be like if the whale were as obsessed with Ahab as Ahab is with the whale. (“I see in him outrageous strength,” Ahab says of his nemesis, “with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.”)

In addition to writing The Brothers Bulger, an absolutely scathing though largely uncorroborated account of the reigns of Billy and Whitey that contends the two worked in concert to build and fortify their respective empires, Carr never wastes a chance to flog the man he relishes calling the “Corrupt Midget,” even if it means dropping anti-Bulger non sequiturs as a kind of shorthand for corruption or nepotism. (In a June column, for example, he trashed someone for being “the first cousin of Billy Bulger’s predecessor as Senate president.”) The climax of the feud came in 2003, during Bulger’s disastrous testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform, which was investigating his ties to his brother, along with other allegations of miscellaneous skullduggery. Carr positioned himself directly behind Bulger, so that his head appeared right over Bulger’s shoulder on TV, and spent the entire testimony rolling his eyes and making choking faces for the cameras. Watching that performance, you got the sense that Carr’s already got half of his savage Billy Bulger obituary written, and is just waiting for the “CM” to kick off so he can do what Hunter S. Thompson did to Nixon, and H. L. Mencken did to William Jennings Bryan—namely, kill his ghost before it gets too far from his body. Carr even included a joke along those lines in the index of his book. Under “Bulger, William Michael ‘Billy’ Sr.,” there’s an entry, “demise of,” that points to passages on Bulger bombing at the 1991 St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast and his 2003 appearance before the House committee.

What really makes the fracas interesting is how similar the two men are. Both come from humble beginnings, attained a top-shelf education, and rose to the local apex of their respective fields. Both are immensely intelligent, though given to cheap showmanship—Bulger with his rote Irishness and Carr with his tired fat jokes and gay-baiting. Both have long, long memories and possess unmatched knowledge of the inner workings of Beacon Hill. Both wrote books about Billy Bulger that were praised nationally and panned locally, and both can be very kind and charitable to people, but are reputed to be painfully sensitive to criticism and prone to pettiness and vindictiveness. They could be brothers themselves.

At one point, I ask Bulger if he’s read Carr’s book. “I couldn’t bring myself to look at it,” he says. “I can’t even listen to him. He’s just so evil. All kinds of things—he just makes it up.”

After our State House tour and the episode with the mounted ranger, Bulger goes off to lunch with friends at Locke-Ober. We agree to meet up later for a trip to Castle Island. I wait on a bench on the edge of the Common, and at the appointed hour he comes walking down Tremont, wearing sunglasses and a scally cap and singing the hoary Irish chestnut “Rising of the Moon.” Bulger’s voice is extraordinarily elastic. Normally ultraprecise and articulate in speech, he’ll drop r’s when recounting something a constituent said, or affect a slight singsong brogue when telling funny stories. (“I still remember my mother, she said, ‘When did you become so Irish?’” he says. “I said, ‘Mum, it’s just shtick—it helps with the campaigns.’”) Sometimes Bulger will fill an entire room with his words, and sometimes he’ll speak so quietly you can barely hear him. We both stand there as he finishes the entire song.

“’Tis the rising of the moon

’Tis the rising of the moon

And hurrah, me boys, for freedom

’Tis the rising of the moon!”

Then we descend into the Common parking garage to get into his car, a black Grand Marquis.

On the passenger seat sit a couple of folders. The one on top is for the William M. Bulger Excellence in State Leadership Award, established in 1996 by the State Legislative Leaders Foundation. “They have an award they give out every year, and it’s named after that most humble man,” Bulger jokes. “Get that look of admiration off your face.” The other folder contains copies of some of Carr’s columns and transcripts of his radio show. The documents were assembled in 1990, Bulger says, “to prepare a suit against this nut.” He never went through with it, dissuaded by the expense and the extreme difficulty of a public figure’s winning a libel suit in the United States—a fact he’s railed against for years.