The Brother Bulger

Bulger believes the animosity he inspires in Carr comes from his refusal to play the game with the columnist. “I’ve never spoken to him in my life,” he says. “I refuse to speak to him, and it drives him to distraction. He’s got all kinds of people who come in through the back door, doing business with him, telling him things about people that might embarrass someone, and that’s fine, that’s a way of doing business. I don’t like it, and I won’t be a part of it.”

“Obviously, his memory has not improved since the Congressional hearings,” quips Carr. “Of course I’ve spoken to him.” (Carr tells a story from his TV reporting days, when he was covering a party for a book of State House recipes. “I went down with my camera crew and asked him, ‘What’s your favorite recipe in the book, Mister President?’ Surrounded by his rumpswabs, he thought a moment and replied, ‘Roast reporter.’ ‘Really?’ I replied. ‘I would have thought it would be strawberry shortcake.’”)

Halfway to Southie, while stopped at a red light by South Station, Bulger rolls down the window and yells to a grizzled Herald hawker by the roadside. “Hey, Mister Bulger!” the guy calls back. “I’m broke out here. It’s horrible out here.”

“You’re a good man. Okay, kid.”

“Us Eastie guys,” the guy yells as we pull away, “we’re all right, too, you know!”

“Poor kid,” Bulger says to me. “I give him a hard time all the time. I say, ‘What kind of misinformation are you giving the public?’ You couldn’t joke with a reporter like that. They take themselves too seriously.”

While in the Senate, Bulger continually baited the press. Though he now tells his Suffolk and BC students, “I wouldn’t recommend it,” he maintains that for him, it was the “price of independence.” It also had a strategic value, as his constituents already resented the Globe for its staunch pro-busing stance in the ’70s. “You can use it in a demagogic fashion,” he says. Another benefit of his sour relationship with the press, perhaps intentional, perhaps not, was that it let him easily dismiss anything written about him—right or wrong—as the product of media bias. And this could be done with relative impunity.

But as the feud with Carr illustrates, the price of independence might have been higher than he imagined. At this point, the image of Bulger many Bostonians hold is the one that’s most readily available, Carr’s: Billy the tinpot tyrant, the sanctimonious fraud. This puts Bulger in an awkward position. He often says he’s proud that he never kowtowed to the media, and he clearly enjoyed goading reporters (in 1993, in response to a query about term limits, he referenced the Roman essayist Juvenal, and then asked if the reporter wanted the quote in Latin or English). Yet he’s nonetheless angry at the treatment this approach ultimately got him.

“It’s not rational, perhaps,” he says. “But what happens every now and again, I say, ‘Every one of these sons of bitches in the press, they all know what a lying son of a gun [Carr] is, and not one word.’ There’s a huge amount of misinformation being spewed out, and these guys that are supposed to be the newspaper of record....” He trails off. “It doesn’t make sense for me to get angry at all, but I do.”