Whitey by Dick Lehr

Author:Dick Lehr [Lehr, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-98654-2
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

In this combustible atmosphere, Whitey Bulger may have backed off from street violence but he hardly retreated. Like most hard-liners in Southie, he brimmed with disdain for the Boston Globe, based two miles from South Boston High. The newspaper was also implacable about busing, but on the other side. On the street, its editorials supporting the court order symbolized the unshared burden of Southie’s struggle.

The daily violence at South Boston soon spilled over to the Globe, which had major highways at its front and back. Night riders put bullet holes in windows on both sides, most symbolically in the large glass façade in front of its presses. Police put sharpshooters on the paper’s roof.

No one was ever arrested for the shootings but Whitey confided to his onetime Winter Hill associate Johnny Martorano that he was the one who fired at the Globe. With ironic inadvertence, he may have helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize for public service.

Bill Bulger, who had moved up the state Senate leadership ladder, also boiled over about busing toward the end of the fraught first year, when tempers were frayed to the nub and the middle ground had dissolved. One morning after police had arrested demonstrators outside of a school, Bulger arrived and denounced the police for overreacting.

The diminutive Bulger confronted the strapping police commissioner, Robert diGrazia, and railed against “Gestapo” tactics and spun on his heel to march away. A weary diGrazia yelled after him that none of the protests would be necessary if politicians had had the “balls” to deal with desegregation when it first became an issue.

Infuriated, Bulger raced back toward the police commissioner and jumped off the ground to get in his face: “Go fuck yourself.” Bill Bulger, the scholar who loved to quote the classics, put a guttural coda on a lawless year.

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