It would take another decade before the code of silence began to break, when victims’ groups would sprout up and begin pushing back against the Bulger tide, when social workers would hit the streets to take hold of the neighborhood kids and urge them to quit snorting coke and shooting up the heroin, when former addicts would stand up. There was the Southie eighteen-year-old who openly described how he hadn’t seen his dad in eight years, how his mother had died from an overdose, how he’d even tried once to hang himself in the hallway of his project. But after all that, he actually considered himself lucky: he hadn’t shot up in fourteen months. There was a nineteen-year-old named Chris who described his seven years lost to drugs—a spiral that began with booze and pot, then LSD, coke, and heroin. He’d served time but was now determined to go straight. “There’s nothing out there for me if I go back, nothing but a grave with my name on it.” Patrick, a thirty-nine-year-old recovering addict, talked about the slippery slope that teen junkies followed: “When they’re fourteen or fifteen, they start out snorting it. They’ll say, ‘I’d never stick a needle in my arm.’ Then, once they do that, they’ll say, ‘I’ll never use a dirty needle.’ Before long they’ll use a rusty nail to get high.”
The thaw was not only about recovery. Too often there was bad news. Shawn T. “Rooster” Austin, a twenty-four-year-old who’d grown up in Old Colony, was found dead one morning in a rooming house from a suspected drug overdose. The empty bag of heroin and a syringe without a needle were discovered near the corpse. “I can remember him as a little boy on his bike,” said a tenant at Old Colony, adding that she’d seen Rooster just a few weeks earlier. “He was saying that all his friends were dying, that all he was doing was going to wakes. Now, to think....” Patricia Murray, a twenty-nine-year-old Southie woman, was a high school dropout and a hard-core heroin addict when she was picked up on prostitution charges in the late 1980s. “Do you think I like going out on the street?” she said at the time, her thin legs covered in a maze of sores. “Well, I don’t.”
But in the 1990s, for the first time, people were fighting back. Michael McDonald, who also grew up in the Old Colony project and would later write a best-selling memoir about life in Southie, founded the South Boston Vigil Group. Drugs had ripped apart his family, and two brothers died playing with the fire that Whitey stoked. “There’s a lot of pain in this neighborhood that’s been ignored by us,” he once said. “If you look at this community the way you look at an addict, we’re at the stage where the addict admits he has a problem.”
Former addicts like Leo Rull emerged as frontline troopers in Southie’s new war on drugs. Back when he was eighteen in the mid-1980s, he was heavy into angel dust and coke, and a decade later he described himself as “a man on a mission,” trying to save the lives of a new generation of project kids, at times rushing those who’d overdosed in alleyways to emergency rooms and then counseling them afterward. Rull worked for an agency with a federal grant that was trying to break the cycle of poverty and drugs in the poorest sections of Southie and Roxbury, an ironic pairing given their past animosity. During busing one of the Southie chants had been that Roxbury was plagued with troubles not found in the neighborhood whose twenty-nine thousand residents—and especially its pols—saw it as the best and most blessed place to live.
Later in the 1990s the city of Boston was planning to open the state’s first detox and treatment center geared exclusively for adolescent drug users. Inside the former rectory at St. Monica’s Church at the rotary near Whitey Bulger’s liquor mart, Catholic Charities had opened Home for Awhile, a halfway house with a dozen beds for boys aged fourteen to eighteen sent on referrals from the South Boston courthouse or detox centers.
Even if some believed that blacks and busing were the twin forces killing the neighborhood, that wasn’t the whole of it—one of their own was at it too. Southie had suffered in Whitey’s hands. This was the reality that Bergeron knew, that DEA agents knew, that state troopers knew, that drug dealers all around knew. If you wanted to supply Southie, one dealer later told an undercover DEA agent, “you either pay Whitey Bulger or you don’t deal or you end up dead.”
But back in the 1980s these were truths the old neighborhood was reluctant to confront. Instead, everyday people clung to the notion that Whitey was their protector. More powerful than any politician, he could police and preserve. To think this way gave them a lift; the ache for a protector had never been greater than after busing, when much of Boston and even the nation unfairly looked down on Southie as a racist, backwater town. Whitey might rarely be seen, but his presence was palpable and, for many, a source of comfort. He might even send flowers or contribute to the funeral expenses of a family who’d lost a member to drugs or violence. He had the right touch that way—sticking to the shadows. His hands were clean. Drugs and prostitution might be “a way of life in other sections of the city, but they will not be tolerated in South Boston,” the South Boston Information Center boldly declared in one of its newsletters, even as crime statistics showed that the neighborhood was just like any other in the city—awash in drugs. Yearly drug arrests were tripling in Southie between 1980 and 1990. Narcotics cases doubled in South Boston District Court from 1985 to 1990, and one Boston police detective said he thought there was more coke in Southie per capita than anywhere else in Boston. In the end the neighborhood’s personality—its reserve and deep mistrust of outsiders—simply served Whitey all the more.
But just as the neighborhood was in denial, the FBI in Boston did not want to know the true story about drugs and Bulger and the forgotten casualties like Patricia Murray. Circulating instead on the streets of Southie and in the corridors of the FBI was a warm, do-good version of Whitey: Whitey hated drugs, hated drug dealers, and did his best to make Southie a drug-free zone.
It was a classic collision of reality and myth.
THE anti-drug Whitey Bulger was always one of the most stubborn and durable stories about the crime boss. It was a position that Bulger, along with John Connolly, staked out by using a linguistic sleight of hand. To the self-styled moral gangster, drug money was separate from the drugs themselves. He could extort “rent” from dealers, loan them money to get them started, and demand that they buy from wholesalers with whom he and Flemmi were associated. He’d make the world safe for drug dealers in return for a piece of the action, but he didn’t personally cut the coke or bag the marijuana. That distinction became the basis for the Bulger ballyhoo: Bulger didn’t do drugs.