New England Cable News - ICYMI: The Freshman Democrat Who Took on the Bulgers

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Watch a young Bill Keating take on the powerful pair

The legends of The Bulger Brothers

By Peter Howe

Beyond all his criminal exploits and alleged 19 murders, what's made James "Whitey" Bulger an inspiration for novels and movies was who his brother was for two decades of his criminal reign: former Massachusetts Senate President William M. Bulger.

The latter Bulger, who served as Senate president from 1978 through 1996 and later as president of the University of Massachusetts, was for many of those years considered the single most powerful man in state government, able to outfox and stymie even governors and bend them to his will.

That Bill Bulger's older brother was also the reputed Irish mob boss in Boston in those years, and secretly a well-protected FBI informant helping the FBI decimate the mafia in Boston, in many ways only magnified his power. There has never been a formal allegation the Bulger brothers colluded, but it's fair to say, the brothers' legends only fueled each other's power. "What one does with a gun," a common Boston saying of the 1980s and 1990s went, "the other does with a gavel." To many the aroma of Whitey's menace only added to Bill's legislative might.

Now-Congressman Bill Keating in 1993-4 staged the only challenge to Bill Bulger's iron Senate rule, leading a statewide effort to recruit senators committed to ousting Bulger as president. Thursday, his principal reaction to Whitey's arrest was as a former district attorney, pleased to see the fugitive brought to justice. But he could still recall "the intimidation factor that was there" because of Whitey challenging Bill. He also remembers a 1994 run-in with a heckler during his state Senate campaign -- someone he is certain to this day was Whitey Bulger. (It's described by Boston Herald columnist and WRKO talkmeister Howie Carr in his 2006 book, "The Brothers Bulger: How they terrorized and corrupted Boston for a quarter century.") "Now," Keating said, "there's a sense of justice."

Boston attorney Warren Tolman, who campaigned for state Senate in 1994 as part of the Keating group, said it's important to remember that in the early 1990s, Whitey Bulger was only a reputed mobster, not an indicted killer and subject of several books depicting him as a sociopathic killer.

"There were rumors about what Whitey was engaging in, but he hadn't been charged yet, and he hadn't run away yet," Tolman said, adding that where some people perceived Bill Bulger as gaining extra power from fear of his mobster brother, to others, it was the stark contrast between the two brothers that made Bill Bulger's rise from the Southie projects to the pinnacle of Beacon Hill all the more remarkable and awe-inspiring. "In some respects, it raised William Bulger," Tolman said. "Here's the good brother -- and Whitey was clearly not the good brother."

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