Are they around in any capacity. Im sure this thread has been posted before but i ask for a different reason. I read when howie winter got arrested a few years back for shaking down somebody, he told the victim he was with the north end i believe. Now i have read that the bulger organization was supposedly winterhill gang. But as time went on the bulger crew became cold towards winterhill/Somerville. I read the Somerville crew even started separating themselves as a group. Also the Somerville crew shared rackettes with the lcn and worked almost as a crew for them. While Connelly in bulgers crew put away all the major lcn guys but they used to share with the lcn prior to the arrests then at one point it became all bulgers and gang. Citizen Somerville, rogue mobster, rat bastartds and brutal were the books i read but im sure there are a few massachusetts guys in here. Any insite for a long islander.
What few knew at the time was that Bulger had been an FBI informant since at least 1974. Bulger worked with FBI agent John Connolly, who grew up in South Boston and went to school with Bulger.
Bulger also worked closely with another FBI informer named Stephen Flemmi, also in the Winter Hill Gang, who had first been recruited by the bureau in 1965.
Connolly proudly affirmed his acquisition of high-level informants from the Winter Hill Gang who would help him take down the Italian Mafia. Connolly represented the FBI’s obsession with Italian-American crime families, and Bulger fed a steady stream of information on the Patriarca crime family based in nearby Providence, Rhode Island. Patriarca family members were sometimes allies but often rivals with the Winter Hill Gang, and the FBI essentially sided with the South Boston gang in their competition.
It was later revealed in court that Bulger was not indicted along with his fellow gang members in 1979 because Connolly intervened to protect his informant.
In the early 1980s, Bulger continued to operate the Boston rackets with impunity while he accumulated more experience with murder, including the killing of a completely innocent man who happened to be giving a lift home to one of Bulger’s targets. Bulger, in that murder, was wearing a hat and a long-haired wig when he shot at the car.
In the 1980s, Bulger started shaking down narcotics distributors and supplying weapons to the Irish Republican Army, which was fighting the British government in Northern Ireland. According to biographers, Bulger kept a sort of code around his involvement in narcotics, refusing to allow heroin to come into South Boston, for example. In 1991, Bulger muscled himself into a share of a $14 million winning lottery ticket from the legal lotto, a ticket that was sold in a store he controlled.
