They were all around the area back in the day. We used to refer to it as “Pukin’ Pot”, for obvious reasons.
I wound up hearing parts of the show that day via podcast (and I think I still have those podcasts from the day on my netbook..)
Howie Carr My heroine of the day is Margaret King, the 68-year-old widow of former Mullen gangster Tommy King.
Whitey Bulger had her husband murdered in 1975, and buried his body under the Neponset River bridge. So she went looking for Whitey at Triple O’s, his bucket of blood in the Lower End.
“I talked to Mr. Bulger, down at Triple O’s,” she was saying yesterday in Courtroom 11. “He was getting into a car.”
The prosecutor asked her, Why would she go to Whitey?
“They worked together.”
She asked Whitey, Where is my husband?
“He said, ‘Probably in Canada, robbing banks, which is what he wanted to do.’ ”
The prosecutor asked, “Did you believe him?”
"No."
And how exactly did Whitey, who, as his pal Stevie Flemmi would say, never had very good relationships with women, take this confrontation with a … broad?
“I’m sure he was a little agitated that I would even bother him, because I was quite upset.”
Tommy King’s fatal mistake was being tougher than Whitey Bulger. Thus, he had to go. Trying to convince his Winter Hill partners to go along with eliminating King, Whitey came up with one bogus reason after another for clipping King. His final one was that King had gone “kill crazy.”
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Witnesses have said Whitey was determined to get rid of the “kill-crazy” King, by shooting him and burying him under the Neponset River bridge. Part two of the plan was to murder King’s pal Francis Xavier “Buddy” Leonard, then leave Leonard’s corpse in King’s car. That way, it looked like King killed his pal and screwed.
Of course Margaret King didn’t believe it.
Fred Wyshak, the prosecutor, asked her: “Did you ever see your husband again?”
“No.”
King was the Mullens’ toughest guy. Back in the early 1960s, he and a couple of other Southie guys robbed a pharmacy in Newton. Everyone escaped except Tommy King. The Newton cops wanted the other guys, so from his jail cell King offered to fight the toughest cop. If he lost, he’d give up the other Southie guys. If he beat the toughest cop, they had to let him go.
Tommy King won. The cops freed him. It was a different time.
Years later, in 1975, King was called in on a hit. He was told they needed to kill Alan “Suitcase” Fidler, a bit player in Billy Bulger’s little book, “While the Music Lasts.” King didn’t trust Whitey, so he wore a bulletproof vest. Didn’t do him any good, because Johnny Martorano shot him in the head.
“I felt terrible,” Johnny said.
But not as terrible as Tommy King felt.