Joe Moakley's Journey: From South Boston to El Salvador

13. Return to Santa Marta

225 13 H H H H H Return to Santa Marta Amonth after his hip replacement surgery, Joe Moakley celebrated Bill Clinton’s second inauguration and the swearing-in of freshmen Jim McGovern, Bill Delahunt, and John Tierney in the new Congress. During this session, Moakley would return to El Salvador, where he was hailed as a hero in Santa Marta. In Cuba he would participate in a historic papal Mass, and meet Fidel Castro again. As they took their oaths, no member of the 105th Congress could imagine that they would conclude the session by voting on the impeachment of a president. H H H Moakley’s primary concerns always lay in his district. Two days after the inauguration, Paul P. J. Rakauskas, a teenager from the Old Colony project , died of a drug overdose. Over the past decade, South Boston had lost about two hundred young people to a plague of guns, drugs, and suicide. This wasn’t supposed to happen in South Boston, a neighborhood that prided itself on family values and neighborhood solidarity.1 Some version of P. J.’s tragic story had been taking place in workingclass communities across the nation since the 1980s. A wave of deindustrialization reduced the number of good jobs that formerly made home ownership attainable for millions. In the Boston metropolitan area the Framingham auto plant, the Quincy and Boston shipyards, and a plethora of midsize machine shops closed their doors. Sheet metal work was no longer a path to a good union job. Some young people reoriented their careers toward the new industries in high-tech manufacturing, software development , or the medical services that had made the region prosperous in the 1990s. Many young men got good jobs on the construction projects —the Big Dig, the downtown skyscrapers, or the new Orange Line— 226 H joe moakley’s journey that were reshaping the face of the city. Thousands of South Boston and Dorchester residents moved out to suburban towns and started happy families. Others did not, and some of their kids felt as though they had no future; the phrase became a slogan for a generation of punk rockers. South Boston, however, had an additional problem that its equivalent neighborhoods did not have. Its resistance to busing in the 1970s had been predicated on the notion that it was a uniquely virtuous community of hard-working people, living by honest moral values. Their resistance to busing intensified the feeling that one couldn’t trust outsiders, who didn’t understand them. A bunker mentality set in, especially among those who felt abandoned by even their own politicians. South Boston tried not to notice that teenagers like P. J. Rakauskas were killing themselves . It didn’t fit the narrative. South Boston’s drug trade had another unique wrinkle. The leader of its criminal underworld pretended to be the man who kept drugs out of the neighborhood. In fact, he made his money by extorting drug dealers. This was James “Whitey” Bulger, whose younger brother, William, was the state Senate president. Joe Moakley and his brothers knew Jimmy and Billy as boys; even as young teenagers they could see that the elder brother was dangerously violent. James Bulger was sent to Alcatraz in the 1950s, and after a long stint in prison he returned to Boston and became the leader of the Irish mob; their antagonists were the North End–based Italians. By the early 1980s, people who crossed Bulger started getting killed, or disappearing. People whispered that the powerful good brother was somehow protecting the bad one. The truth turned out to be much worse. James Bulger had taken into his camp an fbi agent, John Connolly, a Southie kid who had looked up to him as a boy; Connolly in turn convinced his boss to sign Bulger up as an informant against the Italian Cosa Nostra. This was the ultimate story of neighborhood loyalty trumping the principles of law; under the fbi’s protection, Bulger committed nineteen murders. When the scheme finally unraveled, the newspapers reported the unbelievable—“Whitey” Bulger had been an fbi informant, as he fled one step ahead of the state police, whose investigations the fbi had stymied for decades. Bulger wasn’t caught until 2011. The story ranks among the worst scandals in fbi and U.S. law enforcement history.2 Joe Moakley had seen the same pattern in El Salvador, whose military return...