A Run In With Mobster Whitey Bulger

Speckles of blood from the beating of his lifetime sprayed the plastic lined walls in the small room located in the basement of a restaurant. He had been set up, lured there by a rival drug dealer who was trying to beat his capitalistic spirit out of him; the beatings would not stop until he promised to cease his south Boston operations.

The curse words flew from Mark Silverman’s mouth. Fists crashed against his jaw but could not silence him. He was not some soft wannabe street punk. He was tough as nails, a young man from a lower class neighborhood in Winter Hill, Somerville who scraped his way to the top of Boston’s drug trade through sheer force of personality and will. But at some point, balls give way to a body’s pain limitation. The beating finally silenced Silverman.

As he sat tied to a chair in that basement that day, his face swelling and body bruising, he felt a hand grab him by the hair and lift his head up. He opened his eyes the best he could and immediately recognized the man who ordered the beating.

The man paced back and forth in front of Silverman for a few moments, putting on a dramatic show, trying to further intimidate his victim. He stopped in front of Silverman, slapped him in the face and pulled a knife. That knife probably had a list of victims, a list to which Silverman thought he may soon be added. One of the men who had been beating Silverman handed his boss a gun. He shoved it in Silverman’s face and said, “Do you know who I am?”

“Of course I do,” muttered Silverman. “You’re Jim Bulger.”

Jim Bulger … most of America now knows him as “Whitey” Bulger, the Boston kingpin/rat who was recently arrested in Santa Monica, California after 17 years on the lam and who was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character, Frank Costello, in the hit movie The Departed. Bulger is not just a movie character to Silverman, however. He is a man who once almost took his life.

Mark Silverman grew up in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, an area that was notorious for the strength of its organized crime.

He made his first drug deal as a teenager, somewhere between the ages of 15 and 17, but it was not a typical nickel and dime start to a career in drugs. Silverman said his first deal was a sale of 60 pounds, a combination of marijuana and cocaine, and he continued to grow from there.

At the age of 19, Silverman was taken under the wing of Joe McDonald, a senior member of the Winter Hill Gang. McDonald, his brother Leo McDonald and nephew, Joe Donahue, knew Silverman’s father who lived on Marshall Street, a focal point of the Winter Hill Gang, and saw potential in the young hustling Silverman. They hired him as a driver collecting from shylocks and introduced him around town. He continued to deal drugs on the side and the more people the McDonalds introduced him to, the more his side business grew. By the time he was 23 years old he was making deals in the tens of thousands of dollars. His 23rd year was also when he had his near-death run-in with Bulger.

It was a set up from the start, explained Silverman. He said that the elder, more experienced him would have smelled the foul deal a mile away. Dollar signs and power have a way of clouding a young man’s judgment, however.
Silverman was approached by two high profile drug dealers from south Boston who wanted to purchase bulk from him. South Boston was Jim “Whitey” Bulger’s territory, but Silverman did not think twice about saying yes. While Bulger is now an infamous gangster, Silverman was unaware of his power back then. Silverman ran with the McDonalds, after all, and they were close to Bulger. So to Silverman, Bulger was just another one of the guys.

“I was a young cowboy,” laughed Silverman. “I did not know any better.”

He made two deals with the high-profile dealers, paying a runner to do the dirty work both times. Before a third deal could be made, the dealers told Silverman they wanted him to personally make the delivery. They told Silverman that they had a source with the Boston Police Department who informed them that his runner was a rat.

Silverman said he was hesitant to agree to the condition and tried to get them to meet him in Winter Hill, but the dealers kept pushing for him to come to south Boston and kept “sweetening the pot” to the point that he could not say no.

Something did not feel right about the whole situation, so he took a friend and hid a gun in the trunk next to the $22,000 in marijuana he was delivering.

As they drove over the Broadway Bridge into south Boston, both Silverman and his friend realized they were being followed. Their tail was not trying to figure out where they were going; it was there to prevent them from turning around.

When they arrived at the drop, Silverman said he was relieved because it was a restaurant in the middle of the city. Chances were that nothing shady would happen in public, he remembered. One of the buyers met them outside and invited them in for a sandwich. As they walked in, the buyer told Silverman’s associate to sit down and order whatever he wanted while he and Silverman went outside to talk, aka make a deal.

Outside, Silverman popped his trunk and reached for the duffle bag full of marijuana. Before he could pick it up, he was cracked in the skull with a gun. He fell to the ground but still had a lot of fight in him. He began cursing and screaming at the buyer about what he was going to do to him. Unfortunately for Silverman, the buyer had the power; he had the gun. The buyer took the duffle bag, put his gun to Silverman’s head and said that someone wanted to see him.

He escorted him back through the restaurant to a stairway leading into a basement. Silverman cannot remember if he saw his friend or not. He will never forget that basement, however. There were six or seven stairs. The basement was full of restaurant supplies. There were two side rooms splintering off the main room. One was an office. The other was lined with plastic. He was taken to the latter and beaten.

Why was he setup? He was not dealing in Bulger’s territory before Bulger’s men came to him. And why did Bulger spare his life?

“You’ll have to buy my book to find out,” said Silverman.

Once a hustler, always a hustler.

Mark Silverman’s book, Rogue Mobster: The Untold Story of Mark Silverman and the New England Mafia is co-written by St. Pete’s Scott Deitche. It will be released in February 2012.

For more information about the book visit, www.scottdeitche.com

BULGER’S TAMPA BAY CONNECTION

Whitey Bulger had some ties to the Tampa Bay area. In 1993, Bulger purchased a condo in the Bayside Gardens II development on Sand Key.   After Bulger fled Boston and went on the lam in 1995, sightings of him poured into the FBI from across the country, including Florida. They dispatched surveillance teams out to Sand Key, as well as agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to watch out for the fugitive gangster.

Whitey also had an account at a Clearwater Barnett Bank where he kept cash and fake identification papers in a safe deposit box. After he went on the run, he visited the bank and cleared out his safe deposit box, but left his account open. The local Boston Fox news station recently disclosed that the account still had about $4000 in it, and is listed as abandoned property with the state of Massachusetts.

Cigar City – Issue 35 – November 2011