The Great Whitey Hope

Though half of Hollywood is moving in on his territory, local screenwriter Kevin Doyle hopes to make a gangland killing

by Chris Wright

AT FIRST GLANCE, Kevin Doyle doesn't strike you as the Hollywood type. Doyle's not glamorous. He's not connected. He's not a household name -- unless, that is, the household happens to be the Medford two-family where Doyle lives. Sitting and sipping espresso in a local coffee shop, Doyle certainly doesn't sound like Hollywood material.

"I could be the greatest hero or the biggest asshole that ever lived," he says, "for ever believing that I could make it in the movie industry."

And he has reason to be concerned. From his modest little rental unit in suburban Boston, the 56-year-old Milton native is rolling up his sleeves and preparing to go head to head with the biggest names in Hollywood -- Redford, Cruise, Baldwin -- in the race to bring Boston's roiling gangland to the screen.

"I was seduced," he says.

That is, like so many others, Doyle has been seduced by the mystique surrounding Boston's most notorious underworld figure: Whitey Bulger. Or maybe not quite seduced.

"My beloved Boston has been soiled and besmirched by this fucking jerk," he says. "And there's gotta be some reason for it, to justify the foulness of it all. You put shit in the ground, you can make a beautiful rose bush grow. I'd like to see something beautiful grow from this absolute cesspool."

That something is, Doyle hopes, his first and only screenplay: The Informant, an unflattering look at the life and times of James J. "Whitey" Bulger. "Beautiful," though, might not be quite the right word. Doyle's screenplay makes Whitey out to be as cowardly as he is brutal, as deviant as he is devious, and as egregious in breaking the criminal code as he is pitiless in enforcing it.

"This fucking guy," says Doyle. "There's only a handful of people who know him for the louse that he is."

KEVIN DOYLE hasn't always been such a devout Whitey basher. Until recently, he spent his days at the helm of Doyle Studio Press, publishing such relatively sedate titles as The Boston Fish Pier Cookbook, Donovan's Science of Boxing, and Dating Younger Women, which Doyle wrote himself. In fact, writing a Whitey screenplay wasn't even Doyle's idea. "Bankers came to me," he says. " `Whitey Bulger script, big money. No one could write the script like you. Kevin Doyle is the only one who can write this.' "

Having grown up on the periphery of the South Boston underworld, Doyle may be as qualified as anyone to write about its most famous figure. But he's certainly not the only one who's trying. Doyle's included, there are currently at least a half-dozen fledgling efforts to bring Whitey to the screen. While the shadowy, baseball-cap-wearing crime boss continues to elude the FBI, half of Hollywood has joined in the chase.

"It's a fascinating story," says Sonny Grosso, a New York producer who's working on his own Bulger project. "I don't think people ever put hand to mouth and start yawning when they're talking about Whitey."

No kidding. Here's the synopsis: Irish kid from the projects of Southie matures from small-time hood to full-time thief. Polite to old ladies and loyal to his neighborhood, "Whitey" Bulger nonetheless emerges as a ruthless and prolific criminal. Arrested for bank robbery, Whitey spends nine years in the can, three of them at Alcatraz, where he reads Machiavelli and lifts weights. In a bid to reduce his sentence, he volunteers to take LSD in a series of dodgy CIA experiments, suffering chronic psychic reverberations as a result.

After his release from prison, despite the pesky flashbacks and night sweats, Whitey orchestrates a bloody crime war, rising to the top of the Southie underworld. Later on, he moonlights as an informer for the FBI, ratting out his rivals and paving the way for the decimation of the local Italian mob. In return, the FBI allows Whitey to go about his business unfettered, with the stipulation that he refrain from murdering anyone. Underworld struggles rage, and the body count rises as quickly as Whitey's stock. Much of the violence is attributed to Whitey's associate, Johnny Martorano.

All the while, Whitey's brother, Billy Bulger, enjoys a 17-year stint as Massachusetts Senate president, emerging as one of the most powerful politicians in the state's history. Whitey seems to have it made, particularly after he has the good fortune (yeah, right) to win $1.9 million in the lottery.

Then his world falls apart. The FBI turns on him, indicts him for racketeering. Tipped off, Whitey vanishes, setting out on a nebulous, perpetual cross-country trip.

As details of Whitey's murderous career emerge, snitches snitch on snitches, disgraced FBI agents finger other disgraced FBI agents. Whitey is put on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, a $250,000 bounty is slapped on his head, and still he remains at large. Only Elvis and the yeti can rival him for alleged sightings. Add a supporting cast of psychotic hit men, partisan columnists, and feckless cops, and you've got the makings of a sleazy epic on your hands.

"It's a very complex story," says Sonny Grosso. "Every time you turn around there's another curve." Then he adds, "I think you might be able to tell a story here."

GROSSO, ONE of the real-life cops who inspired The French Connection, certainly hopes so. He's recruited the director of that film, William Friedkin, for his own Whitey project. He's also hoping to get Cambridge hunk Matt Damon to star. And the screenplay for Grosso's film will come from none other than John Connolly, the FBI agent who led Whitey into the world of snitchdom.

An addition to Grosso, there's Robert Redford's Wildwood Enterprises, which has bought the rights to a recent George article by Mike Barnicle and Peter Maas, author of Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia (HarperCollins). According to Lisa Bellomo, Wildwood's vice-president of development and production, Redford has expressed an interest in directing and/or starring in the film.

And there are more. Tom Cruise has funded a project by Murder in the First director Mark Rocco. LA producer Chris Lawford and Alec Baldwin have teamed up and are shopping for a script, as is Ted Demme, director of Monument Ave. And Francis "Cadillac Frank" Salemme's lawyer, Anthony Cardinale, reportedly declined to look at another hopeful's screenplay on the advice of his "agent."

And then there's Kevin Doyle, playing David to an entire platoon of Goliaths. "I'm not worried," Doyle says. "I think I've got the best script."

What makes it the best? "I have a unique perspective," he says.

The question is, will that be enough to overcome the Hollywood clout of his rivals?

THERE'S A scene in Steve Martin's recent movie Bowfinger where a struggling producer walks into a swank LA eatery, plants himself within earshot of a Hollywood powerbroker, and starts blathering loudly into a cellular phone, wheeling and dealing with a nonexistent movie star on the other end. What the producer doesn't realize is that the phone -- which he has ripped out of a car -- still has a wire dangling from it. The powerbroker is suitably unimpressed.

The scene highlights the classic Hollywood Catch-22: you can't get investment money without the talent, and you can't get the talent without the money. This is the bind that Kevin Doyle currently finds himself in.

"I could sit down right now with Woody Harrelson, Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin," Doyle says, fiddling with his espresso cup. "I could go to LA right now and attach those guys on the strength of the script and my personality. But in order to do that, it takes development money." What this boils down to is that Doyle needs "a couple hundred grand" to go to LA and buy people breakfast. Not so easy when, as Doyle says, "I can't even take the subway."

But there is hope. For one thing, Doyle has Mark Hankey on his side. Hankey -- who proved his mettle on Next Stop Wonderland and Monument Ave. -- is one of the hottest line producers (basically a movie midwife) around. He says he is "pretty hopeful" that he can help get Doyle's project off the ground. "He's certainly devoted his life to it," says Hankey. "He's dropped everything else, he's given his time and devotion. He's a never-say-die kind of guy."

As every producer knows, however, the road to Hollywood is dotted with the bones of never-say-die kind of guys like Kevin Doyle.

Yes, well, says Hankey, "I think he has a unique perspective."

DOYLE'S ASSOCIATION with Whitey & Co. dates to 1954, when Doyle was taking part in a youth-boxing competition. "I had somehow managed to survive two two-minute rounds," he says, "and afterward this guy came up to me. I can only say my 12-year-old instincts told me this is Count Dracula. He tried to put $5 into my pocket and I shrank from him. My instincts told me there's something wrong with this guy. This is a wrong, wrong guy. A seriously sick fucking guy."

The seriously sick fucking guy was Whitey Bulger.

The following year Doyle saw Whitey again, working out at a local gym. His adolescent instincts notwithstanding, Doyle found himself enthralled, and though he still didn't like the look of the man who was vaulting the horse with "jerky, spastic" moves, Doyle approached him anyway, asking the kinds of dumb questions that kids ask: "What do you do? Where are you from?"

"Whitey said to me, `Remember these three words and you'll never go broke,' " Doyle recalls. "I said, `What's that?' He said, `Stick 'em up.' "

That was the last conversation he and Whitey had. But over the years, says Doyle, "My life was intruded on peripherally by these slobs" -- most notably in 1975, when, says Doyle, Johnny Martorano murdered Doyle's friend Eddie Connors. (Since this interview, Martorano has confessed to the killing.) "[Whitey] sent that murdering weasel over to kill Connors," Doyle says. "He was a beautiful guy. I was pissed."

And he patently still is. He especially deplores the whole heroic myth that's grown up around Whitey. "He was not out there swashbuckling and pulling triggers," Doyle says. "He was manipulating, whispering, telling stories and starting shit."

When he's in the midst of a Whitey tirade, Doyle can seemingly go a full minute without taking a breath. At one point, when it is suggested that a lot of his Whitey criticism is based on rumor, he all but leaps out of his seat. What really gets Doyle going, even more than Whitey, are Whitey apologists.

"Whitey's a bully and a coward," he says. "A bully coward rat."

That's not how he's traditionally been portrayed. Even those who don't buy into the Whitey-as-working-class-hero nonsense at least paint a picture of a robust, clever, and efficient crime boss. This attitude was exemplified by Mike Barnicle, who routinely wrote things like, "Believe me, it's not all ice cream and sweet dreams for Jimmy Bulger. Someone is always after his behind and his job. He's always the subject of some hostile takeover." As recently as last year Barnicle wrote, "Jimmy Bulger . . . was dangerous because he could think." Just the use of the name "Jimmy" -- Whitey reportedly hates being called Whitey -- suggests friendly familiarity.

Every now and then, Doyle will show traces of a grudging respect for Whitey, but these are quickly suppressed. "In a way he had that Machiavellian genius," Doyle says, "in that he could move dumb slugs around. And there were plenty of dumb slugs. You give Whitey a couple hundred dumb slugs who can't think for themselves, and you give Whitey a publicist at the Boston Globe" -- he means Barnicle -- "who says Whitey's a genius and he's a chess player and he's a Robin Hood who keeps drugs out of South Boston and he's good for the city and he keeps things in line and he keeps the peace. You give him a corrupt columnist and a couple hundred dumb slugs and Whitey's in action. And that's what he had."

Needless to say, Doyle is not a big fan of Mike Barnicle. "Barnicle is basically a gangster groupie," he says. "He might even have believed the shit he wrote, but if you're looking for bullshit, read Barnicle's articles about Whitey." Then he adds, leaning across the table, "If Barnicle hadn't foisted that shit on us, I honestly believe that there'd be a hundred people alive today."

But Barnicle was not the only one who bought in to the myth. Half of South Boston saw Whitey as a hard-nosed folk hero. As Globe columnist James Carroll recently pointed out, Governor William Weld himself regaled St. Patrick's Day roasts with rollicking songs about the gangster's exploits.

And then, of course, there's Whitey. "He honestly feels -- 'cause he is, of course, delusional and grandiose -- Whitey Bulger actually believes that he is a heroic member of American society," Doyle says, "that he deserves someday to have a statue of himself in Boston."

IF WHITEY was able to pull the wool over people's eyes, it was decidedly more difficult for his henchman Johnny Martorano, who, according to Doyle, had "thug" written all over him before he was out of short pants.

Doyle first met the teenage Martorano in 1959, when Martorano and his brother Jimmy moved to Doyle's Milton neighborhood. "In those days," Doyle says, "Milton was an insular little community. I was big news because I had figured out a way to get beer when I was 16, and I could get girls, and I could play sports. I was a minor celebrity." Or was, says Doyle, until the Martoranos moved to town and stole his thunder.

"They plundered my popularity," he says. "They had access to drugs, they claimed to be murderers, their father was a gangster who wore a Homburg and smoked a big cigar, they could play football like nobody's business, they had blue beards, they were grown men with hairy chests when they were teenagers. They were unbelievable physical specimens."

They were also unbelievably violent, says Doyle. John in particular was already in full possession of the sociopathy that would send him rocketing to the top of the Boston underworld. Doyle remembers one young man who had the misfortune of being Martorano's girlfriend's ex-boyfriend.

"Every chance Martorano got he would give the guy a beating," Doyle says. "Not a playful beating, not a Milton beating where you don't hit a guy when he's down. Not a Gene Autrey beating where you never hit a man smaller than you. He'd give him a vicious, inner-city, kick-him-in-the-head, hospitalize-him beating. Martorano put that guy almost to death on at least one occasion."

Doyle says that his first impressions of Martorano were marked by a mixture of fear and fascination. As the years went by, fear and fascination merged. "When I went drinking," Doyle says. "I had an irresistible urge to go provoke him.

"In the '60s, it was a rite of manhood to go out and needle Martorano, antagonize him, and then leave without getting murdered. It was a rite of passage: `I ran the Marathon. I needled Martorano.' "

Doyle recalls one such occasion when he went too far. "Martorano had his hand on the butt of his pistol," he says. "He went for his gun." Only the intervention of a local underworld figure kept Doyle from an intimate encounter with the wrath of Martorano. "After that," Doyle says, "he would spit on the ground -- ptoo! `That Irish bastard' -- and say he was gonna kill me."

Furthermore, Doyle says, Martorano tried to recruit allies against him with a fib. "He said I called him an ignorant guinea," Doyle explains, "when in fact I called him an ignorant motherfucker."

Doyle still shows contempt for the man he calls a "malevolent meathead murderer," an "inarticulate, brooding, subhuman lowlife," and a "heavy-lidded, horrible, grotesque zombie." Doyle is particularly annoyed at the media's current portrayal of Martorano as "the very capable mob hit man." Johnny Martorano, says Doyle, "was much closer to Ted Bundy and John Gacy than he was to Sammy `the Bull' Gravano. He was a real ghoul, a serial killer."

A LOT of this stuff is conventional wisdom among Boston crime-watchers. But if Doyle is often going over old ground, the sheer intensity of his scorn, not to mention his brass balls, makes it all seem, um, interesting. Indeed, listening to Doyle riff on some of the toughest, meanest, most vindictive characters -- living characters -- in Boston gangland lore, you don't know whether to laugh or run away. Columnists like Howie Carr are quick to heap scorn on Whitey, but there are few who will come out, like Doyle, and call the man a "devil monkey".

Isn't Doyle afraid that these guys -- Johnny, Whitey -- might come and get him? Or at least get their friends to get him?

The answer is a categorical nope.

"Whitey's an old man," Doyle says. "He hasn't got friends. He betrayed the IRA, so the IRA wants to kill him. The FBI would be delighted if the IRA did kill him. The Irish hate him -- he put hundreds of Irishmen either in graves or in prison. The Italians he put in the can hate him. Who would Whitey's friends be that I would be afraid of?"

And what about Martorano? "Martorano was determined to kill me 25 years ago and he was unsuccessful," Doyle says. "He's going to jail now, he's being labeled a rat. Is that gonna make him more able to kill me? I don't think so. I'm not concerned about being on Martorano's kill list. I think his skills as a murderer have eroded.

"If anything, I'd like him to try it. It would only help the movie."

HELP IS most definitely what Doyle's movie needs. Nine months after he got involved in the Whitey business, Doyle's entire future hinges on a 95-page script and a postcard-size sign taped to the mailbox of a house in Medford, the world headquarters of his Studio Films. Not exactly bankable assets -- and Doyle knows it. Which helps explain why he's more concerned about fickle financiers than he is about the murderous Martorano.

"I'm just waiting to hear on all these money men," he says. "I've been seduced, seduced and abandoned a hundred times." His manic energy suddenly subdued, Doyle adds, "Maybe I should have minded my own business." Then he falls silent.

The script is the most flamboyant -- and the most consuming -- in a history of Kevin Doyle projects. If it fails, it might be crushing, but it won't be the first failure. Doyle's earliest stab at making money in the art world -- painting pictures of New England scenes -- was a colossal flop.

"I was really prolific," Doyle says. "I knocked out a lot of canvases. But unfortunately a lot of them weren't that hot. So I'd paint over my crummy canvases. I'd throw down splashes of color and do portraits of Indians and clowns."

It was a happy accident with the clowns that led to Doyle's first art-world coup. "One time I decided to draw tears coming down this happy clown's face," he says. "Someone said, `What's that?' and I said, `A Tragic Belgian Clown.' " He has no idea where the "Belgian" part came from, but it worked. "The tugboat scenes and landscapes didn't sell, so I'd throw a clown on them," he says. "I literally sold hundreds of Tragic Belgian Clowns."

Later, Doyle parlayed this success into a thriving art studio on Long Wharf. When his stock was destroyed by a burst water pipe, Doyle moved on to Faneuil Hall, where he sold Johnny Appleseed apple pies and Faneuil Fannies -- women's underwear with a stencil, by Doyle, of Faneuil Hall on the tush. "For some reason," he says, "Faneuil Fannies were a big hit."

Indeed, they were such a hit that Doyle fielded offers from Harvard and MIT to impart his marketing savvy to business majors. "I was earning more per square foot than any than any other retailer in Quincy Market, and Quincy Market earned more per square foot than any other retail operation arguably in the world. So," Doyle says, "I could lay claim to being the greatest retailer in the world."

Greatest retailer in the world or no, Doyle grew bored. After flirting with newspaper publishing, he moved to Vermont. "I said fuck writing, fuck painting," he says. "I'm getting a hammer, a ladder, and a pick-up truck, and I'm going roofing." Fifteen years later, Doyle commanded "a fleet of trucks, 40 people." Then he got his first break in publishing. "I published place mats," he says. He also launched his own line of postcards depicting -- yep -- New England scenes.

Three years ago, Doyle returned to Boston and plunged into publishing in earnest. A trade paperback of Treasure Island sold very well in England, Doyle says, while How To Marry Money enjoyed good domestic sales. "I'm a successful publisher with eight titles," he adds. "I'm hot." Or, more accurately, was hot. You can see this thought occurring to Doyle as he tink tink tinks his coffee cup on the tabletop and watches the Medford traffic crawl by.

"I've gambled everything," he says. "I'm broke. I'm past the point of no return."

TO MAKE matters worse, not everyone in Hollywood sees Whitey Bulger as the Holy Grail that Doyle does. Actor-producer (and Kennedy cousin) Chris Lawford, who reportedly has an interest in making a Whitey film, pooh-poohs the idea of a Whitey flick as a sure thing.

"It's a huge, huge challenge," Lawford says. "Only a few people could come up with an interesting take on it. Otherwise, it's gonna be a bad TV movie." Lawford will neither confirm nor deny his own interest in bringing Whitey to the screen.

"There are a lot of projects floating around," he says long-sufferingly. "There are only seven good stories in the world, and for every story you've got thousands of producers swarming all over it."

Whitey, he adds, "may be front-page news in Boston, but out here [in LA], we don't give a shit."

Even the skeptical Lawford, however, refuses to write Doyle off. "He's an honest, good fellow who's trying to do something interesting. I wish him all the luck in the world," Lawford says. "Maybe sooner or later he and I will work together."

As far as Doyle's concerned, sooner would be better than later. "I'm looking for help," he says. "I'm having trouble asking for it, but I do ask for it, and people are jerking me off. I gave up my beautiful shiny Mercury Mountaineer. I sold my $6000 copy machine that I cherished. I'm in a position now, how much do I have to sacrifice?"

The day after this conversation, Doyle phones the Phoenix offices to say, excitedly, that his script has made it past the people who serve as "bullshit detectors" for Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father) and Barry Levinson (Diner). "I've got to get moving on this," Doyle says and hangs up.

As Mark Hankey put it, Doyle's a never-say-die kind of guy. "If pure will can get a movie made," says Hankey, "then Kevin's got a pretty good chance."

Ironically, getting his movie made may compel Doyle to face his trickiest problem yet. "In my script, to make him appeal to A-list actors," Doyle says, "I have no choice but to redeem Whitey with some sympathetic moments." That is, as with his early canvases, Doyle may have to add some splashes of color, perhaps draw in a few tears.

"This will be a challenge," Doyle says, wincing slightly, "since personally I never cared for Whitey."

Chris Wright can be reached atcwright[a]phx.com

Kevin Doyle on . . . Whitey's long-time partner in crime (and fellow FBI informant), Steve "the Rifleman" Flemmi: "Flemmi's got this nickname: `the Rifleman.' He was Stevie the Rifleman. These guys, they're Johnny or Joey; they're never John or Joe. You know, usually when you grow up you go from Stevie to Steve. These guys hang on the same corner till they're 75. They never go from Stevie to Steve. They never become adults, they stay Stevies forever. So he was Stevie the Rifleman. He had to have this thirteen-year-old's nickname. He was just a little fella. "Flemmi, since he got exposed as a rat -- not a good thing to be in prison, even lower than a diddler -- is being spat on by 19-year-old junkies. He doesn't come out of his cell, he doesn't bathe, he's got a long beard. He has the least enviable life of any human being in the Commonwealth." South Boston: "There's something about Southie guys. They're professional sidekicks. Southie produces sidekicks. It does not produce number-one guys. That's what makes Billy Bulger so rare, that's what makes Whitey so rare: they weren't sidekicks. Typically, Southie is a sidekick factory. "People don't go outside of Southie. I got buddies that I hang around with, I get them out of Southie for five minutes they panic, they wanna go back. I pick guys up in Southie, take 'em to Worcester for the fights -- soon as we leave Southie, they're silent, they're stiff and rigid. I drive 'em back and drop 'em at the door, all of a sudden they wanna talk, they're all relaxed and chatty. I don't know why they freeze and panic when it's time to go into that vast area outside of South Boston known as the United States proper. "There's something missing in Southie; I think it's reality. Kids go through adolescence and they're involved in all this illusional belief, this macho sentimentality, gangsterism. The impact when Southie youth hit reality is like when Abbott and Costello meet King Kong. It's too much of a shock for them. They can't handle it. There's no other explanation for the disproportionately high rate of suicide in South Boston. "There's no affection for Whitey Bulger in South Boston. It's a unique neighborhood in that they can't be bullshitted and they can't be bullied. They can be bribed, but they can't be bullshitted or bullied."