• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It’s not right to take cheap shots at people in every column. If you have a problem with someone, say it to his face. But that’s not Howie Coward’s way. He prefers to creep behind closed doors and write stories in which people who understand what’s going on can see he is not even close to being on target. He should have been a writer for a supermarket tabloid. Like so many other reporters, Howie is big on using the little catchwords, like “alleged,” or “reputed,” or “sources say,” so he can get away with anything he wants to say.

His own personal life could be material for another hate radio talk show. Maybe they could talk about his first marriage and how it ended in divorce. My greatest revenge is knowing that this guy has to look in the mirror every morning and see he is a coward. And the rest of the day, he gets to live the life of a coward.

In the late 1980s, when Howie was working at Channel 56 in Boston, Jack Hynes, one of his coworkers at the television station, stopped by the liquor store. “Why doesn’t Howie ever come in here?” I asked Jack. “The coward drives by here three or four days a week just to get a look at us. You tell Howie that if he comes in, we got a fresh Dumpster out back waiting for him. Just like with Robin Benedict.” I was referring to a high-priced call girl who was killed by a college professor in 1984. Benedict’s body was disposed of in a Dumpster.

One afternoon, probably five years after that, Jimmy, Stevie, and I were standing outside the liquor store. Howie pulled up in a blue foreign sports car across the street from where the three of us were standing. The minute I spotted him, I walked between Jimmy and Stevie and started running across the street. As the blue car took off, a puff of black smoke rose out of the tailpipe.

The next day, sitting safely behind his keyboard at the Herald, Howie wrote an article about Jimmy standing outside the liquor store, referring to him as “the diminutive weightlifter.” Jimmy read the article and just laughed at the coward’s latest column. “He didn’t have the balls to get out of the car to face you,” he said. “And now he’s going to write about us.”

Over the years, Howie has made a career of writing about the Bulgers every chance he gets. Even if the article has nothing to with either Jimmy or Billy, he puts them in. Without this subject, he would have little to talk or write about. His hatred of Jimmy and Billy probably started with Billy, who never was the darling of the press. Jimmy told me that once when Billy was talking to an elderly lady, Howie tried to interrupt, asking him repeatedly, “Can I ask you a question, Mr. President?”

Billy, who knew exactly who Howie was, turned around and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m from the press,” Howie answered him.

“Well, do you vote in my district?” Billy asked him. When Howie said, “No,” Billy told him, “Well, you just wait until I’m through talking to my constituent. Then I’ll talk to you.”

Howie never waited.

Jimmy, however, did make some serious attempts to get together with Howie. One, in particular, was at Howie’s house in Acton. Jimmy and I staked out the house, driving by a few times to take pictures of it and to get the layout. The reason for our visit was simple: We were looking to kill him. We didn’t like him because he was a piece of shit who wrote nasty stories about people. The guy was an oxygen thief who didn’t deserve the right to breathe.

Jimmy’s first plan was to fill a basketball with C-4 and blow it up the second Howie came out of his house. His second plan was to wrap a detonation cord around a tree in front of his house when Howie was home. The cord, a quarter of an inch thick, would contain C-4. When it exploded, it would take down the tree, which would take down the house. But both plans had too much risk of killing Howie’s kids, so we had to pass on them.

My idea was just to shoot him. So, one day, I went down to his house at five in the morning and lay in the graveyard across the street. I was holding a high-powered rifle with a scope on it, waiting until he