“We’re not hanging those images to celebrate them, but to recognize a chapter in the gritty story of our neighborhood,” Osherow said during a telephone interview, insisting they weren’t meant to glorify the gangsters. “We’re acknowledging the history of this very spot.”
But the mugshots have outraged neighbors who are demanding their removal, not only because Bulger and Flemmi killed people while running a sprawling criminal enterprise and secretly working as FBI informants. One of those victims was Edward Connors, who ran a tavern, Bulldogs, in the same spot that is immediately Savin Bar, when he was murdered decades ago.
“It’s extremely disrespectful and distasteful,” said Tim Connors, who was a baby when his father was killed in a barrage of gunfire inside a telephone booth on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester on June 12, 1975. Tim Connors waited decades for Bulger and Flemmi to finally be convicted of his father’s slaying. “Absolutely they should take them down,” he said.
Connors, citing news accounts of how Osherow himself was the victim of a brutal stabbing in New Hampshire in 2009, asked during a Globe interview, “How would Ken’s family feel if he died from those wounds and I owned that restaurant and put his killer’s pictures in there?”
Evelyn Cody, who was Edward Connors’s girlfriend and the mother of Tim Connors, said she was “sick to my stomach” when she heard the mugshots were hanging on the walls of the former Bulldogs.
Bulger “had nothing to do” with Bulldogs, which was a neighborhood hotspot, and never frequented the bar, Cody said. “It was Eddie’s place.”
She added that Bulger’s photo “doesn’t belong in there … put him over in Southie,” a reference to the South Boston neighborhood where he was based.
On Monday, during a meeting of the Columbia-Savin Hill Civic Association, several members proposed starting a petition urging Savin Bar to remove the images of Bulger and Flemmi, according to the Dorchester Reporter, which first reported on the controversy. The group agreed to take up the issue at a general membership meeting in November.
Donna McColgan, a lifelong Savin Hill resident who proposed the petition, said she was appalled by the mugshots and had asked the restaurant owners to take them down, but they refused.
“I think members of this community feel affronted and disrespected by putting Whitey Bulger as a theme,” McColgan said during an interview. “Are we so far removed from that kind of world when there were mobsters and gangsters all over the city that we think it’s pure entertainment?”
For McColgan, 71, the exploits of Bulger and Flemmi are still raw. She said the restaurant owners should be sensitive to the fact that the gangsters ruined families and terrorized the community.
“To say that Whitey Bulger is part of our history is false,” she said. “He has nothing to do with the community other than he brought in drugs. He maimed and murdered so many people who live here.”
The death of Connors, a 43-year-old former New England middleweight boxing champion, shook the neighborhood. Gruesome photos of his bullet-riddled body slumped in the telephone booth appeared in newspapers across the region.
The slaying, like many others, would go unsolved for decades, until Bulger fled Boston to evade a federal racketeering indictment in 1995. His former associates began cooperating with authorities after it was revealed during court proceedings that he, and his sidekick Flemmi, were longtime FBI informants. The remains of some victims who disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s were recovered from secret graves in Dorchester.
In 2004, Flemmi pleaded guilty to killing 10 people, including Connors, and implicated Bulger in all of them. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he remains. Seven years later, Bulger, who was a fixture on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, was captured in Santa Monica, Calif., after 16 years on the run.
Bulger was convicted in 2013 of killing 11 people, including Connors, while running a racketeering enterprise from the 1970s to the 1990s that participated in drug trafficking and other crimes. Five years later, the then-89-year-old was beaten to death by a fellow inmate at a federal penitentiary in West Virginia, where he was serving a life sentence.
During Bulger’s federal racketeering trial in Boston, hitman-turned-government witness John Martorano testified that members of the Winter Hill Gang decided to kill Connors because they believed he had been bragging about helping the gang kill James “Spike” O’Toole, who was shot by Martorano in 1973 as he crouched behind a mailbox in Savin Hill.
Detailing Connors’s slaying, Martorano told jurors that he dropped Bulger and Flemmi off near the telephone booth, where they waited for Connors, knowing that he would go there to take a prearranged phone call. Martorano said he heard the shooting from a distance, then Bulger and Flemmi got back into the car and said, “He’s gone.”
Prosecutors played a taped conversation for jurors in which Bulger mimicked the sound of machine gun fire, saying “rat-a-tat-tat” as he mentioned Connors’s slaying to his nephew and niece when they visited him at the Plymouth County Correctional facility.
Osherow, who opened the Savin Bar and Kitchen in 2010 with his partner, Driscoll DoCanto, said Ramsay and his production team “played off the history of the place” when including the mugshots of Bulger and Flemmi as part of a redesign and revamping of the menu featured on an episode of Ramsay’s television series “Secret Service.”
“I actually thought the concept was kind of cool because it is the history of the place,” said Osherow, a New York native who moved to Dorchester in the 1980s. “It wasn’t meant to offend anybody.”
Osherow said the mugshots have been hanging in the restaurant since March and he was “caught off-guard” when a resident asked him to take them down a couple of months ago. Instead, he tacked a flyer onto Bulger’s framed mugshot, stressing that it’s not an “homage,” with a QR link to more information about the gangster.
He said a lot of patrons have urged the restaurant not to remove the images.
“We talked about taking them down,” said Osherow, adding that it is still a possibility. “We don’t want people to be upset.”
Shelley Murphy can be reached at shelley.murphy@globe.com. Follow her @shelleymurph.
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