Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  The Brothers Bulger became a dominant topic of conversation and occasional source of criminal investigation in Boston. Of particular interest was the fact that their theoretical alliance as politician and gangster seemed to symbolize the connection between organized crime and the Democratic Party political machine that was at the heart of the Irish Mob going back at least to the Prohibition era of the 1920s.

  All of this was to become a matter of supreme local attention in Boston, but Whitey Bulger never really became a national story until after he disappeared on the run. In January 1995, after receiving word from a contact in law enforcement that he was about to be indicted and arrested, Whitey fled along with Catherine Greig, a female companion. Many of Bulger’s criminal associates were left behind to face the music. Some of these associates were arrested and cut deals with the government to tell all they knew about Bulger’s operation in exchange for more lenient sentences and/or better conditions while they were incarcerated.

  Most notable of those who would eventually cooperate with the government was Stephen J. Flemmi, who had been Whitey’s criminal partner for twenty years. Flemmi was a lifelong gangster who had killed many people alongside Whitey and was a crucial link between Bulger’s South Boston organization and the Italian Mafia based in the North End. Flemmi, an Italian American, had connections among nearly every criminal faction in the city, including, as it turned out, the FBI.

  In 1997, attorneys for Flemmi were the first to drop the bombshell that both he and James Bulger had been operating as covert informants for the FBI since at least the mid-1970s. Many in Boston had suspected that Bulger had a “special relationship” with the FBI; it had been hinted at in the newspapers and was a source of frustration and anger among other law enforcement agencies that had, over the years, attempted to take down Bulger. Flemmi’s lawyers revealed for the first time not only that Flemmi and Bulger were government informants but that they had, in fact, been protected by the FBI and others in the U.S. Department of Justice. It was part of Flemmi’s defense that he could not be prosecuted for crimes that he had committed, because he and Bulger had been given immunity from prosecution in exchange for their serving as informants in the DOJ’s war against the Mafia.

  The judge presiding over Flemmi’s case—Mark L. Wolf—eventually dismissed Flemmi’s claim as being without merit, but not before calling for an evidentiary hearing that would become known as “the Wolf hearings.” These hearings, which took place in a Boston federal courtroom in late 1997 and into 1998, were the local equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials. A generation of cops, federal agents, gangsters, political figures, and many others were compelled to testify under federal subpoena in what would go down as one of the most stunning public tribunals in the history of the city.

  Along with Flemmi, a number of other Bulger associates had by then cut plea bargain deals with the government and begun cooperating with federal prosecutors. From the witness stand during the hearings, a generation’s worth of murder and mayhem was revealed. Flemmi would eventually plead guilty to having committed eleven murders. Another Bulger associate, John Martorano, would admit to twenty murders. Bulger would eventually be charged with nineteen killings.

  The high volume of dead bodies was one thing, but it went even deeper. The Wolf hearings revealed not only that Bulger and Flemmi had for years been protected by the FBI and others in the criminal justice system, but that the same FBI agents who originally recruited Bulger and Flemmi had played a role in framing Joe Salvati and his codefendants back in 1967. Those agents were given commendations from Director Hoover and received bonuses as part of the bureau’s financial incentive program. On the prosecutorial side, others received promotions, and one key player went on to become a federal criminal court judge. These were men who had protected Joe Barboza and enabled his manipulations of the system, just as they and others would for Bulger and Flemmi. It was a cycle of complicity, if not outright corruption, that ran so deep, many in the system retreated into a state of denial that would continue right through the eventual prosecution of Whitey Bulger.

  From the beginning, the prosecutors had a problem. It had been their intention to nail Bulger and his organization on an array of racketeering charges, but the Wolf hearings of 1997–98 had opened a Pandora’s box of horrific crimes and law enforcement malfeasance going back nearly half a century. This rancid effluvia had threatened to infect the Bulger case, or, even more threatening to the reputation of the system, to wash aside the Bulger case to reveal a broader sewer of criminal complicity on the part of many cops, federal agents, prosecutors, and other centurions of the U.S. Department of Justice.

  The strategy that followed would play out over the next decade and a half. Certain journalists and book writers were cultivated as purveyors of information, and the cult of Bulger began to take shape. Flemmi and other former members of Whitey’s inner circle began to give their versions of various murders and other crimes; this information was leaked to well-placed print, TV, and radio journalists in Boston, a city crawling with hungry and talented reporters. The Bulger legend took flight.

  There were some who felt that the FBI and other representatives of the Justice Department had no real interest in finding Bulger. The speculation was that with all that Whitey knew, he could bring the system to its knees. Nonetheless, the Justice Department did take part in a wide-ranging public relations campaign to catch Whitey. Over the years, he was profiled nearly two dozens times on various television programs such as America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries; he was the subject of documentaries on the History Channel and the Discovery Channel. His reputation expanded to become part of popular American culture, culminating in his exploits being used as the basis for a character memorably played by actor Jack Nicholson in the movie The Departed. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the movie was a huge popular success and, in 2007, received the Academy Award for Best Picture.

  Upon Bulger’s capture, the media spotlight heated up once again. Only now, there would be a new element added to the saga: Whitey himself. Video images of Bulger, now in his eighties, handcuffed, in an orange prison jumpsuit, being brought back to Boston to face the music was all the populace needed to be drawn back into the Age of Whitey.

  The prosecutors handling the case were the same men who had been pursuing Bulger since the early 1990s. Fred Wyshak and Brian Kelly were eager young prosecutors, both in their thirties, when they first began to build their case against Bulger, Flemmi, and others. That case, which had originally revolved around assorted illegal gambling charges, had grown over the years to include thirty-two criminal counts, including conspiracy, various racketeering charges, and nineteen murders. It would be a classic case under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in which Bulger would be charged as the leader of a racketeering enterprise. Those aligned to testify against Bulger included many former rank-and-file members of his organization, as well as three of his closest associates, including Steve Flemmi.

  And yet, with all the evidence, testimony, and prosecutorial firepower accumulated over twenty years, the Bulger case remained a hot potato for the Boston U.S. attorney’s office and a special challenge for Wyshak and Kelly. Though a lot of the pretrial machinations and publicity revolved around exalting Bulger’s nefarious reputation as a psychopath and criminal mastermind, the prosecutors were never able to fully escape the nagging history of the case. Bulger’s court-appointed attorney, J. W. Carney, sought to capitalize on this history by suggesting, on a number of occasions, that his client was going to take the stand and, for the first time, “tell his side of the story.” The implication was that Whitey Bulger was going to blow the lid off forty years of dirt and deceit in the criminal justice system all the way from New England to Washington, D.C.

  The central tension of the Bulger saga remained, and would continue throughout the trial. Was the Bulger story about one very crafty psychopath who had corrupted the system? Or was it about a preexisting corrupt system into which one very wily
gangster insinuated himself and then played it for all it was worth?

  For the prosecutors, this was the deluge they had been holding back for twenty years, the possibility that the Bulger saga might detour down a dozen different tributaries to reveal a generation’s worth of dirty police work and institutional deception. The last thing Wyshak and Kelly wanted was for the government to be put on trial. It was their job to keep the focus on Whitey. It was a tall order. Prosecuting Whitey for his crimes was the easy part; the evidence was overwhelming. But presenting the evidence in all its ugliness and still containing the narrative of the trial required the efforts of skilled prosecutorial wranglers.

  For the Justice Department, the dangers were clear: if the Bulger trial were to become about more than Whitey—if it were to establish, finally and definitively, the link between the Barboza era and the Bulger era—it could destroy all belief in the concept of criminal justice. It could discredit the reputation of the very office that was now prosecuting James Bulger, to an extent that it would be virtually impossible for the people to trust the institutional sanctity of the criminal justice system. There would no longer be good guys and bad guys, but rather one big criminal underworld in which the cops and the criminals were all merely co-conspirators in an ongoing effort to manipulate the universe to suit their needs and the needs of their overseers.

  LIKE MANY PEOPLE who had fallen under the spell of the Bulger saga, I had been following the story for decades. My interest was first piqued in 1978 when I visited South Boston, or Southie, for the first time. I was twenty years old and had come from the West Coast to visit a former high school teacher of mine, now teaching at Cardinal Cushing High School, an all-girls Catholic school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame, then located at 50 West Broadway (the school closed its doors in 1992). At the time, Southie was only a few years removed from the civic maelstrom of forced busing, which had left many around the nation with the impression that the neighborhood was a haven for racism and parochialism. “The busing crisis,” as those years became known, was characterized by blatant political demagoguery and violence in the streets, which was televised on national news programs and shown around the world. Badly tarnished by those years, feeling misrepresented and unfairly demonized by liberals, collectively the neighborhood had turned inward and was suspicious of outsiders.

  The name of Whitey Bulger was not yet well known, even in the neighborhood. In law enforcement circles, it was common knowledge that Bulger was a key player in the Winter Hill Mob, a violent group of gangsters based in the city of Somerville, far from Southie on the other side of Boston and the Charles River. In Southie, Bulger was a shadowy figure. When it was first explained to me by a couple of students at Cardinal Cushing who he was, it was in the context of his brother, Senator Billy Bulger, who was a figure of renown.

  For those in the know, the story was that the senator’s brother was a protector of the neighborhood, a criminal, perhaps even a gangster, but he was “our gangster.” Bulger’s defenders argued that his activities were designed to help bring wealth and opportunity to the community. Furthermore, the local myth was that he kept hard drugs out of the neighborhood. This was an especially potent defense since some political and community leaders, including Billy Bulger, had argued that their resistance to busing was based on not wanting “undesirables” bringing drugs into their community.

  In the 1970s, much of urban America was awash in heroin and marijuana and, in the years ahead, cocaine and crack. Southie residents took pride in the fact that they were a community that looked out for their own and allegedly kept the drug trade at bay, thanks, in part, to their benevolent gangster.

  At Cardinal Cushing High, I talked with a girl—a senior—inside the school’s gym, where a group of teenagers were practicing for a musical play that was being directed by my former teacher and friend. The student explained to me that Bulger was a kind of Robin Hood figure in the neighborhood: he stole from other criminals and took care of people in Southie. She spoke in a hushed voice, almost a whisper, as if it were not safe to talk about Whitey in mixed company.

  Years later, I was startled to read in a book written by a criminal associate of Bulger that Whitey had set up a room in the local gym called the “dog room,” where he spied on female Cardinal Cushing High School students as they undressed. It was also alleged that Bulger had sex with some of these girls and that, secretly, he had “dated” one of them when she was sixteen and he was a man in his forties. At the same time Bulger was having two simultaneous relationships with adult women, he purportedly picked up his underage “mistress” at the end of the school day and drove her to a neighborhood crash pad for sex.

  Robin Hood? Whereas the merry bandit of Sherwood Forest stole from the rich to give to the poor, Bulger, it seemed, stole the virginity of underage girls to add to his list of conquests.

  In early 2004, I was back in Southie, this time doing research for a book I was writing titled Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (2005). The book was a sweeping overview of gangster history and folklore from the time of the Potato Famine to present day. The research took me to a number of cities, including New Orleans, New York, Chicago, and Boston, where the narrative of the Irish American gangster remained long after it had died out elsewhere. That history had become encapsulated in the personage of Bulger, who, at the time, was still on the run.

  It was while researching Paddy Whacked that I first met Patrick Nee, a criminal rival and later an associate of Bulger. At the time, Pat Nee had only recently returned to Southie after a nine-year stint in federal prison on an armed robbery conviction. I interviewed Nee extensively and began with him a professional relationship that exists to this day.

  The reason Nee had agreed to talk with me was a previous book I had published, The Westies (1990), an account of the rise and fall of the Irish Mob in New York City. The Westies were a loosely connected gang based on the West Side of Manhattan, in the neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. They were known for their extreme violence, and, in particular, the manner by which they disposed of their murder victims: they dismembered the bodies, bagged the body parts, and dumped them in the river. The Westies were a terrifying wild card in the New York City underworld from the mid-1970s until 1988, when the core members of the gang were prosecuted and found guilty in a major racketeering trial in the Southern District of New York.

  Nee read The Westies while incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, in Connecticut. He remembered Bulger talking about the Westies gang back in the early 1980s. Whitey was familiar with some of the key players in the Westies story. In fact, according to Nee, at one point the leader of the Westies had reached out to Bulger in an attempt to establish a working relationship, but Whitey was reluctant based on the gang’s reputation for wildness, and also, presumably, because he had at the time a “special relationship” with the FBI that might have been endangered had he formed an alliance with the Westies.

  Over the years, via Pat Nee, I was introduced to a number of central players in the Bulger story, including Kevin Weeks, Bulger’s right-hand man; John Martorano, a hit man for the Winter Hill Mob; Jim Martorano, John’s brother, also a Winter Hill member; Teresa Stanley, Bulger’s common-law wife for thirty years; and others. Through conversations and interviews with these people, and through my ongoing research on the Bulger years, I began to bend my mind around one of the most complicated and multilayered stories in the history of American organized crime.

  When Bulger the octogenarian was finally apprehended in Santa Monica and brought back to Boston in June 2011, I was assigned by Newsweek magazine and its Web affiliate, the Daily Beast, to write a series of articles leading up to and including the trial. I wrote a half-dozen pretrial pieces in which, along with interviewing many of the people mentioned above, I tracked down and interviewed others, such as Joe Salvati—people who had been involved with or affected by traumatic events in the Boston underworld going back decades.

  Among
those I interviewed, the most crucial, arguably, was former FBI special agent John Connolly. From 1975 to 1990, Connolly had been the handler for Bulger in his role as a Top Echelon Informant. When, in the wake of the Wolf hearings, Bulger’s informant status was revealed, Connolly became the focus of criminal investigations headed by prosecutors Wyshak and Kelly. In 2000, he was indicted and convicted on charges of fraud and obstruction of justice in the state of Massachusetts. While serving his ten-year sentence, he was indicted again by the prosecutors, this time in the state of Florida. The charge was murder, on the grounds that Connolly, while serving as Bulger’s handler, had leaked information to Bulger’s gang that led to the killing of a potential government witness.

  I did not believe that Connolly was a totally innocent man. His relationship with Bulger and Flemmi had crossed the line in a number of ways. My own feeling was that the case in Massachusetts had resulted in a just verdict. But there was in the government’s pursuit of Connolly the whiff of an attempt to make him the fall guy for the entire system’s corrupt relationship with Bulger. Connolly was certainly a key player; he and Whitey had a close personal relationship—but Connolly did not create the Top Echelon Informant Program, nor was he a supervisor responsible for making decisions regarding internal policies that spawned the Bulger fiasco.