Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  HANK BRENNAN HAD been biding his time, waiting patiently to cross-examine Foley. As soon as Wyshak said, “I have no further questions, Your Honor,” Brennan was on his feet and at the podium.

  “Sir, you wrote a book last year, did you not?”

  Foley took a deep breath; he had to know this was coming. “Yes, I did.”

  “You signed your name to that book?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And, sir, when that book was published, you said that that book was the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, not only did you say it was the truth, you promoted the book, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Brennan proceeded to list all the Boston-area television shows that the retired trooper had been on to promote the book. “At no time when you were on your speaking tour and you sold your book to members of the public, did you say there were inaccuracies in your book.”

  “I am unaware of any inaccuracies in the book,” said Foley.

  Now Brennan was off and running; he noted that Foley had earlier that day, in his direct testimony, said that he had been limited in his efforts to exert editorial control during the writing of the book. “Were you suggesting that there were things that were truthful that you didn’t want in the book, or things that were in the book that were inaccurate?”

  “There were some things in the book that I was unaware of the information, that it was the other writer who had gone out and did that background on it, and some of the information he came up with I questioned as to where he got it.”

  Foley was now on a slippery slope, having to defend his book and also disown aspects of it at the same time.

  Once Brennan had thoroughly exhausted the book as a topic by which he could make Foley squirm and sweat, he moved on to another subject: Pat Nee.

  Already in the trial, Nee’s name had come up numerous times. Nee’s concern that Bulger’s defense lawyers would do their best to drag him into the trial had been confirmed as early as Carney’s opening statement, when the lawyer suggested that the case against Bulger had been partially created as a concoction of John Martorano, Flemmi, Weeks, and Pat Nee, all of whom, in the interest of saving their own necks, had “added a little Bulger” to their fictitious retelling of gangland Boston. Both in courtroom testimony and in the books they had written, they were out to pin everything on Whitey.

  Foley had never met Pat Nee and was only tangentially aware of his role in the Bulger gang, so Brennan was required to get at Nee by way of Foley’s dealings with another Winter Hill mobster—John Martorano.

  Back in the 1990s, Foley, along with Wyshak and Kelly, had played a crucial role in negotiating Martorano’s cooperation deal with the government. At the time, Martorano, through his lawyer, made it clear that, yes, he would agree to testify against FBI agent Connolly, Bulger, and assorted other targets of the investigators, but he had a list of people that he refused to offer evidence against.

  “One of those people was his brother, Jimmy Martorano?” asked Brennan.

  “Yes,” said Foley.

  “And another person was Pat Nee?”

  “I had no specific conversation with [Martorano] about Pat Nee.”

  Brennan was not about to let it drop. He established that Foley, in his interrogations of Martorano, was told about numerous murders involving others, including Nee. He asked, “As a state police officer, you have a right and you also have a duty to pursue charges against people who are alleged to have committed murder in the state of Massachusetts, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you had information from John Martorano that Patrick Nee had committed murder, was a murderer, didn’t you?”

  On this, Foley pushed back, making it clear that he and the investigators were at the time gathering information on the targets of their investigation, people they could actually indict. It was not a “fishing expedition.”

  “Did you ever encourage the district attorney of Suffolk County to prosecute Pat Nee for the information you had from John Martorano that he was a murderer?”

  “We did not have enough information to prosecute Pat Nee at the time.”

  “John Martorano told you that Pat Nee was involved in murders with him, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And you’ve based prosecutions on John Martorano’s testimony, haven’t you?”

  To this Wyshak objected, and the judge sustained the objection.

  Brennan moved on, but throughout the afternoon he kept coming back to the subject of Nee. It must have seemed odd to the jury and some observers of the trial that so much time was being spent on someone who was not a subject of the trial nor would be called as a witness by the government. Even Foley became annoyed: “We were working on this case, which was taxing us for years, Mr. Brennan. If I sent my people off in every direction we had a lead on, this case would never have been completed. . . . I didn’t have information that Pat Nee killed nineteen people. I had information that Stephen Flemmi and James Bulger killed many people, and that’s where I was focusing on, because that’s where I had to put our resources. I would have loved to have taken out Pat Nee and anyone else he named. But, realistically, Mr. Brennan, it was not going to happen. . . . I took what I could get to get to the bottom of what had been going on here for a long time.”

  “So when I ask you did you make any efforts to take the information Mr. Martorano gave to you to develop a case against Pat Nee, what is your answer, sir?”

  “I’ve answered it several times.”

  Again, Wyshak objected, and the judge encouraged Brennan to move on.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, I spoke with Pat Nee on the phone. “How am I doing?” he asked.

  I didn’t know how to tell him that his name had been a persistent presence at the trial. “If I tell you,” I said, “it may ruin your evening.”

  “Well, it can’t be any worse news than what I already received this morning.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A subpoena,” said Nee.

  That morning, while Nee was at the L Street Gym in Southie, where he occasionally worked out, a process server walked into the gym and said, “Are you Patrick Nee?” Nee said yes, and the man served him with a notice to appear in court on a date yet to be determined. He was being called as a witness by Bulger’s defense lawyers.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  We both knew that the main issue was going to be an allegation commonly made in Boston, but nowhere in any criminal indictment, that Nee had partaken in at least one double murder with Bulger. This particular killing had not yet come up at the trial, but it would; it was one of the counts with which Bulger had been charged.

  “I’ll take the Fifth,” said Nee. “Only smart thing to do in this situation.”

  We talked for a bit about the likelihood of whether or not the judge would allow the defense to drag him into court. The only way that was likely to happen was if Bulger did actually take the stand and name Nee as an accomplice in various crimes, including murder.

  “Do you think he’ll take the stand?” Nee asked.

  I reiterated what I had said before: “No, I don’t. But who knows? He might. But then the question is, who would believe anything he has to say?”

  We went back and forth on the subject for a few minutes. Nee felt the noose tightening around his neck. Officially, he wasn’t yet involved with the trial, but, as with so many people caught up in the legacy of the Bulger era, he was being slowly dragged into it by the ghosts of the past.

  3

  THE O’BRIEN FAMILY BUSINESS

  LIKE MANY AMERICAN municipalities, especially those located on the eastern seaboard or those in the Great Lakes region of the Midwest, the city of Boston had a thriving organized crime underworld rooted in the “glory days” of Prohibition. The Bulger era of the 1970s and 1980s was a direct descendant of this period in which criminal rackets first became deeply embedded in the political and s
ocial structures of urban life. The era of illegal booze was a boon to bootleggers and gangsters, many of whom made fortunes and, just as important, accumulated power through corrupt relationships with politicians and men in law enforcement. Money generated from Prohibition-era rackets fueled the underground economy, and the alliances that were established helped to create a criminal protocol that remained in place for the next seventy or eighty years.

  As a working-class port city with an organized labor force of dockworkers and teamsters, and numerous classic ethnic neighborhoods, Boston was typical of the kind of U.S. city where organized crime found its footing. New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities had a similar system of criminal rackets. After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, much of the criminal activity transitioned into labor racketeering, loan-sharking, gambling, cargo pilferage, and an assortment of other crimes.

  By the postwar years of the 1950s, gangsterism remained pervasive. The Kefauver hearings in 1950 and 1951 had, for the first time, dragged assorted mobsters in front of a committee composed of U.S. senators. Televised live, the hearings were the first time the American public would see gangsters claim their Fifth Amendment privilege to not testify, on the grounds that they would be incriminated. A decade later, the McClellan hearings, chaired by Robert F. Kennedy, shed a harsh light on the Mob’s involvement in trade unions such as the United Brotherhood of Teamsters, which had more rank-and-file members in the New England area than anywhere else in the country.

  As a mob city, Boston was typical, but it was also unique, at least in one respect. The dominant mafia family in Boston was not based in the city. It was based in Providence, Rhode Island. The Patriarca crime family, led by Raymond Patriarca Sr., held sway over much of New England, with mafia crews and affiliated criminal organizations throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. This left something of a vacuum in Boston. There was a mafia entity in the city, based in the Italian North End, and they were powerful—but no more powerful than various other criminal crews of non-Italian gangsters that existed throughout the city’s many neighborhoods and suburbs.

  The Boston underworld was decentralized, a series of interconnected suburbs and villages (Somerville, Charlestown, Southie, etc.) each with its own set of local criminal crews. The ethnic makeup of these crews was surprisingly diverse. It was not uncommon for major crimes to be pulled off by crews composed of Italians, Irish, Greeks, Portuguese, etc. One major example of this was the infamous Brinks robbery, which took place on January 17, 1950, and netted $2.7 million in cash and securities. At the time it was the largest heist in U.S. history, and it was conceived of and pulled off by a raffish, mixed-ethnic crew of hoods from around Boston.

  It was into this eclectic criminal universe that Jim Bulger arrived on the scene in the mid-1950s.

  Born September 3, 1929, Bulger had grown up in the Old Harbor housing projects in South Boston. He was one of six children that included two younger brothers, Jackie and Billy. Bulger’s father was a longshoreman whose prospects for work were greatly hindered by the fact that he had lost an arm during an industrial accident. The Bulgers were lower middle class, one step removed from poverty by the fact that they lived in government-subsidized housing. Book authors and amateur psychologists have speculated that Jim Bulger, the oldest son and in many ways the family’s provider, was driven to a life of crime by witnessing his father’s disability and feelings of inadequacy as the breadwinner of the household.1 Whatever the reason, Bulger got into crime at a young age. It started with “tailgating,” or pilferage off the back of delivery trucks in Southie, and advanced to bank robbery. Bulger would later claim in conversations with his associates that he robbed seventeen banks while in his early twenties. He became part of a crew that was willing to travel if need be to make a score.

  In May 1955, Bulger took part in a successful robbery in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A few months later, he did another, this one in Melrose, a suburb north of Boston. A month after that, in November, he and a partner drove all the way to Hammond, Indiana, where they hit the Hoosier State Bank and netted $12,612.28.

  Bulger always brandished a gun in these robberies. In Indiana, after forcing the bank’s customers to lie on the floor, he was reported to have announced, “We aren’t going to hurt anyone. But we have to make a living. Dillinger did.”

  Immediately after the robbery, Whitey drove back to Boston. Soon he heard that his partner in the Indiana robbery had gotten pinched and squealed on him. Whitey figured it was a good time to make himself scarce. With his girlfriend at the time, a platinum blonde from Southie, he packed a car and headed out for a long drive that took them to Reno, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Chicago. It was a trip similar to those he would make in later decades with two other platinum blondes, Teresa Stanley and Catherine Greig, cross-country jaunts in which the confines of Southie were left behind and Whitey became a speck of dust in the wide-open spaces of the American landscape.

  By early 1956, Bulger was back in Boston, but he was still hiding from the law. Because his former bank robbery partner had ratted him out to the FBI, there was a warrant out for his arrest. Eventually, based on a tip from another informant, federal agents caught up with Bulger; he was arrested outside a nightclub in Revere, a city north of Boston.

  The agent who put the cuffs on Bulger was H. Paul Rico, an ambitious young FBI investigator whose primary focus was organized crime. Already, at the age of thirty, Paul Rico was known to have a special talent for cultivating underworld informants. He was exceedingly polite with Bulger, which, in later years, Whitey would remember. Rico would later become a crucial figure in recruiting Bulger as a Top Echelon Informant for the FBI.

  With his former partner having already ratted him out, Bulger confessed, he said, so that his girlfriend would not be charged as an accomplice. His understanding was that his confession to a series of bank robberies would also result in a lighter sentence, which did not prove to be the case. The judge sentenced him to twenty years behind bars.

  Just twenty-five years old at the time, Bulger was shipped off to a maximum-security federal facility in Atlanta, Georgia, and later transferred to Alcatraz, the legendary prison located on a rock in San Francisco Bay, and eventually to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.

  Bulger’s prison years were notable for at least two factors. In Atlanta, he was informed by prison authorities of a highly covert program that was being offered to inmates as a way to cut time off their sentence. The program was called MK-ULTRA and was being administered by the CIA. MK-ULTRA was an experimental project involving lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, commonly known as acid. Inmates would take the drug on a regular basis and submit to observation by psychiatric doctors working for the agency. As part of this program, Bulger received injections of LSD once a day for nearly eighteen months. His reactions to the drug were documented.

  In later decades, Bulger would claim that he suffered from the aftereffects of this experiment through intense headaches and persistent insomnia.

  In the 1980s, during his years of power in the Boston underworld, Bulger told associates Kevin Weeks, Pat Nee, and others that if he were ever arrested, he would use his involvement in this government program and the resulting psychological aftereffects as a defense in court.

  The other notable feature of Bulger’s years in prison was his use of contacts in “legitimate society” to enhance his position within the criminal justice system.

  While in the Atlanta penitentiary, Bulger wrote letters to Father Robert Drinan, a Boston-area priest who had become friendly with Billy Bulger at Boston College, where they both went to school. A Jesuit scholar, Drinan had vouched for the Bulger family in presentencing reports. Later in the 1960s, Drinan became famous for his activism against the U.S. war in Vietnam, but at the time he was dean at Boston College Law School. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the help you have given me,” Bulger wrote to Drinan.

  With brother Billy acting as his ad
vocate, Whitey had other friends in high places to lean on. Billy was friendly with the most powerful political figure in Southie, John W. McCormack, a U.S. congressman who would rise from majority leader to Speaker of the House while Whitey was in prison. Bill Bulger implored McCormack to do whatever he could for his brother; McCormack wrote letters and made calls to the director of the Bureau of Prisons in Washington to check on Whitey’s status and arrange prison visits for the Bulger family.

  There was nothing outwardly untoward in Bulger’s utilization of a well-placed priest and a political figure to help out his situation. It was the classic Irish way of doing things: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. In letters from prison, Whitey had promised both of these men that once he was out he would turn his life around and follow a more enlightened, crime-free path. These two pillars of the community may have helped out simply as a favor to Bill Bulger, a fine young man who in 1960, while Whitey was away, was first elected to the state House of Representatives.

  Whitey spent nine years in prison. He came out physically the same person—five foot seven inches tall, lean and taut at 178 pounds—but he was, at age thirty-four, a changed man. Hardened by incarceration, with a heightened sense of how to utilize and manipulate enemies and friends alike, he was determined to never return to the penitentiary.

  He was released on March 1, 1965. As a condition of his parole he had to have a job, so brother Billy got Whitey a position as a custodian at the Suffolk County Courthouse. Before long, Whitey stopped showing up for work, though he still collected his paycheck. Within a matter of months, he was reestablishing ties with fellow criminals, only now he was no longer interested in being a roving outlaw in the John Dillinger mode and wanted to be more of a mobster with roots in the city’s organized crime structure.