Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  After her internship was complete, Diane returned to Boston for two years. She saw Louis almost every day. Eventually he got to a point where he could sit up and talk through a respirator. He was as good as someone could be under the circumstances. Eventually, Diane and Louis had a heart-to-heart conversation. He told her that she was not responsible for his life and that she needed to move on. Diane moved back to the state of her upbringing: California. She married and had three children.

  “Did you stay in touch with [Louis]?” asked Kelly.

  “Louis was part of my life for the next twenty-eight years. He moved to Long Beach VA hospital. I lived in Los Angeles. My children grew up from infancy with Louis. Louis’s parents were like a second set of grandparents to my children. I was to this day emotionally connected to Louis. And, yes, I was married and my children are not Louis’s, but part of the deal was Louis would always be part of my life, and we did things together. We would go out, have lunch, have dinner, in the wheelchair. I was trained how to suction him on the respirator, how to handle the wheelchair, what to do if the batteries went low. And so, you know, I developed with him over the twenty-eight years [we had together].”

  “Did he eventually pass away?”

  “Yeah, he passed away in 2001.”

  By the time Sussman de Tennen was finished, there was hardly a dry eye in the courtroom or the media overflow room. The testimony touched trial observers who had been numbed by Martorano’s litany of murders so devoid of emotion. Here was someone speaking from the other side—a victim of a horrible crime whose life had been changed forever.

  Like many on the jury, Janet Uhlar choked up, and she noticed one of the other female jurors with her head lowered in tears.

  The emotion that Janet felt toward this witness started out as empathy, but as the day went on, with other witnesses taking the stand, she felt her emotions transitioning into something else. What Janet began to feel was anger. Initially, that anger was focused on the man who had first described the killing of Michael Milano and the shooting of Louis Lapiana as if it meant nothing to him: John Martorano. Clearly, the man was a monster. But as Janet processed her feelings of repulsion toward Martorano, a question arose:

  How the hell can this man be out on the street today? What kind of justice system makes a deal with a person who has killed twenty people—some of them completely innocent—a man with no feeling or remorse?

  Martorano’s deal with the government shocked Janet Uhlar, and for the first time she found herself questioning the government’s case.

  And it didn’t end there.

  Throughout most of the trial, Uhlar had been staying at her mother’s house in Quincy.

  On train rides to and from the courthouse, her head brimming with images and details from the trial, there were other imponderables: Why Whitey Bulger? What was it about Bulger that made the government feel they needed to make unconscionable deals with men who were as bad—or worse—than he was?

  As the trial headed into its third week of testimony, juror number twelve developed the earliest inklings of a troubling realization: she was leaving and arriving at the courtroom each day with more questions than answers.

  RALPH DEMASI WAS a character. He took the stand on a Friday morning, a stooped old man in his seventies. He did not want to be there. That morning, he had refused to talk with the prosecutors in the hallway. He had been given full immunity to testify; nothing he said in court could be used against him. But Ralph, a former hoodlum and ex-con, was not the kind of guy who talked openly about criminal matters to anyone, much less during a public proceeding.

  At a sidebar between the lawyers and the judge, it was revealed that Ralph had written a letter to Bulger’s lawyer, Jay Carney. In the letter, DeMasi made it clear that he was not testifying under his own volition; he had been forced by a federal order of compulsion. Carney, of course, knew this, and he realized that the letter was really meant for his client, Jim Bulger, so that he could see that Ralph DeMasi was not doing this on his own. Even then, DeMasi refused to take the stand, claiming that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege unless the prosecutor and the judge made it clear in open court that he was only there because the government had forced him to be there by federal decree. The prosecutor and the judge agreed to do that, since it was common procedure anyway.

  Given DeMasi’s reluctance, when he finally got on the stand, he was surprisingly verbose. His testimony was not crucial. He had been along during the shooting death of William “Billy” O’Brien, a Southie hood who had fallen afoul of the Winter Hill Mob. The killing of O’Brien had been described in considerable detail by Martorano. DeMasi was there in the same capacity as Diane Sussman de Tennen, to give survivor testimony.

  Unlike Martorano, DeMasi was not a seasoned witness. He had only recently been released after serving twenty-one years in prison on an armed robbery conviction. He’d never before testified in a courtroom. Apparently, he had not been prepped on how to give short, pithy answers and instead delivered his testimony as a monologue.

  After describing in detail how he wound up in a car with Billy O’Brien on the night in question, he moved on to the shooting: “I got in the car with Billy and we pulled out on Morrissey Boulevard [in the Dorchester section of Boston]. I said, ‘Billy, keep your eye on the rearview mirror, the side mirror. If a car comes up fast, hit the gas.’ He started laughing. ‘Ah, Ralph you’re—ain’t nobody gonna hurt us, blah, blah, blah.’ I said, ‘Billy, pay attention, I got bad vibrations. Watch your mirrors. If a car comes up fast, hit the gas.’ He keeps laughing.

  “All of a sudden, a car pulls up and people start shooting at us. . . . Billy O’Brien said, ‘What the fuck,’ hit the gas, hit the brake, the car started fishtailing. . . . He must have died instantly. As soon as he said ‘What the fuck’ we started fishtailing. . . . I got hit and thrown forward, and just instinct made me go down as low as I could near the floorboards. I got shot eight times. I read somewhere it said three times. I had eight bullets in me.

  “The car hit the guardrail. Boom.

  “My adrenaline was going. I didn’t have a gun, but I had a stiletto. Pulled the stiletto out, opened the door, jumped out of the car. The cars that were shooting at us stopped about thirty yards ahead. The two shooters were getting out. I ran towards them, hoping I could stab one of them and get a gun from him. When they saw me coming, one of them yelled, ‘Here he comes,’ and they jumped back in the car and burned rubber. My adrenaline is going. I start running after them—”

  “Now, wait a minute,” interjected prosecutor Kelly. “You were shot eight times and you were running [after two armed] guys with a knife?”

  “Right. I got shot here, here, my shoulder, and in my back a number of times.”

  “I take it, given your presence here today, you survived that shooting?”

  “It’s pretty obvious.”

  “Did you go to the hospital?”

  “Let me finish the story.” DeMasi ignored the prosecutor and continued. “All right, so after I realize I’m a nitwit running after a car that’s burning rubber, I stop. My whole side was paralyzed. I walked back to the car. I’m looking in. I yell, ‘Billy, Billy.’ Looked in, got close, but it was dark. The whole side of his face was blood. It’s obvious he was dead.

  “I started walking down Morrissey Boulevard to try to get away from the area. Probably within five minutes a cop car pulled up. A cop jumped out. ‘Holy shit, you’ve got blood all over.’ I said, ‘Yeah. What happened?’ He said, ‘You got shot.’ I said, ‘What did you shoot me for?’ I was disoriented a little bit.

  “He said, ‘I didn’t shoot you. Get in the car.’

  “‘No, I ain’t getting in the car. So you can shoot me again?’ He goes, ‘Come on, get in the car.’ He grabbed me, put me in the car, took me to the hospital. I’m in the hospital two or three days, checked out, went to Billy O’Brien’s funeral.”

  “In fact, when you went to Mr. O’Brien’s funeral, what happened to you th
ere?”

  “Got arrested coming out of the church—for getting shot.”

  “Yes, but didn’t you also have a gun with you?”

  “They didn’t know that at the time.”

  “All right, but you got arrested on gun charges coming out of Mr. O’Brien’s funeral, right?”

  “No, no, that isn’t why I got arrested. I got arrested for parole violations for getting shot.”

  “The bottom line is, sir, you don’t know who actually shot you, do you?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “IF RALPH DEMASI thinks he was an innocent bystander that night, he’s got it wrong,” said Pat Nee. “They were trying to hit DeMasi, not O’Brien.”

  I met Pat Nee after the DeMasi testimony and relayed the version that had been detailed in court. It was DeMasi’s contention that he had been an innocent bystander that night. His friend, Billy O’Brien, whom he knew from prison (O’Brien did a stint in Walpole for killing another man named O’Brien in a Southie tavern), must have been the target, figured DeMasi. But what DeMasi never mentioned on the witness stand was that he was in Southie that night to buy guns. Unbeknownst to him, because of his association with Indian Al Notarangeli and his crew, he was on a Winter Hill gang hit list. It was Martorano and Jimmy Sims who shot up the car, with Whitey Bulger following in a backup car.

  Hearing Nee’s version that DeMasi was the target reminded me that just because a witness takes an oath and testifies in court, it doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.

  I did not reach out to Nee to talk about Ralph DeMasi. I reached out, rather, to talk about a different series of murders that his friend John Martorano had testified about. These murders, engineered and perpetrated by Bulger, had changed the criminal landscape in South Boston and left Pat Nee in an especially vulnerable position. Sensing that these killings were key to understanding how Whitey had come to rule the neighborhood, I wanted to know more.

  When talking about local gangland lore and, more specifically, murders that were still open cases that had never been solved, Nee and I had some unofficial ground rules. Sometimes, if I asked about a specific killing, Nee might say “no comment,” or, “I can’t talk about that.” That could mean that he didn’t want to implicate someone he knew who was still alive. It could also mean that maybe he had been involved in some way.

  It was no secret that Nee had been involved in aspects of the Killeen-Mullen gang war of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had revealed some of the details of this gang war in his book, A Criminal and an Irishman. In the past, he had described to me the attempted sniper shooting of Eddie Killeen on an apartment balcony overlooking Dorchester Bay, with such detail that it made me think Pat himself may have been the shooter. There were other notorious crimes. I had been told by a knowledgeable source that Pat Nee was one of the shooters in the killing of Billy O’Sullivan, a Killeen bodyguard who was a close partner of Whitey Bulger. The rumor was that Nee did the killing along with Paulie McGonagle, a fellow Mullen gang member whose brother was murdered by Bulger.

  Another crime Nee was alleged by some to have participated in was a double killing that figured prominently in the Bulger trial—the murder of Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue. Halloran was riddled with gunfire for being an FBI rat, with Donahue merely an unlucky victim who had offered him a ride home.

  Everyone in Boston seemed to believe that Pat Nee was the mystery man in the backseat. Tommy Donahue, Michael Donahue’s son, was out in front of the Moakley Courthouse almost daily speaking to the media, accusing Pat Nee of having murdered his father.

  Pat had never openly denied the accusations, and so the rumors persisted. As to the Halloran-Donahue hit, he told me “no comment,” though he did have an opinion about the Donahues. “They know where I am,” he said. “If they wanted to say something to me or do something, they know where to find me.” The implication was: That’s how we do things in Southie. If need be, we take matters into our own hands.

  Certain crimes were buried deep in the molten foundations of the neighborhood. That’s what I wanted to ask Pat about.

  In the mid-1970s, not long after the mob summit meeting at Chandler’s, Whitey Bulger began to systematically remove some of his most fearsome rivals in South Boston. Bulger, now affiliated with the Winter Hill Mob, was meeting on a daily basis in Somerville at the Marshall Motors garage. But Whitey knew that he needed to have his own base of operation. He also knew that in Southie he would never be viewed as the top guy as long as various members of the Mullen gang were still around.

  I had interviewed Pat Nee before about the founding of the Mullen gang in the late 1950s and how they had emerged, during a time of greasers and early rock and roll, as the most feared street gang in South Boston. Named after John Joseph Mullen, a decorated war veteran who had a neighborhood intersection at East Second and O streets named in his honor, the gang was mostly a collection of “wharf rats”—burglars, thieves, and tailgaters known for pilfering goods along the Boston waterfront. The Mullens were not an organized crime unit—that is, until they hooked up with the Winter Hill Mob and became more involved in high-level criminal rackets in the city.

  Pat Nee had been responsible for bringing the Mullen gang into the realm of organized crime, and not everyone in the gang was in accordance with the move. By 1974, dissention among what was left of the gang created a situation that was problematic for the Winter Hill Mob, which had essentially absorbed the Mullen gang into its structure. Whitey Bulger began to complain to fellow leaders of the Winter Hill Mob—namely Howie Winter, Steve Flemmi, John Martorano, and others—that some of the former Mullen gang members were more trouble than they were worth.

  If any one criminal entity truly represented the hoodlum heart and soul of Southie, it was the Mullen gang. While Bulger had been away in prison, submitting to LSD tests under the watchful eye of the CIA, the Mullens had established themselves as the toughest street fighters in town. Many of the original founders of the gang were ex-military, and others, like Pat Nee, had gone on to fight in Vietnam. In a strange and perhaps perverted way, the dedication and sense of loyalty that these men had known in the service became the foundation of their bond as criminals on the street.

  And then, of course, there was the sense of ethnic solidarity. The Mullens were Irish American to the core, with rambunctious, brawling temperaments to prove it. As a further show of solidarity, many of the gang’s members wore a claddagh ring. In Celtic tradition, the claddagh is a symbol of friendship, love, and loyalty. Two hands holding a heart with a crown on top is adorned in the ring’s setting, along with various jewels. The claddagh has its origins in Galway, the county of Pat Nee’s birth and also the county most highly represented among the Irish immigrants and second- and third-generation Irish Americans of South Boston.

  As Whitey Bulger surveyed the criminal landscape in Boston, he knew he had a problem. Though he was now affiliated with the Winter Hill Mob and therefore had access to big-money rackets that were beyond the reach of the Mullen gang, he would never rule the great ancestral homeland of South Boston as long as remnants of the Mullen gang were still around.

  As with most things, Bulger moved strategically, without anyone fully realizing what his maneuvers were about as they took place.

  Over a period of twelve months, from November 1974 to November 1975, Bulger, along with Martorano, Flemmi, and others, murdered three members of the Mullen gang. By the time Bulger was done, he had effectively cut off the legs of what remained of the gang and eliminated the biggest threat to his power in Southie. Once these three bodies had been buried underground, Whitey could, for the first time, legitimately refer to himself as the mob boss of South Boston.

  Pat Nee had been there for all of it; he was a reluctant participant in this brutal transfer of power.

  I knew from previous interviews I had done with Nee that this was a difficult subject for him to talk about. All these decades later, Nee could now see things about this era that he did not full
y recognize at the time. He had slowly come to realize that quite possibly he had been played by Whitey Bulger and made to take part in the elimination of men who were among his closest cohorts in the neighborhood.

  Pat agreed to speak with me, but we had to do the interview while he ran a few errands around town. It was Friday afternoon, and Nee was leaving later that evening on an Amtrak Acela train to New York City, where he and a lady friend had tickets to see the Broadway show Jersey Boys. They planned on staying in New York through the weekend.

  “I want to ask you about those killings of the Mullen gang members back in ’74 and ’75,” I said to Pat.

  “Oh boy,” he said. “Not a pleasant topic. But go ahead, what do you want to know?”

  In November 1974, Bulger murdered Paulie McGonagle, who was a close associate of Pat. Nee and McGonagle were among the most prominent members of the Mullen gang; they had pulled off many capers together. Bulger, on the other hand, had a hostile relationship with the McGonagle family. An earlier attempt by Bulger to kill Paulie had resulted in him accidentally murdering the twin brother, Donnie McGonagle. Bulger knew that for the rest of his life he would probably have McGonagles wanting to seek revenge against him. And so he murdered Paulie.

  It was done in typical Bulger fashion—devious and effective. On the day before McGonagle’s death, Bulger went to the bank and withdrew cash—all fresh, crisp bills, enough to fill a briefcase. He showed the money to McGonagle, claiming that they were counterfeit bills. McGonagle was impressed. Bulger and McGonagle made an arrangement to meet the following day; McGonagle wanted to purchase some of the counterfeit bills.

  The next day Bulger and McGonagle met. Seated in Bulger’s car, Whitey opened the briefcase, supposedly to show Paulie the bills. Instead, he pulled out a gun and shot McGonagle in the face.