Bucky Barrett had done well for himself as a freelance criminal. Everyone knew that he had been a party to the Depositors Trust bank robbery, which had netted millions. Bulger and Flemmi had already tried to shake down Barrett, insisting that they deserved a cut of the heist simply because they were in charge now, and any major score that occurred in the greater Boston area was within their domain. Not only had Barrett resisted the shakedown, but he went to Frankie Salemme, Steve Flemmi’s old partner from the time of the Boston gang wars in the 1960s. As Weeks explained it, “Frankie basically said that [Bucky] was with him, he was an earner, so [Bulger and Flemmi] backed away.”
Bulger let it slide, but he never forgot how Bucky had finagled his way out of the shakedown. It was now a number of years later, and Whitey had ascended in the underworld; he had gone from being a hustler to being a predator. With his powerful political brother, and his secret relationship with the FBI, Bulger believed he was untouchable. And so part of his modus operandi became feeding off other criminals in the area, luring them into scams and extortions, knowing that, unlike him, they had nowhere to turn.
Said Weeks, “A plan was devised to suck Bucky in, to shake him down. . . . There was a fellow who had a lot of hot diamonds. The plan was that Bucky was going to meet this fellow and buy diamonds off him.”
“Who was this fellow?” asked the prosecutor.
“Well, it was myself.”
Barrett was brought to the house on Third Street to meet the diamond dealer. He was brought by Jim Martorano, Johnny’s brother. Bucky had known Jimmy Martorano for years; he trusted him.
“Bucky came in the house. . . . We shook hands, and I grabbed him by the hand and held him. Jim Bulger stepped out of the kitchen with a Mac-10 nine-millimeter, and he said, ‘Bucky Barrett, freeze!’ He then took possession of him. . . . Barrett was taken to the kitchen and chained and manacled, you know, handcuffed to a chair. . . . Jim told Jimmy Martorano to take off, which he did immediately. It was now Steve Flemmi, myself, and Jim Bulger.”
The interrogation of Bucky Barrett lasted nearly all day. With him chained to a chair, a machine gun pointed at his chest, Bulger and Flemmi grilled Bucky about all the money they believed he had hidden away from his many successful scores. Eventually Barrett began to wear down; he admitted that he had money hidden in his house. The gangsters made Barrett call home to his wife. The conversation was on speakerphone, so they could hear everything that was said. Barrett told his wife to leave the house. She was worried and wanted to know what was going on. Bucky told her to do as she was told, not to worry, everything would be okay.
The plan was for Bulger and Flemmi to go over to the house and take the money.
At some point, Pat Nee came by the house. His brother Michael, the proprietor of the house, was on vacation in Florida. Pat had allowed Bulger and Flemmi access to the house. They wanted to use it because it was conveniently located a half block away from the home of Steve Flemmi’s mother and also the screen house where the gang stored its arsenal of weapons.
While Bulger and Flemmi headed over to the home of Bucky Barrett, Weeks and Nee were assigned the task of keeping an eye on Bucky. He remained strapped to a kitchen chair. At one point, Bucky took out a wallet-size photo of his newborn daughter and began to pray.
Bulger and Flemmi returned with forty-seven thousand dollars in cash they had retrieved from Barrett’s house. But that wasn’t enough. Bulger told Bucky they wanted more. Bucky told them that he had ten thousand dollars over at Rascal’s, a popular bar and restaurant located at Faneuil Hall, the city’s famous historic site and tourist mall. Weeks was told to drive over there and pick up the money, which he did. Then he returned to the house. By the time he returned, Pat Nee was no longer there.
They had now extorted $57,000 out of Bucky, but they wanted more. They came up with a plan for Bucky to call Joe Murray in Charlestown. They knew that Bucky had made money as a partner of Murray in the cocaine and marijuana business. They told him to call Murray and inform him that he was leaving town and wanted to cash out his end of the cocaine business. If Murray didn’t go along with it, Bucky was to tell him he would rat out everybody.
By now, Bucky Barrett was a beaten man. He was bartering to save his life and was willing to do whatever Bulger and Flemmi ordered him to do. He called Murray and made his demands, according to the script. Over the speakerphone, Murray cursed at Bucky and said, “You always were a rat. Fuck off!” Then Joe Murray hung up.
Well, it had been a long day, and they had apparently squeezed all they could out of Bucky Barrett. So Bucky, still manacled and in chains, was led down towards the basement, where Whitey Bulger shot him in the back of the head.
Said Weeks, “Bucky tumbled down to the bottom of the stairs, where Stevie grabbed his body and dragged him over to the side. . . . Stevie had me go get a plastic container with water. He wanted cold water. He explained to me that the cold water helps congeal the blood; it’s easier for the cleanup. He was talking to me, kind of teaching as he went. We cleaned up all the blood and everything, and then [Stevie] went over and proceeded to take out Bucky’s teeth.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was down there with him. I started digging the hole.”
“Who helped you digging the hole?”
“Originally, [it was me], then Pat Nee came back. He came downstairs. He was a little upset because it was his brother’s house. It was supposed to be a shakedown; we weren’t supposed to be killing anybody. So he was mad that [Bucky] got murdered in his brother’s house. Then we were digging the hole, he didn’t like it. He said, ‘I feel like I’m digging my own hole.’ I said, ‘What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘There’s nothing we can do. They got the guns.’ So we continued digging the hole. Stevie prepared the body; we took it over, put it in the hole, put lime on it, and covered it over.”
For Kevin Weeks, the murder and burial of Bucky Barrett was a disorienting initiation into the more macabre aspects of the Bulger organization, but he had made his commitment to the gang. In for a penny, in for a pound. He left the house on Third Street that night hoping that nothing like that ever happened again. Which made it all the more unnerving when, just fifteen months later, he found himself in the midst of a similar situation.
This time the victim was John McIntyre. An experienced sailor and a boat mechanic, McIntyre, in his early thirties, had played a key role in the shipping of weapons to the IRA aboard a schooner named the Valhalla. The shipment was intercepted at sea by Irish authorities. The fact that the guns were seized and the mission apparently sabotaged by an informant was bad enough, but even worse was the fact the Bulger gang’s follow-up shipment of marijuana, on a ship called the Ramsland, was also busted.
The gang learned from John Connolly, their man in the FBI, that they had an informant in their midst. They suspected McIntyre.
This time it was Pat Nee who brought the unsuspecting victim over to the house on Third Street. In interviews I’d done with Nee, he told me that it had been discussed and agreed that McIntyre would not be killed. He would be interrogated and have the fear of God put in him, then he would be moved out of the country and relocated in South America, through contacts of Joe Murray; there he would be out of the reach of any grand jury subpoena.
Nee brought McIntyre to the house under the false pretense that there was another drug shipment deal to discuss. He and McIntyre brought a couple of six-packs of beer. Once Kevin Weeks wrapped his arms around McIntyre, and Whitey stepped out of the shadows with his Mac-10 machine gun, Nee left to go to the Mullens’ club.
What followed next, according to Weeks, was the same routine as with Bucky. McIntyre was strapped to a chair in the kitchen and interrogated over the course of many hours. Eventually, he confessed to ratting out the Ramsland and cooperating with law enforcement. “I’m sorry,” said McIntyre. “I was weak.” McIntyre began to unravel, as though he suspected he would be killed.
Said Weeks, “Jim Bulger told him to calm do
wn. He said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll figure this out.’” Bulger reassured McIntyre that his only punishment would be that he would be forced to leave the country. “McIntyre started to relax. He felt a little better, I guess. And Jim started asking him questions about Joe Murray’s business again, you know, how many boats he brought in, the offloading procedure, who was with him, how much money they made, things like that.”
Asked prosecutor Kelly, “What was the point of asking him so many questions?”
“Looking for the next score,” said Kevin, “the next person that we were going to rob, shake down.”
When they were done questioning McIntyre, he was taken downstairs and first strangled and then shot in the head by Bulger. As soon as the body hit the floor, Steve Flemmi bent down and put his ear to McIntyre’s chest. “He’s still alive,” said Flemmi. Bulger stepped forward and fired five or six shots directly into McIntyre’s face. “He’s dead now,” said Whitey.
McIntyre was stripped down and buried in a hole next to the body of Bucky Barrett.
“How long did this process take?” asked Kelly.
“Maybe an hour,” Weeks answered.
“And where was Bulger while you were digging the hole.”
“Upstairs. Lying on the couch.”
The third and final killing at 799 Third Street occurred only a few months later.
“Jim picked me up and brought me to the house. We went inside. He told me Stevie was bringing Debbie by, he was out buying her a coat.” Kevin knew that Debbie was Deborah Hussey, Flemmi’s stepdaughter, just twenty-six years old. Weeks had never met Deborah Hussey, but he knew that Bulger and Flemmi were having problems with her; she was a drug user and part-time prostitute who had been publicly bad-mouthing her stepfather, making them look bad, as though they couldn’t control the people in their orbit. Weeks knew all this, but he was still relieved to hear that Flemmi was bringing the young lady by the house.
“Why were you relieved?” asked Kelly.
“It was a girl. She wasn’t a criminal. She wasn’t involved with us or anything I knew of, in any crimes. So I didn’t think anything was going to come of it.”
Weeks described what happened next: Flemmi arrived at the house with Deborah. Weeks went upstairs to use the bathroom. While he was there, he heard a loud thud. He zipped up and came downstairs to discover Deborah on the floor with Bulger straddling her, his hands wrapped around her neck. Her eyes rolled up in her head and her lips were turning blue. It took a good three or four minutes, but eventually Bulger had strangled her to death.
They dragged the body down to the basement. Again, Steve Flemmi determined that she was not yet dead. He wrapped a rope around her neck, put a wood stick through it, and twisted the stick until she was good and dead. Flemmi extracted the teeth; Whitey went upstairs and lay down on the sofa, as you might after having vigorous sex. A hole was dug and she was buried in the same general area as the other two.
The murder of Deborah Hussey bothered Kevin Weeks. He could justify the other two as a logical consequence of the gangster life—a dead fellow criminal and a dead informant. But Deborah Hussey was a female, and she was not a criminal. What he heard was that Flemmi had been having a sexual relationship with his stepdaughter since she was a teenager, and she was threatening to call him out. To murder her for that reason had nothing to do with business.
As violent and jarring as these three murders had been, they were, to Weeks, not the most disturbing event to take place at the Haunty. That occurred on Halloween 1985, when it was decided the bodies had to be moved.
Pat Nee’s brother had made it known that he was going to sell the house. Said Weeks, “Originally, Jim wanted to buy the house off Pat’s brother. But then Stevie figured it would be easier to move the bodies. It would be cheaper, too.”
They arrived at five in the morning—Flemmi, Weeks, and Nee—with picks and shovels, trowels, gloves, surgical masks, cleaning fluids, and body bags.
“Where did you get the body bags?” asked Kelly.
“Steve Flemmi had a connection with some funeral home.”
As usual, Kelly rushed through Weeks’s testimony; the exhumation of the bodies was not a criminal charge in the indictment, so perhaps he felt it did not merit going into great detail.
In interviews, both Weeks and Nee had described this event for me, as it was for them a low point in their association with Bulger and Flemmi.
Apparently, when the bodies were first buried, they had used the wrong kind of lime. In the case of Bucky Barrett, instead of using a lime that speeds up decomposition, they had used a fertilizer lime that had partly mummified the body. As they attempted to lift Barrett’s body, the skull snapped off. Nee tossed the head to Weeks and said, “Bucky ain’t looking so good.” The other two bodies had been mostly liquefied except for the bones. As Kevin sought to raise the remains of Deborah Hussey from the hole, his shovel caught under the clavicle and her entire insides spilled out. The stench was overwhelming. Kevin stumbled into a nearby bathroom and vomited.
Both Weeks and Nee noticed how easy the process was for Flemmi, who took a special fascination with various body parts and aspects of decomposition. They knew now why Bulger referred to Stevie as “Dr. Mengele,” the notorious Nazi officer who oversaw unscientific and often deadly human experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
It took all day, but they finally fully exhumed and bagged up the remains. Then they sifted through the dirt floor of the basement for small bones or bone fragments, anything that might serve as a clue that this basement had once been an unceremonious grave for three murdered Bostonians.
After all the heavy lifting was done, Bulger showed up in an old family-style station wagon that opened in the back, with seats that folded down. Under cover of darkness, the body bags were to be taken to a previously chosen location. Pat Nee did not go along. Nee told me that he refused to take part in any more burials. In court, when asked why Nee did not go with the other three to dispose of the bodies, Kevin had a different explanation. “Jimmy never really trusted Pat. I don’t think he wanted him to know where the bodies were buried.”
Bulger, Flemmi, and Weeks drove over to Dorchester, near Florian Hall, a catering hall where firemen, cops, and other civil servants frequently held retirement parties and work-related functions. Across Hallet Street from Florian Hall was a parking lot, and behind the parking lot, a gully that was dense with trees and overgrowth. The three men unloaded the bags from the station wagon and took them down in the gully. Weeks and Flemmi dug the grave, while Bulger stood guard with a machine gun. At one point, Bulger came over and let Weeks go stand guard for a while. While Kevin stood at the edge of the gully hidden by shrubbery, someone drove up in a car. With the engine still running, a young male in his twenties got out and, unaware that Weeks was nearby, urinated in the bushes, then got back in his car and drove off.
Immediately, Bulger came over to Kevin. “Dammit, you let him get too close,” said Whitey. “You should have shot him. There’s plenty of room in the hole.”
Bulger was annoyed. He snatched the machine gun from Kevin and said, “I’ll stand guard. You go back there and finish digging the hole.”
IN HIS BOOK, Brutal, Weeks made it clear that while he was working for the Bulger organization, he held his boss in high regard. Jim, as Weeks called him—never Whitey—was a stern taskmaster, but he was fair. Wrote Weeks:
Jimmy had his own sense of morality. Even though he spent much of his life involved in violent crime, he still believed that certain crimes could not be committed, certainly not on his turf, anyhow. And he never hesitated to help someone that he felt needed help. . . . Ninety-eight percent of his life was business, while two percent was pleasure. While other guys might be out drinking, he’d be thinking. While other people would be going to sleep at night, he’d be up planning. He was disciplined and lived and breathed the life of crime.1
Kevin didn’t like it when the media described Bulger as his “father
figure” or when he was referred to as Whitey’s surrogate son. Bulger himself had used that term to describe his relationship with Kevin. But Weeks wasn’t buying it. He already had a father. In fact, his course in life as a fighter and a tough guy had been set in motion by his father, John Weeks, a former boxer who was often physically abusive with his sons. Bill Weeks, Kevin’s older brother, wrote about their upbringing in the introduction to Brutal:
The streets of Southie were tough. But not as tough as the apartment at 8 Pilsudski Way. There violence reigned supreme. What do you do when the streets are safer than your own home? It was better to go out and take a beating (though mostly you were inflicting one) than face the consequences of failing. And you could win and still fail—you didn’t win by enough, the other person wasn’t bloodied enough or got up too soon after the punishment was inflicted. Do nothing, and you got a beating. There was malevolence that permeated the air we breathed.2
John Weeks originally hailed from Brooklyn. He married a girl from Southie and changed tires for a living. He beat one or more of his kids nearly every day while at the same time instilling in them a near-psychotic desire for achievement. Billy and the other brother, Johnny, chose the conventional route: academic achievement at Harvard and careers in politics and civic administration.
Ironically, the son the father most admired for his choices was Kevin. He was the one who settled problems with his fists and developed a reputation as someone both respected and feared, but mostly feared. When John Weeks learned that his son was serving as a protégé of the notorious Whitey Bulger, he put a hand on his shoulder and told him, “Listen and learn.”
Kevin did not need to be told twice; he listened and he learned. His loyalty to Bulger was such that he was willing to kill without question; he was willing to die for Jim Bulger if it came to that.
It was this deep sense of loyalty to Bulger that Jay Carney sought to mine as he stood to cross-examine Kevin Weeks.
Where the Bodies Were Buried Page 30