Where the Bodies Were Buried (15 page)

One thing the Winter Hill Mob was good at was threatening people. From the stand, O'Brien recalled an incident when he had an agent named George Labate who worked for him. “He had run up a considerable amount of makeup. We paid thousands of dollars to keep him in business. For some reason known only to him, he sort of disappeared. He stopped calling, he didn't inquire about doing business, and it was rather—something that's a no-no in the business. You don't get paid from somebody for thousands of dollars and then just throw your hand up and walk away. And we were told he was now with some other office.”

When Bulger heard about the problem O'Brien was having with Labate, he arranged for a meeting and told Labate that he better show up.

Asked Hafer, “So what happened at the meeting?”

“Well, we were sitting at the bar having coffee, and Mr. Labate was sitting there next to me, and Mr. Bulger was standing on the side, and John Martorano, I believe, was sitting there. And I think it was Mr. Bulger who said to him, ‘Were you treated right by Dickie? You were treated good?' And Labate says, ‘Yes, I was.' He said, ‘Then what are you doing? You owe him a big amount of money in makeup, but you stopped calling him. He doesn't have a chance to make his money back.' Labate said, ‘Oh, I know that isn't right. I will take care of that. But when I do get through with making my makeup, I have my own ideas about what I'm going to do with my business. I'll take care of that and go my own way.' So Mr. Bulger came over to him and said, ‘You're going to go your own way?' Labate nodded, and [Bulger] said, ‘You know, we have another business besides bookmaking.' Labate says, ‘What's that?' Mr. Bulger said, ‘Killing assholes like you.'”

The quiet of the courtroom was pierced by the sound of a cackle. It was the defendant, Bulger, amused by the memory.

On cross-examination, Jay Carney picked up on the killing-assholes-like-you story. It was Carney's intention to tactfully posit the suggestion that the incident was a case of Bulger fulfilling the role he had promised O'Brien he would when they became partners. “Didn't [he] tell you, ‘You wear the white hat and we wear the black hats'?”

“That's true.”

“Did you understand that to mean that you could go about your bookmaking services and deal with customers or agents or others and just be the person who took the bets? That's why you wore the white hat, right?”

“True. Plus the fact that I was brought up by a father being a bookmaker, and he said, Just treat people the way you like to be treated, which I did.”

Dickie O'Brien, gentleman bookmaker, was kept on the stand all day—a Friday—and made to return the following Monday. Mostly, his testimony involved fond recollections of the only business he had ever known. Even his memories of being cajoled and extorted into business arrangements with more powerful criminal entities in the city were presented by the witness as the price of doing business. Perhaps they were stories he told his grandkids of skirting the edges of a potentially perilous trade, and living to tell about it.

On Monday, however, near the end of his time on the stand, the testimony veered into an area that was not so pleasant for O'Brien.

In the early 1990s, when the investigation led by Wyshak, Kelly, and Colonel Foley of the state police began to zero in on the bookies, they put the squeeze on O'Brien. Indictments were coming down left and right. O'Brien figured he might be next to be indicted, so he left the state and moved to Florida with his wife and the two youngest of his six children. But he didn't give up his bookmaking business. He left the entire business in the able hands of his oldest daughter, Tara, who had recently graduated from college. Thus bookmaking as the O'Brien family business passed into a third generation. As Dickie explained it, “I had to have somebody I could rely upon and trust. There was a lot of money involved with [the business], you know, and there were certain unsavory characters that you had as agents. It could cost you a lot of money.”

In Florida, O'Brien reconnected with John Martorano. It happened purely by chance. Dickie's wife was at a PTA meeting in Florida, and she bumped into Martorano, who had been on the lam since 1979.

O'Brien had always liked John Martorano. He once borrowed one hundred thousand dollars from Martorano to keep afloat the sports betting side of his bookmaking operation. Whereas Whitey was remote and scary, and Steve Flemmi was just plain scary, Martorano struck O'Brien as a fun-loving guy who was in the rackets to have a good time. Of course, O'Brien also knew that Martorano was a stone-cold killer, a professional hit man. To have a friendship with anyone in the underworld—much less someone who was known for settling business disputes by making bodies disappear—involved a certain amount of what psychoanalysts refer to as a “primitive ego defense mechanism.” In the rackets, this mechanism—also known as denial—was often the elixir that made friendships possible.

O'Brien kept in regular contact with his daughter back in Boston. Through her, he heard that bookmakers in New England were being rounded up and arrested. He heard that Chico Krantz, the legendary Boston bookmaker, had “flipped” and was cooperating with the federal investigation. Already Tara O'Brien had been approached by someone affiliated with the Winter Hill Mob and told they'd heard a rumor that she and her father were about to “flip.” Tara was scared.

At the same time, in Florida, Dickie O'Brien was told by Martorano that Steve Flemmi was coming down to see him. Flemmi needed to be reassured that O'Brien was not going to cooperate with the feds.

Dickie trusted Martorano, but he did not trust Flemmi. So he called his daughter and told her, “I'm going to a meeting with Steve Flemmi. If you don't hear from me in ten hours, I want you to contact the FBI office in Florida.”

Tara O'Brien was terrified. She'd heard the rumors that Flemmi was a psycho killer who had murdered at least two women, including Debbie Davis, one of his ex-girlfriends.

O'Brien had his meeting with Flemmi. He reassured the mobster that neither he nor his daughter would be cooperating with the feds.

The O'Briens survived that meeting with Flemmi, but afterward, things got worse. A few months later, both Dickie O'Brien and his daughter were indicted. They were charged with various crimes, including RICO violations. Tara was facing eighteen to twenty-four months in prison under mandatory sentencing guidelines. As a result, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in a mental institution.

From the witness stand, O'Brien's guilt was palpable. “I was the cause of that,” he said. “I took her to the hospital, and every day I went to visit her.”

“You were a loving father,” noted Carney.

“I always tried to be.”

Back in 1994, the investigators—Wyshak and Kelly—put pressure on O'Brien. They used the fact that his daughter, now hospitalized, would be sent away to prison for two years unless he cooperated with them.

The O'Brien family business had become the O'Brien family nightmare. To spare his daughter prison time, O'Brien cut a deal with the feds and became the very thing that Steve Flemmi had feared he would become: a rat.

AFTER DICKIE O'BRIEN
finished with his testimony, the trial was adjourned for the day. I closed up my laptop computer, gathered up my belongings, and headed down to the cafeteria for a cup of java. There I ran into Steve Davis.

Steve, age fifty-five, was the brother of Debra Davis, who, according to the indictment, had been strangled to death by Bulger, her body later disposed of by Bulger and Flemmi. Just fifteen months apart from Debra in age, Steve had been close to his sister. He had tried to warn her about Flemmi, who was twenty-six years her senior and a man notorious for his womanizing and violent tendencies.

I first met Steve Davis nearly a year earlier, when I interviewed him for an article I wrote for
Newsweek
leading up to the trial. In the wake of Bulger's capture, Davis had been a ubiquitous figure on the news and in the local media. The reporters liked Steve because he was voluble and emotional; he wore his hatred for Whitey on his sleeve. And he was always good for a punchy quote. When I first interviewed Davis in the lobby of Boston's Seaport Hotel in June 2011, he did not disappoint, saying of Bulger, “I'm an eye-for-eye kind of guy; I'd do to him what he did to my sister. . . . They talk about closure. Fuck closure. Give me fifteen minutes with Bulger and I'll give him closure. I'll shoot him in the fuckin' head.”

In subsequent interviews at pretrial court proceedings and in phone conversations, I got to know Steve better. I noticed that after the initial jolt of Bulger's arrest and the raw emotional viscera it had unleashed, Steve calmed down somewhat. Not that his desire to see Bulger punished had diminished; it had not. But Davis became savvier about how to present himself in the public domain. He wore designer glasses and, on occasion, a silk suit, his hair styled and his snow-white goatee neatly trimmed.

In the courthouse cafeteria, I asked Steve how he was doing. “It's emotional,” he said. “I never thought I would see this day. Just hoping to get through it and that it goes the way we want it to go.”

I knew from previous conversations with Steve that what drove him to follow through on his commitment to maintain a presence at each and every stage of Bulger's legal demise was the memory of his mother, Olga Davis, who died in 2008 at the age of seventy-eight. Way back in the early 1980s, when Debra Davis first disappeared, Steve Flemmi, the co-perpetrator, had come to Olga Davis in tears, saying that he had no idea what had happened to her. At first, Mrs. Davis didn't know what to believe. She reached out to the FBI, which proved to be a mistake, since the FBI at that time was protecting both Flemmi and Bulger. When they told her to forget Debra, that she now had nine other children to worry about, she took it as a threat and cut off contact with the FBI.

I asked Steve if it was bittersweet facing the prospect of finally getting justice in his sister's murder with his mother not here to see the day.

“She would have been here every day of the trial,” said Steve, his eyes moistening.

Back in 2003, the Davis family, along with the families of Deborah Hussey and Louis Latif, two other murder victims of Bulger and Flemmi, filed a joint lawsuit against the FBI and DOJ on the theory that the government had aided and abetted Bulger and Flemmi in the murders of their loved ones. The family of murder victim John McIntyre filed a similar suit. Later, more wrongful death lawsuits were filed, this time by the families of additional murder victims Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue. The fact that the government vociferously contested these cases rather than reach settlements with the families had done much to create a feeling of ill will in Boston toward the DOJ.

In the case of Debra Davis, the government had even argued that the family did not deserve to receive damages because she had bedded down with a known criminal, a claim that federal district judge William G. Young ruled to be “unfounded and baseless . . . a meritless defense with the sole purpose of embarrassing” the Davis family.

In 2005, the McIntyre family received a favorable judgment of $2.3 million, the money to be paid by U.S. taxpayers. The Halloran and Donahue families won their cases and were awarded, collectively, $4 million in damages, but the rulings were overturned on appeal, on the grounds that the families had filed their suit after the statute of limitations had expired. The Davis family, along with the families of Hussey and Latif, won their case. They received judgments ranging from $335,000 to $1.3 million. Again, the government appealed the ruling, but in 2012 the financial judgment was upheld.

The millions of dollars did not bring back the murder victims of Whitey Bulger. Steve Davis lost his sister in the most brutal manner imaginable, and then the murder was partially covered up for years by the FBI. Bulger and Flemmi went on to kill others, including Deborah Hussey, Flemmi's twenty-six-year-old stepdaughter.

“You think the government would be ashamed of its behavior in this case,” said Steve, “but there are things they are still covering up to this day.”

As Steve and I continued to chat about new details that might come to light during the trial, we were approached by someone I knew to be a producer from CNN. “Sorry to interrupt,” said the producer. “Steve, we need to get you on camera.”

The CNN crew had been highly visible since the proceedings began.
Producer and director Joe Berlinger, an award-winning filmmaker, was shooting a documentary on the trial for the network and had been interviewing many of the family members of Bulger's victims, including Steve Davis.

“Sorry, I gotta run,” said Davis. “We'll talk later.” I watched Steve hustle off with the producer, his life now a series of interviews and business propositions that included a book deal and a movie deal about his life in the shadow of Bulger and Flemmi.

Later, I exited the courthouse and came upon what had become the usual media constellation outside the front entrance. Steve was off to one side being “miked up” by the CNN crew. A gaggle of one hundred or so media people were assembled behind a rope, with handheld cameras and boom microphones extended toward three standing microphones. At one of the mics was Tommy Donahue, who, like Steve Davis, had become a familiar representative of the victims' families. Donahue's father, Michael Donahue, was killed by Bulger when he offered a ride home to a man Bulger had targeted for death. Michael Donahue had been collateral damage. Young Tommy was four years old at the time of his father's death. Standing alongside Tommy Donahue was his mother, Patricia, age sixty-five, who had been waiting more than thirty years for closure in the death of her husband.

Next to the Donahues, waiting for an opportunity to speak, was Stephen Rakes, another familiar member of the Bulger survivors' club. Back in the 1980s, Rakes had been extorted by Bulger, who took over his South Boston Liquor Mart by threatening to have him killed. Rakes had also filed a civil lawsuit, given dozens of interviews to the media over the years, and become something of a local celebrity in Boston due to his past associations with the Bulger story.