Where the Bodies Were Buried (37 page)

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 down. 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:

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
:

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.

During direct testimony, Weeks had spoken in mostly a dispassionate tone of voice. He seemed removed from the events of the past, even the murders he described, as if he had long ago come to terms with whatever emotional discomfort might be unearthed by these memories. But Carney was going for a different kind of emotional turmoil, the kind that comes from the rupture of a deep bond.

“Jim Bulger is approximately twenty-seven years older than you,” said the defense lawyer.

“Correct,” said Weeks.

“And during that time you were working with him, it's fair to say that at times he played the role of teacher to you, right?”

“Oh, yeah, everything was a learning experience.”

“He was your mentor, isn't that fair to say?”

“Correct.”

“He was basically teaching you, I guess, all things criminal.”

“No, not all things criminal. . . . Also, how to act. To look formidable. If you look formidable, you're less likely to have trouble with people. He also wanted me to stay out of bars so I didn't get in fights and get in trouble.”

“Don't get drunk because you're vulnerable if you're drunk?”

“No. Don't get drunk because I had a bad temper. I was going to hurt somebody.”

“Did he treat you well, Mr. Bulger?”

“He treated me great.”

As Carney burrowed deeper into the nature of the relationship between Bulger and his young acolyte, Kevin's voice rose an octave with each answer. Carney was touching a nerve, softening up the witness, a tried-and-true technique of skilled trial attorneys. When Kevin mentioned the subject of his own temper, it seemed to be the verbal cue that Carney had been listening for. He moved on from the subject of Jim Bulger to another that was certain to raise the ire of the witness, that of Stephen “Stippo” Rakes.

In his direct testimony, Weeks had detailed the circumstances of events surrounding Act of Racketeering No. 21, the extortion of Stippo Rakes. In 1984, Rakes, a well-known businessman in Southie, had approached Bulger and Weeks with an offer to buy his liquor store, which was strategically located between the Old Colony and Old Harbor housing projects, on West Broadway. Bulger and Weeks immediately recognized that the liquor store was the perfect opportunity for them to launder their proceeds from gambling, loan-sharking, narcotics, extortion, and other criminal rackets.