Where the Bodies Were Buried (4 page)

The name of Whitey Bulger was not yet well known, even in the neighborhood. In law enforcement circles, it was common knowledge that Bulger was a key player in the Winter Hill Mob, a violent group of gangsters based in the city of Somerville, far from Southie on the other side of Boston and the Charles River. In Southie, Bulger was a shadowy figure. When it was first explained to me by a couple of students at Cardinal Cushing who he was, it was in the context of his brother, Senator Billy Bulger, who was a figure of renown.

For those in the know, the story was that the senator's brother was a protector of the neighborhood, a criminal, perhaps even a gangster, but he was “our gangster.” Bulger's defenders argued that his activities were designed
to help bring wealth and opportunity to the community. Furthermore, the local myth was that he kept hard drugs out of the neighborhood. This was an especially potent defense since some political and community leaders, including Billy Bulger, had argued that their resistance to busing was based on not wanting “undesirables” bringing drugs into their community.

In the 1970s, much of urban America was awash in heroin and marijuana and, in the years ahead, cocaine and crack. Southie residents took pride in the fact that they were a community that looked out for their own and allegedly kept the drug trade at bay, thanks, in part, to their benevolent gangster.

At Cardinal Cushing High, I talked with a girl—a senior—inside the school's gym, where a group of teenagers were practicing for a musical play that was being directed by my former teacher and friend. The student explained to me that Bulger was a kind of Robin Hood figure in the neighborhood: he stole from other criminals and took care of people in Southie. She spoke in a hushed voice, almost a whisper, as if it were not safe to talk about Whitey in mixed company.

Years later, I was startled to read in a book written by a criminal associate of Bulger that Whitey had set up a room in the local gym called the “dog room,” where he spied on female Cardinal Cushing High School students as they undressed. It was also alleged that Bulger had sex with some of these girls and that, secretly, he had “dated” one of them when she was sixteen and he was a man in his forties. At the same time Bulger was having two simultaneous relationships with adult women, he purportedly picked up his underage “mistress” at the end of the school day and drove her to a neighborhood crash pad for sex.

Robin Hood? Whereas the merry bandit of Sherwood Forest stole from the rich to give to the poor, Bulger, it seemed, stole the virginity of underage girls to add to his list of conquests.

In early 2004, I was back in Southie, this time doing research for a book I was writing titled
Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster
(2005). The book was a sweeping overview of gangster history and folklore from the time of the Potato Famine to present day. The research took me to a number of cities, including New Orleans, New York, Chicago, and Boston, where the narrative of the Irish American gangster remained
long after it had died out elsewhere. That history had become encapsulated in the personage of Bulger, who, at the time, was still on the run.

It was while researching
Paddy Whacked
that I first met Patrick Nee, a criminal rival and later an associate of Bulger. At the time, Pat Nee had only recently returned to Southie after a nine-year stint in federal prison on an armed robbery conviction. I interviewed Nee extensively and began with him a professional relationship that exists to this day.

The reason Nee had agreed to talk with me was a previous book I had published,
The Westies
(1990), an account of the rise and fall of the Irish Mob in New York City. The Westies were a loosely connected gang based on the West Side of Manhattan, in the neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen. They were known for their extreme violence, and, in particular, the manner by which they disposed of their murder victims: they dismembered the bodies, bagged the body parts, and dumped them in the river. The Westies were a terrifying wild card in the New York City underworld from the mid-1970s until 1988, when the core members of the gang were prosecuted and found guilty in a major racketeering trial in the Southern District of New York.

Nee read
The Westies
while incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, in Connecticut. He remembered Bulger talking about the Westies gang back in the early 1980s. Whitey was familiar with some of the key players in the Westies story. In fact, according to Nee, at one point the leader of the Westies had reached out to Bulger in an attempt to establish a working relationship, but Whitey was reluctant based on the gang's reputation for wildness, and also, presumably, because he had at the time a “special relationship” with the FBI that might have been endangered had he formed an alliance with the Westies.

Over the years, via Pat Nee, I was introduced to a number of central players in the Bulger story, including Kevin Weeks, Bulger's right-hand man; John Martorano, a hit man for the Winter Hill Mob; Jim Martorano, John's brother, also a Winter Hill member; Teresa Stanley, Bulger's common-law wife for thirty years; and others. Through conversations and interviews with these people, and through my ongoing research on the Bulger years, I began to bend my mind around one of the most complicated and multilayered stories in the history of American organized crime.

When Bulger the octogenarian was finally apprehended in Santa Monica and brought back to Boston in June 2011, I was assigned by
Newsweek
magazine and its Web affiliate, the
Daily Beast,
to write a series of articles leading up to and including the trial. I wrote a half-dozen pretrial pieces in which, along with interviewing many of the people mentioned above, I tracked down and interviewed others, such as Joe Salvati—people who had been involved with or affected by traumatic events in the Boston underworld going back decades.

Among those I interviewed, the most crucial, arguably, was former FBI special agent John Connolly. From 1975 to 1990, Connolly had been the handler for Bulger in his role as a Top Echelon Informant. When, in the wake of the Wolf hearings, Bulger's informant status was revealed, Connolly became the focus of criminal investigations headed by prosecutors Wyshak and Kelly. In 2000, he was indicted and convicted on charges of fraud and obstruction of justice in the state of Massachusetts. While serving his ten-year sentence, he was indicted again by the prosecutors, this time in the state of Florida. The charge was murder, on the grounds that Connolly, while serving as Bulger's handler, had leaked information to Bulger's gang that led to the killing of a potential government witness.

I did not believe that Connolly was a totally innocent man. His relationship with Bulger and Flemmi had crossed the line in a number of ways. My own feeling was that the case in Massachusetts had resulted in a just verdict. But there was in the government's pursuit of Connolly the whiff of an attempt to make him the fall guy for the entire system's corrupt relationship with Bulger. Connolly was certainly a key player; he and Whitey had a close personal relationship—but Connolly did not create the Top Echelon Informant Program, nor was he a supervisor responsible for making decisions regarding internal policies that spawned the Bulger fiasco.

Connolly was in a position to present a version of the Justice Department's handling of Whitey that could endanger the careers of many government functionaries. At the time of the Wolf hearings, he had been a vocal public critic of the Justice Department, noting that everything he had done as Bulger's handler was authorized up the chain of command. In being so
vocal, Connolly put a target on his back and became the focus of intense efforts by prosecutors to take him down, even if it meant stretching the bounds of legal propriety.

Specifically, it seemed as though the murder case against Connolly in Florida was an overreach, an attempt to discredit him for all time.

Since being convicted, the former FBI agent was buried away in state prison in the town of Chipley, near the Florida-Alabama border. Through mutual contacts, I was able to communicate with Connolly and request an interview. I made it clear that I was somewhat sympathetic with his predicament. The interview was done over the phone and lasted an hour.

Connolly struck me as a person who was still in denial about many things; he was unwilling to admit that he had done anything wrong, much less criminal in nature. But he offered some extraordinary details about Bulger's relationship with the criminal justice system. He described to me a meeting he set up between Whitey and the chief of the federal New England Organized Crime Strike Force, a man named Jeremiah O'Sullivan. The Strike Force operated under the umbrella of the U.S. attorney's office. Connolly was suggesting, for the first time, that the arrangement Bulger had with the government went beyond the FBI to the U.S. attorney's office and perhaps even higher up in the DOJ.

The article that appeared in
Newsweek
was an exclusive; Connolly had not spoken with any other journalist since Bulger's apprehension in Santa Monica. The article appeared under the headline “The Scapegoat” and created a stir. The U.S. attorney's office in Massachusetts was livid that Connolly had been publicly interviewed and allowed to make statements that were not beneficial to their case against Bulger. A spokesperson for the district attorney in Miami-Dade County publicly condemned the article. Prison authorities in Chipley were not pleased that Connolly had used the opportunity to call his murder conviction into question. Connolly was punished, thrown in “the hole” for fifty-one days of solitary confinement.

The incident reaffirmed something I had learned since I began writing about the government's various criminal prosecutions in relation to the Bulger fiasco. Any attempt to present a broader narrative of culpability that stretched above and beyond Bulger, Connolly, and the usual suspects
would be met with resistance, if not outright malice, by representatives of the criminal justice system in the U.S. District of Massachusetts.
²

THE BOOK YOU
hold in your hand is an account of the trial of Whitey Bulger from a particular point of view. Like many reporters who have followed the Bulger story over the years, my conclusions are my own but have been shaped by the interviews I have done with people who were close to the events that led directly to Bulger's rise and fall.

As with other writers, I came to the trial with an “agenda” of sorts. It was my hope that the
People of the United States v. James J. Bulger
would be a final accounting of the entire Bulger scandal, not only laying out the full cast of characters that had enabled Bulger—all the way up the chain of command to Washington, D.C.—but also delving into the historical antecedents that had helped create Bulger in the first place. Even with all the articles, published memoirs, and many nonfiction books, television documentaries, and feature films based on the Bulger story, many important facts remained unknown. The trial represented an opportunity—perhaps a final opportunity—for a more complete picture of the Bulger scandal to finally be revealed.

From early June 2013 to mid-August, with a brief return in November, I attended every minute of every day of the trial and sentencing. Under federal law, cameras were prohibited from recording events in the courtroom, so the demand for seats was high for media people and spectators who hoped to view the proceedings live and in person. Some days I took in the proceedings from the actual courtroom where the trial took place, but mostly I watched from the media “overflow room,” a separate room on a different floor in the courthouse.

Over the course of eight weeks, the trial unfolded like a casting call
of characters from the Boston underworld spanning four decades. Along with the now-familiar turncoat trio of Flemmi, John Martorano, and Kevin Weeks, who had testified at many Bulger-related hearings and trials over the previous decade and a half, the supporting cast included assorted hoods who had never before been heard from in public. Though their testimony may not have shed much light on the central conspiracy of Bulger's informant relationship with the Justice Department, it did offer many pungent anecdotes and insights into one of the most rambunctious criminal underworlds in the United States over the latter half of the twentieth century.

In the pages that follow, wherever testimony from the trial is reproduced it is derived directly from the court transcript. Other events from inside the courtroom are re-created from my own notes and memory. Whenever possible, these events were further enhanced by follow-up conversations with the participants involved.

Seventy-one witnesses took the stand at the trial (see Appendix A). As far-reaching and devastating as the testimony appeared to be, it became clear as the proceedings unfolded that the evidence presented did not tell the full story. In some cases, witness testimony raised questions the details of which were deliberately being excluded from the proceedings by the prosecutors and the judge.

Thus, as well as attempting to give a daily narrative of the trial as it unfolded, this account is buttressed by historical asides and interviews away from the courtroom with some crucial observers, including people like Joe Salvati; Anthony Cardinale, a highly knowledgeable criminal defense attorney in Boston who has represented many organized crime figures; former FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick, who was a controversial witness at the trial; and a member of the jury who was to become increasingly disillusioned as the proceedings unfolded.

The trial spawned many major news stories, with the defendant dramatically cursing out some of the witnesses, and one potential witness turning up dead while the trial was still ongoing. Locally, it was a front-page item most days, but the implications of the trial reached far beyond Boston.

Bulger and Flemmi had been recruited and used by the DOJ as part of the FBI's Top Echelon Informant Program. Though there had never been a full public accounting of this program—and there was little data available
to the public on how many known criminals were involved, how much the program cost, or who exactly within the DOJ was responsible for its oversight—it was known that the TE program involved the recruiting and use of criminals all over the United States. How many “special relationships” with gangsters and drug lords had gone bad for the FBI? And who, if anybody, was ever held institutionally responsible?