Where the Bodies Were Buried (5 page)

These questions were especially pertinent because another scandal involving the Top Echelon Informant Program had flared up and died out just six years earlier. Around the same time it was first revealed that Bulger and Flemmi had been FBI informants, it came to light that a major mafia figure in New York, Gregory Scarpa, a capo in the Colombo crime family, had also served as a TE for the FBI. First recruited by the feds in the mid-1960s, Scarpa was believed to have committed as many as fifty murders while serving as a paid government informant.

In 1994, Scarpa died of AIDS without it ever having been publicly revealed that he was a federal informant for nearly thirty years. When it was finally revealed at a racketeering trial in Brooklyn, and as with the Bulger case, the Scarpa revelations led to federal charges being brought against the FBI agent who served as the gangster's handler. The case against the agent had been scheduled for trial in 2006 but fell apart when it was revealed that a key witness against the agent had lied under oath. On November 1, 2007, at the request of the government, a federal judge dismissed the charges against the agent; what had promised to be the first and most comprehensive public examination of the government's Top Echelon Informant Program had been thwarted.

Thus the Bulger trial took on added weight. Not only would the proceedings shed light on the criminal activities of the defendant, but they would provide, perhaps, a much-needed and unprecedented opportunity to bring clarity and accountability to a highly controversial method of law enforcement that had, without the knowledge or full understanding of the people, become a standard tactic not only of the FBI but also the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other law enforcement agencies.

LIVING IN A
studio apartment on Hanover Street, across from Café Pompeii—where I met and interviewed Joe Salvati—I walked Monday through Friday to the Moakley United States Courthouse to take in the trial. As I traversed the city, I could not help but notice how much the physical landscape of Boston had changed since the years of Bulger's reign. Boston was booming, with new buildings and ambitious commercial developments going up at a rapid pace. Cranes dotted the skyline. Young people of diverse nationalities populated the shops, restaurants, and drinking establishments once called bars, taverns, or saloons, but now more commonly referred to as lounges. Boston was becoming the diverse, culturally vibrant city some had always hoped it could be—a hope previously hindered by a parochial, insular, violent past that was encapsulated, most gruesomely, in the Bulger era and everything it represented.

That entire era was on trial. And before the city could completely break free, it would have to collectively look backward one last time at the skeletons in the closet.

THE HOUSE AT
799 Third Street in Southie is modest in size, with a quaint architectural style. Unlike the triple-decker homes that traditionally dominate the neighborhood, lined side by side like pigs in a blanket, this one stands alone. A pyramid roof with asphalt shingles is complemented by classic wood siding and an extended vestibule in front of the house. Located in a quiet section of a venerable working-class community, far from any major thoroughfares, it is both out in the open and hidden away, a pleasant abode on a seemingly placid street in a quintessential corner of twenty-first-century urban America.

Pat Nee, formerly a criminal in Southie, was raised a half block from this house, at the corner of Third Street and Court Lane. When Nee was seven, he and his family emigrated from Rosmuc, County Galway, in the west of Ireland. Pat grew up on Third Street with three brothers, one of whom, Michael, would eventually become the owner of the house at 799.

The house had special meaning to the Nees. As kids playing on Third Street, they got to know the owner of the house, a former Harvard professor whom they knew only as “Mr. Sullivan.” He was an older gentleman, with a patrician manner whose upper-class breeding made him an odd fit in the neighborhood. He was rumored to be friendly with the Kennedys, especially Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the most famous political family in the United States.

Mr. Sullivan was married but had no kids of his own, and he was friendly with the kids who played on that street, especially Pat Nee's brother Michael. When Mr. Sullivan passed away in the mid-1970s, he left the house in his will to Michael Nee.

In later years, Pat often visited Michael and his family at the house,
sharing holiday meals and backyard beers, the small, everyday moments that keep a family together and form the backbone of a community.

Starting in the early 1980s, at the direction of Whitey Bulger, the house that had been bequeathed to Michael Nee was turned into a chamber of horrors.

“Miserable cocksucker,” said Pat Nee at the mention of Bulger's name.

We were sitting in Nee's Jeep, parked on Third Street, across the street from the house. I had led Pat Nee back here to reminisce about how his brother's family home in Southie was turned into a place of entrapment, murder, and body disposal. Horrible things took place in this house—despicable things—some of which Nee heard about and others he is alleged to have participated in as a member of Bulger's organization.

Nee is known to some as a hard man, though now, at age sixty-eight, his tough-guy years are well behind him. He's mostly bald now, with a face that is weathered and a body that has been lived in. He is more likely to laugh and tell a joke than engage in gangster intimidation tactics. A grandfather who dotes over his two grandchildren as if they represent to him a new lease on life, Nee is a fixture in Southie, greeted with a friendly “Hey, Pat, how are ya'?” nearly everywhere he goes on his daily rounds in the neighborhood.

For much of his life, Nee was a professional criminal—a thief, a gunrunner for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and a robber of armored cars. He is not particularly proud of his life of crime, but he makes no apologies, either. He did two separate stints in prison, totaling eleven years: he paid his dues. With the wisdom of passing years, he has come to understand that the codes and mores he grew up with in Southie played a crucial role in directing him along a path toward violence.

The first time I met Nee, in April 2004, he told me the story of another brother: Peter. In April 1969, Peter Nee was murdered in South Boston. Peter's death, and how Pat sought to avenge that killing through “street justice,” as it is known in the neighborhood, became a defining moment for Nee.

Peter, the youngest of the four Nee brothers, was neither a gangster nor a troublemaker. He had served two tours of duty in Vietnam as a member of the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command. Pat also served in Vietnam as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps.

On that fateful spring night in 1969, Peter and a group of friends got into a confrontation with some other neighborhood guys just returned from Vietnam. Outside the Coachman bar, down the block from Gate of Heaven Church on Broadway, Peter Nee was shot in the face and died at the scene.

There were many witnesses. But the code of the neighborhood was such that, if the assailant was also from the neighborhood, you did not go to the police. A witness, however, did inform Pat Nee that he saw the whole thing; he knew who killed Pat's brother. It was a neighborhood guy named Kevin Daley.

Nee asked around and confirmed that it was Daley who shot his unarmed brother in cold blood.

Nee knew Daley. They were both veterans of the Vietnam War with deep-rooted family connections in the neighborhood.

Having passed through an apprenticeship as a prominent member of the Mullen gang, a well-known youth gang in Southie in the early 1960s, Nee adhered to the codes of the street. He wanted revenge—not in a court of law, but by his own hands. Over a period of many months, he stalked Kevin Daley until the opportunity presented itself.

Back in April 2004, Nee drove me to the exact location in the heart of South Boston where the retribution took place. It was on East Third Street, just off Medal of Honor Park, near the Daley family home. As Pat described it:

Nee went home that night believing he had killed Kevin Daley and avenged his brother's murder. A few days later, much to his surprise, he was arrested for assault with intent to kill and taken to the infamous Charles Street jail. Daley, apparently, had not died. “My brother got shot twice and died. I shot this guy five times—once above the heart, once below—and he lived. Go figure.” Daley had not only survived; just as he thought he was about to expire, he had identified Pat Nee as his assailant.

Two months after the shooting, Nee was escorted into municipal court. Kevin Daley was brought in, in a wheelchair. Having miraculously and unexpectedly survived the brutal attack, Daley was now confronted with his deathbed statement, in which he had fingered Pat Nee.

“Does your client stand by his statement?” the judge asked Kevin Daley's attorney.

“Your Honor,” said the lawyer, “my client now believes that the statement was made under duress, in a delusionary state, and we would like to rescind that statement. The truth is he did not get a good look at whoever shot and assaulted him on the night in question.”

The judge was dumbfounded, and the court was thrown into disarray. Daley looked at Nee and nodded. It was a Southie thing. Daley had killed Pat's brother; Nee had shot Daley in the pursuit of street justice. Daley understood, and was signaling as much to Nee. Ostensibly, the score was now even. Nee was released from jail and the charges were dropped.

Decades later, the two of us seated in a car across the street from his brother Michael's old house on Third Street, the memories of Nee's attempts to avenge Peter's death seemed almost quaint. The moral certainty
of what Pat had done back then—the use of violence as an honorable means to get even for a wrong that had been done—was replaced by allegations of what took place in this pretty little home. For years, Nee has maintained his silence, neither confirming nor denying the allegations. But these stories, which have been detailed and repeated at various trials and legal hearings over the years, take the former gangster back to his years with Bulger, which involved acts Nee participated in that still bring him feelings of regret and shame.

“I don't know how to describe it,” he said, sitting in the driver's seat of his Jeep with the engine idling. “We all worked with Whitey at various things, but none of us knew the full extent of what he was up to. Then we found ourselves involved in things that were sick. Crazy. But when you're deep into something like that, the criminal life, making scores off of criminal activities, you get used to a life of secrecy, deception, the code of silence. The paranoia becomes part of it. You do things you don't want to sometimes because it's all part of the life you've chosen. It's not always possible to just say no and walk away. People get killed when they try to walk away from a situation like that.”

“Does it bother you,” I asked, “having your childhood memories covered over by the stories of what happened here on the street you grew up on, at this house?”

“I can't drive by here without thinking about it,” said Nee. “It's a curse. I don't even want to be sitting here right now.”

Between 1981 and 1985, on three separate occasions, three people were murdered and buried in the basement of the house on Third Street. Nee is alleged to have taken part in two of the burials. Years later, when Pat's brother Michael—who knew nothing of these killings and burials—put the house up for sale, it necessitated digging up the bodies, a gruesome task. According to trial testimony, Pat and another Bulger associate, Kevin Weeks, disinterred the bodies, which had decayed nearly beyond recognition. The stench was overwhelming, the bodies a mass of fluids, desiccated organs, and dismembered limbs. The severed head of one victim stared at them, as if in reproach. What was left of these bodies was wrapped up and transferred to another location for burial.

The macabre nature of how the murder victims were lured to the house,
whacked, and interred under the basement floor led Kevin Weeks to nickname the house “the Haunty.” The abode was surely haunted by the ghosts of those who died there, but also by the spirit of Whitey Bulger, the neighborhood's seemingly untouchable mob boss who had orchestrated these unseemly acts of murder.

Long ago, there had been rumors that Pat Nee would be charged with the crime of “accessory after the fact” for his role in the burials and disinterments. But the federal statute of limitations on those crimes had passed long ago. Nee could not be charged.
²

As Nee and I sat outside the Haunty and talked, a few miles away, at a courthouse on the South Boston waterfront, Bulger was about to go on trial. In various statements and legal motions filed leading up to the trial, it had become apparent that Bulger wanted to hurt Pat Nee, to entangle him in the legal consequences of a life they once shared as criminal associates. The reasons for this were buried deep in the relationship between the two Southie gangsters going back generations, but one clue is to be found in a book that Nee published in 2006, titled
A Criminal and an Irishman
. Mostly written by two coauthors, the book was published at a time when it seemed likely that Bulger would never resurface. Nee did not hold back his feelings: “Jimmy Bulger is a rat, a pedophile, a rapist, and a sociopath . . . and the man directly responsible for bringing drugs into South Boston.”

When Bulger was arrested in Santa Monica, a copy of
A Criminal and an Irishman
was found on his bookshelf, right next to his bed.

Said Nee, “Whitey's gonna try to implicate me in criminal things he's done. If he takes the stand, he's gonna tell lies and try to get me indicted. He's used to having things go his way.”

Nee glared at the house, as if its façade of civility were a duplicitous representation of the man himself: Bulger. Ever since Whitey's apprehension, Nee had been concerned about how Whitey's trial might be used as an opportunity to seek revenge. Nee was worried about what Whitey might
do, but he is also left with the bitter taste of things Bulger had already done and had others do in his name.

“Treacherous prick.” Pat practically spit out the words. “Sure, I hope he gets convicted, but what I really want is to see him burn in hell. I'd put him there myself if I thought I could get away with it.”

Kill Whitey.

This was a sentiment I had heard expressed frequently in Boston since I had arrived to cover the Bulger trial.

“Let's get out of here,” I said to Pat. “This place gives me the creeps.”

There was no argument from Nee. He slipped the Jeep's transmission into gear, and we eased down the street. The retired gangster seemed relieved to have the Haunty behind him—a toxic memory—framed squarely in the rearview mirror.

AT THE JOHN
Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, located at 1 Courthouse Way along the South Boston waterfront, the people gathered like a flock of hungry pigeons. They were hoping to catch a glimpse of Whitey's motorcade as it arrived from the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, where the city's most notorious criminal had been held during his incarceration.

A crowd of approximately two hundred spectators jostled for position. A gaggle of media personnel, with their cameras and boom microphones and mic stands forming a curbside gauntlet, were corralled behind a rope like paparazzi at a Hollywood award show. Keeping everyone in place was a cordon of cops and U.S. marshals dressed in SWAT gear.