Where the Bodies Were Buried (9 page)

But outside the courthouse, in the scrum of commentary and speculation among observers that would become a post-trial ritual, what everyone wanted to talk about was Carney's “bombshell” that Bulger had never been an informant for the FBI. The veracity of this claim would be hotly debated in the weeks and months ahead, but what it had accomplished in the short term was to undermine Carney's opening presentation. The issue of whether or not Bulger had been an informant had little to do with the charges in the case, and it offered even less insight into the continuity of criminal negligence in the government's dealings with Barboza and Bulger.

In front of the media, Carney was smiling, but he shouldn't have been. A schizophrenic fissure in his case had been revealed, one that would grow more pronounced as the trial unfolded.

Carney had claimed that he and his co-counsel were going to reveal the dirty little secrets behind how the government prepared their prosecutorial banquet, but instead, the defense lawyer misread the recipe and undercooked the main course, leaving the jury, paradoxically, both gaseous and malnourished.

ON THE EVENING
of the trial's first day, I headed over to Southie to meet with Pat Nee and Kevin Weeks. I had arranged to meet them at Mirisola's, an Italian restaurant at the corner of L and East Eighth streets. I knew the place well. A year and a half earlier, I had met and interviewed Whitey Bulger's common-law wife, Teresa Stanley, at Mirisola's. The place is small and intimate, more like a diner than an actual restaurant. Teresa and I sat off in a corner, and she poured her heart out about Jimmy—never “Whitey”—and the relationship they had together for thirty years. Within months of that interview Teresa was informed that she had brain cancer; a few months after that, she was gone.

Every time I walked into Mirisola's I thought of Teresa, almost as if I could feel her presence. Few people had known Bulger as well or as closely as Teresa, though she remained blissfully ignorant of the full extent of his criminal activities when they were together. What she remembered most vividly was the night she found out about Catherine Greig. A mysterious woman had called Teresa and told her that they needed to meet. She went to an agreed-upon location and met the woman who introduced herself as “Jimmy's lover.” Teresa had suspected that Bulger had other women on the side, temporary flings and one-night stands. She asked Catherine how long she and Jimmy had been together. When Greig told her “twenty years,” she almost had a heart attack.

When Teresa recounted this episode to me at Mirisola's, many years after it had taken place, you could still see the hurt in her eyes.

She was seventy years old when I met her, still attractive, with a sweet and humble disposition. I could see she was not the kind of person who would have challenged Bulger, which was likely a requirement of any
relationship he had with a woman. Teresa knew that Jimmy had done time in prison for bank robbery. She knew he was a bookmaker and probably a loan shark. But as with any long-term union between a woman and a known criminal, much of the relationship was based on her not asking questions and instead living in a state of denial.

That arrangement had made it possible for her to have a life of relative financial comfort for herself and her four kids, but in the end, she seemed shell-shocked. Before Whitey disappeared on the run, he told Teresa, “You'll hear many terrible things about me. Don't believe it. It's all lies.” But because of the deception she had experienced with Bulger, a man who lived a separate and secret life with another lover for twenty years while he was also living with her, she had to admit that anything was possible.

When Teresa died on August 16, 2012, she went to her grave still haunted by the knowledge that the man she lived with all those years was quite possibly a psycho killer, or, at the very least, an inveterate liar who had deceived her and everybody else he knew for most of his adult life.

At Mirisola's, to my surprise, there was a small production crew in front of the place filming Pat Nee and some other guys as they entered the restaurant. Pat had told me there would be a crew from the Discovery Channel who were filming a reality show set in and around South Boston. The show was to be called
Saint Hoods,
and it would detail the activities of a group of bookmakers based in the neighborhoods of Southie, Dorchester, and Roxbury. Pat Nee was to be featured on the show, in which he would be identified as the crime boss of the neighborhood.

When I heard about it, I looked at Pat and asked, “Are you sure about this?” It seemed crazy to me that a person who was alleged to have been a professional criminal and was currently worried that he might be subpoenaed to appear at the Bulger trial would be taking part in a reality show in which he was being portrayed as a professional criminal.

Pat Nee is no dummy; he was aware of the risks. He explained, “This may be one of the last opportunities I have for a legitimate payday based on my connections in the neighborhood.”

Nee was a consultant on
Saint Hoods
and had control over who was used as extras on the show and even locations that were used. He told the producers up front that he would not talk about Whitey Bulger or the trial
on the show, and that they could not air the show until after the trial was over. According to Nee, the producers agreed to his conditions.

I still thought it was a bad idea, but who was I to tell a retired gangster with few options for making a living—legitimately—what did or did not make sense? I sat off to one side, not far from where I had interviewed Teresa Stanley, and waited until they were finished filming.

The production team was shooting a scene where Pat and his crew of bookies enter Mirisola's, take a seat, and engage in a spirited discussion about a group of rival bookies in Dorchester. Though it was supposed to be a reality show, much of the dialogue was scripted ahead of time. There was much tough-guy patter that seemed derived from an old Jimmy Cagney movie.

By the time they had finished shooting the scene and the production crew had begun wrapping it up for the day, Kevin Weeks arrived at Mirisola's.

I had known Weeks for seven years, having met him not long after he was released from prison after serving a five-year sentence on racketeering charges. By then, he had published a book called
Brutal,
written in collaboration with Phyllis Karas, which was an account of his years with Bulger.
Brutal
was an honest and unsentimental account of how Weeks became Bulger's right-hand man when he was still in his early twenties. Kevin was interviewed on
60 Minutes,
and his book became a bestseller, though he was restricted by law from receiving any proceeds.

As Bulger's “muscle,” Kevin had done many bad acts, most of which were detailed in his book. Though he was not the kind of person to ask for sympathy or forgiveness, Kevin did admit that he had regrets. It had taken him years to come out from under the spell of Bulger, who was often described in the media as a “father figure” to Weeks—a description that Kevin did not agree with. “I had a father,” he said. “I didn't need another one. Maybe he was like an uncle. He certainly was a mentor. He wanted to teach me things about life, so maybe he viewed me as a surrogate son. That is possible.”

Not far from Mirisola's, Bulger and Weeks used to go for walks nearly every day at Carson Beach or Castle Island, two scenic spots along the South Boston waterfront. It was there that Bulger dispensed his underworld
wisdom and they hatched schemes that kept money flowing in from various ongoing criminal rackets in the city. For a long time, it had been glorious, and then it all turned sour. “I won't bullshit you,” Kevin told me when I first met him. “We had fun on the street. But so much of it was based on lies and deception. And then the lies start to get in the way of your personal life, your personal relationships. It's no way to live.”

We shook hands and sat down at a table near the kitchen. I noticed from the handshake that Kevin could barely move his right arm and was in discomfort. He explained that he'd had an accident on his construction job that tore a muscle in his right shoulder, which required two separate surgeries. Presently, he had no feeling and little mobility with his right arm, but, again, he was not the type to complain. He insisted on shaking hands with his right hand, though it would have been much easier if he switched to his left.

Weeks had put on weight since I last saw him. In his youth, he'd been a Golden Gloves boxer. Now fifty-seven years old (born in 1956), he was less muscular than he used to be in his days on the street, but he was still formidable, with a straightforward, no-nonsense manner that had been part of his persona as Whitey's enforcer.

Pat Nee joined us, and we ordered a meal. Mirisola's is a Sicilian joint so unpretentious that you feel as if you are eating in someone's kitchen at home. Guy Mirisola, the proprietor, is a friend of both Pat and Kevin, who eat there frequently. He knows their tastes and makes suggestions. Though there allegedly are menus at Mirisola's, I have never seen one. The meal that arrives on your plate is usually the result of a personal consultation with Guy and his Sicilian mother, who is head chef.

As we awaited our order, I described to Nee and Weeks in some detail the day's opening statements, how Bulger sat in his kelly-green shirt as his attorney explained to the jury that he could not have been an informant for the FBI because he was Irish. They were both dumbfounded by this argument. Not only was it absurd, but it was an insult to the intelligence of the average criminal.

Nee was born in Ireland, and Weeks is of Irish and Welsh descent, born and raised in Southie. Nee did two years in prison on charges of smuggling guns to the IRA, due in part to various Irish informants. One of those
informants, John McIntyre, an Irish American, was, as mentioned earlier, shot in the head by Bulger. In his book and at previous trials, Weeks detailed how both he and Pat had played a role in the disposal of McIntyre's body. Clearly, in the Irish criminal underworld informants were frowned upon—they were punished and often killed. But to say that someone could not be an informant because they were Irish defied logic and historical precedent.

This brought us around to a discussion of Bulger's defense, as explained by his attorney, that Whitey never was an informant.

Weeks shook his head in dismay. “What do you call it,” he said, “when a guy meets with his FBI contacts every week, gives them information—names, locations, crimes—that goes right into their criminal files? What do you call that except being a rat?”

It had taken Weeks many years to bend his mind around what Bulger had done. For the longest time, like Teresa Stanley, he was in denial. Partly, this was because he was so deep inside the Bulger-Flemmi nexus that emotionally and intellectually he was incapable of acknowledging the truth.

In his book, Kevin recounted how retired special agent John Connolly, around the time of the Wolf hearings, came to him and attempted to give an elaborate justification for what had transpired. They met at the Top of the Hub restaurant, located in the Prudential Center tower, and Connolly had brought a mimeographed copy of Bulger's and Flemmi's FBI files.

To Pat Nee, Whitey being a rat had answered a lot of questions that had been nagging at him for decades. “He was very good at keeping us in the dark,” said Nee. “He had all these different groups he did business with, and he made sure we didn't know what he was doing with the others. We knew he had Connolly on the payroll. We knew he was getting inside information from Connolly. But we didn't know he was giving the feds information about us. If we had, there's a good chance he would have gotten killed. We would have taken care of that.”

The food arrived, and we ate. With Nee and Weeks, I sometimes felt bad asking so many questions about the Bulger years. It was an unpleasant topic for so many people in Boston—most especially those who had loved ones murdered by the Winter Hill gang—but it is also problematic for anyone who ever knew or did business with Bulger. In many ways, his former associates had been made to answer for his legacy, even though, in retrospect, it was clear they also were used and manipulated by Whitey.

Even if we had wanted to avoid the topic, it was not easy to do. As we sat eating our dinner, on a flat-screen television mounted on a wall a news
report came on about the first day of the trial. A reporter summarized the day's events and talked about what was ahead; it was at this point that a photo of Weeks was shown superimposed over images of murder victims' bodies being dug up by federal investigators back in the early 2000s.

I looked across the table at Weeks, who could hear the TV but had been avoiding watching the report. He was sitting at the table; behind him, over his shoulder, was his face on the TV screen.

“Kevin,” I said, nodding toward the TV. He turned around, looked briefly, and said, “Why they always have to put my face up there? There's going to be seventy-five witnesses at this trial and they always have to show me.”

“Well,” I said, “they have to show you because you're the only witness under the age of seventy at this trial, the only youthful face.” It was a joke but also partly true. The witnesses from Bulger's era would mostly be old-time gangsters in their seventies. Kevin laughed, and Pat said, “Hey, I'm only sixty-eight.”