Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (34 page)

Whitey took his time deciding what to do. They considered pouring cement over the dirt floor. They talked about buying the house outright, but that seemed extravagant. Whitey’s solution was cheaper and, in his mind at least, more practical. “We’re gonna have to move the bodies,” he told Weeks. Flemmi was in favor. Weeks dreaded the idea, knowing that much of the work would fall to him. But first he and Whitey drove around town looking for a new burial spot. Whitey picked it out, a wooded area across from Florian Hall, the Boston firefighters function hall nearby in Neponset, a section of Dorchester. The trees and brush provided natural cover. The hum of traffic from the nearby Southeast Expressway would drown out the noise of the digging.

On a crisp October night in 1985, Whitey set up surveillance, and Weeks and Flemmi started digging. They filled ten large duffel bags with dirt—they would need it to cover the bodies—then put the bags in the eight-foot-wide hole and covered it lightly with topsoil. Whitey put a twenty-dollar bill under a rock on top of the pre-dug grave. “If that’s gone when we come back,” Whitey said, “we’re outta here.”
¹⁹
Two days later, on Halloween, they went to The Haunty to dig up the bodies of Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, and Debbie Hussey. Weeks, Nee, and Flemmi arrived in the pre-dawn darkness.
²⁰
They were dressed for work, with painters’ masks and gloves. Whitey left them to do the dirty work, sleeping late into the day, as usual. As he slept, Whitey missed scenes right out of a horror movie. Barrett’s body was so brittle and dry that when Weeks lifted it the head detached from the torso. Removing the decomposed bodies of McIntyre and Hussey was even more grotesque. The masks did only so much to minimize the stench. The corpses were put in body bags Flemmi had obtained from a local funeral director.

At nightfall, Whitey showed up with a wood-paneled Ford station wagon he called the Hearse. He parked it in the driveway next to the bulkhead that led down to the cellar. They were loading the second body in the back of the station wagon when an old man walked past the driveway. Weeks and Flemmi froze, but Whitey told them to relax. “He didn’t see anything,” Whitey said. “Besides, it’s Halloween.”
²¹

It took less than ten minutes to drive the five miles from City Point to the new gravesite. They took turns burying the bodies and keeping watch. Weeks was the lookout, lying on his stomach, holding a machine gun, when a young man emerged from a Halloween party across the street at Florian Hall. The man got into his car but apparently needed to relieve himself, so he drove just across the street and got out of his car. The car stopped twenty feet from where Whitey, Flemmi, and Weeks were hidden by trees and brush. Weeks sized up the driver and figured he was just emptying a beer-filled bladder. He was right, and the young man drove off. But Whitey was mad. Weeks had made a mistake by letting the guy get too close. “You shoulda shot him,” Whitey said. Weeks disagreed but didn’t say so. He couldn’t get the smell of the bodies out of his nose, or his head, for days.

Closing down The Haunty marked,
in retrospect, a turning point in Whitey’s history. It would prove the end of the most violent phase of his criminal reign. Extortions continued at a brisk pace, but threatening to kill people, rather than actually killing people, became the new business model. And to make it really pay, he expanded his extortion enterprise. Ordinary businesspeople became targets, too, and Stephen and Julie Rakes were the first test of the new approach.

Rakes and his wife had bought an old gas station across the street from the Old Colony project and converted it to a liquor store. Stephen Rakes’s prices were lower than those at other nearby liquor stores, and as soon as he opened up, he and his wife began receiving threatening phone calls. A guy kept calling saying that there was a bomb in the store. Rakes wondered if he should go to the cops. His sister, Mary O’Malley, went to Whitey instead. She approached Whitey and Kevin Weeks at Triple O’s and asked them to find the guy who was making the phone calls. They canvassed the neighborhood, talking to the owners of other liquor stores. No one knew who was doing it.
²²

Then one day Whitey and Weeks were driving through Andrew Square when an old bookie they knew waved them down to talk. Out of the blue, the bookie, who owned his own liquor store in Andrew Square, told them he had been calling in bomb threats to Stephen Rakes’s store, trying to snuff out a competitor. “You can’t do that anymore,” Whitey told him. “That guy’s father is a friend of Kevin’s.”
²³
Weeks and Whitey went to see Rakes and tell him he had nothing to worry about; that his business was secure. But not long after, Mary O’Malley was back at Triple O’s. This time, she said her brother wanted to sell the store. The idea intrigued Whitey: a legitimate cash business would be a good investment, a way to wash their dirty money. Besides, he had been looking for a new place to serve as a headquarters, where he and Flemmi and Weeks could meet regularly without drawing notice. The liquor store and the adjoining convenience store, Rotary Variety, would do the trick.

A few days later, Whitey and Weeks showed up at the store. Rakes seemed reluctant to talk in front of his wife. Swing by my house, he suggested. There, they agreed on a price: one hundred thousand dollars. “Then he [Rakes] reneged,” Weeks said. “He wanted more money. It was just a shakedown. And you don’t shake down Jimmy Bulger.” Stephen Rakes tells a different version of the story, not nearly as benign as the one offered by Weeks. Rakes said he never wanted to sell the store. Instead, Whitey and Flemmi showed up at his house one night with Weeks, an old friend of the family. “You’ve got a problem,” Whitey announced as soon as they sat down at the kitchen table. “We were hired to kill you.” As if to underscore the point, Flemmi pulled a .38 from his coat and slapped it down on the table. Rakes’s eyes fixated on the shiny steel of the revolver. Whitey said that there were people who didn’t like Rakes undercutting their prices.

“I’ve got a better deal,” Whitey told him. “We’re going to buy the store.”

“It’s not for sale,” Rakes replied.

Whitey realized that Rakes hadn’t heard what he was really saying. “I’ll fucking kill you,” Whitey explained. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

At that point, Rakes’s one-year-old daughter, Meredith, wandered into the kitchen. Flemmi reached down and picked her up and put her on his lap. The little girl reached for the gun and spun it around, like a toy. Flemmi tousled her hair and smirked at Rakes, who sat mortified. “You wouldn’t want your daughter to grow up without a father, would you?” Flemmi asked. Whitey was smirking, too. He clicked his switchblade, letting the blade flash open and then recoil. He did it over and over, letting Rakes think it over. “Here,” Whitey said, tossing a brown paper bag stuffed with sixty-seven thousand dollars. “Now we own the liquor store.”
²⁴
He had soon renamed it the South Boston Liquor Mart.

Julie Rakes, stunned by the menacing takeover and incredulous that her children had effectively been used as pawns, called her uncle Joe Lundbohm, a Boston police detective, and told him what had happened. Lundbohm called John Connolly. Who else would he call? Connolly was from Southie. He worked the wiseguys. Lundbohm didn’t know that Connolly was Whitey’s handler. They arranged to meet for coffee, and Connolly seemed to know exactly how to make this go away. “Would they wear a wire? Would Stephen wear a wire?” Connolly asked Lundbohm.

“They’d be afraid to,” Lundbohm said.

“There isn’t a helluva a lot we can do,” Connolly replied.
²⁵

The day after Lundbohm met with Connolly, Whitey paid Rakes another visit.

“Tell Lundbohm to back off,” Whitey hissed.

Rakes knew then that Whitey had a direct pipeline to the FBI.

The investigation, such as it was, went away. So did Steve Rakes. To Florida, to get away from it all. By then stories were going around Southie that Whitey had murdered Rakes, and Whitey was still very sensitive about his reputation in the Town. Usually, such rumors were good for business, stoking his reputation as a killer. But the Rakes family was big and well known in Southie, and Whitey didn’t want people thinking he’d killed some guy to take over his liquor store. So they had Rakes’s sister give them his number in Florida, and Weeks told Rakes he had to get back to Southie to dispel the rumors. Rakes said he’d be back in a couple of weeks. Whitey took the phone and growled, “Get back now!”

It was an odd sight. In the middle of winter, Stephen Rakes stood in front of the liquor store he used to own with the new owners, Whitey Bulger and Kevin Weeks, talking for an hour. Then they went up to Perkins Square and stood at Southie’s busiest intersection, so everybody could see them with the guy they had supposedly killed.
²⁶

As 1986 came to a close,
Weeks realized that almost two years had passed since Whitey had killed anyone. It was the longest he had gone without a hit since Weeks had started working for him full-time six years earlier. Between 1981 and the murder of Debbie Hussey in early 1985, Whitey had been involved in the murders of eight people: Roger Wheeler, Debra Davis, Brian Halloran, Michael Donahue, John Callahan, Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, and Deborah Hussey. It wasn’t just Whitey; Stevie stopped killing people, too. The murder of Debbie Hussey shook him like nothing before. Flemmi used to be even more likely than Whitey to suggest killing as a solution to a problem; now he, like Whitey, was content to threaten people.
²⁷

But even with The Haunty shut down, and his approach to his business changed, Whitey’s life remained a complicated straddle of his criminal and domestic realms. There was a gang to manage, with operations in loansharking, extortion, and drugs; he had to sustain his bond with the FBI by supplying a regular flow of tips; and he was also still keeping two households. Early evenings with Teresa Stanley, late nights with Cathy Greig. Stanley was still in the dark about Greig, and Whitey wanted to keep it that way. That trick alone could test a man’s stamina.

If weeknights meant dinner at Stanley’s, Sunday afternoons meant dinner at Mary Flemmi’s house.
²⁸
Whitey, accompanied by Stanley, would always arrive impeccably dressed, showering Mary Flemmi with small gifts. Mary did the cooking, so Stanley could relax with a drink. She made sure not to drink more than a couple of glasses of wine, because Whitey frowned on it.
²⁹

Adjacent to the Flemmis’ house was a screened-in structure. When it was first built, in the late 1980s, Stanley and her girlfriend Terry stayed after dinner one night to clean it and decorate it for a party. They vacuumed up the sawdust, arranged the couch and chairs, lined up the barstools by a counter. They put flower arrangements around the room. Stanley and Terry drank wine as they worked, and the hours flew by. The two women had finished sometime around 3:00 a.m. when Whitey stormed in. He was in a rage. He had come by the house around midnight and had seen the lights out. He had driven to Stanley’s home, and when he couldn’t find her there, he’d driven all around South Boston looking for her. Now it was late, and Stanley must have appeared tipsy, because Whitey made a remark about her drinking and then suddenly grabbed her by the throat and shoved her forcefully. She flailed in his grasp, knocking over tables, sending the flower arrangements crashing to the floor. “Leave her alone!” Terry screamed.

Whitey ignored her. He kept pushing Stanley violently into the furniture, leaving her with a black eye and bruises. “It was a bizarre, horrible night,” said Stanley, realizing for the first time just how volatile Whitey’s temper was. The party was canceled. Whitey ordered Stanley to stay away from Terry; Stanley didn’t see her friend for another eight years “because I didn’t want trouble,” she said.

Whitey’s first and only attack on Stanley was a sign of the increasing strain he was under, or perhaps of his diminished capacity as he aged to deal with the strain that had always been there. In the late 1980s, when he was in his late fifties, he began to have disturbing nightmares. He’d had night terrors after the LSD experiments he had volunteered for in Atlanta, but the nightmares rivaled those. Now he asked Weeks to accompany him to a psychiatrist’s office in Watertown, just outside Boston. Weeks believed Whitey was sincere on one level; that he needed professional help. He also thought that he was working an angle—putting on record, with a doctor, what the LSD testing had done to him. If he ever found himself in court, he wanted a piece of paper saying that the federal government had used him as a human guinea pig and that he still suffered the consequences decades later. “The doctor was a Harvard professor,” Weeks said. “After the fourth visit, the doctor said he couldn’t see Jimmy anymore. He was scared to death over what Jimmy was saying. Jimmy described these dreams of blood and gore. It was dark stuff, and it freaked the doctor out. The doctor referred Jimmy to somebody else, but Jimmy never followed up on it. I think he decided that no doctor could really help him.”

Although he had entered the LSD testing program willingly, Whitey held on to it as a grievance. He obsessed over the government’s duplicity in not informing him and other participants that the testing was part of a secret CIA mind-control experiment. His grievance only grew after he read the 1979 book
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
, by John Marks, which lays out in great detail how Whitey and others were duped. The experience and the haunting memories left him with a lifelong mistrust of the medical profession and of modern medicine in general. “I have been sick and injured many times these years but treated myself with over-the-counter medicine,” he wrote, in papers seized from Stanley’s house and made public by the FBI after he had left town. “I developed or tried to develop a belief that the body cures itself with over-the-counter medicine. I can’t bring myself to trust medical people.” In those same papers, Whitey acknowledged that he had sought out a psychiatrist because of his nightmares. He was referring to the doctor in Watertown. “I did go to a doctor, a psychiatrist who has studied LSD and the long-term effects. I paid for his services and paid for batteries of brain wave tests—brain wave scans and was told by this doctor he felt I definitely have been brain damaged (physically) by LSD.”