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?
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.
PART I
THE GHOSTS OF SOUTH BOSTON
1
THE HAUNTY
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:
The heavy rain made it difficult to see, which worked to our advantage. Me and my backup guy waited in an alleyway, laying down behind barrels and garbage cans. We had a third guy across the street with a shotgun loaded with buckshot. Daley’s two brothers were Boston cops, living in that same house; we knew they might come running out once they heard gunfire. When they came out our guy was supposed to spray them with buckshot, chase them back into the house.
I heard Kevin Daley coming; he drove a Volkswagen with a bad muffler, so we heard him before we saw him. As luck would have it, there was a parking spot right there in the alleyway. I heard the engine turn off. With the rain pissing down, I crept up the alleyway. I had a .38 automatic, which turned out to be a mistake. I was more comfortable with a rifle, but that would have been too big for such tight quarters. He was locking his car with the key. When he turned and saw me, I was no more than a foot away. I simply told him, “Now, it’s your turn.” And I started shooting. Hit him five times. After he went down, I kicked his teeth in and spit on him in the stree
t.1
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.
Where the Bodies Were Buried Page 3
