To anyone who had closely followed the Bulger story, this was also surprising. It was always believed that Bulger and Connolly were close not only professionally, as a corrupt team, but personally, as friends. Some, including Connolly, believed that Bulger might even use his trial as an effort to exonerate his friend, who currently languished in prison on a murder rap. Already, on the first day of the trial, it was clear why the defense would not be calling “the Scapegoat” to the stand. It was their intention to use the disgraced agent as a tactical prop and throw him under the bus.
As Carney explained it, slowly and methodically, Connolly was not the sole underwriter of the partnership with Bulger; he was also its chief mythmaker. Carney explained to the jury how Connolly set about creating a fictional informant file to justify his relationship with Whitey:
“Procedures that were to be followed to set up an informant, as set up by the FBI, were never followed. There wasn’t a contract signed by James Bulger. He didn’t give his fingerprints and photograph to the FBI, as was required. But Connolly wanted people to believe that James Bulger was an informant. He never told Bulger, but he created a file, Connolly did, so he could point to it and say, This file contains the information I’m getting from James Bulger.
“The reason Connolly created this file was just to cover up the fact that he was being seen with Bulger so often, that he was meeting with him when Bulger would be providing him with money. His file grew to hundreds of pages. But when people, supervisors, in the FBI looked at this file, they said, the information in here is of little value. It’s essentially worthless. Plus, it appears to be information, junk tips, that were provided to other FBI agents, because the information duplicated what was in these other FBI agents’ files. . . .
“Supervisors would come from Washington and look at this and say, This person isn’t a Top Echelon Informant. This information isn’t valuable. The information in this file has not led to a single prosecution of anybody.”
Part of Bulger’s defense, Carney seemed to suggest, would be to show that whenever anyone in the Justice Department questioned the Bulger partnership, they were aggressively shut down by Connolly’s organized crime squad. Thanks to Connolly, Bulger had protectors at the highest levels. Who were these protectors? Some would be named—Connolly’s supervisor with the organized crime squad, John Morris; Jeremiah O’Sullivan, head of the New England Organized Crime Strike Force; and others. But the conspiracy was intentionally left open by Carney to form a gaping crater, into which could be thrown the names of Bulger enablers in the Justice Department who had since died or slinked off into retirement.
IN MAJOR ORGANIZED crime trials, juries and the public are sometimes shocked to discover that deals have been made with killers and criminals of the worst kind. In the United States, this is how criminal cases are routinely made. Since at least 1968, when the Organized Crime Control Act was expanded upon by the law-and-order president, Richard M. Nixon, the use of informants had been a staple of state and federal law enforcement. This technique of using criminals to convict other criminals was born out of a statute within the Organized Crime Control Act that led to the creation of a federal Witness Security Program (WITSEC), more commonly known as the witness protection program. Criminals who had been caught now saw themselves as having an alternative to prison: a new life with a new identity, hidden away in some remote recess of the country.
The witness protection program reinvigorated the era of the snitch. It began a long period in which traditional organized crime syndicates, most notably the American Mafia, were devastated through courtroom prosecutions.
In the Bulger case, the prosecutors would be showcasing at least two snitches whose body count was staggering. Steve Flemmi had pleaded guilty to ten murders, though observers with knowledge of the Boston underworld suspected there were more. The other most murderous witness was John Martorano, a gangster whose resume included twenty murders.
Carney and Brennan knew that the jury would likely be repulsed by these two men. In movies, gangsters are sometimes charismatic figures when played by actors like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, but in real life, they are moral ciphers, a fact that defense attorney Carney would buff and shine and put on display for the jury to ponder as often as possible.
“At this trial,” said Carney in his opening statement, “you will hear a lot about John Martorano. It would be fair to say he is the scariest criminal, violent psychopath in Boston history. He would kill people almost randomly, just as the mood befits him. He would kill people because they crossed him. He would kill people because he wanted to get their money. He would kill people because he didn’t want to pay a gambling debt. He would kill people as easily as he would order a cup of coffee in a store.”
For Carney and the defense, Martorano was the key to the government’s case, even more so than Bulger’s partner Steve Flemmi. Because Martorano had been the first former member of the Winter Hill Mob to come in and strike a deal. It was his cooperation that set off a chain of events that would lead, all these years later, to everyone currently sitting in a courtroom overflowing with spectators and media.
Martorano, Carney would allege, was the first to figure out what the government wanted and needed. “Remember,” he told the jury, “at this point, Jim Bulger was gone. By this point years had passed . . . and there was a question if Bulger would ever be seen again. Rumors were that he had had plastic surgery, doesn’t even look the same. There were other rumors of Bulger being hidden in a small village in Ireland where they’re protecting him. Other people speculated that maybe he’s dead of natural causes. But most people thought they’d never see him again.
“But the government had as its primary target John Connolly and had to find a way to get evidence against Connolly and tie Connolly to Bulger.
“And then Martorano was educated and learned that he could be the bridge from Bulger to Connolly.”
Carney noted that Martorano had a problem: he had never met John Connolly. How on earth was he going to link Connolly to Bulger when he’d never been in a room together with the two men? That was rectified when it was explained to Martorano by his attorney that if he testified about conversations he had with Bulger about Connolly, that could be introduced as evidence against both those men. “That became Martorano’s ticket out of this mess,” Carney told the jury. “The more corrupt that he could make Connolly and Bulger, the better the deal that Martorano could get.”
The witnesses’ state of mind, noted Carney, was all-important. In a criminal case, state of mind is more than idle speculation; it is often the most devastating evidence of all. Judges give fine-tuned instructions to juries on the legal ramifications of state of mind. What is a person thinking? What are they planning? What is on his or her mind as they set about to knowingly commit a criminal act?
With Martorano, his state of mind was informed by what he knew of how the game was played, and it was this knowledge, stated Carney, that would be the key to judging his credibility as a witness:
“John Martorano knew how a gangster could make a deal with the federal government and get extraordinary benefits if he were to provide testimony against others. He knew because he had a good friend who had gone through the process. His good friend was Joseph Barboza. Barboza was the mentor of Martorano. And so what Martorano wanted to do for himself was what Barboza did for himself. And like Barboza, Martorano was just as much a psychopath, a soulless killer without a conscience.”
Barboza.
The name echoed throughout the courtroom and down through the ages, rustling the graves of dead mobsters throughout the region.
To anyone with a historical memory of Boston underworld crime, the name sent chills down the spine. Barboza was a thug and indiscriminate killer who, in the 1960s, made a deal with the FBI. He represented the Original Sin, the first mutant offspring of a law enforcement strategy that would later give birth to Bulger.
Barboza was the “rosebud” of the Boston underworld. If Carney and the d
efense team could link the Bulger case to the Barboza era, they would be cutting open the guts of the city’s great whale of corruption. The innards would spew forth a legacy of dirty dealings within the criminal justice system in New England that would devastate the region’s image of itself as a cradle of liberty and justice.
Carney sought to explain to the jury the history of Joe Barboza and his deal with the DOJ back in the 1960s. He explained how Barboza’s criminal partner, Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi, brother of Steve Flemmi, had initiated Barboza into the ranks of government informants. Jimmy Flemmi was himself a Top Echelon Informant. Together, Jimmy Flemmi and Barboza had committed a murder and then used their roles as informants to create a false prosecutorial narrative. To protect Jimmy Flemmi, Barboza lied in court. As part of his deal with the government, he admitted his own role in the murder but then framed four men who were innocent of the crime.
Carney was talking about the case that had led to the wrongful conviction of Joe Salvati. His presentation of these facts to the Bulger jury was clumsy and confusing, and it lacked the appropriate drama. The lawyer’s bloodless delivery belied the shock of what he was saying: Barboza had committed the murder of small-time hood Teddy Deegan along with Jimmy the Bear Flemmi. Then, with the blessing of FBI agents, he took the stand and identified four innocent men. He committed perjury—lied on the stand—so that the government men would have their convictions.
For Barboza, it had been a sweet deal. He was allowed to lie on the stand to protect his criminal partner and friend. By doing the bidding of a corrupt system, he was set free. And his diabolical lie was kept buried for generations.
This, claimed Carney, was the lesson learned by John Martorano, an understanding of how the game was played based on historical precedent—the same historical precedent that lay at the heart of the Bulger prosecution.
The first day of the trial ended in midafternoon. The spectators, attorneys, and reporters spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. The microphones and cameras were in position to receive the various representatives of the case.
The trial was under a gag order, imposed by Judge Casper, which prohibited the lawyers from speaking with the press about the case. The prosecutors stayed out of the media glare altogether, but, occasionally, Carney or Brennan would stand before the microphones and offer innocuous statements, though mostly what they said was “I am prohibited from answering your question.” It was a pointless exchange designed, perhaps, to expose the absurdity of the law, which the defense team had unsuccessfully sought to have rescinded by the judge.
Jay Carney stood before the media and basked in what he perceived to be the glow of a scintillating opening statement. Which was only partly true. For anyone who had followed the Bulger saga and hoped that the trial would tell the full story, Carney’s opening statement had its moments. His detailing of the historical context for the charges against Bulger was potentially groundbreaking. His inclusion of Barboza and how the lessons of his deal with the government had not been lost on an entire generation of gangsters in Boston was the overarching narrative that many of us had been hoping would be brought to bear.
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.
2
CURSE OF THE COWRITER
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 le
gitimate 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.”
Where the Bodies Were Buried Page 6
