Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  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.

  As I read over the files at the Top of the Hub that night, Connolly kept telling me that 90 percent of the information in the files came from Stevie. Certainly Jimmy hadn’t been around the Mafia the way Stevie had. But, Connolly told me, he had to put Jimmy’s name on the files to keep his file active. As long as Jimmy was an active informant, Connolly said, he could justify meeting with Jimmy and giving him valuable information. Even after he retired, Connolly still had friends in the FBI, and he and Jimmy kept meeting to let each other know what was going on. I listened to all that, but now I understood that even though he was retired, Connolly was still getting information, as well as money, from Jimmy.

  As I continued to read, I could see that a lot of the reports were not just against the Italians. There were more and more names of Polish and Irish guys, of people we had done business with, of friends of mine. Whenever I came across the name of someone I knew, I would read exactly what it said about that person. I would see, over and over again, that some of these people had been arrested for crimes that were mentioned in these reports. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it had been bullshit when Connolly told me that the files hadn’t been disseminated, that they had been for his own personal use. He had been an employee of the FBI. He hadn’t worked for himself. If there was some investigation going on and his supervisor said, “Let me take a look at that,” what was Connolly going to do? He had to give it up. And he obviously had. I thought about what Jimmy had always said, “You can lie to your wife and to your girlfriends, but not to your friends. Not to anyone we’re in business with.” Maybe Jimmy and Stevie hadn’t lied to me. But they sure hadn’t been telling me everything.1

  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.”

  I said, “Yeah, but you haven’t been subpoenaed yet.”

  It was a prospect of considerable discussion whether or not Nee would be called by the defense to testify. He had already decided, under advisement from his attorney, that if he were called he would take the stand and invoke his Fifth Amendment right to not testify, on the grounds that he might incriminate himself.

  T
his brought the conversation around to whether or not Whitey himself would take the stand. In the months leading up to the trial, Bulger’s lawyers had stated publicly on a number of occasions that he would, that Whitey was anxious to tell his version of events in the courtroom. These proclamations, delivered both inside the courtroom, to the judge, and outside the courtroom, to the media, had contributed to the high level of advance publicity the trial had received all around the globe.

  From the outset, I doubted Bulger would take the stand. I mentioned to Nee and Weeks that it was telling that during his opening statement to the jury, Carney had made no promises that Bulger would testify.

  “Good,” said Kevin. “He should keep his mouth shut.”

  I counterargued: “I’m hoping he takes the stand and names names of all the government people who facilitated his deal. I want him to get up there and lay it all out on the table.” I was being a little provocative, knowing that this was not what Nee and Weeks wanted to see.

  “Of course,” said Kevin. “You’re a writer. You want him to testify because that’s a better story, but we have different concerns.”

  “We just want it to all be over,” added Nee.

  After we had finished eating, I asked Kevin directly, “So how are you holding up? Did you ever think you were going to see this day? How do you feel about it?”

  It was clear that Weeks was conflicted and in a state of emotional discomfort about the trial and all that it entailed. “To me, it’s sad,” said Kevin. “To see Jimmy going through this. What’s he doing? He could have copped a plea and avoided all this. Just seeing him so old, so diminished, after the way he was years ago. Some say, revenge. Satisfaction. I don’t expect to get any satisfaction out of this. None.”

  For many people in Boston, the trial was an emotional event, but for Weeks there was an added level of intimacy. For more than a decade, he had spent nearly every day of his life alongside Bulger, listening to his advice about everything under the sun, acting as a surrogate son, beating people up for Whitey, intimidating people in the neighborhood, cleaning up after the gang’s many acts of violence and murder. Now he would take the stand, look his former mentor in the eyes, and deliver testimony that presumably would help put him away for the rest of his days. It was a sobering prospect.

  THE SECOND DAY of the trial began with a discussion about a couple of charts, though, as in most matters of love and war, the primary topic of discussion was a pretense for something else.

  As is standard practice in a RICO case, the prosecutor, Fred Wyshak, sought to enter into evidence organizational charts of crime groups that the defendant was alleged to have been a part of. In Bulger’s case, the charts were headlined “Winter Hill Organization Circa 1975 to 1980” and “Winter Hill Organization/South Boston Organized Crime Group 1982” (see Appendices B and C). The motion to submit the charts as evidence brought an objection from the defense, and the person who stood to explain why was Hank Brennan.

  For most of the trial up to this point, J. W. Carney had clearly stood front and center as lead counsel, making the majority of the pretrial arguments in court and answering questions from the media at periodic press conferences held on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. For many who had been following the case, this was the first time they would be hearing Brennan speak.

  At age forty-two, Brennan was a former Suffolk County prosecutor. He had a forceful courtroom manner. His black hair was neatly parted on one side, and he had the trim physique of someone who jogged or worked out at the gym on a regular basis. He spoke as if every word mattered, insistent on the logic of his verbal presentation, and in the case of the government’s two “highly prejudicial” charts, he had a strong argument to make.

  “The charts are not admissible,” said Brennan. “They are overview evidence. And there is an inherent danger by allowing the government to introduce both of these exhibits. The first is, I remind the court that Mr. Bulger is charged with a RICO count. In fact, two RICO counts, one being conspiracy. By providing a chart that shows a number of pictures and in order from top to bottom suggests an opinion, it’s an inadmissible opinion, and what it suggests to somebody who looks at it, especially a juror, is that the person on top is responsible for the persons underneath him.

  “As you can see, on both charts there are lines drawn between the people at the top, notably, for my concern, Mr. Bulger, and people below him. The only implication that can be left or inference that can be drawn is that Mr. Bulger is responsible for the people underneath, as if he is the leader of an organization. The government should have to call witnesses to describe their involvement or known involvement with other people in relation to the person above them, notably Mr. Bulger, before the jury should draw that inference.”

  Fred Wyshak stood to make the counterargument. With his graying hair and stooped shoulders, Wyshak was the dean of Bulger prosecutors. Earlier in his career, he had served for a time as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, and he retained the melodic cadence of a Brooklyn Jew when he spoke, his voice reflecting both distress and weary acceptance in equal measure. No one person had spent more time and energy trying to bring Bulger to justice, and throughout the trial Wyshak would take personally each and every objection from the defense.

  A profile of both Wyshak and Kelly in Boston magazine once referred to the two of them as the Batman and Robin of federal prosecutors. Both believed they were on a holy crusade, and as the trial progressed it was clear that Wyshak was Batman, the older and more nuanced crime avenger.

  Wyshak seemed taken aback by the forcefulness of Brennan’s objection to the charts. He counterargued that it was his intention to enter the charts as evidence during the testimony of an upcoming law enforcement witness, someone who would be offered as an expert on the subject of organized crime in Boston. This so-called expert, Brennan responded, had already testified once before in relation to these charts, in the case of Florida v. Connolly, and he had been decidedly off the mark. To illustrate his point, Brennan produced a transcript from that trial and read from a section of the testimony.

  With Judge Casper interjecting an occasional question to both men, the discussion went back and forth with surprising vigor. The issue itself felt less important than the desire on the part of both combatants to win the trial’s first significant point of contention. After twenty minutes, Judge Casper concluded, “I think there may very well be a juncture in this trial where these charts are appropriate based on the evidence that has come in, but it seems to me that at this juncture Mr. Brennan’s objection has some legs, so I don’t think the charts should come in at this point.”

  If the trial were a tennis match, the defense had scored the first point with a strong overhand volley.

  The trial’s first witness was Robert “Bobby” Long, a former Massachusetts state trooper who had taken part in one of the earliest law enforcement attempts to take down Whitey Bulger. Long’s direct testimony was elicited by Zachary Hafer, a junior member of the prosecution team. Thirty-seven years old, a Dartmouth graduate, compared to the other two prosecutors Hafer seemed like a kid just out of law school, though he had been with the U.S. attorney’s office for six years.

  After Hafer led Long through a detailed recitation of his career as a trooper, including twenty-six years with the state police, or “staties,” as they are known locally, they got to the meat of why Lieutenant Long was on the stand.

  Back in the spring of 1980, Long was part of a law enforcement investigative team that targeted a location that had become known to them as a central meeting place for mobsters from throughout the New England underworld. The Lancaster Street garage, located in the city’s West End, was a nondescript former auto body shop situated on a short, one-way street that made it possible for the mobsters to monitor who was coming and going. Trooper Long and the other investigators were able to set up a video surveillance post in a deserted office building across the street from the garage.

  From April to June of 1980, a handful
of state troopers videotaped comings and going at the garage. The objective was to gather enough footage of known mob figures meeting there so that they would then be able to obtain authorization to plant a wiretap inside the location.

  In the courtroom, it was prosecutor Hafer’s intention to show snippets of the many surveillance videos that had been compiled, but before he did he asked Long about a particular day, June 21, 1980, when he had been watching the garage from the surveillance post when Arthur “Bucky” Barrett showed up.

  From a previous investigation, Long knew Bucky Barrett as a premier safecracker and a “fence,” a receiver and seller of stolen goods. At the time, Barrett was a suspect in a daring bank robbery at the Depositors Trust, which had taken place in the nearby town of Medford.

  “What was stolen?” Hafer asked Long.

  “It was a burglary,” he answered, “a break-in where they went through the roof of a vault in the bank. They hacked into seven hundred safe-deposit boxes and reportedly got away with a million and a half in cash, and the rest, about three and a half million, in gold and jewelry.”

  “Was anyone indicted as part of your investigation?”

  “Yes. Six individuals.”

  “Who specifically?”

  “Gerald Clement, former captain on the MDC police; Thomas Doherty, a lieutenant on the Medford Police Department; Joseph Bangs, a sergeant on the Metropolitan Police Department; Arthur Barrett; Kenneth Holmes; and Francis O’Leary.”

  Seated on the witness stand, Bobby Long, at age seventy-one, projected the same Dudley Do-Right air of rectitude that he had in his many years on the job. He still had the square jaw and full head of black hair, though it was now possibly a dye job. Having retired with honors, he was known to be a good cop. It was logical that a good cop like Long might blanch when describing a major bank robbery pulled off, in part, by a crew of high-ranking police officers. But this was Boston. Bobby Long’s reference to the infamous Depositors Trust bank heist, in which cops and professional criminals teamed up to commit a major crime together, was a harbinger of things to come.