Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  O’Brien kept in regular contact with his daughter back in Boston. Through her, he heard that bookmakers in New England were being rounded up and arrested. He heard that Chico Krantz, the legendary Boston bookmaker, had “flipped” and was cooperating with the federal investigation. Already Tara O’Brien had been approached by someone affiliated with the Winter Hill Mob and told they’d heard a rumor that she and her father were about to “flip.” Tara was scared.

  At the same time, in Florida, Dickie O’Brien was told by Martorano that Steve Flemmi was coming down to see him. Flemmi needed to be reassured that O’Brien was not going to cooperate with the feds.

  Dickie trusted Martorano, but he did not trust Flemmi. So he called his daughter and told her, “I’m going to a meeting with Steve Flemmi. If you don’t hear from me in ten hours, I want you to contact the FBI office in Florida.”

  Tara O’Brien was terrified. She’d heard the rumors that Flemmi was a psycho killer who had murdered at least two women, including Debbie Davis, one of his ex-girlfriends.

  O’Brien had his meeting with Flemmi. He reassured the mobster that neither he nor his daughter would be cooperating with the feds.

  The O’Briens survived that meeting with Flemmi, but afterward, things got worse. A few months later, both Dickie O’Brien and his daughter were indicted. They were charged with various crimes, including RICO violations. Tara was facing eighteen to twenty-four months in prison under mandatory sentencing guidelines. As a result, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in a mental institution.

  From the witness stand, O’Brien’s guilt was palpable. “I was the cause of that,” he said. “I took her to the hospital, and every day I went to visit her.”

  “You were a loving father,” noted Carney.

  “I always tried to be.”

  Back in 1994, the investigators—Wyshak and Kelly—put pressure on O’Brien. They used the fact that his daughter, now hospitalized, would be sent away to prison for two years unless he cooperated with them.

  The O’Brien family business had become the O’Brien family nightmare. To spare his daughter prison time, O’Brien cut a deal with the feds and became the very thing that Steve Flemmi had feared he would become: a rat.

  AFTER DICKIE O’BRIEN finished with his testimony, the trial was adjourned for the day. I closed up my laptop computer, gathered up my belongings, and headed down to the cafeteria for a cup of java. There I ran into Steve Davis.

  Steve, age fifty-five, was the brother of Debra Davis, who, according to the indictment, had been strangled to death by Bulger, her body later disposed of by Bulger and Flemmi. Just fifteen months apart from Debra in age, Steve had been close to his sister. He had tried to warn her about Flemmi, who was twenty-six years her senior and a man notorious for his womanizing and violent tendencies.

  I first met Steve Davis nearly a year earlier, when I interviewed him for an article I wrote for Newsweek leading up to the trial. In the wake of Bulger’s capture, Davis had been a ubiquitous figure on the news and in the local media. The reporters liked Steve because he was voluble and emotional; he wore his hatred for Whitey on his sleeve. And he was always good for a punchy quote. When I first interviewed Davis in the lobby of Boston’s Seaport Hotel in June 2011, he did not disappoint, saying of Bulger, “I’m an eye-for-eye kind of guy; I’d do to him what he did to my sister. . . . They talk about closure. Fuck closure. Give me fifteen minutes with Bulger and I’ll give him closure. I’ll shoot him in the fuckin’ head.”

  In subsequent interviews at pretrial court proceedings and in phone conversations, I got to know Steve better. I noticed that after the initial jolt of Bulger’s arrest and the raw emotional viscera it had unleashed, Steve calmed down somewhat. Not that his desire to see Bulger punished had diminished; it had not. But Davis became savvier about how to present himself in the public domain. He wore designer glasses and, on occasion, a silk suit, his hair styled and his snow-white goatee neatly trimmed.

  In the courthouse cafeteria, I asked Steve how he was doing. “It’s emotional,” he said. “I never thought I would see this day. Just hoping to get through it and that it goes the way we want it to go.”

  I knew from previous conversations with Steve that what drove him to follow through on his commitment to maintain a presence at each and every stage of Bulger’s legal demise was the memory of his mother, Olga Davis, who died in 2008 at the age of seventy-eight. Way back in the early 1980s, when Debra Davis first disappeared, Steve Flemmi, the co-perpetrator, had come to Olga Davis in tears, saying that he had no idea what had happened to her. At first, Mrs. Davis didn’t know what to believe. She reached out to the FBI, which proved to be a mistake, since the FBI at that time was protecting both Flemmi and Bulger. When they told her to forget Debra, that she now had nine other children to worry about, she took it as a threat and cut off contact with the FBI.

  I asked Steve if it was bittersweet facing the prospect of finally getting justice in his sister’s murder with his mother not here to see the day.

  “She would have been here every day of the trial,” said Steve, his eyes moistening.

  Back in 2003, the Davis family, along with the families of Deborah Hussey and Louis Latif, two other murder victims of Bulger and Flemmi, filed a joint lawsuit against the FBI and DOJ on the theory that the government had aided and abetted Bulger and Flemmi in the murders of their loved ones. The family of murder victim John McIntyre filed a similar suit. Later, more wrongful death lawsuits were filed, this time by the families of additional murder victims Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue. The fact that the government vociferously contested these cases rather than reach settlements with the families had done much to create a feeling of ill will in Boston toward the DOJ.

  In the case of Debra Davis, the government had even argued that the family did not deserve to receive damages because she had bedded down with a known criminal, a claim that federal district judge William G. Young ruled to be “unfounded and baseless . . . a meritless defense with the sole purpose of embarrassing” the Davis family.

  In 2005, the McIntyre family received a favorable judgment of $2.3 million, the money to be paid by U.S. taxpayers. The Halloran and Donahue families won their cases and were awarded, collectively, $4 million in damages, but the rulings were overturned on appeal, on the grounds that the families had filed their suit after the statute of limitations had expired. The Davis family, along with the families of Hussey and Latif, won their case. They received judgments ranging from $335,000 to $1.3 million. Again, the government appealed the ruling, but in 2012 the financial judgment was upheld.

  The millions of dollars did not bring back the murder victims of Whitey Bulger. Steve Davis lost his sister in the most brutal manner imaginable, and then the murder was partially covered up for years by the FBI. Bulger and Flemmi went on to kill others, including Deborah Hussey, Flemmi’s twenty-six-year-old stepdaughter.

  “You think the government would be ashamed of its behavior in this case,” said Steve, “but there are things they are still covering up to this day.”

  As Steve and I continued to chat about new details that might come to light during the trial, we were approached by someone I knew to be a producer from CNN. “Sorry to interrupt,” said the producer. “Steve, we need to get you on camera.”

  The CNN crew had been highly visible since the proceedings began. Producer and director Joe Berlinger, an award-winning filmmaker, was shooting a documentary on the trial for the network and had been interviewing many of the family members of Bulger’s victims, including Steve Davis.

  “Sorry, I gotta run,” said Davis. “We’ll talk later.” I watched Steve hustle off with the producer, his life now a series of interviews and business propositions that included a book deal and a movie deal about his life in the shadow of Bulger and Flemmi.

  Later, I exited the courthouse and came upon what had become the usual media constellation outside the front entrance. Steve was off to one side being “miked up�
� by the CNN crew. A gaggle of one hundred or so media people were assembled behind a rope, with handheld cameras and boom microphones extended toward three standing microphones. At one of the mics was Tommy Donahue, who, like Steve Davis, had become a familiar representative of the victims’ families. Donahue’s father, Michael Donahue, was killed by Bulger when he offered a ride home to a man Bulger had targeted for death. Michael Donahue had been collateral damage. Young Tommy was four years old at the time of his father’s death. Standing alongside Tommy Donahue was his mother, Patricia, age sixty-five, who had been waiting more than thirty years for closure in the death of her husband.

  Next to the Donahues, waiting for an opportunity to speak, was Stephen Rakes, another familiar member of the Bulger survivors’ club. Back in the 1980s, Rakes had been extorted by Bulger, who took over his South Boston Liquor Mart by threatening to have him killed. Rakes had also filed a civil lawsuit, given dozens of interviews to the media over the years, and become something of a local celebrity in Boston due to his past associations with the Bulger story.

  Many of these people had been waiting decades for some form of justice against the notorious gangster who, at one time, had been so powerful that you couldn’t speak ill of him in public without fear of retribution. Now they were almost tripping over one another to get before the cameras and have their say.

  As the boom mics swung into position and the cameramen jostled with reporters to get a better view, Steve Davis and the others willingly played their role. Many of the media people knew them by name. They were asked questions about arcane matters of the law of which they knew nothing, but they attempted to answer, because that was expected.

  Certainly these folks deserved to be heard, but I couldn’t help thinking that the obsessive focusing on the families was becoming, like so much of the trial thus far, a compelling diversion from the big picture. The media needed the pathos of Steve Davis, Patricia Donahue, and the others because it put a human face on what was otherwise a dark tale about events that had happened long ago. There were few good guys in the Whitey Bulger story, and so the family members of Bulger’s victims provided the human interest angle that made viable the media’s coverage of a complex story.

  It was telling that among the throng of reporters and filmmakers covering the trial, none had thought to seek out and interview someone like Joe Salvati. The argument could be made that Salvati—though he had been framed for a crime he did not commit, served thirty years in prison, and was the victim of a massive injustice—was not a victim of any crimes committed by Bulger. Factually, this was true. But within this argument were the seeds of what was becoming, in relation to the Bulger trial, a source of frustration.

  In the courtroom, the prosecutors and the judge were engaged in an effort to protect the system from “outrageous allegations” on the part of the defense. At its worst, this represented a process of obfuscation, an attempt to keep the Bulger trial from becoming associated with the history that had helped to create Whitey. The activities outside the courtroom, with the media obsessively soliciting commentary from the family members of victims, had become part of that same diversion. Certainly, the family members had emotional stories to tell, but none of them were in a position to shed light on the historical circumstances that had sustained the likes of Barboza and Bulger and, ultimately, led to the deaths of their lived ones.

  The narrative that was being buried inside the courtroom was being left equally unexamined outside the courtroom. Each day of the trial, with the concurrent layers of physical evidence and witness testimony, the likelihood that the full conspiracy would or could be revealed diminished with each banging of the gavel signaling the trial’s adjournment for the day.

  The anguish of the family members had become one more excuse for diverting attention from the full horror of the Bulger era.

  4

  DEMON SEED

  IN THE CASE against Whitey Bulger, history was on trial. There were those aspects of history that had been cobbled together to form the RICO charges against Bulger, acts of crime both depraved and voluminous. But there was also the history that was being omitted; history that the jury would never hear about because the prosecutors and the court—meaning the judge—would do everything in their power to make sure it did not become a significant factor in the trial.

  So far, this history had been successfully kept at bay. The witnesses, mostly elderly men with dwindling or selective memories, were there, ostensibly, to reclaim history, but it was history preordained by the DOJ. It was the desire of Wyshak, Kelly, and others in the U.S. attorney’s office that had spent decades formulating the case that their version of history would appear so overwhelming and irrefutable that it would render irrelevant any larger picture of the Bulger saga. This was a strategy that, with the help of a compliant judge, seemed likely to rule the day.

  For those who had followed the Bulger story for years, however, the unspoken history haunted courtroom number eleven at the Moakley federal courthouse.

  The name Barboza had not yet been mentioned at all by the prosecution, and if Wyshak and Kelly had any say in the matter, it would stay that way.

  Back in the mid-1960s, when Whitey Bulger was still a federal prisoner on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, Joe Barboza was in the process of turning himself into a criminal legend as notorious as Bulger would become decades later. Like Bulger, Joe the Animal was a product of his times. He maneuvered himself into a position of strength in the underworld through a mutually compromising covert relationship with the upperworld. The more nefarious this alliance became, the better it was for Barboza, because his handlers in the upperworld had a vested interest in making sure the true dimensions of this relationship were never known to the public at large.

  With Barboza, as with Bulger, this relationship was highly beneficial for an extended period of time, until it wasn’t.

  Barboza was born June 20, 1932, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the son of Portuguese immigrants originally from the city of Lisbon. Barboza’s father was a middleweight boxer and his mother a seamstress. His life of crime began early, with robberies and assaults, and he was first imprisoned in 1950, at the age of eighteen. At the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Concord, he met a number of underworld figures affiliated with the Patriarca crime family. Upon his release from prison in 1955, Barboza went to work for the Mafia as a bodyguard and thug while at the same time pursuing a career in boxing as a light-heavyweight contender. Fighting under the nickname “the Baron,” he had twelve professional fights, winning eight, five of those by knockout.

  Around New England, Barboza was known as a vicious thug. He was stocky and muscular, with a thick neck and an angular skull shaped like a watermelon. With less than an eighth-grade education, he was barely literate, though he liked to draw and would later show true talent as a sketch artist.

  The Mafia in New England wasn’t interested in his abilities as an artist, unless those skills could be applied to the art of murder.

  Barboza was willing to kill people for money, and, while still in his twenties, he became known as a proficient contract killer for the Mafia. Because he was not Italian, he would never be a made member, though it was Barboza’s dream, expressed to many of his associates in the underworld, that for him the Honored Society would make an exception and he would become the first non-Italian to be inducted. His Sicilian friends slapped him on the back and said, “Hey, you never know. Keep trying.” Behind his back, his mafia friends referred to him as “the nigger.”

  His nickname “Animal” came about because he once bit a chunk of flesh out of a person’s cheek during a bar fight. In later years, he admitted to having committed seven murders for the Mob, but he was believed to have killed many more, perhaps as many as twenty-six people.1

  In the mid-1960s, Barboza found himself in the middle of the Boston gang wars. Although he officially worked for the Italians, he was also aligned with the Winter Hill Mob, which at that time was still led by Buddy McLean
. Barboza is believed to have taken part in some of the era’s most notorious killings, including the murders of Punchy McLaughlin and the two Hughes brothers, Stevie and Con.

  The Boston underworld was a weird intersection of alliances born out of necessity, relationships that were a manifestation of the Machiavellian philosophy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Many of Barboza’s closest associates during this period would later resurface as key players in the Bulger saga, including John Martorano, Steve Flemmi, and Flemmi’s younger brother Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi.

  In March 1965—the same month that Whitey Bulger was released from prison and returned to Boston—Barboza, Jimmy the Bear, and others had decided to add another body to their ever-growing hit list. The target they had in mind was a low-level hood named Teddy Deegan.

  For a hustler in the Boston underworld, the odds of stepping on somebody’s toes were great. Deegan had murdered a hood named Anthony Sacramone, who was affiliated with the Winter Hill gang. Deegan was associated with the McLaughlin brothers in Charlestown, a competing faction. In the ongoing tit-for-tat of the Boston gang wars, Deegan having killed Sacramone meant that someone would be looking for revenge. Someone, in this case, was Barboza and Jimmy Flemmi.

  Deegan also owed Jimmy Flemmi three hundred dollars, which, by the dictates of gangster logic, was further justification to use him as an example.

  At the time, there had been many killings in the Boston underworld—so many that Barboza and Flemmi decided that, in the interest of protocol and self-preservation, they would first get approval for the Deegan hit from the North End mafia boss Jerry Angiulo.

  The Italians wanted nothing to do with the crazy war going on between the Winter Hill Mob and the Charlestown crew. At a meeting in the North End, Angiulo told Flemmi and Barboza, “You can’t kill someone just because you had an argument with him.” The boss told the two hoods that he would only sanction the hit if capo di tutti capi Raymond Patriarca gave his approval.