Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  The next Mullen that Bulger killed was Tommy King, another prominent member of the gang. At the time, King believed that he was in a partnership with Bulger, which is why when Whitey told him that he needed his assistance in tracking down and killing a criminal rival named Alan “Suitcase” Fidler, King was game. He met with Bulger, Howie Winter, and Johnny Martorano. They were all seated in Bulger’s car, with Steve Flemmi behind them in a crash car. Flemmi had handed out guns to everyone. What King didn’t know was that the chamber of the gun he’d been handed was filled with blanks.

  Seated in the backseat behind Tommy King was Martorano. As Johnny explained it, “We were supposed to drive over and shoot Fidler, and on the way, pretty much after we pulled out, I shot Tommy.”

  “Where did you shoot him?”

  “In the head.”

  Two down, one to go. On the very same night that King was killed, Bulger sought out a third Mullen member, Francis “Buddy” Leonard. Bulger had a beef with Leonard mostly because of his drunken behavior in the neighborhood. Bulger was not a big drinker and never used drugs of any kind. Part of his plan for taking over as boss of the neighborhood was attempting to instill a more rigorous code of personal behavior among Southie gangsters. Buddy did not go along with the program. That night, a few hours after killing King, Bulger found Buddy Leonard and shot him in the head. He then took Leonard’s body and put it in King’s car, to make it appear as if King had killed Leonard.

  Pat Nee did not have anything to do with these murders, but he was alleged to have played a role in the disposal of two of the bodies.

  Said Nee, “The killing of Paulie [McGonagle] was a shock to all of us. We knew Whitey had engineered it, but now that we were all affiliated together with Winter Hill, it wasn’t like you could go murder Whitey. To do that would mean taking on the entire organization. Paulie was collateral damage.”

  We were driving in Pat’s Jeep across the Tobin Memorial Bridge, over the Mystic River, on our way into the city of Chelsea. Pat had to drop off a gift for a friend, and as we slowed down in afternoon traffic on the bridge, Nee was determined to make sense of it all.

  We were not far from the actual location of the Teddy Deegan murder, in a part of the city that hadn’t changed much in the last thirty years. The bridge descended into an area of deserted warehouses and crumbling sidewalks. As we talked about events from the 1970s, a time of hard men, secret deals, and dead bodies left in the trunks of cars, it was not hard to conjure the ghosts of the past.

  I had interviewed enough gangsters to know that it was sometimes difficult for a professional criminal to explain the ways of the underworld to a “civilian,” even someone like myself who had heard many stories. The truth was, in the criminal rackets it was not uncommon to have a partner who was someone you did not completely trust. Strange alliances were born out of the overweening desire to make money. Nee had entered into a partnership with Bulger, but he’d never dealt with someone whose ambitions were so devious and corrupt.

  Not only had Bulger killed Paulie McGonagle, but he spread the word among other Mullen members that Tommy King had played a role in the murder. That put Tommy on the outs with Pat and other remaining members of the Mullens, so that a year after the McGonagle murder—when Bulger made his move on King—Tommy had few defenders left in the gang.

  Nee did not know that Bulger, just a couple of months before killing King, had entered into a partnership with FBI agent John Connolly. This would prove to be crucial; immediately following the dual killings of King and Leonard, Bulger had Connolly input disinformation into FBI 302s (confidential intelligence files) that King had murdered Buddy Leonard, left him in the car, and skedaddled. It was the beginning of a sneaky pattern of misdirection orchestrated by Bulger and his corrupt enablers in law enforcement. As an informant, he fed them information that helped cover up his murders, and his G-men enablers willingly memorialized his lies via law enforcement files.

  Another fact that Nee did not know was that Bulger had gone over his head to get authorization for the murders of King and Leonard from the Winter Hill Mob’s ruling board.

  I explained to Pat how, during his testimony, John Martorano described Bulger coming to the leadership at Marshall Motors seeking approval for the murders. According to Martorano, “I guess [Bulger] and Tommy couldn’t get along; they were always butting heads together. Whitey said, ‘Tommy’s uncontrollable and he’s going to kill some police detective.’ . . . So he wanted to kill Tommy, take him out.”

  According to Martorano, there was disagreement among the group about killing King. But Whitey’s argument was convincing: the detective whom King was threatening to kill was Eddie Walsh, a Boston police legend (Eddie was not related to Frank Walsh, the cop who arrested Joe Salvati). Walsh was practically a member of the underworld, a cop whom the gangsters routinely fed information for their own purposes—information that made Walsh look like a rainmaker, with sources in the underworld that were the envy of others in law enforcement. Killing Detective Eddie Walsh would open a can of worms and bring about a level of scrutiny that would be harmful to everyone.

  Nee listened carefully as I described how his partners in the Winter Hill Mob made the decision to take out his former associate in the Mullen gang. “The bit about Tommy wanting to kill Eddie Walsh is bullshit,” he said. “Tommy was a drinker and a loud-mouth. He might have said something like that—boasting—but he never would have done it.” Unlike the Paulie McGonagle killing, which was done surreptitiously, the killing of Tommy King had been planned and approved by the Winter Hill gang braintrust. Nee was alleged to have helped dig King’s grave.

  The digging of graves and burying of bodies would become a Southie underworld ritual during the Bulger era. Before that, during the gang wars, bodies had been dumped in alleyways or left in car trunks, but Whitey was far too finicky and thorough to leave behind such obvious loose ends.

  To be a member of the underworld’s inner circle in Southie meant you sometimes got roped into burial duty, whether you liked it or not.

  Nee supposedly had been called on to help bury Paulie McGonagle in a grave at Tenean Beach, in Dorchester. Alongside him that night digging the hole, according to court testimony, was Tommy King.

  Given the statute of limitations, Nee could not be chargd for his role in this or other burials, but as with most allegations stemming from the Bulger years, he neither confirms nor denies the particulars.

  Even so, the details are revealing, because a year later Nee is alleged to have been at a nearby location, this time helping to bury King.

  If true, the irony was instructive, with a succession of burials that had to feel ominous for anyone holding the shovel. Being a gangster in Southie had become like the children’s rhyme, “Ring Around the Rosie.” You thought everyone was working in unison, but before you knew you it, you had a pocketful of posies and were digging your own grave.

  IN THE EARLY weeks of the Bulger trial, I sometimes found myself asking, What’s so special about Whitey Bulger? In the Boston underworld of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a gangster without portfolio. He had gained some stature through his role in the Killeen organization but that was on the wane as the Killeens were wiped out by the Mullen gang. He rebounded nicely by latching on with the Winter Hill Mob, but even there he was part of a ruling board; he was not the sole leader. He had shown a willingness to kill, which was a prized skill in the underworld, but when it came to killing people he was no Joe Barboza, or John Martorano, or Steve Flemmi. In many ways, in the mid 1970s, he was a garden-variety Boston gangster.

  Beginning in 1973, from the time he became part of the Winter Hill Mob, Bulger began a systematic rise in the underworld that distinguished him as a man of near-psychotic ambition. And he was able to rise above the fray because of one single factor that put him in a category by himself: his connections.

  It started with his brother, the politician, who served as kind of an unspoken safety net. More than once, I asked Pat Nee, “Why d
idn’t you kill Whitey Bulger? He was whacking out former partners of yours left and right. You’d begun to feel like maybe you were next on his hit list. Why didn’t you kill him before he killed you?” Pat’s answer was always the same: Billy.

  To kill the brother of the most powerful political figure in the community, a rising star in state politics, would have brought about a level of heat that would have—at least temporarily—wiped out the city’s criminal rackets. Billy Bulger’s standing in the city protected Whitey Bulger from retribution.

  The other factor was John Connolly—or, to be more precise, the inroads that Connolly provided Bulger into a vast universe of corruption within the criminal justice system.

  Having a cop in your pocket was nothing new. Before Connolly, the Winter Hill Mob had David Schneiderhan, a state trooper who, from 1968 to 1978, worked for the state attorney general’s organized crime unit. Schneiderhan grew up with the Flemmi brothers, Jimmy the Bear and Stevie, and had been selling information to Steve Flemmi since the late 1960s. As a criminal gang in Boston, you weren’t worth much unless you had multiple agents, troopers, or local cops on the payroll.

  Even so, Connolly was a gold-plated connection, and the benefits of this alliance were apparent almost immediately. The agent intervened in a dispute that had flared up between a vending company called Melotone and the team of Bulger and Flemmi. The two gangsters had started their own vending company and had been going all over town threatening bar owners who installed Melotone vending machines. The company approached the FBI to see if there was a criminal case to be made against Bulger and Flemmi. Connolly handled the overture, assuring Melotone lawyers that it would not be in their interest to pursue legal action. He had, in other words, acted as a front man for the gang, protecting their financial interests.

  On another occasion, Connolly gave Bulger information that allowed the Winter Hill Mob to eliminate an informant in their midst—Richie Castucci. As John Martorano mentioned in his testimony, the gangsters were especially impressed by this because, in giving up Castucci—a registered Top Echelon Informant—Connolly signaled that his loyalty to the gang overrode fidelity to his own FBI.

  In 1977, Connolly introduced Jim Bulger to his new supervisor at the organized crime squad, which was also known as C-3. John Morris was from the Midwest, with a personality that was the opposite of Connolly, who was highly personable and tried to give the impression of being street-smart. Morris was soft-spoken, plain, and couldn’t have passed for streetwise even if he tried. Mostly, he didn’t try, choosing instead to emphasize his strengths as a team player and consummate company man who seemingly followed orders to the letter. His paperwork was impeccable. He had arrived in Boston from the Miami field office and brought with him a reputation as one of the best supervisors in the FBI.

  Most confidential informants are reluctant to meet anyone within law enforcement except for their direct handler, for obvious reasons. The fewer people who know about a person’s role as an informant the better it is for the informant. But Bulger and Connolly had entered into a relationship that was not your typical gangster-handler arrangement. They were more like associates, two men who each saw the other as an opportunity to enhance his standing within his chosen careers.

  In the Irish Mob, connections were everything. Irish gangsters did not function within a structured hierarchy like the Mafia. With Cosa Nostra—literally, “Our Thing”—the reputation of the organization itself was enough to facilitate business and keep people in line. The Mafia was a tradition larger than any one individual. In the Irish Mob, there seemed to be an aversion to structure. An Irish gangster was only as powerful or successful as the connections he was able to make both in the underworld and in the legitimate worlds of business and law enforcement. The history of the Irish Mob going back to the years of Prohibition and before was littered with illicit alliances between gangsters, lawmen, and politicos.

  Bulger seemed to have an intuitive awareness of this history. In his early years as a criminal, he’d envisioned himself an outlaw in the manner of Dillinger, roaming from state to state committing robberies. But if he expected to operate within the universe of organized crime as an Irish American gangster, he knew that he needed to have a base of operation, or turf, of his own. In the old country, turf was something you burned for heat, but it also represented home and hearth, the foundation of all civilization. Southie fit the bill; it was an insular Irish American community with a strong code of loyalty where, it just so happened, Whitey was one step removed from a ruling overlord: his brother.

  But the statehouse was not the street, and so Bulger still had to take over Southie’s underworld the old-fashioned way—by killing people. He moved on from conquering the Mullen gang to compromising law enforcement, starting with Connolly, a fellow son of Southie who also understood the empirical power of having the right connections. The two men were side by side. Whitey’s code name for Connolly was Zip, because they lived in the same zip code. Through Zip, Bulger got to know nearly every agent in the FBI’s organized crime unit, including Morris, the supervisor. But he did not stop there.

  In 2012, when I interviewed John Connolly, he told me about the time he introduced Bulger to Jeremiah O’Sullivan. The meeting took place in December 1978, and it had a sense of urgency. A few months earlier, Bulger had been abruptly dropped as a Top Echelon Informant when it was announced to the FBI that he was the target of a federal investigation. Being the target of a criminal probe disqualified someone from being an informant.

  In Bulger’s case, he and his partner Flemmi were part of a massive investigation involving the fixing of horse races at tracks throughout the Northeast. Spearheaded by a consortium of prosecutors from different jurisdictions, the investigation had been ongoing for years. A sprawling web of criminals, led by Howie Winter, had bought off jockeys and had been fixing races at eight different tracks in five states. Investigators in New Jersey had initiated the case revolving around an informant named Anthony “Fat Tony” Ciulla, a Boston Mafiosi who, along with Winter, had devised the scam. For nearly four years the gangsters had been fixing horse races at tracks in New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and elsewhere. It was estimated that, from 1974 to 1978, they had netted more than $8 million.

  In the fall of 1978, Ciulla testified in front of a grand jury in New Jersey. Now the case was spreading to the District of Massachusetts, and federal indictments seemed imminent.

  Agents John Connolly and John Morris were concerned that they were about to lose their prize informants, Bulger and Flemmi. So they met with Jeremiah O’Sullivan, lead prosecutor in the case.

  It went against FBI informant-handling regulations for the agents to reveal the identity of an active informant to anyone, including a federal prosecutor. But these were special circumstances. Bulger and Flemmi represented the FBI’s best chance for making a major case against Jerry Angiulo and the Mafia, which had became the number-one priority in the Boston field office. The agents explained all this to O’Sullivan, who shared their dream of a major case targeting the Angiulo brothers. O’Sullivan told the agents he would look into it and get back to them.

  According to Connolly, he later heard from O’Sullivan, who wanted to meet Bulger. “I asked him, ‘Are you sure? You don’t have to.’” It was highly unusual for an assistant U.S. attorney to meet face-to-face with someone like Bulger. But O’Sullivan insisted. Connolly set up a meeting between the city’s rising mobster and its top organized crime prosecutor in a hotel room on a rainy afternoon around Christmas. “I was there,” Connolly told me. “Jimmy met Jerry. As I remember it, they were both quite impressed with one another.”

  After this meeting, in January 1979, O’Sullivan agreed to drop Bulger and Flemmi from the indictment. They were free and clear.

  On February 3, 1979, the indictments were announced. It was as if an atomic bomb had been dropped on the New England underworld. Twenty-one gangsters were arrested in a series of high-profile raids throughout the region.
Thanks to Connolly, John Martorano had learned about the indictment and gone on the run. Howie Winter was not tipped off and had been arrested; he was facing a twenty-year sentence.

  Bulger was reinstated as a Top Echelon Informant. In addition, Steve Flemmi was officially reopened as a TE in February 1980, with Special Agent John Connolly as his handler.

  The circle of continuity was complete: as Flemmi’s handler, Connolly officially assumed the role of H. Paul Rico, an agent he still referred to many years later, from prison, as “a great man.”

  The race-fixing case was a turning point on many levels. It virtually wiped out the Winter Hill Mob: along with Howie Winter, Jim Martorano was also arrested. Brother Johnny was forced to go on the lam. “Joe Mac” McDonald, who was already on the lam, was forced to stay. A host of other affiliated criminals were either arrested or forced into hiding and out of the rackets.

  Already, Whitey had eliminated the Mullen gang. Now, with the help of the FBI and the most powerful federal prosecutor in New England, he had been a party to the elimination of the Winter Hill Mob. The gang that had been founded by Buddy McLean, then expanded upon by Howie Winter, Joe Mac, Jimmy Sims, and the Martorano brothers, was now under the sole control of Bulger and Flemmi.

  Whitey didn’t have to make trips over to the Marshall Motors garage in Somerville anymore. The Winter Hill Mob was dead. It was all Whitey and Stevie now, with South Boston as their exclusive base of operation.

  The FBI agents made the introductions, but O’Sullivan had pulled the trigger. Bulger’s connections had now expanded beyond Connolly and Morris into a new and more exalted realm of the criminal justice system. The pieces were in place for Bulger to become boss of the entire Boston underworld. Only one thing stood in his way: the Mafia.

  AT THE BULGER trial, prosecutors Wyshak and Kelly had little to gain by shedding light on this narrative of alliances between the underworld and the upperworld in Boston. They were more concerned with establishing a link between Bulger and the victims of his crimes. The links to O’Sullivan were especially problematic for the prosecutors. After O’Sullivan left the Organized Crime Strike Force in 1987, he became U.S. attorney, a predecessor to the person currently holding the job, Carmen Ortiz. To ponder the irony that O’Sullivan, a key component in Bulger’s rise to power, was once in control of the very office that now sought to prosecute the mob boss was something the prosecutors needed to stifle at every turn. Instead, the jury was treated to a more plebeian narrative, some of it punctuated with low humor.