Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  It later years, it would become known that Special Agents John Morris and John Connolly were among those unnamed sources.

  It is not unusual for big-city reporters to get their tips from off-the-record sources within law enforcement and the prosecutor’s office; it is generally how the game is played. In Boston, where gangsters and cops had grown up in similar working-class neighborhoods, many of the city’s best reporters were also from those same neighborhoods. Newsmen and lawmen meeting quietly for a drink in an out-of-the-way saloon was part of the city’s daily discourse. Information could be exchanged that served the purposes of both sides. The reporter gets “exclusive” inside information, and the lawmen get to generate and, to an extent, control the parameters of how the story will be presented to the public.

  In Boston in the early 1980s, the only organized crime stories to make it into the pages of the Globe and other media outlets were frequent exposés on the criminal activities of the Angiulo brothers and the local Mafia. This was a tremendous benefit to Whitey Bulger, whose relationship with Connolly, Morris, and Strike Force prosecutor Jeremiah O’Sullivan was, by that point, based entirely on his willingness and ability to help them take down the Mafia in Boston.

  All of that changed in 1988, when the Globe ran an explosive four-part series of articles under the heading “The Bulger Mystique.” The series, put together by a group of four reporters designated the Spotlight Team, was as much about Senator Billy Bulger as it was about his alleged gangster brother. The articles delved into what became known as “the 75 State Street investigation,” a proposed federal probe into a real estate deal in which Senator Bulger had received a suspicious $250,000 payment that might have been an illegal transaction. Senator Bulger claimed the payment had been a loan; the money was returned to the person who made the payment. The transaction had nothing to do with Whitey Bulger. The investigation of the senator had been terminated and no charges were ever filed against Billy Bulger.

  In the Globe series, the most explosive nugget to appear in print was the revelation that Whitey Bulger had what the paper called “a special relationship” with the FBI. At the time, the Globe’s reporters and editors knew what the general public would not learn for years, that the unnamed source of that information was John Morris. On the stand at the Bulger trial, Morris claimed that he had leaked the information to the Globe to bring an end to the FBI’s relationship with Whitey, so that other agents would not be compromised as he had been in his dealings with Bulger and Flemmi. Whitey Bulger believed that Morris had leaked it to the press in an effort to get him killed by underworld rivals.

  The Spotlight Team’s reporting did not suggest that the FBI was engaged in criminal activity. It did quote unnamed sources in the Massachusetts State Police who complained that the FBI was possibly protecting Bulger from investigation by other agencies. But there was no suggestion of overt corruption. Anyone who read the series might even have concluded that the use of Bulger as an informant was simply an ingenious tactic on the part of the lawmen, a successful and mutually beneficial ploy to crush the Mafia. Although Bulger’s career as a racketeer, including a number of early gangland murders, was detailed in the Globe series, there was no mention of the FBI leaking information to Bulger so that he could murder potential informants or rivals, no mention of his possible role in the disappearances of Debra Davis, Deborah Hussey, and many others.

  The Spotlight series was unprecedented in its public exposure of the Brothers Bulger. Not long after that series appeared in print, a member of the Spotlight Team—Gerard O’Neill—and another Globe reporter—Dick Lehr—went on to publish a book titled The Underboss. Originally published by St. Martin’s Press in January 1989, the book was subtitled The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family. The primary narrative of the book was the investigation of the local Mafia as conceived by the FBI’s C-3 Squad, led by John Morris, and the prosecution of Jerry Angiulo, led by Jeremiah O’Sullivan. The book bordered on hagiography of a group of agents and prosecutors some of whom, at the time, were involved in an insidiously corrupt relationship with Bulger and Flemmi.

  Years later, in 2000, Lehr and O’Neill published a corrective, of sorts, titled Black Mass. By then, through public testimony under oath, the Wolf hearings had spewed forth a staggering litany of corruption, some of it perpetrated by the same people the writers had lionized a decade earlier in The Underboss. Through the testimony of dozens of witnesses, it was learned that Bulger and Flemmi were far more homicidal and depraved than anyone had imagined, and that the criminal enabling of Bulger by the FBI was vast and scurrilous. Consequently, the tone of Black Mass was one of shock and revulsion—a point of view brought about, perhaps, by the fact that these same reporters had previously been played by their “friendly” FBI sources.

  In the wake of the Wolf hearings and the Bulger indictment, which evolved as more and more informants came forward, a new narrative emerged in the media. The FBI’s organized crime squad, and particularly John Connolly, now took center stage. With Bulger on the lam, Connolly became the primary target of Wyshak and Kelly, who became the driving force not only in how the various Bulger-related prosecutions would unfold, but also in how the story was to be shaped in the press.1 Following the double-whammy prosecutions of Connolly in 2001 (Massachusetts) and 2007 (Florida), Wyshak and Kelly were profiled by writer Dick Lehr, who since the publication of Black Mass—a number-one bestseller in Boston—had retired from the Globe and become a full-time author. In the pages of Boston magazine, Lehr wrote about Wyshak and Kelly in a manner similar to the way he and Gerard O’Neill had written about FBI agents Ed Quinn, John Morris, and others in The Underboss—that is to say, glowingly.

  While Bulger was on the run, he became a figure of national prominence. As the legend grew, the chance that the popular media might be willing or able to look beyond Bulger, the man, to an examination of the universe that had created Bulger became less likely. The story became all about Whitey.

  This was especially relevant to the Bulger trial, which, legally speaking, was likely to be the final chance for those public servants who had enabled Bulger to be called to task for their actions. But this was not to be; the local media representatives best equipped to hold the government’s feet to the fire and make sure that the trial was probative and transparent had, thus far in the proceedings, preferred that the trial be about Whitey “the monster” and little else.

  Howie Carr had built a mini-career around his journalism and radio commentary about Bulger and also through the writing of numerous books, most notably The Brothers Bulger, a bestseller, and Hitman. His knowledge of the Boston underworld is vast and expansive, and through the popularity of his daytime radio talk show on WRKO radio, he had cultivated sources of information on many subjects, including crime and politics, that are second to none. But Carr had long since turned his analysis of the Bulger story into a personalized vendetta against Whitey—perhaps understandably so.

  In 2005, in an interview that Kevin Weeks did with the CBS News program 60 Minutes, it was revealed that Bulger and Weeks had considered killing Howie Carr because of his incessant lampooning of Senator Billy Bulger in print and on his radio show. Weeks had even gone so far as to stalk Carr to his summer vacation home, where he staked out the location with the intention of shooting the famed columnist when he came out his front door. When Carr emerged with his young daughter, the hit was called off.

  During the trial, in his column in the Boston Herald, and on his radio show, Carr preferred to speculate endlessly about Bulger’s sexual preferences, portraying the gangster as a covert gay hustler who liked young boys. Often irreverent, occasionally juvenile, and frequently entertaining in his on-air presentation, Carr seemed to have little interest in interpreting the trial as an occasion to examine the world that had created Bulger.

  Kevin Cullen was another prominent journalistic voice in the city who had written about Bulger frequently over the years, as a reporter and prominent columnist for the Globe. In February 201
3, on the brink of the Bulger trial, Cullen and Shelley Murphy, another veteran Globe reporter who had covered aspects of the Bulger story for decades, published a bestselling biography of Bulger titled Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt that Brought Him to Justice. The book was unprecedented in many respects, informed by sources the two writers had cultivated over an extended period. Their portrait of Bulger was both horrifying and humanizing, as they sought to puncture the mythology that had developed around Whitey and bring him down to size.

  Cullen’s nuanced analysis of Bulger in his and Shelley Murphy’s book was nowhere to be seen in his columns in the Globe, which were devoted almost exclusively to the trial during its duration. Cullen seemed to feel as though he needed to play the role of Bulger’s primary tormentor, the one person who could make Bulger pay for his many years as a bully and psychopath who terrorized people in Southie, where Cullen had lived while working as a young reporter.

  As with Carr, the writer chose to personalize his approach, adding a tone of self-righteous indignation that sometimes bordered on hysteria. Again, like Carr, Cullen had his reasons.

  Back in 1988, Cullen had been part of the Spotlight Team that first learned that Whitey had “a special relationship” with the FBI. On the brink of that series first appearing in the pages of the Globe, Cullen received a phone call from Special Agent Tom Daly, who was a member of the C-3 squad and also a fellow Southie native. Daly had heard that the Globe was about to run their explosive series, and he was calling Cullen in an attempt to intimidate him into canceling “The Bulger Mystique.” The agent told the reporter that Bulger “wasn’t going to like it” and implied that because Cullen was a resident of Southie, his life could be in danger. Cullen reported the call from the FBI agent to his publishers at the Globe; they perceived the call to be a threat and took it seriously enough to temporarily relocate Cullen and his family out of the city.

  The role the media had played in creating and cultivating the myth of Whitey Bulger was complex and personal. Boston is a media town, with a history of top-notch reporters and columnists. Particularly in the wake of the Wolf hearings of 1997, local reporters had done superlative work in unearthing aspects of the Bulger conspiracy. Some had turned their work into bestselling books that found a readership far beyond the city of Boston. But as the prosecution of Bulger—as shaped by Wyshak and Kelly—had begun to dominate and misconstrue many important questions about who ultimately was responsible for the Bulger fiasco, you could argue that the local media engaged in coverage that bordered on dereliction of duty.

  There were exceptions. David Boeri, a writer for the Boston Phoenix and other publications, as well as for radio and television news, had consistently sought to set the Bulger story against the larger context of institutional corruption in New England. In the overall flow of trial coverage, which was voluminous, there were insights by Boeri and others that occasionally went beyond whether or not Whitey was a bad man, or speculation on just how bad a man he truly was.

  Nonetheless, among the most powerful and influential media outlets in the city, the coverage bordered on cheerleading for the prosecutors and the U.S. attorney’s office. Some reporters, in private conversations, used the defense that other aspects of the Bulger story had been covered over the years and didn’t need to be rehashed. This, coincidentally, was the view of the prosecutors.

  The trial was exhaustively covered, but not with much depth. The best journalists in town were more interested in settling old scores with Whitey than probing the parameters of a skewed prosecution. The hidden horrors of the Bulger trial seemed destined to remain so.

  AS A FULL and penetrating accounting of the era, the Bulger trial had begun to show signs of being a well-oiled cover-up, but in some areas it tread new ground. On the subject of illegal narcotics, the proceedings addressed for the first time in public a topic that was central to the Bulger mythology.

  During the mobster’s heyday as the boss of Southie, a large part of his legend was based on the belief that he kept drugs out of the neighborhood. People who advocated on Bulger’s behalf used this “fact” to sustain the myth that Bulger may have been a gangster, but he was also Southie’s preeminent protector. Mostly composed of socially conservative Catholics, Southie was a working-class enclave, highly family oriented. The concept of drug use, be it hard drugs like heroin or cocaine, or more benign drugs like marijuana, was not tolerated as it might be in a ghetto neighborhood like Roxbury. In the 1970s, the desire to keep drugs out of the neighborhood had been used as a primary explanation for violent resistance to school busing, on the theory that bringing blacks into Southie was tantamount to despoiling the town with drugs.

  The myth of a drug-free Southie and the role Whitey Bulger played in keeping it that way was perpetrated by, among others, John Connolly and Senator Billy Bulger. In his off-the-record chats with people in the Boston media and in the community, Connolly extolled the virtues of Jim Bulger, the primary virtue being that he kept Southie free from “bad elements” like street drug dealers, who by then were a common phenomenon on the urban landscape throughout the United States, especially in poor and working-class neighborhoods.

  Billy Bulger promulgated this myth to an even greater extent, though he did so without ever publicly mentioning his brother by name.

  A major part of Billy Bulger’s pitch to the electorate in campaign after campaign had been how South Boston was the model of a close-knit, upright, righteous community where parents kept tabs on their kids, made them stay in school, and took pride in the fact that Southie residents insisted on not allowing dope to denigrate their community.

  Billy Bulger did not invent the concept of “Southie pride,” but he certainly knew how to make it a central component of his career in public life. The fact that he had a brother who was known to be a gangster boss did not detract from his skill at capitalizing on the community’s sense of pride; in fact, it was quite the opposite. The idea that Jim Bulger was “our gangster” in a world of dope peddlers, Mafiosi, “crazy niggers,” and liberal apologists had somehow, in the inverted morality that the Bulger brothers seemed to represent, become a subterranean though undeniable aspect of Southie pride.

  Nowhere was this proclivity more in evidence than at the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast held in Southie, presided over by Senator Billy Bulger. As the president of the Massachusetts Senate, Bulger had risen above his earliest beginnings as the representative from Southie to being among the most powerful lawmakers in the state. The annual breakfast had become a manifestation of his standing in the city. Politicians running for office routinely stopped by the breakfast and submitted themselves to sometimes not so gentle ribbing from Senator Bulger and others, who welcomed the opportunity to make them squirm. U.S. senator Ted Kennedy; Massachusetts governor and later presidential candidate Michael Dukakis; Speaker of the U.S. House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr.; and presidential candidate Ronald Reagan were among the many luminaries who spoke at the breakfast.

  John Morris, from the witness stand, had described how impressed he was to attend the event as a guest of John Connolly. Morris described the breakfast as “probably the single-most spectacular political event of the year . . . hosted by the Senate president and attended by a who’s who in politics.” FBI agents, both retired and currently on the job, were given special treatment at the breakfast, with a table up near the dais. Connolly was so well connected with Billy Bulger that he didn’t even have to wait in line at the main entrance. With Morris at his side, Connolly entered the hall through a private back entrance. Seated at their table was Special Agent Dennis Condon, who maintained a prized spot at the breakfast even after his retirement from the bureau in 1980. Also in attendance, in varying years, were numerous SACs and ASACs (assistant special agents in charge) from the Boston office of the FBI.

  Extolling the virtues of Southie through anecdotes and song was often an aspect of the breakfast. Occasionally, there were offhand references to Senator Bulge
r’s notorious brother, always in a jocular manner and never by name. One year, William Weld made a notable appearance. Weld served as a U.S. attorney in Boston, where he was known for pursuing political corruption cases with great vigor. He went on to become head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Criminal Division and eventually was elected governor of Massachusetts. At Billy Bulger’s St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, from the podium Weld sang a little ditty, the punch line of which was a reference to Billy Bulger becoming rich courtesy of his brother’s criminal activities. Senator Bulger and everyone else burst out laughing.

  Political and some community leaders could react with good-natured laughter at the Whitey references because they operated under the myth that Bulger was a Robin Hood type who kept drugs out of the neighborhood. In truth, beginning in the early 1980s, Bulger implemented a hostile takeover of the neighborhood’s drug trade. Within a year, he would become the largest peddler of illegal narcotics in the history of Southie.

  At the trial, the unlikely narrator of Bulger’s foray into the cocaine and marijuana business was Joe Tower, a man who had thus far avoided scrutiny in all the many legal proceedings and books on the Bulger era. At fifty-nine years of age, he was the youngest witness so far with direct involvement in Bulger’s criminal gang to take the stand.

  With his deep suntan, full head of silver hair, and casual sport coat, Tower seemed like a man who had long ago removed himself from the grittier aspects of his hometown of Boston. But then he spoke. His cadence and manner of speech could only have come from one place: Southie.

  In August 2000, Tower was living peacefully in Port St. Lucie, Florida, working as a luthier, someone who constructs and repairs custom guitars. It was then that Tower was served with a federal subpoena to testify before a grand jury back in Boston about his years as a cocaine dealer for Whitey Bulger. Tower had not been charged with a crime, but the implication was that he could be if he didn’t cooperate. He had followed news about the ongoing Bulger-related prosecutions ever since Whitey disappeared on the lam back in 1995. Through an attorney, Tower negotiated an immunity deal: he would agree to testify as long as nothing he said could be used against him in court.