Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  Brian Kelly stood before Joe Tower and got things rolling: “Let me direct your attention to the 1970s. What were you doing at that time?”

  “In the 1970s I was a musician in a band. I played music.”

  “What kind of band?”

  “It was disco, rock and roll, blues.”

  “What sort of places did you play at?”

  “We played at local establishments in the area. Local bars.”

  “Did you ever play at a place called Triple O’s?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Kelly stepped forward with a photo in his hand; at the same time the photo was projected onto the monitor in the courtroom. “I’d like to show you what I’ve marked for identification purposes as exhibit eighty-one. Do you recognize that photo, sir?”

  “Yes, I do. This is Triple O’s in South Boston.”

  The introduction of Triple O’s into the trial’s narrative was no small matter. By the 1980s, with Bulger no longer making trips into Somerville to convene with confederates in the Winter Hill Mob (which was now moribund), or trips to the Lancaster Street garage, which was closed down after it became known that the place was bugged by state police, Triple O’s became the official headquarters of the Bulger organization. In a previous incarnation it was known as the Transit Café, meeting place for the Southie branch of the Killeen brothers gang, for whom Whitey got his start as a debt collector and leg breaker.

  Named after the three O’Neill brothers, Southie natives who were co-owners, the bar was located on West Broadway, a main thoroughfare. The façade was classic 1970s working class, with a hand-painted sign with the bar’s name—Triple O’s Lounge—that also advertised Coors and Rolling Rock. Anyone who entered the place knew they were entering a domain of the neighborhood’s rough-and-tumble gangster element, a bloody chain of succession that had brought Southie under the control of a man known as Whitey, though no one dared call him that to his face.

  In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Joe Tower and his band played at Triple O’s on Friday and Saturday nights. Everyone liked Joe. He played a passable guitar solo and was a vigorous talker, but more than that he was at the head of a modest drug operation that provided cocaine to the neighborhood.

  Like most American cities in the 1980s, Boston was on the receiving end of a veritable blizzard of cocaine, causing the street-level purchase price to tumble. What had once been the drug of the rich and famous, used only at exclusive nightclubs among the celebrity elite, had now become a working-class drug common among construction workers, housewives, off-duty cops—you name it.

  Prosecutor Kelly asked Tower, “Did there come a time in approximately 1980 when you developed a problem with respect to your drug dealing?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “Well, I had a pretty big-sized organization on my behalf, and there was problems in the town at the time. There was a fellow named Tommy Nee [no relation to Pat Nee] going around—I guess this fellow might have just gotten out of jail. . . . I didn’t know him well, but I knew of him. . . . I guess there were threats going around. They were chasing people that were involved in drugs and shaking them down.”

  “What was your understanding of Thomas Nee’s reputation?”

  “I understood Thomas Nee was a very bad person, a murderer, and if you crossed him, you would be in serious trouble.”

  “So he had a fearsome reputation?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you heard he was shaking down drug dealers in South Boston?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “So what did you do about it?”

  What followed from Tower was a torrent of verbiage and splintered syntax, a roundabout description of how he approached Kevin O’Neill, a proprietor of Triple O’s, and explained his predicament. From the stand, Tower sounded as if he were presently coked up, though he swore he had not touched the white powder in more than a decade. Those years were behind him. His current state was apparently a combination of his innate gregariousness and nervousness about being on the stand. He twitched and moved around in his seat a lot; it was easy to see how he had once been not only a boss but also the primary sampler of his organization. The old adage “don’t get high on your own supply” had fallen on deaf ears with Joe.

  Said Kelly, “Sir, I am going to have to ask you to slow down a bit.”

  The courtroom roiled with laughter; everyone was aware that Tower had been prattling like a South Boston version of Joe Pesci, the motormouth actor of Goodfellas fame.

  “I’m sorry,” said Tower, sheepishly.

  “Our court reporter, his fingers are flying. Slow it down. The jury wants to understand it.”

  Joe was smiling now. “Sorry. It just happens to be the way I am.”

  The laughter in the courtroom seemed to lessen the anxiety for Tower, and from then on he regaled the jury and spectators with a street-level discourse on how Bulger became the cocaine boss of Southie.

  It was Kevin O’Neill who had suggested to Tower that, given his problems with the renegade gangster Tommy Nee disrupting his organization, maybe he needed to have a talk with Jim Bulger.

  Joe Tower was a musician and a cocaine and marijuana dealer; he was not a gangster. But he knew who Jim Bulger was; everyone knew. Joe had said hello a few times to Bulger at Triple O’s. He knew that Bulger was the neighborhood mob boss. He knew that entering into any kind of arrangement with Bulger would be taking his drug business into another realm, but he didn’t know what else to do. Tommy Nee was ruining his business.

  “You know,” Tower said to Kevin O’Neill, “that sounds like something I would be interested in. Set up a meeting.”

  To a rapt jury, Tower described his first meeting with Whitey, the blue Malibu with wire-rimmed wheels and a vinyl top that everyone in the neighborhood knew to be Bulger’s, pulling up in front of his home on L and Seventh streets in South Boston. Tower sat in front, with Whitey in the driver’s seat and Kevin O’Neill riding shotgun. After a few moments of neighborhood small talk, Whitey got to the point: “You know, Joe, I understand Kevin says you have a problem you’re concerned about.” Tower explained the situation. To which Whitey said, “Yeah, you do have a problem. But, you know what? Maybe this problem can be rectified.”

  Bulger asked Joe to give a detailed accounting of his business—how many “customers,” meaning dealers working for him; weekly expenditures; weekly profits; where he got his product; where he stored his product. By the time he was done, Bulger said, “I can help you. I would like you to hook up with a friend of mine. His name is Billy Shea.”

  “Okay,” said Tower.

  “If you do this, there will be no more problems. No one will bother you. You will be free to do what you do with Billy Shea. You take him in, explain what this business is all about, show him the ropes, and you will not be bothered.”

  From then on, Tower met nearly every day with Billy Shea. They went around to every known cocaine and marijuana dealer in Southie and surrounding environs and told them that from now on, they did business with one entity and one entity only. It was made clear that entity was Jim Bulger. The Tommy Nee problem disappeared. Everyone fell in line. Said Tower, “I told my customers there was no longer going to be any problems. They weren’t going to get any intimidation from anybody. Nobody was going to approach them, because I had taken care of the situation.”

  Tower explained how, with Billy Shea as his new partner, they purchased what amounted to a weekly intake of anywhere between forty and seventy ounces, at least a kilo (2.2 pounds), which they always referred to as “pizzas,” just in case anyone was listening. A kilo could cost anywhere from $28,000 to $34,000. “We would cut that,” said Tower, “using special solvents. If I remember correctly, things like mannitol, inositol. There was different ingredients that could be bought and double-boiled and made into a particular formula the same color as cocaine. It could be mixed undetected and, in doing so, it gained weight. And weight was money.” />
  Tower estimated that he and Shea were eventually taking in $100,000 a week from sales. As for his relationship with Shea, Tower said, “He had a way of doing things. It was always the tough-guy approach. And I always said, ‘That isn’t how you run a business. These people aren’t going to work with you like that.’” Nonetheless, generally things ran smoothly, and everyone got rich together. When things didn’t run smoothly, that’s where Bulger came into the picture.

  To illustrate Bulger’s role, the prosecutor elicited from Tower a story the likes of which a person might have heard over a beer at Triple O’s a long time ago.

  As Joe remembered it, there was that one time when his brother, who was an active part of the operation, ran into a problem. “What it was all about,” said Tower, “is that a particular customer up in Wakefield—and he was a good customer. He pretty much had an open run up there. Whatever he needed, we would give him. And in so doing, he incurred quite a large bill with us. And it turned out that he informed me that he couldn’t pay. I asked him why he couldn’t pay, and he said he had given it to a friend of his, a so-called customer of his, and that he wasn’t going to pay him or me. I said, Well, why is that? And he said, The bottom line is that his uncle’s some kind of big wheel, and he said you best not pursue this and forget about the money. And I said to him, Well that ain’t going to happen. So I said to my buddy up there I was dealing with, I said, You should tell your friend to give me a call, and let’s discuss this and see if we can work it out.”

  “So what happened next?” asked Brian Kelly.

  “Next I got a call, probably that afternoon, from the actual individual up there. And he said to me to call this number and talk to the girl, which would be the wife of the person who owed us money. So I said, Well, what’s this? I’m talking to his wife? So I give her a call. She tells me that I have a problem, that we’re not getting nothing. That her uncle, if anything, will create serious problems for me and anybody who tried to come up looking for the money.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “So I told her, I said, Listen. It’s just the opposite. You have a serious problem, and, you know, we need to rectify this right now. And so with that in mind, I said, You think about it. And have your husband call me. So I got a call back from her. She said, Listen, I spoke to my uncle. He got the money for you. And I says, Fine. That’s great. She says, Yeah, go ahead up and see my uncle at the Roadhouse in Lynn. . . . I picked up the phone and called my brother, Thomas. I informed him that he could go up to the Roadhouse in Lynn, and the man would be there to pay him the money. . . . So off he goes. I get a phone call an hour later from somebody on the phone telling me, Hey, Joe, guess what. We got the money and your brother. I says, Who’s this? He says, Never mind who’s this. You got some serious problems and your brother’s got some serious problems. I says, again, You got it wrong. I don’t think you know who you’re dealing with here. I said, I think what you should do is let my brother go and pay him the money. He insists, emphatically, No, we’re going to kill your brother.”

  The guy put Tower’s brother on the phone. “My brother says, Joe, these guys are serious. One of them’s definitely a triggerman. They got a gun on me. They’re talking about making plans how to get rid of me. . . . I says, You put him on the phone again. He puts him back on the phone. I told that gentleman that he is a piece of shit and that if he touched my brother, he was going to be a dead man, and you know, he’s going to be getting a phone call. And I hung up on him.”

  Tower immediately called Billy Shea. “Billy says to me, I’m making a call now to Jimmy. Sit tight.”

  From that point on things were handled without Joe knowing about it, as if the game had been kicked up to a higher level. Billy Shea called and told Tower to get in his car and drive to Rotary Variety in Southie, another Bulger headquarters. Tower drove over there and parked across the street, in front of a machine repair shop. He saw Bulger, Billy Shea, and a couple of key Bulger associates—Steve Flemmi and Kevin Weeks. Occasionally one of them would disappear into the Rotary Variety store and then reappear. Eventually, Jim Bulger looked over at Tower and waved a hand, a gesture that seemed to indicate everything was okay. “Then Billy Shea comes over to me and he says the same thing. Your brother Tom is on his way home. It’s taken care of. It’s all over.”

  Tower was relieved, but not so relieved that he’d forgotten about the money he was owed. He asked Billy Shea about that. “He says, We won’t be seeing anybody in Wakefield no more. We won’t be worrying about the money or the Roadhouse in Lynn. It’s out of our hands.”

  “So,” said prosecutor Kelly, “you didn’t get your money back but you got your brother back?”

  “Correct.”

  “And that’s the sort of protection you wanted by being aligned with Mr. Bulger?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Shortly after that incident, in September 1983, Tower took a pinch. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor narcotics charge and served less than a year at Concord prison. In that time, in accordance with the unwritten rules of the gang, his wife was taken care of. She received a payment of one thousand dollars a month.

  When Tower was released from prison and returned to Southie, it seemed as though things had changed. The Bulger organization was no longer getting their cocaine from his source, a group of Colombians based in Florida. They were getting it from somewhere else. Tower had little involvement, though he was still paid a weekly stipend of one thousand dollars.

  One day, Joe got a call from Patrick Linskey, a member of Bulger’s gang. “Mr. Linskey told me that I was no longer to be involved with any customers, any money, any part of the business, and I would no longer be receiving any thousand dollars a week.”

  Tower wasn’t happy about it. He complained to Kevin O’Neill, owner of Triple O’s, who had first connected him to Bulger. “Mr. O’Neill pulled me aside and said, Listen, you don’t want to do that. This was orders from the Other Guy. The Other Guy said it was over.”

  “Who did you understand ‘the Other Guy’ to be?”

  “Mr. Bulger.”

  “Did you ever consider starting your own individual drug business in South Boston?”

  Tower winced at the thought. “No. . . . If I had done any of that—I was too well known in South Boston, from all the customers, from all the players. Everybody knew me. If there was any way, shape, or form that anybody within the organization found out that I was doing something—they don’t fool around. You’d get a pass, once, if you were lucky, but you would get hurt.”

  That was it. Case closed. Joe Tower was out.

  IN A RICO trial, with multiple counts and witnesses testifying out of chronological order, the proceedings can be like a jigsaw puzzle, with evidence being presented in a confusing jumble. As with a movie production, the jury is expected to assemble a rough cut in their heads during the testimony phase, then reconstruct the evidence in sequential order during deliberations. With the Bulger case, the prosecution made an effort to put witnesses on the stand who would allow the narrative to unfold chronologically. Along with making it easier for jurors to keep track of the evidence—events, names, and specific criminal counts in the indictment in the order they occurred—it illuminated details of the testimony in remarkable ways.

  On the same day that Joe Tower finished his testimony, a subsequent witness was Billy Shea. As a key player in the Bulger organization’s drug operations, Shea had figured prominently in Tower’s testimony. The story Tower told about having his cocaine customers terrorized by the renegade gangster Tommy Nee, forcing Tower to turn to the Bulger crew for assistance, was still fresh in the jury’s mind. Because of that incident, Tower and Shea had become partners, driving around town together nearly every day checking up on their drug connections, making payments and picking up cash.

  Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, Billy Shea had been a tough little Irish hoodlum, quick with his fists and even quicker with a gun. He had done seven years in Walpole state prison on an
armed robbery conviction. When he returned in November 1977, Jimmy Bulger put him to work as a loan shark and a debt collector.

  The passage of years had not been especially kind to Billy Shea. At the age of seventy-four, he was gnomelike, with wrinkles, a wispy comb-over, and missing teeth. To envision the Billy Shea of old, a cocky gangster with the requisite Southie swagger, required an active imagination. At one point, when prosecutor Brian Kelly asked Shea to pull the microphone closer and speak up, the witness explained, “I have a little cold, so my voice sounds like Kermit the Frog right now.”

  It was a Freudian slip: Shea didn’t sound like Kermit the Frog, but he did look like him, or at least like Kermit the Frog’s aging Irish uncle.

  In a soothing voice, slightly raspy but soft, Shea described how, with Bulger’s permission, he opened an after-hours card room for high rollers. Many of the clientele at the card room represented something that had not existed when Shea went off to prison a decade earlier: they were drug dealers with money to burn. Said Shea, “I couldn’t help notice that there was many individuals walking around with rolls of one-hundred-dollar bills large enough to choke a horse. But it appeared to me they had no protection. It appeared to me that they were not organized.”

  “So what did you do?” asked the prosecutor.

  “I visited Jim and made that fact known to him and explained that it could be very lucrative, that I could put them in line. . . . In other words, they’re not mavericks anymore, the day of being a maverick is over, that I’m going to absorb them.”

  “They’d have to pay you?”

  “Well, yeah, that was the basic idea, originally.”

  As Billy remembered it, Bulger liked the idea, but he had a concern. “He did not want his image involved in drugs. He didn’t want his name attached to it.”