Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  Though O’Sullivan had emerged as a primary inheritor of the region’s systemic legacy of corruption, he had successfully stonewalled the press. He had been called to testify at the Burton committee hearings under a federal subpoena and began his testimony by reading a statement that read, in part: “I state categorically and unequivocally that, although I was made aware of the status of Bulger and Flemmi as FBI informants in the late 1970s, I never authorized them to commit any crimes and have no knowledge of such authorization.”

  Most of the questions for O’Sullivan revolved around his decision to drop Bulger and Flemmi from the 1979 race-fix prosecution, which led to the conviction of Howie Winter, Jimmy Sims, and nineteen other confederates of the Winter Hill Mob. O’Sullivan claimed that he had made the decision before he was approached by Connolly and Morris based on the fact that neither Bulger nor Flemmi was central to race-fix conspiracy. But then a lawyer for the committee read a January 1979 memo, written by O’Sullivan, naming Bulger and Flemmi as integral players in the scheme.

  “Is this memo correct?” asked the committee lawyer.

  “It must have been at the time I wrote it . . . so you got me,” said O’Sullivan. He wasn’t too worried. The congressional committee hearings were not legally binding; no matter how mendacious he sounded, he would not be indicted for perjury.

  O’Sullivan did his best to distance himself from Connolly and Morris, saying of the FBI, “If you go against them, they will try to get you. They will wage war on you. They will create major administrative problems for me as a prosecutor.”

  Later, after acknowledging that Bulger and Flemmi were two of the most notorious murderers in the Boston underworld, he was asked by a congressman why, upon hearing that they were being used to make criminal cases in his jurisdiction, he didn’t try to close them as informants.

  Answered the former most powerful organized crime prosecutor in New England, “Because that would have precipitated World War III if I tried to get inside the FBI to deal with informants. That was the holy of holies, the inner sanctuarium. They wouldn’t have allowed me to do anything about that.”

  IT IS NOT uncommon for people in law enforcement to joke about criminals turning on one another. Cops refer to the underworld as “a self-cleaning oven.” Popular wisdom dictates that there is no honor among thieves. If a criminal is used to rat on another criminal, so be it, and if that criminal is telling lies to take down other criminals, it is, perhaps, in the minds of some, not the worst thing in the world. The reality that innocent people might become collateral damage in this provisional approach to justice is more than many in law enforcement are willing to acknowledge.

  What do you want from me, tears?

  Paul Rico became a player in the criminal underworld, some might say a gangster with a badge. He was rewarded for the role he played by those who sent him into battle.

  Jeremiah O’Sullivan claimed that he did not trust the FBI, but he knew better than to rock the boat. When asked, specifically, if he concerned himself with troubling facts about the Teddy Deegan murder trial or other rumored injustices that he might have inherited as U.S. attorney, O’Sullivan answered, “I did not, Congressman.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just wasn’t on my turf. I didn’t think that I could right the wrongs of the whole world.”

  Policies of law enforcement are frequently driven by public relations. For an entire generation of cops, agents, and prosecutors, the war on the LCN was the biggest game in town. Daring new techniques were created, such as the Top Echelon Informant Program and the witness protection program. Agents like Rico and Connolly who could rub shoulders with gangsters and cultivate informants became the new stars.

  In this war that spanned nearly half a century, there were many victims.

  At the Bulger trial, the most obvious manifestation of the price that had been paid was the daily gathering of family members of Bulger’s many murder victims. These were people who had lost loved ones, though, in most cases, the people Bulger was alleged to have murdered were fellow criminals, or others who, by choice, had tragically entered into the orbit of Bulger and Flemmi.

  In the morass of duplicity that flowed from the generation of Barboza and his handlers to the generation of Flemmi and Bulger, there was another kind of victim—people who got caught in the maw of corruption, the detritus of dirty deals struck between informants and their handlers. Human waste. People for whom men like Paul Rico would shed no tears and Jerry O’Sullivan would lose no sleep. People like Joe Salvati.

  At the beginning of the congressional hearings in 2001, Salvati’s longtime attorney, Victor J. Garo, spoke in front of the committee. Garo had fought the government for nearly thirty years in an attempt to have Salvati’s case reopened. The biggest stumbling block was the Justice Department, which consistently refused to release documents that might have exonerated Salvati. Said Garo to the committee, “The FBI determined that the life of Joe Salvati was expendable, that the life and future of his wonderful wife, Marie, was expendable, and that the four young lives of their children, at the time ages four, seven, nine, and eleven, were expendable.”

  Garo talked about the legal struggles to get Salvati out of prison, but most emotional of all was when he described his regular meetings with Salvati’s family. He once joked with the youngest son, Anthony, that “when I get your father out of prison, you’re going to say I created a monster, because he’s going to follow you around, he’s going to want to know everything you have done.” The child got real quiet, said the lawyer, then he spoke. “‘No, Victor,’ he said. ‘I have never seen my father wake up in the morning. I have never had breakfast with my father in the morning. I’ve never taken a walk with my father, and I have never gone to a ball game with my father. I sure do want to do that in the future with my dad.’”

  Joe and his wife, Marie, were at the hearings. After Garo spoke, Salvati read a statement in which he attempted to explain some of the ways his conviction had destroyed his life. “There were constant stories in the media that I was a very bad person and one not to be respected.” This, said Salvati, created a tremendous burden that had to be shouldered mostly by his family. “More than once my heart was broken because I was unable to be with my family at very important times.” With his wife seated at his side, Salvati looked at the collection of political representatives stretched out in front of him. “Finally, I would like to say a few things about my wife,” he said. “She is a woman with great strength and character. She has always been there for me in my darkest hours. She brought up our four children and gave them a caring and loving home. . . .” Salvati’s voice cracked, and his eyes welled with tears. “When God made my Marie, they threw the mold away. . . .” Then he began weeping uncontrollably.

  Victor Garo, seated next to Salvati, leaned to the microphone and said, “Mr. Chairman, may I please finish those last two sentences for Mr. Salvati?”

  “Sure,” said Congressman Burton.

  Reading from Salvati’s statement, Garo continued, “When God made Marie, the mold was thrown away. I am one of the luckiest men in the world to have such a devoted and caring wife, my precious Marie.”

  Then Salvati’s wife, Marie, read a statement about what it was like trying to raise a family while the man in their lives was in prison for a crime they knew he didn’t commit. “The government stole thirty years of my life,” she said.

  By the time Marie Salvati finished reading her brief statement, most of the committee members were in tears or hushed in silence.

  AT CAFÉ POMPEII, when I interviewed Joe Salvati, as with many events from his past, his memory of the congressional hearings was remarkably vivid. Something about the deadness of thirty years in prison had attuned his senses, energizing those moments that are outside the norm. While in prison, Salvati held on to the hope that he would one day be released, but he never dreamed that high-ranking representatives of the U.S. government, or anyone else, for that matter, would one day offer an apology.
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  What still rankles all these years later is that in the long fight to get released and clear his name—with Victor Garo as his Job-like point man—Salvati’s biggest stumbling block were the very institutions that had perpetrated the injustice—the FBI and DOJ. Even after favorable rulings determined that these institutions be required by law to turn over documents, they simply stalled or refused to comply with court orders. It seemed as though the bureaucracy was determined to crush Salvati through indifference and institutional malfeasance. And when Victor Garo, the lawyer, did achieve a provisional victory within the legal system, there was someone else—a law enforcement representative or politician who had a vested interest in Salvati’s conviction—who stepped forward and acted on behalf of the conspiracy.

  Salvati remembered when he was paid a visit by Michael Albano, a member of the state parole board.

  Albano’s name had come up at the Bulger trial. On the witness stand, John Morris was forced to admit that he and Connolly, in 1983, had paid a visit to Albano to discuss with him his intention to vote for commutation of Salvati’s sentence, along with the sentences of Louis Greco and Peter Limone.

  “Albano came to me in prison,” Salvati told me at Café Pompeii. “He said those two agents came up there to threaten him.”

  In so doing, Morris and Connolly were serving as inheritors and custodians of the conspiracy to keep buried the justice system’s dirty little secrets.

  Albano told Salvati that even though he had been intimidated by the two FBI agents, he was still going to vote for the commutation of his and Limone’s sentence. Albano had learned enough about Barboza to comprehend that the Deegan murder convictions were rotten.

  Salvati did not want to get his hopes up. His case had gone before the parole board numerous times over the years and always seemed to get mysteriously derailed. But this time, they had the votes. The state parole board voted in favor of release. Then it went to the Governor’s Council, which voted nine to zero for commutation. Salvati was close; he was even transferred to a “prerelease facility” in expectation of his commutation. All that remained was a final decision from Governor William Weld.

  Weld was a former federal prosecutor, a product of the same system that had conspired to frame Salvati. He had long been a fellow traveler of the Bulger conspiracy. At the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Southie, Weld had shown fealty to Senator Bulger. As state attorney general, he had backed up the decision of Jeremiah O’Sullivan to not grant hoodlum Brian Halloran refuge in the federal witness protection program. Halloran and Michael Donahue were murdered by Whitey Bulger within days of Weld’s decision. Even so, the odds in favor of Salvati’s commutation were strong.

  On May 17, 1993, Governor Weld announced that he declined to commute the sentence of Salvati, Greco, and Limone. In the case of Salvati, the governor cited “Mr. Salvati’s long criminal record.”

  Salvati’s “long” criminal record consisted of a single conviction for stealing a tool from a construction site in 1955.

  It had been a crushing defeat, but four years later, in 1997, the governor reversed his decision. I asked Salvati how that came about.

  “We got to Weld through Moakley,” said Salvati.

  I was startled. Congressman Joe Moakley? The beloved figure after whom the federal Moakley Courthouse was named?

  “What happened was, my wife’s aunt was sick and dying in the hospital. And in the bed next to her was Joe Moakley’s wife. My wife used to go up there to the hospital every night. Moakley couldn’t go often because he was in Washington. So my wife used to sit with her, keep her company. And she told her my story. Moakley’s wife said, ‘Make sure your husband’s lawyer talks to my husband, the congressman.’

  “Sure enough, one day Moakley comes in the hospital room and saw Marie sitting there. After being introduced, she told Moakley the story. He couldn’t get over it. He said, ‘You come by my office tomorrow.’

  “Marie goes to the office. He has her sitting in the waiting area, but she can hear him say, ‘Get me Governor Weld on the phone.’ She hears him talking. He says to Weld, ‘I want this guy home by Christmas.’”

  Salvati’s long nightmare was over, but there were still a few battles to wage. One of those battles was a lawsuit filed in 2003 by Salvati, Limone, and the families of the other two men who had been falsely incarcerated. The suit claimed that the FBI and the DOJ were guilty of “malicious prosecution, civil conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent selection, supervision and retention.” The family members also cited “loss of consortium” for having lost their loved ones to prison for three decades. The suit would occasionally be mentioned during the Bulger trial as “the Limone case” or “the Limone matter.”

  The case was brought before Judge Nancy Gertner, who heard testimony at a bench trial that lasted, on and off, for years. Gertner was successful in doing what the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had been unsuccessful in doing; under a U.S. Supreme Court subpoena, she obtained unredacted FBI files relating to the fraudulent Deegan murder convictions and subsequent attempts to keep the truth buried. Gertner’s findings were staggering, some of which she summarized in a July 2007 final ruling on the case. Declared Judge Gertner:

  Government agents suborned perjury, framed four innocent men and conspired to keep them in jail for three decades. . . . The FBI agents handling Barboza and their superiors—all the way up to the FBI Director—knew that Barboza would perjure himself. They knew this because Barboza, a killer many times over, had told them so—directly and indirectly. . . . They coddled him, nurtured him, debriefed him, protected him, and rewarded him—no matter how much he lied. . . . Indeed, they took steps to make certain that Barboza’s false story would withstand cross-examination, and even be corroborated by other witnesses. . . . The FBI agents were given raises and promotions precisely for their extraordinary role in procuring the Deegan convictions. . . . The pieties the FBI offered to justify their actions are the usual ones: The benefits outweigh the costs. . . . Now is the time to say and say without equivocation: This “cost”—to the liberty of four men, to our system of justice—is not remotely acceptable. No man’s liberty is dispensable. No human being may be traded for another. Our system cherishes each individual. We have fought wars over this principle. We are still fighting those wars.

  Judge Gertner awarded the families of those affected a total of $101 million.

  “It was a good chunk of money, sure,” said Joe Salvati. His family’s portion of the award was approximately $30 million. “We were able to take care of the kids, put some money away. But if somebody said, ‘I’ll give you thirty million, will you do thirty years?’ you’d have to be an imbecile to say yes.”

  Mostly, Salvati has let go of the anger—“You can’t hold on to it forever; it eats you up”—but there are many things about the experience that still bother him.

  With the Bulger trial ongoing, Joe noticed that many of the names involved in his case—Rico and Condon and Harrington—had emerged as a Greek chorus. It is this fact that rankles Salvati most of all, that the people who cultivated and used Barboza were able to pass their skills along to those who used Whitey Bulger, and that the efforts to hide the true nature of that arrangement became not only a source of corruption but an operating mandate within the system.

  “It is a shame,” said Salvati. “But I’m not surprised by any of it.”

  The interview was over. Salvati and I exited Café Pompeii and headed out into the early evening sunlight. We shook hands and said our goodbyes. As part of his usual routine, Joe would likely go next door to Stanza dei Sigari to smoke a cigar, or farther down the block to Caffé Vittoria for an aperitif, or maybe do both.

  Salvati strolled along the sidewalk, his face to the sky.

  That afternoon on Hanover Street, the ghosts of the past were alive and well.

  11

  IRISH DAY OF THE DEAD

  IN THE HIERARCHY of witnesses at the Bul
ger trial, where killers and those who had survived the killers garnered the most attention, few could have known that among the most enlightening would be a forensic anthropologist. In retrospect, it should have been obvious: the Bulger trial had the trappings of an excavation, an immersion deep into the molten core of various horrific acts, with gruesome details buried under layers of terror and deception. Clearly, an anthropologist would be required to get at the root of the matter.

  From the witness stand, Ann Marie Mires spoke with authority, though her voice was soothing and her manner solicitous of the uninitiated. As an expert in the field of skeletal biology and the excavation and recovery of skeletonized remains, she seemed accustomed to breaking things down, explaining the most elemental facts of human decomposition.

  Already the Bulger trial had led the jury and spectators through a litany of ways to die at the hands of another human being. Mires would now take us into the world of the postmortem. The forensic anthropologist was sworn in and took the stand to testify about “the diggings.”

  Thirteen years earlier, beginning in 2000, the city of Boston had been riveted by news of a series of excavations—three, to be exact—in which a total of six bodies were unearthed. The diggings had been initiated courtesy of Kevin Weeks, who had begun cooperating with Wyshak and Kelly. During his debriefings, Weeks for the first time told investigators about the Haunty and how the bodies that had originally been buried there were moved to another site. He told them about other murders and burials, some of which he had participated in and others he heard about over the years.

  Over a nine-month period, Weeks led a team of state police, prosecutors, and anthropologists on an expedition into the heart of the city’s recent gangland history.