With a note of disdain in his voice, Hafer further addressed the point in the motion about Bulger being exhausted, saying that, as an argument for a continuance, “That’s not good enough, either. The victims in this case have been waiting long enough for justice. Mr. Bulger had sixteen years to relax in California. Mr. Carney and Mr. Brennan have had the discovery in this case for years, and in our view, there’s absolutely no basis to adjourn the trial for any time at all.”
Judge Casper asked Hafer to run through, in order, the upcoming witnesses for the remainder of the week. He did so: John Druggan, a forensic chemist from the crime lab for the state police; Elaine Barrett, Bucky Barrett’s wife; FBI agent Thomas Daly; Paul Moore, a South Boston drug dealer; Gerald Montanari, another FBI agent; Barry Wong, an unwitting accomplice to an extortion; Steve Davis; and Patricia Donahue.
Judge Casper tried to appear as though she were weighing the significance of the witnesses to judge how much time the defense would need to prepare for cross-examination, but it was clear from her demeanor and tone of voice that she had made up her mind.
Carney made one last effort. He stood to speak. There was exasperation in his voice, and in his argument astonishment that the judge would not allow the defense two measly days to be better prepared to defend their client.
Said the judge, “I’m going to cut you off there. . . . Mr. Carney, I appreciate the tone that you took in the motion in putting it forward, in laying it out without hyperbole, which I always appreciate. . . . I also take, as I take every motion that’s filed before me, that you filed this in good faith and that your team has been working around the clock, matched only, perhaps, by the government team working around the clock to push this forward. So I’m not inclined to suspend the trial.”
If body language is an indicator of state of mind, it was as if the defense table had taken a collective kick in the testicles. To them, the trial had become one big steamroller.
AT ITS MOST vast and far-reaching, the conspiracy to utilize Bulger and Flemmi as a means to take down the Mafia in Boston was, for the FBI and others in the criminal justice system, a theoretical exercise. Men and women who had gone to college, earned degrees, and pursued reputable lives of accomplishment in the field of criminal justice had set about to undermine and bring down a criminal underworld that they had never, nor would they ever, experience firsthand. It was this fact that led J. Edgar Hoover to make such a strong commitment to the FBI’s informant program. He may have believed, instinctively, that it was the only way the Mafia could be brought down.
It was a solid strategy—in theory. Using snitches or informants from inside an organization to undermine that organization was not exactly new. John Martorano made reference to it during his testimony: Judas may have been the first Top Echelon Informant, and had he perpetrated his betrayal many millennia later, under the auspices of Hoover, he might have been relocated to Oregon or Utah, somewhere far away from the King of the Jews.
Throughout the Bulger trial, the prosecution often underscored the narrative that Whitey and Flemmi had been recruited by the FBI to help build cases against the Mafia. This was the story line that had been used in previous Bulger-related trials, and also the theory fed by prosecutorial sources to the media, where it was further expounded upon in books, documentaries, and feature films.
But the belief that Bulger and Flemmi’s value to the government was based solely on their ability to make cases against the Mafia does not tell the full story. It does not explain why Special Agents Morris and Connolly would take it upon themselves to threaten a member of the Massachusetts State Parole Board presiding over a case that was initiated before either of them was even in the FBI, much less stationed in Boston. That mission had nothing to do with Bulger and Flemmi. They were acting as inheritors of the system’s dirty little secrets, proprietors of a corrupt history. It was their duty to help keep it buried.
That history had been born out of a partnership between criminals—Barboza, Jimmy Flemmi, and many others less exalted—and the system. It was a central flaw of the Top Echelon Informant Program that had existed from the beginning, and if it had ever been exposed, it would have ended the program and possibly even Hoover’s career.
The partnership that the system forged with Steve Flemmi and later Whitey Bulger was part and parcel of the same arrangement. By becoming informants, they also had become proprietors of this history. They knew the system’s dirty little secrets. And by forming an alliance with the likes of Connolly and Morris, they were entering into a pact part of which involved helping to keep this dirty history hidden forever.
And this is where they derived their power: Flemmi and Bulger knew that by entering into this pact with the system, the system was now beholden to them. They could do whatever they wanted, not only financial crimes like loan-sharking, drugs, extortion, and robberies, but murder, any kind of murder they wanted, as long as they made the bodies disappear, so that there would be no investigation.
The murders of Debbie Davis and Deborah Hussey were a manifestation of this arrangement: killings that had nothing to do with business and everything to do with showing that they could kill virtually whomever they wanted, anytime, for any reason, and they would never be prosecuted for it.
That is partly why the burials of the bodies had become a necessity. Not only were they an effort to inter evidence belowground and out of sight; they also became a ritualistic way for Bulger to illustrate his omnipotence.
Ann Marie Mires, with her skills as an anthropologist and her pleasant demeanor, had no awareness of the motives behind the burials that she described. Part of what made her descriptions in court so chilling was the matter-of-fact way she detailed the end result of murders that had been so intimate and brutal.
The last excavation took place two weeks after the exhumation at Tenean Beach. It was centered on a location two miles to the south, in Quincy.
Approximately one hundred yards from Commander Shea Boulevard, alongside the Neponset River, a field of marshland lay at the foot of the elevated train tracks of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Digging here was a challenge. Lumpy marshland covered an area the size of two or three football fields, and there were no markers, such as trees or large rock formations or prominent outgrowths, to help identify the exact locations of the graves. The digging crew knew that out there somewhere were the remains of two people, Tommy King and Debra Davis, whose unceremonious burials had taken place six years apart, in 1975 and in 1981.
In this instance, the excavation team brought in a geophysicist, whose “ground-penetrating radar” made it possible to examine a large area in search of “any pits and anomalies underneath the ground” before any digging had even begun.
Just as before, Mires narrated a video of the excavation, and as with the diggings at Tenean Beach, the conditions were difficult. Here high tide actually covered the entire marshland, meaning that the graves were completely submerged. It also gave a sense of urgency to the dig, since the archeologists would be forced to postpone their expedition once the tide rolled in.
A week of diggings went by, and they uncovered nothing. Pit after pit was dug up, the soil spilled out and sifted through, with nary a bone or shred of clothing. A sense of frustration set in. Then they got lucky and uncovered some skull fragments. They also uncovered a moldy, deteriorated bulletproof vest.
For the jurors, this was telling. They had heard, via the testimony of John Martorano, that Tommy King put on a bulletproof vest the night he was murdered. King believed that he, Bulger, Flemmi, and Martorano were going to kill a sad sack hoodlum named Suitcase Fidler, not realizing that his executioner was, in fact, Martorano, sitting behind him in the car. A bullet to the back of the cranium ended Tommy King’s life.
At the site, the skull fragments and other remains, mixed with dirt and debris (the marshland had also been used as landfill), were dumped out on a tarp. Mires highlighted a section of the video that showed her carefully sifting through the dirt. “Her
e, you can see elements of the spine. Here, I’m in the pelvic area, and this is pelvic bone I’m exposing, or the hipbone. . . . This is the humerus or the upper arm bone. . . . And this is a remnant of a blue suit jacket and a vest. It was a three-piece suit.”
Though the Mullen gang had largely been considered a group of ruffians, Tommy King wore a three-piece suit to his execution. Not only that, he wore what was, perhaps, the premier fashion statement of the gang. “If you look here,” said Mires, “you’ll see what I later determined to be driving gloves. They were the kind of gloves that only goes up to your fingers and then the fingers are exposed. But I want to draw your attention to—this is a claddagh ring. So the gloves were on the hands, and there’s a claddagh ring here on the finger bones of the individual.”
Said prosecutor Wyshak, “Showing you what’s been marked five-six-two for identification, I ask you if you recognize what that is.”
Once again, Mires held up a claddagh ring, the Irish symbol of friendship and eternal love worn by many South Boston gangsters.
It would be another month, in October, before they found the remains of Debra Davis. Her grave site was found nearer the river, in an area that was often underwater. The skeleton was found encased in a plastic body bag that had deteriorated. The body had been trussed up and tied with rope, and was tightly compacted in a fetal position. As with the other shoreline burials, some aspects of the remains had been preserved by the salt water, which served as a kind of brine. With Mires narrating, the prosecution showed a ghastly photo of the remains, where hair and some scalp tissue had been preserved though the body had been interred in its marshy grave for nearly twenty years.
As with the other remains, the bones were secured and brought to a lab for postmortem analysis. DNA tests were conducted to identify that it was, in fact, the remains of Debra Davis. Then the bones were laid out on a stainless steel table, in what had become a ritual of the Boston diggings. “Because [the Davis remains were found] in a very tight pit,” said Mires, “we were able to recover almost all the material.” She ran through the visual inventory of bones, a complete skeletal catalog of the human form.
Debbie Davis had been strangled to death, so there were no bullet holes to the skull or traumatic damage to the bones to help determine the cause of death.
Earlier, when Deborah Hussey’s remains were found, Mires confronted a similar situation. Hussey had also been strangled to death, which was a mode of death undetectable through skeletal examination. In both cases, Mires determined that the cause of death was “homicidal violence, etiology unknown.”
Wyshak asked the witness to explain what that meant.
“Cause of death is really looking at the body and trying to find that mechanism that stopped life. In skeletal remains of women that I’ve examined, there will not be any marks of any kind on the skeleton indicating what exactly was the mechanism that stopped life. So there’s a category that we engage in or I can use, it’s called homicidal violence, etiology unknown or cause unknown. It’s a designation that allows us to say, ‘I believe this person died of homicidal violence.’ Exactly what stopped life, I do not know.”
“Well,” said Wyshak, “in this case what are the indicators of homicidal violence?”
“Actually, they come more from the fact that the body was buried . . . the act of or trying to disguise the location of the burial often suggests homicidal violence.”
Wyshak was not satisfied; he wanted Mires to crystallize for him how the circumstances of these people’s interment were the clearest indication of how they had died. “It is unusual in this day and age to find individuals who die of natural causes buried in unmarked graves?”
“Yes,” said Mires. “It’s unusual.”
“It is unusual in this day and age to find people who die of natural causes buried in an unmarked grave with two other individuals?”
“Yes. It’s unnatural.”
The forensic anthropologist finished her direct testimony, and there were no questions from the defense. She was dismissed without cross-examination.
A FEW DAYS after Mires’s testimony, I was standing at Tenean Beach, at the exact location where the remains of Paul McGonagle had been exhumed. I was standing there with someone who was alleged to have helped put McGonagle’s body in the ground: Pat Nee.
It was a crystal-clear day. From the beach, you could see all the way to downtown Boston, an impressive skyline that hardly existed back in 1975, when McGonagle was buried.
The setting was more of a cove than a beach, hidden from the main highway and located alongside a marina. The most dominant landmark was a large gas tank from Boston Gas, which partially blocks the downtown view, depending on where you are standing on the beach. There is also a large children’s play area that was not in existence back in 1975.
Nee did not really want to be there. In previous interviews, he had told me that he would show me the sites of the burials, which had previously been identified in the media. But Nee kept putting it off. As with many things relating to Whitey, and especially anything to do with the demise of the Mullen gang, it was not a pleasant memory for Nee.
The death of Paulie McGonagle had been the beginning of the descent. McGonagle was one of the original Mullen gang members who had been resistant to an alliance with the Winter Hill Mob, which was one of the reasons that he was murdered by Bulger. As a newly established partner of Bulger, Nee, it was alleged in trial testimony, had been enlisted to help dispose of the body.
All these years later, it is a topic of discussion that still bothers Nee. As we strolled over to the section of beach where McGonagle was buried, which I had recently seen depicted in video footage at the trial, Nee’s discomfort was evident. He fidgeted, looked around nervously, and generally adopted the demeanor of how I imagine a person might have felt were they enlisted to dig up sand and soil, creating a small pit in which they dumped the body of a former friend and gang member.
“I was able to justify [the death of Paulie McGonagle] in my head,” said Nee, “because Paulie getting killed was all about business. We were making good money at the time with bookmaking and gambling. Bulger had a conflict with the McGonagles that went back years. Now that we were in business with Whitey, his problems became our problems, in a way.”
According to courtroom accounts, present that night were Bulger, Nee, and Tommy King.
Among other things, one prominent detail of the McGonagle burial was the fact that, if Nee were involved, the man standing next to him that night digging the grave—Tommy King—would be the next to go.
I said to Pat, “Somebody digging the grave of a Bulger victim, standing alongside a fellow digger who wold himself soon become a Bulger victim, wouldn’t that tell you something?”
Nee thought about it and said, “Yes. It might even make that person feel that they, potentially, were next in line.”
As we got in Pat’s car and headed toward the next burial site, Nee pointed out locations off Morrissey Boulevard where key Bulger-related killings took place. “Right there,” said Pat. “That’s where Eddie Connors was shot. There used to be a phone booth there. He was in the booth when they drove up on him.” A few miles down the road, Nee continued, “This is where they shot Billy O’Brien. They drove up on his car from behind and opened fire.”
I had heard the details of these murders at the trial, and seeing the locations now was a weird juxtaposition, but also a historical revelation, sort of like going on a South Boston version of the city’s best-known tourist expedition—the Freedom Trail.
Before we pulled into the burial site off Commander Shea Boulevard, where the remains of King and Debbie Davis were found, Nee showed me Bulger’s condominium building, where he had lived with girlfriend Catherine Greig. From the outside, it was a nondescript redbrick building with many units. Nee had been inside the condo on a few occasions. “It was a nice place,” he said. “A duplex. With a beautiful view of the harbor. Whitey used to stand at the window with binoculars. He cou
ld see the burial sites from there. He used to say, ‘Tides coming in. Let’s have a drink on Paulie.’” Nee shook his head at the memory. “Sick fuck. That was the kind of humor he had.”
We parked Nee’s car in a lot, crossed the street, and walked along a path that took us into a dense grove. Right away, I recognized the location from the testimony of Mires: the sweeping marshland leading out toward the mouth of the river, the elevated MBTA tracks running behind us.
“It looked completely different back then,” said Nee. The path where we were standing was surrounded by a jungle of vines and overgrowth. “None of this was here. Far as I can tell, where we’re standing right now is exactly where Tommy King was buried.”
Even though Pat neither confirms nor denies any role in the burial, he does admit that the murder of King—committed without his foreknowledge by Bulger, Flemmi and John Martorano—had been another turning point. The realization by Nee that he might be next on the hit list loomed on the horizon like a bad case of delirium tremens.
It was around this time that a legendary IRA operative named Joe Cahill, from Belfast, reached out to the South Boston criminal underworld. Cahill was looking for money and guns in the IRA’s clandestine struggle against British occupation of the six counties of Northern Ireland. At the Triple O’s Lounge, Cahill met with Bulger, Nee, and a handful of others who were active in NORIAD, or Northern Irish Aid, a U.S. organization that was sympathetic to the IRA. The war in Northern Ireland had intensified in the late 1970s and would eventually culminate in the hunger strike of 1981, when Bobby Sands and ten other Irish republican prisoners in Long Kesh prison starved themselves to death as an act of protest against the authoritarian leadership of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Given that he had been born in the old country, Pat was drawn to “the struggle.” Some Irish Americans saw the IRA as nothing more than a criminal organization, with a history of thuggery that included the punishment of “touts” or informants via violent means, including death. As someone who had been around violence as a marine, a Vietnam veteran, and a gangster, Nee had no problems with that side of “the Movement.” And, whether you agreed with him or not, his political motivations were sincere. He viewed it as his duty to do what he could on behalf of the fight for Irish freedom. And along with all of that, he saw the IRA gunrunning operation as a way to distance himself from Bulger.
Where the Bodies Were Buried Page 36
