Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  “Did Mr. Bulger make any demands of you at this time?” asked prosecutor Zach Hafer.

  “Yes,” said Lindholm, in a matter-of-fact manner. “He was asking me a very specific line of questioning, and initially I thought that he might be with law enforcement. He was asking me questions that a police officer might ask. I was also concerned that the building might be bugged, so I was not forthcoming with the information or answers that he was trying to elicit from me. . . . So the conversation wasn’t going too well. He demanded a million dollars from me. . . . One of the persons there fired a gun off by my head. There was a silencer on it, and the chamber was open. Five bullets were dropped on the table, along with one spent casing. A bullet was put in the chamber and spun and pointed at my head, and the trigger was pulled.”

  “The trigger was pulled like Russian roulette?”

  “Right . . . And uh, you know, we’d been dealing with a lot of Mexicans and a lot of Colombians over the years. I knew if he killed me, he wasn’t going to get any money. And I wasn’t going to let down my associates. I wasn’t going to drop the ball on the five-yard line. I wasn’t going to give him a million dollars. So I bluffed him in negotiations down to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Mr. Lindholm, the individual that initially demanded a million dollars from you and then later agreed to take two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and was in the Marconi Club as someone fired a gun by your head, do you see him in the courtroom today?”

  “I do.”

  “Could you point him out and identify an article of clothing that he’s wearing, please?”

  “He’s the gentleman sitting there in the blue shirt.”

  Perhaps in recognition of the incongruous use of the word gentleman, Bulger glanced over at Lindholm, which is more than he did during most courtroom identifications.

  It took Lindholm a while to get out of the Marconi Club that afternoon in 1983. Bulger continued to interrogate him about various aspects of his business. “I determined that he didn’t know much about me. He knew something about me, but he didn’t know much. Certainly, Yerardi and everybody else did not know the scope of what we were doing on the East Coast, from Philadelphia to New York and Boston. So I tried to downplay the level of marijuana business that we were doing. He seemed satisfied when I offered to pay two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  At all times during his testimony, Lindholm remained relaxed, even cavalier, as he described Bulger’s extortion tactics. The picture he painted seemed a tad self-serving, with the younger version of himself always in control, never frightened or panicked.

  As the negotiation came to an end, said the witness, “[Bulger] shook my hand, told me that I handled myself well and some other people didn’t handle themselves well. . . . He told me that if I mentioned the specifics of our discussion to anyone that he would kill Yerardi and Martorano. Well, I clearly knew that wasn’t true. So when they drove me back to my car, [Yerardi and Martorano] asked me if everything was okay. I said everything was all right; I had an obligation I had to take care of, and I’d be talking to them in the near future.”

  Hafer paused for dramatic effect. It was late in the day, and he had held off with a particular question that, if properly posed, might supply the kind of zinger that prosecutors dream of using to end a day of dramatic testimony. “Did Mr. Bulger say anything to you at that meeting, Mr. Lindholm, about what would happen if he found out you sold marijuana on your own without informing him?”

  “Yeah,” answered the witness. “He’d cut my head off.”

  Judge Casper knew a closing line when she heard one. Without missing a beat, she asked, “Mr. Hafer, given the time, is this a good place to stop?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Before Casper was finished with her standard cautionary instruction to the jury about not discussing the case, people flooded out of the media room, where it was prohibited to use cell phones. They wanted an update on the Stippo Rakes death mystery. The courthouse was filled with media, so it was a good place to garner the latest details.

  Not much new had been revealed since the body was found that morning, but speculation had moved on from suicide to the likelihood that Rakes had indeed died as a result of foul play. The body was found fully clothed but with no cell phone and no wallet. No official cause of death had yet been announced, but the scuttlebutt among reporters—many of whom had inside sources in the state police and district attorney’s office—was that Rakes had been poisoned.

  By later that evening, the Rakes story had gone national. Throughout the night, I received emails and texts from friends and associates outside Boston who had heard about the suspected murder on Twitter, CNN, or the Internet. An obvious conclusion was that if Rakes had been murdered, it must have something to do with the trial. It was too big a coincidence that he wound up dead on the very day that he had been scheduled to testify. Though most everyone knew that Whitey Bulger had long since been stripped of his impregnability and no longer had a gang or contacts in the underworld, the idea that the once-powerful mob boss had somehow found a way to reach into his old bag of tricks was an irresistible angle (the headline in the Boston Herald that day was DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES).

  The notion that Bulger had Rakes whacked was plausible, but for anyone close to the case it seemed unlikely. There was no reason for Bulger to kill Rakes. It made no sense.

  The following morning, once again the volume of media people and spectators arriving for the trial was higher than usual. Stephen Flemmi would definitely be taking the stand sometime later that afternoon, and the Rakes story was unfolding by the minute. The Bulger trial was the place to be.

  As I grabbed my morning coffee and settled in for the day, I was approached in the hallway outside the media room by a local reporter I knew. “Hey,” said the female journalist, excitedly, “did you hear the latest?”

  “What?” I asked, ready for a bombshell.

  “Pat Nee is being investigated for the murder of Stephen Rakes. He left a threatening note in the mailbox at Rakes’s house the day before the body was found.”

  The reporter worked for a prominent news website; she had been covering the trial and had filed a number of stories since the trial began.

  “Are you working the story?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Me and others. It’s ready to go. Only thing holding it back right now is the legal department.”

  A couple of questions raced through my head, the first being the possibility, or plausibility, that Pat Nee killed Stippo Rakes. That seemed unlikely, bordering on absurd. Not that Pat Nee wasn’t capable, if he had a motive and felt that such an act was necessary. I knew that decades ago Pat sought to kill the person he believed had killed his brother Peter, shot him and left him for dead. I knew that Pat had wanted to kill Whitey Bulger, and probably still would if he could do it and get away with it. Obviously, Nee was capable of killing—at least the Pat Nee of twenty-five years ago, who was involved in gangster activity that reportedly included the burial of bodies.

  But Nee had no beef with Stippo Rakes. It made no sense that he would be involved. Nee had been out of the killing business for a long time. He had written a book about his criminal career, was involved in his Discovery Channel reality show, and was now a grandfather who doted over his grandkids and gave talks to young males about not getting involved in the criminal life.

  The second question that crossed my mind: why is this person telling me this? Journalists are not in the habit of sharing hot tips with other journalists. The idea that a reporter would give away their story before it had been published or broadcast was suspicious. Clearly, this tidbit was being thrown my way in the expectation I would look into it, thus helping to spread the rumor that Pat Nee had murdered Rakes.

  As far as I could tell, this reporter had no idea that I knew Pat Nee, much less that Nee was a key source of mine whom I spoke with frequently about different aspects of the Bulger story. She had leaked this story to me figuring I was
a writer from outside Boston who might not know the lay of the land and would jump on what appeared to be inside information on the hottest story in town.

  I asked the reporter some questions about the source or sources of her information. She mentioned something about cops and family members, but her answers were vague, leaving me with the conclusion that not only was the story fraudulent, but that the reporter was deliberately feeding me disinformation. The question remained: why was she giving me this information, and who was behind it?

  As the day’s proceedings got under way, my head was swimming.

  Much of the day was spent with Lindholm finishing his testimony. There was cross-examination and re-direct and re-cross. The proceedings were scheduled to end that day at 1 P.M. At around 12:45, the moment everyone had been waiting for arrived: Steve Flemmi was brought into the courtroom.

  In his khaki pants and light green jacket, Flemmi looked like a union delegate who had just come from a work site, or a plumber, which was ironic; other than his duties as a full-time hoodlum, he’d never worked an honest day in his adult life.

  Among the media, everyone had his or her own expectations about the testimony of Steve Flemmi. For the local Boston press, it was a momentous occasion, the first face-to-face showdown between two gangsters who had, over the course of a quarter century, conspired together to eliminate all underworld competition in the city and take over the criminal rackets. As with the testimony of Kevin Weeks, Flemmi would for the first time be making his accusations about “the Bulger years” with Whitey right there in the room.

  The personal aspect of the testimony—the fact that Flemmi and Bulger were facing each other for the first time in a courtroom—was less significant to me than the fact that here was an opportunity to finally put all the pieces together. Steve Flemmi had been an FBI informant since the mid-1960s. He had served as an informant under Paul Rico and Dennis Condon during the Boston gang wars. He was the person who, at the behest of those two men, convinced Joe Barboza to become a cooperating witness. He also was the person who, along with Frank Salemme, planted a bomb in the car of John Fitzgerald, Barboza’s lawyer, blowing off Fitzgerald’s leg. He had committed that crime on behalf of the Mafia, as ordered by Jerry Angiulo. Flemmi had also been at the center of interactions between Bulger, Connolly, Morris, and the FBI.

  Steve Flemmi was the Zelig of the Boston underworld. He played all sides of a complex criminal universe, including the side of law enforcement. The fact that, in the end, he betrayed everybody he ever did business with was beside the point. More than anyone else, including Jim Bulger, Flemmi was in a position to open Pandora’s box and let the demons fly.

  From the moment Flemmi took the stand, I sensed a problem. Partly, it was his demeanor. At seventy-nine years old, Flemmi was somewhat doddering, with limited hearing in one ear. If there were an old folks’ home for once-feared and now-diminished gangsters, he would be the sergeant at arms. But it wasn’t so much the physical frailties that didn’t bode well as it was an issue of intellectual acumen.

  There are many kinds of people operating in the criminal underworld. Some, like Bulger, are known for their self-discipline. Others are good with money. Still others are outright sociopaths and psychopaths, valuable because of their facility and enthusiasm for violence. Over the years, I made a mental note that some Boston gangsters I had met, people like Kevin Weeks, Pat Nee, and the Martorano brothers, were seemingly no different than many other working-class people I knew from the city’s neighborhoods. They had been raised in the same general environment as many cops, firemen, and other civil servants. Most had, at some point, dropped out of school, but they were reasonably well-read individuals who had an active intellectual curiosity and seemed to have a sense of the world beyond their own atavistic needs of eating, sleeping, screwing, killing, and shitting.

  Steve Flemmi, on the other hand, seemed to be only a step or two above an outright thug, and that was surprising. I was aware of his criminal history from having burrowed into his government debriefing file, hundreds of investigative DEA-6s from when he first became a cooperating witness and gave detailed personal versions of criminal activity going back forty years. Those facts had been further expounded upon by Flemmi having testified at three previous trials and three civil proceedings. For Flemmi to have had the criminal career he did, I was expecting someone more along the lines of Bulger, or someone like the late Buddy McLean from Somerville, or Howie Winter—criminal figures from the annals of Boston mob lore who had become key players through guile or force of personality.

  But then it occurred to me—these men had all been leaders. Steve Flemmi was a follower. It could be argued that he was a master follower who had functioned and even excelled from within many different camps, and that took skill. On the streets, Flemmi had certainly been a survivor, and he had made money for himself and his partners. As a gangster, he had a long and fruitful career. But after seeing and hearing Flemmi on the stand, after observing the vacuous gaze, the slowness of his ability to mentally process information, the stuttering speech, my initial impression was that his long, highly profitable run as a gangster was an act of prestidigitation worthy of Harry Houdini.

  Except, of course, that Harry Houdini escaped, and Flemmi was now in captivity. Once he was arrested in December 1994, his lack of mental capacity became a huge liability. Incredibly, in all his time as a criminal, he had never even been through a trial, much less been convicted of anything. He had never faced an extended period in jail. When Flemmi first went public with the astounding revelation that both he and Bulger were FBI informants and that they had been promised immunity from prosecution by the FBI, he believed he had the upper hand. But he and his attorney were no match for Wyshak and Kelly, who ultimately defeated Flemmi and crushed his will.

  And so now, here he was, working for those very same prosecutors, a none-too-bright former gangster with many stories to tell.

  Fred Wyshak stood at the lectern and led the witness through a series of questions that established his personal history: born and raised in Boston; two siblings, the infamous Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi, and Michael Flemmi, former Boston cop convicted on criminal charges; two tours of duty as a paratrooper in Korea. The prosecutor had Flemmi point out the defendant and asked, “How long have you known Mr. Bulger?”

  “Well, I met him once on one occasion in 1969, and I met him again in ’74, in the middle of ’74 when I came back off the lam. I met him up in the Winter Hill section of Somerville.”

  “Okay, and when was the last time you saw him?”

  “I saw him about a week prior to Christmas in 1994.”

  “And did you know him from between 1974 and 1994?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the nature of your relationship during that twenty-year period?”

  “Strictly criminal,” said the witness—emphatically—as if he were concerned that someone might misinterpret the nature of their union.

  Like John Martorano before him, Flemmi came to the stand having admitted to multiple murders, in his case ten. As part of his plea deal with the government, Flemmi was allowed to plead guilty to the murders he had committed along with Jim Bulger and would not be prosecuted for any others. Wyshak established that, unlike Martorano and Weeks, who had done time and were out on the street, Flemmi was a ward of the state. From deep within the prison system, where he was held in a special witness protection unit, he was every few years dusted off, prepped like a contestant on a television quiz show, and brought into court to testify at a Bulger-related legal proceeding. This time his mission was to seek and destroy the man himself.

  Flemmi’s time on the stand was a teaser: after fifteen minutes the trial was adjourned for the day. It was just enough of an introduction to guarantee that everyone would be back again the following morning for the big show.

  I MADE ARRANGEMENTS to meet Pat Nee that night, without saying anything about the story I’d heard regarding his being investigated for the murder
of Stippo Rakes. I waited until he picked me up in his Jeep on Hanover Street, and then I said, “Let’s drive around a bit. There’s something I heard at the courthouse today that we should talk about.” As we drove around the narrow, quaint confines of the North End, past the former Angiulo brothers’ headquarters at 98 Prince Street, I told Pat what I had heard from the journalist that day.

  “Are you joking?” he said. “Why the hell would I want to kill Stippo Rakes?”

  Nee was as curious as anybody about who might have killed Rakes. But now his curiosity was consumed by the question of who might be trying to rope him into the picture. One possible culprit was Bulger. “Could he be pulling the strings on this?” Nee said, more of a rhetorical question than a serious line of inquiry. We both doubted that Whitey had that kind of sway anymore; his power to control events in Boston had ended long ago when he went on the lam.

  “Let me ask around a bit,” said Nee, “see what I can find out.” My guess was that Pat still had friends or contacts in law enforcement. If investigators were looking into anyone specific for the Rakes murder, no doubt that information would be spreading on the city’s law enforcement grapevine.

  “I’ve got another potential problem that has come up,” said Nee.

  “What’s that?” I asked, wondering what could be worse, or equal, to being investigated for the most notorious murder in town.

  “I was contacted the other day by some people here in the North End,” he said. I knew what that meant: the Italians, that is, whatever was left of the Mafia in the neighborhood. “Kevin’s testimony opened some old wounds. They’re unhappy with certain things that came out at the trial. They want to have a meeting and talk about it.”

  “They’re unhappy about what, exactly?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Nee. “That’s what they want to talk about, I guess.”