Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  It seemed unusual to me that there was still any kind of a mafia faction remaining in the city, but I had been informed otherwise by a cross section of Bostonians. It was thought of as common knowledge that the boss of the neighborhood was Vincent “Vinny” Ferrara. Now sixty-three years old, Ferrara had been released from prison in 2005, after serving sixteen years on a racketeering conviction. Ferrara’s twenty-two-year sentence had been reduced by Judge Mark Wolf when it was revealed that Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Auerhahn withheld evidence during Ferrara’s plea negotiations. Ferrara had pleaded guilty to a second-degree murder charge—on a murder he didn’t commit—believing that if he went to trial and was convicted he would spend the rest of his life in prison. What he didn’t know was that the primary witness against him had tried to recant his accusations but was talked out of it by the assistant U.S. attorney.

  In court, Judge Wolf excoriated the U.S. attorney’s office and released Ferrara six years early.

  Though he was under “supervised release” for three years and had agreed in court to a stipulation that he would not return to his life of crime, there were some who believed that Ferrara, over the last decade or so, had resumed his role as a boss of the North End.1

  I had been wondering how remnants of the Mafia in town might react to the Bulger trial, or, for that matter, to Bulger in general. The attorney Tony Cardinale, for one, had told me on numerous occasions that his clients didn’t think much of Bulger and Flemmi, referring to them as lowlifes and scumbags. The fact that the former Winter Hill mobsters had used the FBI to take down the Angiulos and others put Bulger and Flemmi—and FBI agent John Connolly—in a special category as reviled figures among mafia aficionados in Boston.

  Over the years, in interviews with Nee and others in the Southie gang world, I asked if there were concerns about retribution. But by then many former Southie gangsters were being used to testify in various Bulger-related prosecutions. It didn’t make much sense for the Mafia to attempt to kill, say, Weeks or Flemmi, since they were the very people who were being used to take down Connolly and Bulger.

  There had been concerns, Nee told me, that the Mafia might try to kill Billy Bulger as a way to get revenge against Whitey. Or maybe they would go after one of Billy Bulger’s sons, one of whom was a visible figure in city government. It was the kind of act that the Mafia in its heyday might have considered, but by the early decades of the twenty-first century, the Mafia didn’t have the wherewithal to pull off such a high-profile hit, which would bring down a level of heat and attention that would eliminate whatever little rackets were left for them to muster a living from.

  A more realistic possibility, thought Nee, might be that “the Italians” would attempt to harm Kevin Weeks. Now that Weeks had completed testifying against Whitey, he was vulnerable. “If they want to do anything to Kevin,” said Nee, “I won’t go along with that.”

  We drove around and talked some more. Up until then, the Bulger trial seemed to exist mostly as an artifact of history, with events from long ago, and players whose criminal reputations had faded like the sun that was now setting over the North End, casting a golden hue. The murder of Stephen Rakes seemed to change all that. The dark uncertainties surrounding his death, the speculation over who or what was behind the circumstances of this possible homicide, seemed to pull the proceedings into the orbit of the Bulger era from long ago.

  For Pat Nee, this was not a good thing. I could see his mind was working. He was back in Whitey’s world trying to figure out what the hell was going on, who was pulling the strings, and whether or not he needed to watch his back.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Steve Flemmi was back on the stand, wearing the same clothes as the day before. He settled in for the long haul.

  Flemmi would be on the stand for the better part of the next five days. His testimony lasted so long that twice it would be interrupted to bring in short-term witnesses who had been flown in from elsewhere in the country. They had been scheduled to testify on a specified date, and their travel plans needed to be accommodated. Flemmi, on the other hand, was not going anywhere.

  The area of testimony that seemed to garner the most intense focus from trial observers was Flemmi’s versions of the Debbie Davis and Deborah Hussey murders. The killings were so obviously outside the bounds of any ethical code, gangster or otherwise, that both Bulger and Flemmi had, over the years, been attempting to deflect culpability. Both claimed that the other had done the deed, with Flemmi taking things a step further and claiming that he had been against undertaking these murders but was talked into it by Bulger.

  For sheer depravity and shock value, the witness’s description of these murders belonged in a category by itself. Flemmi had described these acts in public before—in various hearings and trials—but he was now doing so within the context of his relationship with Bulger, who sat nearby in his usual Hensley shirt, blue jeans, and white sneakers, his face buried in his notepad as the witness detailed acts that stripped away any last vestige of humanity that these two men might claim to possess.

  The story that Flemmi had told in previous accounts was that Debbie Davis was murdered because she had become a threat to the “organization.” As the relationship between the attractive young woman and Flemmi, her much older gangster boyfriend, seemed to be coming to an end, Bulger was worried that Davis knew too much. Flemmi admitted to his partner that he had “blurted out” to Davis the fact that they met regularly to exchange information with FBI agent John Connolly. Bulger was “angry.” He was especially concerned because Davis’s brother, Mickey, who was an inmate at Walpole state prison on narcotics charges, was believed to have become a cooperating informant. Bulger believed that if Debbie told her brother about the Connolly connection, there was a good chance that Mickey Davis would seek to use the information to barter a deal for himself.

  From the stand, when attempting to relate the detail about Debbie’s brother Mickey, Flemmi mistakenly said, “Steve Davis.” He was about to correct the mistake, when suddenly, from the spectators’ gallery of the courtroom, Steve Davis exploded.

  “That’s a lie!” Davis shouted. “That’s a fucking lie!” He bolted to his feet. Davis’s wife, seated next to him, sought to hold him back. Armed marshals moved in from all sides.

  “Mr. Davis!” shouted Judge Casper.

  “There’s no testimony on me being a rat, you piece of shit,” declared Davis.

  “Mr. Davis,” repeated the judge.

  Flemmi was startled, saying across the courtroom to Steve Davis, “I just told you I inadvertently made a mistake. I said it wasn’t you that I was referring to.”

  “Mr. Davis, I need you to be respectful of these proceedings, okay? I need you to promise that you can do that.”

  Davis caught his breath and said, “Yes. Okay.” His wife pulled him back down to his seat on the spectators’ bench.

  The judge turned to the jury box. “Jurors, you’ll disregard anything that was said from the gallery.”

  Some of the jurors sat wide-eyed; they were riveted by the sudden pandemonium. Once matters settled back down, Flemmi was able to resume his tale of strangulation and murder.

  On December 10, 1981, Flemmi told Davis to meet him at the house on Third Street in Southie that he had recently purchased for his mother. Among other things, the house was a symbol of the strong bond that had developed between Flemmi and Bulger. Located next door to the house of Whitey’s brother, Senator Bill Bulger, the two front doors facing each other, it was also less than half a block away from the Haunty.

  These two homes, Flemmi’s and Bulger’s, brought into proximity blood relations of both families, solidifying for these two gangsters that they were in it together. The fact that down the street was a basement burial ground connected to the two only made their bond stronger.

  When Debra Davis arrived at the house, the interior was being remodeled. There was no furniture yet in it. Plastic tarps were spread around, stepladders still standing, and construction tools
and equipment lying around on the floor.

  According to Flemmi, as soon as Debra Davis entered the front door of the house, Bulger grabbed her around the neck. He dragged her down some stairs into the basement, never letting go of her neck. In the basement, he strangled her to death.

  “I’ve never been able to forget it,” said Flemmi from the witness stand. “It’s affected me, and it’s going to affect me until the day I die.” He was talking about watching Bulger squeeze the life out of his former girlfriend. He claimed to have said to Bulger, “Let her pray.”

  “If she was already dead before you brought her downstairs, why did you say ‘let her pray’?” asked Hank Brennan during cross-examination.

  Said Flemmi, “Because that was a reaction on my part. . . . Because I was in a semi-traumatic state, I said, ‘Let her pray.’ I might have said it upstairs, I might have said it on the way downstairs, I don’t remember. But that’s exactly what happened, and nothing’s going to change that.”

  Then Flemmi helped Bulger strip the clothing off Davis’s dead body. Bulger went upstairs and lay down on the floor. Flemmi began pulling the teeth from the mouth of Davis, using a set of dental pliers. “It was distasteful,” said Flemmi. “It bothers me now to think about it.”

  In court, the witness wanted everyone to know how abhorrent the killing had been and how bad it made him feel. This had validity only if you turned a blind eye to how calculating Flemmi had been following the murder: how he went to Olga Davis, the mother, and told her how concerned he was, later telling Mrs. Davis that he located travel records that showed Debra had flown out of Logan International Airport to Mexico. Flemmi paid someone to steal Debra’s dental records from her dentist’s office, so he could destroy them. He even made sexual advances toward Debra’s younger sister, Michelle, who was sixteen at the time. And, most damning of all, a few years later, Flemmi took part in another gruesome murder of a woman in his life, his stepdaughter Deborah Hussey, under circumstances that were remarkably similar to the killing of Debra Davis.

  In the annals of depraved acts by Flemmi and Bulger, the Hussey murder was another benchmark.

  In his direct testimony, Flemmi insisted that, once again, it was Bulger who wanted Deborah Hussey murdered, that he was initially against it. Flemmi’s story was that Deborah had become a drug addict and a part-time prostitute. She was at Triple O’s one night and made a spectacle of herself, which had caused the owner, Kevin O’Neill, to warn Bulger and Flemmi that she was out of control. According to Flemmi: “[Bulger] wanted to kill her, and I told him, I said, ‘Well, why don’t we just send her off? I’ll send her off somewhere.’ I kept sending her off and she kept coming back. So it came to the point where he wanted to kill her.”

  On cross-examination, Hank Brennan dug a little deeper. Through a series of pointed questions, he led Flemmi into an admission that he’d been having a sexual relationship with his stepdaughter. “It was consensual,” said Flemmi. No intercourse, just oral sex. The mother, Marion Hussey, had been unaware of this relationship until one night—six months prior to the murder—there was a heated argument between the three participants. Deborah Hussey told her mother that Flemmi had been molesting her for years. Marion demanded to know if this was true. Flemmi admitted that he and Deborah had been having sex but insisted that it was consensual.

  “You knew that having this relationship with your stepdaughter was wrong, didn’t you, Mr. Flemmi?” asked Brennan.

  Flemmi squirmed in his seat. Throughout his testimony, he had exhibited a slight tic: whenever he became distressed, he began to sniffle, which he did now. “What about Mr. Bulger?” he said defensively. “We shared a lot of information, both of us, Jim Bulger and myself. And he had a young girlfriend, sixteen years old, that he took to Mexico. That’s a violation of the Mann Act. So if you want to come down on me, I just want to relate to you—”

  Judge Casper raised a hand and cut Flemmi off, telling him to stick to the question at hand.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” said Flemmi.

  Brennan paused a moment. He was doing what good defense attorneys do—improvising, trying to capitalize on the fact that Flemmi was riled. “When you were asked questions [on direct examination] about why you killed Miss Hussey that day, there’s something you left out about your motives, isn’t there, Mr. Flemmi?”

  “What did I leave out?”

  “Well, you know that having a reputation as a murderer, although some people may look at it negatively, you enjoyed that reputation, didn’t you?”

  Flemmi shook his head. “Mr. Brennan, when I was in the military I killed a lot of Chinese. I never enjoyed that. I never enjoyed killing anyone my whole life. It was distasteful.”

  “There’s a word in jail that’s worse than ‘murderer,’ isn’t there, and that’s ‘pedophile,’ isn’t it, Mr. Flemmi?”

  “I wasn’t a pedophile. You want to talk about pedophilia,” said Flemmi, nodding toward Bulger, “right over there at that table.”

  Again, Judge Casper snapped; Flemmi was trying her patience. “Mr. Flemmi, you need to answer the question that’s asked. No ad-libbing, no adding commentary, just listen to the question and answer it, okay?”

  Flemmi said yes.

  All eyes were on Whitey; if he were going to explode, now would be the time. But he kept his eyes down and continued to doodle on the notepad in front of him.

  “In jail they call pedophiles diddlers or skinners, don’t they?” asked Brennan.

  Wyshak rose to his feet. “Objection. He’s trying to goad the witness.”

  “Sustained,” said the judge. “Mr. Brennan, next question.”

  Apparently, the defense counselor had squeezed all he could out of this exchange. So he turned his attention to the specifics of Deborah Hussey’s cruel demise.

  Unlike the Debra Davis homicide, where Flemmi and Bulger were the sole participants, there had been an additional witness to the Hussey killing—Kevin Weeks. In his testimony, Whitey’s henchman described how he had come down from the upstairs bathroom at the Haunty to discover Bulger with his hands around Hussey’s neck, rolling around on the floor. Hussey frothed at the mouth and her eyes rolled back in her head until Whitey had squeezed the life out of her petite five-foot, two-inch frame. Then they dragged her down in the basement.

  Flemmi was in accordance with this description until the point where they were all in the basement. Weeks had testified that Flemmi put his ear to Deborah’s chest and proclaimed, “She’s not dead.” He then affixed a rope around a stick, placed the stick across Hussey’s windpipe, and twisted the stick so that the rope pulled tighter and tighter, cutting off every last molecule of oxygen.

  Flemmi denied that any of that took place. “I definitely didn’t strangle her,” he said.

  They stripped the body, and Flemmi, as was the routine, extracted the teeth. Then Weeks and Flemmi dug the hole in the basement, while Bulger, as per usual, went upstairs and lay down.

  Asked why Bulger always lay down, Flemmi said, “I don’t know. Maybe he was mentally, physically exhausted. I don’t know. Maybe he got high on it or something, and he was exhausted. That’s my interpretation.”

  For the jurors, or anyone else soaking in the testimony surrounding the murders of the two Debbies, these were among the trial’s darkest days. The intimacy of the killings, and the fact that these defenseless young women stood no chance against these brute men of violence, was more than many could bear. At least two female jurors were brought to tears, and there were sniffles among the family members in the courtroom.

  The details were so horrifying that they obscured an even deeper horror. For two men who took such pride in their reputations as professional gangsters, these two murders were a leap into the unknown. Although Flemmi spent considerable energy trying to explain how the killings were connected to the criminal enterprise, to anyone with a discerning intelligence this rang false. Two twenty-six-year-old women who were not part of the group and knew little or nothing about the gang’
s criminal activities, strangled to death. In the universe of organized crime, or any other universe, there was no justification.

  Why, then, had Flemmi and Bulger engaged in these depraved acts that were an affront even to the gangster code?

  Because they could.

  These two men routinely murdered people, made the bodies disappear, and walked away clean. The result was that they had entered into a world of magical thinking: the belief that they were invincible had led them to increasingly more depraved acts, many of which had nothing to do with the business of crime. Having sex with underage girls, murdering young women with your bare hands, extorting people at will with no fear of ever being caught—these were the acts of men who not only thought but knew that they were above the law.

  Delusions of grandeur? Certainly. But they could hardly be blamed.

  The FBI’s commitment to their two informants was all-inclusive. Amid speculation on the street and in the halls of law enforcement that Flemmi and Bulger may have played a role in the disappearance of Davis and Hussey—among other victims—special agents from the Boston division paid visits to Olga Davis and Marion Hussey. The mothers were told that the bureau was doing everything in its power to locate their missing loved ones. They were also told not to talk to any other law enforcement agencies. In the case of Olga Davis, she was eventually told by an agent that she had “nine other children to worry about” and should move on with her life.

  At the same time, false theories and disinformation about the murders were disseminated through FBI reports, supposedly based on inside information from their Top Echelon Informants, who just happened to be the two men who committed the murders.

  BY DAY THREE of Flemmi’s testimony, defense attorney Brennan began to zero in on a line of inquiry that had gone cold weeks earlier.

  Flemmi was the last chance the defense had to burrow into the history of Boston gangland and show how the Bulger era was a logical outgrowth of all that had come before. The opportunity had presented itself when, during Flemmi’s direct testimony, Wyshak led the witness through a series of questions about Special Agent Paul Rico. Flemmi explained how, in the early months of the Boston gang war, he and his partner at the time, Frank Salemme, had been approached by Rico and a Boston police officer named Bill Stuart. At the time, Flemmi and Salemme were based out of Roxbury, a rough-and-tumble Boston neighborhood, and they were aligned with a criminal gang led by the three Bennett brothers, Walter, Billy, and Wimpy.