IN THE HIERARCHY of witnesses at the Bulger 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.
The first of the diggings began on January 13, 2000, at a location in Dorchester across from Florian Hall, at 55 Hallet Street. This particular excavation would involve the uncovering of the most recent of the Southie murder victims, including the bodies of Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, and Deborah Hussey, all of whom had originally been buried in the basement of the Haunty.
From the stand, Mires remembered that it was snowing that night, and it was extremely cold. She was the leader of an investigative crew that included Colonel Tom Foley of the state police and many others.
Prosecutor Wyshak directed the witness’s attention to a photo projected onto a flat-screen monitor. “Do you recognize that location?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” answered Mires.
“And what is that location, Doctor?”
“That is the location of the grave site off of Hallet Street, across the street, and you can see in the picture with the American flag in the front, that’s Florian Hall.”
The digging had begun at 5:30 P.M. and was soon shrouded in darkness. Klieg lights were erected at the site, giving the photos presented by Wyshak an eeriness that seemed to match the task at hand.
“There’s a telestrator in front of you,” said the prosecutor to the witness. “If you could sort of mark the area of excavation . . . you can do it with your finger.”
Mires was able to draw an arrow or a circle or an X with her finger on the monitor; her markings instantly appeared on the screen in the courtroom and also in the media room two floors below.
Said Wyshak, “I direct your attention to photo three-seventy. What does this photograph depict?”
“This is the excavation under way. We initiated the excavation with a large backhoe in order to remove the overburden. . . . We had information leading us to believe there was a seven- to eight-foot overburden, in other words, that much soil over the grave. . . . The soil consistency is going to be different inside the pit than it’s going to be outside the pit. We started to feel the ground getting softer, and we consulted at that time, and we brought in the small Bobcat in order to remove the rest of the overburden.”
“And showing the next photo, what does that depict?”
“This is a nice shot of the embankment, which shows you some of the stratigraphy, but right in the middle here, there’s a discoloration, the soil is depressed more, it’s softer, and you can see all the colors are mixed, what we call ‘mottled.’ This is what we believed to be the top of the grave, and soon we found out that it was.”
Along with being a forensic anthropologist, Mires was also a college professor and someone who often gave presentations to other scientists and people in law enforcement. She narrated her anthropological undertaking with clarity and precision, using terminology of the trade not to impress her listeners, but to lead them into her world, so that even if you were not familiar with a term, you understood what she meant.
“The small Bobcat had disturbed the very top, so we brought in a tarp and dumped all the soil on that; we then sifted it.” Mires drew a mark on the telestrator. “Here we’re getting an elevation. The police officer in the center is holding a stadia rod, and we’re taking a depth measurement. As I mentioned earlier, you want to lock in the horizontal and vertical dimensions of where you are; this ties it into space. Right? Ties it into Dorchester, ties it into the vertical coordinates in the world.”
The doctor’s manner was comforting; she was giving us observers—laypeople—details based on logic as we began our descent into what was beginning to feel spooky and ominous. “In the tines of the Bobcat we picked up some leg bones. . . . Here’s a quarter-and-an-eighth-inch mesh screen that’s attached to wood so we can sift the soil. And we are looking for any bones we might have missed. The large leg bones are fairly obvious, but the small foot bones are a little less obvious.”
Now that Mires and her team had discovered the grave pit, they settled in for the long haul. A large tent was constructed, with lamps and electrical heat generators on the inside. Tables were set up and tarps laid out, so that the findings could be separated and laid out in individual pieces. Photos from this undertaking showed men and women wearing surgical masks and gloves along with boots and digging gear.
Once the location of the remains within the pit was identified, the process slowed to a crawl. “Essentially, now we’re into a hand excavation. We’re going to use what are called trowels, they’re diamond-shaped hand tools; dustpans; brushes; wooden implements. This is the more tedious and slow process of removing the layers of the soil and material.”
As Mires explained it, coming upon a bone fragment, the investigators could not just grab it; they had to carefully dig around it, doing as little damage as possible, brushing it, feeling its contours, and then extract the bone from the earth. “So here we have a left and a right femur. We have the tibia, left, and the fibula of the lower leg. . . . If you’ll notice, the bones are almost the exact same color as the soil. So the bones take on the same color as the soil, and they develop a patina, or covering. If the break to the bone is recent, it’s like a dry twig, if you snap it, on the inside it’s going to be white or light in color. The same with a bone. . . . That tells us the damage is postmortem, it occurred after the death of the individual.”
Eventually, in addition to still photographs documenting each stage of the dig, the investigators brought in a video cameraman. The expedition was videotaped, with the cameraman zooming in tight on each and every major discovery.
In the courtroom, Mires narrated the video, making sense of what might have seemed to the layperson like a mysterious journey into the core of the earth. In the video, the scene looked like frozen tundra somewhere in Antarctica, with snow swirling in the night air. The archeologists and cops were dressed in huge parkas, with their breath emanating like steam from their mouths in the freezing conditions.
“What’s starting to happen is we’re beginning to get more than two sets of leg bones showing up. So we have a right and a left for each person, but we’re now beginning to see three sets of leg bones. . . .”
Using the telestrator, Mires directed viewers to what initially appeared as streams of white in the dark soil. “Here’s the body bag on top, and here’s one set of leg bones, here’s another set of leg bones, and I have a third. A series of ribs. And we have plastic bags and pelvic bones or hipbones over here.”
For the jurors, these findings were like pieces of a puzzle falling into place.
Kevin Weeks, in his courtroom testimony, had mentioned the body bags when they moved the bodies, and now, all these years later, Mires was pointing them out, buried underground with the remains. Weeks had also mentioned the lime they had used to suppress the smell of the bodies. Mires pointed out the white chalky substance in the grave pit, which they suspected was lime but wouldn’t know for sure until they sent it to the lab for analysis.
Said the witness, “With archeology, you don’t exactly know what you’re going to find. It’s revealing itself to you as you go along. . . . Here, for instance, it appears as if this particular individual that belongs to those leg bones was buried not in an anatomical position, that they are probably disarticulated.”
“What does that mean, disarticulated?” asked Wyshak.
“Articulated is when you’re attached, everything is attached and the bones are attached to each other with ligaments, and that occurs when you’re buried in a fresh state, right? In this situation, it appeared that this individual was disarticulated, was no longer in an anatomical position. That was probably due to the decomposition.”
Occasionally, the witness would see something that pricked her enthusiasm, for instance, root growth coming up through the human remains. “There’s a lot of organic material, and so it encourages root and plant growth”—in other words, fluids and the decomposition of the bodies were like fertilizer for the soil. The physical forms of the murder victims were being absorbed into the earth; they were, literally, going back to nature, causing root growth to intertwine with bones and become the organic legacy of the Bulger era.
Eventually, the remains of three distinct bodies were uncovered. Mires described how these remains were carefully moved inside the tent, where, with the heat generators, it was “a mild fifty degrees.” The various bones were laid out on stainless steel gurneys. “The first thing I do is put the body in anatomical position, as if they were laying prone, faceup, with their hands out on the gurney. . . . You’re going to see some photographs of those full-body shots, or, as we call them, full inventory.”
On the monitor appeared an image of the reconstruction of nearly an entire skeleton, bones laid out on the gurney in the shape of a human form, complete with a skull or skull fragments. Some in the jury and spectators’ gallery gasped. These disarticulated bones, which were eventually assembled for all three victims, represented all that was left of Barrett, McIntyre, and Davis, and laid out on the table like that they looked almost like people.
Said Mires, “The skeleton is like a road map. It allows us anthropologists to drive through the lifetime of that individual. We look for signs of age—how old is the person at the time they died; what sex are they, male or female; how tall are they; and ancestry. . . . There are physical characteristics in your skull, in your facial features, and in the shape of your skull that determines who your ancestors were, whether they were Caucasian, Negroid, or Asian in origin, or a mixture.”
The analysis of the remains continued at the burial site for many hours. Every item found on or near the three distinct skeletons was inventoried, including, in the case of remains that were later identified as those of John McIntyre, the bullet lodged in his skull after being shot in the head at close range by Jim Bulger.
Three hours into Mires’s testimony, Wyshak said, “All right, now I’d like to direct your attention to approximately nine months later. On or about September 14, 2000, did you respond to a crime scene at Tenean Beach in Dorchester?”
“I did,” answered the witness.
And so began the description of the second digging, which was also well documented through photographs and video footage of the excavation. This time, the investigators were looking for the body of Paul McGonagle, who had been killed by Bulger in 1975, ten years before the victims found in the grave near Florian Hall.
The investigators were told that the body was buried in a rocky area near the shoreline. Again, the anthropologists moved slowly and methodically. The conditions were even more difficult than the previous site. “We’re only three feet from the low-tide line,” noted Mires. “At high tide, the grave itself wasn’t submerged, but the salt water comes through the ground.”
“And what does that do to decomposition?” asked Wyshak.
“It has a very caustic effect. Salt water is like acid, almost. There’s a lot of salt in salt water and in the seashells. There’s a lot of calcium carbonate. So it offers a contradiction because it can actually help preserve materials.”
Before long, the investigators uncovered traces of a body—clothing, a shoe, organic material. “We’re battling the elements. High tide is pretty much full-on now, and we’re getting seepage from the bottom.”
Said Wyshak to an assistant, “Okay, can we put up exhibit six-oh-six.” On the screen came a photo of what looked like a body crammed into a wet grave, decomposed, fossilized, like something out of a horror movie. “Now, what is this a photograph of?”
“This is a photograph of an individual fully exposed. . . . It’s about as clear as it got. We have the shoes, platform sneakers. Here we have the knees. And this would be the trunk, the lower trunk. We have the spine, although you can’t see that. Here you can see the arm. And then here it’s the skull on its side and the whole—one side is removed—so it’s actually kind of an open container at that point.”
Wyshak called for another photo, this one a close-up of something goopy and muddy. “I’ll direct your attention, right in the middle there’s a gold-colored claddagh ring.”
Said Mires, marking the screen of her telestrator for all to see, “Yes, the ring is here, and although I can’t really make them out here, there are remnants of the finger bones in this area. They’re very hard to pick out. The bones become the color of the soil the body decomposes in, so everything looks the same color because it essentially is now part of the beach after all this time.”
“Did you recover this claddagh ring?”
“I did.”
Wyshak produced the ring—calling it “exhibit six thirty-four for identification”—and handed it to the witness. “Is that the claddagh ring that you recovered at Tenean Beach?
“Yes, it is.”
The prosecutor had Mires hold up the ring for the jury to see, and then place it in an evidence envelope.
The photos kept coming, each one more macabre than the last.
Now Mires and her team were trying to remove the remains from the grave, but they quickly discovered that the material was “almost the consistency of wet cardboard. It’s very punky, almost like rotten wood, from being saturated and being in this kind of caustic environment for so long. . . . This was the only chance probably that I was going to have to measure the skull, so I set up a ruler so that I could take some very crude measurements, because once I got [the skull] out of the grave, it just kind of fell apart. So you can see here the mandible, what’s left of it. A denture that was probably attached to the maxilla. It’s an upper denture.”
“Did you recover the denture as well?”
“Yes.”
Wyshak handed the witness a plastic sandwich-size bag with something inside. “Can you open the bag?”
“I can,” said Mires, opening the bag like a box of Cracker Jacks and reaching inside.
“Are the dentures in the bag?”
“They are.”
“Will you display them?”
Mires held up her prize: a thirty-year-old set of dentures, extracted from the moist, decrepit skull of a Bulger murder victim from long ago.
Intoned Wyshak to Judge Casper, “Let the record reflect that the witness is displaying the dentures recovered at Tenean Beach in September of 2000.”
“It may so reflect,” responded the judge.
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
“Counsel, would this be a good place to stop for the day?”
“Sure,” said Wyshak.
And so, the day ended with the dentures of Paulie McGonagle serving as a sad coda to a long session of grisly testimony.
The lawyers and court personnel and media people spilled out into the afternoon sunshine. It was Wednesday, midweek, and the bright sky was alive with possibilities, but the dark video and photographic images from the diggings lingered in the air, befouling the shiny façade of a proud city.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Mires was scheduled to return to the witness stand, but, first, there was an issue that the court needed to address. The previous evening, defense counsel had filed a motion with the judge that required immediate attention.
A motion is a formal request asking the judge to do something for the “moving party” or “movant.” Under Rule 7(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, motions must be filed in writing and accompanied by a signed affidavit by the movant—in this case Jay Carney—and the motion papers must be served on all parties in the case. Carney had filed his motion papers too late for the prosecution to draft a response, so that a hearing was required in front of the judge, who would hear oral arguments for and against the motion. These hearings usually took place in the morning before the jury was brought into the courtroom.
The defense motion, docket number 1134, was headlined “DEFENDANT’S MOTION TO ADJOURN TRIAL.” Bulger’s lawyers were asking that as soon as Mires completed her testimony, the proceedings be adjourned until the following Tuesday. They were, in essence, asking for two extra days.
“Simply put,” stated the motion, “the defendant’s counsel has hit a wall and are unable to proceed further without additional time to prepare for upcoming witnesses. Counsel have struggled mightily to be ready for each day of the trial since it began . . . working seven days a week and extraordinarily long hours. . . . There is a physical and mental limitation on how much work can be done by the defense team, and a brief adjournment of the trial will allow counsel to be prepared for the upcoming witnesses.”
The motion further noted, “The defendant is awakened at 4:00 a.m. every trial day, and by the end of his travel back to Plymouth, this 83-year old man is exhausted. Meaningful interaction with counsel in the evening is impossible.”
Carney’s motion touched off a spirited debate. It had been brought about, in part, by the prosecution’s contention that the trial was well ahead of schedule and moving fast. In a strategic move, the prosecution also announced that they had dropped certain witnesses who were scheduled to testify. The defense complained on the grounds that since these witnesses were on the prosecution’s list and had been scheduled to appear, the defense was put in the position of having to prepare for witnesses that the government did not intend to call. Precious time had been wasted, and now the defense was struggling to be ready to cross-examine witnesses who had been moved up the list.
It didn’t seem like an unreasonable request to be asking for two extra days to prepare, but the government wasn’t buying it.
“Obviously, the government opposes the motion,” said Zach Hafer, who stood to argue on behalf of the prosecution. Hafer took particular exception to defense counsel’s position that they had been hindered, in part, by the government not having been forthcoming with the required discovery material. “As your honor is well aware, we too have spent countless hours, mostly logistically at this point, arranging out-of-state travel, hotel accommodations, witness prep, based on daily progress of this trial. It is a massive undertaking. We’ve met every deadline your honor has set with respect to exhibits, witness lists. We provided daily updates to the defense as to where witnesses are going to fall in the order of proof or even just saying, ‘These are the exhibits that go with this witness.’ In our view, we’ve provided a clean road map to this trial, and there’s absolutely no reason to delay it.”
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. “Here, 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 could 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.
In late 1978, Nee moved across town to Charlestown, where much of the city’s underground activity on behalf of the IRA was centered. There Nee met regularly with Cahill and others. As much as Nee tried to remove himself from Bulger’s orbit, they remained entangled. Bulger was instrumental in securing black market weapons for the large shipment that became the basis for the Valhalla expedition, the gun-smuggling operation in which John McIntyre played a key role.
Bulger’s involvement in the Southie Mob’s IRA ventures may have been beneficial to gathering money and guns for “the cause,” but it was not good for Pat Nee. Once again, Nee found himself in partnership with someone he never fully trusted. Also, it was around this time that Nee became friendly with Kevin Weeks. Nee knew that Bulger was suspicious of his relationship with Weeks. When Bulger had suspicions, he tended to scheme and manipulate as a way to control the situation.
One of Bulger’s manipulations involved the use of Pat’s brother’s house as a site for murders and burials of bodies. It made no sense to bury those bodies down in the basement of the Haunty. Why not just take them out in the woods, as they eventually had to do anyway? Over the years, Nee had come to the conclusion that Whitey used the house as his own personal chamber of horrors as a way to compromise and entrap him in the worst of his schemes.
The other way Bulger manipulated people was by roping them into the burials, especially if the person killed was a former friend or associate—which would have been the point of having Nee put in the position of burying his former Mullen gang compatriots.
The various burials would eventually become a key element in the Bulger prosecution, and in a way may have played a role in Nee never having been indicted.
Back in 2000, after Kevin Weeks began cooperating with the government, part of his deal was based on his ability to lead investigators to the various burial sites. Weeks had no difficulty locating the grave site across from Florian Hall because he had taken part in those burials. He knew about the other burials; the general location of those graves had been pointed out to him, but when it came time to do the digging, he was unable to pinpoint the exact locations of the remains. So, according to Kevin in his testimony at the Bulger trial, he reached out to Pat Nee.
Nee was in prison on attempted armed robbery charges in 1997, when the revelations about Bulger and Flemmi first exploded in the media. In a roundabout way, he was fortunate; he avoided being subpoenaed to testify at the Wolf hearings. Through his attorney, he was told that prosecutors had every intention of charging him with being an “accessory after the fact,” but the statutes of limitations at both the state and federal levels had passed.
In 2000, when Weeks reached out to Nee, Pat had no legal obligations to help locate the bodies. But by then he was disgusted by the revelations that Bulger and Flemmi had, for decades, been serving as informants for the FBI. He was having regrets about how he had been used by Bulger. Nee, according to the testimony of Weeks, told him exactly where the bodies were buried, leading to their disinterment.
Some believe that Nee’s willingness to help the government locate the bodies is partly why prosecutors had taken a hands-off approach to him over the years, but Nee does not agree. “I’m sure that if those alleged crimes had taken place within the statute of limitations and I could have been prosecuted, they would have come after me,” said Nee.
Of course, Pat Nee’s alleged role in other crimes was still an open topic of speculation at the Bulger trial.
The day after Mires testified about the diggings, Patricia Donahue, the widow of murder victim Michael Donahue, took the stand. The night Pat Donahue’s husband gave a ride to Brian Halloran down at the Southie waterfront, he met his demise in a hail of bullets. Bulger, according to Kevin Weeks, had pulled the trigger, but everyone wanted to know who his accomplice was sitting in the backseat of the hit car. There was no doubt who Bulger’s defense team was trying to implicate for this crime.
“Did you learn there was a person in the backseat of the car that had a machine gun who was involved in killing your husband?” Jay Carney asked Pat Donahue.
“Yes, I did,” she answered.
“And do you know that person’s name is Patrick Nee?”
“From what I understood, yes.”
Outside the courthouse, when talking to the media, Mrs. Donahue was reticent in her condemnation of Nee, and for good reason. Back in 1986, Donahue had sat through the trial of another person who had been identified and indicted as being the shooter. Jimmy Flynn was a well-known Charlestown criminal who had, according to Brian Halloran, made an attempt on his life before that fateful night in May 1981. The allegation was that Flynn had remained persistent and finally got the job done.
The evidence against Flynn seemed ironclad. On the evening Halloran was riddled with bullets outside Anthony’s Pier 4 restaurant, as he lay dying on the pavement, he gave a last-minute identification of his assassin.
“Who did it?” asked a cop kneeling alongside Halloran.
“James Flynn of Weymouth,” he replied, according to three law enforcement officials at the scene. Those were Halloran’s last words before he died.
The sandy-blond, curly-haired wig worn by Bulger had apparently led Halloran to misidentify his killer. Or had it? Some speculated that Jimmy Flynn was the man in the backseat. When the arrest warrant went out for Flynn, he disappeared on the run and was not apprehended for two and a half years.
In March 1986, Flynn was put on trial. Pat Donahue was there nearly every day, listening to the testimony. The accused took the stand and was able to establish that he was nowhere near the site of the shooting on the day and at the time it took place. When Flynn was found not guilty, the Donahue family believed a travesty of justice had taken place. For the next two decades, the Donahues believed that Jimmy Flynn was the person who had killed their beloved husband and father, and that he had gotten away with murder.
Whitey Bulger’s name was never mentioned in relation to the killing, until Kevin Weeks came forward in 1999 with his description of the Halloran-Donahue hit.
Now the Bulger defense team seemed determined to link Pat Nee to the double killing, not to mention other crimes for which they alleged he had played a role.
Bulger’s attempts to implicate Nee persisted as a subnarrative to the proceedings. Not long after the testimony of Pat Donahue, the defense lawyers filed a motion with Judge Casper that made their intentions clear: “Patrick Nee was an affiliate of the Winter Hill gang in the 1970s and 1980s. He was integrally involved in the criminal activities of the gang. . . . The government’s apparent indifference to Nee raises a legitimate question as to whether Nee has been given a ‘free pass’ for his criminal history. . . . Pursuant to Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure . . . the government must be ordered to provide all transcripts, reports or any other documentation of statements made by Patrick Nee to law enforcement about the criminal activities of James Bulger, Stephen Flemmi, John Martorano and any other people associated with the Winter Hill gang. . . .”
The government fired back with a written response titled, “Government’s Opposition to Defendant’s Mid-Trial Motion for Discovery Regarding a Nongovernment Witness,” stating further, “Bulger’s strange obsession with Pat Nee does not give rise to discovery obligations nor can it change the reality that Nee was, in fact, twice prosecuted by Boston U.S. Attorney’s office. Indeed, Nee was prosecuted and convicted in the mid-1980s for his role in the Valhalla arms shipment (he was ultimately arrested by trial witness Don Defago, a U.S. Customs Agent). Shortly after he was released from prison, Nee was arrested again in 1991 and subsequently convicted for his role in an armored car robbery.”
In court, Judge Casper let it be known that she would not make a decision about “the Nee matter” until the government was close to resting its case.
The fact that he had become the focus of a tug-of-war between the defense and the prosecution had, in a way, ruined the trial for Nee. He had been hoping that Bulger’s long-awaited demise in court would serve as a source of pleasure and entertainment, but instead he had been subpoenaed by the defense and put in a position of concern about his own criminal liability and the legal jeopardy that might ensue.
This, of course, was precisely as Bulger had intended. In a way, much like Whitey’s claim that he had never been an informant, it was another sideshow that diluted the defense case. But it was what Bulger wanted, and so his attorneys seemed determined, every chance they got, to make the issue of Nee’s role in the gang a central aspect of The People v. James J. Bulger.
And if all this weren’t rankling enough for Bulger’s longtime Southie rival, the local media became involved.
In the wake of the motions filed by both sides regarding Nee, the Boston Globe published an article by trial reporter Milton J. Valencia headlined “Speculation on Trying Oft-Mentioned Patrick Nee.” The article quoted Hank Brennan making essentially the same argument as the defense counsel motion, adding, “He’s an eyewitness to many of the core allegations in this case. If the government doesn’t want to call an eyewitness, we will.”
Nee’s attorney, Steven Boozang, responded by saying that his client would not testify in Bulger’s trial. “Whitey is a professional con artist. He’s trying to bring [my client] down because Pat went on with his life and became a productive member of society.”
The Globe article also made mention of Nee’s involvement in Saint Hoods, the Discovery Channel reality show that supposedly chronicled a group of Boston bookmakers. The Donahue family, in particular, was outraged that Nee was featured in the show, with Tommy Donahue quoted as saying, “Shame on the Discovery Channel.”
Driving back toward Southie, having completed our tour of the various murder and burial sites, I asked Nee about where he thought all this was headed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But this is exactly what I was concerned about, that Whitey would try to use the trial as a way to get even. Looks like I’ve got a real fight on my hands.”
Driving along William J. Day Boulevard, looking out over Carson Beach on a sunny July afternoon, it was too nice a day to keep pestering Nee about the trial. So I gave it a rest. At a stoplight, I noticed Nee mumbling something over and over to himself. At first I thought it might be a prayer, which did not fit with the Pat Nee I had come to know.
“What’s that you’re mumbling?” I asked.
He repeated the phrase out loud: “On the advice of my counsel, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege and decline to answer on the grounds that I might be incriminated.”
I told Nee that his mumbling attempts to memorize the words reminded me of the scene in The Godfather, when the character of Luca Brasi is at the wedding waiting to see the Don, trying to memorize his lines.
Pat laughed, because he has the Irish self-deprecating sense of humor. But he wasn’t kidding.
The rest of the drive, whenever he thought I wasn’t looking, I could hear him mumbling the phrase under his breath. He was committing the invocation to memory.