ON THE EVENING of the trial’s first day, I headed over to Southie to meet with Pat Nee and Kevin Weeks. I had arranged to meet them at Mirisola’s, an Italian restaurant at the corner of L and East Eighth streets. I knew the place well. A year and a half earlier, I had met and interviewed Whitey Bulger’s common-law wife, Teresa Stanley, at Mirisola’s. The place is small and intimate, more like a diner than an actual restaurant. Teresa and I sat off in a corner, and she poured her heart out about Jimmy—never “Whitey”—and the relationship they had together for thirty years. Within months of that interview Teresa was informed that she had brain cancer; a few months after that, she was gone.
Every time I walked into Mirisola’s I thought of Teresa, almost as if I could feel her presence. Few people had known Bulger as well or as closely as Teresa, though she remained blissfully ignorant of the full extent of his criminal activities when they were together. What she remembered most vividly was the night she found out about Catherine Greig. A mysterious woman had called Teresa and told her that they needed to meet. She went to an agreed-upon location and met the woman who introduced herself as “Jimmy’s lover.” Teresa had suspected that Bulger had other women on the side, temporary flings and one-night stands. She asked Catherine how long she and Jimmy had been together. When Greig told her “twenty years,” she almost had a heart attack.
When Teresa recounted this episode to me at Mirisola’s, many years after it had taken place, you could still see the hurt in her eyes.
She was seventy years old when I met her, still attractive, with a sweet and humble disposition. I could see she was not the kind of person who would have challenged Bulger, which was likely a requirement of any relationship he had with a woman. Teresa knew that Jimmy had done time in prison for bank robbery. She knew he was a bookmaker and probably a loan shark. But as with any long-term union between a woman and a known criminal, much of the relationship was based on her not asking questions and instead living in a state of denial.
That arrangement had made it possible for her to have a life of relative financial comfort for herself and her four kids, but in the end, she seemed shell-shocked. Before Whitey disappeared on the run, he told Teresa, “You’ll hear many terrible things about me. Don’t believe it. It’s all lies.” But because of the deception she had experienced with Bulger, a man who lived a separate and secret life with another lover for twenty years while he was also living with her, she had to admit that anything was possible.
When Teresa died on August 16, 2012, she went to her grave still haunted by the knowledge that the man she lived with all those years was quite possibly a psycho killer, or, at the very least, an inveterate liar who had deceived her and everybody else he knew for most of his adult life.
At Mirisola’s, to my surprise, there was a small production crew in front of the place filming Pat Nee and some other guys as they entered the restaurant. Pat had told me there would be a crew from the Discovery Channel who were filming a reality show set in and around South Boston. The show was to be called Saint Hoods, and it would detail the activities of a group of bookmakers based in the neighborhoods of Southie, Dorchester, and Roxbury. Pat Nee was to be featured on the show, in which he would be identified as the crime boss of the neighborhood.
When I heard about it, I looked at Pat and asked, “Are you sure about this?” It seemed crazy to me that a person who was alleged to have been a professional criminal and was currently worried that he might be subpoenaed to appear at the Bulger trial would be taking part in a reality show in which he was being portrayed as a professional criminal.
Pat Nee is no dummy; he was aware of the risks. He explained, “This may be one of the last opportunities I have for a legitimate payday based on my connections in the neighborhood.”
Nee was a consultant on Saint Hoods and had control over who was used as extras on the show and even locations that were used. He told the producers up front that he would not talk about Whitey Bulger or the trial on the show, and that they could not air the show until after the trial was over. According to Nee, the producers agreed to his conditions.
I still thought it was a bad idea, but who was I to tell a retired gangster with few options for making a living—legitimately—what did or did not make sense? I sat off to one side, not far from where I had interviewed Teresa Stanley, and waited until they were finished filming.
The production team was shooting a scene where Pat and his crew of bookies enter Mirisola’s, take a seat, and engage in a spirited discussion about a group of rival bookies in Dorchester. Though it was supposed to be a reality show, much of the dialogue was scripted ahead of time. There was much tough-guy patter that seemed derived from an old Jimmy Cagney movie.
By the time they had finished shooting the scene and the production crew had begun wrapping it up for the day, Kevin Weeks arrived at Mirisola’s.
I had known Weeks for seven years, having met him not long after he was released from prison after serving a five-year sentence on racketeering charges. By then, he had published a book called Brutal, written in collaboration with Phyllis Karas, which was an account of his years with Bulger. Brutal was an honest and unsentimental account of how Weeks became Bulger’s right-hand man when he was still in his early twenties. Kevin was interviewed on 60 Minutes, and his book became a bestseller, though he was restricted by law from receiving any proceeds.
As Bulger’s “muscle,” Kevin had done many bad acts, most of which were detailed in his book. Though he was not the kind of person to ask for sympathy or forgiveness, Kevin did admit that he had regrets. It had taken him years to come out from under the spell of Bulger, who was often described in the media as a “father figure” to Weeks—a description that Kevin did not agree with. “I had a father,” he said. “I didn’t need another one. Maybe he was like an uncle. He certainly was a mentor. He wanted to teach me things about life, so maybe he viewed me as a surrogate son. That is possible.”
Not far from Mirisola’s, Bulger and Weeks used to go for walks nearly every day at Carson Beach or Castle Island, two scenic spots along the South Boston waterfront. It was there that Bulger dispensed his underworld wisdom and they hatched schemes that kept money flowing in from various ongoing criminal rackets in the city. For a long time, it had been glorious, and then it all turned sour. “I won’t bullshit you,” Kevin told me when I first met him. “We had fun on the street. But so much of it was based on lies and deception. And then the lies start to get in the way of your personal life, your personal relationships. It’s no way to live.”
We shook hands and sat down at a table near the kitchen. I noticed from the handshake that Kevin could barely move his right arm and was in discomfort. He explained that he’d had an accident on his construction job that tore a muscle in his right shoulder, which required two separate surgeries. Presently, he had no feeling and little mobility with his right arm, but, again, he was not the type to complain. He insisted on shaking hands with his right hand, though it would have been much easier if he switched to his left.
Weeks had put on weight since I last saw him. In his youth, he’d been a Golden Gloves boxer. Now fifty-seven years old (born in 1956), he was less muscular than he used to be in his days on the street, but he was still formidable, with a straightforward, no-nonsense manner that had been part of his persona as Whitey’s enforcer.
Pat Nee joined us, and we ordered a meal. Mirisola’s is a Sicilian joint so unpretentious that you feel as if you are eating in someone’s kitchen at home. Guy Mirisola, the proprietor, is a friend of both Pat and Kevin, who eat there frequently. He knows their tastes and makes suggestions. Though there allegedly are menus at Mirisola’s, I have never seen one. The meal that arrives on your plate is usually the result of a personal consultation with Guy and his Sicilian mother, who is head chef.
As we awaited our order, I described to Nee and Weeks in some detail the day’s opening statements, how Bulger sat in his kelly-green shirt as his attorney explained to the jury that he could not have been an informant for the FBI because he was Irish. They were both dumbfounded by this argument. Not only was it absurd, but it was an insult to the intelligence of the average criminal.
Nee was born in Ireland, and Weeks is of Irish and Welsh descent, born and raised in Southie. Nee did two years in prison on charges of smuggling guns to the IRA, due in part to various Irish informants. One of those informants, John McIntyre, an Irish American, was, as mentioned earlier, shot in the head by Bulger. In his book and at previous trials, Weeks detailed how both he and Pat had played a role in the disposal of McIntyre’s body. Clearly, in the Irish criminal underworld informants were frowned upon—they were punished and often killed. But to say that someone could not be an informant because they were Irish defied logic and historical precedent.
This brought us around to a discussion of Bulger’s defense, as explained by his attorney, that Whitey never was an informant.
Weeks shook his head in dismay. “What do you call it,” he said, “when a guy meets with his FBI contacts every week, gives them information—names, locations, crimes—that goes right into their criminal files? What do you call that except being a rat?”
It had taken Weeks many years to bend his mind around what Bulger had done. For the longest time, like Teresa Stanley, he was in denial. Partly, this was because he was so deep inside the Bulger-Flemmi nexus that emotionally and intellectually he was incapable of acknowledging the truth.
In his book, Kevin recounted how retired special agent John Connolly, around the time of the Wolf hearings, came to him and attempted to give an elaborate justification for what had transpired. They met at the Top of the Hub restaurant, located in the Prudential Center tower, and Connolly had brought a mimeographed copy of Bulger’s and Flemmi’s FBI files.
As I read over the files at the Top of the Hub that night, Connolly kept telling me that 90 percent of the information in the files came from Stevie. Certainly Jimmy hadn’t been around the Mafia the way Stevie had. But, Connolly told me, he had to put Jimmy’s name on the files to keep his file active. As long as Jimmy was an active informant, Connolly said, he could justify meeting with Jimmy and giving him valuable information. Even after he retired, Connolly still had friends in the FBI, and he and Jimmy kept meeting to let each other know what was going on. I listened to all that, but now I understood that even though he was retired, Connolly was still getting information, as well as money, from Jimmy.
As I continued to read, I could see that a lot of the reports were not just against the Italians. There were more and more names of Polish and Irish guys, of people we had done business with, of friends of mine. Whenever I came across the name of someone I knew, I would read exactly what it said about that person. I would see, over and over again, that some of these people had been arrested for crimes that were mentioned in these reports. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it had been bullshit when Connolly told me that the files hadn’t been disseminated, that they had been for his own personal use. He had been an employee of the FBI. He hadn’t worked for himself. If there was some investigation going on and his supervisor said, “Let me take a look at that,” what was Connolly going to do? He had to give it up. And he obviously had. I thought about what Jimmy had always said, “You can lie to your wife and to your girlfriends, but not to your friends. Not to anyone we’re in business with.” Maybe Jimmy and Stevie hadn’t lied to me. But they sure hadn’t been telling me everything.1
To Pat Nee, Whitey being a rat had answered a lot of questions that had been nagging at him for decades. “He was very good at keeping us in the dark,” said Nee. “He had all these different groups he did business with, and he made sure we didn’t know what he was doing with the others. We knew he had Connolly on the payroll. We knew he was getting inside information from Connolly. But we didn’t know he was giving the feds information about us. If we had, there’s a good chance he would have gotten killed. We would have taken care of that.”
The food arrived, and we ate. With Nee and Weeks, I sometimes felt bad asking so many questions about the Bulger years. It was an unpleasant topic for so many people in Boston—most especially those who had loved ones murdered by the Winter Hill gang—but it is also problematic for anyone who ever knew or did business with Bulger. In many ways, his former associates had been made to answer for his legacy, even though, in retrospect, it was clear they also were used and manipulated by Whitey.
Even if we had wanted to avoid the topic, it was not easy to do. As we sat eating our dinner, on a flat-screen television mounted on a wall a news report came on about the first day of the trial. A reporter summarized the day’s events and talked about what was ahead; it was at this point that a photo of Weeks was shown superimposed over images of murder victims’ bodies being dug up by federal investigators back in the early 2000s.
I looked across the table at Weeks, who could hear the TV but had been avoiding watching the report. He was sitting at the table; behind him, over his shoulder, was his face on the TV screen.
“Kevin,” I said, nodding toward the TV. He turned around, looked briefly, and said, “Why they always have to put my face up there? There’s going to be seventy-five witnesses at this trial and they always have to show me.”
“Well,” I said, “they have to show you because you’re the only witness under the age of seventy at this trial, the only youthful face.” It was a joke but also partly true. The witnesses from Bulger’s era would mostly be old-time gangsters in their seventies. Kevin laughed, and Pat said, “Hey, I’m only sixty-eight.”
I said, “Yeah, but you haven’t been subpoenaed yet.”
It was a prospect of considerable discussion whether or not Nee would be called by the defense to testify. He had already decided, under advisement from his attorney, that if he were called he would take the stand and invoke his Fifth Amendment right to not testify, on the grounds that he might incriminate himself.
This brought the conversation around to whether or not Whitey himself would take the stand. In the months leading up to the trial, Bulger’s lawyers had stated publicly on a number of occasions that he would, that Whitey was anxious to tell his version of events in the courtroom. These proclamations, delivered both inside the courtroom, to the judge, and outside the courtroom, to the media, had contributed to the high level of advance publicity the trial had received all around the globe.
From the outset, I doubted Bulger would take the stand. I mentioned to Nee and Weeks that it was telling that during his opening statement to the jury, Carney had made no promises that Bulger would testify.
“Good,” said Kevin. “He should keep his mouth shut.”
I counterargued: “I’m hoping he takes the stand and names names of all the government people who facilitated his deal. I want him to get up there and lay it all out on the table.” I was being a little provocative, knowing that this was not what Nee and Weeks wanted to see.
“Of course,” said Kevin. “You’re a writer. You want him to testify because that’s a better story, but we have different concerns.”
“We just want it to all be over,” added Nee.
After we had finished eating, I asked Kevin directly, “So how are you holding up? Did you ever think you were going to see this day? How do you feel about it?”
It was clear that Weeks was conflicted and in a state of emotional discomfort about the trial and all that it entailed. “To me, it’s sad,” said Kevin. “To see Jimmy going through this. What’s he doing? He could have copped a plea and avoided all this. Just seeing him so old, so diminished, after the way he was years ago. Some say, revenge. Satisfaction. I don’t expect to get any satisfaction out of this. None.”
For many people in Boston, the trial was an emotional event, but for Weeks there was an added level of intimacy. For more than a decade, he had spent nearly every day of his life alongside Bulger, listening to his advice about everything under the sun, acting as a surrogate son, beating people up for Whitey, intimidating people in the neighborhood, cleaning up after the gang’s many acts of violence and murder. Now he would take the stand, look his former mentor in the eyes, and deliver testimony that presumably would help put him away for the rest of his days. It was a sobering prospect.
THE SECOND DAY of the trial began with a discussion about a couple of charts, though, as in most matters of love and war, the primary topic of discussion was a pretense for something else.
As is standard practice in a RICO case, the prosecutor, Fred Wyshak, sought to enter into evidence organizational charts of crime groups that the defendant was alleged to have been a part of. In Bulger’s case, the charts were headlined “Winter Hill Organization Circa 1975 to 1980” and “Winter Hill Organization/South Boston Organized Crime Group 1982” (see Appendices B and C). The motion to submit the charts as evidence brought an objection from the defense, and the person who stood to explain why was Hank Brennan.
For most of the trial up to this point, J. W. Carney had clearly stood front and center as lead counsel, making the majority of the pretrial arguments in court and answering questions from the media at periodic press conferences held on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. For many who had been following the case, this was the first time they would be hearing Brennan speak.
At age forty-two, Brennan was a former Suffolk County prosecutor. He had a forceful courtroom manner. His black hair was neatly parted on one side, and he had the trim physique of someone who jogged or worked out at the gym on a regular basis. He spoke as if every word mattered, insistent on the logic of his verbal presentation, and in the case of the government’s two “highly prejudicial” charts, he had a strong argument to make.
“The charts are not admissible,” said Brennan. “They are overview evidence. And there is an inherent danger by allowing the government to introduce both of these exhibits. The first is, I remind the court that Mr. Bulger is charged with a RICO count. In fact, two RICO counts, one being conspiracy. By providing a chart that shows a number of pictures and in order from top to bottom suggests an opinion, it’s an inadmissible opinion, and what it suggests to somebody who looks at it, especially a juror, is that the person on top is responsible for the persons underneath him.
“As you can see, on both charts there are lines drawn between the people at the top, notably, for my concern, Mr. Bulger, and people below him. The only implication that can be left or inference that can be drawn is that Mr. Bulger is responsible for the people underneath, as if he is the leader of an organization. The government should have to call witnesses to describe their involvement or known involvement with other people in relation to the person above them, notably Mr. Bulger, before the jury should draw that inference.”
Fred Wyshak stood to make the counterargument. With his graying hair and stooped shoulders, Wyshak was the dean of Bulger prosecutors. Earlier in his career, he had served for a time as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, and he retained the melodic cadence of a Brooklyn Jew when he spoke, his voice reflecting both distress and weary acceptance in equal measure. No one person had spent more time and energy trying to bring Bulger to justice, and throughout the trial Wyshak would take personally each and every objection from the defense.
A profile of both Wyshak and Kelly in Boston magazine once referred to the two of them as the Batman and Robin of federal prosecutors. Both believed they were on a holy crusade, and as the trial progressed it was clear that Wyshak was Batman, the older and more nuanced crime avenger.
Wyshak seemed taken aback by the forcefulness of Brennan’s objection to the charts. He counterargued that it was his intention to enter the charts as evidence during the testimony of an upcoming law enforcement witness, someone who would be offered as an expert on the subject of organized crime in Boston. This so-called expert, Brennan responded, had already testified once before in relation to these charts, in the case of Florida v. Connolly, and he had been decidedly off the mark. To illustrate his point, Brennan produced a transcript from that trial and read from a section of the testimony.
With Judge Casper interjecting an occasional question to both men, the discussion went back and forth with surprising vigor. The issue itself felt less important than the desire on the part of both combatants to win the trial’s first significant point of contention. After twenty minutes, Judge Casper concluded, “I think there may very well be a juncture in this trial where these charts are appropriate based on the evidence that has come in, but it seems to me that at this juncture Mr. Brennan’s objection has some legs, so I don’t think the charts should come in at this point.”
If the trial were a tennis match, the defense had scored the first point with a strong overhand volley.
The trial’s first witness was Robert “Bobby” Long, a former Massachusetts state trooper who had taken part in one of the earliest law enforcement attempts to take down Whitey Bulger. Long’s direct testimony was elicited by Zachary Hafer, a junior member of the prosecution team. Thirty-seven years old, a Dartmouth graduate, compared to the other two prosecutors Hafer seemed like a kid just out of law school, though he had been with the U.S. attorney’s office for six years.
After Hafer led Long through a detailed recitation of his career as a trooper, including twenty-six years with the state police, or “staties,” as they are known locally, they got to the meat of why Lieutenant Long was on the stand.
Back in the spring of 1980, Long was part of a law enforcement investigative team that targeted a location that had become known to them as a central meeting place for mobsters from throughout the New England underworld. The Lancaster Street garage, located in the city’s West End, was a nondescript former auto body shop situated on a short, one-way street that made it possible for the mobsters to monitor who was coming and going. Trooper Long and the other investigators were able to set up a video surveillance post in a deserted office building across the street from the garage.
From April to June of 1980, a handful of state troopers videotaped comings and going at the garage. The objective was to gather enough footage of known mob figures meeting there so that they would then be able to obtain authorization to plant a wiretap inside the location.
In the courtroom, it was prosecutor Hafer’s intention to show snippets of the many surveillance videos that had been compiled, but before he did he asked Long about a particular day, June 21, 1980, when he had been watching the garage from the surveillance post when Arthur “Bucky” Barrett showed up.
From a previous investigation, Long knew Bucky Barrett as a premier safecracker and a “fence,” a receiver and seller of stolen goods. At the time, Barrett was a suspect in a daring bank robbery at the Depositors Trust, which had taken place in the nearby town of Medford.
“What was stolen?” Hafer asked Long.
“It was a burglary,” he answered, “a break-in where they went through the roof of a vault in the bank. They hacked into seven hundred safe-deposit boxes and reportedly got away with a million and a half in cash, and the rest, about three and a half million, in gold and jewelry.”
“Was anyone indicted as part of your investigation?”
“Yes. Six individuals.”
“Who specifically?”
“Gerald Clement, former captain on the MDC police; Thomas Doherty, a lieutenant on the Medford Police Department; Joseph Bangs, a sergeant on the Metropolitan Police Department; Arthur Barrett; Kenneth Holmes; and Francis O’Leary.”
Seated on the witness stand, Bobby Long, at age seventy-one, projected the same Dudley Do-Right air of rectitude that he had in his many years on the job. He still had the square jaw and full head of black hair, though it was now possibly a dye job. Having retired with honors, he was known to be a good cop. It was logical that a good cop like Long might blanch when describing a major bank robbery pulled off, in part, by a crew of high-ranking police officers. But this was Boston. Bobby Long’s reference to the infamous Depositors Trust bank heist, in which cops and professional criminals teamed up to commit a major crime together, was a harbinger of things to come.
Long described how he observed Bucky enter a main office at the garage accompanied by Bulger and Flemmi. They were in there for a long time, with the door closed. For the jury, it was a tiny piece of connecting tissue to the government’s opening statement, when prosecutor Kelly related how Barrett ran afoul of Bulger and Flemmi by allegedly withholding proceeds from a major heist. The jury knew how this story ended: with Barrett being chained to a chair, then shot in the head and buried in the basement of the Haunty.
Primarily, Bobby Long had been summoned to the witness stand so that the government could enter into evidence the surveillance videos from the Lancaster Street garage. Without sound, and mostly in black-and-white, clips of assorted videos were shown over the next ninety minutes, a trip back to a time when Whitey Bulger was in his prime.
The videos represented a who’s who of Boston-area mobsters from the 1970s and 1980s. As ghostly images from long ago played on a monitor in the courtroom, Long narrated, pointing out the comings and goings of underworld figures such as Georgie Kaufman, the manager of the garage; Vinnie Roberto; Nicky Femia; Larry Zannino; Nick Giso; Bulger; Flemmi; and many others. It was a motley parade of gangsters, many of them slovenly men from the working class seemingly unconcerned about their physical appearance. That is, all except for one person: Bulger.
Forty-nine years old at the time, Whitey was lean and neatly dressed in every video. Mostly, he favored tight-fitting jeans that were pressed with a crease down the front of the legs. He wore tight T-shirts that showed off his physique. While others in the videos were shown talking and gesticulating in the Neapolitan manner, Bulger was contained and controlled. He looked like a prince: a man, touched by vanity, who saw himself as a cut above the rest.
Another notable feature of the videos—uncommented upon by anyone—was that for thirty-three years they had sat in an evidence vault somewhere in the U.S. attorney’s office. Finally, in 2013, here they were being dusted off and used for the first time, the restoration of an investigative narrative that was abruptly aborted in June 1980. As with most of the unseemly corruption-related revelations in the trial, the task of revealing why these surveillance videos were never put to good use would fall on the defense team and take place during cross-examination.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” said Jay Carney, in an overly solicitous tone of voice that, in a court of law, often meant something ruthless was about to take place.
“Good morning, Mr. Carney,” said the witness.
With both hands on the podium, Carney launched into a series of questions the answers of which he knew before he asked them, questions about basic law enforcement procedure when launching an operation like the Lancaster Street garage investigation.
The Q&A continued in this vein, Carney speaking slowly and methodically, Long answering as if he were on automatic pilot. They both knew where this was headed. The defense lawyer was leading Long to the moment where his investigative team had enough probable cause to apply for legal authorization to plant a bug. Long got approval from his supervisor, Colonel Jack O’Donovan, a legendary figure in the state police. The next step, before applying to a federal judge, was to obtain the approval of the state’s top organized crime prosecutor.
“Now,” asked Carney, “in the course of doing this, did you approach Jeremiah O’Sullivan for assistance?”
At the mention of O’Sullivan’s name, Hafer stood up: “Objection.”
“Grounds, Counsel?” asked Judge Casper.
“Beyond the scope. Relevance.”
The judge thought about speaking further on the matter out loud, but instead said, “I’ll see counsel at sidebar.”
The lawyers huddled off to the side with the judge, away from the jury so they could not be heard.
The sidebar process is a staple of American jurisprudence, an opportunity for both sides to discuss a point with the judge that, by its very nature, might become prejudicial if it were to be discussed in open court. Sidebars can be tedious for a jury and public observers; they interrupt the flow of the proceedings and give the impression that something important is being withheld from the public, which, in this case, was true.
“Where are you going with this?” Judge Casper asked Carney, with the court stenographer nearby recording every word.
The defense lawyer explained how he would question Lieutenant Long about O’Sullivan, chief of the federal New England Organized Crime Strike Force. It was Carney’s understanding that, in his request for approval from O’Sullivan, Long told him specifically that he did not want the FBI to know about the bug, telling O’Sullivan that he did not trust them. “And O’Sullivan said, well, the FBI would have to be involved.” So Long and his team decided to go around O’Sullivan and instead seek as their cosigner a prosecutor from the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office. They did get approval, and the bug was secretly planted in the garage. Almost immediately, the bug was compromised. Somehow, the gangsters knew about the bug almost before it was planted.
Said Carney to the judge, “I will ask Lieutenant Long if he conveyed knowledge of the bug to many people or rather kept it in a very tight circle. And I expect he’ll say he kept the knowledge of the bug to a very select, handpicked group of people that he trusted. I’ll ask him if, to his knowledge, John Connolly had any knowledge of the bug. I expect he’ll say no. Did he tell John Morris [Connolly’s supervisor] any information about the bug? I expect he’ll say no. And then I’ll ask him, so the only person in federal law enforcement who would have known about the bug was, to his knowledge, Jeremiah O’Sullivan.”
“And how is this relevant?” asked the judge.
“Because it suggests that O’Sullivan may have been the person who led to the compromise of the bug.”
The prosecutor jumped in: “Anything that O’Sullivan said to Long is hearsay. This entire line is well beyond the scope of direct [examination], and it’s not relevant.”
The discussion continued, and it was animated. For the defense, it was a major point. In terms of detailing the range of the corrupt conspiracy that had enabled Bulger, it was crucial: Carney was attempting to throw out a broad net, and the biggest fish he hoped to entangle was the late Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan.
Only in recent years had it emerged that O’Sullivan, with his impeccable and imposing reputation as a fierce crime fighter, had quite possibly been the Man Behind the Curtain in the Bulger saga. When he passed away in 2009 at the age of sixty-six, his role in having protected Bulger and Flemmi was not fully known. Though he had been served with a subpoena to appear at the Wolf hearings back in the late 1990s, he was exempted from testifying when he suffered a stroke that allegedly prohibited him from speaking. In later years, he gave no interviews nor ever attempted to fully explain his motives.
In his time with the Strike Force and later as U.S. attorney in Boston, O’Sullivan made some enemies. He could be self-righteous in the manner of New York’s Rudolph Giuliani, another crusading federal prosecutor during this same era. Over the years, through hearings and trials and the accounts of participants, it became clear that O’Sullivan was far more central to the DOJ’s relationship with Bulger and Flemmi than he had ever been willing to admit publicly.
To the defense, O’Sullivan was the Wizard of Oz, and since he was dead and not around to defend himself, he was a convenient target. Much could be implied about his actions; he served as an attractive receptacle for any conspiracy theory the defense could imagine.
Carney was fully aware of the importance of O’Sullivan to their defense. If, at this early stage in the trial, he were shut down by Judge Casper in this attempt to make O’Sullivan a relevant factor in the case, the prospects for laying out the defense he and his co-counsel had in mind would be severely disabled.
Hafer also seemed to understand the importance of the moment. “I reiterate, this is not relevant, Your Honor,” he said forcefully to Casper. “It does not go to this witness’s credibility, does not go to any material issue.”
“Yes,” said Judge Casper, “it’s beyond the scope. I’m not going to allow it to go any further.”
Carney did not take no for an answer; he continued to argue in favor of establishing O’Sullivan as a primary co-conspirator.
“I made my ruling,” said the judge.
Walking back toward the podium to continue his cross-examination of the witness, Carney couldn’t help but look defeated. His shoulders were slightly slumped, and, as he resumed his questioning of former state trooper Bobby Long, his voice was meek. His strategy for steering the evidence in a direction that would illuminate the defense he had in mind had been strangled in the crib. It was going to be a long trial.
THOMAS J. FOLEY was another retired statie with a tale of woe to tell. Whereas Bobby Long had seen his three-month-long investigation of the Lancaster Street garage fall prey to sabotage from within Boston’s law enforcement fraternity, Foley entered the courtroom with the hope of fulfilling a dream deferred. The dream was to put away James Bulger for the rest of his natural life; the deferral was the consequence of a creeping realization, years ago, that the system to which he had taken an oath of service was riddled with corruption and deceit.
Fred Wyshak, the prosecutor who stood to lead Foley through his direct examination, had an interesting task. As with Trooper Long, Foley had realized over time and with mounting dismay that his attempted investigation of Whitey Bulger was sabotaged by the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office. But Wyshak had nothing to gain by going over this with the witness. Since he worked for the U.S. attorney’s office, it was not in Wyshak’s interest, or the interest of the case, to wallow in past transgressions of the very office for which he plied his trade. The entire subject was a land mine to be avoided. In many ways, it was a crystallization of the main difficulty that the prosecutors had: how did they convict Bulger without collaterally tarnishing the reputation of the system they represented.
On the witness stand, Foley projected the same aura of integrity for which he had become known in his years as a state trooper. He was Irish American, a redundancy that would become more evident as the trial progressed. There were an unusually high number of Irish American cops and agents in Boston, which sometimes made the trial of Bulger and his mostly Irish American gang seem like a donnybrook between contrasting sides of the Hibernian identity.
Foley had sensitive blue eyes and spoke in a calm, soothing tenor. He had the look and demeanor of a Catholic priest, another profession in which he might have found himself dismayed or disillusioned by the failings of an institution to which he had pledged his undying loyalty. Foley had been, until his retirement in 2004 at the relatively young age of fifty, a devoted officer of the law, but more than that he seemed like a virtuous man forever doomed to smack up against the baser impulses of his own tribe.
“Good morning, Colonel Foley,” said Wyshak.
“Good morning,” answered the witness.
It was an unusual moment for both men. More than two decades earlier, Foley, along with prosecutors Wyshak and Kelly, had initiated the criminal case against Bulger that brought them all to this courtroom. Now, here they were, paunchier and grayer, like participants in an old-timers’ game, still willing to take the field and assume the roles of player and teammate.
The main reason Foley had been called as a witness was to introduce some key pieces of evidence. In 2000, Foley was part of a team that had confiscated a huge cache of weapons that belonged to Bulger and Flemmi’s criminal organization. It was Wyshak’s intention to initiate the introducing of the weapons into evidence as soon as possible, but first he had a few items he needed to tend to with his witness. One was a recitation of Foley’s career in the area of organized crime, so that he could be recognized by the court as an expert witness on the subject. The other thornier item was to put out on the table the fact that Foley had coauthored a book about his pursuit of Bulger, titled Most Wanted: Pursuing Whitey Bulger, the Murderous Mob Chief the FBI Secretly Protected.
Like many who had been drawn into Bulger’s orbit and later wrote a book about it, Foley had embarked on his venture in publishing at a time when it looked as though Bulger would never resurface. The idea that he would have to explain his book in a court of law was, at the time, likely a distant concern. As with Pat Nee, Kevin Weeks, and others who published Bulger-related memoirs, Foley had taken the opportunity to unleash years of frustration on the page. He was not, apparently, concerned about burning bridges.
Of the FBI, Foley wrote in Most Wanted, “I have never known any other organization, or any individuals, where what they said and what they did had so little to do with each other.” Foley broadened his critique to include what he called “the feds,” a symbiotic partnership between the FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston, and the Justice Department, which seemed determined to shut down local efforts to bring Bulger to justice:
The feds stymied our investigation of Whitey, got us investigated on bogus claims, tried to push me off the case, got me banished to distant barracks, phonied up charges against other members of the State Police, lied to reporters, misled Congress, drew in the president of the United States to save themselves, nearly got me and my investigators killed.2
Foley had used Most Wanted to get things off his chest. In the courtroom Wyshak sought to minimize the book, asking in an offhand manner, “Did you also write a book?”
“Yes, I did,” said Foley.
“You didn’t write it, right? Somebody else wrote it?”
“I was—I had somebody I collaborated with, yes.”
“What’s the book about?”
“It’s about the investigation into the activities of James Bulger.”
“It’s fair to say it’s a story about your career?”
“Yes.”
“How much editorial control did you have over the book?”
“Some editorial control, not total.”
“Were there some things in the book that you disagreed about?”
“Yes.”
And that was the extent of Wyshak’s inquiries about the book. Quickly he moved on to the detailing of Foley’s storied career; a series of questions to establish Foley’s bona fides as an expert on the subject of organized crime in the Greater Boston area (duly stipulated by the judge); and, most important, his investigative uncovering and acknowledgment in court of the Bulger gang’s vast arsenal of weapons.
The handguns, rifles, machine guns, knives, numerous rounds of ammunition, and many other accoutrements of the gangster life had been found in a small guesthouse located directly behind a house occupied by Steve Flemmi’s seventy-five-year-old mother. The house was located in South Boston, at 832 Third Street, a half block away from the Haunty.
Colonel Foley pointed out that Flemmi’s mother’s house, and the stash of weapons that adjoined it, were located directly next to the house of state senate president William Bulger, Whitey’s brother.
The fact that various murders, the stashing of guns, and criminal summit meetings had all taken place within a few hundred yards of Senator Billy Bulger’s house had been reported in many courtroom accounts, newspaper articles, and books leading up to this current trial. For those who had been following the Bulger saga, it no longer qualified as a shocking revelation. But for the jury listening to the testimony of Trooper Foley, it must have been the beginnings of an understanding of just how insidious was the Bulger gang’s nexus of power, with murders, guns, mothers, and powerfully connected political siblings all tied together in a neat little bow on one neat little street in Southie.
And then there was the arsenal itself. Wyshak began by entering into evidence and having the witness describe a series of photos taken inside the guesthouse. The house had been built expressly to serve as a place for criminal summit meetings and the hiding of weapons; there was a secret room behind a wall. Inside that room were row upon row of gun racks; shelves for the storing of ammunition, silencers, knives, brass knuckles, etc.; hooks for the hanging of bulletproof vests, hoods, and masks.
Foley noted that the investigators had expected to find more. They later learned from Flemmi’s son and also from Kevin Weeks, both of whom were by then cooperating with the investigators, that months before the raid most of the arsenal had been moved from the guesthouse to another hiding place, in Somerville. So Foley and his team also descended on that location and discovered an even larger arsenal hidden in the cellar of a nondescript working-class house at 62 Dane Street.
Over the next two hours, on a flat-screen monitor in the courtroom, Foley was shown and identified photo after photo of guns and ammunition. “That’s an M-1 military rifle. . . . That’s a pump-action shotgun with the butt removed. . . . That’s a semiautomatic pistol. . . . That’s a Thompson submachine gun. . . . That’s a derringer. . . . That’s a Smith & Wesson revolver. . . . That’s a black bag containing multiple clips of ammunition that would be inserted into the automatic weapons. . . .” Along with the guns was a staggering array of criminal supplies: “That’s a camouflage mask with a fake beard on it. . . . That’s a U.S. Navy gas mask. . . . That’s a Boston police officer badge found inside a safe. . . . That’s a double-edged military knife. . . . That’s a stiletto. . . .”
On and on it went. Either Bulger and his gang had planned on going to war with the U.S. military, or this arsenal was the manifestation of a fevered imagination. More than a collection of items gathered together out of necessity, this accumulation of criminal hardware seemed to be the realization of a fetish. Because the Winter Hill gang was a collection of mobsters, they collected guns, knives, and brass knuckles. If their métier had been sex, their secret hiding places would have been filled with whips, chains, leather masks, and dildos.
HANK BRENNAN HAD been biding his time, waiting patiently to cross-examine Foley. As soon as Wyshak said, “I have no further questions, Your Honor,” Brennan was on his feet and at the podium.
“Sir, you wrote a book last year, did you not?”
Foley took a deep breath; he had to know this was coming. “Yes, I did.”
“You signed your name to that book?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And, sir, when that book was published, you said that that book was the truth?”
“Yes.”
“In fact, not only did you say it was the truth, you promoted the book, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
Brennan proceeded to list all the Boston-area television shows that the retired trooper had been on to promote the book. “At no time when you were on your speaking tour and you sold your book to members of the public, did you say there were inaccuracies in your book.”
“I am unaware of any inaccuracies in the book,” said Foley.
Now Brennan was off and running; he noted that Foley had earlier that day, in his direct testimony, said that he had been limited in his efforts to exert editorial control during the writing of the book. “Were you suggesting that there were things that were truthful that you didn’t want in the book, or things that were in the book that were inaccurate?”
“There were some things in the book that I was unaware of the information, that it was the other writer who had gone out and did that background on it, and some of the information he came up with I questioned as to where he got it.”
Foley was now on a slippery slope, having to defend his book and also disown aspects of it at the same time.
Once Brennan had thoroughly exhausted the book as a topic by which he could make Foley squirm and sweat, he moved on to another subject: Pat Nee.
Already in the trial, Nee’s name had come up numerous times. Nee’s concern that Bulger’s defense lawyers would do their best to drag him into the trial had been confirmed as early as Carney’s opening statement, when the lawyer suggested that the case against Bulger had been partially created as a concoction of John Martorano, Flemmi, Weeks, and Pat Nee, all of whom, in the interest of saving their own necks, had “added a little Bulger” to their fictitious retelling of gangland Boston. Both in courtroom testimony and in the books they had written, they were out to pin everything on Whitey.
Foley had never met Pat Nee and was only tangentially aware of his role in the Bulger gang, so Brennan was required to get at Nee by way of Foley’s dealings with another Winter Hill mobster—John Martorano.
Back in the 1990s, Foley, along with Wyshak and Kelly, had played a crucial role in negotiating Martorano’s cooperation deal with the government. At the time, Martorano, through his lawyer, made it clear that, yes, he would agree to testify against FBI agent Connolly, Bulger, and assorted other targets of the investigators, but he had a list of people that he refused to offer evidence against.
“One of those people was his brother, Jimmy Martorano?” asked Brennan.
“Yes,” said Foley.
“And another person was Pat Nee?”
“I had no specific conversation with [Martorano] about Pat Nee.”
Brennan was not about to let it drop. He established that Foley, in his interrogations of Martorano, was told about numerous murders involving others, including Nee. He asked, “As a state police officer, you have a right and you also have a duty to pursue charges against people who are alleged to have committed murder in the state of Massachusetts, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you had information from John Martorano that Patrick Nee had committed murder, was a murderer, didn’t you?”
On this, Foley pushed back, making it clear that he and the investigators were at the time gathering information on the targets of their investigation, people they could actually indict. It was not a “fishing expedition.”
“Did you ever encourage the district attorney of Suffolk County to prosecute Pat Nee for the information you had from John Martorano that he was a murderer?”
“We did not have enough information to prosecute Pat Nee at the time.”
“John Martorano told you that Pat Nee was involved in murders with him, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did.”
“And you’ve based prosecutions on John Martorano’s testimony, haven’t you?”
To this Wyshak objected, and the judge sustained the objection.
Brennan moved on, but throughout the afternoon he kept coming back to the subject of Nee. It must have seemed odd to the jury and some observers of the trial that so much time was being spent on someone who was not a subject of the trial nor would be called as a witness by the government. Even Foley became annoyed: “We were working on this case, which was taxing us for years, Mr. Brennan. If I sent my people off in every direction we had a lead on, this case would never have been completed. . . . I didn’t have information that Pat Nee killed nineteen people. I had information that Stephen Flemmi and James Bulger killed many people, and that’s where I was focusing on, because that’s where I had to put our resources. I would have loved to have taken out Pat Nee and anyone else he named. But, realistically, Mr. Brennan, it was not going to happen. . . . I took what I could get to get to the bottom of what had been going on here for a long time.”
“So when I ask you did you make any efforts to take the information Mr. Martorano gave to you to develop a case against Pat Nee, what is your answer, sir?”
“I’ve answered it several times.”
Again, Wyshak objected, and the judge encouraged Brennan to move on.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON, I spoke with Pat Nee on the phone. “How am I doing?” he asked.
I didn’t know how to tell him that his name had been a persistent presence at the trial. “If I tell you,” I said, “it may ruin your evening.”
“Well, it can’t be any worse news than what I already received this morning.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A subpoena,” said Nee.
That morning, while Nee was at the L Street Gym in Southie, where he occasionally worked out, a process server walked into the gym and said, “Are you Patrick Nee?” Nee said yes, and the man served him with a notice to appear in court on a date yet to be determined. He was being called as a witness by Bulger’s defense lawyers.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
We both knew that the main issue was going to be an allegation commonly made in Boston, but nowhere in any criminal indictment, that Nee had partaken in at least one double murder with Bulger. This particular killing had not yet come up at the trial, but it would; it was one of the counts with which Bulger had been charged.
“I’ll take the Fifth,” said Nee. “Only smart thing to do in this situation.”
We talked for a bit about the likelihood of whether or not the judge would allow the defense to drag him into court. The only way that was likely to happen was if Bulger did actually take the stand and name Nee as an accomplice in various crimes, including murder.
“Do you think he’ll take the stand?” Nee asked.
I reiterated what I had said before: “No, I don’t. But who knows? He might. But then the question is, who would believe anything he has to say?”
We went back and forth on the subject for a few minutes. Nee felt the noose tightening around his neck. Officially, he wasn’t yet involved with the trial, but, as with so many people caught up in the legacy of the Bulger era, he was being slowly dragged into it by the ghosts of the past.