JUROR NUMBER TWELVE, Janet Uhlar, had begun to leave the courtroom each day with a sinking feeling in her gut. Her mood started to shift somewhere around day seven, after the Martorano testimony was finally complete.
Martorano’s three days on the stand had been stomach churning, to say the least. For a woman who had little interest in the world of organized crime or serial killers or the differences between a hit man and a vigilante, it was a master’s course in Boston gangland psychopathology. Martorano talked about his various murders as if they were akin to swatting a mosquito on his forearm. The lack of emotion, or remorse, was chilling.
But that was not what had begun Janet Uhlar’s downward spiral. That began with the witness that followed the hit man, an unassuming sixty-three-year-old woman named Diane Sussman de Tennen. The woman had been subpoenaed to take the stand at the Bulger trial because, forty years earlier, on a fateful night in March 1973, she found herself in the middle of a shooting that had nothing to do with her but changed the direction of her life.
Uhlar and the other jurors had heard about the shooting already, during Martorano’s direct testimony and again on cross-examination. The hit man had described a series of gangland shootings and killings intended to eliminate a renegade gangster named Al “Indian Al” Notarangeli.
It all started back in late 1972, not long after Bulger, Howie Winter, Pat Nee, and others had their mobster summit meeting at Chandler’s bar in the South End. That was the meeting that ended the gang wars that had been raging since the mid-1960s and brought together Bulger and the Winter Hill Mob under one umbrella. One of the first initiatives of this new confederation of gangsters was to hunt down and take out Indian Al.
According to Martorano, he, Howie Winter, Bulger, and others took on this task as an assignment from Jerry Angiulo, the mafia boss of Boston. Al Notarangeli and his crew had made it known that they were going to take over the Angiulos’ sports betting book. They had already murdered one of Angiulo’s bookmakers, a Mafioso named Paulie Folino. Afterward, Jerry Angiulo had a meeting with John Martorano and Howie Winter. Angiulo explained that Indian Al was out of control, and his war on the Italians was going to lead to death and destruction throughout the Boston underworld. The Winter Hill crew took the hint. They offered to take out Indian Al.
A Winter Hill crew led by Howie Winter, Martorano, Jimmy Sims, and Whitey Bulger began hunting for the doomed gangster. Since none of them were close to Notarangeli, they first had to develop information on his daily routine—what he looked like, where he lived, and what kind of car he drove. They learned that Indian Al drove a brown Mercedes and often frequented a bar called Mother’s Cafe, located near Boston Garden, where the Bruins played hockey and the Celtics had won a string of basketball championships.
On the night of March 8, the Winter Hill crew received word that Notarangeli was at Mother’s drinking with friends. Martorano, Bulger, and the others swung into action. They arrived in two cars, with Winter, Martorano, and Sims in a boiler car, one of a dozen stolen vehicles that Howie Winter kept in garages all around Somerville. In this car were two machine guns. In a backup car was Bulger—a crash car but also a radio car. Bulger had a police scanner so that he could track police whereabouts in the area. Also, all of the gangsters had walkie-talkies and were in communication. They even had a lookout inside Mother’s to notify them when Indian Al was leaving the premises.
They received that message around two in the morning. The person identified as Al Notarangeli, their target, exited the bar with a couple of friends—a woman and another male. The target got into the brown Mercedes, in the front seat behind the wheel, with the woman in the front passenger seat and the other guy in the back. The Winter Hill hit team followed. A couple of blocks away, the car with Martorano and Winter inside drove up alongside the Mercedes. “We gave it what you’d call a broadside,” Martorano explained. Two machine guns blasting away. Later, after the assault, Bulger told Martorano that from where he was in the crash car, it looked as though the entire Mercedes had exploded.
It was an outrageous gangland “drive-by.” The problem was that it was not Al Notarangeli in the car. Their spotter had identified the wrong person. The gangsters had killed a kid named Michael Milano, a bartender at Mother’s, a completely innocent twenty-three-year-old with no criminal affiliations.
Since the Milano murder was one of twenty that Martorano testified about, many jurors—including Janet Uhlar—remembered the crime in the swirl of testimony surrounding the attempted murder of Indian Al. There were other cases of mistaken identity killings. The mobsters wound up killing four separate men—including Notarangeli’s brother—before they got their man. The jurors could be forgiven for having a blurred remembrance of the killing of Michael Milano. But then Diane Sussman de Tennen took the stand.
In 1973, she was in Boston serving an internship as a dietitian at Beth Israel Hospital. She was twenty-three years old and had met and fallen in love with a young man named Louis Lapiana. Louis had recently started working as a bartender at Mother’s Cafe, where Michael Milano, his good friend and fellow bartender, had helped him land the job.
Early on the morning of March 8, Diane Sussman de Tennen waited as Michael and Louis closed up the bar. Afterward, they headed outside to Michael’s Mercedes. Milano had offered to give both Louis and Diane a ride home.
Milano was very proud of his new car. It was identical to a brown Mercedes owned by Indian Al Notarangeli. At Mother’s, it was well known that Michael Milano worshipped Al Notarangeli. He admired his look and his tough-guy swagger. Though Notarangeli was fifteen years older, Milano slightly resembled Indian Al, a fact that he heightened by wearing his hair like the notorious hoodlum. He’d bought a leather coat that was identical to one owned by Notarangeli. The pièce d’ résistance was when he bought the brown Mercedes. Milano had no way of knowing it, but it was his copycat fascination with Indian Al—and especially his buying an identical car—that would lead to his death that night.
Diane Sussman de Tennen recalled the night as if it were a sense memory, deeply embedded in her soul: “I got the honor of sitting in the front passenger side, getting to play with all the newness of the car. . . . Michael was driving; Louis was in the back. They played chess together, and they were giving each other a hard time about who was going to win the next game and, you know, egging each other on.”
With some witnesses, prosecutor Brian Kelly had a tendency to rush through the direct examination, but not with Diane Sussman de Tennen. He took his time and let the jury ruminate upon her evident decency and goodness, thankful, perhaps, that here was a noncriminal witness—an average person—during a trial overstocked with depraved and cynical denizens of the criminal class.
“Now,” said Kelly, “after a while with this drive, did something highly unusual happen?”
“Yes. Close to the apartment, we were at a stoplight, and all of a sudden there was this noise, a continuous stream of noise of, you know, gunfire, and it was just nonstop. There were dozens and dozens of rounds, or whatever. In retrospect, it was a machine gun, but whatever I heard was going on and on. The car was hit with machine gun bullets. . . . When I heard the sound, I ducked. I don’t know why or what, but I will tell you I come from California, and we have earthquakes. You grow up knowing certain survival skills. Not that you duck in an earthquake, but the minute you hear any rattling or something unusual, there’s a procedure. And I think out of training, I ducked. That’s probably the only reason I’m here today.
“After the shooting stopped, I got up. Michael was forward on the steering wheel. I looked at him and asked if he was okay, and I got no response.
“I turned around to ask Louis how he was, and he was slumped forward, his eyes were glazed, and he barely shook his head. I heard a very low noise of, ‘No.’ Having been trained in a hospital, I knew I couldn’t do anything. So I put my hand on the horn and just figured someone would hear it.”
Sirens sounded, and cop cars and medical vehicles arrived. Diane realized that she also had been hit. She was covered in shards of glass. She took off her coat; her arm was drenched in blood. But she did not want to leave her boyfriend. “I remember fighting with the police because they wouldn’t let me get in the ambulance with Louis. I didn’t want to be separated from him. I didn’t know his status, and I was afraid to leave him.”
At the hospital, Diane was treated for a gunshot wound to the arm. Later, she was informed that Michael Milano had died.
They wouldn’t let Diane see Louis the first day, but at some time on the second or third day she was allowed into his room. “When I finally saw him, he could not speak. They had to shave his head because he had bullet wounds all over him. They saved his mustache, and that was, like, the only recognizable thing about Louis at that point. He could not move, and he was on a breathing apparatus.”
“So he was paralyzed?”
“He was paralyzed.”
Up to this point, Sussman de Tennen’s testimony was riveting enough, but then she described the aftermath. “I had a fellowship [in Seattle], and I was supposed to leave Boston in two weeks. I really didn’t want to leave not knowing the status of Louis. I had friends who offered me a place to stay. But at that point the police told me that they were concerned for my safety, because they thought I might be a target because the people who machine-gunned down the car probably did not want me as a witness. I wasn’t concerned for myself, but they said whoever I stayed with I was putting in jeopardy, and so I left Boston.”
Diane Sussman de Tennen moved to Seattle and went on with her life, but she did not forget Louis Lapiana. “It was a real long recovery. For twenty-eight years he was a quadriplegic on a respirator. But the first eight to twelve months were very difficult. He couldn’t speak at all. The nurses were really nice; they got used to my calls. They would put the phone by Louis’s head. I could talk to Louis. Since he couldn’t talk, it was a one-way stream. But the nurses helped out by saying he’s smiling or [responding] in some way.”
After her internship was complete, Diane returned to Boston for two years. She saw Louis almost every day. Eventually he got to a point where he could sit up and talk through a respirator. He was as good as someone could be under the circumstances. Eventually, Diane and Louis had a heart-to-heart conversation. He told her that she was not responsible for his life and that she needed to move on. Diane moved back to the state of her upbringing: California. She married and had three children.
“Did you stay in touch with [Louis]?” asked Kelly.
“Louis was part of my life for the next twenty-eight years. He moved to Long Beach VA hospital. I lived in Los Angeles. My children grew up from infancy with Louis. Louis’s parents were like a second set of grandparents to my children. I was to this day emotionally connected to Louis. And, yes, I was married and my children are not Louis’s, but part of the deal was Louis would always be part of my life, and we did things together. We would go out, have lunch, have dinner, in the wheelchair. I was trained how to suction him on the respirator, how to handle the wheelchair, what to do if the batteries went low. And so, you know, I developed with him over the twenty-eight years [we had together].”
“Did he eventually pass away?”
“Yeah, he passed away in 2001.”
By the time Sussman de Tennen was finished, there was hardly a dry eye in the courtroom or the media overflow room. The testimony touched trial observers who had been numbed by Martorano’s litany of murders so devoid of emotion. Here was someone speaking from the other side—a victim of a horrible crime whose life had been changed forever.
Like many on the jury, Janet Uhlar choked up, and she noticed one of the other female jurors with her head lowered in tears.
The emotion that Janet felt toward this witness started out as empathy, but as the day went on, with other witnesses taking the stand, she felt her emotions transitioning into something else. What Janet began to feel was anger. Initially, that anger was focused on the man who had first described the killing of Michael Milano and the shooting of Louis Lapiana as if it meant nothing to him: John Martorano. Clearly, the man was a monster. But as Janet processed her feelings of repulsion toward Martorano, a question arose:
How the hell can this man be out on the street today? What kind of justice system makes a deal with a person who has killed twenty people—some of them completely innocent—a man with no feeling or remorse?
Martorano’s deal with the government shocked Janet Uhlar, and for the first time she found herself questioning the government’s case.
And it didn’t end there.
Throughout most of the trial, Uhlar had been staying at her mother’s house in Quincy.
On train rides to and from the courthouse, her head brimming with images and details from the trial, there were other imponderables: Why Whitey Bulger? What was it about Bulger that made the government feel they needed to make unconscionable deals with men who were as bad—or worse—than he was?
As the trial headed into its third week of testimony, juror number twelve developed the earliest inklings of a troubling realization: she was leaving and arriving at the courtroom each day with more questions than answers.
RALPH DEMASI WAS a character. He took the stand on a Friday morning, a stooped old man in his seventies. He did not want to be there. That morning, he had refused to talk with the prosecutors in the hallway. He had been given full immunity to testify; nothing he said in court could be used against him. But Ralph, a former hoodlum and ex-con, was not the kind of guy who talked openly about criminal matters to anyone, much less during a public proceeding.
At a sidebar between the lawyers and the judge, it was revealed that Ralph had written a letter to Bulger’s lawyer, Jay Carney. In the letter, DeMasi made it clear that he was not testifying under his own volition; he had been forced by a federal order of compulsion. Carney, of course, knew this, and he realized that the letter was really meant for his client, Jim Bulger, so that he could see that Ralph DeMasi was not doing this on his own. Even then, DeMasi refused to take the stand, claiming that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege unless the prosecutor and the judge made it clear in open court that he was only there because the government had forced him to be there by federal decree. The prosecutor and the judge agreed to do that, since it was common procedure anyway.
Given DeMasi’s reluctance, when he finally got on the stand, he was surprisingly verbose. His testimony was not crucial. He had been along during the shooting death of William “Billy” O’Brien, a Southie hood who had fallen afoul of the Winter Hill Mob. The killing of O’Brien had been described in considerable detail by Martorano. DeMasi was there in the same capacity as Diane Sussman de Tennen, to give survivor testimony.
Unlike Martorano, DeMasi was not a seasoned witness. He had only recently been released after serving twenty-one years in prison on an armed robbery conviction. He’d never before testified in a courtroom. Apparently, he had not been prepped on how to give short, pithy answers and instead delivered his testimony as a monologue.
After describing in detail how he wound up in a car with Billy O’Brien on the night in question, he moved on to the shooting: “I got in the car with Billy and we pulled out on Morrissey Boulevard [in the Dorchester section of Boston]. I said, ‘Billy, keep your eye on the rearview mirror, the side mirror. If a car comes up fast, hit the gas.’ He started laughing. ‘Ah, Ralph you’re—ain’t nobody gonna hurt us, blah, blah, blah.’ I said, ‘Billy, pay attention, I got bad vibrations. Watch your mirrors. If a car comes up fast, hit the gas.’ He keeps laughing.
“All of a sudden, a car pulls up and people start shooting at us. . . . Billy O’Brien said, ‘What the fuck,’ hit the gas, hit the brake, the car started fishtailing. . . . He must have died instantly. As soon as he said ‘What the fuck’ we started fishtailing. . . . I got hit and thrown forward, and just instinct made me go down as low as I could near the floorboards. I got shot eight times. I read somewhere it said three times. I had eight bullets in me.
“The car hit the guardrail. Boom.
“My adrenaline was going. I didn’t have a gun, but I had a stiletto. Pulled the stiletto out, opened the door, jumped out of the car. The cars that were shooting at us stopped about thirty yards ahead. The two shooters were getting out. I ran towards them, hoping I could stab one of them and get a gun from him. When they saw me coming, one of them yelled, ‘Here he comes,’ and they jumped back in the car and burned rubber. My adrenaline is going. I start running after them—”
“Now, wait a minute,” interjected prosecutor Kelly. “You were shot eight times and you were running [after two armed] guys with a knife?”
“Right. I got shot here, here, my shoulder, and in my back a number of times.”
“I take it, given your presence here today, you survived that shooting?”
“It’s pretty obvious.”
“Did you go to the hospital?”
“Let me finish the story.” DeMasi ignored the prosecutor and continued. “All right, so after I realize I’m a nitwit running after a car that’s burning rubber, I stop. My whole side was paralyzed. I walked back to the car. I’m looking in. I yell, ‘Billy, Billy.’ Looked in, got close, but it was dark. The whole side of his face was blood. It’s obvious he was dead.
“I started walking down Morrissey Boulevard to try to get away from the area. Probably within five minutes a cop car pulled up. A cop jumped out. ‘Holy shit, you’ve got blood all over.’ I said, ‘Yeah. What happened?’ He said, ‘You got shot.’ I said, ‘What did you shoot me for?’ I was disoriented a little bit.
“He said, ‘I didn’t shoot you. Get in the car.’
“‘No, I ain’t getting in the car. So you can shoot me again?’ He goes, ‘Come on, get in the car.’ He grabbed me, put me in the car, took me to the hospital. I’m in the hospital two or three days, checked out, went to Billy O’Brien’s funeral.”
“In fact, when you went to Mr. O’Brien’s funeral, what happened to you there?”
“Got arrested coming out of the church—for getting shot.”
“Yes, but didn’t you also have a gun with you?”
“They didn’t know that at the time.”
“All right, but you got arrested on gun charges coming out of Mr. O’Brien’s funeral, right?”
“No, no, that isn’t why I got arrested. I got arrested for parole violations for getting shot.”
“The bottom line is, sir, you don’t know who actually shot you, do you?”
“No, I do not.”
“IF RALPH DEMASI thinks he was an innocent bystander that night, he’s got it wrong,” said Pat Nee. “They were trying to hit DeMasi, not O’Brien.”
I met Pat Nee after the DeMasi testimony and relayed the version that had been detailed in court. It was DeMasi’s contention that he had been an innocent bystander that night. His friend, Billy O’Brien, whom he knew from prison (O’Brien did a stint in Walpole for killing another man named O’Brien in a Southie tavern), must have been the target, figured DeMasi. But what DeMasi never mentioned on the witness stand was that he was in Southie that night to buy guns. Unbeknownst to him, because of his association with Indian Al Notarangeli and his crew, he was on a Winter Hill gang hit list. It was Martorano and Jimmy Sims who shot up the car, with Whitey Bulger following in a backup car.
Hearing Nee’s version that DeMasi was the target reminded me that just because a witness takes an oath and testifies in court, it doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.
I did not reach out to Nee to talk about Ralph DeMasi. I reached out, rather, to talk about a different series of murders that his friend John Martorano had testified about. These murders, engineered and perpetrated by Bulger, had changed the criminal landscape in South Boston and left Pat Nee in an especially vulnerable position. Sensing that these killings were key to understanding how Whitey had come to rule the neighborhood, I wanted to know more.
When talking about local gangland lore and, more specifically, murders that were still open cases that had never been solved, Nee and I had some unofficial ground rules. Sometimes, if I asked about a specific killing, Nee might say “no comment,” or, “I can’t talk about that.” That could mean that he didn’t want to implicate someone he knew who was still alive. It could also mean that maybe he had been involved in some way.
It was no secret that Nee had been involved in aspects of the Killeen-Mullen gang war of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had revealed some of the details of this gang war in his book, A Criminal and an Irishman. In the past, he had described to me the attempted sniper shooting of Eddie Killeen on an apartment balcony overlooking Dorchester Bay, with such detail that it made me think Pat himself may have been the shooter. There were other notorious crimes. I had been told by a knowledgeable source that Pat Nee was one of the shooters in the killing of Billy O’Sullivan, a Killeen bodyguard who was a close partner of Whitey Bulger. The rumor was that Nee did the killing along with Paulie McGonagle, a fellow Mullen gang member whose brother was murdered by Bulger.
Another crime Nee was alleged by some to have participated in was a double killing that figured prominently in the Bulger trial—the murder of Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue. Halloran was riddled with gunfire for being an FBI rat, with Donahue merely an unlucky victim who had offered him a ride home.
Everyone in Boston seemed to believe that Pat Nee was the mystery man in the backseat. Tommy Donahue, Michael Donahue’s son, was out in front of the Moakley Courthouse almost daily speaking to the media, accusing Pat Nee of having murdered his father.
Pat had never openly denied the accusations, and so the rumors persisted. As to the Halloran-Donahue hit, he told me “no comment,” though he did have an opinion about the Donahues. “They know where I am,” he said. “If they wanted to say something to me or do something, they know where to find me.” The implication was: That’s how we do things in Southie. If need be, we take matters into our own hands.
Certain crimes were buried deep in the molten foundations of the neighborhood. That’s what I wanted to ask Pat about.
In the mid-1970s, not long after the mob summit meeting at Chandler’s, Whitey Bulger began to systematically remove some of his most fearsome rivals in South Boston. Bulger, now affiliated with the Winter Hill Mob, was meeting on a daily basis in Somerville at the Marshall Motors garage. But Whitey knew that he needed to have his own base of operation. He also knew that in Southie he would never be viewed as the top guy as long as various members of the Mullen gang were still around.
I had interviewed Pat Nee before about the founding of the Mullen gang in the late 1950s and how they had emerged, during a time of greasers and early rock and roll, as the most feared street gang in South Boston. Named after John Joseph Mullen, a decorated war veteran who had a neighborhood intersection at East Second and O streets named in his honor, the gang was mostly a collection of “wharf rats”—burglars, thieves, and tailgaters known for pilfering goods along the Boston waterfront. The Mullens were not an organized crime unit—that is, until they hooked up with the Winter Hill Mob and became more involved in high-level criminal rackets in the city.
Pat Nee had been responsible for bringing the Mullen gang into the realm of organized crime, and not everyone in the gang was in accordance with the move. By 1974, dissention among what was left of the gang created a situation that was problematic for the Winter Hill Mob, which had essentially absorbed the Mullen gang into its structure. Whitey Bulger began to complain to fellow leaders of the Winter Hill Mob—namely Howie Winter, Steve Flemmi, John Martorano, and others—that some of the former Mullen gang members were more trouble than they were worth.
If any one criminal entity truly represented the hoodlum heart and soul of Southie, it was the Mullen gang. While Bulger had been away in prison, submitting to LSD tests under the watchful eye of the CIA, the Mullens had established themselves as the toughest street fighters in town. Many of the original founders of the gang were ex-military, and others, like Pat Nee, had gone on to fight in Vietnam. In a strange and perhaps perverted way, the dedication and sense of loyalty that these men had known in the service became the foundation of their bond as criminals on the street.
And then, of course, there was the sense of ethnic solidarity. The Mullens were Irish American to the core, with rambunctious, brawling temperaments to prove it. As a further show of solidarity, many of the gang’s members wore a claddagh ring. In Celtic tradition, the claddagh is a symbol of friendship, love, and loyalty. Two hands holding a heart with a crown on top is adorned in the ring’s setting, along with various jewels. The claddagh has its origins in Galway, the county of Pat Nee’s birth and also the county most highly represented among the Irish immigrants and second- and third-generation Irish Americans of South Boston.
As Whitey Bulger surveyed the criminal landscape in Boston, he knew he had a problem. Though he was now affiliated with the Winter Hill Mob and therefore had access to big-money rackets that were beyond the reach of the Mullen gang, he would never rule the great ancestral homeland of South Boston as long as remnants of the Mullen gang were still around.
As with most things, Bulger moved strategically, without anyone fully realizing what his maneuvers were about as they took place.
Over a period of twelve months, from November 1974 to November 1975, Bulger, along with Martorano, Flemmi, and others, murdered three members of the Mullen gang. By the time Bulger was done, he had effectively cut off the legs of what remained of the gang and eliminated the biggest threat to his power in Southie. Once these three bodies had been buried underground, Whitey could, for the first time, legitimately refer to himself as the mob boss of South Boston.
Pat Nee had been there for all of it; he was a reluctant participant in this brutal transfer of power.
I knew from previous interviews I had done with Nee that this was a difficult subject for him to talk about. All these decades later, Nee could now see things about this era that he did not fully recognize at the time. He had slowly come to realize that quite possibly he had been played by Whitey Bulger and made to take part in the elimination of men who were among his closest cohorts in the neighborhood.
Pat agreed to speak with me, but we had to do the interview while he ran a few errands around town. It was Friday afternoon, and Nee was leaving later that evening on an Amtrak Acela train to New York City, where he and a lady friend had tickets to see the Broadway show Jersey Boys. They planned on staying in New York through the weekend.
“I want to ask you about those killings of the Mullen gang members back in ’74 and ’75,” I said to Pat.
“Oh boy,” he said. “Not a pleasant topic. But go ahead, what do you want to know?”
In November 1974, Bulger murdered Paulie McGonagle, who was a close associate of Pat. Nee and McGonagle were among the most prominent members of the Mullen gang; they had pulled off many capers together. Bulger, on the other hand, had a hostile relationship with the McGonagle family. An earlier attempt by Bulger to kill Paulie had resulted in him accidentally murdering the twin brother, Donnie McGonagle. Bulger knew that for the rest of his life he would probably have McGonagles wanting to seek revenge against him. And so he murdered Paulie.
It was done in typical Bulger fashion—devious and effective. On the day before McGonagle’s death, Bulger went to the bank and withdrew cash—all fresh, crisp bills, enough to fill a briefcase. He showed the money to McGonagle, claiming that they were counterfeit bills. McGonagle was impressed. Bulger and McGonagle made an arrangement to meet the following day; McGonagle wanted to purchase some of the counterfeit bills.
The next day Bulger and McGonagle met. Seated in Bulger’s car, Whitey opened the briefcase, supposedly to show Paulie the bills. Instead, he pulled out a gun and shot McGonagle in the face.
The next Mullen that Bulger killed was Tommy King, another prominent member of the gang. At the time, King believed that he was in a partnership with Bulger, which is why when Whitey told him that he needed his assistance in tracking down and killing a criminal rival named Alan “Suitcase” Fidler, King was game. He met with Bulger, Howie Winter, and Johnny Martorano. They were all seated in Bulger’s car, with Steve Flemmi behind them in a crash car. Flemmi had handed out guns to everyone. What King didn’t know was that the chamber of the gun he’d been handed was filled with blanks.
Seated in the backseat behind Tommy King was Martorano. As Johnny explained it, “We were supposed to drive over and shoot Fidler, and on the way, pretty much after we pulled out, I shot Tommy.”
“Where did you shoot him?”
“In the head.”
Two down, one to go. On the very same night that King was killed, Bulger sought out a third Mullen member, Francis “Buddy” Leonard. Bulger had a beef with Leonard mostly because of his drunken behavior in the neighborhood. Bulger was not a big drinker and never used drugs of any kind. Part of his plan for taking over as boss of the neighborhood was attempting to instill a more rigorous code of personal behavior among Southie gangsters. Buddy did not go along with the program. That night, a few hours after killing King, Bulger found Buddy Leonard and shot him in the head. He then took Leonard’s body and put it in King’s car, to make it appear as if King had killed Leonard.
Pat Nee did not have anything to do with these murders, but he was alleged to have played a role in the disposal of two of the bodies.
Said Nee, “The killing of Paulie [McGonagle] was a shock to all of us. We knew Whitey had engineered it, but now that we were all affiliated together with Winter Hill, it wasn’t like you could go murder Whitey. To do that would mean taking on the entire organization. Paulie was collateral damage.”
We were driving in Pat’s Jeep across the Tobin Memorial Bridge, over the Mystic River, on our way into the city of Chelsea. Pat had to drop off a gift for a friend, and as we slowed down in afternoon traffic on the bridge, Nee was determined to make sense of it all.
We were not far from the actual location of the Teddy Deegan murder, in a part of the city that hadn’t changed much in the last thirty years. The bridge descended into an area of deserted warehouses and crumbling sidewalks. As we talked about events from the 1970s, a time of hard men, secret deals, and dead bodies left in the trunks of cars, it was not hard to conjure the ghosts of the past.
I had interviewed enough gangsters to know that it was sometimes difficult for a professional criminal to explain the ways of the underworld to a “civilian,” even someone like myself who had heard many stories. The truth was, in the criminal rackets it was not uncommon to have a partner who was someone you did not completely trust. Strange alliances were born out of the overweening desire to make money. Nee had entered into a partnership with Bulger, but he’d never dealt with someone whose ambitions were so devious and corrupt.
Not only had Bulger killed Paulie McGonagle, but he spread the word among other Mullen members that Tommy King had played a role in the murder. That put Tommy on the outs with Pat and other remaining members of the Mullens, so that a year after the McGonagle murder—when Bulger made his move on King—Tommy had few defenders left in the gang.
Nee did not know that Bulger, just a couple of months before killing King, had entered into a partnership with FBI agent John Connolly. This would prove to be crucial; immediately following the dual killings of King and Leonard, Bulger had Connolly input disinformation into FBI 302s (confidential intelligence files) that King had murdered Buddy Leonard, left him in the car, and skedaddled. It was the beginning of a sneaky pattern of misdirection orchestrated by Bulger and his corrupt enablers in law enforcement. As an informant, he fed them information that helped cover up his murders, and his G-men enablers willingly memorialized his lies via law enforcement files.
Another fact that Nee did not know was that Bulger had gone over his head to get authorization for the murders of King and Leonard from the Winter Hill Mob’s ruling board.
I explained to Pat how, during his testimony, John Martorano described Bulger coming to the leadership at Marshall Motors seeking approval for the murders. According to Martorano, “I guess [Bulger] and Tommy couldn’t get along; they were always butting heads together. Whitey said, ‘Tommy’s uncontrollable and he’s going to kill some police detective.’ . . . So he wanted to kill Tommy, take him out.”
According to Martorano, there was disagreement among the group about killing King. But Whitey’s argument was convincing: the detective whom King was threatening to kill was Eddie Walsh, a Boston police legend (Eddie was not related to Frank Walsh, the cop who arrested Joe Salvati). Walsh was practically a member of the underworld, a cop whom the gangsters routinely fed information for their own purposes—information that made Walsh look like a rainmaker, with sources in the underworld that were the envy of others in law enforcement. Killing Detective Eddie Walsh would open a can of worms and bring about a level of scrutiny that would be harmful to everyone.
Nee listened carefully as I described how his partners in the Winter Hill Mob made the decision to take out his former associate in the Mullen gang. “The bit about Tommy wanting to kill Eddie Walsh is bullshit,” he said. “Tommy was a drinker and a loud-mouth. He might have said something like that—boasting—but he never would have done it.” Unlike the Paulie McGonagle killing, which was done surreptitiously, the killing of Tommy King had been planned and approved by the Winter Hill gang braintrust. Nee was alleged to have helped dig King’s grave.
The digging of graves and burying of bodies would become a Southie underworld ritual during the Bulger era. Before that, during the gang wars, bodies had been dumped in alleyways or left in car trunks, but Whitey was far too finicky and thorough to leave behind such obvious loose ends.
To be a member of the underworld’s inner circle in Southie meant you sometimes got roped into burial duty, whether you liked it or not.
Nee supposedly had been called on to help bury Paulie McGonagle in a grave at Tenean Beach, in Dorchester. Alongside him that night digging the hole, according to court testimony, was Tommy King.
Given the statute of limitations, Nee could not be chargd for his role in this or other burials, but as with most allegations stemming from the Bulger years, he neither confirms nor denies the particulars.
Even so, the details are revealing, because a year later Nee is alleged to have been at a nearby location, this time helping to bury King.
If true, the irony was instructive, with a succession of burials that had to feel ominous for anyone holding the shovel. Being a gangster in Southie had become like the children’s rhyme, “Ring Around the Rosie.” You thought everyone was working in unison, but before you knew you it, you had a pocketful of posies and were digging your own grave.
IN THE EARLY weeks of the Bulger trial, I sometimes found myself asking, What’s so special about Whitey Bulger? In the Boston underworld of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a gangster without portfolio. He had gained some stature through his role in the Killeen organization but that was on the wane as the Killeens were wiped out by the Mullen gang. He rebounded nicely by latching on with the Winter Hill Mob, but even there he was part of a ruling board; he was not the sole leader. He had shown a willingness to kill, which was a prized skill in the underworld, but when it came to killing people he was no Joe Barboza, or John Martorano, or Steve Flemmi. In many ways, in the mid 1970s, he was a garden-variety Boston gangster.
Beginning in 1973, from the time he became part of the Winter Hill Mob, Bulger began a systematic rise in the underworld that distinguished him as a man of near-psychotic ambition. And he was able to rise above the fray because of one single factor that put him in a category by himself: his connections.
It started with his brother, the politician, who served as kind of an unspoken safety net. More than once, I asked Pat Nee, “Why didn’t you kill Whitey Bulger? He was whacking out former partners of yours left and right. You’d begun to feel like maybe you were next on his hit list. Why didn’t you kill him before he killed you?” Pat’s answer was always the same: Billy.
To kill the brother of the most powerful political figure in the community, a rising star in state politics, would have brought about a level of heat that would have—at least temporarily—wiped out the city’s criminal rackets. Billy Bulger’s standing in the city protected Whitey Bulger from retribution.
The other factor was John Connolly—or, to be more precise, the inroads that Connolly provided Bulger into a vast universe of corruption within the criminal justice system.
Having a cop in your pocket was nothing new. Before Connolly, the Winter Hill Mob had David Schneiderhan, a state trooper who, from 1968 to 1978, worked for the state attorney general’s organized crime unit. Schneiderhan grew up with the Flemmi brothers, Jimmy the Bear and Stevie, and had been selling information to Steve Flemmi since the late 1960s. As a criminal gang in Boston, you weren’t worth much unless you had multiple agents, troopers, or local cops on the payroll.
Even so, Connolly was a gold-plated connection, and the benefits of this alliance were apparent almost immediately. The agent intervened in a dispute that had flared up between a vending company called Melotone and the team of Bulger and Flemmi. The two gangsters had started their own vending company and had been going all over town threatening bar owners who installed Melotone vending machines. The company approached the FBI to see if there was a criminal case to be made against Bulger and Flemmi. Connolly handled the overture, assuring Melotone lawyers that it would not be in their interest to pursue legal action. He had, in other words, acted as a front man for the gang, protecting their financial interests.
On another occasion, Connolly gave Bulger information that allowed the Winter Hill Mob to eliminate an informant in their midst—Richie Castucci. As John Martorano mentioned in his testimony, the gangsters were especially impressed by this because, in giving up Castucci—a registered Top Echelon Informant—Connolly signaled that his loyalty to the gang overrode fidelity to his own FBI.
In 1977, Connolly introduced Jim Bulger to his new supervisor at the organized crime squad, which was also known as C-3. John Morris was from the Midwest, with a personality that was the opposite of Connolly, who was highly personable and tried to give the impression of being street-smart. Morris was soft-spoken, plain, and couldn’t have passed for streetwise even if he tried. Mostly, he didn’t try, choosing instead to emphasize his strengths as a team player and consummate company man who seemingly followed orders to the letter. His paperwork was impeccable. He had arrived in Boston from the Miami field office and brought with him a reputation as one of the best supervisors in the FBI.
Most confidential informants are reluctant to meet anyone within law enforcement except for their direct handler, for obvious reasons. The fewer people who know about a person’s role as an informant the better it is for the informant. But Bulger and Connolly had entered into a relationship that was not your typical gangster-handler arrangement. They were more like associates, two men who each saw the other as an opportunity to enhance his standing within his chosen careers.
In the Irish Mob, connections were everything. Irish gangsters did not function within a structured hierarchy like the Mafia. With Cosa Nostra—literally, “Our Thing”—the reputation of the organization itself was enough to facilitate business and keep people in line. The Mafia was a tradition larger than any one individual. In the Irish Mob, there seemed to be an aversion to structure. An Irish gangster was only as powerful or successful as the connections he was able to make both in the underworld and in the legitimate worlds of business and law enforcement. The history of the Irish Mob going back to the years of Prohibition and before was littered with illicit alliances between gangsters, lawmen, and politicos.
Bulger seemed to have an intuitive awareness of this history. In his early years as a criminal, he’d envisioned himself an outlaw in the manner of Dillinger, roaming from state to state committing robberies. But if he expected to operate within the universe of organized crime as an Irish American gangster, he knew that he needed to have a base of operation, or turf, of his own. In the old country, turf was something you burned for heat, but it also represented home and hearth, the foundation of all civilization. Southie fit the bill; it was an insular Irish American community with a strong code of loyalty where, it just so happened, Whitey was one step removed from a ruling overlord: his brother.
But the statehouse was not the street, and so Bulger still had to take over Southie’s underworld the old-fashioned way—by killing people. He moved on from conquering the Mullen gang to compromising law enforcement, starting with Connolly, a fellow son of Southie who also understood the empirical power of having the right connections. The two men were side by side. Whitey’s code name for Connolly was Zip, because they lived in the same zip code. Through Zip, Bulger got to know nearly every agent in the FBI’s organized crime unit, including Morris, the supervisor. But he did not stop there.
In 2012, when I interviewed John Connolly, he told me about the time he introduced Bulger to Jeremiah O’Sullivan. The meeting took place in December 1978, and it had a sense of urgency. A few months earlier, Bulger had been abruptly dropped as a Top Echelon Informant when it was announced to the FBI that he was the target of a federal investigation. Being the target of a criminal probe disqualified someone from being an informant.
In Bulger’s case, he and his partner Flemmi were part of a massive investigation involving the fixing of horse races at tracks throughout the Northeast. Spearheaded by a consortium of prosecutors from different jurisdictions, the investigation had been ongoing for years. A sprawling web of criminals, led by Howie Winter, had bought off jockeys and had been fixing races at eight different tracks in five states. Investigators in New Jersey had initiated the case revolving around an informant named Anthony “Fat Tony” Ciulla, a Boston Mafiosi who, along with Winter, had devised the scam. For nearly four years the gangsters had been fixing horse races at tracks in New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and elsewhere. It was estimated that, from 1974 to 1978, they had netted more than $8 million.
In the fall of 1978, Ciulla testified in front of a grand jury in New Jersey. Now the case was spreading to the District of Massachusetts, and federal indictments seemed imminent.
Agents John Connolly and John Morris were concerned that they were about to lose their prize informants, Bulger and Flemmi. So they met with Jeremiah O’Sullivan, lead prosecutor in the case.
It went against FBI informant-handling regulations for the agents to reveal the identity of an active informant to anyone, including a federal prosecutor. But these were special circumstances. Bulger and Flemmi represented the FBI’s best chance for making a major case against Jerry Angiulo and the Mafia, which had became the number-one priority in the Boston field office. The agents explained all this to O’Sullivan, who shared their dream of a major case targeting the Angiulo brothers. O’Sullivan told the agents he would look into it and get back to them.
According to Connolly, he later heard from O’Sullivan, who wanted to meet Bulger. “I asked him, ‘Are you sure? You don’t have to.’” It was highly unusual for an assistant U.S. attorney to meet face-to-face with someone like Bulger. But O’Sullivan insisted. Connolly set up a meeting between the city’s rising mobster and its top organized crime prosecutor in a hotel room on a rainy afternoon around Christmas. “I was there,” Connolly told me. “Jimmy met Jerry. As I remember it, they were both quite impressed with one another.”
After this meeting, in January 1979, O’Sullivan agreed to drop Bulger and Flemmi from the indictment. They were free and clear.
On February 3, 1979, the indictments were announced. It was as if an atomic bomb had been dropped on the New England underworld. Twenty-one gangsters were arrested in a series of high-profile raids throughout the region. Thanks to Connolly, John Martorano had learned about the indictment and gone on the run. Howie Winter was not tipped off and had been arrested; he was facing a twenty-year sentence.
Bulger was reinstated as a Top Echelon Informant. In addition, Steve Flemmi was officially reopened as a TE in February 1980, with Special Agent John Connolly as his handler.
The circle of continuity was complete: as Flemmi’s handler, Connolly officially assumed the role of H. Paul Rico, an agent he still referred to many years later, from prison, as “a great man.”
The race-fixing case was a turning point on many levels. It virtually wiped out the Winter Hill Mob: along with Howie Winter, Jim Martorano was also arrested. Brother Johnny was forced to go on the lam. “Joe Mac” McDonald, who was already on the lam, was forced to stay. A host of other affiliated criminals were either arrested or forced into hiding and out of the rackets.
Already, Whitey had eliminated the Mullen gang. Now, with the help of the FBI and the most powerful federal prosecutor in New England, he had been a party to the elimination of the Winter Hill Mob. The gang that had been founded by Buddy McLean, then expanded upon by Howie Winter, Joe Mac, Jimmy Sims, and the Martorano brothers, was now under the sole control of Bulger and Flemmi.
Whitey didn’t have to make trips over to the Marshall Motors garage in Somerville anymore. The Winter Hill Mob was dead. It was all Whitey and Stevie now, with South Boston as their exclusive base of operation.
The FBI agents made the introductions, but O’Sullivan had pulled the trigger. Bulger’s connections had now expanded beyond Connolly and Morris into a new and more exalted realm of the criminal justice system. The pieces were in place for Bulger to become boss of the entire Boston underworld. Only one thing stood in his way: the Mafia.
AT THE BULGER trial, prosecutors Wyshak and Kelly had little to gain by shedding light on this narrative of alliances between the underworld and the upperworld in Boston. They were more concerned with establishing a link between Bulger and the victims of his crimes. The links to O’Sullivan were especially problematic for the prosecutors. After O’Sullivan left the Organized Crime Strike Force in 1987, he became U.S. attorney, a predecessor to the person currently holding the job, Carmen Ortiz. To ponder the irony that O’Sullivan, a key component in Bulger’s rise to power, was once in control of the very office that now sought to prosecute the mob boss was something the prosecutors needed to stifle at every turn. Instead, the jury was treated to a more plebeian narrative, some of it punctuated with low humor.
When Frank Capizzi took the stand, courtroom spectators might have guessed they were in for a show. Capizzi was seventy-nine years old, with his white hair in a ponytail. He wore an out-of-date sport coat, and had a voice out of central casting. He spoke in the gravelly tones of the late actor Michael V. Gazzo, who played the character Frank Pantangeli in The Godfather: Part II—a voice so redolent of the streets that for generations after that movie was released, young Mafiosi who thought they sounded tough were merely doing an imitation of Michael Gazzo.
Capizzi, on the other hand, was an original. His time in the underworld predated both Godfather movies.
He took the stand with a wild-eyed look, as if taking the stand in a criminal court preceding was something he had feared his entire life. He glanced in the direction of Bulger but seemed disoriented, as if everything about the environment he was in suggested that he had arrived prematurely at his own conception of hell on earth.
The prosecutor, Zach Hafer, sensed the witness’s discomfort and sought to put him at ease. “Sir,” he said, “before we get to the substance of your testimony, I want to ask you a few questions about your medical condition, if I could. Do you have a condition, sir, that causes something referred to as audio interruption?”
“Yes, absolutely,” said Capizzi.
“Could you explain that?”
“After I had encephalitis meningitis, I got a condition. When I hear you speak, I have to stop and think about what you’re saying, because what you’re saying to me comes over in the Sicilian language. Some words are English, some words are Sicilian, and I have to decipher.”
Oh boy: audio interruption. Did such a thing exist? There were titters in the courtroom among the jury and the spectators. It sounded like the beginnings of a comedy routine. Said Hafer, “If you need me to repeat anything or slow down, just let me know.”
Capizzi was there to serve the same function as Diane Sussman de Tennen, Ralph DeMasi, and others who had survived Winter Hill gangland mayhem from the time of the gang wars and could now provide sinew and flesh to crimes that might otherwise be perceived as remote or outdated.
Back in 1973, like a lot of gangsters in Boston, Capizzi found himself caught up in the Winter Hill Mob’s murderous hunt for Indian Al Notarangeli. In Capizzi’s case, he was in a car one night with a couple of members of Notarangeli’s crew, Al “Bud” Plummer and Hugh “Sonny” Shields. They had just pulled up to a stoplight at the intersection of Commercial and Hanover streets, in the heart of the city’s North End.
Capizzi felt safe on Hanover Street. He’d been born and raised in a cold-water flat at 452 Hanover Street, on the exact corner where he now sat in the backseat of Al Plummer’s car. This was his neighborhood. His parents had come here from the same town in Sicily, only they didn’t know that until they met on Hanover Street. They both found work in the garment industry. But Capizzi’s father, who was a tailor, died suddenly when Frank was in his late teens, and his mother passed away a year later. Frank was on his own. In 1952, he joined the U.S. Coast Guard, and for a time was stationed at a Coast Guard facility located, of all places, at the corner of Commercial and Hanover streets. After leaving the Coast Guard, young Frank Capizzi became a numbers runner and a gambler and, according to law enforcement, a made member of La Cosa Nostra.
Before he was sitting in the backseat of Al Plummer’s car, at an intersection near where much of his life seemed to have taken place, Capizzi was at a bar having a drink. He decided to go see his Sicilian grandmother. “She still lived in the North End, and thinking about this, I knew she never slept. So it was ten o’clock at night, and I was going to pay her a good-night visit. She was about eighty-five, I think, or eighty-eight at the time. And she still lived on Hanover Street.” So he was on his way to give his grandmother a good-night kiss on the cheek, and he’d enlisted Al Plummer to give him a ride.
Asked Hafer, “What happened after you got into the car with Plummer and Shields on March 19, 1973?”
Capizzi paused; the prosecutor’s words seemed to be bouncing around inside his head. “Excuse me. I was just deciphering what you were saying.”
“No problem. Take your time. After you were in the car driving towards Hanover Street, did something unusual happen?”
“Unusual?” The witness seemed insulted by the word’s inadequacy. “A firing squad hit us,” he proclaimed. “For maybe two and a half minutes, about a hundred slugs hit the automobile, and it imploded.”
“Could you tell from the noise how many guns were firing at you?”
“I’ll speculate. It sounded and felt like maybe two automatic weapons and maybe a couple of rifles or pistols.”
The jury had heard about this event from one of the men on the other side of the guns—Martorano—who testified that he and Howie Winter did the shooting from one car, with Bulger and others providing backup in another.
“What did you do when the shooting stopped?” asked Hafer.
“Unbelievably, although I had been hit in the head and could feel warm blood running down my neck and excruciating pain in my back, I said, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of this car. Bud, come on.’ And I put my hand into his neck where his head should have been.” Plummer’s head had been obliterated by the fusillade of bullets.
Capizzi’s testimony was dramatic, and as he explained being rushed to the hospital and undergoing emergency surgery—which saved his life—he warmed to the idea of having a captive audience. Capizzi told the jury and everyone in the courtroom that after that fateful day in 1973, which resulted in the death of Al Plummer, he left the city of his birth and never returned.
On cross-examination, the witness became feisty, as if he were once again a gangster back on the streets. When defense attorney Carney asked if Jerry Angiulo was the head of a criminal group in the North End, he answered, “That’s what the papers say.”
“Do you know that yourself?” asked Carney.
“You know, ask me a more specific question. Did I know that? The question should be, Who doesn’t know that?”
The courtroom erupted in laughter. Capizzi smiled; he was getting the hang of this. But then Carney started asking about specific criminal activities, and Capizzi’s audio interruption kicked in. “Say that again?” he responded to a question about illegal gambling, which he theoretically heard half in Sicilian and half in English. And to another question, “Would you repeat that again—slowly? I wanna get every word,” to which jurors and spectators again burst into laughter.
When Carney asked Capizzi about whether Al Notarangeli made his living from bookmaking forty years ago, he responded, “Forty years ago? Who remembers a lot of what we did forty years ago? He probably gambled like the rest of us.”
Then Carney got specific: “Were you involved in any way in illegal bookmaking?”
Capizzi gave the lawyer a hard stare, the kind he may have given to late-paying gambling clients back in the day. He turned to the judge. “Your Honor, I’m going to invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment.”
The judge tried to explain to Capizzi that he already had immunity to testify; he didn’t need to claim the Fifth. He could not be prosecuted for anything he might say. But Capizzi wasn’t buying it. He asked to see a court-appointed lawyer. So he was removed from the stand until a lawyer could be found to explain the situation. Meanwhile, other minor witnesses were brought to the stand to give testimony.
After a few hours, Capizzi was brought back to the witness stand. He was ready to resume. But, in the intervening time, defense lawyer Carney had apparently decided that this witness, with his audio interruption and selective memory, was more trouble than he was worth. Capizzi took the stand, and Carney said, “Your Honor, I have no further questions.”
“Mr. Capizzi,” said Judge Casper. “You don’t have to get comfortable. Examination is completed. You’re excused.”
Capizzi seemed positively thrilled. “Thank you, Your Honor.”
“No problem, sir.”
As the aging Mafiosi stood up, there were chuckles of appreciation in the courtroom. He looked out at the people, as if a standing ovation might be in order. “Thank you, everyone,” he announced. “I appreciate it. It’s been an experience.”
And then he left, a minor though memorable player in the trial of Whitey Bulger.