A few months after I wrote to U.S. Attorney Stern, I got some good news. Colonel Hillman, the one who’d sent me to Leominster, was being replaced by a new superintendent, Colonel John DiFava. A short time after that I made captain, and DiFava returned me to headquarters to serve as chief of staff for Lieutenant Colonel Jack Cunningham. He was in charge of Field Services, which covers most of the State Police activities. He’d done some investigation, and he believed in the Bulger case. I still couldn’t work on the case full-time, but I could watch over it more closely than I could in Leominster, and I had the support of the colonel and my lieutenant colonel. And I was back.
And then there was Kevin Weeks. If Martorano knew the Whitey of the past, Kevin knew the Whitey of the present, right up to the time he fled in 1995, and even since.
Weeks was a real Southie type—tough, street-smart, humorless, and loyal. He would never have made a move against Whitey if Martorano hadn’t. Like both Bulgers and John Connolly, Weeks had grown up in the Old Harbor housing project. He was one of six children; his father changed tires for a living. He’d been a decent boxer in his teens, and after graduating from South Boston High, he’d turned semipro as a middleweight. He’d taken a job at Whitey’s bar, the Triple O’s, and Whitey liked the way he’d handled himself, dispensing punishment only as needed. Whitey didn’t like many people, but he liked Weeks and let him hang around. People said that they were like father and son, that they looked out for each other. As it turned out, the concern went only one way.
Kevin was one of the thugs I’d seen frantically dashing about Southie that last night when we were both trying to find Whitey—they wanted to warn him about us, and we wanted to arrest him. Since then, we’d gotten the earlier info from the counterfeiter suggesting continuing ties to Whitey as a fugitive, but we never had enough to move on Weeks.
We eventually got to Weeks with the help of a terrific agent named Dave Lazarus at the IRS, plus Johnson and Doherty and Tom Reilly’s attorney general’s office. After months of legwork, we hit Weeks with a serious package of indictments. Teams of troopers fanned out over South Boston to get him. Mike Scanlan, Trooper Nunzio Orlando, and Lazarus were the ones to spot Weeks on N Street as he was returning to his car.
“Kevin,” Scanlan called out to him. “You got a minute?” Weeks didn’t recognize him but said he was headed to the Rotary Variety, Whitey’s old store, and could meet him there if he wanted. Then Scanlan identified himself and told Weeks to stay right where he was.
Then Johnson, Doherty, and Duffy swooped in to help out, and Doherty arranged to bring Kevin back to his DEA offices near City Hall. There, they handed him the indictment. It was long and involved, with twenty-nine counts in all, including extortion, racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy to distribute drugs, and several others. These were serious charges that had taken us months to put together. Weeks’s head dropped as he read through all of them.
This was November 1999, long after Whitey’s flight and Flemmi’s revelations. By now, Weeks knew that Whitey Bulger was not what he seemed. Later, he told us exactly when he found out. It was back when Flemmi was testifying. Weeks had the TV going in the background while he read a book. The ten o’clock news came on with a report about Flemmi’s relationship with the FBI. Weeks lurched out of his seat, sending the book to the floor. He stormed around the house screaming, “What the fuck? What the fuck?” He couldn’t believe it. He was so sure he’d misunderstood that he watched until the eleven o’clock news came on and he realized he had it right. Steve Flemmi was an FBI informant, and probably Whitey Bulger was, too.
Weeks was full of arrogance. You could see it on his face, and in the way he carried himself. As many charges as there were, and as detailed as they were, he figured he could beat them. No prosecutors would ever outsmart Kevin Weeks.
But a couple of veteran mob lawyers set him straight: even if he did get rid of most of the charges, which he probably wouldn’t, he’d still spend a good twenty years in prison. And there was something else to consider. Now that everyone knew Flemmi and Whitey had been federal snitches, they might think Weeks was one, too. And that might not be healthy.
But he had the example of John Martorano. Weeks had never met Martorano, but he admired him. A lot of hoods did. Not flashy, not loud, but solid as anything. Others might think that Weeks was Bulger’s son, but Martorano would have been a better fit as a father to him. Both of them told it like it was, and briefly. Neither ever wanted to be a legend, or the boss. They just did what they had to do, and no more. If Johnny Martorano turned state’s evidence, then Kevin Weeks could, too. As Jimmy Martorano said, you can’t rat a rat.
When Weeks was first arrested, he wanted to make clear to everyone that he was never going to give up his friends. That was the end of November. Early in December, Weeks told his girlfriend, Janice Connolly (no relation to John), to get in touch with our man Duffy and let him know that actually he’d like to talk about cooperating with us. (One columnist calculated that the turnaround from “cooperate never” to “cooperate now” took exactly fourteen days, and said that Kevin should be renamed “Two Weeks.”)
As soon as Weeks said he wanted to talk, though, he stopped dealing from strength. He was still a tough guy, but a tough guy who needs something from you isn’t quite so tough. On our side, we had nothing to lose. If Weeks could produce information that made it worthwhile for us to consider cutting his sentence, then we would. If he didn’t, then he got nothing. It was pretty simple. On Kevin’s side, the question was—when was he going to see that he needed us more than we needed him? The sneer on his face said never; it seemed welded on. But he loosened up eventually.
He wasn’t the warmest guy, but I could work with him. I didn’t care about any of the macho; I cared only about what he could give us. And if he could hand us Whitey, that was sure good enough for me. Because of Weeks’s efforts to help Bulger secure fake IDs, I’d hoped that he might help us find Bulger. He’d been gone for almost five years, and nobody seemed to have a clue about where he was. There was talk that he was overseas, maybe in England. Or he could have been in Florida. Who knew? Not the FBI, anyway. A current alias, a location, a car. Anything that would jump-start the manhunt? Unfortunately, Kevin shook his head. He had no idea. While he’d been in touch with Whitey weekly for the first year or two, as Whitey called in from pay phones to see what was going on in Boston, the contact had fallen way off a year before, and Kevin said it was totally dead now. He didn’t know where Whitey was.
Weeks was able to fill us in on why Whitey had fled. As Flemmi had told us, Connolly had tipped him off to the coming arrests at the end of December. Weeks said that, unlike Flemmi, Whitey had immediately left town, going to New York with Theresa Stanley. He’d holed up there in a hotel, and Weeks had gone down to see him, meeting them there outside the New York Public Library. But when the arrests didn’t happen, Whitey had figured it was September all over again, and he started back to Boston on the evening of January 5. Driving up through Connecticut, though, he got news of the indictments over the radio. He immediately made a U-turn back to the city, and the two hunkered down there, just two more faces in a big city, for several more weeks. At one point, Weeks drove down to see them. Whitey asked him to meet them “at the lions,” meaning outside the New York Public Library. Stanley soon got sick of life on the run with Whitey, who was never the most cheerful companion. She missed her kids and wanted to go home. Whitey drove her back to Southie and dropped her off with Weeks in a parking lot. He said he’d call her, but he never did. Weeks then picked up Catherine Greig.
If we couldn’t use Kevin to find Whitey, I hoped that we could at least use him to tear down some of the legends that had sprung up about him. Martorano had gone a long way toward implicating Bulger in Wheeler’s murder, but there were others that we wanted to get him for, and we needed Weeks’s help. Despite the revelations about Whitey’s illicit relationship with the FBI, and his drug dealing, extortion, and racketeering, a lot of people around town continued to believe that Whitey wasn’t really all that bad. If he was an informant, this line went, wasn’t that a good thing? And if he was a gangster, so what? There are always gangsters.
But it was more than that. In media interviews, the FBI was promoting Whitey as a Robin Hood, supposedly keeping drugs out of South Boston.
And in Southie, the politics of forced busing still hung over everything. Even though that issue was from the 1970s, it created a “Southie against the world” mentality that had never gone away. Whitey had played into it back then, shooting out windows at the Globe offices late one night because he was infuriated by its pro-busing line. And he represented the harsh Southie approach to life, the attitude best expressed by a middle finger. The more that people elsewhere in the city were shocked by Whitey Bulger, the more they liked him in Southie.
But Kevin Weeks would change all that. He would lead us to the bodies.
When the year rolled over to 2000, on top of everything else we had to deal with the Y2K hysteria, preparing for a host of possible public-safety crises that, thankfully, never happened. By now Colonel DiFava had promoted me to major and assigned me to command the 230-man Troop A in Danvers, toward the North Shore. DiFava was still a believer in the Bulger investigation, so I was free to devote as much time to the case as I could spare.
On New Year’s Day, Kevin Weeks was in the custody of the U.S. Marshals. With Weeks, even more than with the others, you never knew quite where you stood. But at bottom, working with informants is all about trust, and that has to go both ways. You expect them to tell the truth, and they expect you to honor your promises.
And that trust can only be developed one-on-one, or as close to one-on-one as you can get. Certainly, it can’t be developed in a room full of people with different agendas firing off questions. But with Weeks, guess what. Once the FBI learned that we had flipped him, the feds wanted in. And they did the usual: they leaned on the USAO, this time on Durham.
In December 1999, we finally brought Weeks up to the new federal courthouse for the first of a series of formal interviews. He was represented by a former federal prosecutor, Dennis Kelly. On our side, it was me, Johnson, Doherty, and Duffy—and John Tutungian, of the original five, who’d been working for O’Malley and managed to get reattached to the Bulger case, at least for the time being.
All witnesses, even the most hard-boiled of them, tell stories. They’re human, and that’s what humans do. They give their version of the truth. But there are certain facts that are so monumental that there is no getting around them, no matter what anyone says. And those are the facts on which you can build your case. And, finally, Weeks gave them to us. He gave us the murders. Ones he saw and could describe in detail. And once he did, and we could confirm them, the legend of Whitey Bulger was over.
Still, before we could get anywhere with Weeks, we had to test his veracity. And we had our chance when he told us about the guns. He said that Bulger and Flemmi had stashed a small arsenal in an outbuilding in back of Flemmi’s mother’s house, the one pretty much next door to Billy Bulger’s place.
Weeks told us exactly where to look: behind one wall in a little guesthouse that the Flemmis used primarily for hanging out and drinking beer, in back of the main house. They had everything there, Weeks told us. Handguns, semiautomatics, silencers. At least thirty guns altogether.
That was it, the perfect test. Either the guns were there or they weren’t. So either he was telling us the truth, or he wasn’t. We needed to move on that right away before those guns disappeared. Wyshak drew up the paperwork for the search warrant. That would take a day, so, while we waited for it, we turned Weeks back to the murders.
We went out to Mrs. Flemmi’s house a few days later. It was a freezing January day, with biting winds and several inches of dusty snow on the ground. Doherty, Johnson, and Duffy went with me, and I brought along some State Police crime scene personnel to do the special forensics of such a site, if we found it. Photographing everything, pulling off any fingerprints, mapping out the location. When we knocked on the door, Mike Flemmi answered. A shorter, wider version of his brother, Mike was an officer in the Boston police department; he and I had worked on some fugitive cases together. The third brother was the oldest, Jimmy “The Bear” Flemmi. Like his two brothers, Mike was an edgy guy, and I’d never felt comfortable around him. Having two mobsters for brothers will do that when you’re in law enforcement. It was dizzying—here we had Stevie, Jimmy, and Mike Flemmi all together in one house, and Whitey’s brother Billy Bulger next door.
We showed Mike the search warrant we’d obtained to look for the guns. Weeks had told us they were hidden inside a wall in a small cottage beside the house. Flemmi looked at the warrant, but he didn’t seem too surprised, and he said almost nothing. This was revealing. If he’d showed up at my house with a search warrant for thirty guns on the premises, I’d have plenty to say. He found the key to the cottage and led us around to its front door. The place was basically just a rec room with a couch, a TV, some chairs, and a kitchenette. Weeks had told us that the guns were hidden inside the wall behind the refrigerator. While Flemmi stood by, arms crossed, radiating irritation, we pulled the fridge back from the wall. The wall was paneled, and the nails weren’t gouged or dented as if they’d been pulled and re-hammered. Everything looked neat and tight, as though it had never been touched since it had been installed. But when I rapped on it with my knuckles, it sounded hollow.
We dug into a tool kit, pulled out a couple of hammers, popped the nails, and peeled the panels back. There was a shallow closet in there, with several shelves. We didn’t see any guns. But we did find several gun racks—holders for what looked like a range of firearms, from handguns on up to automatic rifles, maybe even submachine guns. There were spaces for at least two dozen guns altogether, and maybe more. But the racks were all empty. Somebody had obviously cleaned them all out.
I glanced back at Flemmi and asked him if he knew anything about this. He shrugged, said no. But he was a poor actor, and it was plain he knew all about the guns, and had probably removed them himself. When we probed around inside with a flashlight, we found some boxes of bullets of various calibers, and a gun silencer or two. I glanced back at Mike, and he just kind of shrugged, as if to say: I don’t know anything about that.
Finally, Johnson took the flashlight, peered down behind a strip of paneling we couldn’t remove, and thought he saw something. He put on a pair of clear plastic gloves, reached all the way down, and came back up with a handgun.
I turned back to Mike. “Any idea how that got here?” I asked.
This time, Flemmi looked panicky. “Shit—I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got no idea how that got there.”
This time, it wasn’t the FBI, at least not directly. We found out later that when Stevie Flemmi learned that Weeks was talking to us, he’d told Mike and Flemmi’s stepson Billy Hussey to clean the gun locker out. They opened up the paneling, scooped out all the guns—machine guns and automatic weapons, just as we’d thought—stuffed them into some duffel bags, and drove them down to a storage facility in Florida. We found them all there later.
Staring at the handgun he missed, though, Mike had to wonder—had this gun been used in a murder? By his brother? In that case, would it convict Stevie of murder? And was Mike now an accessory?
The raid produced more than the gun. It showed that we could trust Kevin Weeks.
It was fairly late by then, maybe seven, and we were tired and hungry after a long day, so we went down to a dinner place called Farragut’s for something to eat. We’d hardly started in when Stevie Johnson got a call on his cell. He listened for a few minutes, then shut off the phone.
“Hey, Tommy, that was a trooper. They’re about to start digging.”
“Shit, no. At Florian’s?”
“You got it.” Weeks had showed us the spot earlier, but we hadn’t had a chance to get in there because we were so busy with the guns.
“Now?” It was freezing. The plan was to do Florian’s tomorrow.
“O’Malley wants to get it going tonight,” Stevie told me. “He’s got the heavy machinery, the crime scene people, everything.”
Guns were one thing, bodies another. I knew that, and obviously O’Malley did, too. After he took over from me as head of SSS, he’d pretty much ignored the Bulger investigation as a losing proposition. We’d been hitting roadblocks with USAO, had some bad luck with court rulings, and had trouble getting the witnesses we needed. So O’Malley had gone off and done his own thing with SSS, and that was OK with me.
Now that things were finally heating up on Bulger, and we were close to getting the bodies that would prove Whitey to be the murderer we all knew him to be, everything changed. Now O’Malley wanted in. I can’t blame him—human nature. It was flattering, in its way. We had something desirable.
In law enforcement, you can pile racketeering charges up to the sky, but they’ll never match a single count of murder, let alone several counts. Florian’s could deliver us those, and we’d have Weeks’s testimony to prove that Bulger and Flemmi had done it. The discovery would finally bring closure for families wondering what had happened to their loved ones. And it would make irrelevant Flemmi’s belabored argument that the FBI had allowed any crimes up to murder. Well, this was murder.
Lots of times, murders are just part of the mobster business. Kill or get killed. But the murder of Debbie Davis was different, and Kevin Weeks had told us all about it. More than any of the others, this was the one that showed the savage side of Bulger and Flemmi. By all accounts—and plenty of other people knew Debbie—she was a sweetheart, gentle and trusting. The girl next door, the kind who’d babysit for your children and call you Mrs. or Mr. She looked like Farrah Fawcett, whose pinup was everywhere back then, because of the big blond hair, the radiant smile, and the curves. But there was still a lot of little girl in her.
Although Flemmi still had a wife from his days as a paratrooper, he lived with Marion Hussey, the mother of the Stephen who owned Schooner’s and of Billy, who’d removed the guns, in that nice house with a tennis court out back in Milton. But he loved girls like Debbie, had loved several like her, and would love several more. He’d sneak around with them, act all excited about them, right up until they got into their twenties, when womanhood set in, and he’d lose interest. Davis had been Flemmi’s girlfriend since she was seventeen. He met her in an upscale jewelry store in Brookline, one town over from Boston, where Davis worked at the counter after school. She was a high school junior. Flemmi was in his forties, and she was perfect for him.
It wasn’t long before Stevie Flemmi and Debbie were tooling around town in his Jaguar, and he’d installed her in a love nest he rented in Brookline. He’d bought her stuff, too, like a Maserati. She must have loved the attention and the money, and maybe she was impressed, too, with the worldliness of a man like Stevie, who acted as if he knew everything and everyone. But she must have been aware of the sick rumors about another pert beauty who’d captured Flemmi’s attention and with whom he had dallied for some time. This was Marion Hussey’s own daughter, also named Debbie. That Debbie was his stepdaughter, and Flemmi had been abusing her since she was in grade school, if not before. Strung out on all the weirdness of being regularly molested by a mobster stepdad, Debbie Hussey was a mess. She did drugs, stripped in the Combat Zone, did anything to get by. It was both incest and sexual abuse, but nobody ever said anything about it, or at least nobody said anything that made a difference. No one ever said anything when it came to Stevie Flemmi. If a problem came up, he laid a little money on it. And if it kept coming up, it disappeared.
Debbie Davis stuck by him, seduced by the fast life. She knew that Flemmi ran with Whitey Bulger, that he was in with other mobsters, that he had a lot more money than he could account for, and that he never mentioned a legitimate job. She even knew about Connolly. Knowing anything about Connolly was knowing too much, and she knew a lot more than that. She was OK with all the craziness with the FBI, but it started to bother her that she was losing Stevie’s attention. He seemed stressed all the time. (This was 1981, after all, the year of all the Wheeler murders.) Plus, she was sure there were other women. To show her he cared, he finally divorced his first wife, but that wasn’t the point. She had to have wondered: What’s the use? That summer when she turned twenty-six, she decided to take a little break from him and flew to Acapulco. There, she met a handsome young Mexican businessman who was respectable, was fun to be with, and genuinely adored her. He wasn’t like Flemmi at all. She returned to visit him again a few months later, and stayed longer.
Flemmi must have seemed to be understanding, an older man who knew how things are. Because when she got back from Mexico the second time, she did something that was otherwise extremely risky. She tried to get clear with Flemmi. She wanted to break up. She loved her new man. Flemmi got angry, but that was to be expected. He didn’t go crazy. He said she should come over to his parents’ new house, the one where we later found the guns on East Third Street, to talk it over. Flemmi had just bought the house for his parents, and he wanted to show her around. She’d figured she’d be fine if Flemmi’s parents were around. A couple of days later, after she went shopping with her mother, she dropped by the place as they’d arranged.
That was September 17, 1981. Debbie Davis had never been seen since.
Her disappearance was never investigated. No one in law enforcement ever asked Flemmi about what went on that afternoon. Everyone took Flemmi’s word for it that she was a screwed-up kid who’d decided to blow town and get away from everything. She had her Mexican, after all. And she’d talked of wanting to go to California. In retrospect, it was obvious why no one in law enforcement pursued it: thanks to Connolly, the FBI had persuaded everyone to back off. The feds would handle it. But, of course, they never did, and the mystery of Debbie’s disappearance was never solved. Despite the heavy suspicions of the Davis family, who knew plenty about Steve Flemmi, the matter was treated as a routine missing person case, nothing pressing. Eventually, just about everyone except her family and friends forgot that Debbie Davis had ever lived.
That was everything that was known about Debbie Davis until we talked to Kevin Weeks, and he told us the rest, because he’d gotten the lowdown from Bulger. When Debbie stepped inside that door, Whitey and Stevie were waiting for her. It was only them. Flemmi’s parents weren’t around. Neither of them had any plans to work anything out with Debbie. She knew too much, and she had to go. Bulger grabbed her and tied her to a chair, and then wrapped duct tape around her head, sealing her mouth. Then, when she was immobilized, Flemmi loomed over her. As she looked up at him in terror, he leaned down, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered she would be going “to a better place.” Then Bulger leaped toward her, brought his hands around her neck, and squeezed. She must have struggled and kicked; strangle victims never go easily. But Bulger was unrelenting, and she soon went limp. Later, Flemmi claimed that he was so angry at Bulger that he nearly shot him right there. But, of course, he did not. He let it be. “His ego got in the way,” Weeks told us with a shrug, as if it was no big deal. “He couldn’t take her leaving him for another guy, especially a Mexican.”
Weeks said that Whitey and Flemmi stuffed the body into a plastic garbage bag, threw it into the back of a trunk, and then buried it somewhere along the shore of the Neponset River, on the Quincy side. He didn’t know exactly where. He just knew it was down there with the body of Tommy King, a mobster Whitey had dispatched in 1975. As Weeks told it, King had made the mistake of making a fist at Whitey after the two had words. Later, Whitey made King think that he’d forgotten all about it, and they should all go out in the car when Whitey was, as Weeks said, “looking for someone to kill.” King had stuffed himself into a bulletproof vest, thinking he was going out on a hit, and sat in the passenger seat, the death seat. Whitey was behind, in the murder seat. King got it in the back of the head. Because Weeks couldn’t be sure about the exact location of those graves, our plan had to be to start with other grave sites he was sure of and work our way up.
That afternoon, before we went to Flemmi’s mother’s house, Doherty, Duffy, and O’Malley, along with a few U.S. Marshals, brought Weeks out in handcuffs to point out the spot where he’d helped Whitey and Flemmi bury the bodies. Even though Weeks probably hadn’t been out to this part of Dorchester in years, he directed them to Florian’s as if he came out every morning. Turn here, turn there, and there it was.
Florian’s is a function room owned by the Boston firefighters’ union, a modest place for a dinner dance or a banquet. A driveway passes in front of it, and then there’s a thicket of trees and some low bushes across the street, which settle down into a gulley that must drop five feet off road level.
It was not the most obvious place for a mass grave, and that’s probably the reason Whitey chose it. Just a dumping ground, the bones of the dead all heaped together, Weeks said, about eight feet down. The whole idea was hideous, a burial ground just off the road, right where banquet guests would come out. And the three bodies joined together forever, like a family: Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, and Debbie Hussey. This was the wreckage that Whitey left behind.
Bucky Barrett was the first to die. He was a safecracker, drug dealer, jeweler, and bank robber who’d failed to cut in Whitey on a $1.5 million bank heist in nearby Medford. Instead, he’d handed Frank Salemme $100,000 to protect him from Whitey. That did not sit well, and two years later, Whitey lured Bucky to a friend’s house at 799 East Third Street to take a look at some hot diamonds. When Bucky arrived, Whitey thrust an automatic rifle in his face and told him to sit down at the kitchen table. Stevie shackled his legs to his chair while Whitey trained the gun on Bucky’s face. He complained about Barrett’s deal with Salemme and demanded compensation. Bucky told Whitey where he’d stashed money around town, and Whitey and Stevie drove around collecting what they could while Weeks watched Barrett. The two came back with $50,000. Bucky said his prayers. Exhausted from the ordeal, he asked to lie down. Stevie led him downstairs for a nap, and Whitey shot him from behind. The basement had an earth floor, and, with a small military shovel, Flemmi dug a shallow grave for Barrett. Bulger and Flemmi stripped the corpse, yanked the teeth, and dropped Barrett into the hole. They spread lime over the body before covering it up. Afterward, Bulger started calling Flemmi “Dr. Mengele.”
Then came the deckhand McIntyre, who had been buried in the basement at 799 as well.
And finally, it was Debbie Hussey. She was never the steady that Davis was, but then, Flemmi had to do his best to conceal the relationship, considering that he was living with her mother and regarded her as his daughter. Like Davis, she was twenty-six when the fun went out of the relationship for Flemmi. He’d turned his attention to other girls, younger ones, and that made Debbie furious. But she knew too much, and he could never just let her go.
Before she broke with him, though, Flemmi asked her to meet him one last time. At 799. He’d bought her a fur coat first, to let her know there were no hard feelings. But as soon as she was inside the door, Whitey was on her, slamming her to the ground, then hooking his legs around her waist and groping for her neck with his hands. Debbie was small, barely five feet, and weighed nothing. She didn’t put up much of a struggle. He squeezed furiously, relaxed his grip only to see her surge back to life, and then squeezed again. Finally, she lay still, her lips and face a faint blue, her eyes bulging. Flemmi bent over her and put an ear to her chest. He insisted he heard a heartbeat.
Weeks was watching, horrified. He was sure she was dead. “But Stevie and Whitey sometimes got into this thing, where they competed with each other to see who could be tougher when it came to killing people.” Stevie took some clothesline, looped it around her neck, and twisted it ever tighter with a stick until he was sure it was over. Together, Whitey and Flemmi yanked off her clothes and removed her identifying details. Then they carried her downstairs and dropped her into a ditch that Weeks had dug for her there. But he’d miscalculated, and Hussey ended up almost on top of McIntyre.
That was 1984. A year later, Whitey and Stevie learned that his friend was planning to sell 799. They thought of buying the house themselves, but ended up enlisting Weeks to help them dig up the three bodies and move them somewhere else. They did it on Halloween weekend. Bulger chose the Florian’s site, and the three of them—Whitey, Stevie, and Kevin Weeks—set to digging a deep hole in the gulley to receive the bodies. At 799, the work was far grislier, as the bodies released such a horrible stench when they were uncovered that Weeks had to rush upstairs to an open window. Flemmi remained with the bodies, and when Weeks returned, he said Flemmi had “a wild look.”
The bodies were hideous beyond belief. The lime had eaten them away, and Barrett’s skull had snapped off at the spine, so that it rolled loose when the three tried to lift his corpse free. Hussey was wedged in on top of McIntyre, so that when Weeks tried to pry her loose with a pickax, he accidentally drove it into her chest. Finally, though, they were able to pack the remains into three body bags, and then carry them to a station wagon that Whitey called the Hearse and drive to Florian’s. Because it was Halloween weekend, Whitey pointed out, no one would pay much attention to them. Working in the dark, they settled the bodies into the open holes, and then packed the loose soil down on them.
With the officers guarding him, and his wrists handcuffed, Weeks directed everyone to the spot, thick with underbrush, across from Florian’s. “There,” Weeks said, pointing. The Marshals took Weeks back into custody, and we obtained warrants to search the site and the outbuilding at Flemmi’s mother’s house. Since it was getting late, and cold, we decided to hunt for the guns first. We’d come back to search for the bodies the next day.
It was nearly evening, darkness was falling, and the temperature was down in the single digits and likely to fall lower. But O’Malley insisted on going after the bodies anyway. He’d called in earthmoving equipment and a six-man crime scene unit, and he set up a State Police command post—an RV with radio equipment, conference room, and heat. He set the superbright lights going to light the whole scene like a movie set. People started pulling in to see what was going on, and soon the media people with the TV trucks were there, with satellite feeds.
A backhoe was grinding away when I got there. I found O’Malley standing in the driveway. When he saw me, he gave off an icy chill that was far worse than anything winter was doing. At the time, I outranked him—I was a major and he was a detective lieutenant—but that was nothing compared with the fact that I had put in ten years on Bulger and he’d put in about ten minutes. His boss, Rick Fraelick, Deputy Commander of Investigative Services, and Lieutenant Colonel Paul Regan, head of the Division of Investigative Services, were planning to come by shortly, and probably for the same reason.
“What’s going on here, Jack?” I asked O’Malley, as genially as I could.
“We’re going after the bodies. Weeks says they’re down here.”
“It’s pretty cold out, and it’s only going to get colder.”
“No point waiting.”
I didn’t tell him the bodies weren’t going anywhere.
“We found that arsenal hidden at Flemmi’s mother’s,” I told him. “Weeks was dead-on there.”
“Good. Let’s see if he’s right about this.” Then he turned his eyes back to the deepening pit, ending the conversation.
As the machinery continued to grind away, O’Malley stayed on, but Regan and Fraelick came around only long enough to look everything over, and then returned to the warmth of their cars. We stayed all night, and clear through until morning, even though it got brutally cold and an icy breeze came up. We’d put a tent over the dig to keep out some of the cold, but it didn’t do too much. It was better at concealing us from the increasing number of media people who were crowding around.
In the depth of winter, the permafrost is like concrete, and it went down about a foot. So it took a while for the teeth on the bucket of the heavy backhoe to cut through it and peel it back. Grinding and scraping and clanging, the big yellow machine made a huge racket that seemed all the louder at night. The deeper it went, though, the more delicately it had to work. This was a crime scene, but also a burial site, and we had to be respectful of the dead, and of the living who would grieve for them.
Dr. Anne Marie Miers, from the medical examiner’s office, was there working with us. She was an expert in recovering buried bodies, and after each scrape of the backhoe she’d check for any change in the color or consistency of the dirt that might indicate it had been dug up and replaced at some point. But down and down the backhoe would go, and there was no change.
Finally, about four or five feet down, we spotted something poking up out of the earth, something slim and knobby. At first it looked like a piece of a tree branch. It was a brownish-gray, as dark as the soil it was embedded in. But it was bone. Femur, Dr. Miers said after she’d had a chance to spoon away the dirt and then brush the bone off. “We’re there,” she said.
With that, the backhoe pulled back. Despite the cold, the forensics people in their blue State Police jackets went at their work patiently, piece by piece, scrap by scrap. It was like an archaeological dig. Everyone had to shovel gently to work around the bones, then dust them off with fine brushes, and finally sift the dirt for any tiny fragments that might have been missed. Bone, tissue, hair, clothing—everything had to be photographed on-site, removed, bagged, labeled, and mapped. It was an elaborate, exhausting procedure, made all the more difficult because the bodies were buried right on top of one another and the remains had intermingled as they had decomposed.
Despite the elements, we all kept on through the night. It was like the old days, when it was us against everybody. By the time the sun broke over the horizon, it was clear that we’d uncovered three bodies, and we had nearly finished the complicated task of removing them from the ground. Because they were just crumpled skeletons with shreds of cloth, it would take detailed analysis and DNA testing at forensic laboratories to make an official determination. And to prove what we already sensed was true: that we were looking at the remains of Debbie Hussey, Bucky Barrett, and John McIntyre. Everything fitted with what we knew of their physiques, the way they’d died, and how the bodies had been mutilated.
It was an exhausting night, one filled with a sense of accomplishment but also of terrible tragedy. When we were finally ready to leave, I was asked by a reporter to comment on what had gone on. “We’re conducting an investigation into organized crime,” I said, deliberately limiting myself to the obvious. “And we’ve just uncovered the remains of three victims.”
From the reaction I got, you’d think I’d taken a potshot at the governor. Even though we had pulled three bodies out of the earth to confirm our worst suspicions about Bulger and Flemmi, and even though I was the ranking officer for the State Police on the scene, the only topic in law enforcement circles was: What the hell is Foley doing? The USAO declared I had no business commenting on a federal case. Others in the State Police thought I should butt out, since I was only a troop commander.
Making it personal, Major Fraelick drove out to see me at my office in Danvers. Fraelick had been involved in the Lancaster Street surveillance of Bulger for the State Police back in the 1980s. That surveillance hadn’t gotten anywhere, for reasons that were very familiar to us. You might think that Fraelick saw us as colleagues and was coming to congratulate me on seeing his work through. Actually, no.
“Tommy, I’m here to remind you that you are out of OC work and you’re to stay away from the Bulger investigation.”
“On whose orders?” I asked him. He had no authority over me, as we both knew.
“On the orders of Colonel DiFava.”
“Rick, I’ve been working this case since 1990. I’ve stuck with it when everyone said it was going nowhere. And you want me to walk away? I don’t think so. And if Colonel DiFava thinks I’m done, he can tell me himself. Not you.”
“It’s not your place, Tommy. You’re up in Danvers, not Framingham.”
“Doesn’t matter. I take my orders from Colonel DiFava. Not you.”
Before I could get to Framingham to see DiFava, though, Fraelick called Fred Wyshak and tried to recruit him to push me off the prosecution of Bulger and Flemmi.
But Wyshak would have none of it.
When I got in to see DiFava, he told me that he didn’t know what Fraelick was talking about. “I never said anything like that. I think you’re doing great work and you should keep it up.” He specifically mentioned the dig at Florian’s, and Flemmi’s guns. It reflected well on the State Police, and there was no reason for me to stop.
It was the same old thing, except it wasn’t. Fraelick wasn’t trying to bounce me off the case for all the usual reasons: because the FBI was pressuring him, or because I had run afoul of the USAO, or because I was stepping on someone’s toes. He wanted me off because the case was going so well. He wanted me off because others wanted in. In their own twisted way, Fraelick and O’Malley did believe in me. I knew because they wanted to take our case.
That sentiment became unmistakable a few months after the discoveries at Florian’s. I got a call from Colonel DiFava at my office in Danvers. It was one that, at that point, I thought would never come. “I’d like you to come back to headquarters, Tommy,” DiFava told me. “I want you to be the deputy division commander of investigative services here.” Just as I had gotten used to barracks life in Leominster, I’d adjusted to it in Danvers. A tiny part of me wanted to stay right where I was. But the rest of me was ecstatic. I knew what it meant: that I could go back on the Bulger case full-time, and just as all our work was coming to fruition, too. I’d be serving under Lieutenant Colonel Paul Regan, and alongside Major Fraelick. That wasn’t going to please Fraelick. He would be in charge of the Special Service Section, SSS, my old organization, but it didn’t include Bulger anymore. But this didn’t matter nearly so much, now that I had the colonel’s support. I would be free to work on the case from headquarters unhindered, with ready access to the resources we desperately needed to push the case forward.