Where the Bodies Were Buried (10 page)

I said, “Yeah, but you haven't been subpoenaed yet.”

It was a prospect of considerable discussion whether or not Nee would be called by the defense to testify. He had already decided, under advisement from his attorney, that if he were called he would take the stand and invoke his Fifth Amendment right to not testify, on the grounds that he might incriminate himself.

This brought the conversation around to whether or not Whitey himself would take the stand. In the months leading up to the trial, Bulger's lawyers had stated publicly on a number of occasions that he would, that Whitey was anxious to tell his version of events in the courtroom. These proclamations, delivered both inside the courtroom, to the judge, and outside the courtroom, to the media, had contributed to the high level of advance publicity the trial had received all around the globe.

From the outset, I doubted Bulger would take the stand. I mentioned to Nee and Weeks that it was telling that during his opening statement to the jury, Carney had made no promises that Bulger would testify.

“Good,” said Kevin. “He should keep his mouth shut.”

I counterargued: “I'm hoping he takes the stand and names names of all the government people who facilitated his deal. I want him to get up there
and lay it all out on the table.” I was being a little provocative, knowing that this was not what Nee and Weeks wanted to see.

“Of course,” said Kevin. “You're a writer. You want him to testify because that's a better story, but we have different concerns.”

“We just want it to all be over,” added Nee.

After we had finished eating, I asked Kevin directly, “So how are you holding up? Did you ever think you were going to see this day? How do you feel about it?”

It was clear that Weeks was conflicted and in a state of emotional discomfort about the trial and all that it entailed. “To me, it's sad,” said Kevin. “To see Jimmy going through this. What's he doing? He could have copped a plea and avoided all this. Just seeing him so old, so diminished, after the way he was years ago. Some say, revenge. Satisfaction. I don't expect to get any satisfaction out of this. None.”

For many people in Boston, the trial was an emotional event, but for Weeks there was an added level of intimacy. For more than a decade, he had spent nearly every day of his life alongside Bulger, listening to his advice about everything under the sun, acting as a surrogate son, beating people up for Whitey, intimidating people in the neighborhood, cleaning up after the gang's many acts of violence and murder. Now he would take the stand, look his former mentor in the eyes, and deliver testimony that presumably would help put him away for the rest of his days. It was a sobering prospect.

THE SECOND DAY
of the trial began with a discussion about a couple of charts, though, as in most matters of love and war, the primary topic of discussion was a pretense for something else.

As is standard practice in a RICO case, the prosecutor, Fred Wyshak, sought to enter into evidence organizational charts of crime groups that the defendant was alleged to have been a part of. In Bulger's case, the charts were headlined “Winter Hill Organization Circa 1975 to 1980” and “Winter Hill Organization/South Boston Organized Crime Group 1982” (see Appendices B and C). The motion to submit the charts as evidence brought an objection from the defense, and the person who stood to explain why was Hank Brennan.

For most of the trial up to this point, J. W. Carney had clearly stood front and center as lead counsel, making the majority of the pretrial arguments in court and answering questions from the media at periodic press conferences held on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. For many who had been following the case, this was the first time they would be hearing Brennan speak.

At age forty-two, Brennan was a former Suffolk County prosecutor. He had a forceful courtroom manner. His black hair was neatly parted on one side, and he had the trim physique of someone who jogged or worked out at the gym on a regular basis. He spoke as if every word mattered, insistent on the logic of his verbal presentation, and in the case of the government's two “highly prejudicial” charts, he had a strong argument to make.

“The charts are not admissible,” said Brennan. “They are overview evidence. And there is an inherent danger by allowing the government to introduce both of these exhibits. The first is, I remind the court that Mr. Bulger is charged with a RICO count. In fact, two RICO counts, one being conspiracy. By providing a chart that shows a number of pictures and in order from top to bottom suggests an opinion, it's an inadmissible opinion, and what it suggests to somebody who looks at it, especially a juror, is that the person on top is responsible for the persons underneath him.

“As you can see, on both charts there are lines drawn between the people at the top, notably, for my concern, Mr. Bulger, and people below him. The only implication that can be left or inference that can be drawn is that Mr. Bulger is responsible for the people underneath, as if he is the leader of an organization. The government should have to call witnesses to describe their involvement or known involvement with other people in relation to the person above them, notably Mr. Bulger, before the jury should draw that inference.”

Fred Wyshak stood to make the counterargument. With his graying hair and stooped shoulders, Wyshak was the dean of Bulger prosecutors. Earlier in his career, he had served for a time as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, and he retained the melodic cadence of a Brooklyn Jew when he spoke, his voice reflecting both distress and weary acceptance in equal measure. No one person had spent more time and energy trying to bring Bulger to justice, and throughout the trial Wyshak would take personally each and every objection from the defense.

A profile of both Wyshak and Kelly in
Boston
magazine once referred to the two of them as the Batman and Robin of federal prosecutors. Both believed they were on a holy crusade, and as the trial progressed it was clear that Wyshak was Batman, the older and more nuanced crime avenger.

Wyshak seemed taken aback by the forcefulness of Brennan's objection to the charts. He counterargued that it was his intention to enter the charts as evidence during the testimony of an upcoming law enforcement witness, someone who would be offered as an expert on the subject of organized crime in Boston. This so-called expert, Brennan responded, had already testified once before in relation to these charts, in the case of
Florida v. Connolly,
and he had been decidedly off the mark. To illustrate his point, Brennan produced a transcript from that trial and read from a section of the testimony.

With Judge Casper interjecting an occasional question to both men, the discussion went back and forth with surprising vigor. The issue itself felt less important than the desire on the part of both combatants to win the trial's first significant point of contention. After twenty minutes, Judge Casper concluded, “I think there may very well be a juncture in this trial where these charts are appropriate based on the evidence that has come in, but it seems to me that at this juncture Mr. Brennan's objection has some legs, so I don't think the charts should come in at this point.”

If the trial were a tennis match, the defense had scored the first point with a strong overhand volley.

The trial's first witness was Robert “Bobby” Long, a former Massachusetts state trooper who had taken part in one of the earliest law enforcement attempts to take down Whitey Bulger. Long's direct testimony was elicited by Zachary Hafer, a junior member of the prosecution team. Thirty-seven years old, a Dartmouth graduate, compared to the other two prosecutors Hafer seemed like a kid just out of law school, though he had been with the U.S. attorney's office for six years.

After Hafer led Long through a detailed recitation of his career as a trooper, including twenty-six years with the state police, or “staties,” as they are known locally, they got to the meat of why Lieutenant Long was on the stand.

Back in the spring of 1980, Long was part of a law enforcement
investigative team that targeted a location that had become known to them as a central meeting place for mobsters from throughout the New England underworld. The Lancaster Street garage, located in the city's West End, was a nondescript former auto body shop situated on a short, one-way street that made it possible for the mobsters to monitor who was coming and going. Trooper Long and the other investigators were able to set up a video surveillance post in a deserted office building across the street from the garage.

From April to June of 1980, a handful of state troopers videotaped comings and going at the garage. The objective was to gather enough footage of known mob figures meeting there so that they would then be able to obtain authorization to plant a wiretap inside the location.

In the courtroom, it was prosecutor Hafer's intention to show snippets of the many surveillance videos that had been compiled, but before he did he asked Long about a particular day, June 21, 1980, when he had been watching the garage from the surveillance post when Arthur “Bucky” Barrett showed up.

From a previous investigation, Long knew Bucky Barrett as a premier safecracker and a “fence,” a receiver and seller of stolen goods. At the time, Barrett was a suspect in a daring bank robbery at the Depositors Trust, which had taken place in the nearby town of Medford.

“What was stolen?” Hafer asked Long.

“It was a burglary,” he answered, “a break-in where they went through the roof of a vault in the bank. They hacked into seven hundred safe-deposit boxes and reportedly got away with a million and a half in cash, and the rest, about three and a half million, in gold and jewelry.”

“Was anyone indicted as part of your investigation?”

“Yes. Six individuals.”

“Who specifically?”

“Gerald Clement, former captain on the MDC police; Thomas Doherty, a lieutenant on the Medford Police Department; Joseph Bangs, a sergeant on the Metropolitan Police Department; Arthur Barrett; Kenneth Holmes; and Francis O'Leary.”

Seated on the witness stand, Bobby Long, at age seventy-one, projected the same Dudley Do-Right air of rectitude that he had in his many years on the job. He still had the square jaw and full head of black hair, though
it was now possibly a dye job. Having retired with honors, he was known to be a good cop. It was logical that a good cop like Long might blanch when describing a major bank robbery pulled off, in part, by a crew of high-ranking police officers. But this was Boston. Bobby Long's reference to the infamous Depositors Trust bank heist, in which cops and professional criminals teamed up to commit a major crime together, was a harbinger of things to come.

Long described how he observed Bucky enter a main office at the garage accompanied by Bulger and Flemmi. They were in there for a long time, with the door closed. For the jury, it was a tiny piece of connecting tissue to the government's opening statement, when prosecutor Kelly related how Barrett ran afoul of Bulger and Flemmi by allegedly withholding proceeds from a major heist. The jury knew how this story ended: with Barrett being chained to a chair, then shot in the head and buried in the basement of the Haunty.

Primarily, Bobby Long had been summoned to the witness stand so that the government could enter into evidence the surveillance videos from the Lancaster Street garage. Without sound, and mostly in black-and-white, clips of assorted videos were shown over the next ninety minutes, a trip back to a time when Whitey Bulger was in his prime.

The videos represented a who's who of Boston-area mobsters from the 1970s and 1980s. As ghostly images from long ago played on a monitor in the courtroom, Long narrated, pointing out the comings and goings of underworld figures such as Georgie Kaufman, the manager of the garage; Vinnie Roberto; Nicky Femia; Larry Zannino; Nick Giso; Bulger; Flemmi; and many others. It was a motley parade of gangsters, many of them slovenly men from the working class seemingly unconcerned about their physical appearance. That is, all except for one person: Bulger.

Forty-nine years old at the time, Whitey was lean and neatly dressed in every video. Mostly, he favored tight-fitting jeans that were pressed with a crease down the front of the legs. He wore tight T-shirts that showed off his physique. While others in the videos were shown talking and gesticulating in the Neapolitan manner, Bulger was contained and controlled. He looked like a prince: a man, touched by vanity, who saw himself as a cut above the rest.

Another notable feature of the videos—uncommented upon by
anyone—was that for thirty-three years they had sat in an evidence vault somewhere in the U.S. attorney's office. Finally, in 2013, here they were being dusted off and used for the first time, the restoration of an investigative narrative that was abruptly aborted in June 1980. As with most of the unseemly corruption-related revelations in the trial, the task of revealing why these surveillance videos were never put to good use would fall on the defense team and take place during cross-examination.

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” said Jay Carney, in an overly solicitous tone of voice that, in a court of law, often meant something ruthless was about to take place.

“Good morning, Mr. Carney,” said the witness.

With both hands on the podium, Carney launched into a series of questions the answers of which he knew before he asked them, questions about basic law enforcement procedure when launching an operation like the Lancaster Street garage investigation.

The Q&A continued in this vein, Carney speaking slowly and methodically, Long answering as if he were on automatic pilot. They both knew where this was headed. The defense lawyer was leading Long to the moment where his investigative team had enough probable cause to apply for legal authorization to plant a bug. Long got approval from his supervisor, Colonel Jack O'Donovan, a legendary figure in the state police. The next step, before applying to a federal judge, was to obtain the approval of the state's top organized crime prosecutor.