Where the Bodies Were Buried (24 page)

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.