Where the Bodies Were Buried (31 page)

As with Carr, the writer chose to personalize his approach, adding a tone of self-righteous indignation that sometimes bordered on hysteria. Again, like Carr, Cullen had his reasons.

Back in 1988, Cullen had been part of the Spotlight Team that first learned that Whitey had “a special relationship” with the FBI. On the brink of that series first appearing in the pages of the
Globe,
Cullen received a phone call from Special Agent Tom Daly, who was a member of the C-3 squad and also a fellow Southie native. Daly had heard that the
Globe
was about to run their explosive series, and he was calling Cullen in an attempt to intimidate him into canceling “The Bulger Mystique.” The agent told the reporter that Bulger “wasn't going to like it” and implied that because Cullen was a resident of Southie, his life could be in danger. Cullen reported the call from the FBI agent to his publishers at the
Globe;
they perceived the call to be a threat and took it seriously enough to temporarily relocate Cullen and his family out of the city.

The role the media had played in creating and cultivating the myth of Whitey Bulger was complex and personal. Boston is a media town, with a history of top-notch reporters and columnists. Particularly in the wake of the Wolf hearings of 1997, local reporters had done superlative work in unearthing aspects of the Bulger conspiracy. Some had turned their work into bestselling books that found a readership far beyond the city of Boston. But as the prosecution of Bulger—as shaped by Wyshak and Kelly—had begun to dominate and misconstrue many important questions about who ultimately was responsible for the Bulger fiasco, you could argue that the local media engaged in coverage that bordered on dereliction of duty.

There were exceptions. David Boeri, a writer for the
Boston Phoenix
and other publications, as well as for radio and television news, had consistently sought to set the Bulger story against the larger context of institutional corruption in New England. In the overall flow of trial coverage, which was voluminous, there were insights by Boeri and others that occasionally went beyond whether or not Whitey was a bad man, or speculation on just how bad a man he truly was.

Nonetheless, among the most powerful and influential media outlets in the city, the coverage bordered on cheerleading for the prosecutors and the U.S. attorney's office. Some reporters, in private conversations, used the defense that other aspects of the Bulger story had been covered over the years and didn't need to be rehashed. This, coincidentally, was the view of the prosecutors.

The trial was exhaustively covered, but not with much depth. The best journalists in town were more interested in settling old scores with Whitey than probing the parameters of a skewed prosecution. The hidden horrors of the Bulger trial seemed destined to remain so.

AS A FULL
and penetrating accounting of the era, the Bulger trial had begun to show signs of being a well-oiled cover-up, but in some areas it tread new ground. On the subject of illegal narcotics, the proceedings addressed for the first time in public a topic that was central to the Bulger mythology.

During the mobster's heyday as the boss of Southie, a large part of his legend was based on the belief that he kept drugs out of the neighborhood. People who advocated on Bulger's behalf used this “fact” to sustain the myth that Bulger may have been a gangster, but he was also Southie's preeminent protector. Mostly composed of socially conservative Catholics, Southie was a working-class enclave, highly family oriented. The concept of drug use, be it hard drugs like heroin or cocaine, or more benign drugs like marijuana, was not tolerated as it might be in a ghetto neighborhood like Roxbury. In the 1970s, the desire to keep drugs out of the neighborhood had been used as a primary explanation for violent resistance to school busing, on the theory that bringing blacks into Southie was tantamount to despoiling the town with drugs.

The myth of a drug-free Southie and the role Whitey Bulger played in keeping it that way was perpetrated by, among others, John Connolly and Senator Billy Bulger. In his off-the-record chats with people in the Boston media and in the community, Connolly extolled the virtues of Jim Bulger, the primary virtue being that he kept Southie free from “bad elements” like street drug dealers, who by then were a common phenomenon on the urban landscape throughout the United States, especially in poor and working-class neighborhoods.

Billy Bulger promulgated this myth to an even greater extent, though he did so without ever publicly mentioning his brother by name.

A major part of Billy Bulger's pitch to the electorate in campaign after campaign had been how South Boston was the model of a close-knit, upright, righteous community where parents kept tabs on their kids, made them stay in school, and took pride in the fact that Southie residents insisted on not allowing dope to denigrate their community.

Billy Bulger did not invent the concept of “Southie pride,” but he certainly knew how to make it a central component of his career in public life. The fact that he had a brother who was known to be a gangster boss did not detract from his skill at capitalizing on the community's sense of pride; in fact, it was quite the opposite. The idea that Jim Bulger was “our gangster” in a world of dope peddlers, Mafiosi, “crazy niggers,” and liberal apologists had somehow, in the inverted morality that the Bulger brothers seemed to represent, become a subterranean though undeniable aspect of Southie pride.

Nowhere was this proclivity more in evidence than at the annual St. Patrick's Day breakfast held in Southie, presided over by Senator Billy Bulger. As the president of the Massachusetts Senate, Bulger had risen above his earliest beginnings as the representative from Southie to being among the most powerful lawmakers in the state. The annual breakfast had become a manifestation of his standing in the city. Politicians running for office routinely stopped by the breakfast and submitted themselves to sometimes not so gentle ribbing from Senator Bulger and others, who welcomed the opportunity to make them squirm. U.S. senator Ted Kennedy; Massachusetts governor and later presidential candidate Michael Dukakis; Speaker of the U.S. House Thomas P. “Tip” O'Neill Jr.; and presidential candidate Ronald Reagan were among the many luminaries who spoke at the breakfast.

John Morris, from the witness stand, had described how impressed he was to attend the event as a guest of John Connolly. Morris described the breakfast as “probably the single-most spectacular political event of the year . . . hosted by the Senate president and attended by a who's who in politics.” FBI agents, both retired and currently on the job, were given special treatment at the breakfast, with a table up near the dais. Connolly was so well connected with Billy Bulger that he didn't even have to wait in line at the main entrance. With Morris at his side, Connolly entered the hall through a private back entrance. Seated at their table was Special Agent Dennis Condon, who maintained a prized spot at the breakfast even after his retirement from the bureau in 1980. Also in attendance, in varying years, were numerous SACs and ASACs (assistant special agents in charge) from the Boston office of the FBI.

Extolling the virtues of Southie through anecdotes and song was often an aspect of the breakfast. Occasionally, there were offhand references to Senator Bulger's notorious brother, always in a jocular manner and never by name. One year, William Weld made a notable appearance. Weld served as a U.S. attorney in Boston, where he was known for pursuing political corruption cases with great vigor. He went on to become head of the U.S. Justice Department's Criminal Division and eventually was elected governor of Massachusetts. At Billy Bulger's St. Patrick's Day breakfast, from the podium Weld sang a little ditty, the punch line of which was a reference to Billy Bulger becoming rich courtesy of his brother's criminal activities. Senator Bulger and everyone else burst out laughing.

Political and some community leaders could react with good-natured laughter at the Whitey references because they operated under the myth that Bulger was a Robin Hood type who kept drugs out of the neighborhood. In truth, beginning in the early 1980s, Bulger implemented a hostile takeover of the neighborhood's drug trade. Within a year, he would become the largest peddler of illegal narcotics in the history of Southie.

At the trial, the unlikely narrator of Bulger's foray into the cocaine and marijuana business was Joe Tower, a man who had thus far avoided scrutiny in all the many legal proceedings and books on the Bulger era. At fifty-nine years of age, he was the youngest witness so far with direct involvement in Bulger's criminal gang to take the stand.

With his deep suntan, full head of silver hair, and casual sport coat, Tower seemed like a man who had long ago removed himself from the grittier aspects of his hometown of Boston. But then he spoke. His cadence and manner of speech could only have come from one place: Southie.

In August 2000, Tower was living peacefully in Port St. Lucie, Florida, working as a luthier, someone who constructs and repairs custom guitars. It was then that Tower was served with a federal subpoena to testify before a grand jury back in Boston about his years as a cocaine dealer for Whitey Bulger. Tower had not been charged with a crime, but the implication was that he could be if he didn't cooperate. He had followed news about the ongoing Bulger-related prosecutions ever since Whitey disappeared on the lam back in 1995. Through an attorney, Tower negotiated an immunity deal: he would agree to testify as long as nothing he said could be used against him in court.

Brian Kelly stood before Joe Tower and got things rolling: “Let me direct your attention to the 1970s. What were you doing at that time?”

“In the 1970s I was a musician in a band. I played music.”

“What kind of band?”

“It was disco, rock and roll, blues.”

“What sort of places did you play at?”

“We played at local establishments in the area. Local bars.”

“Did you ever play at a place called Triple O's?”

“Yes, I did.”

Kelly stepped forward with a photo in his hand; at the same time the photo was projected onto the monitor in the courtroom. “I'd like to show you what I've marked for identification purposes as exhibit eighty-one. Do you recognize that photo, sir?”

“Yes, I do. This is Triple O's in South Boston.”

The introduction of Triple O's into the trial's narrative was no small matter. By the 1980s, with Bulger no longer making trips into Somerville to convene with confederates in the Winter Hill Mob (which was now moribund), or trips to the Lancaster Street garage, which was closed down after it became known that the place was bugged by state police, Triple O's became the official headquarters of the Bulger organization. In a previous incarnation it was known as the Transit Café, meeting place for the Southie
branch of the Killeen brothers gang, for whom Whitey got his start as a debt collector and leg breaker.

Named after the three O'Neill brothers, Southie natives who were co-owners, the bar was located on West Broadway, a main thoroughfare. The façade was classic 1970s working class, with a hand-painted sign with the bar's name—Triple O's Lounge—that also advertised Coors and Rolling Rock. Anyone who entered the place knew they were entering a domain of the neighborhood's rough-and-tumble gangster element, a bloody chain of succession that had brought Southie under the control of a man known as Whitey, though no one dared call him that to his face.

In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Joe Tower and his band played at Triple O's on Friday and Saturday nights. Everyone liked Joe. He played a passable guitar solo and was a vigorous talker, but more than that he was at the head of a modest drug operation that provided cocaine to the neighborhood.

Like most American cities in the 1980s, Boston was on the receiving end of a veritable blizzard of cocaine, causing the street-level purchase price to tumble. What had once been the drug of the rich and famous, used only at exclusive nightclubs among the celebrity elite, had now become a working-class drug common among construction workers, housewives, off-duty cops—you name it.

Prosecutor Kelly asked Tower, “Did there come a time in approximately 1980 when you developed a problem with respect to your drug dealing?”

“Yes.”

“What was the problem?”

“Well, I had a pretty big-sized organization on my behalf, and there was problems in the town at the time. There was a fellow named Tommy Nee [no relation to Pat Nee] going around—I guess this fellow might have just gotten out of jail. . . . I didn't know him well, but I knew of him. . . . I guess there were threats going around. They were chasing people that were involved in drugs and shaking them down.”

“What was your understanding of Thomas Nee's reputation?”

“I understood Thomas Nee was a very bad person, a murderer, and if you crossed him, you would be in serious trouble.”

“So he had a fearsome reputation?”

“Yes.”

“And you heard he was shaking down drug dealers in South Boston?”

“That's correct.”

“So what did you do about it?”

What followed from Tower was a torrent of verbiage and splintered syntax, a roundabout description of how he approached Kevin O'Neill, a proprietor of Triple O's, and explained his predicament. From the stand, Tower sounded as if he were presently coked up, though he swore he had not touched the white powder in more than a decade. Those years were behind him. His current state was apparently a combination of his innate gregariousness and nervousness about being on the stand. He twitched and moved around in his seat a lot; it was easy to see how he had once been not only a boss but also the primary sampler of his organization. The old adage “don't get high on your own supply” had fallen on deaf ears with Joe.

Said Kelly, “Sir, I am going to have to ask you to slow down a bit.”