Where the Bodies Were Buried (39 page)

“Can I get you some more tea?” asked Weeks.

After leaving Weeks that day, something came into focus. In the years that Bulger and Flemmi were together, their killings became more outrageous and depraved. Why? The answer was simple: because they knew they could get away with it. They could kill whomever they wanted, plant a false version of what happened into law enforcement files, and never be held accountable. There would be no investigation. They had been doing it for years.

And the reason they had this power—the entity that made it possible for them to kill and get away with it for so long—was the U.S. Department of Justice.

NOT LONG AFTER
Kevin Weeks finished his two-day stint on the witness stand, I was invited to come on the Howie Carr radio show to talk about the trial. I knew Carr and had been a guest on his show in previous years to promote books I had published. Nearly every day during the proceedings, I saw Howie in the third-floor media room watching the monitors and taking notes on his laptop computer, just like everyone else.

Carr is a lightning rod in Boston: some love him, some hate him. He uses ridicule and sarcasm in a way that can, at times, be sophomoric, but he is an effective entertainer. Behind his jocular on-air persona, Howie possesses a comprehensive knowledge of Boston crime history. And, as a columnist for the
Boston Herald
back in the 1980s, he had gone after the Bulger brothers—in print—at a time when others in the media rarely touched the subject.

It was a Thursday afternoon, after the trial testimony was finished for the day. Carr was broadcasting his show live from the Barking Crab, a seafood restaurant located on a dock directly across from the Moakley Courthouse. The restaurant was a classic waterfront chowder house, a wooden structure with indoor picnic tables and a horseshoe bar in the middle of the room. The menu was a chalkboard on the wall, and, on this particular day, pitchers of beer were flowing at three o'clock in the afternoon.

The Carr show was set up in an area near the back wall, next to a window overlooking Fort Point Channel and the scenic Old North Avenue drawbridge, with seagulls honking and swooping just outside the open-air windows. The place was packed with customers, most of them brought in to provide background atmosphere for the ever-popular
Howie Carr Show.
In the crowd were many familiar faces from the trial—Steve Davis was
there, as were the three sons of Michael Donahue—Tommy, Michael, and Brian—as well as their mother, Pat. The CNN film crew led by director Joe Berlinger was there with cameras and a boom microphone, filming the scene at the restaurant. The atmosphere was rambunctious and circuslike, with much loud conversation and laughing and drinking. It was a slightly incongruous scene, given that many of these folks had just come from the trial where, thirty yards away at the courthouse building, the morning had been filled with the usual tales of corruption and murder.

In the crowd, I spotted Stippo Rakes. I had met Rakes earlier in the trial. I was introduced by Steve Davis, who sometimes served as a kind of liaison between the various family members and the media. By that point, I was familiar with Stippo's story. When we first met, he was friendly; he had read a book I wrote and was complimentary. But I noticed that he had the odd habit of not looking a person in the eyes when he spoke with them.

I went up and said hello to Stippo. I asked him what he'd thought of Kevin Weeks's testimony. He said, “Oh, Kevin lied. That's what he always does. It's what the government has trained him to do. The truth will come out when I take the stand.”

Stippo's words were almost an exact repeat of what I had heard him say earlier in a statement to the media outside the courthouse entrance. It reinforced a feeling I had that some of the family members had become stuck in a kind of self-promotional loop, delivering sound bites and predigested commentary for the press. Stippo was hyperfriendly, and he gave the appearance of being accessible, but I was not alone in thinking he was the kind of guy who, with his shifty eyes and nervous smile, did not inspire trust.

After meeting with Carr and his small crew, I was given a set of headphones and sat down to take part in his show “live from the Barking Crab.”

I wasn't the only guest. Seated next to me was John “Red” Shea, a former South Boston drug dealer (no relation to Billy Shea, Kermit the Frog's Irish uncle). Along with many of the mid- and street-level dealers in Bulger's organization, Shea had been swept up and arrested in 1990 as part of a sting operation by the Drug Enforcement Administration. In all, fifty people were pinched, though, noticeably, Bulger, Flemmi, and Weeks—the top echelon of the organization—were not among them. Some of those
dealers had accepted plea bargain arrangements with the government and become informants, two of whom—Paul Moore and Anthony Attardo—would take the stand at the current Bulger trial. Red Shea, on the other hand, served eleven years in prison and kept his mouth shut. That is, until he was released and turned his years with the Bulger organization into a memoir titled
Rat Bastards: The South Boston Irish Mobster Who Took the Rap When Everyone Else Ran,
published in 2007.

Like many people, Shea had turned his feelings about Bulger into a personal vendetta, partly to promote himself and his book. He was friendly and bright. Like many ex-criminals in Boston that I met—especially those who had done an extended stretch in the joint—Shea read books and told a good story.

Howie's show that afternoon reflected the loose and jocular atmosphere of the waterfront saloon where it took place, with Carr, as he often did, obsessing about Whitey Bulger's sexuality, quoting sources who said they had seen him in the 1970s cruising the infamous gay bars in Provincetown. Red Shea suggested that Whitey had an unnatural affection for young boys in Southie, including himself. The show was set up to take calls from listeners; the calls were off the wall and took the discussion even further from anything worthwhile than had the commentary of Howie and Red Shea.

After
The Howie Carr Show
wrapped for the day, I headed back toward my lodgings in the North End with the sinking feeling that the Bulger trial was doomed. Yes, there were many dramatic moments, and the parade of old-school bookies, loan sharks, hit men, and gangsters continued to be fascinating. But the trial—and the commentary surrounding it—had become a modern version of the Salem witch trials. Any hope that the proceedings would shed light on the universe of corruption that created Bulger seemed more distant with each passing day. If I hoped to achieve a deeper understanding of the motivations behind the Bulger era, I needed to get away from the Moakley Courthouse and away from Southie.

Staying in the city's Italian North End while following the trial had been instructive. I was staying at the Bricco Suites, a set of studio apartments located behind Bricco Ristorante, a popular restaurant and bar on Hanover Street. Owned by Frank DePasquale, a prominent businessman in the North End, the Bricco was a popular spot with neighborhood old-
timers. I was introduced to people with long memories, some of whom had done time in prison—or knew people who had done time—courtesy of Bulger, Flemmi, John Connolly, John Morris, or Jeremiah O'Sullivan.

In the North End, attitudes toward Whitey Bulger were scalding. People's hatred for the Bulger brothers was surpassed only by their venom for Steve Flemmi, an Italian American who had betrayed his own blood.

Few people in Boston understood the reasons behind these sentiments better than Anthony “Tony” Cardinale. Though he was not a gangster nor born and raised in the North End, Cardinale had acquired a broad range of knowledge in both areas due to his role as a prominent criminal defense attorney for many Boston-based Mafiosi.

I had interviewed Cardinale before and knew that he also had a deep professional disdain for Bulger and Flemmi. Through their relationship with the FBI and the New England Organized Crime Strike Force, they had sowed the seeds of dissension among many of Cardinale's clients in the 1980s, leading to unscrupulous convictions in court and gangland murders in the streets. Since Bulger's apprehension in Santa Monica in June 2011, Cardinale had been a frequent commentator in the Boston media, where he rarely missed an opportunity to refer to Bulger as a “lowlife” and “a piece of garbage.”

I made arrangements to meet with Cardinale at Café Pompeii on Hanover Street.

One of the great pleasures of staying in the North End during the trial was that the neighborhood existed as a kind of living history of gangland Boston. Just down the street from my studio apartment was an early-twentieth-century building—formerly the C. K. Importing Company, now a bank—where Frankie Wallace was executed in December 1931. Wallace had been the leader of the Gustin gang, a group of bootleggers and racketeers from South Boson prominent during the Prohibition era. The gang was named after a street in Southie. In 1931, the Gustins hijacked some shipments of booze belonging to the Mafia. Wallace and an underling, Bernard “Dodo” Walsh, were lured to a “sit-down” on Hanover Street to discuss a truce. In the lobby of the building, they were ambushed and assassinated by two hit men.

More recent history, including key events from the Bulger trial, had
taken place at locations within blocks from my living quarters. The intersection where Frank Capizzi—the witness who heard things half in Sicilian and half in English—had been shot up while riding shotgun in a car was at the end of Hanover Street. That drive-by shooting by Martorano, Bulger, and Flemmi, in which Al Plummer was killed, had been part of the hunt to find and murder Alfred “Indian Al” Notarangeli in the early 1970s.

Prince Street, where Jerry Angiulo had been born and where his headquarters was based, out of a social club at 98 Prince Street, intersected Hanover Street and was a block away from my place.

And Café Pompeii, where I was meeting Tony Cardinale, had been mentioned at the trial by John Martorano. It had been the location for a meeting between Indian Al, John Martorano, Howie Winter, and Jerry Angiulo. At that meeting, Notarangeli begged for his life and paid Angiulo fifty thousand dollars to not kill him and let him continue his business. Angiulo told him, “Okay, I will take your money. And you can live.” A couple of weeks later, on Angiulo's instructions, Indian Al was murdered by Martorano—lured to Revere and shot in the head inside a car, with Bulger in a nearby boiler, or crash car, serving as an accomplice.

When I arrived at Café Pompeii, Tony Cardinale was already there, sipping espresso and grappa, chatting with the owner.

We got right to it. “Tell me about the Holy Grail,” I said to the lawyer.

Cardinale smiled. “I will,” he said. “But first let me come at it in a roundabout way.”

As with many people in the legal profession, especially trial lawyers, Tony liked to talk. But he was one of those people from whom you didn't mind if you were going to get a roundabout answer, because within that answer would be anecdotes and layers of information that would reveal essential truths about the criminal mentality in general, and, more specifically, the inner workings of the Bulger fiasco, from the point of view of someone who also happened to be a terrific storyteller.

“Let me take you back to the roots of this case,” said Cardinale. “We need to go back to the Barboza era, the 1960s.”

Cardinale knew from whence he spoke: as a young attorney, having just recently passed the bar, he went to work for renowned criminal defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey. Among many notorious clients, Bailey had briefly rep
resented Joe “Animal” Barboza. In 1970, Barboza had come to Bailey and signed an affidavit declaring that his testimony at various criminal trials was riddled with lies perpetrated in consort with devious officials of the criminal justice system. Then Barboza abruptly recanted the affidavit. Bailey ceased representing Barboza after arriving at the conclusion that the Animal was untrustworthy and quite possibly psychotic. Barboza responded by publicly vowing to kill Bailey—a threat that the attorney took seriously.

“He had to hire bodyguards,” noted Cardinale.

When Barboza was eventually hunted down and taken out in a mob hit in February 1976, Bailey was quoted saying, “With all due respect to my former client, I don't think society has suffered a great loss.”

Barboza's first big test as an informant witness was not the Patriarca trial, or the notorious Teddy Deegan murder trial; it had come before that in a trial involving the charge of murder against Jerry Angiulo and three others.

As an underboss in the Patriarca crime family and boss of the Mafia in the North End, Angiulo, then in his forties, had emerged as a tremendous moneymaker. Operating primarily as an organizer and financier of bookies and shylocks, Angiulo and his Boston crew became the central bank for all gambling and bookmaking operations throughout New England. The feds figured if they could take down Angiulo, they could cut off the Mafia's cash flow.

The trial took place at the Pemberton Square courthouse in Boston in January 1968. As a witness, Barboza was green and easily rattled. Consequently, Jerry Angiulo and his codefendants were found not guilty of the murder charge. Afterward, the mafia boss told a flock of reporters, “I don't want to say anything right now. I want to see my mother. She's seventy-three, and this thing has been bothering her.”

Barboza went on to redeem himself as a professional witness in the trial of Raymond Patriarca and the Teddy Deegan murder trial, where he told lies that resulted in the conviction of four innocent men. Meanwhile, the feds never forgot about Jerry Angiulo, who continued to be a major player in the New England Mafia. From his perch on Prince Street, Angiulo and his brothers rubbed it in the nose of federal authorities by openly ruling the North End like Sicilian padroni from the old country.

When FBI agents John Connolly and John Morris took the baton from H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condon, they knew that a big part of that legacy involved nailing Jerry Angiulo.

Seated at a back table at Café Pompeii, away from the windows, away from the front door, Tony Cardinale chose his words carefully. “Getting Jerry Angiulo was the highest priority. It's why the FBI recruited Stevie Flemmi, whose brother Jimmy had been a Top Echelon Informant, and later Stevie recruits Bulger.”

Along with Connolly and Morris, the other key inside player in the government's quest to avenge their 1968 loss to Angiulo was Jeremiah O'Sullivan. As the leader of the federal New England Organized Crime Strike Force, O'Sullivan had been on the receiving end of a baton exchange of his own. He received his mandate to aggressively pursue high-profile Mafia indictments from Ted Harrington, his mentor, the former assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw the 1968 Angiulo prosecution and other Barboza-related trials. In 1970, Harrington took over as lead attorney for the Strike Force. As a young prosecutor, O'Sullivan was part of Harrington's team; he was groomed to take over as Strike Force chief.