Where the Bodies Were Buried (43 page)

Wyshak called for another photo, this one a close-up of something goopy and muddy. “I'll direct your attention, right in the middle there's a gold-colored claddagh ring.”

Said Mires, marking the screen of her telestrator for all to see, “Yes, the ring is here, and although I can't really make them out here, there are remnants of the finger bones in this area. They're very hard to pick out. The bones become the color of the soil the body decomposes in, so everything looks the same color because it essentially is now part of the beach after all this time.”

“Did you recover this claddagh ring?”

“I did.”

Wyshak produced the ring—calling it “exhibit six thirty-four for identification”—and handed it to the witness. “Is that the claddagh ring that you recovered at Tenean Beach?

“Yes, it is.”

The prosecutor had Mires hold up the ring for the jury to see, and then place it in an evidence envelope.

The photos kept coming, each one more macabre than the last.

Now Mires and her team were trying to remove the remains from the grave, but they quickly discovered that the material was “almost the consistency of wet cardboard. It's very punky, almost like rotten wood, from being saturated and being in this kind of caustic environment for so long. . . . This was the only chance probably that I was going to have to measure the skull, so I set up a ruler so that I could take some very crude measurements, because once I got [the skull] out of the grave, it just kind of fell apart. So you can see here the mandible, what's left of it. A denture that was probably attached to the maxilla. It's an upper denture.”

“Did you recover the denture as well?”

“Yes.”

Wyshak handed the witness a plastic sandwich-size bag with something inside. “Can you open the bag?”

“I can,” said Mires, opening the bag like a box of Cracker Jacks and reaching inside.

“Are the dentures in the bag?”

“They are.”

“Will you display them?”

Mires held up her prize: a thirty-year-old set of dentures, extracted from the moist, decrepit skull of a Bulger murder victim from long ago.

Intoned Wyshak to Judge Casper, “Let the record reflect that the witness is displaying the dentures recovered at Tenean Beach in September of 2000.”

“It may so reflect,” responded the judge.

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

“Counsel, would this be a good place to stop for the day?”

“Sure,” said Wyshak.

And so, the day ended with the dentures of Paulie McGonagle serving as a sad coda to a long session of grisly testimony.

The lawyers and court personnel and media people spilled out into the afternoon sunshine. It was Wednesday, midweek, and the bright sky was alive with possibilities, but the dark video and photographic images from the diggings lingered in the air, befouling the shiny façade of a proud city.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, Mires was scheduled to return to the witness stand, but, first, there was an issue that the court needed to address. The previous evening, defense counsel had filed a motion with the judge that required immediate attention.

A motion is a formal request asking the judge to do something for the “moving party” or “movant.” Under Rule 7(b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, motions must be filed in writing and accompanied by a signed affidavit by the movant—in this case Jay Carney—and the motion papers must be served on all parties in the case. Carney had filed his motion papers
too late for the prosecution to draft a response, so that a hearing was required in front of the judge, who would hear oral arguments for and against the motion. These hearings usually took place in the morning before the jury was brought into the courtroom.

The defense motion, docket number 1134, was headlined “DEFENDANT'S MOTION TO ADJOURN TRIAL.” Bulger's lawyers were asking that as soon as Mires completed her testimony, the proceedings be adjourned until the following Tuesday. They were, in essence, asking for two extra days.

“Simply put,” stated the motion, “the defendant's counsel has hit a wall and are unable to proceed further without additional time to prepare for upcoming witnesses. Counsel have struggled mightily to be ready for each day of the trial since it began . . . working seven days a week and extraordinarily long hours. . . . There is a physical and mental limitation on how much work can be done by the defense team, and a brief adjournment of the trial will allow counsel to be prepared for the upcoming witnesses.”

The motion further noted, “The defendant is awakened at 4:00 a.m. every trial day, and by the end of his travel back to Plymouth, this 83-year old man is exhausted. Meaningful interaction with counsel in the evening is impossible.”

Carney's motion touched off a spirited debate. It had been brought about, in part, by the prosecution's contention that the trial was well ahead of schedule and moving fast. In a strategic move, the prosecution also announced that they had dropped certain witnesses who were scheduled to testify. The defense complained on the grounds that since these witnesses were on the prosecution's list and had been scheduled to appear, the defense was put in the position of having to prepare for witnesses that the government did not intend to call. Precious time had been wasted, and now the defense was struggling to be ready to cross-examine witnesses who had been moved up the list.

It didn't seem like an unreasonable request to be asking for two extra days to prepare, but the government wasn't buying it.

“Obviously, the government opposes the motion,” said Zach Hafer, who stood to argue on behalf of the prosecution. Hafer took particular exception to defense counsel's position that they had been hindered, in part, by
the government not having been forthcoming with the required discovery material. “As your honor is well aware, we too have spent countless hours, mostly logistically at this point, arranging out-of-state travel, hotel accommodations, witness prep, based on daily progress of this trial. It is a massive undertaking. We've met every deadline your honor has set with respect to exhibits, witness lists. We provided daily updates to the defense as to where witnesses are going to fall in the order of proof or even just saying, ‘These are the exhibits that go with this witness.' In our view, we've provided a clean road map to this trial, and there's absolutely no reason to delay it.”

With a note of disdain in his voice, Hafer further addressed the point in the motion about Bulger being exhausted, saying that, as an argument for a continuance, “That's not good enough, either. The victims in this case have been waiting long enough for justice. Mr. Bulger had sixteen years to relax in California. Mr. Carney and Mr. Brennan have had the discovery in this case for years, and in our view, there's absolutely no basis to adjourn the trial for any time at all.”

Judge Casper asked Hafer to run through, in order, the upcoming witnesses for the remainder of the week. He did so: John Druggan, a forensic chemist from the crime lab for the state police; Elaine Barrett, Bucky Barrett's wife; FBI agent Thomas Daly; Paul Moore, a South Boston drug dealer; Gerald Montanari, another FBI agent; Barry Wong, an unwitting accomplice to an extortion; Steve Davis; and Patricia Donahue.

Judge Casper tried to appear as though she were weighing the significance of the witnesses to judge how much time the defense would need to prepare for cross-examination, but it was clear from her demeanor and tone of voice that she had made up her mind.

Carney made one last effort. He stood to speak. There was exasperation in his voice, and in his argument astonishment that the judge would not allow the defense two measly days to be better prepared to defend their client.

Said the judge, “I'm going to cut you off there. . . . Mr. Carney, I appreciate the tone that you took in the motion in putting it forward, in laying it out without hyperbole, which I always appreciate. . . . I also take, as I take every motion that's filed before me, that you filed this in good faith and that your team has been working around the clock, matched only, perhaps, by the government team working around the clock to push this forward. So I'm not inclined to suspend the trial.”

If body language is an indicator of state of mind, it was as if the defense table had taken a collective kick in the testicles. To them, the trial had become one big steamroller.

AT ITS MOST
vast and far-reaching, the conspiracy to utilize Bulger and Flemmi as a means to take down the Mafia in Boston was, for the FBI and others in the criminal justice system, a theoretical exercise. Men and women who had gone to college, earned degrees, and pursued reputable lives of accomplishment in the field of criminal justice had set about to undermine and bring down a criminal underworld that they had never, nor would they ever, experience firsthand. It was this fact that led J. Edgar Hoover to make such a strong commitment to the FBI's informant program. He may have believed, instinctively, that it was the only way the Mafia could be brought down.

It was a solid strategy—in theory. Using snitches or informants from inside an organization to undermine that organization was not exactly new. John Martorano made reference to it during his testimony: Judas may have been the first Top Echelon Informant, and had he perpetrated his betrayal many millennia later, under the auspices of Hoover, he might have been relocated to Oregon or Utah, somewhere far away from the King of the Jews.

Throughout the Bulger trial, the prosecution often underscored the narrative that Whitey and Flemmi had been recruited by the FBI to help build cases against the Mafia. This was the story line that had been used in previous Bulger-related trials, and also the theory fed by prosecutorial sources to the media, where it was further expounded upon in books, documentaries, and feature films.

But the belief that Bulger and Flemmi's value to the government was based solely on their ability to make cases against the Mafia does not tell the full story. It does not explain why Special Agents Morris and Connolly would take it upon themselves to threaten a member of the Massachusetts State Parole Board presiding over a case that was initiated before either of them was even in the FBI, much less stationed in Boston. That mission had nothing to do with Bulger and Flemmi. They were acting as inheritors of the system's dirty little secrets, proprietors of a corrupt history. It was their duty to help keep it buried.

That history had been born out of a partnership between criminals—Barboza, Jimmy Flemmi, and many others less exalted—and the system. It was a central flaw of the Top Echelon Informant Program that had existed from the beginning, and if it had ever been exposed, it would have ended the program and possibly even Hoover's career.

The partnership that the system forged with Steve Flemmi and later Whitey Bulger was part and parcel of the same arrangement. By becoming informants, they also had become proprietors of this history. They knew the system's dirty little secrets. And by forming an alliance with the likes of Connolly and Morris, they were entering into a pact part of which involved helping to keep this dirty history hidden forever.

And this is where they derived their power: Flemmi and Bulger knew that by entering into this pact with the system, the system was now beholden to them. They could do whatever they wanted, not only financial crimes like loan-sharking, drugs, extortion, and robberies, but murder, any kind of murder they wanted, as long as they made the bodies disappear, so that there would be no investigation.

The murders of Debbie Davis and Deborah Hussey were a manifestation of this arrangement: killings that had nothing to do with business and everything to do with showing that they could kill virtually whomever they wanted, anytime, for any reason, and they would never be prosecuted for it.

That is partly why the burials of the bodies had become a necessity. Not only were they an effort to inter evidence belowground and out of sight; they also became a ritualistic way for Bulger to illustrate his omnipotence.

Ann Marie Mires, with her skills as an anthropologist and her pleasant demeanor, had no awareness of the motives behind the burials that she described. Part of what made her descriptions in court so chilling was the matter-of-fact way she detailed the end result of murders that had been so intimate and brutal.

The last excavation took place two weeks after the exhumation at Tenean Beach. It was centered on a location two miles to the south, in Quincy.

Approximately one hundred yards from Commander Shea Boulevard, alongside the Neponset River, a field of marshland lay at the foot of the elevated train tracks of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Digging here was a challenge. Lumpy marshland covered an area the size
of two or three football fields, and there were no markers, such as trees or large rock formations or prominent outgrowths, to help identify the exact locations of the graves. The digging crew knew that out there somewhere were the remains of two people, Tommy King and Debra Davis, whose unceremonious burials had taken place six years apart, in 1975 and in 1981.

In this instance, the excavation team brought in a geophysicist, whose “ground-penetrating radar” made it possible to examine a large area in search of “any pits and anomalies underneath the ground” before any digging had even begun.

Just as before, Mires narrated a video of the excavation, and as with the diggings at Tenean Beach, the conditions were difficult. Here high tide actually covered the entire marshland, meaning that the graves were completely submerged. It also gave a sense of urgency to the dig, since the archeologists would be forced to postpone their expedition once the tide rolled in.

A week of diggings went by, and they uncovered nothing. Pit after pit was dug up, the soil spilled out and sifted through, with nary a bone or shred of clothing. A sense of frustration set in. Then they got lucky and uncovered some skull fragments. They also uncovered a moldy, deteriorated bulletproof vest.