Where the Bodies Were Buried (49 page)

Buccheri met Flemmi at his mother's house and was led to the cabana that he had helped build, where Bulger was waiting.

“Richie,” said Bulger. “Sometimes you should keep your mouth shut.” Bulger banged on the table and added, “Did you know that Kevin Weeks is like a surrogate son to me?”

Then, according to Buccheri, Bulger put a shotgun to his head and threatened his family. “Richie, you're a stand-up guy. I'm not gonna kill you now, but you're gonna have to pay me.”

“How much?” asked Buccheri.

“Two hundred,” said Bulger.

The real estate developer was somewhat relieved. “Two hundred dollars?” he asked.

Bulger smiled. “Two hundred thousand.”

When Buccheri balked, Flemmi stuck a revolver in his mouth until he nodded.

“Will you take a check?” asked Richie.

Flemmi nodded.

A check for two hundred thousand dollars was made out to Stephen J. Flemmi. The next day, Buccheri received a call from his bank requesting authorization to cash the check. “Go ahead and cash it,” he told the bank manager. Then Buccheri had his secretary draw up some fraudulent paperwork to make it appear as if the transaction were a real estate deal.

It was a high price to pay, but Buccheri was happy to be alive. A few days later, he received a phone call from Steve Flemmi, who told him, “Jim Bulger says you're a friend now.”

On Friday, July 26, the jury heard from the government's final witness, FBI special agent Scott Garriola, who testified about the arrest of eighty-two-year-old James Bulger in Santa Monica. After Garriola left the stand, Wyshak walked to the podium and declared, “Your Honor, the United States rests its case against James J. Bulger.”

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH
of Stippo Rakes continued to hang over the proceedings for a couple of weeks, and then the mystery was solved. Rakes's murder, it turned out, had nothing to do with the Bulger trial.

Rakes had always been a bit of a hustler, an independent businessman looking to make deals. One of his deals was with a man named William Camuti, age sixty-nine. Rakes had given Camuti a significant amount of money as a loan, and Camuti, apparently, had not been able to pay him back.

The two men made arrangements to meet in the parking lot of a McDonald's in Waltham to discuss Camuti making a payment. They met in Camuti's car. When Rakes climbed into the passenger seat, Camuti had already purchased two cups of coffee at the McDonald's, one of which he gave to Rakes. What Stippo didn't know was that the coffee was laced with a fatal dose of potassium cyanide that Camuti had bought via the Internet.

Rakes complained about the coffee being bitter, but he drank enough of it to die. Camuti drove around for a while with the dead man next to him, then he dumped the body of Stippo Rakes on the jogging path in Lincoln.

Investigators were mystified until, a week later, Camuti tried to commit suicide. Detectives visited him at the hospital, and there the assailant confessed to the entire scheme.

Death has a way of exerting its presence, and the weirdly timed demise of Stippo Rakes became absorbed into the proceedings at the Moakley Courthouse, like a smell that persists even after the cause of the odor has passed. The trial was about death, or, to be exact, many deaths, and so the idea that a fresh corpse might be added to the mix had a perverse logic. The murder of Rakes became part of the ether surrounding the trial, one more violent detail in the penultimate chapter of the Bulger saga.

Now that the government had rested its case, it was the defense lawyers' turn to call witnesses to the stand.

It is a well-worn jeremiad that the burden of proof in a legal proceeding is on those making the accusations. The defense does not have to put forth a case at all, and often they will not, especially if it is believed that the accuser's case is weak or has been sufficiently undermined through cross-examination of the prosecution's witnesses. But the Bulger case was unusual. Carney and Brennan were, to an extent, attempting to put the government on trial and therefore were in the position of needing to make their case. This had been a point of contention throughout the trial, both as a philosophical position and as a legal matter. It was the position of the government that the defense did not have the legal right to pursue such a strategy, especially if their goal was jury nullification, a specious tactic not supported by case law. The battleground for this particular conflict was the defense counsel's proposed witness list.

When the trial began, the defense submitted a list of eighty names that included everyone from recent FBI director Robert Mueller to Howie Carr. The prosecutors let it be known that they would be contesting most of the names on this list on the grounds that any testimony these witnesses might offer came under the heading of “collateral matters” that had nothing to do with the trial.

Midway through the trial, defense counsel submitted an amended list of fifty names. Once again, prosecutors made it clear that, in their opinion, the list was filled with proposed witnesses who had little or nothing to do with the trial at hand. They intended to object to each and every name on the list.

Judge Casper had been avoiding this battle. Whenever the issue came up during the trial, she advised the counsel on both sides to work it out. But by the time the government was ready to rest its case, after the defense lawyers had revised their list downward again with no relenting from the government, it was clear there needed to be a hearing in open court.

The judge's ruling on the defense team's proposed witness list turned out to be one of the final indignities for the defense in a proceeding that had consistently not gone their way. Carney and Brennan came into this hearing with a list of thirty proposed witnesses that included people like Joe Salvati and Michael Albano.

Some of the names on the list were people designed to impeach the testimony of individual witnesses in the government's case, but others were there to give credence to the defense contention that Bulger's criminal career was the consequence of corruption and collaboration from within the system, and that it went back half a century. The government had been objecting to this argument all along, with support from Judge Casper, and it seemed unlikely that the parameters of the trial would change now.

Said Wyshak, “I mean, really—Joe Salvati, Your Honor? Joe Salvati?”

With a tone of incredulity, the lead prosecutor stood before Casper at the late afternoon hearing and sought to discredit and derail the defense counsel's witness list and therefore their entire case. He was largely successful. When the hearing was over, there were a total of twelve people that the judge was going to allow the defense to call as witnesses for their case.

Whatever last semblance of hope there was that the defense would be able to make a grandiose case that encapsulated the full sweep of the Bulger era had been crushed, once and for all.

Still, there were a few witnesses to be called who promised to shed new light on the Bulger fiasco, one of them being Robert “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick, the former assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of the FBI's Boston division from 1981 to 1986.

I had come to know Bob Fitzpatrick well since the summer of 2011, when Bulger was apprehended in Santa Monica. Around that time, Fitzpatrick published a memoir about his experiences in the Boston division of the FBI. The book was called
Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down.
A scathing insider's account of the FBI's duplicitous efforts to protect Bulger and Flemmi, the book stirred up controversy and enmity among former FBI agents and members of the Boston U.S. attorney's office who had been on the job during the years of the Bulger fiasco.

After reading
Betrayal,
I contacted Fitzpatrick and we began an ongoing friendship based primarily on a desire to understand how the Bulger era ever could have been possible in the first place.

I met Fitzpatrick for the first time at his home in Rhode Island, a bucolic setting overlooking Narragansett Bay. Having read his book, I knew he'd been through hell in his efforts to challenge the FBI's insistence on
protecting Bulger and preserving his status as a Top Echelon Informant. After years of making a pest of himself, and after an exemplary twenty-one-year career, Fitzpatrick was drummed out of the bureau a few years before becoming eligible for a pension.

In his early seventies, still vigorous, with skin and hair permanently bleached by the ocean air and sun, Fitzy was the classic G-man in retirement. At his home office in Rhode Island, he dug out old files on the Bulger case; we traded information and began constructing a narrative that might explain how Whitey had been able to remain in power for so long, even though, during the 1970s and 1980s, he was suspected of being involved in many murders.

“At the time,” said Fitzpatrick, “I couldn't see it. Bulger was being protected by forces beyond my comprehension. I knew he was being protected, of course. Every time I tried to challenge the in-house position on having a guy who was himself a mob boss—a real no-no as far as confidential informants are concerned—I received pushback at every level. But it took a long time for me to begin to see the big picture. Probably not until the Wolf hearings and the various trials that came after that.”

One of the reasons that Fitzpatrick ran into problems in Boston had been simply that he was an outsider. In 1981, FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., made the decision to transfer Fitzpatrick from his posting in Miami to Boston, where, as ASAC, he would be second in command to Lawrence Sarhatt, who was the SAC of the entire Boston division.

Specifically, Fitzpatrick was sent to Boston to sort out what had become a nasty jurisdictional dispute between the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in the area, namely the Massachusetts State Police. There were accusations being made that the FBI's C-3 organized crime squad was interfering with other agencies' investigations into Bulger and Flemmi's activities.

Part of Fitzpatrick's mandate involved meeting Bulger, assessing his “suitability” as an informant, and filing a report with the supervisor of the Boston office.

“It was Morris who drove me to Bulger's condo in Quincy,” said Fitzpatrick. “All the way there, he's telling me how much I'm going to like this guy Bulger. He's building him up, so much so that I became suspicious.
So we get to the location, Morris stays in the car. I go to Bulger's door. He answers. He's wearing a Boston Red Sox cap and sunglasses, even though he's indoors. I mean, they say the eyes are the window to the soul, and right away, I can't see this guy's soul.” Fitzpatrick laughs, not so much with mirth but as if to say, What else can you do but laugh. “I put out my hand to shake his, and he ignores the gesture, leaves me standing there with my hand out. Oh, well, that's not good.”

Fitzpatrick had dealt with many confidential informants in his career. He had been assigned to teach a course on the cultivation and management of informants, which is one of the reasons he'd been assigned to Boston to assess the Bulger situation. With Whitey, right away he saw that the signs were not good. Usually, an informant is solicitous when meeting someone higher up in the law enforcement chain of command. Explained Fitzpatrick, “Their entire deal with the government is based on their delivering the goods, so to speak. So they are often eager to convince you that what they have to offer is ‘singular information,' as we call it. But with Bulger, it was the opposite. He was unfriendly bordering on hostile. He wanted to make it clear that he was the one in charge, not the other way around.”

Once inside the apartment, Bulger did not offer Fitzpatrick a seat. They stood in the kitchen. Fitzpatrick asked, “So, what are you doing for us?” Bulger launched into a long dissertation on how he would never testify in court and how he did not expect nor did he want to be paid. “I have my own informants,” he said. “I pay them for information. They don't pay me.”

“I didn't say much,” remembered Fitzpatrick. “I let him do most of the talking. And none of it was good, from my perspective. He was boasting that he was the boss of his own group, that he called the shots. After a few minutes of hearing this, I asked myself, What the hell am I doing here? I mean, clearly this guy thinks we work for him.”

If that weren't enough to throw Fitzpatrick for a loop, all of a sudden, from another room in walks John Connolly. “He's not supposed to be there. This was supposed to be a one-on-one between Bulger and me. Connolly knows that. It was improper for him to be there.”

The meeting lasted twenty minutes, then Fitzpatrick left and went back to the car. When he sat in the front seat, Morris asked, “So, what did you think?”

Fitzpatrick said, “I'm going to close him.”

Morris became deadly serious and said, “No, you're not.”

Decades later, Fitzpatrick remembered the moment vividly, as if he could still feel the sting. “Morris was the supervisor of the organized crime squad, but he was under me. I was his manager. For him to say that to me was an act of insubordination. I was angry. But I let it pass. I was still new to the division, had only been there three months or so.” Fitzpatrick shook his head in dismay. “It was the first indication of what I was up against. And it got worse after that.”

After his meeting with Bulger, Fitzpatrick returned to the office and composed a two-page memo recommending that Bulger be closed as informant.

I knew after meeting Fitzpatrick that first time that he was the kind of source a journalist or writer dreams about, someone who has been inside a particular system and then, through some sort of cataclysmic experience, is cast out of it. Bob had gone to Boston a die-hard FBI agent, a true believer and good soldier, and through his long process of disillusionment he was able to see things from a unique perspective, like a cult member who has left or been forced out of the cult.

On July 28, the evening before he was scheduled to take the stand, I met Fitzpatrick at Champion's bar, near the Westin Copley Place hotel, where he had been booked into a room by the Bulger defense team. He was with his wife, Jane, whom I had met in Rhode Island. Jane went through Bob's travails with him back in the 1980s, when he was ASAC, and also during his extended and acrimonious parting of ways with the bureau.

I said to Bob, “I hope you're ready for this. Turns out you are pretty much the one and only major witness for the defense. You are their entire case.”

Fitzpatrick laughed at the obvious absurdity of his being called to testify on behalf of the defense. He was not a supporter of Bulger. “I hope they fry the bastard,” he told me when we first met in 2011. But he was sympathetic to the argument that Bulger had been protected by people within the criminal justice system and was therefore, in some ways, a creation of that system. And certainly Fitzpatrick welcomed the opportunity to explain to a jury and the public what happened to someone within the system who went against the grain.

“I'm hoping that testifying at this trial can maybe bring us some closure,” said Bob. “Because that's what Jane and I have never had.”

“Well,” I said, “one question you will need to answer for yourself before you take the stand: was Bulger an informant or not?”

Bob had been following the trial; he knew the defense had been attempting to make the argument that Bulger never was an informant, that his role as a TE was a fictional creation of the FBI.

“He was an informant,” said Bob. “But that was the problem. He had been allowed by Connolly and Morris to believe that he wasn't an informant, or at least that he didn't have the obligations that were expected of someone who was an informant.”