Where the Bodies Were Buried (55 page)

It was a promising opening salvo, and for a good thirty minutes Brennan laid it all out. He started with Steve Flemmi and constructed a narrative that, in all the journalism and books on the Bulger era, had been insufficiently explored. It was Flemmi who, during the city's gang wars, while Bulger was away in prison, first became a Top Echelon Informant. Flemmi entered into a partnership with Special Agents Rico and Condon.

Noted Brennan: “[Flemmi] was at war with other criminals. He was at war with other gangsters, and when he needed help, all he needed to do was draw on his friends, the federal government. Condon and Rico, they'd tell him where Punchy McLaughlin was, where Wimpy Bennett was. ‘You want to murder him? I'll give you the bus stop he's going to be at.' They're in partnership with him. And when they needed his help, they needed some information, they needed a gun, they needed a car fixed, they'd call on their friend. This is the type of relationship that they had, and they accepted it.”

It was a cogent point: Brennan was suggesting that the seed that had been planted that gave flower to the ugliness, corruption, and murder that were to follow for the next thirty years had been planted not by Bulger, Connolly, and Morris, but by Flemmi, Rico, and Condon.

To illustrate his point, Brennan reminded the jury how, after Flemmi and his partner Salemme blew up the car of Joe Barboza's lawyer, blowing off his leg, they were told to get out of town by Special Agent Rico. During his time on the lam, Flemmi remained in touch with Rico. At the same time, he murdered a criminal partner in the Nevada desert. There was a warrant out for his arrest. But Flemmi kept moving. He wound up in
Montreal, where he hid out until receiving a call from Rico telling him it was safe to return to Boston. Brennan reminded the jury, “[Flemmi] didn't even want to come home. He said that. He felt like it was a threat.” But Rico insisted. Flemmi's services were needed back in Boston.

“Then we have the transition,” said Brennan. “As agents get older and Mr. Rico and Mr. Condon start to move on, who comes in to take their place? Special Agent Connolly and Special Agent Morris. They hand off the baton, and it's business as usual. It's not a rogue agent. It's systemic. It's what they do.”

So far, so good: Brennan was spinning a tale that implied that the purveyors of the system, the FBI field agents and their supervisors, were manipulating the gangsters like pieces on a chessboard. Brennan even took the argument a step further, explaining how the efforts of the FBI became the foundation for the federal Strike Force and the U.S. attorney's office.

“When we near the late 1970s, we know the temperament of the Department of Justice. We know the Strike Force, headed by Jeremiah O'Sullivan, wants the national attention. They want everybody to look at Boston and say, ‘This is the prototype. These guys are the best at what they do.' They want the accolades, they want the glory, and they're willing to make deals. They're willing to protect criminals, murderers, because of pride. Because when law enforcement puts pride and self-importance in the equation, something about it gets distorted, something gets perverted, and something gets corrupted.”

And this is where Brennan's presentation became derailed. After constructing a compelling narrative, Brennan found himself at a dead-end street with nothing visible except for the disembodied visage of Whitey, hovering in the darkness, like the face of Obi-Wan Kenobi. It was logical to surmise—and there was plenty of evidence to back it up—that Flemmi was called back to Boston, in part, to help recruit Bulger as a Top Echelon Informant. But Brennan could not make that argument because his client was not willing to admit that he ever was an informant. And so Brennan was left with a less than startling conclusion to his story. He ended by suggesting that Flemmi's historical relationship with the government was the reason that Bulger's partner was now a witness telling lies about his client. This may have been true, but it was a far less epic explanation for Flemmi's
motivation than the likelihood that he was an essential facilitator of Whitey's relationship with the feds, thus ushering in the Age of Bulger and all the bloodshed that followed

The defense team's closing argument became even less probative when Brennan handed over the reins to his co-counsel.

Throughout the trial, J. W. Carney had seemed to become increasingly unfocused. Carney was the one who had been saying to the media from the outset that his client would take the stand, and when Bulger chose not to do so, the lawyer appeared deflated. He remained vigorous in his legal arguments before the judge, but his grasp of the particulars of the case at hand unraveled in the final days, culminating in a closing argument that was slipshod and uninspired.

He went for the folksy approach, mentioning to the jury before he began that if he seemed nervous it was because, for the first time in his thirty-five-year legal career, “my mother is in court watching me.” The attorney then began his summation with a rambling example of why the government's witnesses couldn't be trusted, citing the television show
The Brady Bunch
—an oddly outdated reference—and then segueing into an anecdote about buying a television from a youthful but untrustworthy sales assistant, all of which was unnecessary if you, the jury, had first utilized a copy of
Consumer Reports
magazine. And if all of this weren't enough to underscore the jury's need to make wise evaluations, Carney free-associated on the subjects of elective surgery, childbearing, and consulting a guidance counselor as further obtuse examples of informed decision making.

Carney delivered some tart one-liners: Of Martorano, he noted, “I think if you did a CAT scan, you'd have troubling finding a heart in this guy.” After quoting from the testimony of Kevin Weeks where he declared, “I've been lying my whole life; I'm a criminal,” Carney waited a few beats before saying wryly to the jury, “May I kiss you, Mr. Weeks, for your candor?”

The one-liners elicited chuckles from some in the jury and the spectators' gallery, but Carney's attempts to make substantive points often led to dismay. He sought to link Martorano to the historical quagmire of Joseph Barboza, noting that the witness was a protégé of Barboza. But in his reference to the Teddy Deegan murder and Barboza having framed innocent men for the crime with the help of the FBI, Carney mistakenly identified
Jimmy Martorano as one of the true killers when he meant to say Jimmy Flemmi. He repeated this mistake throughout his summation. Elsewhere, he referred to Kevin Weeks as Kevin Nee, once correcting that mistake only to repeat it twice more before he was finished.

Carney used barely half of his allotted time, ending with a boilerplate plea to the jury that they live up to their constitutional duties by saying, “No, we don't find the evidence to be proof beyond a reasonable doubt. You can say it with courage that the prosecutors have not met their burden of proof, and then you will embody our constitutional protections.”

Given the tepid nature of Carney's portion of the closing argument, and the overwhelming evidence aligned against Bulger, it was a surprise that the jury deliberations took as long as they did. For five days, the jury gathered to deliberate behind closed doors. The media and interested spectators also gathered. These days were a time for followers of the Bulger saga to kibitz and speculate. Waiting for a verdict had an air of expectation not because there was much question how the verdict would go, but because the verdict represented the end of a story that had held the city in its grip for at least three decades.

Finally, the jury announced that they were ready with their verdict, the word spreading via texts and Twitter. The media and trial observers flooded into the Moakley Courthouse and took their positions. Bulger was brought into the courtroom. By this time, Whitey had adopted a nonchalant attitude, as if the verdict meant nothing to him. He sat down at the defense counsel's table and immediately began scribbling notes on a legal pad, as he had often throughout the latter weeks of the trial.

The jury was brought into the courtroom.

Bulger was asked to stand.

The court clerk began to read the verdict. It was going to take some time. There were thirty-two counts and multiple criminal acts within each count.

Many of the counts were pro forma: Bulger had already admitted to racketeering, loan-sharking, illegal gambling, drug trafficking, and gun possession. The clerk announced the word
guilty
in relation to these charges as if he were reading from a grocery list. It was when the clerk reached the portion of the verdict sheet that involved the nineteen murders that the entire gathering was riveted to attention.

Almost immediately it was clear that the prosecution had not scored an across-the-board victory on these charges. With the clerk announcing “proved” or “not proved” to each of the murder counts, it was a mixed verdict. Overall, Bulger was found guilty on eleven of the murders, with seven being declared “not proved,” and one, the murder of Debra Davis, resulting in a declaration of “no finding.”

The reading of the verdict had taken twenty minutes. When it was over, Bulger was asked by Judge Casper, “Do you fully understand the verdict reached by the jury in this case?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Whitey.

Bulger sat down and resumed scribbling on his notepad.

The judge thanked the men and women of the jury for their service, and they were dismissed. After they were gone, Casper announced a date two months hence when the guilty party would be sentenced for his crimes.

A gaggle of U.S. marshals gathered around Bulger; he stood and was led from the courtroom. The trial was over.

It had been a long haul: thirty-five days of testimony spread over two months. Seventy-two witnesses. After two days of closing statements and the judge's official charging of the jury, deliberations had lasted for thirty-two and a half hours over five days.

Not everyone was happy with the verdict. Family members of those murdered for whom Bulger's involvement was not proved were vocal in their displeasure. William O'Brien, whose father, also named William O'Brien, had been gunned down in the shooting so dramatically described by witness and shooting survivor Ralph DeMasi, was livid. He stormed into the hallway outside the courtroom and cursed loudly. Other family members expressed outrage and dismay outside the courthouse, where the media horde was the largest it had been, double its usual size, with helicopters buzzing overhead and well-known local television reporters conducting live remotes for their various news agencies, cable shows, and podcasts.

Patricia Donahue, who had become a favorite of the media because of her dignity and politeness in the face of such trying circumstances, seemed relieved. She told the press that she had cried during the reading of the verdict, adding, “I think there was justice for me, but maybe not for some other victims.”

William O'Brien continued to vent his anger, saying to the media, “My father was just murdered again, forty years later, in the courtroom. The prosecution dropped the ball. . . . That jury should be ashamed of themselves.”

Steve Davis, who had become such a ubiquitous figure in and around the courthouse and with the media, also expressed displeasure. He said that he was certain Bulger had played a role in his sister's death, no matter what the jury decided. “It's not over for me,” he said, and then he broke down in tears and stepped away from the microphone.

After the family members had spoken, Carney and Brennan stepped up and claimed that they were satisfied with how the trial had gone; they declared victory. Said Carney, “Mr. Bulger knew from the time that he was arrested that he was going to be behind the walls of a prison for the rest of his life, or be injected with a chemical that would kill him. . . . This trial was never about Jim Bulger being set free.” Carney and his co-counsel both noted that an unprecedented level of corruption had been exposed during the trial, which had been Bulger's primary goal.

In the warm summer breeze that blew in from Boston Harbor, the lawyers' rhetoric rang hollow. By attempting to oversimplify their client's relationship with the FBI and others in the criminal justice system, they had contributed to a further muddling of the facts. This was partly what they had been paid to do, the bulk of their fees, in the end, covered by U.S. taxpayers.

The final group of interested parties to speak to the media were those representing the federal government. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, in the job once held by Jeremiah O'Sullivan, stood at the bank of microphones flanked by eight men representing various branches of the U.S. Justice Department. None of these directors and supervisors had been in their current positions when James Bulger was active in Boston. Likely they knew no more or less about Bulger than the average citizen who followed his story through journalism accounts and books. Nonetheless, these people were there to dance on Whitey's grave. The conviction of Bulger was a big moment in their careers, and they were there to receive the accolades and take part in throwing the last few shovels of dirt over the remains of the Bulger legacy.

“Today is a day that many in this city thought would never come,” said Ortiz. “We hope that we stand here today to mark an end to an era that was very ugly in Boston's history.” Ortiz went on to say, “The myth, the legend, the saga of James Bulger is now finally over. He is ancient history.”

The emphasis on history, putting the story of Bulger in the distant past, was the key talking point as leaders of the federal Bulger Fugitive Task Force, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service, and other law enforcement agencies followed Ortiz to the microphone. Said Vincent Lisi, a man who had only recently been appointed SAC of the Boston FBI office, “I realize that the actions of a small percentage of law enforcement many years ago caused some people to lose faith and confidence in us. . . . We went through a dark period where there was corruption, but we're beyond that now.”