Where the Bodies Were Buried (57 page)

It was as if the family were to blame for not fully grasping the conspiracy behind their father's murder until it was too late. After all these years, it still riled David Wheeler, who grasped the podium with both hands and almost shouted: “Everyone within the sound of my voice should understand this: the FBI, entrusted with the greatest law enforcement powers in the nation, is responsible for my father's murder. They are as responsible for that murder as this defendant sitting here before you.”

Wheeler's statement was a barnburner. The problem was that Wheeler's words seemed aimed at issues barely touched upon at the trial.

The day after the impact statements, Bulger was brought back to the courthouse for his final appearance. He stood before Judge Casper, who prefaced her sentencing of Bulger with a statement. She called Whitey “evil,” “reprehensible,” “monstrous.” Her words were the culmination of what the trial had been for many Bostonians: a demonization of Whitey Bulger as the greatest criminal mastermind the city had ever seen.

Casper sentenced Bulger to two life terms, plus seventy-five years.

Bulger was asked if he had anything to say.

“No,” he answered.

He was led from the courtroom for the final time.

IN THE DAYS
and weeks following the trial, I spoke with Kevin Weeks and Pat Nee. Both were satisfied with the verdict but seemed to derive no great sense of pleasure or closure from the proceedings. Weeks, in particular, saw the trial as a public disgrace for Bulger that could have been avoided if Whitey had simply pleaded guilty to the charges. For Kevin, closure was a pipe dream: he has two sons entering young adulthood who will be made to answer for his legacy as Bulger's protégé and also the man who brought him down by testifying against him in court.

“It hasn't been easy for them,” Weeks told me. “All I can do is be there and give them the support that I never really had when I was their age.”

As for Nee, the concerns were more of a legal nature. Rumors persisted after the trial that local prosecutors would attempt to bring charges against him for various crimes in which he was alleged to have played a role, including, most notably, the double murder of Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue. Nee makes no attempt to hide from these allegations. The fact that he continues to circulate in Southie and, in some quarters, remains a well-respected member of the community is Nee's way of saying, “You have no case against me.”

Following the trial, Nee's more immediate concern was that
Saint Hoods,
his reality show on the Discovery Channel, was canceled after only two episodes had been aired. The former gangster had mixed feelings. “The money was decent,” he told me. “I'll miss that. But the notoriety was more trouble than it was worth. I never wanted to be a media sensation. I'll leave that to Whitey.”

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE
of the U.S. Department of Justice, the trial of Whitey Bulger was an unequivocal success. The devil had been burned at the stake in the town square, and the town had reveled in his demise. The trial provided the government with the self-justification they had been denied while Bulger was on the run for sixteen years. Not only had they nailed Bulger, silencing those who claimed they had no interest in prosecuting the well-connected gangster, but they had done so in a way that effectively shut all doors leading to further official areas of inquiry. The historical framework
that created Bulger—and the law enforcement strategy that gave him his power—remained mostly unexamined. The individuals responsible, aside from John Connolly, would not be legally held to task.

The cost of the trial was considerable: U.S. taxpayers paid approximately $6 million to stage the trial at the Moakley Courthouse. Prosecutors, defense lawyers, and their staffs had to be paid. The expense of transferring Bulger on a daily basis to and from Plymouth County Correctional Facility, escorted by a law enforcement motorcade, was considerable. Witnesses had to be flown in from around the United States and put up in hotels. The jury was paid transportation expenses and fed on a daily basis. The security detail at the courthouse was twice its normal size.

With the expense of such a high-profile proceeding, a discerning citizen might have expected more than a show trial. Given that there never was any doubt that Bulger would be found guilty of crimes that would result in him being put away for life, the trial could have been a legal exploration of the law enforcement policy that makes it possible for a man like Whitey Bulger to thrive. Instead, the trial was largely a strategic rope-a-dope designed to contain and focus all venom on Bulger, while the many players who had enabled and protected his reign—for personal or institutional reasons—were allowed to fade into retirement.

For anyone who thinks this a minor injustice, or a local issue only relevant to Boston, consider the following: the policies that created Whitey Bulger are still in place. The Top Echelon Informant Program has been discontinued in name only. Local cops and federal agents still cultivate and pay criminal informants, and sometimes those criminals continue to prey upon people and commit murder while serving as informants. It happens all the time. In areas of organized crime, gangs, and the narcotics business, in particular, this tango between criminals and the law is how criminal cases are made. The scope of these arrangements can be vast and far-reaching. It exists at every level of the underworld, from low-level street criminals to mob bosses like Whitey Bulger and beyond.

Right now, somewhere in America, agents from the FBI, DEA, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), or ICE are cultivating informants—maybe a Mexican assassin in the narco trade, or a young Muslim who could penetrate a suspected terrorist cell, or a member of the Aryan
Nations who is also a meth distributor. Deals will be made with these criminals that shall remain intentionally vague and clandestine. These criminals will utilize the arrangement to enhance their position in the underworld; that may be why they agreed to take part in the arrangement to begin with. The criminal and the agent will enter into a dance of mutual manipulation, and the wiliest man or woman shall come out on top. If the arrangement goes haywire, as they sometimes do, the agent, and most especially the agent's handlers within the system, will cut and run. They will deny involvement and seek institutional protection through the destruction of documents, bureaucratic smoke screens, or a skewed prosecution, as was the case in the disposal of the Bulger fiasco.

Unless this policy is called into question, and those who use and abuse it are held accountable, it will continue to metastasize, playing out on ever more grandiose levels.

Consider, for instance, the case of Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, the son of a powerful cartel boss in Mexico who was himself a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel.

At the same time that Bulger was on trial in Boston, Zambada Niebla was being held on racketeering, narcotics, and murder charges at a prison outside Chicago. In 2010, when Zambada Niebla was indicted and arrested in the United States, he claimed that he could not be prosecuted because he was operating under an immunity agreement with the DEA.

In legal papers filed in federal court, lawyers for Zambada Niebla claimed:

The allegations were stunning but would have been familiar to anyone who had followed the Bulger case. Just as the FBI had done back in the 1960s when they played an incendiary role in the Boston gang wars, the DEA was accused of taking sides in the Mexican cartel wars. The results were similar, but on a much larger scale. In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, located along the border with El Paso, Texas, narco violence reached unprecedented levels. The Sinaloa Cartel was engaged in a bloody war with the Juarez Cartel. According to Zambada Niebla, they won that war because they were being covertly protected by the U.S. Department of Justice.

After the dust had settled, Zambada Niebla played a role similar to that of Steve Flemmi. Just as Flemmi, upon arrest, had divulged his and Bulger's deal with the feds, Zambada Niebla claimed that he and his cartel had formed a similar deal with the DEA.

In 2014, the U.S. government reached a plea deal with Zambada Niebla. Rather than go to trial, which would have presented prosecutors with a containment challenge even greater than what Wyshak and Kelly encountered, the cartel underboss was allowed to plead guilty and accept a relatively light sentence of ten years in prison. This way, the gangster's tales would remain untold in a public forum.

The Bulger and Zambada Niebla cases, when placed against the larger framework of law enforcement strategies and DOJ policy, seem to suggest a long-standing pattern of U.S. agents acting not as lawmen but as players in the underworld, making secret deals, pitting one side against another, and protecting those who are deemed to be “on our side.” Just as Bulger and Flemmi had supplied underworld intelligence to agents that helped them make cases against the Mafia, the Sinaloa Cartel would supply info to the DEA, helping them make major cartel-related narcotics cases in the United States.

The game goes on, and there is much collateral damage. Sometimes innocent people get killed, or framed for crimes they did not commit. There is a system of justice in the United States that is supposed to help protect the innocent and see to it that the law is applied with fairness and transparency. But the Bulger trial seemed to suggest that in some cases the pursuit of justice takes a backseat to the dictates of bureaucratic self-preservation.

Over the years, many people knew of or played a role in the coddling of
Bulger. That inclination was the ugly stepchild of an earlier generation of corruption forged through the handling of Joe Barboza, the Flemmi brothers, and untold other government-protected criminal informants. When these arrangements are exposed, those responsible have a tendency to disappear into the woodwork. The truth is buried or obscured. The facts are deemed inadmissible or not relevant to the matter at hand.

In the end, the System protects itself.

ALTHOUGH THIS BOOK
is intended to be an account of the legal proceedings known as
The People of the United States v. James J. Bulger,
the narrative ultimately goes far beyond the trial. The result is a book based on sources, both human and archival, that I have accumulated while following the Bulger saga for more than a decade. Some interviews over the years have been off the record. More recently, the trial afforded an opportunity to revisit or interview anew individuals who lived aspects of this story. Among the key interview subjects: Kevin Weeks, Patrick Nee, Teresa Stanley, Joseph Salvati, Anthony Cardinale, Paul Griffin, Robert Fitzpatrick, Thomas Foley, Richard Marinick, Steve Davis, Marilyn Di Silva, John Connolly, and Janet Uhlar.

Requests for one-on-one interviews were made of the various legal parties involved in the Bulger trial. I was turned down by both the defense team and the prosecutors. As for Bulger, I twice wrote to him in prison requesting an interview, once before and once after the trial. I received no response.

To this date, Bulger has never submitted to a formal interview. In the documentary
Whitey,
directed by Joe Berlinger, he is recorded talking on the phone with Jay Carney, his attorney. He is asked questions by Carney that were designed to illustrate a central argument of the government's case, that Bulger never was an informant for the FBI.

Previously, Bulger had been able to leak self-serving versions of his life story to the media through a series of letters he wrote to a former fellow prison inmate named Richard Sunday. Bulger encouraged Sunday to divulge the letters to the media, which he did, creating a stir in the press in the months leading up to the trial.

In the letters and also the Berlinger documentary, Bulger proved to be skilled at finding ways to put forth his version of events without ever having to explain himself in detail or submit to questions that might challenge his version of the truth. Throughout the trial, Bulger's attorneys stated publicly
that their client wanted “the full truth to be known,” but what they really meant was that he wanted his version of the truth to be known. In his strategic leaks to the media and through his lawyers, Bulger put forth many incredible allegations, including that he was given immunity to commit crimes by Jeremiah O'Sullivan in exchange for protecting the prosecutor's life from retribution by the Mafia in New England. These allegations were sometimes reiterated in strategic letters sent to friends, which found their way into the press. Whitey seemed to have an interest in shaping his image in the public domain; this negated any desire he might have to submit to an honest interview the terms of which he could not control.

Since Bulger disappeared on the lam in 1995, there has been voluminous litigation on matters relating to his criminal exploits and also his time as a Top Echelon Informant. Evidence gathered for these trials and hearings, and the transcripts of testimony, have informed this book. The various legal proceedings are too numerous to mention, but two governmental hearings were essential in understanding the corrupt universe that helped to create Whitey Bulger. One was the Hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which resulted in a report titled “Everything Secret Degenerates.” The other was the memorandum issued by Judge Nancy Gertner, who presided over what became known as “the Limone matter,” the lawsuit that resulted in substantial financial settlements for Joe Salvati and others who were framed on murder charges by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Finally, any understanding of the Bulger fiasco begins with absorbing the work of the many journalists who have covered the story over the years. Some of these reporters have gone on to write books about the case, as have innumerable people who were associates or rivals of Bulger. This includes people in law enforcement who played a role in trying to bring Bulger down. My opinions are my own, but all of these books and journalism accounts have contributed to a broader and deeper understanding of this complex, multilayered story.