Where the Bodies Were Buried (6 page)

The heavy security was not unexpected. Two months earlier, on Patriots' Day, April 15, the city had been rocked by the explosion of two homemade bombs planted at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. It was a shocking event that galvanized the attention of the entire country and the world. Three people were killed and an estimated 264 injured by the two pressure-cooker bombs packed with nails and hidden in a backpack left on the sidewalk near where many thousands of people gathered to welcome marathon runners as they crossed the finish line. The carnage was ugly, with images of burnt and bloodied victims that went viral via cable news reports and social media sites for days and weeks to come.

The bombers were soon identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, two Chechen exiles who had been living in the Boston area for more than a decade.

On the night of April 18—less than two months before the Bulger trial began—the brothers shot and killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer in Cambridge and initiated an exchange of gunfire with police in Watertown. In the ensuing chaos, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, driving a stolen SUV, ran over and killed his brother, Tamerlan. Dzhokhar had been shot and injured but managed to escape. Law enforcement officers sealed off a twenty-block area in Watertown. They trapped and captured the alleged bomber, who was hiding inside a boat stored in a resident's backyard. Tsarnaev was bleeding and barely alive.

The bombing and subsequent manhunt was a seminal event for Boston, showcasing the city as a strong and cohesive community, with heroic officers of the law who always got their man. But once the triumph of the capture began to diminish, the city was left with the knowledge that this horrific act had been committed not by some invading force, but from within, by two young men who were largely indistinguishable from others who populated what was now an ethnically diverse metropolis. The security concerns that this caused—the fear of not knowing if the average person walking down the street was a terrorist bomber—was evident in the massive show of armed security outside the courthouse for the first day of the Bulger trial.
³

At 7:30
A.M.
, a buzz went through the crowd. Bulger's motorcade was coming down the street. Five or six black SUVs, with dark-tinted windows, drove past the crowd toward a driveway leading to a restricted, underground entrance to the courthouse. It was impossible to tell which of the SUVs contained Bulger, but it didn't really matter. He was in one of those vehicles, wearing wrist and ankle cuffs, on his way to face his destiny.

Located on Fan Pier, jutting out into the harbor, the Moakley Courthouse was reflective of the new Boston—institutional, efficient, handsomely constructed. Designed by the firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, based in
Manhattan, the building was completed in 1999 at a cost of $170 million. The courthouse building stands alone, across the street from a huge parking lot. The building has a wide entrance, with double glass doors and an undistinguished façade made of red brick. The front of the building, facing Seaport Street, is devoid of windows, so that it is not immediately clear what might be taking place behind the walls of this imposing urban monolith.

Despite the notoriety of the Bulger trial, which had all but guaranteed large crowds and high public interest, the trial was not being held in the largest courtroom in the building. In the interest of crowd management,
The People v. Bulger
was assigned to courtroom number eleven, a midsize room on the building's fifth floor. Media personnel and spectators who were unable to get a seat in the courtroom were diverted to overflow rooms on separate floors.

Inside courtroom eleven, spectators jockeyed for position. The various legal representatives gathered at large tables in the well of the room, two tables for the prosecutors and their legal assistants, two tables for the defense team. Everyone waited expectantly for the defendant to be brought in.

At around 8:45
A.M.
, a side door in the well of the courtroom opened up. Two U.S. marshals entered, followed by the short, lean figure of James J. Bulger.

Whitey had shaved off the full white beard he had at the time of his arrest and had maintained during his pretrial appearances in court. Without the beard, he looked slightly younger and more accessible—the type of old man you might see out for a brisk morning walk along the waterfront. He was wearing a long-sleeved kelly-green shirt known as a Hensley, much like a crewneck T-shirt but with three vertical buttons at the collar, along with blue jeans and white sneakers. Apparently, Bulger and his team decided that he go with a casual, workingman look as opposed to the dapper suit-and-tie presentation favored by many mobster defendants. Whitey was Irish American, not a Mafioso, and his choice of attire seemed designed to underscore the difference.

Nonetheless, he was a man of stature, and as he was led to his seat at the defense table, Bulger sought to do so with a certain swagger. He knew that he was being watched, not only by a courtroom full of onlookers but
by hordes of reporters who would characterize his demeanor to the masses. Back in the day, his tough-guy strut no doubt served to reflect his standing in the city's underworld, but now, at the age of eighty-two, his swagger was circumscribed by the realities of his aged physical frame. As he positioned himself to sit down in the heavy oak chair, he almost stumbled.

The defendant sat with his back to the spectators' gallery and courtroom entrance, a disappointment to members of the public who had hoped that, by securing entry, they would get to stare the city's most notorious desperado in the eye. Instead, they were looking at the back of his mostly bald head.

“All rise,” announced a court clerk. Everyone in the courtroom stood as Judge Denise J. Casper entered the room and took her place on the bench, an elevated perch that looked out over the entire courtroom.

An African American woman in her mid-forties, Casper was notable for her relative youthfulness. She had come into the case a year into its development, when the previous judge, Richard G. Stearns, had been removed on the grounds that there was a conflict of interest. Back in the 1980s, Stearns had served as an assistant in the criminal division of the U.S. attorney's office when James Bulger was covertly functioning as an informant for the government. The defense claimed that Judge Stearns, at the time, must have been aware of Bulger's informant status—a claim the judge denied. But he was removed from the case by an appellate court that ruled “the appearance of a conflict” was sufficient grounds to warrant bringing on a new judge.

Casper was the first black female judge to serve on the federal bench in Massachusetts. She had been a federal judge for only three years, a noticeably short tenure for someone presiding over such a high-profile case. But she had a sterling reputation for fairness and at least one other characteristic that made her appealing to both the prosecution and the defense: she had not been around long enough to be associated with or tainted by the district's problematic historical relationship with Bulger.

Casper greeted the defendant and all of the lawyers, which included Fred Wyshak, Brian Kelly, and Zachary Hafer for the prosecution, and for the defense, J. W. Carney and Hank Brennan.

There followed a brief discussion about the respective lengths of the opening statements. There would need to be a short morning and
afternoon break, and a one-hour lunch break. The judge wanted to get a sense of how best to schedule these interruptions. After hearing from both sides, she asked the bailiff to bring the jury into the courtroom.

From a backstage door, eighteen citizens entered the courtroom and took their seats in the jury box. As with most juries, it was a collection of average-looking folk, more men than women, and predominantly Caucasian. Ultimately, twelve would serve as actual jurors; the other six were alternate jurors to be called upon only if something unforeseen happened to one of the original twelve that made it impossible for them to continue.

Among the members of the jury was Janet Uhlar, a fifty-five-year-old woman from Cape Cod, who had been selected from among three hundred people who were interviewed from among the jury pool. Uhlar had come into the case not knowing much about the story of Whitey Bulger. She was a retired schoolteacher and author of three books about differing aspects of the American Revolutionary War. Born and raised in Quincy, a city just south of Boston, she had nonetheless lived outside Massachusetts for thirty years. She had heard Bulger's name and knew that he had a brother who was formerly a powerful politician in the state. She was aware of something called the “Irish Mob” through references in popular culture. She had not seen
The Departed
or any other movies that were supposedly based on Bulger, and she had not read any of the many published books on the subject.

As Uhlar took her seat as juror number twelve, she looked out for the first time at the courtroom packed to the gills, the lawyers in their suits surrounded by boxes of evidence and stacks of legal documents. After weeks of filling out questionnaires; being interviewed multiple times by the lawyers on both sides; having sat through, the previous day, a long instruction to the jury by Judge Casper, the moment had finally arrived. After taking a deep breath, Janet Uhlar said to herself, “Sit back and enjoy the ride; this may be one of the big adventures of your life.”

IS THE GOVERNMENT
ready to proceed with its case?” asked Judge Casper, directing her question to the prosecutors' table.

Co-prosecutor Brian Kelly stood and answered, “Yes, thank you, Your Honor.”

Kelly walked over to a podium facing Janet Uhlar and the other jurors. His manner was dour and workmanlike as he began his opening statement.

“Good morning,” he said, nodding to the jurors. “This is my chance to give you an overview of the case. It's a case about organized crime, public corruption, and all sorts of illegal activities ranging from extortion to drug dealing to money laundering to possession of machine guns to murder. Nineteen murders. It's about a criminal enterprise, which is a group of criminals, who ran amok in the city of Boston for almost thirty years. So you'll hear about crimes in the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. And at the center of all this murder and mayhem is one man, the defendant in this case, James Bulger.”

Kelly adopted the demeanor of the common man. At the age of fifty-two, balding and paunchy, he somewhat resembled the actor Paul Giamatti, and gave the impression of being a card-carrying member of the proletariat, but he was, in fact, a seasoned assistant U.S. attorney with a reputation as a tenacious trial lawyer. In the early 2000s, Kelly spent several years investigating financial fraud arising from Boston's infamous $14.5 billion Big Dig infrastructure project. The prosecutor recovered more than $500 million in fraudulent charges against the government, making him a darling among government accountants and a recipient of an Exceptional Service Award, the DOJ's highest honor. In the Bulger case, he had, over the years, proven to be a tough negotiator who enlisted the cooperation of many government witnesses via means that some defense lawyers characterized as highly coercive.

If judged by appearance only, Kelly could have been a Boston detective, or a deliveryman, or a ditch digger. His manner of addressing the jury was conversational. He was one of them, and, in theory, his outrage would become their outrage as he described the criminal methodology of the man now seated just a few feet away in his kelly-green T-shirt.

“Let's go back to the summer of 1983,” said Kelly. “There was a man named Arthur Barrett; everyone called him Bucky. Bucky Barrett. By all accounts, a likable guy, wife, two little kids, owned a restaurant, and he had a fondness for stolen jewelry that he could resell for a profit. And it's this fondness for jewelry that proved to be his undoing. Because in the summer of '83, he was tricked into going to a small home in South Boston at seven
ninety-nine Third Street. He was tricked with the false promise that there would be stolen jewelry there that he could assess and then resell for a profit. But, instead, when he got to that small house, he didn't see any stolen jewelry. What he saw was this man over here, James Bulger, sticking a gun at him, yelling at him to freeze. And Bucky Barrett froze.”

As an experienced prosecutor, Kelly knew that opening statements were like the introduction to a book. You were expected to lay out your themes but also to hook the reader into your narrative. Kelly was attempting to position the jury into being led by the government's interpretation of the evidence. He would tell them a story, and they would be enraptured, like a group of scouts seated around the campfire listening to a yarn from their scoutmaster.

“And then Bucky Barrett was taken to a chair, handcuffed, and chained to that chair. And then for several hours he was questioned by this man over here, James Bulger”—Kelly pointed at Whitey, making the connection as explicit as possible—“and his criminal sidekick, Stephen Flemmi. And they questioned him about other criminals in the area, pumped him for information about their criminal competitors. . . . They asked him a lot of questions, but eventually they got around to asking him where he kept his money. He admitted that he had cash in his house. So they made him call his wife several times and try to get her to leave the house with the young kids so they could go over and take the money.

“Finally, she was able to do that. She didn't know why she had to leave the house; she just kept getting calls from her husband, Bucky. When she left the house, Bulger and Flemmi went to the house and helped themselves to over forty thousand dollars.

“Now, you will hear from Elaine Barrett herself. She's a witness in this case. She will tell you that that was the last time she heard from Bucky Barrett. Because Bucky Barrett, while Bulger and Flemmi were at his house stealing money, was back at the small house in South Boston, still chained to the chair, being watched by two other members of his criminal enterprise, one of whom was a guy named Kevin Weeks. Kevin Weeks watched [Barrett] as he said his prayers.