Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (20 page)

In early 1981, Davis went to Acapulco on a vacation Flemmi paid for but didn’t want to go on himself. Davis took her mother, Olga, instead and met a Mexican guy named Gustav. Gustav had made a fortune in the olive oil and poultry business. He was everything Flemmi wasn’t: a legitimate businessman, a romantic, an aspiring dad. Gustav talked about kids. He didn’t want a mistress; he wanted a wife. Davis and her mother went on and on about Gustav, right in front of Flemmi, thinking maybe it would change his attitude. Instead, Flemmi and Whitey flew down to Mexico, looking for Gustav. They couldn’t find him. Whitey, as Flemmi recounted it, believed that if they couldn’t kill Gustav, they had better kill Davis; she couldn’t be trusted if she wandered out of Flemmi’s control. Flemmi said that Whitey was the prime mover in Davis’s murder. In letters and in conversations with friends, Whitey has insisted that he didn’t kill Davis—indeed, that he has never killed a woman.

Flemmi would later suggest that what got Davis killed was jealousy—not his but Whitey’s. Whitey got irked when he called or paged Flemmi and his partner didn’t answer because he was with her. To Whitey, this wasn’t personal, it was business. He told Flemmi he was going soft, that Davis was taking his edge. They were losing money because Flemmi was preoccupied with his high-maintenance girlfriend. “Bulger kind of resented the fact that I didn’t spend enough time with him and our business,” Flemmi would later testify.
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Flemmi always insisted he loved Davis, but he did two things that got her killed: He told her that he and Whitey had an FBI agent named John Connolly in their pocket, and then he told Whitey that she knew.
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It wasn’t something he intended to do but rather something he blurted out one night when he and Davis were having a romantic dinner in the Bay Tower Room, which afforded panoramic views of Boston from the thirty-third floor of a downtown office building. This was the kind of night that Davis wanted more of, and she was making that very point when Flemmi’s pager went off. It was Connolly, asking to meet. Davis was furious; she was also suspicious. Flemmi was always rushing off to meetings and never explaining why. Flemmi tried to assuage her, insisting that it wasn’t another woman; that it was Whitey. In fact, he said, it wasn’t just Whitey but John Connolly, an FBI agent who’d given Whitey and Flemmi a license to operate as they pleased. Everything he had been able to give Davis was because he and Whitey had an FBI agent on the inside.
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It was the one thing about his life that he was never supposed to share, and as soon as Flemmi told Whitey, Davis was as good as dead. Flemmi tried to make a case to let it go—after all, Whitey’s closest girlfriends knew John Connolly, too. Flemmi believed they knew Whitey was an informant.
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But Whitey’s girls were Southie girls. They knew the rules. They would stand up. They’d go to jail before they’d talk to the cops. Davis wasn’t anything like them. She was a kid, really. She didn’t understand the life. She wouldn’t stand up. Whitey insisted she had to go. And if Flemmi wouldn’t do it, he would.
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On September 17, 1981, Flemmi called Davis and said he wanted to see her. She was glad, because she wanted to talk to him anyway, to tell him she wanted to break up. She had gone back to Acapulco, this time for a month, and was more sure of Gustav than ever. “She loved him,” her brother Victor said of Gustav. “She was going to marry him. She was preparing to leave Stevie Flemmi, but she was afraid.”
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Flemmi told Davis he wanted to show her a house on East Third Street in South Boston, saying he had just bought it for his parents. Davis had an eye for design and decorations, and Flemmi said he wanted her to see the house and tell him what she thought. Pat Nee was walking to the old Mullens clubhouse at O and Third, just down the street, when Flemmi pulled over on the way to the house. Flemmi said hello and introduced Davis. Pat Nee took one look at Davis and read her body language: She was pressed against the passenger door, as if she was trying to stay as far away from Flemmi as possible.
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Flemmi pulled the car a little further down East Third Street, parked, and walked with Davis toward the property he was buying his parents. It was a nice house with important neighbors. Whitey’s brother Bill, now president of the Massachusetts senate, lived next door. Whitey visited his brother’s home often. But this time he was hiding in the house Flemmi had bought, waiting for his partner and Davis. After Flemmi led Davis in, Whitey, by Flemmi’s account, approached from behind. Davis didn’t know he was there until his hands wrapped around her throat. Whitey wouldn’t use a weapon to kill a woman. He used his bare hands. It took a few minutes for Whitey to choke the life out of her, and as he did she was looking right into Flemmi’s face.
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Whitey was still throttling her as he dragged her toward the cellar stairs. Flemmi did nothing except watch, and then he followed them down to the cellar. Davis was unconscious or maybe already dead. “Let her pray,” Flemmi said, as Whitey laid her body on the cellar floor. If Whitey heard him, he ignored him.
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Flemmi bent down and kissed her on the forehead. “You’re going to a better place,” he said.

Suddenly, Flemmi was gripped with remorse, and for a moment he thought about killing Whitey right then and there. But that thought passed quickly. Instead, he took out a pair of pliers, knelt down, and started yanking Davis’s teeth, to make it harder to identify the body if it was found. Whitey stripped her clothes and wrapped her body in plastic.
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Whitey and Flemmi had been in on at least a half-dozen murders together before. But their victims had been men, almost all of them involved in the underworld. The murder of Debra Davis was different, and the decision to kill her strained their partnership. It was the one murder in their many years together in which the only witnesses, by Flemmi’s account, were him and Whitey. And they would each blame the other. In the moment, however, the flare-up was swiftly set aside, and they went back into mission mode, preparing to dispose of her body without a word between them.

Just minutes after he’d wrapped Debra Davis in plastic, Whitey walked into the Mullens club and sat next to Pat Nee.

“We need some help,” Whitey said. “Stevie’s up the street doing Debbie.”

“What do you mean, ‘doing her’?” Nee asked.

“He’s killing her,” Whitey replied.
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They waited for it to get dark, then put her body in a trunk and drove a few miles over the bridge into Quincy. They buried her in some marshland, next to a train bridge, a few hundred yards away from the busiest road in Boston.
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Olga Davis knew something was wrong. Debra wouldn’t just disappear without calling her. But Flemmi went to Olga’s house and told her he was on top of it. Debra had gone to Texas, and Flemmi had sent some people down there to find her. He needed some photos of Davis, he said, to give to the people looking for her. “I’ll find her,” Steve Flemmi told Olga Davis. “I’ll never stop looking.”
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Later, Flemmi called a friend and asked him to go to Davis’s dentist in Brookline and pull her dental records. As soon as Flemmi got the records, he destroyed them.
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He had already torn out her teeth, but he was obsessed with making sure there was no way Davis would ever be found and identified. His remorse, if he felt any, was short-lived. Not long after Flemmi buried Davis, he started having sex with her thirteen-year-old sister, Michelle, who had been living with Debra when she vanished.
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Debra was gone without a trace, and the two men who killed her were confident her body would never be found.

There was a perfunctory investigation. FBI agents visited Olga Davis. She and her sons told the agents they were sure that Flemmi was behind Debra’s disappearance. The FBI men nodded and took notes, but neither Flemmi nor Whitey was ever interviewed about Davis. Olga Davis reported her daughter’s disappearance to local police, who entered a missing persons report in the FBI’s national computer database, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Six months after Davis vanished, someone secretly tapped into the FBI’s database and removed the missing persons alert, falsely claiming she had been spotted in Houston.
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Even as some FBI agents
were actively engaged in protecting Whitey and Flemmi, other agents were building a race-fixing case against the Winter Hill Gang. In the mid-1970s, a Boston-born gangster named Tony Ciulla had been sent to prison in New Jersey for orchestrating a scam at various racetracks on the East Coast. Given the size of the conspiracy, Ciulla’s sentence of four to six years in New Jersey was relatively light, but even so he offered to give up others for reduced time. The New Jersey state cops didn’t know who he was talking about when he started throwing around names like Howie and Whitey and Flemmi and Martorano, so the FBI was brought in. Even before the Boston office of the FBI could weigh in, the feds in New Jersey had opened a case and put Ciulla before a grand jury.

In New Jersey, it was a good case. In Boston, it was a massive headache, because among the targets of the investigation were Whitey and Flemmi. John Connolly caught wind of the probe and reached out to Whitey. They met in Connolly’s town house in Southie, and Connolly told Whitey he’d meet with his supervisor, John Morris, and the federal prosecutor in Boston who had taken over the New Jersey case, Jeremiah O’Sullivan. Surely, he thought, they would see the folly of losing two informants in the battle against the Mafia because of a two-bit race-fixing case where a few jockeys got beat up. It was 1979, and the FBI was gearing up to take down the local Mafia. Connolly and Morris told O’Sullivan they couldn’t afford to lose any of their eyes and ears inside the Italian mob. According to Flemmi, O’Sullivan’s response to Connolly and Morris was that he had to consult the case agent, Tom Daly, who was handling Tony Ciulla. If Daly harbored any ill will for his informant Richie Castucci’s having been murdered by Whitey only a couple of years earlier, he didn’t show it. He signed off, and Whitey and Flemmi skated.

Connolly did elicit a promise from them, however. “We had to give our word we wouldn’t kill Tony Ciulla,” Flemmi testified.
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Connolly’s stipulation was significant. At no other time when he was identifying informants or potential informants to Whitey and Flemmi did he extract such a promise.

It probably should have dawned on the other members of Winter Hill how odd it was that, of all those who made money from the race-fixing scam, only Whitey and Flemmi avoided being indicted. But Winter and Martorano and Jimmy Sims and Joe McDonald were so relieved that somebody would be left on the outside to watch the gang’s interests that they never stopped to consider why. Instead, the gang held a breakup dinner. Johnny Martorano took the sports betting operation and offered a piece to Whitey and Flemmi. Winter, McDonald, and Sims kept the numbers and the loansharking operation.

Johnny Martorano also suggested they start rounding up the independent bookies and force them to pay rent, the way it was done in New York. Whitey and Flemmi were all for that.
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They did some quick calculations: If they charged a couple of dozen bookies a thousand dollars a month each for the privilege of staying in business and staying alive, they could pull in almost twenty-five thousand dollars a month. The possibilities were tantalizing. Near the dinner’s end, Johnny Martorano announced he was going on the lam to avoid the impending indictment. His destination was not exactly imaginative for a wiseguy: Florida. He had barely settled into his digs in Miami when John Connolly pulled Whitey and Flemmi aside. Martorano had been spotted in Miami, Connolly told them.

Whitey and Flemmi scrambled to get word to Martorano: move. They later sat down with Connolly and talked about the benefits of keeping Martorano out of town for a while. It was Connolly, Flemmi said, who went a step further: Martorano should stay on the lam for good. As long as he was out there in the ether, the Mafia wouldn’t move on either Flemmi or Whitey, because they knew Johnny would avenge them. Martorano was the most prolific hit man in Boston; and now he was, in a way, even more dangerous, on ice, in Florida.

But the flashy Martorano was a lousy fugitive. Your guy is in Fort Lauderdale, Connolly told Whitey and Flemmi. One of the problems was that so many people from Southie and the rest of the Boston area who knew him routinely traveled to Fort Lauderdale. “He’s gotta move again,” Whitey said. But when Flemmi called him, Martorano said he couldn’t move: He had just gotten new furniture.
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After a while, he relented. He headed to Boca Raton. The FBI would later insist they were hot on his tail from the moment Martorano went on the run. Connolly was doing all he could to keep him from being nabbed, because Martorano had killed too many people. If he got locked up, he might be tempted to talk and cut a deal. He had to stay out there.

Sometime after the Winter Hill breakup meeting, Flemmi drove out to the state prison in Shirley, in central Massachusetts, where Howie Winter had been incarcerated in another extortion case. He explained to Winter how things had been split up and assured him his share would be taken care of. Winter understood. He only had one request. “You guys gotta leave the garage,” he said. “I’m gonna rent it out.”
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So the gangsters cleared out of the garage on Marshall Street, the seedy headquarters for so much plotting and mayhem. Years later, Howie Winter’s old stomping ground, where Whitey Bulger first grasped the reins of power in Boston, would be transformed into an evangelical church.

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The framed men—Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, Louis Greco, and Joseph Salvati—were formally cleared of the 1965 murder of Teddy Deegan, and the Justice Department was ordered to pay them $102 million. Greco and Tameleo died in prison before they were cleared.

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Steve Flemmi testified on several occasions about the circumstances of Debra Davis’s murder, but Whitey has told friends he did not kill her. The authors also viewed letters Whitey has written from jail insisting he did not kill Davis or Deborah Hussey.