Whitey's Payback (24 page)

Boston can sometimes seem like a small town, and covering the Bulger story meant getting to know a circumscribed cast of former gangsters, family members of murder victims, local crime journalists, former cops, and criminal defense lawyers who seemed trapped in an ongoing horror that never ended. There were Bulger’s years as Mob boss, his years on the lam, and now his prosecution, which promised to drag everyone back out into the limelight to regurgitate stories and events they thought had been put to bed decades earlier. As Pat Nee, a former criminal rival and then reluctant partner of Bulger’s put it to me, “It’s like being trapped in a nightmare. We just want it to all be over.”

How insular was the cast of characters in the Bulger story? One time, in the lobby of the Seaport Hotel, I was interviewing the relative of a man that Bulger and an accomplice were alleged to have murdered. My next interview, also scheduled to take place in the hotel’s lobby on the heels of this one, was with the person who was thought to have been Bulger’s accomplice during that murder. Though it was common knowledge to many—including the victim’s relative—that this man may have been an accomplice to the murder, the man had never been charged with the crime. It was nerve-wracking trying to quickly finish up the interview with the victim’s relative so that the two men, victim and killer, did not stumble upon each other. Covering the Bulger story offered many potentially explosive juxtapositions.

The various articles in this section represent a mishmash of assignments and styles. Three of the articles are full-fledged investigative pieces, one a book review, another a spot reporting assignment, and another a personalized obituary written for my Internet blog page. Most of the articles were written months apart from one another and were never intended to be read back to back. If read successively, the reader will find numerous informational repetitions in these articles, a consequence of having to remind the reader of salient details and factual matters relating to the Bulger story. Also, you may notice a repeat of certain adjectives or phrases that I use as shorthand over the course of these articles to describe Bulger and his criminals activities. I was tempted to go back and reedit these pieces to make them appear more seamless for this anthology but, ultimately, felt it was a more accurate representation of my work—
extremis
and on deadline—to let them appear exactly as originally intended in print and on the Web.

Of all the murders James “Whitey” Bulger is alleged to have committed in his twenty-year run as the Mob boss of Boston, the killing of Debra Davis stands alone. Whitey is alleged to have strangled the woman with his bare hands.

Davis, age twenty-six, was the girlfriend of Bulger’s gangster partner, Steve Flemmi. Bulger and Flemmi were concerned that Davis, a blond-haired beauty, had learned that they were both informants for the FBI. One night in September 1981, Flemmi, forty-six at the time, brought Davis to a house on Third Street in South Boston, or “Southie,” a tight-knit neighborhood that served as the base of Bulger and Flemmi’s criminal operations. Flemmi and Davis had been arguing. After nearly nine years together, Davis wanted out of the relationship. Flemmi wanted her out also, but not in the way Davis planned. Waiting in the house on Third Street was Whitey Bulger, fifty-two years old. Bulger suddenly emerged from the shadows and wrapped his hands around Davis’s throat. She struggled to break free. Squeezing tightly, never letting go of her neck, Bulger dragged Davis down to the basement, where he finished the job. Afterward, using a pair of pliers, Flemmi pulled the teeth from Davis’s head so that the body could not be identified by dental records. They later trussed and wrapped up the body and dumped it in a shallow grave near the Neponset River in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Steve Davis never got the chance to say good-bye to his sister. She had disappeared seemingly without a trace. Two or three times Flemmi came to Steve’s mother’s house in tears, professing not to know where Debra was or why she had disappeared, but then they didn’t hear from him anymore.

Looking back now, thirty years later, Steve, at age fifty-three, has some regrets. He had his own run-ins with the law, and, from neighborhood scuttlebutt and street knowledge, knew all about Bulger and Flemmi. “I tried to warn her,” he remembers. “I said, ‘Your boyfriend is not a nice guy. He’s dangerous. People fear him.’ She would say, ‘Yeah. But what’s he gonna do to me?’ ”

The Davis family suspected Bulger and Flemmi of having killed Debra, but they didn’t know for sure. Debra’s mother had conversations with FBI agents who claimed they were investigating the disappearance, but they seemed more interested in what she knew about Flemmi than the whereabouts of Debra. Steve wanted to talk to the FBI, to go with his mother, who was meeting with agents at strange locations and odd hours, but she said, “No.” Says Steve, “When an agent told her, ‘You have nine other kids to worry about now,’ she took that as a threat and stopped meeting with them.”

It took nearly twenty years for the Davis family to learn that Debra had been the victim of a homicide, and that Bulger and Flemmi were the culprits. The details of the killing, and Bulger and Flemmi’s role as Top Echelon informants for the FBI, was revealed by Flemmi in the late-1990s, when he was arrested and later found his calling as the biggest snitch in the history of the Boston underworld. In court, Flemmi described the murder, the removal of teeth, and how they wrapped up the body of Debra Davis and buried it near the river. While Flemmi sang his treacherous song from the witness stand, Bulger was on the run, where he remained for sixteen years, living, as we’ve now learned, for most of that time near the beach in Santa Monica, California. When he was spectacularly apprehended last June, Bulger had $822,198 cash hidden in the wall of his condo and an arsenal of thirty guns, including semi-automatics, a machine gun, and a sawed-off shotgun.

Steve Davis remembers the day he received word they had captured Whitey. A cousin called: “They got him!” Davis watched the early reports of Bulger being transferred from Santa Monica, where he had been cohabitating with his female companion, Catherine Greig, while on the lam. He heard of the multitude of charges that Bulger would now be facing. Davis thought then and still thinks:
It’s not a done deal. With the power Bulger has had in politics and with the FBI, he could find a way to manipulate the situation to his advantage.
Now Davis is less fixated on what will happen to Bulger in court than he is on what he’d do to Bulger if he got his hands on him.

“I’m an eye for eye kind of guy,” says Davis. “I’d do to him what he did to my sister…. They talk about closure. Fuck closure. Give me fifteen minutes with Bulger and I’ll give him closure. I’ll shoot him in the fuckin’ head.”

In Boston these days, revenge is a dish best served cold. Since last June, when news of the capture of Bulger and Greig first settled over the city like a bad weather pattern, the city has been stewing in its own juices. Family members of Bulger’s many victims (he is charged with nineteen murders) have been vocal in their demands that the full weight of the criminal justice system be brought to bear on Whitey. Federal prosecutors have begun strategizing: In July, all of the racketeering counts in the indictment against Bulger were dropped, so that the U.S. attorney’s prosecution team can zero in on the multiple murder charges. The thinking is, this way, the road to justice will be accelerated and less encumbered by Bulger’s staggering multitude of criminal acts stretching back to the mid-1960s and across the country with outstanding murder indictments in Florida and Oklahoma.

Justice in court is one thing and outside the courtroom something else entirely. Forty years ago, when Jim Bulger first rose to power in the city’s organized crime structure, he did so as the result of a gangland revenge war that lasted almost a decade. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, mobsters and innocent bystanders were shot, knifed, strangled, and mangled. Sixty-six murders were attributed to this internecine gang war, a tit-for-tat series of killings that were more about underworld retribution than anything else.

When it was all over, in 1975, Bulger emerged as a key powerbroker. It was also around this time that he secretly began to work as an informant for the FBI, under the supervision of Special Agent John Connolly. Bulger fed Connolly information about the local Mafia, with whom Bulger did business. In return, Connolly tipped off Whitey about local law enforcement investigations in which he was a target, which gave Bulger a tremendous edge throughout his long criminal career.

And then there was the brother, State Senator William “Billy” Bulger, who for close to twenty years was the most powerful politician in state government. Billy sometimes ran interference for Whitey by inquiring about law enforcement investigations involving his brother and making implied threats.

Over the decades, untold people, both criminals and average citizens, were drawn into and/or burned by what the
Boston Globe
christened “the Bulger Mystique.” Many are now looking for justice. But to those who know Whitey best, their concern is how Bulger might try to use his current predicament to exact revenge on his enemies.

“Since at least the early 1990s, he’s had a strategy for when he got pinched,” says Kevin Weeks, who stood alongside Bulger as his right-hand man when the gangster was at the height of his power. “It’s his nature to be manipulative. Machiavellian. He’ll be looking to hurt people who hurt him. To even scores. He will want to rewrite history.”

At one point in his life, Weeks looked up to Bulger as if he were a big brother, or an uncle. At the age of nineteen, he was handpicked by Whitey to serve as his “muscle.” When Bulger wanted someone physically threatened or assaulted, Weeks was his man. Brawny and physically capable, Weeks broke bones, once beating a man who owed Bulger money so brutally that he shattered the bones in his own hand. Weeks was also frequently called upon to help Bulger and Flemmi dispose of the bodies of their many murder victims.

In 1999, after Bulger went on the run and Flemmi began to spill his guts to the Feds, Weeks cut his own deal with the government. He literally told investigators where the bodies were buried, including the body of Debra Davis, who Weeks had helped bury. Weeks testified in court and served five years in prison. He was paroled in 2004 and lives once again in Southie.

Of his time with Bulger, Weeks says, “I ain’t gonna lie to you, I had some exciting times with the guy. We had fun out on the street. But then we all found out he was a rat for the FBI. I felt betrayed. And for a while I was angry. But I’ve had time to think about things. Mostly, I blame myself.”

What Weeks remembers best about Bulger is this: “He was a hard guy, tough as nails. A stone-cold killer. I know he’s eighty-two now, but still, he’s in great shape, mentally strong. I hear they’ve got him in protective custody to protect him from other inmates. But don’t put it past him: He might try to kill somebody himself. Put a shank in his hand, and he’d know what to do with it.”

Richard Marinick is another former South Boston criminal who had dealings with Bulger. Marinick is unique. In the early 1980s, he was a Massachusetts state trooper. He then crossed over to the other side of the law and became a criminal, a robber of armored cars. Eventually, Marinick got busted on an armed robbery charge and served ten years at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Norfolk, but before that he had numerous encounters with Bulger.

It was a rule of the Boston underworld that any criminal activity that took place in Whitey’s jurisdiction, he was supposed to get a cut. Bulger heard that Marinick’s crew was making scores locally, and he wanted a piece of the action. Remembers Marinick, “I’m walking along the street in Southie one day, and Bulger’s car pulls up. He says, ‘Get in.’ I’m sitting in the backseat, face-to-face with Jimmy. He says, ‘You’re a health nut, right, a healthy guy?’ Bulger was into good health, eating right, taking vitamin supplements; we’d talked about it before. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘what you’re doing now is not very healthy.’ He explained to me, ‘Our primary line of business is racketeering. Our secondary line of business is killing people. You do not want to be part of our secondary line of business… I will kill you and run your body through the meat-grinding plant. I will grind up your body, put it in a plastic bag and leave it on your mother’s doorstep.’ ”

The whole time Marinick was receiving this threat from the city’s preeminent Mob boss, he noticed that he was wearing a chain around his neck—on the outside of his T-shirt—that had on it a silver Christ’s head with two red rubies on either side. “As he’s yelling at me, I see that Christ head looking at me and, I swear, it looked like those two red rubies were glowing.”

As a negotiator, Bulger’s tactics were simple. “He absolutely terrified people, made them literally piss and shit in their pants,” says Marinick. “His high was making people afraid of him; that’s how he got pleasure from what he did.”

Marinick, like Weeks, sees Bulger as an obsessive manipulator and schemer, proclivities he is now likely to apply to his current predicament as an incarcerated criminal and potential defendant.

Among criminals in Boston who interacted with Bulger both as a rival and a partner, few were in as privileged a position as Patrick Nee. Like Bulger, Nee grew up in South Boston at a time when it was very much an insular Irish enclave. A former Marine who served in Vietnam in the early-1960s, Nee returned home in 1965 just as the Boston gang wars were heating up. He was a prominent member of the Mullen Gang, who clashed with Bulger’s crew, led by the Killeen brothers, Donald, Eddie, and Kenneth. On multiple occasions, Nee and Bulger tried to kill one another, with Whitey shooting at Nee and Nee stalking Bulger with a rifle. Today, whenever he is asked if he has any regrets in life, Nee responds, “I wish I’d killed Whitey Bulger when I had the opportunity.”