Where the Bodies Were Buried (16 page)

Many of these people had been waiting decades for some form of justice against the notorious gangster who, at one time, had been so powerful that you couldn't speak ill of him in public without fear of retribution. Now they were almost tripping over one another to get before the cameras and have their say.

As the boom mics swung into position and the cameramen jostled with reporters to get a better view, Steve Davis and the others willingly played their role. Many of the media people knew them by name. They were asked questions about arcane matters of the law of which they knew nothing, but they attempted to answer, because that was expected.

Certainly these folks deserved to be heard, but I couldn't help thinking that the obsessive focusing on the families was becoming, like so much of the trial thus far, a compelling diversion from the big picture. The media needed the pathos of Steve Davis, Patricia Donahue, and the others because it put a human face on what was otherwise a dark tale about events that had happened long ago. There were few good guys in the Whitey Bulger story, and so the family members of Bulger's victims provided the human interest angle that made viable the media's coverage of a complex story.

It was telling that among the throng of reporters and filmmakers covering the trial, none had thought to seek out and interview someone like Joe Salvati. The argument could be made that Salvati—though he had been framed for a crime he did not commit, served thirty years in prison, and was the victim of a massive injustice—was not a victim of any crimes committed by Bulger. Factually, this was true. But within this argument were the seeds of what was becoming, in relation to the Bulger trial, a source of frustration.

In the courtroom, the prosecutors and the judge were engaged in an effort to protect the system from “outrageous allegations” on the part of the defense. At its worst, this represented a process of obfuscation, an attempt to keep the Bulger trial from becoming associated with the history that had helped to create Whitey. The activities outside the courtroom, with the media obsessively soliciting commentary from the family members of victims, had become part of that same diversion. Certainly, the family members had emotional stories to tell, but none of them were in a position to shed light on the historical circumstances that had sustained the likes of Barboza and Bulger and, ultimately, led to the deaths of their lived ones.

The narrative that was being buried inside the courtroom was being left equally unexamined outside the courtroom. Each day of the trial, with the concurrent layers of physical evidence and witness testimony, the likelihood that the full conspiracy would or could be revealed diminished with each banging of the gavel signaling the trial's adjournment for the day.

The anguish of the family members had become one more excuse for diverting attention from the full horror of the Bulger era.

IN THE CASE
against Whitey Bulger, history was on trial. There were those aspects of history that had been cobbled together to form the RICO charges against Bulger, acts of crime both depraved and voluminous. But there was also the history that was being omitted; history that the jury would never hear about because the prosecutors and the court—meaning the judge—would do everything in their power to make sure it did not become a significant factor in the trial.

So far, this history had been successfully kept at bay. The witnesses, mostly elderly men with dwindling or selective memories, were there, ostensibly, to reclaim history, but it was history preordained by the DOJ. It was the desire of Wyshak, Kelly, and others in the U.S. attorney's office that had spent decades formulating the case that their version of history would appear so overwhelming and irrefutable that it would render irrelevant any larger picture of the Bulger saga. This was a strategy that, with the help of a compliant judge, seemed likely to rule the day.

For those who had followed the Bulger story for years, however, the unspoken history haunted courtroom number eleven at the Moakley federal courthouse.

The name Barboza had not yet been mentioned at all by the prosecution, and if Wyshak and Kelly had any say in the matter, it would stay that way.

Back in the mid-1960s, when Whitey Bulger was still a federal prisoner on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, Joe Barboza was in the process of turning himself into a criminal legend as notorious as Bulger would become decades later. Like Bulger, Joe the Animal was a product of his times. He maneuvered himself into a position of strength in the
underworld through a mutually compromising covert relationship with the upperworld. The more nefarious this alliance became, the better it was for Barboza, because his handlers in the upperworld had a vested interest in making sure the true dimensions of this relationship were never known to the public at large.

With Barboza, as with Bulger, this relationship was highly beneficial for an extended period of time, until it wasn't.

Barboza was born June 20, 1932, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the son of Portuguese immigrants originally from the city of Lisbon. Barboza's father was a middleweight boxer and his mother a seamstress. His life of crime began early, with robberies and assaults, and he was first imprisoned in 1950, at the age of eighteen. At the Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Concord, he met a number of underworld figures affiliated with the Patriarca crime family. Upon his release from prison in 1955, Barboza went to work for the Mafia as a bodyguard and thug while at the same time pursuing a career in boxing as a light-heavyweight contender. Fighting under the nickname “the Baron,” he had twelve professional fights, winning eight, five of those by knockout.

Around New England, Barboza was known as a vicious thug. He was stocky and muscular, with a thick neck and an angular skull shaped like a watermelon. With less than an eighth-grade education, he was barely literate, though he liked to draw and would later show true talent as a sketch artist.

The Mafia in New England wasn't interested in his abilities as an artist, unless those skills could be applied to the art of murder.

Barboza was willing to kill people for money, and, while still in his twenties, he became known as a proficient contract killer for the Mafia. Because he was not Italian, he would never be a made member, though it was Barboza's dream, expressed to many of his associates in the underworld, that for him the Honored Society would make an exception and he would become the first non-Italian to be inducted. His Sicilian friends slapped him on the back and said, “Hey, you never know. Keep trying.” Behind his back, his mafia friends referred to him as “the nigger.”

His nickname “Animal” came about because he once bit a chunk of flesh out of a person's cheek during a bar fight. In later years, he admitted to
having committed seven murders for the Mob, but he was believed to have killed many more, perhaps as many as twenty-six people.
¹

In the mid-1960s, Barboza found himself in the middle of the Boston gang wars. Although he officially worked for the Italians, he was also aligned with the Winter Hill Mob, which at that time was still led by Buddy McLean. Barboza is believed to have taken part in some of the era's most notorious killings, including the murders of Punchy McLaughlin and the two Hughes brothers, Stevie and Con.

The Boston underworld was a weird intersection of alliances born out of necessity, relationships that were a manifestation of the Machiavellian philosophy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Many of Barboza's closest associates during this period would later resurface as key players in the Bulger saga, including John Martorano, Steve Flemmi, and Flemmi's younger brother Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi.

In March 1965—the same month that Whitey Bulger was released from prison and returned to Boston—Barboza, Jimmy the Bear, and others had decided to add another body to their ever-growing hit list. The target they had in mind was a low-level hood named Teddy Deegan.

For a hustler in the Boston underworld, the odds of stepping on somebody's toes were great. Deegan had murdered a hood named Anthony Sacramone, who was affiliated with the Winter Hill gang. Deegan was associated with the McLaughlin brothers in Charlestown, a competing faction. In the ongoing tit-for-tat of the Boston gang wars, Deegan having killed Sacramone meant that someone would be looking for revenge. Someone, in this case, was Barboza and Jimmy Flemmi.

Deegan also owed Jimmy Flemmi three hundred dollars, which, by the dictates of gangster logic, was further justification to use him as an example.

At the time, there had been many killings in the Boston underworld—so many that Barboza and Flemmi decided that, in the interest of protocol and self-preservation, they would first get approval for the Deegan hit from the North End mafia boss Jerry Angiulo.

The Italians wanted nothing to do with the crazy war going on between the Winter Hill Mob and the Charlestown crew. At a meeting in the North End, Angiulo told Flemmi and Barboza, “You can't kill someone just because you had an argument with him.” The boss told the two hoods that he would only sanction the hit if
capo di tutti capi
Raymond Patriarca gave his approval.

A meeting was set up for Barboza and Flemmi to convene with “the Office” in Providence. Barboza was excited; it would be his first face-to-face meeting with Patriarca, a big moment for someone who harbored dreams of becoming a made man.

They met the Godfather at Badway's Garage in the Federal Hill section of Providence. Raymond Patriarca showed up looking like exactly what he was: mafia royalty. He wore a lavish, tailored suit and had a diamond pinky ring that caught the light and sparkled.

The sit-down lasted forty-five minutes. Jimmy Flemmi made the case for killing Deegan. “He's a sneak, and I don't fuckin' trust him,” he told Patriarca.

Later, the results of this meeting would remain in dispute. Patriarca insisted that he never authorized the Deegan hit but simply told the two killers that if they received approval from Jerry Angiulo, then they would have his approval. Flemmi and Barboza took this as a yes and began planning the hit.

After the meeting, Flemmi said to Barboza, “You didn't have much to say in there. What were you thinking?”

Said Barboza, “I was thinking how I could bite his finger and get that diamond ring.”

What none of the men at the meeting in Providence realized was that the location where they met to discuss the killing of Deegan was bugged by the FBI's organized crime division. It was an illegal wire, known as a “gypsy wire,” unauthorized by any court of law but fully sanctioned by Director J. Edgar Hoover.

There are multiple FBI memos, never revealed until many decades later, that show the FBI knew what was coming next. They sat back and let it happen.

It was a complicated hit for such an insignificant hood. On the night
of March 12, 1965, Barboza, Flemmi, and four other gangsters traveled to Chelsea, where it was known Deegan and two others were to take part in the robbery of a finance company located inside the Lincoln National Bank. One of Deegan's partners was Roy French. Unbeknownst to Deegan, French was a traitor working in cahoots with Barboza and Flemmi.

The robbery was an inside job: a contact at the bank was going to leave an alleyway door open for Deegan and French to enter, where a couple bags of cash would be waiting for them to snatch. It was Barboza and Flemmi's plan to murder Deegan as he was in the midst of the heist.

Jimmy Flemmi was in the getaway car, with Barboza and two others acting as gunmen. The idea was for Roy French to shoot Deegan, but the killers were leaving nothing to chance.

Deegan was gunned down in the alleyway. The autopsy revealed that he had been hit with six bullets from three different guns.

On the night of the murder, the one Deegan accomplice who was not in on the killing was able to escape. Barboza and Jimmy the Bear heard that he was currently in the custody of police. Barboza was worried that this man would rat them out. He told the Bear that they might have to go on the run.

Jimmy the Bear smiled. It was then that he told Barboza not to worry, he had it covered. The Bear explained that for months he had secretly been meeting with an FBI agent named H. Paul Rico. The Bear was facing charges on another murder he'd done with Barboza, and Paul Rico had suggested to Flemmi that he could make those charges go away if he was willing to become an informant. Jimmy Flemmi had officially signed on as a Top Echelon Informant on March 12, the exact day that he and Barboza murdered Teddy Deegan.

The FBI was fully aware of what they were getting into with Jimmy Flemmi. On March 9, following Flemmi and Barboza's secretly recorded meeting with Patriarca in Providence, a memo was sent from the special agent in charge (SAC) of the Boston field office to Director Hoover. The memo stated, “[Jimmy] Flemmi is suspected of a number of gangland murders and has told [the informant] of his plans to be recognized as the No. One ‘hit man' in this area as a contract killer. . . . Flemmi told the informant that all he wants to do now is kill people, and that it is better than hitting banks. . . . Informant said, Flemmi said he can now be the best hit man in the area and intends to be.”

The memo further stated, “[Flemmi] is going to continue to commit murder, but informant's potential outweighs the risk involved.”

Hoover authorized Jimmy Flemmi's role as a Top Echelon Informant knowing that he was a homicidal maniac whose stated goal was to become the biggest hit man in Boston.
²

IN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
published in 1975, allegedly written by Barboza with the aid of crime writer Hank Messick, the Animal claimed that he was stunned to hear that Flemmi was an informant. Being a rat for the feds was a violation of the underworld code, a betrayal punishable by death. At least, that's what the gangsters told each other. In truth, informants were common.

In the days of the Boston gang wars, paranoia was running high. Gangsters were constantly looking for an edge, and one way to be “in the know” was to have contacts in law enforcement, an exchange of information that could possibly save your life. You scratch my back, I scratch yours, was a philosophy steeped in treachery, because it meant the criminals were also leaking information to the lawmen, though no one in the underworld was supposed to know.

According to Barboza, Jimmy Flemmi suggested to the Animal that he too should become an FBI informant. It was the smart thing to do.

Barboza later learned that Flemmi's brother Stevie had also signed on with Paul Rico as a Top Echelon Informant.

Barboza was reluctant. He met Paul Rico but did not yet know the agent well enough to feel he could be trusted. The Animal needed reassurance, which he was to receive a few months later, in October 1965.

For many months, Barboza and his gangster affiliates had been looking to kill members of the Charlestown faction, most notably the McLaughlin
brothers. Bernie McLaughlin had already been whacked, and a hit team that included Barboza, Steve Flemmi, and Cadillac Frank Salemme, who was Flemmi's partner, had been hunting for Punchy McLaughlin. On one occasion, they had come close to nailing Punchy. In August 1964, in the parking lot of Beth Israel Hospital, Steve Flemmi and Salemme, disguised as Hasidic rabbis, snuck up on McLaughlin and opened fire with a sawed-off shotgun. Punchy was hit in the side of the face with buckshot, but before the two hit men could finish the job a potential witness stumbled upon the scene; Flemmi and Salemme were forced to flee. McLaughlin survived the hit.

On another occasion, the hit team of Flemmi and Salemme ambushed McLaughlin while he was driving on a rural roadway near Dedham, Massachusetts. Flemmi and his crew pulled up alongside Punchy and opened fire. They blew off part of McLaughlin's hand, which later had to be amputated. Spewing blood, Punchy veered his car onto the wrong side of the road and escaped, then went into hiding.

Ever since, the hit men had been looking for yet another opportunity to take out Punchy, but he was nowhere to be found.

Special Agent Rico had become conversant with the Flemmi brothers, Salemme, and assorted other Boston hoodlums. In his quest to recruit new informants, he occasionally socialized and drank at known mobster locations and became entangled with various players.

Rico had a personal beef with the McLaughlins, especially George, Punchy's brother, who had been picked up on an FBI gypsy wire calling him a “fag.” George drunkenly alleged that Rico had been involved in three-way sex with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his close associate Clyde Tolson, who was rumored to be Hoover's lover. It was an absurd accusation, but Rico, a family man with four kids, took umbrage. When Rico received information about where George McLaughlin was hiding out (many Boston gangsters seemed to be on the lam or in hiding during this period), he took matters into his own hands.