Where the Bodies Were Buried (3 page)

Decades later, at the café on Hanover Street, Salvati relates these memories from a great distance. He's been out of prison for sixteen years and told these stories before. But when I say to him about his daughter's question, “That must have broken your heart,” the emotion comes rushing back. “I cried for two days,” he said. And then he begins crying right there, an octogenarian who has never gotten over the grief of having seen the fear and confusion in the eyes of his family. He was and still is a broken man—broken in ways that can never be fully reversed.

Salvati tried to appeal the conviction. Barboza went on to testify the following year in a much bigger trial, a racketeering case against the boss of the New England Mafia. It resulted in the biggest conviction ever in the federal government's widely proclaimed war on organized crime. Decades later, it would be revealed that that case also was based on fraudulent testimony by Barboza, who would eventually be exposed as an inveterate liar and finally, in an act of revenge, be murdered by mafia assassins while he was living under a false name in the federal witness protection program.

Meanwhile, Salvati's case became buried deeper in the system. One year
became ten, and ten became thirty. He likely never would have been released at all were it not for Whitey Bulger.

I said to Salvati, “In a way, the Bulger case is the reason we're sitting here today. His indictment is what blew your case wide open.”

Salvati squinted his eyes; he knew I was being deliberately ironic. There is no love lost between Joe and Whitey Bulger. Though Salvati never met the man who was now a defendant in the biggest organized crime trial in Boston since the Barboza years, he is, in many ways, a victim of the same corrupt system that made Bulger possible. The same men who engineered Joe Salvati's wrongful conviction were the men who laid the groundwork for the Bulger era.

Talking to Joe Salvati was like being in the presence of a living ghost. He was the link between what I had been observing daily at the federal courthouse in Boston during the Bulger trial, and the historical quagmire that had given rise to Whitey. For the first time, I realized that the trial wasn't only about Bulger, it was about the vast network of people and events that were wrapped up in a historical continuum that seemed to never end.

IN JUNE 2011
,
when it was first announced that James Bulger had been apprehended in Santa Monica, California, after sixteen years as a fugitive from the law, it was a major international story. Whitey had always been a figure of much conjecture and media attention in Boston, where he functioned as an old-fashioned mob boss from 1975 to 1995. Among other things, he was the older brother of perhaps the most powerful politician in the state of Massachusetts, Senator William “Billy” Bulger, who served as president of the state senate for sixteen years. Jim Bulger's criminal career did not hurt his younger brother's political fortunes at all. In fact, it could be argued that in South Boston, the Bulgers' home neighborhood, having a brother who was reputed to be an “outlaw” was a badge of distinction. For a time, Bill Bulger played the association for all it was worth. If a politician or media outlet such as the
Boston Globe
mentioned Jim Bulger's name in relation to the senator, they were accused of engaging in anti-Irish slander, a potent accusation in a city where the Irish had risen from the gutter to control the town.

The Brothers Bulger became a dominant topic of conversation and occasional source of criminal investigation in Boston. Of particular interest was the fact that their theoretical alliance as politician and gangster seemed to symbolize the connection between organized crime and the Democratic Party political machine that was at the heart of the Irish Mob going back at least to the Prohibition era of the 1920s.

All of this was to become a matter of supreme local attention in Boston, but Whitey Bulger never really became a national story until after he disappeared on the run. In January 1995, after receiving word from a contact in law enforcement that he was about to be indicted and arrested, Whitey fled along with Catherine Greig, a female companion. Many of Bulger's criminal associates were left behind to face the music. Some of these associates were arrested and cut deals with the government to tell all they knew about Bulger's operation in exchange for more lenient sentences and/or better conditions while they were incarcerated.

Most notable of those who would eventually cooperate with the government was Stephen J. Flemmi, who had been Whitey's criminal partner for twenty years. Flemmi was a lifelong gangster who had killed many people alongside Whitey and was a crucial link between Bulger's South Boston organization and the Italian Mafia based in the North End. Flemmi, an Italian American, had connections among nearly every criminal faction in the city, including, as it turned out, the FBI.

In 1997, attorneys for Flemmi were the first to drop the bombshell that both he and James Bulger had been operating as covert informants for the FBI since at least the mid-1970s. Many in Boston had suspected that Bulger had a “special relationship” with the FBI; it had been hinted at in the newspapers and was a source of frustration and anger among other law enforcement agencies that had, over the years, attempted to take down Bulger. Flemmi's lawyers revealed for the first time not only that Flemmi and Bulger were government informants but that they had, in fact, been protected by the FBI and others in the U.S. Department of Justice. It was part of Flemmi's defense that he could not be prosecuted for crimes that he had committed, because he and Bulger had been given immunity from prosecution in exchange for their serving as informants in the DOJ's war against the Mafia.

The judge presiding over Flemmi's case—Mark L. Wolf—eventually dismissed Flemmi's claim as being without merit, but not before calling for an evidentiary hearing that would become known as “the Wolf hearings.” These hearings, which took place in a Boston federal courtroom in late 1997 and into 1998, were the local equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials. A generation of cops, federal agents, gangsters, political figures, and many others were compelled to testify under federal subpoena in what would go down as one of the most stunning public tribunals in the history of the city.

Along with Flemmi, a number of other Bulger associates had by then cut plea bargain deals with the government and begun cooperating with federal prosecutors. From the witness stand during the hearings, a generation's worth of murder and mayhem was revealed. Flemmi would eventually plead guilty to having committed eleven murders. Another Bulger associate, John Martorano, would admit to twenty murders. Bulger would eventually be charged with nineteen killings.

The high volume of dead bodies was one thing, but it went even deeper. The Wolf hearings revealed not only that Bulger and Flemmi had for years been protected by the FBI and others in the criminal justice system, but that the same FBI agents who originally recruited Bulger and Flemmi had played a role in framing Joe Salvati and his codefendants back in 1967. Those agents were given commendations from Director Hoover and received bonuses as part of the bureau's financial incentive program. On the prosecutorial side, others received promotions, and one key player went on to become a federal criminal court judge. These were men who had protected Joe Barboza and enabled his manipulations of the system, just as they and others would for Bulger and Flemmi. It was a cycle of complicity, if not outright corruption, that ran so deep, many in the system retreated into a state of denial that would continue right through the eventual prosecution of Whitey Bulger.

From the beginning, the prosecutors had a problem. It had been their intention to nail Bulger and his organization on an array of racketeering charges, but the Wolf hearings of 1997–98 had opened a Pandora's box of horrific crimes and law enforcement malfeasance going back nearly half a century. This rancid effluvia had threatened to infect the Bulger case, or, even more threatening to the reputation of the system, to wash aside the
Bulger case to reveal a broader sewer of criminal complicity on the part of many cops, federal agents, prosecutors, and other centurions of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The strategy that followed would play out over the next decade and a half. Certain journalists and book writers were cultivated as purveyors of information, and the cult of Bulger began to take shape. Flemmi and other former members of Whitey's inner circle began to give their versions of various murders and other crimes; this information was leaked to well-placed print, TV, and radio journalists in Boston, a city crawling with hungry and talented reporters. The Bulger legend took flight.

There were some who felt that the FBI and other representatives of the Justice Department had no real interest in finding Bulger. The speculation was that with all that Whitey knew, he could bring the system to its knees. Nonetheless, the Justice Department did take part in a wide-ranging public relations campaign to catch Whitey. Over the years, he was profiled nearly two dozens times on various television programs such as
America's Most Wanted
and
Unsolved Mysteries;
he was the subject of documentaries on the History Channel and the Discovery Channel. His reputation expanded to become part of popular American culture, culminating in his exploits being used as the basis for a character memorably played by actor Jack Nicholson in the movie
The Departed
. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the movie was a huge popular success and, in 2007, received the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Upon Bulger's capture, the media spotlight heated up once again. Only now, there would be a new element added to the saga: Whitey himself. Video images of Bulger, now in his eighties, handcuffed, in an orange prison jumpsuit, being brought back to Boston to face the music was all the populace needed to be drawn back into the Age of Whitey.

The prosecutors handling the case were the same men who had been pursuing Bulger since the early 1990s. Fred Wyshak and Brian Kelly were eager young prosecutors, both in their thirties, when they first began to build their case against Bulger, Flemmi, and others. That case, which had originally revolved around assorted illegal gambling charges, had grown over the years to include thirty-two criminal counts, including conspiracy, various racketeering charges, and nineteen murders. It would be a
classic case under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in which Bulger would be charged as the leader of a racketeering enterprise. Those aligned to testify against Bulger included many former rank-and-file members of his organization, as well as three of his closest associates, including Steve Flemmi.

And yet, with all the evidence, testimony, and prosecutorial firepower accumulated over twenty years, the Bulger case remained a hot potato for the Boston U.S. attorney's office and a special challenge for Wyshak and Kelly. Though a lot of the pretrial machinations and publicity revolved around exalting Bulger's nefarious reputation as a psychopath and criminal mastermind, the prosecutors were never able to fully escape the nagging history of the case. Bulger's court-appointed attorney, J. W. Carney, sought to capitalize on this history by suggesting, on a number of occasions, that his client was going to take the stand and, for the first time, “tell his side of the story.” The implication was that Whitey Bulger was going to blow the lid off forty years of dirt and deceit in the criminal justice system all the way from New England to Washington, D.C.

The central tension of the Bulger saga remained, and would continue throughout the trial. Was the Bulger story about one very crafty psychopath who had corrupted the system? Or was it about a preexisting corrupt system into which one very wily gangster insinuated himself and then played it for all it was worth?

For the prosecutors, this was the deluge they had been holding back for twenty years, the possibility that the Bulger saga might detour down a dozen different tributaries to reveal a generation's worth of dirty police work and institutional deception. The last thing Wyshak and Kelly wanted was for the government to be put on trial. It was their job to keep the focus on Whitey. It was a tall order. Prosecuting Whitey for his crimes was the easy part; the evidence was overwhelming. But presenting the evidence in all its ugliness and still containing the narrative of the trial required the efforts of skilled prosecutorial wranglers.

For the Justice Department, the dangers were clear: if the Bulger trial were to become about more than Whitey—if it were to establish, finally and definitively, the link between the Barboza era and the Bulger era—it could destroy all belief in the concept of criminal justice. It could discredit
the reputation of the very office that was now prosecuting James Bulger, to an extent that it would be virtually impossible for the people to trust the institutional sanctity of the criminal justice system. There would no longer be good guys and bad guys, but rather one big criminal underworld in which the cops and the criminals were all merely co-conspirators in an ongoing effort to manipulate the universe to suit their needs and the needs of their overseers.

LIKE MANY PEOPLE
who had fallen under the spell of the Bulger saga, I had been following the story for decades. My interest was first piqued in 1978 when I visited South Boston, or Southie, for the first time. I was twenty years old and had come from the West Coast to visit a former high school teacher of mine, now teaching at Cardinal Cushing High School, an all-girls Catholic school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame, then located at 50 West Broadway (the school closed its doors in 1992). At the time, Southie was only a few years removed from the civic maelstrom of forced busing, which had left many around the nation with the impression that the neighborhood was a haven for racism and parochialism. “The busing crisis,” as those years became known, was characterized by blatant political demagoguery and violence in the streets, which was televised on national news programs and shown around the world. Badly tarnished by those years, feeling misrepresented and unfairly demonized by liberals, collectively the neighborhood had turned inward and was suspicious of outsiders.