Where the Bodies Were Buried (42 page)

In the morass of duplicity that flowed from the generation of Barboza and his handlers to the generation of Flemmi and Bulger, there was another kind of victim—people who got caught in the maw of corruption, the detritus of dirty deals struck between informants and their handlers. Human waste. People for whom men like Paul Rico would shed no tears and Jerry O'Sullivan would lose no sleep. People like Joe Salvati.

At the beginning of the congressional hearings in 2001, Salvati's longtime attorney, Victor J. Garo, spoke in front of the committee. Garo had fought the government for nearly thirty years in an attempt to have Salvati's case reopened. The biggest stumbling block was the Justice Department, which consistently refused to release documents that might have exonerated Salvati. Said Garo to the committee, “The FBI determined that the life of Joe Salvati was expendable, that the life and future of his wonderful wife, Marie, was expendable, and that the four young lives of their children, at the time ages four, seven, nine, and eleven, were expendable.”

Garo talked about the legal struggles to get Salvati out of prison, but most emotional of all was when he described his regular meetings with Salvati's family. He once joked with the youngest son, Anthony, that “when I get your father out of prison, you're going to say I created a monster, because he's going to follow you around, he's going to want to know everything you have done.” The child got real quiet, said the lawyer, then he spoke. “‘No, Victor,' he said. ‘I have never seen my father wake up in the morning. I have never had breakfast with my father in the morning. I've never taken a walk with my father, and I have never gone to a ball game with my father. I sure do want to do that in the future with my dad.'”

Joe and his wife, Marie, were at the hearings. After Garo spoke, Salvati
read a statement in which he attempted to explain some of the ways his conviction had destroyed his life. “There were constant stories in the media that I was a very bad person and one not to be respected.” This, said Salvati, created a tremendous burden that had to be shouldered mostly by his family. “More than once my heart was broken because I was unable to be with my family at very important times.” With his wife seated at his side, Salvati looked at the collection of political representatives stretched out in front of him. “Finally, I would like to say a few things about my wife,” he said. “She is a woman with great strength and character. She has always been there for me in my darkest hours. She brought up our four children and gave them a caring and loving home. . . .” Salvati's voice cracked, and his eyes welled with tears. “When God made my Marie, they threw the mold away. . . .” Then he began weeping uncontrollably.

Victor Garo, seated next to Salvati, leaned to the microphone and said, “Mr. Chairman, may I please finish those last two sentences for Mr. Salvati?”

“Sure,” said Congressman Burton.

Reading from Salvati's statement, Garo continued, “When God made Marie, the mold was thrown away. I am one of the luckiest men in the world to have such a devoted and caring wife, my precious Marie.”

Then Salvati's wife, Marie, read a statement about what it was like trying to raise a family while the man in their lives was in prison for a crime they knew he didn't commit. “The government stole thirty years of my life,” she said.

By the time Marie Salvati finished reading her brief statement, most of the committee members were in tears or hushed in silence.

AT CAFÉ POMPEII
, when I interviewed Joe Salvati, as with many events from his past, his memory of the congressional hearings was remarkably vivid. Something about the deadness of thirty years in prison had attuned his senses, energizing those moments that are outside the norm. While in prison, Salvati held on to the hope that he would one day be released, but he never dreamed that high-ranking representatives of the U.S. government, or anyone else, for that matter, would one day offer an apology.

What still rankles all these years later is that in the long fight to get released and clear his name—with Victor Garo as his Job-like point man—Salvati's biggest stumbling block were the very institutions that had perpetrated the injustice—the FBI and DOJ. Even after favorable rulings determined that these institutions be required by law to turn over documents, they simply stalled or refused to comply with court orders. It seemed as though the bureaucracy was determined to crush Salvati through indifference and institutional malfeasance. And when Victor Garo, the lawyer, did achieve a provisional victory within the legal system, there was someone else—a law enforcement representative or politician who had a vested interest in Salvati's conviction—who stepped forward and acted on behalf of the conspiracy.

Salvati remembered when he was paid a visit by Michael Albano, a member of the state parole board.

Albano's name had come up at the Bulger trial. On the witness stand, John Morris was forced to admit that he and Connolly, in 1983, had paid a visit to Albano to discuss with him his intention to vote for commutation of Salvati's sentence, along with the sentences of Louis Greco and Peter Limone.

“Albano came to me in prison,” Salvati told me at Café Pompeii. “He said those two agents came up there to threaten him.”

In so doing, Morris and Connolly were serving as inheritors and custodians of the conspiracy to keep buried the justice system's dirty little secrets.

Albano told Salvati that even though he had been intimidated by the two FBI agents, he was still going to vote for the commutation of his and Limone's sentence. Albano had learned enough about Barboza to comprehend that the Deegan murder convictions were rotten.

Salvati did not want to get his hopes up. His case had gone before the parole board numerous times over the years and always seemed to get mysteriously derailed. But this time, they had the votes. The state parole board voted in favor of release. Then it went to the Governor's Council, which voted nine to zero for commutation. Salvati was close; he was even transferred to a “prerelease facility” in expectation of his commutation. All that remained was a final decision from Governor William Weld.

Weld was a former federal prosecutor, a product of the same system that
had conspired to frame Salvati. He had long been a fellow traveler of the Bulger conspiracy. At the annual St. Patrick's Day breakfast in Southie, Weld had shown fealty to Senator Bulger. As state attorney general, he had backed up the decision of Jeremiah O'Sullivan to not grant hoodlum Brian Halloran refuge in the federal witness protection program. Halloran and Michael Donahue were murdered by Whitey Bulger within days of Weld's decision. Even so, the odds in favor of Salvati's commutation were strong.

On May 17, 1993, Governor Weld announced that he declined to commute the sentence of Salvati, Greco, and Limone. In the case of Salvati, the governor cited “Mr. Salvati's long criminal record.”

Salvati's “long” criminal record consisted of a single conviction for stealing a tool from a construction site in 1955.

It had been a crushing defeat, but four years later, in 1997, the governor reversed his decision. I asked Salvati how that came about.

“We got to Weld through Moakley,” said Salvati.

I was startled. Congressman Joe Moakley? The beloved figure after whom the federal Moakley Courthouse was named?

“What happened was, my wife's aunt was sick and dying in the hospital. And in the bed next to her was Joe Moakley's wife. My wife used to go up there to the hospital every night. Moakley couldn't go often because he was in Washington. So my wife used to sit with her, keep her company. And she told her my story. Moakley's wife said, ‘Make sure your husband's lawyer talks to my husband, the congressman.'

“Sure enough, one day Moakley comes in the hospital room and saw Marie sitting there. After being introduced, she told Moakley the story. He couldn't get over it. He said, ‘You come by my office tomorrow.'

“Marie goes to the office. He has her sitting in the waiting area, but she can hear him say, ‘Get me Governor Weld on the phone.' She hears him talking. He says to Weld, ‘I want this guy home by Christmas.'”

Salvati's long nightmare was over, but there were still a few battles to wage. One of those battles was a lawsuit filed in 2003 by Salvati, Limone, and the families of the other two men who had been falsely incarcerated. The suit claimed that the FBI and the DOJ were guilty of “malicious prosecution, civil conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent selection, supervision and retention.” The family members also
cited “loss of consortium” for having lost their loved ones to prison for three decades. The suit would occasionally be mentioned during the Bulger trial as “the Limone case” or “the Limone matter.”

The case was brought before Judge Nancy Gertner, who heard testimony at a bench trial that lasted, on and off, for years. Gertner was successful in doing what the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had been unsuccessful in doing; under a U.S. Supreme Court subpoena, she obtained unredacted FBI files relating to the fraudulent Deegan murder convictions and subsequent attempts to keep the truth buried. Gertner's findings were staggering, some of which she summarized in a July 2007 final ruling on the case. Declared Judge Gertner:

Judge Gertner awarded the families of those affected a total of $101 million.

“It was a good chunk of money, sure,” said Joe Salvati. His family's portion of the award was approximately $30 million. “We were able to take
care of the kids, put some money away. But if somebody said, ‘I'll give you thirty million, will you do thirty years?' you'd have to be an imbecile to say yes.”

Mostly, Salvati has let go of the anger—“You can't hold on to it forever; it eats you up”—but there are many things about the experience that still bother him.

With the Bulger trial ongoing, Joe noticed that many of the names involved in his case—Rico and Condon and Harrington—had emerged as a Greek chorus. It is this fact that rankles Salvati most of all, that the people who cultivated and used Barboza were able to pass their skills along to those who used Whitey Bulger, and that the efforts to hide the true nature of that arrangement became not only a source of corruption but an operating mandate within the system.

“It is a shame,” said Salvati. “But I'm not surprised by any of it.”

The interview was over. Salvati and I exited Café Pompeii and headed out into the early evening sunlight. We shook hands and said our goodbyes. As part of his usual routine, Joe would likely go next door to Stanza dei Sigari to smoke a cigar, or farther down the block to Caffé Vittoria for an aperitif, or maybe do both.

Salvati strolled along the sidewalk, his face to the sky.

That afternoon on Hanover Street, the ghosts of the past were alive and well.

IN THE HIERARCHY
of witnesses at the Bulger trial, where killers and those who had survived the killers garnered the most attention, few could have known that among the most enlightening would be a forensic anthropologist. In retrospect, it should have been obvious: the Bulger trial had the trappings of an excavation, an immersion deep into the molten core of various horrific acts, with gruesome details buried under layers of terror and deception. Clearly, an anthropologist would be required to get at the root of the matter.

From the witness stand, Ann Marie Mires spoke with authority, though her voice was soothing and her manner solicitous of the uninitiated. As an expert in the field of skeletal biology and the excavation and recovery of skeletonized remains, she seemed accustomed to breaking things down, explaining the most elemental facts of human decomposition.

Already the Bulger trial had led the jury and spectators through a litany of ways to die at the hands of another human being. Mires would now take us into the world of the postmortem. The forensic anthropologist was sworn in and took the stand to testify about “the diggings.”

Thirteen years earlier, beginning in 2000, the city of Boston had been riveted by news of a series of excavations—three, to be exact—in which a total of six bodies were unearthed. The diggings had been initiated courtesy of Kevin Weeks, who had begun cooperating with Wyshak and Kelly. During his debriefings, Weeks for the first time told investigators about the Haunty and how the bodies that had originally been buried there were moved to another site. He told them about other murders and burials, some of which he had participated in and others he heard about over the years.

Over a nine-month period, Weeks led a team of state police,
prosecutors, and anthropologists on an expedition into the heart of the city's recent gangland history.

The first of the diggings began on January 13, 2000, at a location in Dorchester across from Florian Hall, at 55 Hallet Street. This particular excavation would involve the uncovering of the most recent of the Southie murder victims, including the bodies of Bucky Barrett, John McIntyre, and Deborah Hussey, all of whom had originally been buried in the basement of the Haunty.

From the stand, Mires remembered that it was snowing that night, and it was extremely cold. She was the leader of an investigative crew that included Colonel Tom Foley of the state police and many others.

Prosecutor Wyshak directed the witness's attention to a photo projected onto a flat-screen monitor. “Do you recognize that location?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” answered Mires.

“And what is that location, Doctor?”

“That is the location of the grave site off of Hallet Street, across the street, and you can see in the picture with the American flag in the front, that's Florian Hall.”

The digging had begun at 5:30
P.M.
and was soon shrouded in darkness. Klieg lights were erected at the site, giving the photos presented by Wyshak an eeriness that seemed to match the task at hand.

“There's a telestrator in front of you,” said the prosecutor to the witness. “If you could sort of mark the area of excavation . . . you can do it with your finger.”

Mires was able to draw an arrow or a circle or an X with her finger on the monitor; her markings instantly appeared on the screen in the courtroom and also in the media room two floors below.

Said Wyshak, “I direct your attention to photo three-seventy. What does this photograph depict?”

“This is the excavation under way. We initiated the excavation with a large backhoe in order to remove the overburden. . . . We had information leading us to believe there was a seven- to eight-foot overburden, in other words, that much soil over the grave. . . . The soil consistency is going to be different inside the pit than it's going to be outside the pit. We started to feel the ground getting softer, and we consulted at that time, and we brought in the small Bobcat in order to remove the rest of the overburden.”

“And showing the next photo, what does that depict?”

“This is a nice shot of the embankment, which shows you some of the stratigraphy, but right in the middle here, there's a discoloration, the soil is depressed more, it's softer, and you can see all the colors are mixed, what we call ‘mottled.' This is what we believed to be the top of the grave, and soon we found out that it was.”

Along with being a forensic anthropologist, Mires was also a college professor and someone who often gave presentations to other scientists and people in law enforcement. She narrated her anthropological undertaking with clarity and precision, using terminology of the trade not to impress her listeners, but to lead them into her world, so that even if you were not familiar with a term, you understood what she meant.

“The small Bobcat had disturbed the very top, so we brought in a tarp and dumped all the soil on that; we then sifted it.” Mires drew a mark on the telestrator. “Here we're getting an elevation. The police officer in the center is holding a stadia rod, and we're taking a depth measurement. As I mentioned earlier, you want to lock in the horizontal and vertical dimensions of where you are; this ties it into space. Right? Ties it into Dorchester, ties it into the vertical coordinates in the world.”

The doctor's manner was comforting; she was giving us observers—laypeople—details based on logic as we began our descent into what was beginning to feel spooky and ominous. “In the tines of the Bobcat we picked up some leg bones. . . . Here's a quarter-and-an-eighth-inch mesh screen that's attached to wood so we can sift the soil. And we are looking for any bones we might have missed. The large leg bones are fairly obvious, but the small foot bones are a little less obvious.”

Now that Mires and her team had discovered the grave pit, they settled in for the long haul. A large tent was constructed, with lamps and electrical heat generators on the inside. Tables were set up and tarps laid out, so that the findings could be separated and laid out in individual pieces. Photos from this undertaking showed men and women wearing surgical masks and gloves along with boots and digging gear.

Once the location of the remains within the pit was identified, the process slowed to a crawl. “Essentially, now we're into a hand excavation. We're going to use what are called trowels, they're diamond-shaped hand tools;
dustpans; brushes; wooden implements. This is the more tedious and slow process of removing the layers of the soil and material.”

As Mires explained it, coming upon a bone fragment, the investigators could not just grab it; they had to carefully dig around it, doing as little damage as possible, brushing it, feeling its contours, and then extract the bone from the earth. “So here we have a left and a right femur. We have the tibia, left, and the fibula of the lower leg. . . . If you'll notice, the bones are almost the exact same color as the soil. So the bones take on the same color as the soil, and they develop a patina, or covering. If the break to the bone is recent, it's like a dry twig, if you snap it, on the inside it's going to be white or light in color. The same with a bone. . . . That tells us the damage is postmortem, it occurred after the death of the individual.”

Eventually, in addition to still photographs documenting each stage of the dig, the investigators brought in a video cameraman. The expedition was videotaped, with the cameraman zooming in tight on each and every major discovery.

In the courtroom, Mires narrated the video, making sense of what might have seemed to the layperson like a mysterious journey into the core of the earth. In the video, the scene looked like frozen tundra somewhere in Antarctica, with snow swirling in the night air. The archeologists and cops were dressed in huge parkas, with their breath emanating like steam from their mouths in the freezing conditions.

“What's starting to happen is we're beginning to get more than two sets of leg bones showing up. So we have a right and a left for each person, but we're now beginning to see three sets of leg bones. . . .”

Using the telestrator, Mires directed viewers to what initially appeared as streams of white in the dark soil. “Here's the body bag on top, and here's one set of leg bones, here's another set of leg bones, and I have a third. A series of ribs. And we have plastic bags and pelvic bones or hipbones over here.”

For the jurors, these findings were like pieces of a puzzle falling into place.

Kevin Weeks, in his courtroom testimony, had mentioned the body bags when they moved the bodies, and now, all these years later, Mires was pointing them out, buried underground with the remains. Weeks had
also mentioned the lime they had used to suppress the smell of the bodies. Mires pointed out the white chalky substance in the grave pit, which they suspected was lime but wouldn't know for sure until they sent it to the lab for analysis.

Said the witness, “With archeology, you don't exactly know what you're going to find. It's revealing itself to you as you go along. . . . Here, for instance, it appears as if this particular individual that belongs to those leg bones was buried not in an anatomical position, that they are probably disarticulated.”

“What does that mean, disarticulated?” asked Wyshak.

“Articulated is when you're attached, everything is attached and the bones are attached to each other with ligaments, and that occurs when you're buried in a fresh state, right? In this situation, it appeared that this individual was disarticulated, was no longer in an anatomical position. That was probably due to the decomposition.”

Occasionally, the witness would see something that pricked her enthusiasm, for instance, root growth coming up through the human remains. “There's a lot of organic material, and so it encourages root and plant growth”—in other words, fluids and the decomposition of the bodies were like fertilizer for the soil. The physical forms of the murder victims were being absorbed into the earth; they were, literally, going back to nature, causing root growth to intertwine with bones and become the organic legacy of the Bulger era.

Eventually, the remains of three distinct bodies were uncovered. Mires described how these remains were carefully moved inside the tent, where, with the heat generators, it was “a mild fifty degrees.” The various bones were laid out on stainless steel gurneys. “The first thing I do is put the body in anatomical position, as if they were laying prone, faceup, with their hands out on the gurney. . . . You're going to see some photographs of those full-body shots, or, as we call them, full inventory.”

On the monitor appeared an image of the reconstruction of nearly an entire skeleton, bones laid out on the gurney in the shape of a human form, complete with a skull or skull fragments. Some in the jury and spectators' gallery gasped. These disarticulated bones, which were eventually assembled for all three victims, represented all that was left of Barrett, McIntyre, and Davis, and laid out on the table like that they looked almost like people.

Said Mires, “The skeleton is like a road map. It allows us anthropologists to drive through the lifetime of that individual. We look for signs of age—how old is the person at the time they died; what sex are they, male or female; how tall are they; and ancestry. . . . There are physical characteristics in your skull, in your facial features, and in the shape of your skull that determines who your ancestors were, whether they were Caucasian, Negroid, or Asian in origin, or a mixture.”

The analysis of the remains continued at the burial site for many hours. Every item found on or near the three distinct skeletons was inventoried, including, in the case of remains that were later identified as those of John McIntyre, the bullet lodged in his skull after being shot in the head at close range by Jim Bulger.

Three hours into Mires's testimony, Wyshak said, “All right, now I'd like to direct your attention to approximately nine months later. On or about September 14, 2000, did you respond to a crime scene at Tenean Beach in Dorchester?”

“I did,” answered the witness.

And so began the description of the second digging, which was also well documented through photographs and video footage of the excavation. This time, the investigators were looking for the body of Paul McGonagle, who had been killed by Bulger in 1975, ten years before the victims found in the grave near Florian Hall.

The investigators were told that the body was buried in a rocky area near the shoreline. Again, the anthropologists moved slowly and methodically. The conditions were even more difficult than the previous site. “We're only three feet from the low-tide line,” noted Mires. “At high tide, the grave itself wasn't submerged, but the salt water comes through the ground.”

“And what does that do to decomposition?” asked Wyshak.

“It has a very caustic effect. Salt water is like acid, almost. There's a lot of salt in salt water and in the seashells. There's a lot of calcium carbonate. So it offers a contradiction because it can actually help preserve materials.”

Before long, the investigators uncovered traces of a body—clothing, a shoe, organic material. “We're battling the elements. High tide is pretty much full-on now, and we're getting seepage from the bottom.”

Said Wyshak to an assistant, “Okay, can we put up exhibit six-oh-six.”
On the screen came a photo of what looked like a body crammed into a wet grave, decomposed, fossilized, like something out of a horror movie. “Now, what is this a photograph of?”

“This is a photograph of an individual fully exposed. . . . It's about as clear as it got. We have the shoes, platform sneakers. Here we have the knees. And this would be the trunk, the lower trunk. We have the spine, although you can't see that. Here you can see the arm. And then here it's the skull on its side and the whole—one side is removed—so it's actually kind of an open container at that point.”