Where the Bodies Were Buried (45 page)

In 2000, when Weeks reached out to Nee, Pat had no legal obligations to help locate the bodies. But by then he was disgusted by the revelations that Bulger and Flemmi had, for decades, been serving as informants for the FBI. He was having regrets about how he had been used by Bulger. Nee, according to the testimony of Weeks, told him exactly where the bodies were buried, leading to their disinterment.

Some believe that Nee's willingness to help the government locate the bodies is partly why prosecutors had taken a hands-off approach to him
over the years, but Nee does not agree. “I'm sure that if those alleged crimes had taken place within the statute of limitations and I could have been prosecuted, they would have come after me,” said Nee.

Of course, Pat Nee's alleged role in other crimes was still an open topic of speculation at the Bulger trial.

The day after Mires testified about the diggings, Patricia Donahue, the widow of murder victim Michael Donahue, took the stand. The night Pat Donahue's husband gave a ride to Brian Halloran down at the Southie waterfront, he met his demise in a hail of bullets. Bulger, according to Kevin Weeks, had pulled the trigger, but everyone wanted to know who his accomplice was sitting in the backseat of the hit car. There was no doubt who Bulger's defense team was trying to implicate for this crime.

“Did you learn there was a person in the backseat of the car that had a machine gun who was involved in killing your husband?” Jay Carney asked Pat Donahue.

“Yes, I did,” she answered.

“And do you know that person's name is Patrick Nee?”

“From what I understood, yes.”

Outside the courthouse, when talking to the media, Mrs. Donahue was reticent in her condemnation of Nee, and for good reason. Back in 1986, Donahue had sat through the trial of another person who had been identified and indicted as being the shooter. Jimmy Flynn was a well-known Charlestown criminal who had, according to Brian Halloran, made an attempt on his life before that fateful night in May 1981. The allegation was that Flynn had remained persistent and finally got the job done.

The evidence against Flynn seemed ironclad. On the evening Halloran was riddled with bullets outside Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant, as he lay dying on the pavement, he gave a last-minute identification of his assassin.

“Who did it?” asked a cop kneeling alongside Halloran.

“James Flynn of Weymouth,” he replied, according to three law enforcement officials at the scene. Those were Halloran's last words before he died.

The sandy-blond, curly-haired wig worn by Bulger had apparently led Halloran to misidentify his killer. Or had it? Some speculated that Jimmy Flynn was the man in the backseat. When the arrest warrant went out for Flynn, he disappeared on the run and was not apprehended for two and a half years.

In March 1986, Flynn was put on trial. Pat Donahue was there nearly every day, listening to the testimony. The accused took the stand and was able to establish that he was nowhere near the site of the shooting on the day and at the time it took place. When Flynn was found not guilty, the Donahue family believed a travesty of justice had taken place. For the next two decades, the Donahues believed that Jimmy Flynn was the person who had killed their beloved husband and father, and that he had gotten away with murder.

Whitey Bulger's name was never mentioned in relation to the killing, until Kevin Weeks came forward in 1999 with his description of the Halloran-Donahue hit.

Now the Bulger defense team seemed determined to link Pat Nee to the double killing, not to mention other crimes for which they alleged he had played a role.

Bulger's attempts to implicate Nee persisted as a subnarrative to the proceedings. Not long after the testimony of Pat Donahue, the defense lawyers filed a motion with Judge Casper that made their intentions clear: “Patrick Nee was an affiliate of the Winter Hill gang in the 1970s and 1980s. He was integrally involved in the criminal activities of the gang. . . . The government's apparent indifference to Nee raises a legitimate question as to whether Nee has been given a ‘free pass' for his criminal history. . . . Pursuant to Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure . . . the government must be ordered to provide all transcripts, reports or any other documentation of statements made by Patrick Nee to law enforcement about the criminal activities of James Bulger, Stephen Flemmi, John Martorano and any other people associated with the Winter Hill gang. . . .”

The government fired back with a written response titled, “Government's Opposition to Defendant's Mid-Trial Motion for Discovery Regarding a Nongovernment Witness,” stating further, “Bulger's strange obsession with Pat Nee does not give rise to discovery obligations nor can it change the reality that Nee was, in fact, twice prosecuted by Boston U.S. Attorney's office. Indeed, Nee was prosecuted and convicted in the mid-1980s for his role in the
Valhalla
arms shipment (he was ultimately arrested by trial witness Don Defago, a U.S. Customs Agent). Shortly after he was released from prison, Nee was arrested again in 1991 and subsequently convicted for his role in an armored car robbery.”

In court, Judge Casper let it be known that she would not make a decision about “the Nee matter” until the government was close to resting its case.

The fact that he had become the focus of a tug-of-war between the defense and the prosecution had, in a way, ruined the trial for Nee. He had been hoping that Bulger's long-awaited demise in court would serve as a source of pleasure and entertainment, but instead he had been subpoenaed by the defense and put in a position of concern about his own criminal liability and the legal jeopardy that might ensue.

This, of course, was precisely as Bulger had intended. In a way, much like Whitey's claim that he had never been an informant, it was another sideshow that diluted the defense case. But it was what Bulger wanted, and so his attorneys seemed determined, every chance they got, to make the issue of Nee's role in the gang a central aspect of
The People v. James J. Bulger
.

And if all this weren't rankling enough for Bulger's longtime Southie rival, the local media became involved.

In the wake of the motions filed by both sides regarding Nee, the
Boston Globe
published an article by trial reporter Milton J. Valencia headlined “Speculation on Trying Oft-Mentioned Patrick Nee.” The article quoted Hank Brennan making essentially the same argument as the defense counsel motion, adding, “He's an eyewitness to many of the core allegations in this case. If the government doesn't want to call an eyewitness, we will.”

Nee's attorney, Steven Boozang, responded by saying that his client would not testify in Bulger's trial. “Whitey is a professional con artist. He's trying to bring [my client] down because Pat went on with his life and became a productive member of society.”

The
Globe
article also made mention of Nee's involvement in
Saint Hoods,
the Discovery Channel reality show that supposedly chronicled a group of Boston bookmakers. The Donahue family, in particular, was outraged that Nee was featured in the show, with Tommy Donahue quoted as saying, “Shame on the Discovery Channel.”

Driving back toward Southie, having completed our tour of the various murder and burial sites, I asked Nee about where he thought all this was headed.

“I don't know,” he said. “But this is exactly what I was concerned about,
that Whitey would try to use the trial as a way to get even. Looks like I've got a real fight on my hands.”

Driving along William J. Day Boulevard, looking out over Carson Beach on a sunny July afternoon, it was too nice a day to keep pestering Nee about the trial. So I gave it a rest. At a stoplight, I noticed Nee mumbling something over and over to himself. At first I thought it might be a prayer, which did not fit with the Pat Nee I had come to know.

“What's that you're mumbling?” I asked.

He repeated the phrase out loud: “On the advice of my counsel, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege and decline to answer on the grounds that I might be incriminated.”

I told Nee that his mumbling attempts to memorize the words reminded me of the scene in
The Godfather,
when the character of Luca Brasi is at the wedding waiting to see the Don, trying to memorize his lines.

Pat laughed, because he has the Irish self-deprecating sense of humor. But he wasn't kidding.

The rest of the drive, whenever he thought I wasn't looking, I could hear him mumbling the phrase under his breath. He was committing the invocation to memory.

AS I HAD
most mornings for the duration of the Bulger trial, on July 17 I arose early, showered, grabbed some Sicilian olive bread at Bricco Panetteria, in the courtyard beneath my studio apartment, and headed out into the morning air. The walk to the courthouse, along Boston Harbor, was especially magnificent that morning. The seagulls sang their song, the flowers in the parkway along Atlantic Avenue were in full bloom, and the twinkling morning dew made the air seem clean and fresh as a baby's butt.

I arrived at Moakley Courthouse earlier than usual. There was potential that it would be a landmark day: Steve Flemmi was scheduled to testify, though there were still a few witnesses ahead of him on the docket, so maybe not. But with the spectator and media presence expected to be greater then usual, I didn't want to take any chances. I was there to make sure I staked out my usual spot in the media room.

When I arrived, a reporter I had gotten to know—Ed Mahoney—was already there. Mahoney had been covering the Bulger story for decades, as a writer for the
Hartford Courant
. He had been at the Wolf hearings in the late 1990s, at Paul Rico's testimony in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and both John Connolly trials. Perhaps his most notable accomplishment was being among the first to write about mob infiltration of World Jai Lai, whose corporate headquarters were based in Connecticut, which made Mahoney one of the most knowledgeable reporters around about the murders of Roger Wheeler and John Callahan, as well as many other aspects of the Bulger fiasco.

“Hey, did you hear what happened?” said Mahoney, cup of coffee in hand, by way of his morning greeting.

“What?” I answered.

“They found the body of Stephen Rakes this morning. He's dead.” He was talking about Stippo Rakes.

“What!” I thought he might be joking, but he wasn't. “Anything on cause of death?”

“Right now they're calling it a suicide, but it sounds like they're not sure.”

I instantly thought back to the day before. After the proceedings had adjourned at 1
P.M
., that afternoon I went downstairs to the courthouse cafeteria for a quick bite to eat. I had seen Stephen Rakes walking down the hall, looking agitated about something. I said hello, but Rakes did not acknowledge me, which was strange. He was a friendly fellow, always quick with a greeting and usually more than willing to engage in small talk.

I later learned that Rakes had been informed that afternoon by Wyshak and Kelly that he would not be called to testify at the trial. They were concerned that Rakes's version of how he had been extorted by Bulger was at odds with that of another witness, Kevin Weeks. To present two different versions of how the sale of the South Boston Liquor Mart had transpired would only confuse the issue and provide an opportunity for the defense team to call the testimony of both witnesses into question, thus damaging their case. Rakes was out.

To say that Rakes was disappointed would be putting it mildly: his testimony was supposed to be his big moment. But would he have been so upset that he would have taken his own life?

All that was known so far was that his body was found, fully clothed, with no outward signs of trauma, on a jogging path in the suburban town of Lincoln. His car was found seven miles away in a McDonald's parking lot.

As the media people, lawyers, and trial spectators gathered for the day's proceedings, the hallways were abuzz with gossip. Many were stunned by the news, and in the absence of details there was speculation about Rakes having been murdered. Was he killed by someone connected to Bulger to prevent him from testifying? Was he killed by Kevin Weeks, who made it clear during his testimony that he had great animosity toward Stippo Rakes? Or was he killed by someone else for some reason unrelated to the trial?

The jury was brought into the courtroom that morning sharply at nine,
as was the routine. There was no mention of the Rakes story, nor would there be as the day wore on. The proceedings unfolded as if nothing untoward had taken place.

At the morning break, around eleven, I received a text from Pat Nee: “Stippo Rakes killed himself.”

I texted back: “Yeah, it's a big buzz here at the courthouse.”

I imagined that the Rakes story was all over the local TV news and lighting up the Internet.

The primary witness that day was David Lindholm, a major marijuana dealer who had been extorted by Bulger back in the 1980s. The Lindholm testimony was fascinating and at least temporarily took everyone's mind off news of Rakes's death.

Back in the late 1960s and 1970s, Lindholm had grown from being a guy who sold joints and bags of weed to his college friends into one of the largest importers of Colombian cannabis on the eastern seaboard. He was a college-educated, middle-class kid from Milton who got involved in the trade because the profits were astounding.

On the witness stand, well past his peak smuggling years, Lindholm gave off the air of someone who was now above it all. But back in 1983, the success of his smuggling operations brought him into the orbit of Jim Bulger, who was at the time solidifying his reputation as the mob boss of all New England. Anyone making big money in his jurisdiction, according to Bulger, owed him a piece of the action. Whitey referred to it as a “tax,” a variation on the term “rent
,”
which is what the old Winter Hill Mob called it when they extracted regular payments from bookies, loan sharks, and other racketeers.

On the Fourth of July weekend in 1983, Lindholm was at a party in Nantucket, where he owned a summer home. There he ran into Joe Yerardi, a former Winter Hill bookmaker he knew, though not well, and a friend of Yerardi introduced to him as Jimmy, who he later learned was Jimmy Martorano.

Lindholm had just come off the largest shipment of Colombian marijuana in his career, a load that, he claimed from the witness stand, grossed $72 million. Approximately $40 million went to the Colombians, and another $21 million went back into the business. Lindholm estimated that he had personally cleared about $4 million, tax-free.

At the party in Nantucket, the master smuggler was careful not to reveal the full nature of his business to Yerardi and Jimmy Martorano, but they got the picture.

A few days later, back in Boston, Yerardi and Martorano paged Lindholm. They met in front of the New England Aquarium, off Atlantic Avenue near the harbor. They told Lindholm there was someone who wanted to meet him. Lindholm was suspicious, but he agreed to “go through the motions of this charade.” He was taken to a place called the Marconi Club, a small function hall. There he was delivered into the clutches of Jim Bulger and Steve Flemmi.

“Did Mr. Bulger make any demands of you at this time?” asked prosecutor Zach Hafer.

“Yes,” said Lindholm, in a matter-of-fact manner. “He was asking me a very specific line of questioning, and initially I thought that he might be with law enforcement. He was asking me questions that a police officer might ask. I was also concerned that the building might be bugged, so I was not forthcoming with the information or answers that he was trying to elicit from me. . . . So the conversation wasn't going too well. He demanded a million dollars from me. . . . One of the persons there fired a gun off by my head. There was a silencer on it, and the chamber was open. Five bullets were dropped on the table, along with one spent casing. A bullet was put in the chamber and spun and pointed at my head, and the trigger was pulled.”

“The trigger was pulled like Russian roulette?”

“Right . . . And uh, you know, we'd been dealing with a lot of Mexicans and a lot of Colombians over the years. I knew if he killed me, he wasn't going to get any money. And I wasn't going to let down my associates. I wasn't going to drop the ball on the five-yard line. I wasn't going to give him a million dollars. So I bluffed him in negotiations down to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Mr. Lindholm, the individual that initially demanded a million dollars from you and then later agreed to take two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and was in the Marconi Club as someone fired a gun by your head, do you see him in the courtroom today?”

“I do.”

“Could you point him out and identify an article of clothing that he's wearing, please?”

“He's the gentleman sitting there in the blue shirt.”

Perhaps in recognition of the incongruous use of the word
gentleman,
Bulger glanced over at Lindholm, which is more than he did during most courtroom identifications.

It took Lindholm a while to get out of the Marconi Club that afternoon in 1983. Bulger continued to interrogate him about various aspects of his business. “I determined that he didn't know much about me. He knew something about me, but he didn't know much. Certainly, Yerardi and everybody else did not know the scope of what we were doing on the East Coast, from Philadelphia to New York and Boston. So I tried to downplay the level of marijuana business that we were doing. He seemed satisfied when I offered to pay two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

At all times during his testimony, Lindholm remained relaxed, even cavalier, as he described Bulger's extortion tactics. The picture he painted seemed a tad self-serving, with the younger version of himself always in control, never frightened or panicked.

As the negotiation came to an end, said the witness, “[Bulger] shook my hand, told me that I handled myself well and some other people didn't handle themselves well. . . . He told me that if I mentioned the specifics of our discussion to anyone that he would kill Yerardi and Martorano. Well, I clearly knew that wasn't true. So when they drove me back to my car, [Yerardi and Martorano] asked me if everything was okay. I said everything was all right; I had an obligation I had to take care of, and I'd be talking to them in the near future.”

Hafer paused for dramatic effect. It was late in the day, and he had held off with a particular question that, if properly posed, might supply the kind of zinger that prosecutors dream of using to end a day of dramatic testimony. “Did Mr. Bulger say anything to you at that meeting, Mr. Lindholm, about what would happen if he found out you sold marijuana on your own without informing him?”

“Yeah,” answered the witness. “He'd cut my head off.”

Judge Casper knew a closing line when she heard one. Without missing a beat, she asked, “Mr. Hafer, given the time, is this a good place to stop?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Before Casper was finished with her standard cautionary instruction
to the jury about not discussing the case, people flooded out of the media room, where it was prohibited to use cell phones. They wanted an update on the Stippo Rakes death mystery. The courthouse was filled with media, so it was a good place to garner the latest details.

Not much new had been revealed since the body was found that morning, but speculation had moved on from suicide to the likelihood that Rakes had indeed died as a result of foul play. The body was found fully clothed but with no cell phone and no wallet. No official cause of death had yet been announced, but the scuttlebutt among reporters—many of whom had inside sources in the state police and district attorney's office—was that Rakes had been poisoned.

By later that evening, the Rakes story had gone national. Throughout the night, I received emails and texts from friends and associates outside Boston who had heard about the suspected murder on Twitter, CNN, or the Internet. An obvious conclusion was that if Rakes had been murdered, it must have something to do with the trial. It was too big a coincidence that he wound up dead on the very day that he had been scheduled to testify. Though most everyone knew that Whitey Bulger had long since been stripped of his impregnability and no longer had a gang or contacts in the underworld, the idea that the once-powerful mob boss had somehow found a way to reach into his old bag of tricks was an irresistible angle (the headline in the
Boston Herald
that day was
DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES
).

The notion that Bulger had Rakes whacked was plausible, but for anyone close to the case it seemed unlikely. There was no reason for Bulger to kill Rakes. It made no sense.

The following morning, once again the volume of media people and spectators arriving for the trial was higher than usual. Stephen Flemmi would definitely be taking the stand sometime later that afternoon, and the Rakes story was unfolding by the minute. The Bulger trial was the place to be.

As I grabbed my morning coffee and settled in for the day, I was approached in the hallway outside the media room by a local reporter I knew. “Hey,” said the female journalist, excitedly, “did you hear the latest?”

“What?” I asked, ready for a bombshell.

“Pat Nee is being investigated for the murder of Stephen Rakes. He left
a threatening note in the mailbox at Rakes's house the day before the body was found.”

The reporter worked for a prominent news website; she had been covering the trial and had filed a number of stories since the trial began.

“Are you working the story?” I asked.

She nodded. “Me and others. It's ready to go. Only thing holding it back right now is the legal department.”

A couple of questions raced through my head, the first being the possibility, or plausibility, that Pat Nee killed Stippo Rakes. That seemed unlikely, bordering on absurd. Not that Pat Nee wasn't capable, if he had a motive and felt that such an act was necessary. I knew that decades ago Pat sought to kill the person he believed had killed his brother Peter, shot him and left him for dead. I knew that Pat had wanted to kill Whitey Bulger, and probably still would if he could do it and get away with it. Obviously, Nee was capable of killing—at least the Pat Nee of twenty-five years ago, who was involved in gangster activity that reportedly included the burial of bodies.