Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (33 page)

By the time Boeri showed up at the police station, John McIntyre had already made a big decision. “I’d like to make a deal,” John McIntyre told Bergeron and Boeri, who tried to hide their incredulity and delight. “I’d like to get out of here and get those two old warrants off me. And I’d just like to start living a normal life. It’s like, it’s almost like living with a knife in you. . . . I mean, I didn’t start out in life to end up like this. You know?”
³¹

“Yeah,” Boeri replied. “So you want to cooperate with the government?”

“Yeah,” McIntyre said, “if you can get me out of this jam.”

The jam was entirely of McIntyre’s making. The authorities had nothing on him before he volunteered it. But he was tired of the life that had put him in the company of dangerous men while doing little for his own bank account. He had been the engineer on seven of Murray’s drug smuggling voyages and had little to show for it. During the long night of questioning, McIntyre evaded Boeri’s questions about the South Boston gang. He never mentioned Whitey’s name, and he knew Kevin Weeks only as Kevin. But he knew Pat Nee, saying Nee was the driving force behind the gunrunning mission.

Boeri knew all the players and knew the risks they posed.

“I want to get something straight now,” the DEA agent told McIntyre. “You definitely want to disengage yourself from this criminal element that you’ve been going with?”

“I’d like to be able to sleep at night without having to look over my shoulder,” McIntyre replied.

“Do you want to stay in the Boston area?” Boeri asked.

“Yeah.”

Boeri knew what Whitey was capable of; he sensed that McIntyre did not.

“There’s no way I could talk you into, like, going somewhere else?” Boeri asked.

“No.”

Boeri eventually got to the point: “How would you feel about, would you be willing to feed us information about working with these guys?”

“I’d do it,” John McIntyre replied, “if it would get me out of this.”

The following day, McIntyre was interviewed by FBI agent Roderick Kennedy, the FBI’s liaison with the DEA. McIntyre acknowledged that “an individual named Whitey who operates a liquor store in South Boston” was in the drug business with his boss, Joe Murray.
³²
Kennedy sat in on additional meetings as Customs agents interviewed McIntyre. Kennedy later insisted that Connolly overheard him and other agents talking about someone on the
Valhalla
cooperating.

Connolly arranged to meet with Whitey to tell him what he knew. His information was not precise. The
Boston Globe
had published a photograph showing Andersen and McIntyre walking off the
Valhalla
for questioning by Customs agents. Flemmi said Connolly told Whitey that one of those two men in the photo was cooperating.
³³

Whitey suspected McIntyre from the beginning. He considered Andersen to have been around and involved with Murray long enough to keep his mouth shut. McIntyre was a wild card.

Besides, Connolly had told them it was Dick Bergeron, a Quincy police detective, who had rolled the informant. Whitey knew Andersen was a North Shore guy; McIntyre lived in Quincy on the South Shore. It had to be McIntyre. “This kid won’t stand up,” Whitey said, and he was right.

According to Weeks, Whitey went to see Joe Murray and told him he believed McIntyre was talking. Murray was crushed; not only was his drug empire in peril, but he was about to lose the best marine engineer he ever had. He suggested sending McIntyre to South America to stay with his drug contacts there. “We could keep him there until this whole thing blows over,” Murray said. “Or we could kill him down there.”
³⁴

Alternatively, Murray suggested, they could coach McIntyre on what to say before a grand jury so that it would be impossible for indictments to spring from his testimony. Whitey just stared at Murray. Whitey wanted to get McIntyre alone so he could interrogate him—torture him, if need be. He needed to know how much DEA and Customs knew; if they knew he was involved in the
Valhalla
; if they knew he was making millions from the drug trade. Whitey was confident that, if he could get McIntyre alone, he could get the truth out of him. But he wanted corroborating evidence to point to as he worked him over. Whitey instructed Pat Nee to approach McIntyre and solicit twenty thousand dollars as McIntyre’s investment in a drug shipment that the South Boston gang was putting together.
³⁵
Whitey knew McIntyre was broke; he didn’t have that kind of money. But he could obtain the cash from his government handlers if he went running to them to tell them of the proposal from Nee. “If he can come up with twenty grand,” Whitey said, “then he’s working with Customs or DEA.”
³⁶

Within days, McIntyre came up with the money. Now Whitey needed to get him alone.

Whitey laid out the ruse to Nee: Tell McIntyre they had to drop some beer off at Nee’s brother’s house in South Boston for a party. Pat Nee picked McIntyre up in Quincy. There were two cases of beer in the backseat of his car. “We’re gonna go by my brother’s,” Nee said. “We need to drop this stuff off.”

Nee’s brother was away in New Hampshire. Nee parked in front of the house, at 799 East Third Street, and took a case of Miller Lite out of the backseat. He headed toward the front door and called back over his shoulder to McIntyre, “Grab the other case and follow me.”

It was noontime on a Friday, a week after Thanksgiving, and John McIntyre thought he was doing Pat Nee a favor when he walked into the house. Then he saw Kevin Weeks and Stevie Flemmi standing in the kitchen. Whitey stepped from behind the refrigerator, holding a MAC-10 machine pistol equipped with a silencer. He pointed the gun at McIntyre’s chest. McIntyre put the beer down and stumbled backward, trying to get away. But Weeks sprang forward and grabbed him by the throat with one hand and the back of his hair with the other, lowering him to the ground.

It was eerily quiet, and very crowded in the cramped kitchen.

“Let him up,” Whitey said.
³⁷

Weeks pulled McIntyre to his feet while Flemmi and Whitey put a hand on each of McIntyre’s shoulders and pushed him down onto a kitchen chair. Without a word, Flemmi pulled handcuffs, leg shackles, and a long chain from a duffel bag. With practiced precision, he fastened them around McIntyre.

“We need to talk,” Whitey said, putting the machine gun on the table. Whitey pulled up a chair and sat right in front of him. McIntyre’s eyes drifted unconsciously toward the gun. He appeared resigned to his fate even before Whitey asked a single question, and within thirty seconds, Flemmi recalled, McIntyre confirmed Whitey’s suspicions. “I’m sorry,” McIntyre said. “I was weak.”

McIntyre had done more than talk to the police about the gunrunning mission. He had helped the DEA seize a boatload of marijuana from which Whitey was supposed to have received a three-million-dollar cut. That was all Whitey needed to justify killing him. And McIntyre seemed to understand that. But getting McIntyre to confess was just the beginning. Whitey was looking for information. And so he tried to reassure McIntyre. “Relax. You’re going to be okay,” Whitey told him. “We’re going to work something out.”

Whitey said they might have to send him down to Joe Murray’s friends in South America for a while until the heat died down. But it’s doubtful even John McIntyre believed that. Whitey’s questioning was perfunctory. McIntyre admitted that it was Bergeron and Steve Boeri who had flipped him. He admitted that Customs had given him the twenty thousand dollars in cash to pay for his share of the drug shipment. The trap Whitey had concocted had worked perfectly.

McIntyre apologized to Nee, insisting that he had not been the informant who gave up the
Valhalla
. Sounding a bit like Whitey nearly a decade before in John Connolly’s car on Wollaston Beach, McIntyre said, “I’d never give up the IRA.” Whitey believed him about the IRA, but that was already ancient history as far as he was concerned. This was personal; did the DEA know enough to take him down? It was also professional. He’d long wondered if he was getting a fair cut from Joe Murray’s drug importations. McIntyre could help him figure that out.

It was enormously important for Whitey to find out how much product Murray was moving, what had been shipped lately, what was still in the works. Flemmi stayed in the kitchen with Whitey through an interrogation that lasted six hours. Weeks sat in the living room, watching TV. The voices from the kitchen were never raised. “We’re gonna give you some money, John,” Whitey told him. “We’re gonna send you away.”

But thirty-two-year-old John McIntyre got no farther than the bottom of the stairs that led to the basement at 799 East Third Street. The chains jangled as he walked. In the basement, he was pushed down into another chair. But there were no more questions. Flemmi stood there and watched as Whitey wrapped a think rope around McIntyre’s neck and tightened it.

John McIntyre just went limp. He submitted to his own execution. But the executioner was having trouble. The rope was too thick to dig into McIntyre’s windpipe and cut off his air supply. Instead, it made McIntyre gag and throw up.

Whitey stepped away, his brow shiny with sweat, his hands and arms tight from exertion. “This ain’t working,” he said. He grabbed a gun. It was a .22-caliber rifle cut down, with a pistol grip and a silencer. Whitey waved it so McIntyre could see it.

“Would you like one in the head?” Whitey asked, solicitously.

“Yes,” McIntyre replied, sitting up slightly after catching his breath. “Please.”

Whitey obliged and fired a shot into the back of McIntyre’s head. The bullet exited his chin and McIntyre fell once again.

Flemmi, who typically played coroner to Whitey’s executioner, put his head to McIntyre’s chest and felt his neck.

“He’s still alive,” Flemmi said.

So he grabbed McIntyre’s slumped head by the hair and held it aloft so Whitey could come around and pump a volley of shots into McIntyre’s face.

Flemmi let go and McIntyre’s body slumped to the floor.

“Well,” Whitey said. “He’s dead now.”

Flemmi took his pliers out and began removing McIntyre’s teeth. Kevin Weeks started digging up the cellar floor. Whitey went upstairs and took a nap.

“Kevin,” Flemmi said, as Weeks was digging. “C’mere a second.”

Weeks stepped over and Flemmi held forth his pliers, waving them back and forth. A piece of John McIntyre’s tongue wagged at the end of the pliers.

“He won’t be using this no more,” Flemmi said.

Weeks didn’t see the humor. He went back to his digging.

After John McIntyre’s body was buried, Whitey and Flemmi went to get something to eat. Whitey was pensive, replaying the interrogation in his head. He told Flemmi that McIntyre had told the truth about one thing: He didn’t give up the
Valhalla
. Somebody else did.

On the other side of the Atlantic,
that somebody else, Sean O’Callaghan, had briefly prospered with Martin Ferris out of the picture. He had become the IRA’s top man in Kerry. His superiors in Belfast ordered him to find out who gave up the gunrunning mission and to arrange the prison escape of Ferris and the other IRA men arrested on the
Marita Ann
.

The IRA commander from Belfast overseeing the gunrunning mission lost his position over the debacle. The IRA, meanwhile, was convinced the mission had been given up by someone in Ireland and began an internal investigation.

O’Callaghan tried politics and was elected as a councilor in Tralee. But he became paranoid, thinking others knew he had given up Ferris. He abruptly moved to England and offered his services to MI-5, the British domestic counterintelligence agency. His mental condition deteriorated. Four years after he gave up the
Valhalla
, he walked into a police station in Kent, England, and told the astonished desk officer that he had killed two people in Northern Ireland.

By the time the authors of this book interviewed him in a prison in Northern Ireland in 1994, O’Callaghan knew that he had unwittingly gotten John McIntyre killed. In 1996, O’Callaghan was released from prison after serving eight years of a life sentence.

He lived under the constant threat of IRA assassination. But he was already dead to his family. His admissions of being an informer bought him new friends in some Tory parlors in London, but he was widely shunned in Ireland. Among the Irish, even those who hated the IRA, O’Callaghan was looked upon as someone to avoid: a tout, an informer, the worst.

O’Callaghan embraced his new identity, writing a memoir called
The Informer
. In 1997, just hours before he flew to America for a publicity tour, he learned that his father, Jack, had died earlier in the week. No one in O’Callaghan’s family had bothered to tell him. O’Callaghan didn’t go to the funeral.

The graveside oration for Jack O’Callaghan was given by Martin Ferris, the IRA leader Sean O’Callaghan had put in prison for ten years. Ferris praised Jack O’Callaghan as a republican hero. The hero’s son, an informer, was not mentioned.

A few years earlier, while still in prison, Sean O’Callaghan had marveled at Whitey Bulger’s ability to play the game. Whitey, the snitch, had just skipped town for good, tipped off by John Connolly that he was about to be arrested. “I have to give him one thing,” Sean O’Callaghan said. “He was better at it than me.”

*
John Newton, in an interview with the authors in September 2012, called Flemmi’s claim that he gave Whitey and Flemmi C-4 bizarre and outrageous and said he had never been questioned about it by law enforcement.

12

Deep in The Haunty

W
hitey called it The Haunty,
because what took place there was haunting.
¹
Pat Nee’s brother’s house, just 250 feet down the street from Bill Bulger’s place in South Boston, was a plain, two-story Cape, with a narrow vestibule that poked out from the front door. It was surrounded by three-deckers, dwarfed by its neighbors, and was often vacant—Nee’s brother spent a lot of time out of town. On the first floor, there was a kitchen and a living room; on the second, two bedrooms and a bath. Most important to Whitey, there was an unfinished basement with a room that had a dirt floor. It was 799 East Third Street and it became his secret burial ground.

After the scorching law enforcement heat that followed the Holy Trinity murders, Whitey was convinced he had to start burying his bodies again. He and Steve Flemmi had long had a motto: no corpus delicti. If there was no body, there was usually no case. They had let themselves flout that cautious rule—but no more. “Jimmy changed his M.O. after the Holy Trinity,” said Kevin Weeks. “He didn’t go after anybody. He lured them to him. So he could dispose of the bodies.”
²
For that savage purpose, The Haunty was just right: Matters could be dealt with discreetly there; it offered perfect cover. Flemmi’s parents lived next door to Bill Bulger. If anyone in law enforcement wanted to know why they were spending so much time on East Third Street, both Whitey and Flemmi had a perfectly good alibi. They were just visiting family.

As partners, Whitey and Flemmi were moving on in other ways as well. The easy money promised in the World Jai Alai deal had of course not materialized. Whitey wouldn’t let Flemmi forget about that debacle, which Flemmi had talked him into. In any case, by the summer of 1983, Whitey had found a new score.

This time the easy money was in the possession of Arthur “Bucky” Barrett, who was destined to become the first permanent guest at The Haunty. They had already taken a run at Barrett, a renowned safecracker who had helped an independent band of thieves get past the security systems at the Depositors Trust in Medford. A break-in and heist at the bank over the Memorial Day weekend in 1980 landed Barrett’s group some $1.5 million. It was bold but foolhardy—a lot of the loot taken was owned by Mafia and other organized crime interests, much of it jewels and unreported income held in safe deposit boxes. It wasn’t just the cops who were looking for the robbers. The wiseguys were looking for them, too.

And some of the robbers, in fact, were cops. Three of the six burglars who broke into the bank were police officers. They enlisted Barrett to get into the bank and around its security system. Barrett’s reputation as a master thief and safecracker was known to both cops and criminals in the Boston area. But he wasn’t a tough guy, he never carried a gun. That made him a soft touch for the likes of Whitey Bulger.

John Connolly, as part of his ongoing effort to buff Whitey’s credentials as an informant, had tried to give Whitey credit for being the first to identify the Depositors Trust robbers. In a June 25, 1980, report, he noted that Whitey had told him that “the word on the street” was that Barrett had set up the heist and had control over most of the gold and diamonds taken.
³
Connolly conveniently left out of his report that Whitey had instructed him and John Morris to tell Barrett that Whitey was looking for him and wanted a cut, and that he could save himself by joining the Witness Protection Program and giving up all the crooked cops who had helped him rob the bank.
⁴
This marked a new dimension in the conspiratorial bond between Whitey and the FBI. Now it was the mobster telling agents how to cultivate informants and who to go after. Connolly and Morris dutifully carried out Whitey’s plan. But Barrett refused to go along. He believed he had his own insurance policy: Frank Salemme, Flemmi’s old partner, who had cast his lot with the Mafia.

Barrett had intended to give a hundred thousand dollars from the bank heist to Whitey, as tribute for Winter Hill, and a hundred thousand dollars to Salemme, for the Mafia, because it was common knowledge he had pulled off the Medford bank job, and it behooved a small-time crook to share proceeds with the criminal powers in town.
⁵
But for reasons that were never clear, Whitey didn’t get his cut, a slight he nursed for three years before moving on Barrett. He wanted his money and he also wanted information on Joe Murray’s drug operation, which Barrett was now connected to. Whitey had a lucrative but uneasy deal with Murray; he always had the feeling—even before the
Valhalla
misadventure—that he wasn’t really getting his share.

The plan was to lure Barrett to The Haunty; to get him in a place where he would have to give up everything he had. Whitey knew Barrett well enough to know he could not pass up a score involving diamonds, so he had a mutual friend contact him about some stolen gems he might want to buy on the cheap. Barrett liked what he saw and agreed to go to a house in City Point in Southie to see the rest of the haul. The setup man brought Barrett to The Haunty for the viewing, but, once inside, all Barrett saw was Whitey, holding a 9mm machine gun with a silencer. Flemmi was standing by, waiting to handcuff their prisoner. “Bucky Barrett,” Whitey announced, “freeze.”
⁶

Weeks thought he was watching a shakedown. “Jimmy never said anything about killing him,” Weeks said. “This was just an extortion.” As usual, Weeks went into the adjoining living room to watch television while Whitey and Flemmi chained Barrett to a chair and interrogated him with great patience. Whitey asked for, and Barrett supplied, a detailed outline of Joe Murray’s drug business: who was in it, how much he was making, where he was storing his marijuana and cocaine. Once Whitey had exhausted Barrett’s knowledge, he demanded Barrett’s money. Not some of it. All of it. Barrett called his wife at their house in Quincy, a fifteen-minute drive away, saying he needed to bring some friends by on business. “Turn off the alarm,” Barrett said, and then he instructed her to take their sons—one two years old and the other thirteen weeks old—“and go out for a couple of hours.”
⁷

Within an hour, Whitey and Flemmi were back with the forty-seven thousand dollars Barrett had stashed at home. Whitey then forced Barrett to call everyone he knew who could give him money. His partner at a restaurant in Faneuil Hall Marketplace came up with ten thousand dollars, which was duly collected. Barrett called Murray and pleaded with him, saying he needed money desperately, but Murray was unsympathetic. Convinced he had wrung as much out of Barrett as possible, Whitey decided it was time to kill him. He pulled Flemmi aside and said Barrett wasn’t leaving the house alive; that he wouldn’t be leaving the house at all. Flemmi led Barrett toward the door that led to the cellar. “Bucky’s going downstairs to lie down for a while,” Whitey told Weeks.

Barrett had followed Flemmi down a couple of the cellar steps when Whitey aimed his gun at the back of Barrett’s head. But he had trouble pulling the trigger, which seemed stuck. There was a momentary pause as Whitey fumbled to put his glasses on. He looked at the gun and saw that the safety was on. He clicked it off and aimed again. Barrett was almost at the bottom of the steps when a quick burst of gunfire went into the back of his head. He fell down the last two steps and came to rest near Flemmi’s feet.

Flemmi was furious.

“That coulda gone through him and hit me!” he yelled.
⁸

Whitey waved him off and turned to Kevin Weeks.

“I couldn’t trust Bucky,” Whitey said by way of explanation. “He had to go.”

Weeks said nothing.

“Go downstairs and help Stevie,” Whitey said. “I’m gonna lie down.”

As Weeks dug a grave in the cellar, Flemmi pulled Barrett’s teeth and Whitey took a nap on the living room couch. “As soon as Bucky was dead, Jimmy just calmed down,” Weeks said. “It was like he took a Valium.”
⁹
Weeks was sickened, especially when he looked at the kitchen table and saw Barrett’s open wallet, which showed a photograph of Barrett’s young son. But Whitey simply fell asleep. It was a pattern Weeks observed: in the days and hours leading up to a murder, Whitey appeared hyperactive, but in the immediate aftermath of a murder, his body language changed. He appeared relaxed, contented, spent.
¹⁰

The real value in Barrett was not his money but his information on Joe Murray. Whitey, whose defenders credited him with keeping drugs out of Southie, had the leverage now to demand better terms from the city’s biggest drug importer. He was to get a cut of everything Murray moved, no matter where it was landed and warehoused. It was the most lucrative shakedown of his career.

A year after Barrett was buried
in the dirt floor, John McIntyre was buried next to him. While McIntyre’s status as an informant for various law enforcement agencies meant that his disappearance brought more scrutiny than Barrett’s had, the heat was more easily deflected than that following the murders of Wheeler, Halloran, Donahue, and Callahan. After all, there was no body. McIntyre was simply gone.

The third and final guest at The Haunty was Deborah Hussey, and she would turn out to be the last person whose murder was blamed on Whitey and Flemmi. The fact that she had been like a stepdaughter to Flemmi did not stand in the way of his molesting her, from her early teens onward, even as he continued to treat her mother as his common-law-wife. Deborah Hussey started using drugs soon after the abuse started. Tom Hussey blamed Flemmi for his daughter’s addiction.

It is safe to assume that Tom Hussey is the only man who ever spit in Flemmi’s face and lived to tell the tale. “Stevie had just moved in with my wife. I was still drinking at the time, and Stevie walked into this bar on Columbia Road called Lombardi’s. I walked right up to him and spit in his face,” Tom Hussey said. Flemmi beat him and left him bloodied. Tom Hussey soon left Boston, moved to Florida, joined the plumbers’ union, and stopped drinking. Debbie had started acting up in her teens, so he told her to come down to Florida to spend time with him and get away from trouble. The visits helped; away from Flemmi, she seemed her old self for long stretches. But she would always go back to Boston and to Flemmi and the drugs. “She was a smart girl, a beautiful girl,” Tom Hussey said. “I got her to come down and live with me when she was about twenty. I got her a job at a hotel in Boca Raton, and the manager said she was the best waitress he ever had. But she couldn’t stay off the drugs and she went back to Flemmi.”
¹¹
It wasn’t just the drugs. Debbie was dancing in a strip club and prostituting herself to buy heroin. Flemmi claimed he was scandalized because she brought black clients back to the family house on Blue Hill Avenue in suburban Milton.
¹²
It was in that spacious home, around the fall of 1982, that Debbie told her mother Flemmi was the reason she couldn’t get off drugs. Debbie was in bed, sick from the narcotics, and Flemmi was slapping her when Marion burst in and demanded to know what was going on.

Debbie blurted out that she had been performing oral sex on Flemmi since she was a teenager.
¹³

Marion was floored. Her knees went weak.

“I’ve been doing it for years,” Debbie said.

Flemmi gathered her up and dragged her out of the house. His two sons were downstairs. They couldn’t hear this. “I’m not lyin’, Ma!” Debbie cried over her shoulder, as Flemmi bundled her out the door. Debbie, a junkie, had been lying about her life for years, but Marion believed her now. “Get out,” Marion told Flemmi the next day. And he did.
¹⁴

Debbie kept getting arrested downtown, usually for prostitution. She was dropping names. Flemmi’s name. Whitey’s name. Sometimes, too, the name of Flemmi’s brother, Michael, the cop. This can’t go on, Whitey told Flemmi. As he had with Debra Davis four years earlier, he started pressing Flemmi to deal with Debbie Hussey. It was inevitable that his partner would cave.

On a cold night in January 1985, Whitey picked up Kevin Weeks. “We’re gonna meet Stevie,” Whitey said.
¹⁵
When Whitey parked in front of The Haunty, Weeks felt odd. The only time they went there was to kill someone. For the first time, he wondered: Was it his turn? Whitey soon put Weeks’s mind to rest when he explained that someone else would be joining them at The Haunty. “Stevie’s out buying her a coat,” Whitey said. A half-hour later, Debbie Hussey walked into the house; Flemmi had lured her there by saying he was thinking of buying the house for her. Kevin Weeks was in the upstairs bathroom when he heard a thud. He says he walked downstairs and came upon Whitey, lying on his back in the living room, his legs wrapped around Debbie Hussey’s waist, his hands wrapped around her neck. As Whitey choked the life out of her, Flemmi stood there. Whitey denies that he was the killer, but the accounts of Flemmi and Weeks closely agree.
*
¹⁶

Flemmi put his ear to Debbie’s chest and apparently heard something, because he put a rope around her neck and tightened it, using a stick as a lever. When it was over, the trio assumed their usual roles: Weeks started digging, Flemmi started pulling Debbie’s teeth, and Whitey lay down to take his nap.
¹⁷
Later that night, after Debbie had been buried, Whitey was driving around Southie. He was his typical self after a murder: relaxed, relieved. Another threat averted. “What was that all about?” Kevin Weeks asked. “I don’t know,” Whitey replied, “maybe Stevie was fucking her and she was going to tell.” Actually, he went on, it was more than that. Debbie was a junkie. “She was bringing niggers back to the house and fucking them,” Whitey said. “It couldn’t go on.”
¹⁸

A few months after Debbie Hussey’s murder, Whitey and Weeks were driving through City Point when Pat Nee waved them down in front of The Haunty. Nee leaned into the window and said, “My brother’s selling the house.” This was not good news. What if the person who bought the house decided to renovate the cellar? Whitey turned to Nee in anger. “Why can’t you control your brother?” he asked. “It’s his house,” Nee said, shrugging. “What am I going to do?”