Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (46 page)

Whitey’s hard edge was on display, however, when he dipped into the books written about him by former associates. Some had dubbed him “King Rat,” scorning his role as an informant. Some of the accounts cast him alternatively as a homosexual or as a sexual deviant who liked to have his way with teenage girls.
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It infuriated Whitey that people were making money off his life, his story. He seethed when John Martorano, the hit man–turned–government witness who served just twelve years in prison for killing twenty people, appeared on CBS’s
60 Minutes
in 2008 and gave a chilling account of his criminal exploits with Whitey. Martorano talked nonchalantly about the people he’d murdered, insisting he killed out of loyalty to Whitey and other members of the Winter Hill Gang. He also styled himself a noble warrior and lashed Whitey as a scoundrel who had betrayed his friends. “I’ll go along with a lot of things, but not no Judas, not no informant,” said Martorano, adding that he would kill Whitey if given the chance. After watching the broadcast in the quiet refuge of Apartment 303, Whitey sat down and began writing his own memoirs.
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In his small, neat handwriting, he began: “I’ve been driven to this by the lies of JM and seeing his insane interview on 60 Minutes was the last straw.” Calling Martorano’s version of events “20 minutes of lies,” Whitey wrote that it “pushed me to write this true account.” He only got about a hundred pages into his manuscript. The anger that had inspired him to begin seemed to dissipate. He found he now had trouble staying mad, something new for him. It was a gradual but unmistakable change. The emotions that John Martorano inspired were from his old life. His new life was a much better place. Whitey had evolved while on the run. “Became a real citizen and became a different person,” he told a friend, “experienced emotions, feelings that I’d shut down for years.”
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After so many years in Santa Monica, he saw himself, in fact, not so much as a criminal in hiding as a man in love. Greig’s loyalty, proven over so many years, meant more to him than anything. He was not a man prone to regret, but regretted not meeting Greig right after he got out of prison in 1965. If he had, he felt he could have left his criminal life behind. “By the time we met it was too late,” he said. “I was in too deep, had done too much to even consider an honest way of life.”
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Whitey Bulger had not gone soft as much as he had gone native. He was a man of Southern California now, and he had never been happier.

16

Uncontrolled Wickedness

T
ommy Donahue was standing
in the outfield in Wainwright Park in Dorchester, bored. His baseball glove, too big for his hand, hung limp by his side. He was eight years old, and hardly anyone hit the ball to the outfield in the minors in Little League. He turned and looked at the fence on the third-base side where his father used to stand. But Michael Donahue wasn’t there. “It kind of hit me, like a punch in the stomach, during that baseball game,” Tommy Donahue later recalled. “This realization.” The father who had been at all of his games, who consoled him when he struck out and praised him when he got a hit, was gone for good. At the end of the inning, Tommy Donahue ran in from the outfield with his head down so his teammates couldn’t see the tears. He sat at the end of the bench and turned away.

There was a similar realization, that Michael Donahue was really gone, among the neighbors on Roseland Street in St. Mark’s Parish when the Fourth of July came and went without fanfare two months after his murder in 1982. For years, Michael Donahue had organized the neighborhood Independence Day block party. He rolled barbecue grills onto the sidewalk. He set up games for the kids. He handed out ice-cold beers to his neighbors. He had a friend in Chinatown who supplied him with fireworks, and Roseland Street lit up with sparklers and bottle rockets as night fell. One Fourth of July, Michael handed a Roman candle to someone wearing a Roman collar: the parish priest. The priest was figuring out how to light the thing as a Boston Police cruiser inched down Roseland Street. The cop slowed down, looked at the priest, then shook his head as the priest tried to explain how he came to be holding some illegal fireworks. The kids howled with laughter.

Roseland Street was a stable place. Many of the neighborhood kids, including the three Donahue boys, went to St. Mark’s School, the same red brick Catholic elementary school Whitey Bulger had attended in the 1930s. You could walk to everything. The kids walked to school, the mothers walked to Maria’s Market on Dorchester Avenue, the men walked up to the Peabody Tavern after work. And Michael Donahue was the pope of St. Mark’s, the glue on Roseland Street; when he was murdered, things just seemed to come loose. The block parties stopped. Families moved away. The neighborhood changed. Even the Donahues moved away. Patricia Donahue lost the house. She took her three boys to a suburb south of Boston, thinking the change of scenery might help. But it didn’t. Over the years, whenever Michael Jr. or Shawn or Tommy bumped into childhood friends, their father’s death inevitably came up in the conversation, and the consensus was that the fond memories of their childhoods ended when Whitey Bulger murdered Michael Donahue on the waterfront. “Whitey didn’t just kill my father,” Tommy Donahue said. “He killed a neighborhood.”

While Whitey was reinventing himself as a retiree in sunny Santa Monica, the families of his victims in Boston struggled with the dark legacy he had left behind. Many of them had no idea why their loved ones had died. Some had no bodies to mourn; they had just disappeared. Others, including the Donahues, had buried their father but had no idea Whitey was the culprit. Still, in their despair, they mustered the moral force that helped bring Whitey down.

In the years after Michael Donahue died on the South Boston waterfront next to Brian Halloran, Pat Donahue made it her cause to try to find out who killed her husband and why. The FBI and the police had told her that a gangster named Jimmy Flynn had shot her husband while gunning for Halloran. They told her that Michael Donahue was killed only because he happened that day to be driving Halloran home. So when Flynn was arrested two and a half years later and charged in the killings, Pat Donahue thought it was the end of the story.

She had no way of knowing that the police were innocently mistaken and that the FBI was feeding her lies.

Pat Donahue sat through the trial of Jimmy Flynn and was crushed when he walked free. He had multiple alibis placing him at home, eating dinner, fifteen miles from the murder scene. Brian Halloran’s dying declaration that Jimmy Flynn had shot him wasn’t enough for the jury that acquitted him in 1986. “We just thought a guilty guy got off, that there was nothing more we could do,” Pat Donahue said. “The FBI kept saying it was him, it was him. And I believed them. I had no reason not to. So it was over.”
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Judge Mark Wolf’s September 1999 ruling,
and the revelatory evidentiary hearings that led up to it, upended the Donahues’ world and that of many other families whose loved ones had died at Whitey Bulger’s hands or on his orders. Judge Wolf found evidence that John Connolly had told Whitey and Flemmi that Brian Halloran had implicated them in the murder of World Jai Alai president Roger Wheeler. Wolf found that the tip may have provoked Whitey and Flemmi to kill Halloran—and Donahue, the innocent bystander. “We had never heard Bulger’s name mentioned in connection with Michael’s murder,” Pat Donahue said. “Judge Wolf changed everything.”

So did John Martorano and Kevin Weeks. Martorano’s decision to become a witness in 1998 convinced Weeks he should do the same the following year. Martorano and Weeks gave the state police–DEA team that built the case against Whitey the evidence they needed to bring murder charges—the story, the motives, and the long-hidden bodies. The police, in turn, gave some answers to families that had been in the dark for fifteen to twenty-five years.

Bill St. Croix, Steve Flemmi’s thirty-nine-year-old son, was recovering from treatment for cancer of the thymus at the Weymouth condominium of his mother, Marion Hussey, in January 2000 when DEA agent Dan Doherty and Massachusetts State Police detective Steve Johnson knocked on the door. “We think we found Debbie,” Dan Doherty said. They had to do a lot of testing before they would know for sure, and the testing would take time. St. Croix had always looked up to his big sister, who had now been missing for fifteen years. Flemmi had been telling St. Croix’s mother all those years that she had run away and that he was trying to track her down. St. Croix didn’t wait for the testing. He knew a quicker way to identify the remains that had been pulled from the grave beside the expressway. He and his uncle, Mike Flemmi, a Boston police officer, drove down to the jail in Plymouth where his father was being held.

“Is that Debbie in the ground?” St. Croix remembers asking.

“Yes,” Steve Flemmi said softly.

“Did you kill her?”

“Yes,” Flemmi said, “but I can explain.”

“There is no explanation you can give me,” St. Croix said.

Mike Flemmi took his brother’s side: Debbie was a junkie; she had been prostituting herself to black men in her mother’s house, and something had to be done. St. Croix stood up and slapped his uncle. Then he turned to his father.

“Was Bulger there?”

“Yup,” Flemmi said. Later, Weeks recounted on the witness stand how Whitey choked the life out of Deborah Hussey as he and Flemmi watched. Then Flemmi made sure she was dead. Whitey would later dispute this account, putting Flemmi’s hands, not his own, on Debbie’s throat. But there is no question, according to both Flemmi and Weeks, that Whitey was present, approved of the killing, and shared in the blame for Hussey’s brutal end.

St. Croix felt sick to his stomach. He was haunted by the image of his sister gasping for air. He had always seen his father as a man of honor, even though he knew he was a gangster. Growing up, he had no idea his father had molested his sister as a teenager. He knew his father had killed people, but he presumed those people were other gangsters who would have killed his father if they had had the chance. Now he couldn’t look at him. “To be able to kill my sister and then go home and have relations with my mother, [to be] able to put his arm around my mother knowing how he killed my sister, I would say that’s a classic sociopath,” St. Croix said. “Or maybe not even classic. Maybe it’s something new.”
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The recovery of Deborah Hussey’s remains
did more than change Bill St. Croix’s view of his father; it galvanized him to act. He told investigators about his father’s jailhouse confession and about a plot Flemmi had hatched to escape from prison. He led them to a cache of seventy machine guns and sawed-off shotguns and pistols that Whitey and Flemmi shared. Michael Flemmi was later convicted of helping his brother hide the guns.

The disclosures at Judge Wolf’s hearing and then at John Connolly’s trial led the families of thirteen people killed by Whitey and Flemmi during their years as informants to file civil suits against the United States. In cases brought between 2001 and 2003 seeking more than $1.3 billion in compensation,
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they argued that the FBI was responsible for the deaths because the bureau had protected Whitey and Flemmi from prosecution and in some cases agents had leaked information that led directly to the slayings. The law is stacked against those seeking financial compensation for official wrongdoing by a federal agency, especially, as in this case, wrongdoing that occurred many years ago. Eight of the suits were ultimately dismissed because they were deemed to have been filed too late. Under federal law, the families were required to make claims against the government within two years of when they knew—or a reasonable person should have known—that FBI misconduct was involved. The key question for the courts was: At what point should the families have known?

The families and their advocates believed that simple decency would lead the government to be generous in its interpretation, given the grievous loss of life, Connolly’s blatant corruption, and the long, dismal history of official malfeasance. Instead, Justice Department lawyers from Washington stubbornly fended off most of the suits by arguing that any “reasonable person” should have known by 1997 or early 1998 that the FBI was implicated in the slayings—even though the FBI was still staunchly denying it at that time, and even though some of the victims were still buried in secret graves. The government insisted that the families should have known better—even though two separate investigations into the murders and FBI corruption were still under way, and Judge Wolf was still hearing evidence. At the very least, the families should have paid more attention to media accounts about the FBI’s corrupt relationship with Whitey and Flemmi, the government lawyers said, instead of relying on the FBI’s insistence that it had done nothing wrong. They pointed to anguished statements the victims’ relatives made to the press as the scandal was unfolding in court as proof that they knew the FBI was liable and that the families had waited too long to file suit. It was a strategy that shifted responsibility from the guilty to the departed and those who mourned them. It shook the public’s confidence in the justice system, but it worked: A federal appeals court sided with the government, handing down decisions between 2004 and 2011 that barred six of the families from ever taking their suits to trial and overturned awards that two other families had won at trial.

From the earliest stages of the investigation, the FBI had blocked efforts by Tulsa police to solve the murder of businessman Roger Wheeler, withholding evidence that its informants, Whitey and Flemmi, had been identified as suspects. An FBI agent once even suggested to Wheeler’s son Lawrence that his mother might have been involved in the slaying.
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The Wheeler family’s $860 million civil suit was the first to be dismissed because it was filed too late. “There’s a lot that we should have known that we didn’t know,” Lawrence Wheeler said. “But here I am supposed to have known that the FBI was covering things up.”

The Justice Department was unapologetic about pursuing a legal strategy supported by case law as opposed to one grounded in commonsense principles of right and wrong. They weren’t being cruel; they were being good lawyers. “This is a sympathetic case, I realize that,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey S. Bucholtz told an appeals court in Boston, referring to the claim brought by the Wheeler family. But Bucholtz insisted that the Justice Department should not have to apologize for arguing that the families of Whitey’s victims had waited too long to file suit. “No one here was lulled into not filing the suit.”
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Those families whose cases weren’t thrown out on statute of limitations grounds were forced to listen as the Justice Department reversed its legal arguments in the civil proceedings. The DOJ had used Flemmi, Martorano, and Weeks as star witnesses to prosecute John Connolly. Now Justice Department lawyers defending the FBI declared those same witnesses devoid of credibility. In the criminal proceedings, their testimony was hailed as evidence; in the civil proceedings, government lawyers argued that their testimony should be disregarded as hearsay. The government went on to argue that Connolly and Morris were corrupt agents acting outside the scope of their duties when they leaked information to Whitey and Flemmi. How, then, could the FBI be held to account for their misdeeds? “He’s a traitor to the FBI,” Justice Department lawyer Thomas M. Bondy said of Connolly to the appeals court in Boston. “This guy crossed to the other side. He was a criminal who had a day job as an FBI agent.”
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It was all well within the parameters of accepted legal practice, but the government lawyers appeared unaware of or indifferent to public perception. Donald K. Stern, the US Attorney in Boston at the time, turned over responsibility for the civil suits to Justice Department lawyers in Washington. He reasoned that, with prosecutors on his staff working with the families of Whitey’s victims on the criminal case, it would be awkward for them to argue against the families in civil cases. “My expectation at the time was the Justice Department would recognize and acknowledge the misdeeds of the FBI and try to come to some sort of resolution instead of fighting those suits tooth and nail,” Stern said. “I sort of assumed it would be a friendlier resolution.”

But something got lost in translation between Boston and Washington. “The outcome ended up turning on legal doctrine, which probably had less to do with ultimate fairness and more to do with individualized facts,” Stern said. “The resolution did suffer from the fact that lawyers handling it probably had no gut instinct or feeling about the impact of those lawsuits on the history of Boston, and how law enforcement has been viewed.”
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The Justice Department focused on preserving the legal precedent that makes it difficult to sue the government, and defending the image of the FBI. It insisted that whatever took place was the result of a rogue agent, not a rogue agency. The FBI, one government lawyer insisted, was and will always be “the nation’s premier law enforcement agency.”
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