Black Mass

MEANWHILE, a number of major developments during the autumn of 1999 contributed to the great undoing of the Bulger years.

The John Martorano deal went public in late September when Martorano walked into court and calmly admitted to killing ten people as the key hitman for Bulger’s gang. In exchange for his confession—and his testimony against Bulger, Flemmi, and FBI agents—prosecutors recommended he receive a fifteen-year prison sentence. The plea bargain proved controversial, with some appalled at the apparently light sentence for a cold-blooded killer. U.S. attorney Donald Stern conceded that cutting deals with killers was “distasteful” but argued that it would have been even more distasteful not to have made the deal to get more evidence against bosses Bulger and Flemmi. Martorano implicated Bulger in three of the murders and Flemmi in half a dozen.

Then, in early December, Cadillac Frank Salemme bailed. He pled guilty to racketeering charges that he’d run a joint venture with the Bulger gang to control the Boston underworld. In return, prosecutors agreed to drop murder charges against him. The deal did not require Salemme to testify, but Salemme voluntarily appeared before the Connolly grand jury to testify against the former agent. Wyshak and Cardinale jointly filed a sentencing recommendation that Salemme serve from ten to thirteen years. It meant that Salemme would be free in about six years, since he got credit for the five years he’d spent behind bars since his arrest in 1995. Judge Wolf accepted the plea bargain on February 23, 2000. “He’s tired of fighting,” Cardinale said afterward, adding that his client also wanted to get away from Flemmi. “Frank doesn’t want to be next to Flemmi for another second, never mind another two years.” Flemmi’s attorney Ken Fishman sought to put the best face on the plea: “As far as we’re concerned, we’re happy to have the courtroom to ourselves.”

BULGER’S in absentia foothold on the city continued its rapid erosion with the indictment of two key lieutenants. The “two Kevins,” forty-three-year-old Kevin Weeks and fifty-one-year-old Kevin O’Neil, were charged with racketeering and shaking down drug dealers and bookies for more than two decades. The indictment also put both men alongside Bulger and Flemmi in the takeover of the Rakeses’ liquor store and the extortion of Raymond Slinger. It cited O’Neil as the longtime operator of Triple O’s, which one columnist had nicknamed the “Bucket of Blood.” It accused Weeks of carrying out Bulger’s commands in the daily operation of the gang’s criminal activities as Bulger found ways to keep in touch by using calling cards to reach Weeks at the businesses and homes of friends.

Initially, Kevin Weeks kept up the bounce and bluster he’d displayed publicly as a supreme Bulger loyalist. He’d been a man about the neighborhood, even appearing in a tuxedo for the Oscar party in 1998 to honor the nomination of the set-in-Southie film Good Will Hunting at the L Street Tavern. Standing by him at his arraignment on November 18 was lawyer Tom Finnerty, Billy Bulger’s old friend and former law partner. Weeks pleaded not guilty, and on his way out of the courtroom he turned to columnist Howie Carr of the Boston Herald. “Be kind, Howie. Be gentle.”

In a matter of days Weeks was a different man. He’d never in his life faced serious criminal charges like this—racketeering, extortion, loan-sharking, drug trafficking, with murder charges probably in the offing. Finnerty was soon gone, replaced by another lawyer. Then word spread that Weeks was talking.

The morning of January 14, 2000, the city awoke to news reports that state police had spent one of the coldest nights of the winter digging up the remains of two men and a woman stacked in a makeshift grave in Dorchester. Kevin Weeks, looking now to cut a deal for leniency but first having to demonstrate his bona fides, had pinpointed the burial site in the gully across from a popular meeting hall, down an embankment from the Southeast Expressway. By daylight, TV camera crews and reporters circled the troopers’ big dig about eight feet under to recover the remains. The site was once a mostly marshy area, located conveniently right off the routes that Bulger and Flemmi drove between Southie and Quincy.

Based on dental records, one of the bodies was soon identified as John McIntyre. The parking lot where McIntyre’s abandoned truck and wallet had been found the day he disappeared in 1984 was less than a mile from the burial ground. Though not positively identified, the other bodies were believed to be Deborah Hussey, missing since the fall of 1984, and Arthur “Bucky” Barrett, the safecracker who disappeared in 1983.

For the victims’ families, the discovery brought some relief. For investigators, having Weeks turn on Bulger was like holding a stake to drive into the gang’s heart. Negotiations continued in secret regarding Weeks’s deal; in the street Whitey’s surrogate son acquired a nickname to play off how long it had taken him to fold: “Two Weeks.”

BY early 2000 John Morris had moved on to Florida after losing his job with an insurance company in Tennessee. He occasionally flew to Boston to appear before the ongoing grand jury. Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan and Jim Ring continued working together at the Boston law firm of Choate Hall and Stewart. Bill Bulger continued in his second career as president of the University of Massachusetts. Though his appointment by then-governor Weld was at first controversial, Bulger generally has won passing grades for his stewardship of the state university.

The Boston FBI office had become the most heavily investigated field office in the bureau’s history. Retired and current FBI agents grew defensive and weary, wondering, who’s next? Paul Rico? Dennis Condon? Both were under the intense scrutiny of the ongoing grand jury overseen by prosecutor Durham, along with a number of other agents, such as Mike Buckley and Nick Gianturco. Connolly’s pal John Newton was notified that he was going to be fired for allegedly lying to protect Connolly during court hearings in 1998 before Judge Wolf. Newton pledged through his lawyer to fight the move.

Beyond the bureau, the city continued to assess the damage and to ask what went wrong. Was it two guys from the projects—Connolly and Bulger—whose loyalty to one another outweighed everything else? Deeply flawed government oversight? Man’s capacity for evil and self-deception? Probably all of the above. The Bulger harm had certainly been felt in ways immeasurable and difficult to quantify. There were some who felt that the corruption had seeped not only into the heart of Southie and the FBI, but into almost everything—the State House, law enforcement, and public life.