Where the Bodies Were Buried Read Free

never be fully reversed.
    Salvati tried to appeal the conviction. Barboza went on to testify the following year in a much bigger trial, a racketeering case against the boss of the New England Mafia. It resulted in the biggest conviction ever in the federal government’s widely proclaimed war on organized crime. Decades later, it would be revealed that that case also was based on fraudulent testimony by Barboza, who would eventually be exposed as an inveterate liar and finally, in an act of revenge, be murdered by mafia assassins while he was living under a false name in the federal witness protection program.
    Meanwhile, Salvati’s case became buried deeper in the system. One yearbecame ten, and ten became thirty. He likely never would have been released at all were it not for Whitey Bulger.
    I said to Salvati, “In a way, the Bulger case is the reason we’re sitting here today. His indictment is what blew your case wide open.”
    Salvati squinted his eyes; he knew I was being deliberately ironic. There is no love lost between Joe and Whitey Bulger. Though Salvati never met the man who was now a defendant in the biggest organized crime trial in Boston since the Barboza years, he is, in many ways, a victim of the same corrupt system that made Bulger possible. The same men who engineered Joe Salvati’s wrongful conviction were the men who laid the groundwork for the Bulger era.
    Talking to Joe Salvati was like being in the presence of a living ghost. He was the link between what I had been observing daily at the federal courthouse in Boston during the Bulger trial, and the historical quagmire that had given rise to Whitey. For the first time, I realized that the trial wasn’t only about Bulger, it was about the vast network of people and events that were wrapped up in a historical continuum that seemed to never end.
    IN JUNE 2011 , when it was first announced that James Bulger had been apprehended in Santa Monica, California, after sixteen years as a fugitive from the law, it was a major international story. Whitey had always been a figure of much conjecture and media attention in Boston, where he functioned as an old-fashioned mob boss from 1975 to 1995. Among other things, he was the older brother of perhaps the most powerful politician in the state of Massachusetts, Senator William “Billy” Bulger, who served as president of the state senate for sixteen years. Jim Bulger’s criminal career did not hurt his younger brother’s political fortunes at all. In fact, it could be argued that in South Boston, the Bulgers’ home neighborhood, having a brother who was reputed to be an “outlaw” was a badge of distinction. For a time, Bill Bulger played the association for all it was worth. If a politician or media outlet such as the Boston Globe mentioned Jim Bulger’s name in relation to the senator, they were accused of engaging in anti-Irish slander, a potent accusation in a city where the Irish had risen from the gutter to control the town.
    The Brothers Bulger became a dominant topic of conversation and occasional source of criminal investigation in Boston. Of particular interest was the fact that their theoretical alliance as politician and gangster seemed to symbolize the connection between organized crime and the Democratic Party political machine that was at the heart of the Irish Mob going back at least to the Prohibition era of the 1920s.
    All of this was to become a matter of supreme local attention in Boston, but Whitey Bulger never really became a national story until after he disappeared on the run. In January 1995, after receiving word from a contact in law enforcement that he was about to be indicted and arrested, Whitey fled along with Catherine Greig, a female companion. Many of Bulger’s criminal associates were left behind to face the music. Some of these associates were arrested and cut deals with the government to tell all they knew about