Where the Bodies Were Buried Read Free Page A

Bulger’s operation in exchange for more lenient sentences and/or better conditions while they were incarcerated.
    Most notable of those who would eventually cooperate with the government was Stephen J. Flemmi, who had been Whitey’s criminal partner for twenty years. Flemmi was a lifelong gangster who had killed many people alongside Whitey and was a crucial link between Bulger’s South Boston organization and the Italian Mafia based in the North End. Flemmi, an Italian American, had connections among nearly every criminal faction in the city, including, as it turned out, the FBI.
    In 1997, attorneys for Flemmi were the first to drop the bombshell that both he and James Bulger had been operating as covert informants for the FBI since at least the mid-1970s. Many in Boston had suspected that Bulger had a “special relationship” with the FBI; it had been hinted at in the newspapers and was a source of frustration and anger among other law enforcement agencies that had, over the years, attempted to take down Bulger. Flemmi’s lawyers revealed for the first time not only that Flemmi and Bulger were government informants but that they had, in fact, been protected by the FBI and others in the U.S. Department of Justice. It was part of Flemmi’s defense that he could not be prosecuted for crimes that he had committed, because he and Bulger had been given immunity from prosecution in exchange for their serving as informants in the DOJ’s war against the Mafia.
    The judge presiding over Flemmi’s case—Mark L. Wolf—eventually dismissed Flemmi’s claim as being without merit, but not before calling for an evidentiary hearing that would become known as “the Wolf hearings.” These hearings, which took place in a Boston federal courtroom in late 1997 and into 1998, were the local equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials. A generation of cops, federal agents, gangsters, political figures, and many others were compelled to testify under federal subpoena in what would go down as one of the most stunning public tribunals in the history of the city.
    Along with Flemmi, a number of other Bulger associates had by then cut plea bargain deals with the government and begun cooperating with federal prosecutors. From the witness stand during the hearings, a generation’s worth of murder and mayhem was revealed. Flemmi would eventually plead guilty to having committed eleven murders. Another Bulger associate, John Martorano, would admit to twenty murders. Bulger would eventually be charged with nineteen killings.
    The high volume of dead bodies was one thing, but it went even deeper. The Wolf hearings revealed not only that Bulger and Flemmi had for years been protected by the FBI and others in the criminal justice system, but that the same FBI agents who originally recruited Bulger and Flemmi had played a role in framing Joe Salvati and his codefendants back in 1967. Those agents were given commendations from Director Hoover and received bonuses as part of the bureau’s financial incentive program. On the prosecutorial side, others received promotions, and one key player went on to become a federal criminal court judge. These were men who had protected Joe Barboza and enabled his manipulations of the system, just as they and others would for Bulger and Flemmi. It was a cycle of complicity, if not outright corruption, that ran so deep, many in the system retreated into a state of denial that would continue right through the eventual prosecution of Whitey Bulger.
    From the beginning, the prosecutors had a problem. It had been their intention to nail Bulger and his organization on an array of racketeering charges, but the Wolf hearings of 1997–98 had opened a Pandora’s box of horrific crimes and law enforcement malfeasance going back nearly half a century. This rancid effluvia had threatened to infect the Bulger case, or, even more threatening to the reputation of the system, to wash