It’s of a bygone era – Cadillac DeVilles, aluminum sided split level homes, Levi jeans and sideburns. The evidence is a slice of life going back more than 50 years, conjuring a wisp of nostalgia for a simpler era - even the gangland warfare once romanticized by Frank Sinatra who, by coincidence, is found in the evidence file in a photograph with Richard Castucci, just one of the Winter Hill Gang’s murder victims.
Also in the files, thousands of documents, surveillance video, photographs, handwritten notes and communications between the FBI, mobsters, the state police, victims and innocents.
There were no computers, no electronic transfers, no digital firewalls to hide behind – just cash and checkbooks, a paper trail marching to the doorsteps of James "Whitey" Bulger, Steven Flemmi and Kevin Weeks. There’s the ginned-up contract where Steven Rakes transfers his South Boston Liquor Mart to the Bulger gang – and hundreds of quaint hand-written checks bearing the Liquor Mart’s name neatly made out to Bulger, Steven Flemmi and Kevin Weeks. And one is a real eye-popper; a $287,000 extortion check the gang squeezed out of a poor chump paying to spare his life.
Moving on to the guns and knives - so many they are catalogued by where they were left, from Boston to Florida, including a staggering stash of weapons found in the apartment Bulger shared with Catherine Grieg in Santa Monica – the same apartment where FBI officials found some $800,000 in cash stashed in a wall hideaway, carefully stacked and wrapped for preservation.
There’s even some amusing evidence – confirmation that Whitey Bulger was curious what people were saying about him – his reading collection included books by fellow mobsters Kevin Weeks, Red Shea, and Patrick Nee. And apparently crime reporter and author Michele McPhee piqued his fancy too.
The jury saw some human touches too – Bulger with hitman John Martarano’s baby, Bulger and Flemmi enjoying bananas, the gang sipping cocktails at the Charles Hotel.
But the sheer magnitude of the Winter Hill Gang’s reign of terror appears in dozens of mostly black and white photos of murder scenes – bodies slumped over steering wheels, blood soaked seats, windows blown out by the rat-a-tat of machine guns – the car of onetime Jai Alai executive Roger Wheeler still parked in the bucolic setting of an Arizona country club hours after his body had been taken away.
Some of the photos of victims are less familiar, like Al Plummer, Joseph Notarangeli, and Thomas King, who once spared Bulger in a bar fight only to later die at his hand. And there are the faces we’ve come to know well, Debra Davis and Deborah Hussey – two onetime girlfriends of Flemmi who paid with their lives for what they knew.
A slew of eerie death certificates note the murders of Arthur "Bucky" Barrett, John McIntyre, and Hussey – all of whom disappeared in the 1980s – their bodies dumped in a gully along the southeast expressway in Dorchester and dug up one blustery January day in 2000 – a date duly noted as the official day of death. Laid out in a medical examiner’s office, Barrett’s skeleton reveals a signature Flemmi calling card – missing teeth.
And finally, something I had not seen – official FBI informant cards – issued to, among others, Bulger himself.
