Where the Bodies Were Buried Read Online Free PDF

unfolded that the evidence presented did not tell the full story. In some cases, witness testimony raised questions the details of which were deliberately being excluded from the proceedings by the prosecutors and the judge.
    Thus, as well as attempting to give a daily narrative of the trial as it unfolded, this account is buttressed by historical asides and interviews away from the courtroom with some crucial observers, including people like Joe Salvati; Anthony Cardinale, a highly knowledgeable criminal defense attorney in Boston who has represented many organized crime figures; former FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick, who was a controversial witness at the trial; and a member of the jury who was to become increasingly disillusioned as the proceedings unfolded.
    The trial spawned many major news stories, with the defendant dramatically cursing out some of the witnesses, and one potential witness turning up dead while the trial was still ongoing. Locally, it was a front-page item most days, but the implications of the trial reached far beyond Boston.
    Bulger and Flemmi had been recruited and used by the DOJ as part of the FBI’s Top Echelon Informant Program. Though there had never been a full public accounting of this program—and there was little data availableto the public on how many known criminals were involved, how much the program cost, or who exactly within the DOJ was responsible for its oversight—it was known that the TE program involved the recruiting and use of criminals all over the United States. How many “special relationships” with gangsters and drug lords had gone bad for the FBI? And who, if anybody, was ever held institutionally responsible?
    These questions were especially pertinent because another scandal involving the Top Echelon Informant Program had flared up and died out just six years earlier. Around the same time it was first revealed that Bulger and Flemmi had been FBI informants, it came to light that a major mafia figure in New York, Gregory Scarpa, a capo in the Colombo crime family, had also served as a TE for the FBI. First recruited by the feds in the mid-1960s, Scarpa was believed to have committed as many as fifty murders while serving as a paid government informant.
    In 1994, Scarpa died of AIDS without it ever having been publicly revealed that he was a federal informant for nearly thirty years. When it was finally revealed at a racketeering trial in Brooklyn, and as with the Bulger case, the Scarpa revelations led to federal charges being brought against the FBI agent who served as the gangster’s handler. The case against the agent had been scheduled for trial in 2006 but fell apart when it was revealed that a key witness against the agent had lied under oath. On November 1, 2007, at the request of the government, a federal judge dismissed the charges against the agent; what had promised to be the first and most comprehensive public examination of the government’s Top Echelon Informant Program had been thwarted.
    Thus the Bulger trial took on added weight. Not only would the proceedings shed light on the criminal activities of the defendant, but they would provide, perhaps, a much-needed and unprecedented opportunity to bring clarity and accountability to a highly controversial method of law enforcement that had, without the knowledge or full understanding of the people, become a standard tactic not only of the FBI but also the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other law enforcement agencies.
    LIVING IN A studio apartment on Hanover Street, across from Café Pompeii—where I met and interviewed Joe Salvati—I walked Monday through Friday to the Moakley United States Courthouse to take in the trial. As I traversed the city, I could not help but notice how much the physical landscape of Boston had changed