Where the Bodies Were Buried Read Online Free PDF Page B

since the years of Bulger’s reign. Boston was booming, with new buildings and ambitious commercial developments going up at a rapid pace. Cranes dotted the skyline. Young people of diverse nationalities populated the shops, restaurants, and drinking establishments once called bars, taverns, or saloons, but now more commonly referred to as lounges. Boston was becoming the diverse, culturally vibrant city some had always hoped it could be—a hope previously hindered by a parochial, insular, violent past that was encapsulated, most gruesomely, in the Bulger era and everything it represented.
    That entire era was on trial. And before the city could completely break free, it would have to collectively look backward one last time at the skeletons in the closet.

1
THE HAUNTY
    THE HOUSE AT 799 Third Street in Southie is modest in size, with a quaint architectural style. Unlike the triple-decker homes that traditionally dominate the neighborhood, lined side by side like pigs in a blanket, this one stands alone. A pyramid roof with asphalt shingles is complemented by classic wood siding and an extended vestibule in front of the house. Located in a quiet section of a venerable working-class community, far from any major thoroughfares, it is both out in the open and hidden away, a pleasant abode on a seemingly placid street in a quintessential corner of twenty-first-century urban America.
    Pat Nee, formerly a criminal in Southie, was raised a half block from this house, at the corner of Third Street and Court Lane. When Nee was seven, he and his family emigrated from Rosmuc, County Galway, in the west of Ireland. Pat grew up on Third Street with three brothers, one of whom, Michael, would eventually become the owner of the house at 799.
    The house had special meaning to the Nees. As kids playing on Third Street, they got to know the owner of the house, a former Harvard professor whom they knew only as “Mr. Sullivan.” He was an older gentleman, with a patrician manner whose upper-class breeding made him an odd fit in the neighborhood. He was rumored to be friendly with the Kennedys, especially Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the most famous political family in the United States.
    Mr. Sullivan was married but had no kids of his own, and he was friendly with the kids who played on that street, especially Pat Nee’s brother Michael. When Mr. Sullivan passed away in the mid-1970s, he left the house in his will to Michael Nee.
    In later years, Pat often visited Michael and his family at the house,sharing holiday meals and backyard beers, the small, everyday moments that keep a family together and form the backbone of a community.
    Starting in the early 1980s, at the direction of Whitey Bulger, the house that had been bequeathed to Michael Nee was turned into a chamber of horrors.
    â€œMiserable cocksucker,” said Pat Nee at the mention of Bulger’s name.
    We were sitting in Nee’s Jeep, parked on Third Street, across the street from the house. I had led Pat Nee back here to reminisce about how his brother’s family home in Southie was turned into a place of entrapment, murder, and body disposal. Horrible things took place in this house—despicable things—some of which Nee heard about and others he is alleged to have participated in as a member of Bulger’s organization.
    Nee is known to some as a hard man, though now, at age sixty-eight, his tough-guy years are well behind him. He’s mostly bald now, with a face that is weathered and a body that has been lived in. He is more likely to laugh and tell a joke than engage in gangster intimidation tactics. A grandfather who dotes over his two grandchildren as if they represent to him a new lease on life, Nee is a fixture in Southie, greeted with a friendly “Hey, Pat, how are ya’?” nearly everywhere he goes on his daily rounds in the neighborhood.
    For much of his life, Nee was a professional criminal—a thief, a