Where the Bodies Were Buried by T. J. English

the job. He still had the square jaw and full head of black hair, thoughit was now possibly a dye job. Having retired with honors, he was known to be a good cop. It was logical that a good cop like Long might blanch when describing a major bank robbery pulled off, in part, by a crew of high-ranking police officers. But this was Boston. Bobby Long’s reference to the infamous Depositors Trust bank heist, in which cops and professional criminals teamed up to commit a major crime together, was a harbinger of things to come.
    Long described how he observed Bucky enter a main office at the garage accompanied by Bulger and Flemmi. They were in there for a long time, with the door closed. For the jury, it was a tiny piece of connecting tissue to the government’s opening statement, when prosecutor Kelly related how Barrett ran afoul of Bulger and Flemmi by allegedly withholding proceeds from a major heist. The jury knew how this story ended: with Barrett being chained to a chair, then shot in the head and buried in the basement of the Haunty.
    Primarily, Bobby Long had been summoned to the witness stand so that the government could enter into evidence the surveillance videos from the Lancaster Street garage. Without sound, and mostly in black-and-white, clips of assorted videos were shown over the next ninety minutes, a trip back to a time when Whitey Bulger was in his prime.
    The videos represented a who’s who of Boston-area mobsters from the 1970s and 1980s. As ghostly images from long ago played on a monitor in the courtroom, Long narrated, pointing out the comings and goings of underworld figures such as Georgie Kaufman, the manager of the garage; Vinnie Roberto; Nicky Femia; Larry Zannino; Nick Giso; Bulger; Flemmi; and many others. It was a motley parade of gangsters, many of them slovenly men from the working class seemingly unconcerned about their physical appearance. That is, all except for one person: Bulger.
    Forty-nine years old at the time, Whitey was lean and neatly dressed in every video. Mostly, he favored tight-fitting jeans that were pressed with a crease down the front of the legs. He wore tight T-shirts that showed off his physique. While others in the videos were shown talking and gesticulating in the Neapolitan manner, Bulger was contained and controlled. He looked like a prince: a man, touched by vanity, who saw himself as a cut above the rest.
    Another notable feature of the videos—uncommented upon byanyone—was that for thirty-three years they had sat in an evidence vault somewhere in the U.S. attorney’s office. Finally, in 2013, here they were being dusted off and used for the first time, the restoration of an investigative narrative that was abruptly aborted in June 1980. As with most of the unseemly corruption-related revelations in the trial, the task of revealing why these surveillance videos were never put to good use would fall on the defense team and take place during cross-examination.
    â€œGood morning, Lieutenant,” said Jay Carney, in an overly solicitous tone of voice that, in a court of law, often meant something ruthless was about to take place.
    â€œGood morning, Mr. Carney,” said the witness.
    With both hands on the podium, Carney launched into a series of questions the answers of which he knew before he asked them, questions about basic law enforcement procedure when launching an operation like the Lancaster Street garage investigation.
    The Q&A continued in this vein, Carney speaking slowly and methodically, Long answering as if he were on automatic pilot. They both knew where this was headed. The defense lawyer was leading Long to the moment where his investigative team had enough probable cause to apply for legal authorization to plant a bug. Long got approval from his supervisor, Colonel Jack O’Donovan, a legendary figure in the state police. The next step, before applying to a federal judge, was to obtain the approval of the state’s top