Bigger town, bigger crimes

Dan Barry has an article in The New York Times about Whitey Bulger:

Heads turned as the lanky man made his way to the courtroom pews reserved for those who suffer because of the criminal Whitey Bulger. The face of an altar boy masked his rage, and a shirt of powder-blue covered his tattoos, including one evoking the Celtic cross that adorns his father’s gravestone.
“Tommy’s here,” one of the many reporters whispered, and others nodded, for it was like saying that all of Boston had just walked into Federal District Court to bear witness.
Tommy Donahue (photo, at center), a union electrician, 37 years old, with one good eye and the nickname of Bagga— as in 'bag of bones'— attends nearly every Bulger-related hearing as the representative of the nineteen people Bulger is accused of killing, especially Michael Donahue, his father. He then tells the news media assembled outside exactly what he thinks, his every word accented with Dorchester distrust. “To be honest with you...” Donahue often begins, as if to suggest that in this uncomfortable summer of Bulger, honesty needs to be stipulated.
Bulger’s sixteen-year flight from reckoning ended last month, when he and his female companion were captured in a Southern California apartment where the interior design included walls stuffed with guns and cash. Among the many killings that dog him, he is charged with committing ten while he was a paid informer who used the Federal Bureau of Investigation as his personal public relations firm and tip service.
But Bulger, now 81, returned in shackles to a different Boston. When he vanished in 1995, after being tipped off by his FBI handler, he was South Boston’s charming rogue. Sure, he heads a gang of thugs, the FBI con job went, but he’s nothing like the real bad guys, those Italian mobsters up in the North End. Proud of his Irish heritage, he keeps away the junkies, hands out turkeys, helps the elderly: St. Whitey of Southie.
But, during his protracted absence, various newspaper investigations and trials— including the racketeering conviction of his main FBI contact, John Connolly Jr.— ripped away this false image to reveal a vicious sociopath whose complicity in snuffed-out lives was shared by a government agency sworn to protect life.
Now that Bulger’s return has exhumed a damning past never properly buried in the first place, a half-blind electrician from Dorchester is once again speaking out. And everyone in Boston knows that, in this matter, Tommy Donahue has standing.
In the late afternoon of 11 May 1982, a union truck driver, the son of a Boston police officer, found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s how a wise guy later summed it up, in the oops philosophy of the underworld: wrong place, wrong time. His name was Michael Donahue, and he had stopped off at a Northern Avenue bar hard against Boston Harbor. As he was leaving, he agreed to give a ride to a neighborhood acquaintance, Brian Halloran, a low-level criminal who was informing on Bulger, which so offended Connolly of the FBI that he told Bulger, who was likewise offended. There is only so much betrayal an informer can stand. A hulking mug with small eyes named Kevin Weeks later admitted to acting as Bulger’s lookout that afternoon. He said that, as Michael Donahue began to drive off with Halloran in his Datsun, Bulger, in a floppy hat and a long-haired wig, sprayed them with bullets.
Halloran lingered long enough to implicate, wrongly, a long-haired player from Weymouth named Jimmy Flynn. But Michael Donahue, 32, a civilian in the world who had merely agreed to give someone a ride, died instantly, and so did the childhoods of his three sons: Michael, then thirteen; Shawn, then eleven; and Tommy, then eight.
Just moments earlier, they had been part of a tight Dorchester family, made tighter by Tommy’s first Holy Communion on Saturday and a Mother’s Day brunch on Sunday; by fishing trips and Dairy Queen; by a plan to open a bakery and the story of how their mother, Patricia, had fallen in love with their father. She saw him dancing one night, and thought he had soul.
For more than a decade, the Donahue family believed that Jimmy Flynn from Weymouth had murdered their father. Even after his acquittal in 1986, they figured not guilty did not necessarily mean innocent. The name of James Bulger, also known as Whitey, was never in the equation, thanks to certain FBI agents determined to protect that name at the expense of justice.
Then truth made a break for it. Here came a voluminous report by a federal judge that laid out the heinous pact between gangster and government; the chilling testimony of a former FBI supervisor granted immunity after shaming his office; the horrid recollections of various thugs. One detail: Bulger was in the habit of yanking teeth from bodies to thwart identification.
After suffering a devastating loss, and then being misled for almost two decades, with no apology ever from the FBI, the Donahues sued the government in 2001, saying it had helped to cause the death of Michael Donahue. Six years later, Judge Reginald C. Lindsay of United States District Court found the evidence so overwhelming that he went directly to hearing testimony on damages.
Judge Lindsay died, but his successor, Judge William G. Young, shared his colleague’s outrage. What he said was, well, Tommy Donahue can practically recite parts of the ruling, and Patricia Donahue has the court papers stored in the triple-decker house the family shares in Dorchester: Michael and his wife on the first floor, Shawn and his mother on the second, and Tommy and his girlfriend on the third.
“This was a happy, vibrant family,” Judge Young wrote, and it is nearly inconceivable “that our government, through negligence, inattention, self-interested hubris, and outright corruption” could cause these two horrific murders. In May of 2009, he ordered the resistant government to pay $6.4 million to the Donahues.
It has yet to happen. Earlier this year, a divided three-member federal appeals court overturned the decision, saying the Donahues had filed their claim too late. In other words, amid the government dissembling and personal heartache, this working-class family should have filed its claim by April of 2000, within two years of a specific snatch of damaging testimony in the midst of a long proceeding and not when it did, in March of 2001, after the hearing’s conclusion.
Once again, wrong place, wrong time. Oops.
But the Donahues have petitioned for a new hearing, taking heart in the heated dissent of Judge Juan R. Torruella, who called the reversal “an unjust outcome which rewards official uncontrolled wickedness”.
At another court proceeding the other day, this one a bail hearing for Bulger’s female companion, Tommy Donahue and his mother sat among the suffering and listened. When invited to speak, Donahue apologized for his poor vision before squinting to read a poem he had written when he was nine: Speak, father, speak to your little boy. Or I shall be lost forever. His Dorchester voice broke.
After the hearing, he walked out of the courthouse and up to a bank of microphones. In the hazy summer distance, a couple of hundred yards down Northern Avenue, could be seen the waterfront spot where, 29 years ago, a gangster and a government killed his father. But no matter where he stands, it is always close by. “Tommy,” the reporters called. “Hey, Tommy.”

Rico says that 'official uncontrolled wickedness' is the worst kind. But, while the six million bucks is hardly enough to assuage the family's grief, it should all come out of the pensions (or any other monies) going to the FBI fucks who dealt with Bulger...