Free Where the Bodies Were Buried by T. J. English Page B

but, occasionally, Carney or Brennan would stand before the microphones and offer innocuousstatements, though mostly what they said was “I am prohibited from answering your question.” It was a pointless exchange designed, perhaps, to expose the absurdity of the law, which the defense team had unsuccessfully sought to have rescinded by the judge.
    Jay Carney stood before the media and basked in what he perceived to be the glow of a scintillating opening statement. Which was only partly true. For anyone who had followed the Bulger saga and hoped that the trial would tell the full story, Carney’s opening statement had its moments. His detailing of the historical context for the charges against Bulger was potentially groundbreaking. His inclusion of Barboza and how the lessons of his deal with the government had not been lost on an entire generation of gangsters in Boston was the overarching narrative that many of us had been hoping would be brought to bear.
    But outside the courthouse, in the scrum of commentary and speculation among observers that would become a post-trial ritual, what everyone wanted to talk about was Carney’s “bombshell” that Bulger had never been an informant for the FBI. The veracity of this claim would be hotly debated in the weeks and months ahead, but what it had accomplished in the short term was to undermine Carney’s opening presentation. The issue of whether or not Bulger had been an informant had little to do with the charges in the case, and it offered even less insight into the continuity of criminal negligence in the government’s dealings with Barboza and Bulger.
    In front of the media, Carney was smiling, but he shouldn’t have been. A schizophrenic fissure in his case had been revealed, one that would grow more pronounced as the trial unfolded.
    Carney had claimed that he and his co-counsel were going to reveal the dirty little secrets behind how the government prepared their prosecutorial banquet, but instead, the defense lawyer misread the recipe and undercooked the main course, leaving the jury, paradoxically, both gaseous and malnourished.

2
CURSE OF THE COWRITER
    ON THE EVENING of the trial’s first day, I headed over to Southie to meet with Pat Nee and Kevin Weeks. I had arranged to meet them at Mirisola’s, an Italian restaurant at the corner of L and East Eighth streets. I knew the place well. A year and a half earlier, I had met and interviewed Whitey Bulger’s common-law wife, Teresa Stanley, at Mirisola’s. The place is small and intimate, more like a diner than an actual restaurant. Teresa and I sat off in a corner, and she poured her heart out about Jimmy—never “Whitey”—and the relationship they had together for thirty years. Within months of that interview Teresa was informed that she had brain cancer; a few months after that, she was gone.
    Every time I walked into Mirisola’s I thought of Teresa, almost as if I could feel her presence. Few people had known Bulger as well or as closely as Teresa, though she remained blissfully ignorant of the full extent of his criminal activities when they were together. What she remembered most vividly was the night she found out about Catherine Greig. A mysterious woman had called Teresa and told her that they needed to meet. She went to an agreed-upon location and met the woman who introduced herself as “Jimmy’s lover.” Teresa had suspected that Bulger had other women on the side, temporary flings and one-night stands. She asked Catherine how long she and Jimmy had been together. When Greig told her “twenty years,” she almost had a heart attack.
    When Teresa recounted this episode to me at Mirisola’s, many years after it had taken place, you could still see the hurt in her eyes.
    She was seventy years old when I met her, still attractive, with a sweet and humble disposition. I could see she was not the kind of person who would have