Steve Flemmi murdered his girlfriend Debbie Davis. He tried to say he did it because Whitey Bulger wanted him to do it. Let’s imagine how a prosecutor on the level, let us call her Alethia, would have spoken with Flemmi.
Alethia: Now Mr. Flemmi let’s get to the death of Debbie Davis.
Flemmi: Yeah
Alethia: I have heard that she was a very attractive young woman.
Flemmi: No question about that.
Alethia: You first got involved with her when she was 17 years old, is that right.
Flemmi: That’s right.
Alethia: I assume you were involved with her from that time up until her death.
Flemmi: That’s right.
Alethia: That would have been a period of six or seven years.
Flemmi: That’s right.
Alethia: You were also at the time involved with other women such a Marion Hussey.
Flemmi: That’s right.
Alethia: With respect to Debbie, would you say that you loved her?
Flemmi: I’d put it this way I loved her but I wasn’t in love with her.
Alethia: I have no idea what that means but let’s go on. You bought her gifts.
Flemmi: Lots of them and expensive gifts.
Alethia: You set her up in an apartment, gave her money for clothes, bought her cars over the time.
Flemmi: That’s right, lots of gifts including nice jewelry and new cars but what I did not like was that she would sort of show off the gifts and call attention to herself.
Alethia: Would you say you had a good relationship with her?
Flemmi: Yes, it was very good.
Alethia: After providing for her and giving her those gifts did you feel she owed you something?
Flemmi: She owed me what she was which was my girlfriend.
Alethia: Up until the time she died was she always your girlfriend from the time you met.
Flemmi: That’s what I believed as I said I took good care of her.
Alethia: At some time did she tell you she wanted to end the relationship.
Flemmi: She mentioned something like that but I never took her seriously.
Alethia: Was it around the time that she died that she said she wanted to end the relationship?
Flemmi: That had nothing to do with it.
Alethia: So it was just a coincidence that when she told you she was planning to leave you for a man she had met in Mexico she happened to be strangled.
Flemmi: Those are your words not mine.
Alethia: You know John Martorano, I assume.
Flemmi: Yeah I know Johnny.
Alethia: He made a statement that he asked you about Debby and you said you accidentally strangled her.
Flemmi: I never said that.
Alethia: Do you know any reason John Martorano would make up a lie like that?
Flemmi: He’s not my favorite guy so he would lie about me. It is a long story.
Alethia: Do you know other lies he has told?
Flemmi: You have to ask him.
Alethia: You were there when Debbie was strangled weren’t you.
Flemmi: It was the worst day of my life. Whitey Bulger did it.
Alethia: It was you though who brought her to the house where you say she was strangled.
Flemmi: Whitey made me do it.
Alethia: Was Whitey upset she was leaving you for another man.
Flemmi: He was upset that she knew that we were going to meet [FBI Agent John] Connolly.
Alethia: Wasn’t that relationship widely known in the FBI and believed to exist by the state police? What was it about that which she knew that so upset Whitey Bulger?
Flemmi: He thought Debbie would tell her brother Mickey who was doing time in Walpole for drugs about it and he would use it to make a deal.
Alethia: Weren’t you with Whitey when he told the FBI he did not care who said he was an informant because no one would believe it. Why would Whitey worry about what a guy doing time on a drug rap would say about his relationship with the FBI to the point he would want to kill your girlfriend?
Flemmi: He just did not want it to get out.
Alethia: So suddenly Whitey is fearful a locked up con might go to someone and say you and Whitey are FBI informants, is that what you are saying.
Flemmi: Something like that, look, I told you he told me to murder her.
Alethia: If he told you not to turn state’s evidence would you have followed that advice?
Flemmi: Next question
Alethia: So it is your testimony that just because Whitey told you someone you loved might do something he did not like you agreed it was all right to murder her even though you had no motive at all to do it.
Flemmi: That’s right
Alethia: Do you know Kevin Weeks.
Flemmi: Yes, very well.
Alethia: He suggested Whitey was wary of you. He said Whitey, I’ll quote, “never would’ve berated Stevie, either. Stevie was a psychopath. Stevie would’ve killed him.” This suggests if you did not want to murder Debbie you never would have done it.
Flemmi: That’s not how it was.
Alethia: Let me suggest to you that your story that Whitey was involved would not be believed by a judge in the future. He would say you blaming Whitey,”are the vapid maunderings of a supremely evil old man. Flemmi had Davis murdered for that most common and banal reason underlying male domestic violence against women. Flemmi thought he “controlled” Davis.”
Flemmi: What does he know!
Alethia: You’ve murdered other people before isn’t that true.
Flemmi: Yeah, I admitted that.
Alethia: Paul Poulos you murdered by yourself out in Las Vegas; one of the McLaughlin brothers you gunned down in public at a bus stop by yourself; and there were others.
Flemmi: I’ve admitted that. I told you.
Alethia: You were fully capable of murdering Debbie Davis by yourself.
Flemmi: I told you what happened.
Alethia: I know what you said but from all I see of you I don’t see you need any help in murdering a person.
Flemmi: If I had to do it alone I could.
Alethia: So if I believe you had the motive to murder Debbie because the day she was murdered was the day before she planned to fly off to Mexico to meet a guy she had fallen in love with and on that day told you she was ending your long-term relationship as the evidence shows you would disagree with that.
Flemmi: I told you she was murdered because Whitey wanted it.
Alethia: And, if I suggest to you the motive you ascribe to Whitey makes no sense in light of everything else we know about him and that he had no motive at all to want Debbie murdered you would disagree.
Flemmi: I would not have done it unless he told me.
Alethia: It seems to me Mr. Flemmi you murdered her because she was leaving you. You did it immediately after learning that news. You needed and had no help. You admitted to Martorano you did it. But you believe by implicating Whitey in it you will get a better deal. I don’t buy it. Take him away.
Flemmi: I’ll find someone who’ll believe it.
And if you can believe it he did.
It would have been useful if someone had done this questioning of Flemmi when Davis went missing. Like someone in the DA’s office in the jurisdiction in which she resided when she disappeared. Why didn’t you, Matt?
Bob:
There a simple answer which is that we did not know about it. You may recall Olga went to the FBI to seek its help. Other problems are that Debbie and Flemmi were probably residing in Suffolk County at the time which was not in our jurisdiction and even if they were then it would have been something the local police handled. The DAs do not get into missing person investigations.
I’ll have to check to see if I remember correctly, but I seem to recall that Davis’s mother went to the Randolph Police. If that’s so, wouldn’t you have heard about it from them?
I also have to disagree with your characterization of this as a “missing person case”. This was a case that potentially involved a major figure in organized crime. I would be surprised that a District Attorney’s office would not have standing instructions to local police to report something that might involve someone like Flemmi (or other organized crime figures).
I don’t doubt that people in your office were sincerely trying to build cases against Bulger, Flemmi, et al. Some kind of co-ordination between the DA’s office and local police would seem to be in order.
Regardless of whether Davis’s mother went to the local police, or the FBI, or both, did your office have a system in place for reporting on organized crime figures?
Bob:
Even had the Randolph police been told of Debbie’s disappearance they would not have notified us. I told you we never heard of Debbie being missing nor would we have heard of anyone missing. It was kept at the police level.
You may disgree all you wish but you are talking from hindsight. Much of what is known about Flemmi and Whitey came to light long after Debbie disappeared. There were no standing instructions to local police outside of reporting homicide cases to our office. As I told you earlier Flemmi was not operating in our county; he was a Boston guy and far outside of our jurisdiction.
We were not “sincerely tring to build cases against Bulger, Flemmi, etc. but went where the evidence took us. Our resources were quite limited with a state police unit of less than ten men assigned to us and their primary job was dealing with homicides. Most of our work was reactive – a crime was committed which was solved by the police departments and we would prosecute it. The only reaching out we did with respect to organize crime was when we did electronic surveillance with the state police, the Quincy police or a police task force. I was in charge of all those cases. They were mostly drug cases or illegal gaming cases. We followed the evidence to where it led. During all that time we only intercepted Whitey and Stevie talking on the phone once when Whitey called the Davis house and told Stevie he was back in town. That was the extent of the call. Neither man spoke much on the phone.
We had some informants in the drug area but almost none in the organized crime field. Nor did we have undercover operatives working for us. We knew Whitey was a top organized crime figure who lived in Quincy. He had been targeted by the Quincy police special service unit but more particularly by Detective Bergeron who worked with our office on some cases but with the DEA when they had Whitey in their sights.
We did our wiretaps or planted bugs hoping that the information gained would take us to a higher level. Sometimes it did, often it did not. As for the major organized crime figures we expected that the FBI would be handling those or one of the state police special units. We were prosecutors and not police investigators. The only DA’s office that I recall that had anything like a real organized crime investigative unit was in Suffolk County and it was called the SKIP unit.
Evidence from our gaming wiretaps brought us the closest to Whitey and Stevie. I would learn that much later I did not know at the time that Whitey and Stevie had taken over all the gaming operations and when we conducted raids we were hurting their organization. For instance, I assumed Jimmy Katz, a witness at Whiteys trial, was operating under Eddie Lewis direction. The first time we grabbed him that was the case. I never knew that when we grabbed him a second time he was part of Whitey’s group. Nor did I know that a lot of our bookie raids were hurting Whitey. I did not have the intelligence unit that would give me that type of information.
Sometimes in retrospect I think I should have had something like you suggested. I had made plans to establish something similar to that with Trooper Naimovich prior to him being indicted in 1988. That’s a long story.
One of the problems I faced although I was unaware of it at the tie was that State Trooper Dick Schneiderhan who I trusted to do computer run of the telephone numbers we intercepted was on Flemmi’s payroll… I had no idea he was leaking information to Flemmi. I also had no idea Flemmi and Whitey were being protected by the FBI.
Even assuming we learned of Debbie’s disappearance and conducted an investigation of it what do you think we would have accomplished given the protection around Flemmi.
It is my understanding that during the time Steve Flemi dated the young woman in question her father drowned in Boston Harbor in 1975 and her brother was knifed to death in Walpole State Prison in 1981. A lot of death around Steve Flemi during his many decades of crime.
Norwood:
Yes, Debby’s dad objected to his daughter being involved with Flemmi; he ended up drowning. Her brother was in Walpole on a drug dea and was murdered. The person who was believe to have done it was indicted but acquitted after trial. The prosecutor told Debbie’s mother Olga that he was sorry with the result. She sad don’t worry about it; we’ll take care of it later. That man was murdered shortly after he got out of prison. Steve had a fondness for murder.