Kevin Cullen: For one family, something approaching justice
June 23, 2011 6:21 PM
By Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff
Kevin Cullen on vindication for a victim's family
(Boston Globe) Kevin Cullen talks about how a family whose father was allegedly killed by Whitey Bulger feels some vindication after the gangster's arrest. (By Alan Miller, Globe Staff)
Tommy Donahue was sound asleep in the three-decker on Hecla Street in Dorchester when the phone rang.
It was his girlfriend Michelle’s 14-year-old son, Joey. Joey is family, so he called Tommy Donahue what everybody in the family calls him and that’s Bagga.
“Bagga,” he said, “They caught Whitey Bulger.”
It was 1 o’clock in the morning, and Tommy was still rubbing his eyes, so his first reaction was to think, “Hey, kid, you got school in the morning. What are you doing up at this hour?”
Suddenly, it hit Tommy Donahue, like a slap in the face, that the man who allegedly murdered his father Michael 30 years ago was finally captured.
Tommy Donahue said it aloud, and in the middle-of-the-night silence his words were loud even though he whispered them: “They finally caught the bastard.”
He shook Michelle awake. Then he walked down to the second floor and woke his mom, Patricia.
Pat Donahue gave her youngest son a stern, “This better be good,” look, and boy oh boy, was it ever good: it was the news Pat Donahue, who struggled to raise three boys alone after Whitey Bulger murdered her husband, was waiting for.
“California?” Pat Donahue said. “He was in California?”
Tommy’s brother Shawn lives with Pat.
“Finally,” Shawn said. “Finally.”
Tommy Donahue’s last stop was the first floor, where he told his brother Michael Jr., like him, an electrician.
Then Tommy Donahue walked back upstairs to his place and picked up the phone and the first person he called was David Wheeler.
“I didn’t know what time it was in Oklahoma,” he said. “I didn’t think David would be upset if I woke him up. He was very happy when I told him.”
Not that long ago, after a divided federal appeals court told the Donahue family that they were entitled to nothing, even though their father and husband was murdered by a man bought and paid for by the FBI, David Wheeler called Tommy Donahue out of the blue. David Wheeler told him his family felt bad for the Donahues, and just wanted them to know that the Wheelers were with them.
“You’d look at us and say, ‘Wow, the Wheelers and the Donahues couldn’t be more different,’ “ Tommy Donahue was saying. “One family’s from Oklahoma, the other’s from Boston. One family has a lot of money, the other family doesn’t. But you know what? We’re very similar. Our fathers were murdered because the FBI protected Whitey Bulger. David Wheeler is like me and my brothers. He grew up without a dad because the FBI protected a murdering scumbag like Whitey Bulger. Our families were ripped apart, and our families have suffered for 30 years, and still suffer, because of corrupt FBI agents.”
So they talked, the two boys who grew into men without their fathers.
Roger Wheeler was murdered because he caught wind that Whitey Bulger and his minions were skimming money from the jai alai operation Wheeler owned in Florida. Michael Donahue was murdered because he offered a ride home to a guy from the neighborhood who had offered Bulger to the FBI not knowing Bulger was an FBI informant.
Ostensibly, a corrupt FBI agent, John Connolly, got both Roger Wheeler, millionaire mogul, and Michael Donahue, Teamster truck driver, killed. But that is a simple narrative - one rogue FBI agent from South Boston helping the Southie mob boss stay out of prison as a favor to his idol, Whitey Bulger’s politician brother Billy Bulger - that simply will not withstand scrutiny now. It was always nonsense and now it’s about to be exposed as utter nonsense by none other than Whitey Bulger.
“The only thing Whitey has going for him is he can take down all the other FBI agents who protected him,” Tommy Donahue was saying.
The myth that Whitey Bulger only killed other gangsters died in 1981, in the parking lot of a Tulsa golf club with Roger Wheeler, and on the South Boston waterfront with Michael Donahue. Bulger dispatched his trusted hitman, Johnny Martorano, to take out Roger Wheeler in Oklahoma. But Whitey was always a hands-on kind of guy and when Connolly let his gang know that a hoodlum named Brian Halloran was offering him up, Whitey took part in the ambush himself.
Tommy Donahue was 8 years old and his father had promised to take him fishing. Michael Donahue went down to the waterfront to get some bait, then he stopped into a Northern Avenue bar for a quick pop before heading home. Halloran approached him, asking for a ride back to Dorchester. Michael Donahue had no way of knowing that Halloran had offered Bulger up on a plate. Halloran had no way of knowing that Bulger, the FBI’s prized, if highly overrated, snitch was waiting outside with a machine gun. So Donahue got into his car to give Halloran a lift and Bulger and an accomplice riddled them both with bullets.
Ten years ago, when the Donahue family finally had a reasonable idea of why the FBI cynically and criminally decided the murder of an innocent truck driver named Michael Donahue was the cost of doing business with a sociopath named Whitey Bulger, they sued their own government.
It took almost a decade, the fortitude of a family, and the moral and legal courage of two judges, one named Reggie Linsday, the other named Bill Young, to hold the FBI and their apologists in the US Justice Department accountable.
The Donahues were awarded $6 million in damages and words that were priceless.
“Michael Donahue was a good man,” Bill Young said from the bench, while Justice Department lawyers who had done the bidding of FBI agents who smeared Michael Donahue and his widow cast their eyes everywhere but at the truth.
But the Justice Department, which has behaved reprehensibly throughout this, kept appealing and appealing, rejecting Lindsay’s advice to settle with an innocent family, ignoring Young’s admonitions that they had besmirched the reputation of an innocent man their agents had gotten killed.
The government lawyers who have spent millions to litigate rather than settle are soulless but not stupid. If you appeal things enough, you get lucky, and last February they got lucky. Two of three judges on a First Circuit Court of Appeals panel decided that the Donahue family didn’t read the newspapers closely enough in 1998.
Because if they had surely they would have been able to figure out that the FBI had put a target on Brian Halloran’s back. The Donahues, two judges found, should have filed their suit a year earlier and so they were barred under a two-year statute of limitations. The Wheelers were similarly barred from getting anything.
This is all ridiculous, of course, because Michael Donahue and Roger Wheeler were the collateral damage of a corrupt government and the Donahues and Wheelers are innocent families ruined by that corruption.
And if there’s anything good to come out of Whitey Bulger finally being brought to justice is that innocent families like the Donahues and the Wheelers get something approaching justice.
“Maybe this will help our appeal of the Appeals Court ruling,” Tommy Donahue said. “At the very least, I’ll get to see the guy who murdered my father. I can look him in the eye, in court, down on the waterfront, not that far from where he shot my father.
“I’d like to see him fry. I know that won’t happen in Massachusetts. So maybe it’s better if he goes to Oklahoma. They don’t have any qualms about the death penalty. Or Florida. They’d have no problem. I certainly wouldn’t have any problem with it.
“The guy didn’t just murder my father. He murdered families. God bless the FBI guys who caught Whitey. But there’s a lot of other FBI guys who have to be held accountable.”
Five hours after Tommy Donahue found out the man who murdered his father was in custody, he was in his work clothes, on the porch of the three-decker on Hecla Street, waiting for a ride to a job in Abington.
“I’m a working guy,” he said. “I got no money.”
If there is any justice, when all this is over, he will get a big fat check from the Justice Department, which can take as many bows as it wants after the FBI finally caught the murderer they enabled. Those bows mean nothing until there’s justice for the Donahues and the Wheelers.
Globe columnist Kevin Cullen can be reached at .