Impact Statement: A Family's Fight for Justice against Whitey Bulger, Stephen Flemmi, and the FBI

by Bob Halloran

Overview

No one can deny that mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi are two of the most brutal killers in American history—not even the two gangsters themselves. But a jury denied the Davis family closure for the slaying of Debbie Davis, Flemmi's beautiful young girlfriend, who went missing in 1981 and whose remains were found nearly twenty years later under the Neponset River Bridge in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Now serving a life sentence, Stephen Flemmi testified in graphic detail how he lured Debbie to a house in South Boston where Bulger jumped out of the shadows and strangled her to death. Flemmi then extracted her teeth and buried her body by the Neponset River while Bulger watched. Bulger wanted Debbie dead, Flemmi claimed, because she knew that the two men were meeting with an FBI agent named John Connolly. That, and he might have been jealous of the time Flemmi and Debbie were spending together. Throughout his trial, Bulger stubbornly insisted that he never would have committed the dishonorable act of killing a woman. In the end, it was one stone-cold murderer's testimony against another's.

In Impact Statement, veteran journalist Bob Halloran looks at the devastating impact Bulger and Flemmi have had on the Davis family, whose longstanding relationship with the two mobsters cost them a father, two sisters, and a brother. Through up-to-the-minute coverage of Bulger's criminal trial and extensive interviews with Debbie's brother Steve Davis, a one-time protégé of Flemmi's and now an outspoken advocate for the victims' families, Halloran has pieced together this unique and compelling story of a family's quest for justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781510718593
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	07/18/2017
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bob Halloran is a television news and sports anchor for Boston's ABC affiliate. He is the author of White Devil: The True Story of the First White Asian Crime Boss, Irish Thunder: The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward, Destiny Derailed: The Story of the 2003 Boston Red Sox, and Breakdown. He resides in Milton, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction v

Preface to the Paperback Edition ix

1 Meeting at Triple O's 1

2 Beauty and the Beast 23

3 The Summer of 1981 45

4 Without a Trace 67

5 Missed Opportunity 85

6 On the Banks of the Neponset River 99

7 Davis v. Government 121

8 "They Got Whitey" 135

9 The Trial Starts 157

10 A Confederacy of Liars 171

11 Steve Davis Takes the Stand 187

12 The Prosecution's Star Witness 195

13 The Right to Remain Silent 215

14 No Finding, No Closure 229

Acknowledgments 239

Editorial Reviews

Whitey Bulger was one of the most notorious murderers in U.S. history, whose legend was enabled by corrupt FBI officials. In Impact Statement, Bob Halloran provides an intimate view of the personal toll of Bulger’s crimes, as he lets us not only see, but also feel, the impact on the family of one of his victims, Debbie Davis. Heartbreaking!” — Mike Farris, attorney and author of A Death in the Islands: The Unwritten Law and the Last Trial of Clarence Darrow”

“Whitey Bulger was one of the most notorious murderers in U.S. history, whose legend was enabled by corrupt FBI officials. In Impact Statement, Bob Halloran provides an intimate view of the personal toll of Bulger’s crimes, as he lets us not only see, but also feel, the impact on the family of one of his victims, Debbie Davis. Heartbreaking!” — Mike Farris, attorney and author of A Death in the Islands: The Unwritten Law and the Last Trial of Clarence Darrow”

From the Publisher

2013-10-01
Hard-boiled investigative look at murderous South Boston drug kingpin Whitey Bulger. TV journalist and author Halloran (Irish Thunder: The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward, 2007, etc.) gives a no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts portrait of South Boston's most notorious drug czar and mass murderer. Although there have been accounts of Bulger and his long and lethal reign over the Boston drug world, Halloran's book is more specifically about the relationship between Bulger and Southie cocaine-peddling rival Steve Davis. Davis' first inauspicious meeting with Bulger occurred when Davis' brother accidentally began dealing coke on Bulger's turf, a mistake that would make Davis a marked man and eventually lead to the violent death of Davis' sister, Debbie Davis. At the time, Bulger was an informant for the FBI, while also making tons of money from simply targeting other less-prominent area gangsters and threatening to have them snuffed out if they didn't pay him protection money. Throughout much of the book, Halloran keeps up a blistering pace in constructing this narrative of South Boston's gangland, where Bulger and his crew ran brutal shakedowns almost at will throughout the 1970s and '80s. In the first third of the book, the author describes the lead-up to the brutal strangulation of Debbie Davis by Bulger and then the eventual, inevitable difficulties Steve Davis had for years in trying to investigate the murder due to Bulger's FBI protection. It isn't until the 2000s that enough red tape was cut to finally get to the point where Davis saw Bulger and his partner indicted for the murder of his sister. A tough-as-nails portrait of the close-knit connection among organized crime, the FBI and the deaths of innocent people.

Kirkus Reviews