This much is true: Good guys 'don't go around murdering people'

MIAMI - Tommy Hussey was wearing a maroon track suit and sitting in the back row of the courtroom when Johnny Connolly came walking in.

"He's aged," Tommy Hussey said.

He knew Connolly, who became an FBI agent, from the town, from Southie, just as he knew Jimmy Bulger, who became Whitey Bulger, the gangster.

At 73, Tommy Hussey was between them, five years older than Connolly, seven years younger than Bulger.

But they were Southie guys, and everybody in Southie knows everybody in Southie.

"I grew up on Boston Street, near St. Mary's," Tommy Hussey was saying, "and the first time I seen Whitey he was driving a big car, and he drove up to a bunch of us kids on the corner and says, 'Hop in.' He was just a tough kid then, a teenager."

Years passed, Tommy Hussey grew up, Whitey did a stretch for bank robbery, and the next thing you know it's 1969 and Tommy's at the corner of Broadway and E Street, unlocking his car, and Whitey puts a knife to his throat and takes his keys and drives off in Tommy's Buick.

"The cops found it the next day," he said. "Nothing damaged. Nothing taken. Who knows why he took it? So I go down to Station 6 to pick it up, and a cop comes out from behind the desk and says to me, 'You're lucky you're not dead.' "

Tommy's daughter Debbie wasn't so lucky. After his marriage ended, Tommy moved to Florida and got into the plumber's union.

His wife, Marion, hooked up with Stevie Flemmi, Whitey Bulger's sidekick, and Stevie raised Debbie like she was one of his own. Until she was 13, and then Stevie started having sex with her.

"It was over right then," Tommy Hussey was saying. "She was just a kid. It screwed her up. She started taking drugs. They killed her right there. When she was 13. It was over right then."

They didn't really kill her until 13 years later, when Debbie Hussey was 26 and strung out and talking too much. Bulger told Flemmi she had to go, so Flemmi lured her to a house in Southie with the promise of a new coat. She was sitting there when Whitey went over and strangled her. And when Whitey was done, Stevie put his ear to her chest and said she was still alive, so then Stevie put a rope around his stepdaughter's neck and made sure she was dead.

"That's something you never get over," Tommy Hussey was saying, as the government outlined its case against John Connolly, accused of selling his badge and his honor for something he considered more honorable, protecting Whitey Bulger, the gangster, because he worshiped his brother, Billy Bulger, the politician.

Tommy Hussey lives in Deerfield Beach, 45 miles north of Miami, but he hopped on a train and came down to watch the start of Connolly's trial.

"I got no time for the FBI," he said. "If they took Whitey and Stevie off the streets when they should have, maybe my Debbie would still be alive. Maybe a lot of other people would be alive."

He looked around the courtroom. "I haven't had a drink for seven years, but I go to this place, this sports bar, to watch the games, and I was in there and there's this guy, a retired Boston cop, and something comes on the TV about this trial, and this cop says something like, 'I know Whitey Bulger and he's a good guy.'

"So I go over to this guy, and he's bigger than me, but I grabbed him by the collar and I pull him off his chair and I said, 'How do you say something like that?' "

A court officer put a finger to his lips, so Tommy Hussey lowered his head and spoke in a hush.

"If somebody's a good guy," Tommy Hussey whispered, "they don't go around murdering people."

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.