Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (11 page)

But his looks belied his cunning. And he plunged into his job as much as anything as a way to counterbalance his troubled personal life. The arrows were moving in opposite directions and the more the separation grew, the more Morris threw himself all-out into a career being propelled by none other than Whitey Bulger. He and Connolly were free to do whatever they wanted so long as they produced. Similarly, Bulger and Flemmi were free to do pretty much whatever they wanted, so long as they produced as well. “Quid pro quo,” as one agent put it.

It was a clear recipe for an impending disaster.

Indeed, Morris and Connolly would and did do anything necessary to protect their Top Echelon informants, whom they saw as fast-track tickets to fame and glory. They aspired to be viewed as crime-fighting heroes of the FBI, even though the means to those ends made them anything but. Bulger and Flemmi had to be kept out of jail and out of harm’s way. Priority one. Simple as that.

None of this was happening under the radar either. The Massachusetts State Police and Boston Police Department were hearing things from their own informants—rumors of feds who were enabling felons—and complaints were flowing into the Boston FBI office as a harbinger of the firestorm ignited by MSP head Colonel O’Donovan after the Lancaster Garage incident.

The FBI attempted to walk a fine line by ensuring that these clandestine Top Echelon relationships resulted in more good than harm. Summing up that ultimately impossible challenge, John Connolly would later tell me in reference to Bulger and Flemmi, “Sure, they’re bad guys, but they’re
our
bad guys.”

PART TWO

BLOWBACK

“You got me.”

12

MOUNT LORETTO, 1958

When I left the Mount in 1958 it was to enter still another institution—the U.S. Army. Without telling anyone, I enlisted as a young private and did my infantry training at Fort Dix in New Jersey. I had no money and needed a job, and for most of us kids in the Mount, the military was the way to go. I felt at home with a cot, three squares, and some pocket money to boot. My training took me to a succession of military instruction schools in Texas and New Mexico, the most exciting being a nuclear warhead school in Los Alamos—until, that is, I learned that we might have been guinea pigs for nuclear testing the whole time! Looking back, that became a strangely appropriate metaphor for what I’d later face in Boston, since the office was truly toxic.

Once my training was complete, I was shipped to Germany, just outside Mainz and Wiesbaden. The culture shock I experienced was disorienting at first. Here I was, a kid fresh from the Mount, finding myself in postwar Germany, where the ruins and spoils of war were still evident. Yet it was also mysterious and exciting, and I was being paid to do this. I was fortunate enough to take over the company supply unit, and within a year I had my sergeant stripes and more opportunity. Being overseas was a great adventure for me, and later, I’d reflect that I grew up in this new culture, which expanded my horizons beyond my wildest dreams.

It was wonderful. I went to schools at Wiesbaden and Mainz and Heidelberg, grabbing college credits for future enrollment. The barracks I stayed in was an old SS casern with a fair amount of history. As a basic infantry soldier with a “supply military occupational specialty,” I traveled throughout Europe increasing and enhancing my desire to know more. My boss, a Ranger captain, signed me up for OCS (Officer Candidates School) and even got me a nod to West Point, after which my Seventh Army commanding general put me in for a slot. I was achieving beyond my wildest expectations.

At the same time, Father Kenny, who’d long taken an interest in me at Mount Loretto, suggested a scholarship to St. Peter’s College in New Jersey in lieu of West Point. Father Kenny saw the priesthood in my future, believing my compassion made me ideal for the job. There had not been many successs stories like that from the Mount, and to the good Father I looked like a legitimate candidate.

“You know
people,
Fitz,” he told me once.

“What do you mean, Father?”

He just smiled in response, but I gathered that he recognized that I was an effective listener and that I had a way of understanding and interpreting information beyond the words people used when talking to me. Perhaps Father Kenny was sensing in me the traits that would later make me one of the FBI’s new profilers. I had used those skills in my one and only meeting with Whitey Bulger, learning from his body language more than he had thought he’d told me. I had a visceral sense that matched his. Bulger’s persona was pure selfish stuff to enhance his own perceived legend. But Father Kenny was also talking about my compassion, a compassion born of feeling for the weak, needy, and indisposed; I had been all of these things myself as a boy and had learned to recognize them in those I was drawn to help. A coping mechanism, I guess, but it helped me become the man I was and led ultimately to my rise through the ranks of the FBI, assisting other agents when necessary.

I finally decided to go back across the pond to New Jersey’s St. Peter’s College in 1961. Had I gone to the Point instead, I would’ve inevitably ended up in Vietnam, which I wanted no part of. It wasn’t that I was shirking my duty or wasn’t patriotic; I just felt I’d already spent too much of my life fighting a war. Leading a charge up a proverbial hill was a metaphor for so much of my youth that the notion of doing it for real was just too much to bear. St. Peter’s was definitely the saner, safer choice.

College offered yet another structured environment in my life and development, and one in which I thrived. I’d always been scholastically minded, and even took my share of taunts from the Mount kids for being “too smart.” Back then, being selected to go to New York’s St. Peter’s Boys School on a scholarship from Mount Loretto allowed me to be “outside,” to see the world beyond the Mount’s shuttered walls. All I ever wanted to do was get my college education so I could join the FBI, and my years at St. Peter’s offered me that and more. A passport to a better life and a chance to be able to change my family history.

Having spent the better part of my life living communally, at both the Mount and in the military, freedom had been limited and decisions were pretty much made for me. College provided me with the freedom I needed to grow and learn. I had far more real-life experiences than my college classmates and pals, but this didn’t stop me from forming friendships that remain to this day. I also used the opportunity to get my fellow students engaged in projects to benefit the boys back at Mount Loretto. I went to college originally as little more than a precursor to joining the Bureau, but it became a wonderful experience on its own.

I never lost sight of the Mount and, in fact, worked full-time there through my college years. The classes I’d taken over in Germany enabled me to work as a social worker for the Catholic charities that administered Mount Loretto, a role that was sorely needed at the Mount and one I was prepared to embrace. Not only did that help me fund my studies in a small way, it also allowed me to give back to the place that had, for all intents and purposes, saved me and then raised me. I saw so many kids in those years who weren’t much different from me. They had the same scowl, the same fear and hatred of life, and I endeavored to help each and every one of them in any way that I could.

The world of the Mount was full of unpredictable problems, sometimes fraught with aggression that could turn violent. You always had to watch your back, and I think part of why I lay awake those long nights listening to
This Is Your FBI
was that I was afraid to fall asleep. There were always enemies, varying by the day, week, or even hour. One of the reasons I joined the boxing team was for survival. Now I was back “home,” no longer needing an outlet for survival and with a hopeful desire that the current Mounties wouldn’t either.

I can remember Father Kenny sitting in on my sessions, smiling and nodding as he watched, and I couldn’t help but recall his pronouncement that “You know
people,
Fitz.” As a kid from the Mount myself, I understood the plight of these boys and could guide them through their problems from an experienced point of view. I figured Father Kenny still harbored hopes I’d join him in the priesthood and, perhaps, even return to the Mount on a full-time basis.

The formative college years, combined with full-time “social work” at the Mount, gave me a keen practical sense of fulfillment. I was able to advance from child-care counselor to child-care supervisor to full field social worker. I drew the worst cases involving the most troubled youth from Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, the Bronx, and Corona, Queens. I worked some family cases where a child was killed, and others where children had to deal with the killing of a parent. I also worked gang-related cases, becoming an amicus curiae for the kids in State court.

My life had come full circle, with the wealth of my experiences being utilized in the very last way I’d ever imagined. There were so many nights when I’d lay awake fretting, hating this place and wishing I was anywhere else. Now I was back and determined to help other children shedding late-night tears just as I did. These years were crucial not only for the sense of fulfillment they provided me, but also for the “people experience” they allowed, something I am convinced to this day was paramount in my success in the Bureau. Later on I used to tell the good Father that you really get to know people when you live among twelve hundred children each day; that’s a lot of different stories coming at you all at once.

I remember when my college days and my work at the Mount were coming to an end. Father Kenny had yet to give up his hope I would enter the priesthood and asked one last time what my plans were.

“Father, I’m going to join the FBI.”

I thought he’d try to talk me out of it, make a case for all the good I had done and could continue to do. Instead he just smiled that warm, reassuring smile I knew so well. He’d aged badly over the years, wracked by a bad heart condition that he hid well, but the smile made him seem young again.

“Fitz,” he said, “there’s not a more honorable thing in this world you could do.”

13

BOSTON, SPRING 1981

Listening to
This Is Your FBI
while growing up at the Mount, one thing was certain: The FBI always got their man, always did the right thing. That’s the way my career had played out so far and I had no reason to believe Boston would prove to be any different. I had done my due diligence, interviewed Whitey Bulger himself, and came to the only conclusion I could draw: He should be closed as an informant there and then.

I filed my report with Special Agent in Charge Larry Sarhatt, recommending we close Bulger as an informant, and pretty much figured that would be the end of it since my mandate in coming to Boston was clear, and Sarhatt gave me no reason to believe anything to the contrary. In fact, my discussions with him right up until my fateful interview with Bulger more than confirmed this. He seemed to have one burning desire, which was to find out whether Bulger should remain an informant or not. And since Morris and Connolly’s handling of him had become a mess for Sarhatt administratively, I believe to this day that he wanted Bulger off the books once and for all. I was the cover he needed to get that done, especially since the Boston office was about to undergo a vigorous inspection.

The Inspection Division sends agents on a regular basis to audit all offices for compliance and attention to rules and regulations. My memo advising that Bulger be closed as an informant would come under review and give Sarhatt just the ammunition he needed when he sat down with the inspectors to justify his position.

Before and after I’d filed my memo to close Bulger, this evaluation of the agents’ priorities and prowess (or lack thereof) was echoed by others with no axe to grind at all. Dick Bates, a former SAC at Boston who used to be my boss in Washington, D.C., when I was a supervisor in the Criminal Division, was one of them. We met periodically for coffee after he called me upon my reporting to Boston, sometimes at a Dunkin Donuts in Dorchester not far from where informant John McIntyre’s body would be found twenty years later. Bates was also a Deputy Assistant Director in Division 6, the Criminal Division at HQ when I was assigned to the Name Check section. We handled the most secret files in the Bureau, which were available to only selected agents. We had access to J. Edgar Hoover’s most sensitive documents, which were needed to answer inquiries from foreign governments and super-sensitive intelligence agencies in the U.S. government and governments worldwide.

In effect, our liaison duties were extremely complex in view of the myriad of rules and regulations governing the release of this info. Hoover’s documents were the most interesting since they shed light on the Director’s thoughts and dealings with the internal workings of the FBI and other agencies.

Once, a memo from Hoover came across my desk in relation to an FBI investigation nationally. Hoover was responding to a field office about a particularly sensitive matter. The memo to Hoover had requested permission from HQ to conduct this investigation. The memo’s writer had taken the entire page in his request and left no room for pagination or handwritten comments. Hoover squeezed into a space at the very bottom of the memo: “Watch the borders!” The file was replete with actions to be taken upon Hoover’s instructions. So virtually every field office across the country was instructed to “watch the borders.” Of course, no one knew exactly what they were “watching” for, but dutifully did so anyway, not daring to ask Hoover for an explanation.

Hoover, though, had simply meant that he had no place to put his remarks and pithily noted that the writer should watch the borders, or pagination, so he could remark uninhibited by such a lack of space. Hoover, either in person or on paper, was never disputed. No one ever asked him for an explanation nor would anyone dare to. Dick and I would recall these amusing moments and get a chuckle here and there, even with the ever-escalating situation I was facing during the first months in my new job.