Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (14 page)

I found solace in hating my mother and then hating God, and became immune to the special conciliatory expressions of kindness by the nuns and priests. I was an altar boy, a choirboy, an honor student, but what good had that been in the eyes of God? He hadn’t just stolen my mother, he had stolen my hope and my dreams. The message at the Mount was that suffering makes you strong so that when you fall you always get up, often to suffer all over again.

When I instructed at law enforcement classes across the nation, I met an untold number of police officers who were divorced. I passed it off to the overwhelming stress they were under and the long anxious hours they worked, all the time taking comfort in the fact that it would never happen to me. My wife understood me and my passions; that was the man with whom she fell in love, after all. Then I got a phone call and it was over. Just like that. She decided not to join me in Boston. An annulment followed, then divorce.

Had I lost sight of my personal life, the fact that I was a father and a husband? In retrospect, I suppose I had.

But the FBI was my home too, as it had been, I guess, since I fell in love with the Bureau listening to those old radio shows drifting down the hall from Sister Mary Assumpta’s room. And I wasn’t about to let anything change that now.

15

BOSTON, 1982

I knew Brian Halloran was the weakest and most easily exploited link to Bulger. His drug habit was pretty well known by that time, and he’d confided to more than one lower-level associate that he was being phased out of the Winter Hill Gang and was afraid of what Whitey might do to him. How much this had to do with Whitey’s not using him for the Wheeler hit was moot. The seeds of their detachment had been bred of the cocaine Halloran shoved up his nose. That fact rendered him unreliable and no longer fit for Bulger’s inner circle.

But it made Halloran very fit to pursue for what I was after: incontrovertible evidence of Whitey’s complicity in the gunning down of Roger Wheeler. Bulger may not have pulled the trigger, but I knew that he effectively put the gun in the shooter’s hand. We suspected Martorano had been involved and were convinced we’d never be able to turn him. But Brian Halloran was another case altogether because he feared for his life.

By early 1982, more and more circumstantial evidence continued to surface in Tulsa linking the Winter Hill Gang to Roger Wheeler’s murder. By then I had already assigned two agents on my nontraditional Organized Crime squad to test the waters with Halloran. The nontraditional label didn’t mean they could break any rules, but it did allow them to circumvent some procedures in “turning” an informant, such as not filling out reports. No paper trail, in other words, nothing for John Connolly to get his hands on this time.

Halloran began to talk; slowly at first, knowing he had to make himself valuable enough to us so we’d protect him and ultimately offer him a chance in the Witness Protection Program. I assigned two more agents to handle Halloran in what was now a full-fledged informant “fight” against Bulger and Flemmi, using daily intelligence reports and contacts with Halloran to get info about the Wheeler murder in Tulsa. The investigation was conducted in secret, under the office radar, because of the kind of leaks that had already cost informants like Richie Castucci their lives.

At the same time, my job was to stay in secret contact with HQ in Washington in an attempt to finally put a stop to the myriad leaks that had riddled criminal investigations in Boston for too long. In essence, I had gone undercover in my own office, taking on a Serpico-like role in Boston, which was something unprecedented. But then nothing in the Boston office seemed to have any historical precedent. More accurately, the tradition here seemed to be about rewriting local FBI history instead.

To further my efforts, I requested a secret wire and authored documents to FBIHQ spelling out the purpose and the expected results it would bear. I wanted Halloran to wear the wire against Callahan and others to verify the informant information and corroborate the specific allegations implicating Callahan’s collusion with Bulger and Flemmi in the Jai Alai’s business dealings in Florida. There was also a chance I could get incriminating evidence on tape about the Wheeler murder. This was complex, confusing stuff, and I would need every bit of intelligence at my disposal to convince HQ powers-that-be of just how deep the problems were as I went about this by the book.

I was also working to develop Callahan as an informant, trying to get him to wear a wire as well in an effort to bolster Halloran’s anticipated testimony later on. If I could accomplish this, I’d be able to place Halloran and Callahan in a conspiracy with Bulger and Flemmi involving a massive racketeering-influenced corruption matter. We’d be working a full-blown RICO case instead of just a murder rap.

Since Morris at the time was in charge of the Organized Crime 3 Squad responsible for going after La Cosa Nostra, and this remained in large part an LCN matter, I had no choice but to use his resources for surveillance support. His Organized Crime agents knew the territory and the players, and I had no reason to believe that Morris would go to the extremes he ultimately did to protect Whitey Bulger. Still, Morris would be used only to cover my meets with Halloran and Callahan, which were fraught with danger because of what Bulger would do to them if he found out they were talking.

Also unpredictable was how Morris would react. From my initial entry into the Boston quagmire, I had viewed Morris and John Connolly as an unholy alliance and had viewed the manipulative Connolly as capable of twisting Morris around his finger. I questioned whether it was worth it to inform and involve him at all, but much of the FBI’s long-tenured success could be attributed to its militarylike, hierarchal chain of command. Playing things by the book meant never going over another head or trying to pull an end run. Just because Connolly had made a career out of this didn’t mean I was going to. There was no way I was going to become the kind of agent I hated most to get the goods on Bulger. I would do my job the way it was supposed to be done, and even though I was officially undercover at this point, that meant bringing Morris’s squad into the case I was building against Bulger and Flemmi. Following procedure, I kept HQ at Washington in the loop explaining my strategy in confidential teletypes and other communiqués.

Morris knew what my overall mission was but not my undercover mission, namely to nail Bulger and Flemmi and other conspirators in what amounted to a RICO sting similar to the one I ran in Miami with ABSCAM. The sting, using Halloran and hopefully Callahan eventually, would be to get Bulger to admit to sending Martorano to Tulsa to kill Roger Wheeler. Morris was well aware of what I had accomplished in Miami, and things had already progressed too far for him to stand in my way in Boston when it came to this case.

ABSCAM had started as a huge effort to expose scams and corruption in Florida and beyond, but quickly morphed into something even greater as more and more politicos were implicated. The investigation culminated in the arrest of Senator Harrison Williams, who was receiving money for furnishing identity cards to foreign illegals to evade Immigration and Naturalization laws.

The difference, of course, was that Bulger had something the senator did not: corrupt FBI agents willing and able to inform him of the FBI’s intentions and plans. I chatted with Morris and he agreed that his squad would lend support for logistical and surveillance purposes. As his boss, I instructed him to keep things close to the vest and made it plain that Connolly should be kept out of the loop altogether. I stressed that careers, his included, were at stake here, since at that point I could see no way the higher-ups in the Bureau would hesitate to back me up now that we had an opportunity to bring down a massive criminal enterprise.

Colonel O’Donovan of the Massachusetts State Police wasn’t so sure. To him this was the Lancaster Garage all over again and it was only a matter of time before it blew up in my face. But that never happened in the radio broadcasts of
This Is Your FBI.
And I was still idealistic enough to think that once squarely in my sights, even Whitey Bulger wouldn’t be able to escape justice.

So I prepared to interview Halloran and Callahan on the sting angle. I tried to build a Chinese wall of silence and secrecy separating the agents involved in my undercover operation from those handling Bulger and Flemmi as informants, a tricky situation to say the least. Sure, Morris was a pal of Connolly’s, but he was also his supervisor along with at least eighteen other agents assigned to various Organized Crime duties. In effect, Morris oversaw Connolly’s handling of Bulger and Flemmi, but this case was actually about the murder of Wheeler in Tulsa and the graft uncovered at Miami Jai Alai. Morris would have to straddle a very fine line and it was hard to imagine him risking his career to back Bulger, and thus Connolly.

I actually believe both Morris and Connolly were deathly afraid of Bulger and what he would do if they threw him to the proverbial wolves. He’d already had people killed with the FBI supposedly watching; imagine what would happen if he had nothing to lose!

To make matters administratively worse, Strike Force chief Jeremiah O’Sullivan was still convinced that Bulger could give him what he wanted most: the Italian Angiulo mob in the RICO case
he
was trying to build totally separate from my squad’s. Closing Bulger, pinning the Wheeler murder on him along with a separate RICO case, would eliminate Whitey as a cooperating informant and witness and threaten to undermine so much of the evidence O’Sullivan had accumulated. He’d have nothing to show for years of work.

The problem, of course, was that Bulger had really given O’Sullivan nothing of substance. Whitey was playing an elaborate shell game of information never delivered and promises never kept. But O’Sullivan was so single-mindedly focused on the FBI’s obsessive mandate to nail the mafia at all costs that he couldn’t see how little Bulger was actually providing. That fact put his interests diametrically opposed to mine, and promised to be difficult to reconcile.

What most people in later years found difficult to comprehend, as we did, was that Morris at the time of the Bulger sting was considered to be a highly reputable agent, a trusted supervisor, and a superior strategist in taking down LCN in Boston. There was little if any indication on our part that he was actually a turncoat who was already dirty, having gone along with John Connolly’s tactics for so long that there was no going back. The mystery had always been the origin of the leaks of sensitive info in our cases that put our agents in harm’s way and destroyed countless investigations. Who was warning Bulger and his crew about our operations? Who was warning Bulger about the other informants?

Labeling Morris as a snitch for the Irish gang at that point seemed preposterous, so I honestly believed our sting operation was safe from Connolly’s corrupted clutches. And it better have been, since Morris was privy to all of the details of what Brian Halloran was telling us, as well as of our plan of how to make use of the information to turn John Callahan, too.

Complicating matters further was SAC Larry Sarhatt’s increasing withdrawal from a leadership role as his retirement loomed. He acted like a soldier in a war zone with his tour coming to an end, afraid of doing anything that might upset the brass at HQ and throw an administrative monkey wrench into the works. Besides, he’d already taken his stand by accepting Morris and Connolly’s memo countering mine, which had recommended that Bulger be closed as an informant. How could he fully support my efforts now?

I should have suspected that whatever was going on reached much deeper. This wasn’t, and never had been, about a single agent handling a single Top Echelon informant, even if that informant was Whitey Bulger. Competing agendas were in play, the common denominator between them being everyone involved wanted to take down the Boston mafia using whatever means necessary. I also underestimated the culture of corruption that had become so pervasive during the Rico-Condon era that it was now pretty much business as usual.

The point is that agents like Connolly and supervisors like Morris had no fear that Sarhatt would intervene against them, and that left me as the only thing standing in their way. Still, Morris disclosing my intentions to Bulger, either through Connolly or not, could make him an accessory to murder since there was no doubt Whitey would kill anyone ready to dime him. At this point Bulger rightfully believed that he had the FBI, as well as O’Sullivan’s Strike Force, in his pocket. My next move was to relay to HQ that I was worried about additional leaks cropping up that could destroy my planned sting operation and put the life of my snitch, Brian Halloran (along with John Callahan in the not-too-distant future), in jeopardy.

I recall expediting my secrecy coverage and cloaking all info by instituting a secure communications system to cap all leaks. The top echelon HQ people—including Sean McWeeney all the way up to the Bureau’s number two man John Otto and the assistant to the director, Oliver Revel—I was dealing with were aware that all info was secret, that no one from Boston should see any of the reports. I was filing coded TELEX reports directly with them and communicating with FBIHQ TEs in person. This was for my protection, since I faced the very real possibility that I could just as easily become the target of the bad guys I was after, both inside and outside of the Bureau.

What I did not know,
could
not know, was that something even more insidious was taking place in this shadow world I had entered. Powerful forces in the federal Organized Crime squad at HQ under McWeeney, concerned that the entire basis for their high-profile case against the Angiulo mob was about to go up in smoke, “backdoored” some of the secret info I was relaying to them in my undercover status
back to Morris and Connolly
! The Chinese wall I’d constructed came crashing down as, among others, a major vending machine operation we’d launched against forces of Whitey’s Winter Hill Gang crashed and burned thanks, I’d later learn, to John Morris. I cannot say that McWeeney himself was responsible for the flow of information back to Boston. Nor do I believe McWeeney, Otto, Revel or anyone else at HQ was actually party to the ongoing corruption in Boston; instead they were enablers, complicit in their unwitting facilitation of that corruption.