Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (16 page)

There was more. Instead of moving him closer to us, Halloran’s murder pushed John Callahan away, at least temporarily. After all, we were relying on Halloran’s testimony, naming him as an accessory to Roger Wheeler’s murder, in an effort to make Callahan turn state’s evidence. With Halloran out of the way, Callahan figured he’d gotten a reprieve. While he might have been on the numbers side of things, Callahan fancied himself a wiseguy and loved the lifestyle that had him entertaining the Winter Hill boys down for a time in his native Miami. Halloran’s murder filled Callahan with a strange sense of vindication and freedom, as if he no longer had anything to fear in his world of punks, two-timers, stone killers, and muffs.

Meanwhile, Tulsa homicide detective Michael Huff, the lead investigator on the Wheeler murder, continued to work that killing. Huff was a methodical, by-the-book cop who followed the trail where it took him, which in this case was Connecticut (home of another fronton owned by World Jai Alai), Miami, and Boston. He found plenty of cooperation in Connecticut and Miami, but little in Boston since both Connolly and Morris and Strike Force head O’Sullivan stonewalled his efforts to dig deeper into the doings of the Winter Hill Gang at every turn. Huff tried me but in the wake of the Halloran killing, my squad was effectively disenfranchised from the work being done by Morris’s Organized Crime squad and O’Sullivan’s Strike Force.

In fact, our work was paralleling Huff’s in the sense that we were trying to work Callahan into a formal suspect, thereby making it easier to turn him by offering him immunity from prosecution for his part in the Wheeler murder. The problem was that word got around the office that Detective Huff was nosing around Boston in search of his Tulsa killers. Since the Winter Hill Gang had already surfaced in his investigation, John Connolly would have been a natural for him to talk to. While I’m not sure they ever spoke, I’m reasonably sure Connolly let Bulger know, as he had done with Halloran, that the investigation was honing in on Callahan, who could pin Wheeler’s murder on Whitey.

Again, the actions themselves were John Connolly’s. But he must have figured he was doing the bidding of Jeremiah O’Sullivan, John Morris, and the Organized Crime staff at FBIHQ. Protect Bulger at all costs had become the code he lived by, but I doubt he conceived it alone. All of these people were in so deep at this point they must have felt the very real concern that Whitey could take them down at the same time. So their actions weren’t just self-serving, they were also about self-protection. Imagine if I had been able to arrest Bulger for the Wheeler murder and he decided to turn on his former protectors by confessing how he had bamboozled them and used their auspices to fuel his own murderous rise through the Boston underworld.

Whitey may have been a psychopath, but he was far from stupid. He had found that the path to criminal power without fear of censure was paved with 209 informant forms and commendations to the agents beholden to him. As long as he appeared to be giving the FBI what it wanted, he could steal, extort, terrorize, and even murder without any fear of repercussions. And because the cadre that allowed this to be was in so deep with him, they had to let it continue in order to save their own asses.

Mike Huff and his associate detectives in Connecticut, meanwhile, kept at it, gradually accumulating evidence that would be enough to get an arrest warrant for John Callahan. They intended to fly down to Miami personally to serve it. Callahan must have gotten word of his pending arrest and quickly made overtures to Miami agents working with my squad to pick up the discussions that had been abruptly halted with Brian Halloran’s murder. The problem was the Boston office must have picked up on that, too, likely from Huff and his Connecticut partners. As traditional cops with no real grasp of the depths to which the Boston office had sunk, they were strictly following protocol since their investigation involved another ongoing one.

Again the word came down from on high, in this case north in Boston, about what was soon to go down. In August 1982, Huff and his Connecticut counterparts headed to Miami. They landed and boarded a cab that drove right past a parking garage where John Callahan’s body had been stuffed in the trunk of his Cadillac, shot in the back of the head. The twentieth victim of John Martorano.

This particular murder also profoundly affected me on a personal level, once my fiancée Jane witnessed the look on my face when I received the fateful call about Callahan’s murder. As a nurse who worked reglarly in emergency situations, she’d seen more than her share of deaths from gunshot wounds and other forms of violence. Suddenly she began to obsess about my life and safety, anxious over what seemed like the very real possibility that I might be next on Bulger’s hit list, and for good reason. Jane feared for our future, the family we had every intention of starting. She was my second chance at happiness, and the whole sordid mess in Boston was now jeopardizing that.

John Connolly, and the culture of corruption surrounding and protecting him, had struck again, this time much too close to home for comfort. Bulger was still free and still killing, the FBI now a willing and unambiguous accomplice in his rise to the pinnacle of the New England underworld.

PART THREE

BEYOND BULGER

“Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.”

17

BOSTON, 1982

“I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

I recited the FBI oath on a warm fall day at the age of twenty-five with the rest of my graduating class in the Old Post Office Building in 1965. It was a cavernous space and our voices echoed, reverberating in a din kind of like PA-speaker feedback. I remember hoping J. Edgar Hoover himself would be there, but he wasn’t. I remember listening to similar words spoken during the introduction to those old radio shows. It should have been a happy moment, and I guess it was. But it was tinged by melancholy. Thoughts of my mother and memories of the Mount, how cold the concrete floor felt in winter. I don’t know why I thought about that then, but I did.

But my melancholy swiftly vanished with my first posting in New Orleans in 1965. My supervisor, John Reynolds, commanded the #4 squad which was made up of about eighteen agents ranging from me, a shave-tailed twenty five year old, to Regis, a senior twenty plus veteran who was assigned to the JFK assassination case in New Orleans.

Reynolds used to yell across the glass partition, “Fitzpatrick, get your ass in here!”

Wry smiles flashed on the faces of my brother agents; we were all male agents back then in 1965, always a step away from a “whupping” by Reynolds, reputed to be the toughest supervisor in the FBI.

“I know you were a social worker in your other life,” he said. Reynolds had thick bushy eyebrows and spoke in a voice permanently hoarse from cigarettes. He had a picture of his family framed on his desk but sometimes, when the discussion grew especially unpleasant, he’d turn the picture away so that his family wouldn’t bear witness. “But, dammit, you’re an agent now and these pabulum reports tell me you better get on the ball! You’ll have to testify to this and the jury could care less about how you feel! Facts are facts and, dammit, from now on your reports will only contain facts. Do you read me, Fitzpatrick?”

The only thing I could mutter was, “Yes, sir.”

“Then get the hell out of here!”

For all of the bluster, John Reynolds taught me how to write a report; an FBI report, one that would hold up in court under the best scrutiny. As a first office agent this was part of my indoctrination and probationary period. Hoover made sure all new agents went through such a probationary period, extending from training school to the first-year evaluation. Some agents were let go even before their first-year-evaluation rating, several more afterwards.

The fact that my initial reviews were positive led to my first bump up the ladder to an assignment as a lookout; specifically for two cop killers out of Oklahoma who had escaped from prison and were on the lam. The identification order claimed they liked to hang out around YMCAs, hitting the customers in violent smash-and-dash robberies. My assignment was to surveil a certain YMCA and watch for suspicious vehicles or persons.

Along about ten or eleven one night, lo and behold, two guys drove into the YMCA parking lot and took a position in a darkened corner diagonally across from me. After a few minutes, I sneaked up and grabbed the license plate number which, unbelievably, matched a car stolen by the Oklahoma escapees a few days earlier.

I crept toward the car and IDed two men in the front seat, apparently asleep and drunk. The driver had a gun in his left hand at the ready while the other guy’s hand was hidden from sight. I staked out the car and called for backup. The case agent arrived and I briefed him on the facts at hand. A plan was drawn up to take the individuals down. The case agent, a hard-nosed FBI lifer named Ziggy, would make the arrest, while I covered him from the driver’s side.

Being a brand new agent, I’m sure the seasoned agents were covering me, throwing me a bone as a gesture for alerting them to this potential grab. As Ziggy approached the car he wrapped on the window, startling both fugitives. When he yanked the passenger door open, the fugitive on that side made a sudden movement that ended when Ziggy stuck a gun in his face. The fugitive I was eyeballing slowly raised his hand, and I immediately wrapped on his window pointing my gun directly at his head.

“Gun!” I yelled, keeping with protocol.

The apprehension team responded in a flurry of movement that left the two fugitives squirming facedown on the ground.

Later, I was given the assignment and honor to fingerprint the fugitive cop killers. Still a little drunk and hostile, they fought my attempt to photograph and fingerprint them. The third time they resisted I gave one last warning. When they still refused to cooperate, I looked to a senior agent who nodded, the implication of his gesture clear. I pulled the third finger of one of the fugitives back until I heard a
pop!
as it broke. After howling and jumping up and down he settled in to be fingerprinted. The other fugitive offered no resistance at all.

We brought the first fugitive before the magistrate in New Orleans. The subject immediately protested that I had brutally broken his finger. The magistrate questioned me about it and I told him these cold-blooded killers wouldn’t let me do my job. I cited that I had to establish identity in making sure that the subject was indeed the shooter since we recovered the gun that allegedly killed a police officer. The magistrate agreed that force was necessary and refused to concede that I had committed police brutality.

*   *   *

I’d graduated the Bureau’s Training Academy certain that as long as I was an agent, I’d never lose sight of the FBI oath’s words or its meaning. In my mind, that’s what the whole Bulger mess was about. Agents were plainly violating that oath and sometimes much worse. But for me to have turned a blind eye to what was going on, to have not continued to pursue Bulger and his enablers at all costs, would have run counter to everything I tried to stand for as an agent. Some would call that stubborn, Irish stubborn, as they say. Some would call it simply tenacious. Bucking the system, while some would just call it stupid.

I call it simply right and it explains why I wasn’t going to stop until the mess was cleaned up, no matter what. Until I was transferred to the Boston FBI office in 1981 I never had reason to question the integrity of a fellow agent or even the FBI as a whole. My fifteen-year tenure with the Bureau up until this time was marked by a steady climb, experiencing major roles in a series of high-profile and successful investigations. My assumption, based on that experience, was that all agents were like me. They had taken the oath, too, hadn’t they?

Not John Connolly, apparently.

The culture of the Boston FBI office allowed him to set the tone and act as if he were in charge. This was best exemplified by a “point shaving” case involving the Boston College basketball team. A wiseguy by the name of Paul Mazzei was convicted for his involvement in a basketball scheme featured on the cover of
Sports Illustrated.
There were three groups involved: a Pittsburgh connection that involved a student named Tony Perla; a Boston College player named Rick Kuhn; and a New York connection with gangsters Henry Hill (from the movie
Wiseguy
who became an informant for the FBI in 1979 when I was in Miami) and James Burke, a Westie from Hell’s Kitchen who ran away from Mount Loretto when I was there. The gangsters created “protection,” and the players received $2,500 per game in exchange for ensuring that Boston College did not beat the point spread in games where the betting gangsters wagered against the team.

While this took place during the 1978–79 season, the trials came to a head early into my tenure as Boston ASAC. I was sitting in my office when my secretary buzzed to tell me that a high-ranking official from Boston College was on the phone. Perplexed, I took the call.

“What can I do for you, sir?” I asked politely.

Making small talk, the official said he was happy to chat with the FBI head in Boston and congratulated the office for a fine job cleaning up the town.

“So what I can do for you today?” I repeated.

“John Connolly said you might be able to do the school, and me, a favor.”

“John Connolly?”

“Well, these kids are fine boys, but sometimes they get into trouble. Boys, you know.”

“Pardon me, but are you talking about the Boston College basketball betting scandal?”

“These are good boys, Mr. Fitzpatrick.”

“The case is currently being investigated by the FBI.”

“Agent Connolly thought you might be able to help us out a bit.”