Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (20 page)

20

BOSTON, 1985

Remember Dave Twomey, the Strike Force attorney two of my agents had branded a leak? I did and I’d never let go of my resolve to see him brought to justice.

I got my chance in early 1985 when a DEA agent named Vinton reported he’d recently heard the very same thing through one of his own informants. Specifically that Twomey might well be funneling information to Martin Boudreau to aid in the defense of his mob clients whom the Strike Force was trying to put away. So at long last we arrested Twomey on charges of accepting bribes and obstruction of justice, among others. In December 1986 he was “convicted of four violations of federal law arising out of his sale of confidential law enforcement information to a drug smuggler whom he had investigated in the course of his official duties.” (The decision was later upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which has appellate jurisdiction in Massachusetts.)

By all indications, though, Twomey wasn’t the only one leaking. We knew the Boston office of the FBI itself had been plagued by leaks for years, and I was about to learn where at least some of them may have originated.

In June of 1985, Tom McGeorge, an agent who handled my Public Corruption squad, asked to see me in private.

“You’re not gonna believe this, Fitz.”

“What?” I asked him.

“I think I know who’s been leaking. It’s Greenleaf.”

The way McGeorge said it, I don’t think he could believe it himself. I was flabbergasted and nearly fell out of my seat. But the intelligence McGeorge related to me indicated that Greenleaf had, like Twomey, met with defense attorney Martin Boudreau, formerly of the Strike Force under Jerry O’Sullivan and now a known lawyer for the wiseguys. Greenleaf, according to McGeorge, told Boudreau that a “witness” to the drug cartel was prepared to dime Whitey Bulger and others. Was that witness John McIntyre? I’ll never know. All we knew then was that McIntyre had disappeared and, in fact, had been labeled a fugitive. Whatever I and other agents suspected aside, we had no evidence of an underlying crime having resulted from that leak. McIntyre could have gone AWOL, after all. We looked for him for about a month, a touchy situation in itself since we couldn’t give away his informant status either. McIntyre, like Halloran, was a key witness in getting the goods on Bulger so we could arrest him.

At this point I did recall Martin Boudreau’s presence on the dock when the
Ramsland
sailed into port the year before. Someone had alerted him to the major drug bust we were about to make, and now it was becoming clear to me just who that leak may have been.

If McGeorge’s assertions were correct, Greenleaf was furnishing federal grand jury information to a defense attorney in violation of federal statutes. Committing the very serious crime of revealing informant information that could not only jeopardize a case, but also get an informant killed.

I told McGeorge to make out a full report. In front of him I called the Strike Force chief and told him the story. In a cavalier manner O’Sullivan advised me that he “already knew about this.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I asked him.

“Because it’s none of your fucking business.”

“What are you gonna do about it now?”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to report it to OPR.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t that he couldn’t believe leaking was taking place in his office; he knew it was. But he also knew that acknowledging that fact would undermine his credibility if revealed. And since the leaking filtered back to Bulger, and possibly Joe Murray, the results of a full investigation risked destroying the prized informant O’Sullivan had been protecting for years now.

I next called the Director’s Office in Washington, D.C., and got the Director’s standby John Glover. He was livid; more at me than Greenleaf, it seemed, and he ordered me not to write a report or tell Greenleaf anything.

The pit in my stomach was growing harder and I recalled one of my buddies saying, “If you take on the dragon you have to kill him!” I had laughed at the time, but I wasn’t laughing now. After all, wasn’t this my duty to report? Didn’t I take an oath to do this very thing?

Never embarrass the Bureau
 …

But the whole arrangement grew even more incestuous and complex once Whitey Bulger began exerting more and more influence over the drug trade in his native Southie enclave and Boston environs beyond. Ultimately, the DEA professed to have little interest in working their cases in tandem with the FBI and, by connection, with O’Sullivan’s Strike Force. No less a source than Stephen Flemmi himself would later admit that “Both in 1984 and 1989, the FBI made Mr. Bulger and I aware of a number of drug investigations.”

As I told the
Boston Herald
in a story entitled “Ex-Agent Details Treachery in HUB FBI Office” that was published in April 2001, “‘Innocent people were killed, murdered, and I hold certain agents responsible for that.’” The
Herald
reporters (Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers, and Maggie Mulvihill) went further in linking everything together: “When the alleged leak occurred, Boudreau, a former federal Organized Strike Force prosecutor, was representing major drug traffickers. Also at the time, Bulger and Flemmi were collecting ‘tribute’ payments from traffickers doing business in the Boston area.”

Of course, at that point all we were sure of was that McIntyre had vanished, complicating a case I was trying to make against Greenleaf since I couldn’t use what I knew in a report HQ had ordered me not to file anyway. I’d become a real thorn in their side, and since they could no longer ignore what I was telling them, they told me to put no further reports in writing that could—you guessed it—embarrass the Bureau.

But Justice Department protocol told me something else. In fact, that protocol was reiterated to all office employees in a memo dated June 3, 1985, a few days before my reporting, that read in part, “I wish to remind you that it is your responsibility to inform the Counsel on Professional Responsibility of all such allegations which come to our attention and to advise him when inquiries into these allegations have been completed.”

The memo was signed “Attorney General.” It was circulated by Special Agent in Charge James Greenleaf.

As I told the
Boston Herald
for that same story in 2001, I filed my own memo directly under the subject heading “Alleged Disclosure of Information by SAC Greenleaf.” My memo referred specifically back to our investigation of Strike Force lawyer Dave Twomey and the informant who told us about Twomey warning off the organized crime subjects of the Strike Force’s investigations. The memo detailed how James Greenleaf had leaked the informant’s name to former Strike Force attorney Martin Boudreau, who’d moved into private practice representing the kind of people he used to put away. This would not only allow Boudreau to impeach that confidential informant’s character but also could have placed his very life in danger. Remember what had happened to Brian Halloran and John Callahan, not to mention Richie Castucci?

Even though I’d left out the most pointed allegation from my report, Greenleaf was pissed that I’d done my job by reporting him, afraid this time it would stick since I’d bypassed the traditional channels offering him cover. His ire knew no bounds. I had initially struggled with the filing of charges against him and was forbidden by FBIHQ itself to discuss that filing with the SAC either before or after. I never thought of myself as a “snitch” or that I was “diming” the SAC. In Washington, though, among those who had installed Greenleaf as SAC in Boston and continue to support him to this day, I was ostracized and deemed a pariah for telling the truth. Not only did the DOJ OPR not contact me, but the Director’s Office continued to order me to keep everything I knew secret. The problem was I’d gone too far now to follow that order. I tried to report my suspicions about the SAC to the FBIHQ general counsel and the Director’s Office of the FBI, keeping a copy of that report in the event they weren’t acted upon, which, of course, they weren’t. My report should have triggered an investigation—that’s all. The allegation I leveled against Greenleaf was just that and nothing more. It was certainly explosive, but it was also procedure and should have been treated as such.

But it wasn’t.

The FBI never asked for additional clarification of what I knew about John McIntyre’s disappearance; if they had, they’d have evidence of corruption inside the Boston FBI at the highest level. In all my years working major cases, I had never seen the kind of abject corruption that I witnessed in Boston. Until John McIntyre’s body was pulled from the ground on a cold day in January 2000, the truth behind his disappearance was never fully known. But the fact he had suffered the same fate, at the same hands, as Richie Castucci, Brian Halloran, and John Callahan was as unavoidable as it was obvious.

In that same 2001 article in the
Boston Herald
, Tom McGeorge was reported to have denied ever having that conversation with me during which he reported Greenleaf. McGeorge was running a private security firm in Florida at the time, and if he actually did deny our conversation to a reporter perhaps it was because he was afraid of getting involved. Interviewed by the same reporters, James Greenleaf offered no comment. Jeremiah O’Sullivan, meanwhile, flat out denied our subsequent conversation and my reporting.

“Absolutely and unequivocally this did not happen,” O’Sullivan said at the time.

This is the same O’Sullivan who would later confess to lying and misrepresentation in his testimony before the House’s Government Reform Committee in 2002, including an admission that he knew Bulger and Flemmi were murderers. He died in February 2009, and at the time of his death a lawyer named Robert Popeo told the
Boston Globe
that, “For those in the highest levels, the admiration he earned for his conduct will stay with him forever. And there are those who don’t know what it’s like to be down in the pit and make these decisions. His legacy of fighting crime in Boston stands.”

Popeo had once represented none other than Billy Bulger.

As for James Greenleaf, in 2006 he would testify in district court that investigations of Bulger and Flemmi “just didn’t register” with him. This in spite of the fact that the appellate decision later found that “[Greenleaf] was not focused on the reports that Bulger and Flemmi had sources within law enforcement generally or within the FBI.” The same court made note of the fact that “The FBI’s recognition of the apparent link between the Winter Hill gang and three murders—Wheeler’s, Halloran’s and Callahan’s—was reported in a November 1982 memo sent by the Chief of the FBI’s Organized Crime Section, Sean McWeeney, to Associate Deputy Director Oliver Revell. The memo stated that ‘there is evidence [the murders] were committed by an organized crime group in Boston, Massachusetts, the Winter Hill gang.’ James Greenleaf, who became the SAC of the Boston Office on November 29, 1982, was among those copied on the memo, which was generated at FBI Headquarters in Washington.”

I gave a deposition under oath for that same 2006 trial before a bevy of ten lawyers, including one representing James Greenleaf.

“At any time after McIntyre’s disappearance did you come to believe that McIntyre’s identity had been leaked?” the interrogatory attorney asked me.

“Yes,” I answered unequivocally.

“And can you describe how you came to that belief?”

I proceeded to relate the details of my meeting with Tom McGeorge, stressing that McGeorge had specifically mentioned Greenleaf as leaking the informant’s name to former Strike Force attorney Martin Boudreau and that I had immediately informed Jerry O’Sullivan of that.

No objections were offered by the attending attorneys.

“So you called the Director’s Office,” the attorney said, picking up the questioning. “And—”

“It was because it involved the SAC,” I interrupted.

“And what did you tell the Director’s Office?”

“That one of my supervisors just reported that the SAC of the Boston Division is a leak. We had a federal grand jury going on, and he had given away 6E, federal grand jury 6E information, which is a crime.”

“And what, if anything, was done as a result of that report?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

21

BOSTON, 1985

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

The opening line from Charles Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
described things perfectly as 1985 descended upon Boston. It started out as a great year, one of the best of my life. My squad’s takedown of the Boston La Cosa Nostra, which had begun with my arrest of the underboss Gennaro Angiulo in September 1983 had been parlayed into additional arrests as “made” guys turned against each other to avoid the same fate. Several of the public corruption cases came to fruition, and our financial squad and undercover cases netted several organized crime heavies in major cases involving infiltration into legitimate business and the illegal manipulation of stock on the OTC (over-the-counter) market.

Beyond that, my Miami experience in running ABSCAM had finally produced several trials and plea deals, and helped usher in a new age of accountability in Washington. That experience led directly to my investigations of illegal offshore financial corporations, a national con man indexing, a computerized crimes violations system that was way ahead of its time, undercover operations in PENDORF (a wiretap on Allen Dorfman, head of the AFL-CIO), BRILAB (our pursuit of bribery and labor racketeering in the unions), and multiple stings involving organized crime penetration of the New York Stock Exchange. The common denominator here was the Bureau’s first ever “hands-on” Economic Crimes Unit to monitor drug laundering, international bank scams, and to establish a watchdog unit with Interpol to monitor organized crime infiltration into legitimate business.

And amid all my accomplishments, amidst the many problems we had resolved in the Boston office, I continued to be at odds with HQ and my own SAC, James Greenleaf. The Organized Crime section at HQ under Sean McWeeney appeared insulted that the ASAC in Boston had dared criticize the way FBI business was done. McWeeney couldn’t get past my dogged pursuit of Whitey Bulger, because his Organized Crime section felt their judgment was being challenged and that represented a direct threat to the FBI’s quasi-military atmosphere. They also couldn’t get past the fact Bulger and Flemmi had become part of the FBI’s extended family.