Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (24 page)

“Brownie,” I told him, “it was different. Believe me. The complaints were so widespread and coming from the Staties, the Boston cops, the DEA, and even from inside our own office. It was useful for the FBI to pretend ignorance; I mean, after all, if you don’t know, you can’t be blamed for doing nothing.”

As 1987 dawned, I looked ahead with a combination of excitement and trepidation. My wife Jane’s support, in the face of her own career issues, was vital. Because of that, along with a desire to prove worthy of her faith, I got my PI (private investigator) license. I never saw myself following deadbeats and shooting pictures of men or women carrying on affairs to use in divorce proceedings. Fortunately, my considerable contacts in law enforcement allowed me to pursue higher-profile cases in the areas of corporate espionage, professional protection, security consulting, and fraud investigation. Some of these cases eerily mirrored my work in the Public Corruption arena with the FBI, like the Pete Rose baseball case I worked for Major League Baseball. Rose had been caught up in a gambling scandal and I wrote a report outlining how I’d found evidence that he had bet on himself in games. It was quite an investigation and grabbed the headlines for a time. I was finally leaving the past behind me.

But not for long.

In my new role as a private investigator, I got a call from a client who wanted information concerning Whitey’s brother Billy, the still all-powerful president of the Massachusetts State Senate, and possible payoffs he may have gotten in the infamous 75 State Street scandal. Through sleuthing and contacts I managed to locate an account linked to something called St. Botolph Realty Trust that had made out two six-figure checks totaling nearly a half million dollars (as also reported in
Black Mass
) to Bulger for “a loan in anticipation of a legal fee.”

I still wanted to see justice done and called John Morris, not knowing he was in trouble himself. Since John headed up the corruption case in the FBI, I gave him the information that I felt would have subjected Billy Bulger once and for all to a public corruption charge, or at least provide Morris with “probable cause” that a crime had been committed.

Morris and acting U.S. attorney Jeremiah O’Sullivan formed the team that would ultimately affirm or decline prosecution in the investigation. I felt certain that I had given them the smoking gun and eagerly waited to see the news in the
Globe
; I just wanted justice done and didn’t care who received credit. But I was astounded to learn that O’Sullivan was declining prosecution on Billy, immediately recalling the same kind of inexplicable behavior that had characterized his treatment of Whitey in years past. I called Morris and was stunned to hear him stonewall me with nonresponsive answers to my questions. In retrospect, I’m glad it was a telephone conversation and we weren’t in the same room together.

“What the fuck, John?”

“Look, I can’t do anything. This was O’Sullivan’s decision entirely. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Nothing to do with it? You’re the one I brought it to.”

“Yeah, but it’s O’Sullivan’s jurisdiction and his call. I gotta follow his lead.”

I was steaming. “This whole thing’s gonna break sooner or later, John, and when it does it’ll be on your head.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You really think you can get away with this shit forever?”

No less an authority than Alan Dershowitz later wrote that “Billy got a free pass from prosecution for extortion after he received a quarter of a million dollars from the developer of 75 State Street, when the acting U.S. attorney [Jeremiah O’Sullivan] on the case just happened to be the only Justice Department lawyer in on the Connolly-Whitey secret.”

In July 1988, shortly after the Bureau and Department of Justice, through O’Sullivan, failed to act on the intelligence I’d given them, Dick Lehr from the
Boston Globe
called, saying that he wanted to talk to me about the Bulger affair. He knew I had been Morris’s boss and that I’d overseen the Organized Crime and Public Corruption squads in the past. Lehr drove to my house in Rhode Island and we went for a walk on the beach. The day was muggy and overcast and, more important, the beach was empty. I was rather abrasive with Lehr because he had intimated that he had gotten my name from someone who said I knew the whole story.

Walking alongside him on the beach that day, I really didn’t know what I was going to say at first. Then I figured I’d just stick with the most simple and basic: I’d tell the truth. So I spent the next several hours laying things out for Lehr, about how Whitey Bulger was a liability who’d never given the FBI any information of substance, especially regarding the Angiulo mob my squad had brought down. I told him the very notion of having an organized crime kingpin as an informant went against every tenet of smart law enforcement. Because, I explained to Lehr, you never own the top guy. He always owns you. Just like he owned John Connolly and John Morris and proceeded to corrupt virtually the entire Boston office. Washington had chosen sides as soon as they named James Greanleaf SAC in 1982. Bulger was their guy now, too.

There it was. After all the years of frustration and betrayal, I’d finally gone public about what I knew and had experienced, and for the first time I didn’t feel I was abandoning or reneging on the oath I’d taken as an agent. The only way the FBI could be fixed was to first acknowledge it was broken. Nothing I’d tried up to that point had worked, and more lives continued to be ruined or lost. By remaining silent I was essentially condoning that behavior. It wasn’t about getting even; if it had been, I’d have gone to the
Globe
the day I resigned and packed up my desk in Providence. I’d thought, hoped anyway, consenting to the interview might excise the demons of that period that had destroyed my dream. Instead, rehashing the whole sordid experience only made things worse, and I realized it didn’t mark the end of my war, only the beginning.

It started to rain while we were on the beach, so Lehr and I went back to my house. I remained both tense and pissed, since I had just relived the darkest period of my life in chronicling why I’d left the Bureau. It all seemed so clear-cut when articulated in succinct fashion, though not to the FBI. Couldn’t they see the corruption? Couldn’t they see that they had been taken over by a thug, a sniveling rat? To the Irish a tout is a tout, and Bulger was a tout! I told Lehr I had worked multiple informants throughout my career in equally high-profile cases, so I knew what I was talking about. I had taught at the FBI Academy about these very informant problems and had been a profiler of people and events that spawned such debacles.

I told Lehr about what Morris had said, “You’ll never close Bulger.” I was Irish, but not Boston-Irish. I didn’t know the inner city, but my childhood experiences in the Mount made me understand the culture and mores of Boston’s Irish Southie. When I started encountering Bulger and Connolly, I was quick to find out what made them tick. And yet the same pro-Bulger proponents continued to prevail. I had spent the formative years of my youth watching my back at the Mount and, thanks to Bulger and his Bureau cronies, I spent what should have been the peak of my professional life doing the same thing.

“The FBI is being compromised. That’s what pisses the shit out of me. I mean the FBI is being used,” I told Lehr.

Just as we were used as kids in the Mount, held hostage by bullies and counselors, forced to fend for ourselves as we carved out a reasonable degree of security that often extended no further than our bunks. The Mount as metaphor for Boston was especially fitting, given that the entire city was being harmed by the drugs and violence pushed by Bulger and the corruption that fed his empire. You just couldn’t escape it. If it wasn’t Whitey operating in the city’s seedy underbelly, it was his brother Billy ripping off the city and state from his office in the State House.
The Brothers Bulger,
Howie Carr’s brilliant and powerful study of the era, is subtitled
How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
for a very good reason.

I went on to tell the
Globe
’s Dick Lehr that the root of the problem came down to what I had taught at the FBI Academy. The most basic seduction facing any FBI informant handler was “overidentification.” In other words, letting the informant run the agent instead of vice versa. To put it another way, Connolly and Morris had “gone native” with Whitey Bulger just as Rico and Condon had years before with Joseph Barboza. What was clear to me, and I hoped to Lehr, was that Bulger and other informants like Barboza had dragged the FBI’s name and reputation through the mud. And, for trying to get the Bureau straight again, my name had ended up shit-canned by the very people who should’ve joined my efforts instead of fighting them tooth and nail. If this were the Mount, I’d still be hanging from the steam pipes.

The rain was still falling when Dick Lehr left my home, his windshield wipers fighting to slap it away as he drove off. I wondered what he’d do with what I’d given him and what he’d been able to glean elsewhere. Would the FBI squash his story somehow? Would power be exerted over his superiors at the
Globe
and its owners? After what had happened to me, anything seemed possible.

Two months later, on September 19, 1988, the
Boston Globe
published the first installment of Lehr’s explosive Spotlight Series. The articles, which ran for four days, tore the lid off the whole unspeakable mess by encapsulating Bulger’s hold on the FBI and how that derailed the attempts of locals cops, Staties, and drug agents to put him away once and for all. The evidence and will to nail Bulger had always been there, forestalled by the Bureau at every juncture.

The
Globe
series marked the first public exposure and rebuke of the FBI’s handling of the Bulger fiasco. Mention of Angiulo, who’d been taken down by my squad, formed another ironic counterpoint, since that was what Whitey had been enlisted to help with but he instead ended up accomplishing nothing that didn’t serve his own ends. The
Globe
series went on to describe, in fairly amorphous terms, the DEA’s attempt to get Bulger via federal wiretaps (thanks in large part to intelligence furnished by John McIntyre before he “disappeared”). To no avail, of course, since Connolly, Morris, and probably others made sure Whitey knew his car and condo were all bugged.

In fact, as the
Globe
article from September 20, 1988, alluded, those in the DEA involved in the 1984 Bulger investigation had determined they couldn’t even share their intentions or information with the FBI. As anyone in law enforcement knows, this represents an egregious break from established procedure and protocol, and the DEA would only have opted for it had they determined no other viable option existed. It seemed to me they’d come to the same conclusion I had long before: that the FBI had absolutely no intention or desire to deal with Whitey Bulger as a problem or even recognize that he posed one.

If I’d had any questions about Lehr’s intentions or veracity in our walk on the beach, his Spotlight Series written in tandem with Gerard O’Neill and Christine Chinlund pretty much vanquished them. The series of articles chronicling the rise to power of Whitey and Billy Bulger finally dug deep enough below the surface to find the same mess I’d found eight years before when I arrived in Boston, and their reporting gave my own accusations a fair and thorough hearing.

“Part Three,” for example, covered a portion of the FBI’s complicity in helping to fuel Bulger’s rise to power. (The series also expertly paralleled Whitey’s pursuits with those of his powerful pol brother Billy, especially fitting since my investigation of at least one of the scandals involving Billy was derailed by my departure from Boston.) It was the beginning of the end for Whitey Bulger and his enablers, but, even then, the end would not come soon enough. The new Boston SAC, James Ahearn, would publicly defend the FBI position by flatly denying Bulger and Flemmi’s informant status instead of the usual “no comment.”

The Spotlight Series wasn’t afraid to name names either, and did a commendable job of tying the disparate strands together, while suggesting some of the twisted connections that seemed too incredible to believe. It even revisited the 1979 Race Fix case that cemented Jeremiah O’Sullivan’s complicity in the Bulger debacle and that remains to this day one of the clearest shots the Bureau had to get Whitey, although they failed to act.

The Race Fix case had sent several Winter Hill Gang members to federal prison. One of these, Anthony “Fat Tony” Ciulla, was unequivocal in his insistence that Whitey Bulger and his right-hand man Stephen Flemmi had taken a hefty cut of the profits. But the ever-crusty Jeremiah O’Sullivan, who saw his position as head of the Strike Force as a stepping-stone to a lucrative career as a high-profile defense attorney, which he went on to pursue in the 1990s, still refused to indict the two men who were the operation’s kingpins.

“We had no evidence against them outside of Ciulla’s word,” he told the
Globe
reporters. “Very rarely do you indict on just the word of an informant.”

25

BOSTON, 1995

“Did you hear about Bulger?” one of my old squad members asked over the phone in early 1995.

“What’s he done now?”

“He’s gone.”

“Guess he got one last tip,” was all I could think to say, a better prophet than I’d ever imagined, as it turned out.

I suppose I knew this day would come, the only conceivable resolution given the FBI clearly had no intention of ever prosecuting Whitey. I remember feeling strangely ambivalent at first, taking the news in stride. On the one hand, Bulger’s disappearance dredged up all the painful memories about my failed attempts to close him. On the other, the fact that he had been allowed to slip away was final affirmation of the Bureau’s utter incompetence and malfeasance in their dealings with him. This while providing no vindication for my efforts or claims at all, and only reviving my bitterness.