Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (25 page)

That wasn’t all. The fact that Bulger was now on the lam presented a very real threat to me. He’d already made his intentions plain to John Morris, and the fact that he was now free to come after me, and my family, unsettled my wife Jane and our two young daughters, who were afraid to go to sleep, to school, or leave the house at all. Our friends offered us safe harbor, a place to hide from a man they knew wanted vengeance against me for pursuing him without end. Bulger had killed plenty for just talking about him, telling the truth, and I’d continued to do just that in my years after leaving the Bureau. The tension was palpable, increasing with each call from friends or associates to check on my well-being. I was never far removed from my gun and made sure the blinds were always drawn over the windows. Seeing the fear in the faces of my wife and daughters replaced my anxiety with anger over the fact that their lives were being disrupted by this psychopath who should have been jailed long before he had the opportunity to escape. I almost wish Bulger had come after me, so I could have settled things once and for all myself.

Bulger’s disappearance became a de facto demarcation point whereby the debacle, as far as I was concerned, moved the action from the street almost entirely into the courtroom. John Connolly, who would soon face trial and imprisonment for his actions, had retired from the Bureau. John Morris would suffer a heart attack while in Quantico following a telephone call from Whitey apocryphally telling him “he was going down with the ship,” a threat to effectively end his career as well. And not long after Whitey vanished, hearings before Judge Mark Wolf in Boston federal court would further expose much of the way the FBI had done business in Boston over the years.

The playbook had already begun to change with Connolly’s retirement as 1990 drew to a close. It’d be easy to say he saw the writing on the wall, but the writing had been there for years, Connolly brash and arrogant enough to ignore it. Still, he saw an opportunity to get out while the getting was good. I heard a hell of retirement party was held for him; guess my invitation got lost in the mail. Whitey’s, too. Connolly’s loyal service to one Bulger, though, had earned him payback from another Bulger. Among the “perks” of his retirement package was a “lobbying job” for Boston Edison, a power company, at Billy Bulger’s State House complete with a $112,000 annual salary.

“We take care of our own here,” Billy had told me during our one meeting, as much a show of force as a warning.

And he had taken care of John Connolly splendidly. Connolly had paid his dues to the Bulger family and was now reaping the rewards. John Morris left Boston soon after, bound for Los Angeles to become Assistant Special Agent in Charge there, en route to his heart attack a few years later. I’d like to say I smiled over the irony of Morris assuming the same position in L.A. I’d held in Boston, but I didn’t.

As for Whitey, years prior to his disappearance he hit the lottery on someone else’s ticket. The jackpot number had been purchased at the Rotary Variety Store Bulger owned, and he was able to “cajole” the winner into splitting the proceeds fifty-fifty with him. That amounted to about $90,000 a year after taxes, enough to live pretty well on if it ever came to that.

But this time even Whitey must have seen the writing on the wall, especially with the security blanket he’d maintained, in the form of Connolly and Morris, gone. Not that he intended to lay low, not with the Boston rackets and a drug trade under his control. The new mafia boss, Frank “Cadillac” Salemme, may not have taken his orders directly from Bulger, but neither did he make any move that would have stoked the old tribal fires between Boston’s Irish and Italian mobs. The only kind of peace Whitey knew was one that left him calling the shots, and Salemme was happy to cede whatever it took to keep that peace. Since he’d have far less insulation to cushion him the next time his escapades resulted in blowback, Whitey was more than happy to let Salemme take the heat while he laid low, at least in relative terms.

Then a new “sheriff” came to town, specifically an assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office by the name of Fred Wyshak. The New York–born Wyshak had the advantage of a proven background, like mine, having successfully prosecuted the New Jersey mob in his last stopover. He didn’t have to worry about John Connolly, John Morris, or James Greenleaf running interference for the murderous Bulger. Nor was he beholden to the legacy and rules of the FBI that had so hamstrung my efforts.

Brian Kelly, a thirty-year-old U.S. attorney who worked the case with Wyshak, couldn’t believe the evidence before them, specifically that a pair of psychopaths, Bulger and Flemmi, had been able to run roughshod over one of the largest Bureau offices in the country. To Kelly and Wyshak himself, this was absolutely mind-boggling and further complicated by the fact that they couldn’t find a single example over the past decade where information provided by the prized Bulger had led to an arrest, much less successful prosecution.

Fred Wyshak, who I met only briefly and with whom I had very little real interaction, didn’t have to worry about embarrassing the Bureau. He had the entire United States government behind him and was smart enough to first target Howie Winter, recently released from a long stretch of prison. His Winter Hill Gang had been remade in Whitey Bulger’s image. Operating out of Southie as a satellite of the Sommerville Winter Hill Gang, it was similar in a way to the North End as an organized crime satellite to Patriarca’s OC Providence gang. It allowed Bulger to pull the wool over Winter’s eyes because no one knew what was going on “down there” in Southie.

Howie Winter later remarked that Bulger built his power base that way, and Winter had no choice but to accept it: there was plenty of work to go around, some of which made him fodder for Wyshak on a drug beef. What’s clear from this arrest was that Wyshak’s focus was trained on Bulger. And when Winter refused to give Whitey up, clinging to an old code his Winter Hill rival had long abandoned, Wyshak resolved to find another way to get his true quarry.

That is, until the new assistant U.S. attorney fell victim to the culture of corruption that still pervaded the Boston office of the FBI, even with the recent departures of John Connolly and John Morris and less recent transfer of James Greenleaf. Wyshak wired up a Bulger money launderer named Tim Connolly (no relation to John) to get the dirt he needed, only to have Whitey suddenly clam up around Connolly. Stephen Flemmi would later testify that Whitey had been tipped off, the tradition seemingly having outlived its founders.

Still, Wyshak didn’t give up. He set his sights on what he saw as the weak link of Bulger’s operation—bookmaking—to make a federal racketeering case against him. With his FBI family and Jeremiah O’Sullivan no longer there to short circuit such efforts, Whitey found himself suddenly vulnerable. The man wearing the bull’s-eye instead of the one painting it on others. Wyshak went after Bulger’s army of bookies like a pit bull, ultimately accumulating enough evidence to secure racketeering indictments against Salemme, Flemmi, and Whitey himself in late 1994. Flemmi was taken into custody, Salemme fled to Florida where he, too, was arrested a few months later, but Whitey was nowhere to be found. Whether he was tipped off or not in one last show of deference by the Bureau, at least to some, remains in dispute. What isn’t in dispute is that his gangster associate Kevin Weeks funneled enough money to Whitey early on to keep him on the lam through America’s underbelly. Places he wouldn’t have been caught dead in before, where his status as a legendary kingpin on the streets of Boston meant nothing.

The next contact anyone else had with Whitey was none other than John Morris in that phone call while Morris was serving as training director at the FBI Academy. There are differing versions of that conversation, but one thing is clear in all of them: Whitey warned Morris not to talk, not to give him up. Do that and Morris would be going down, too. Or worse. Bulger disappeared for good after that call and, other than a few rumored sightings, wasn’t heard from again until his June 2011 capture in Santa Monica, California.

But his name surfaced plenty in the now infamous Wolf hearings that began three years after his disappearance. Infamous because the mob-related testimony and evidentiary material blew the lid off the FBI’s casual use, and protection, of criminals as informants, and nearly blew up the case against Frank Salemme and the other defendants.

“The court has reviewed the defendant’s Motion to Disclose Confidential Information and Suppress Electronic Surveillance conducted in this case,” wrote the presiding judge, Mark Wolf, in one of his rulings after several days of closed sessions. “In this case, in which the defendants are charged, among other things with conducting a racketeering enterprise, the fact that a codefendant was during the relevant period a confidential informant for the FBI would, if true, constitute exculpatory information to which his codefendants are entitled.”

In other words, the State, and thus the FBI, had no choice but to reveal who their informants were and how exactly they had been used. What many had suspected for decades, starting with Colonel John O’Donovan of the Massachusetts State Police, the very root of the cancer that had infected the Boston office, was about to be laid bare for public inspection in open court. And that would mean, under no uncertain terms, many of the claims that had followed my interview with Whitey Bulger that night in his Quincy condo, and subsequent recommendations that he be closed as an informant, were going to be revealed. Specifically, that he had played the FBI for years without furnishing the exacting information that supposedly made him indispensable.

The bull had broken free of the barn and was running loose in the China shop, and now the FBI and Justice Department were about to be called in for a reckoning.

What followed through much of 1998 in Judge Wolf’s courtroom was a virtual parade of the rogue’s gallery responsible for the entire sham. Everyone from Dennis Condon, who had gotten the ball rolling, to John Morris, who had kept it going through the years, to forty-four more witnesses, who took the witness stand—everyone shed a different light on the business the Bureau had been doing in the dark. Among those not to testify at all or only briefly, this time anyway, was Jeremiah O’Sullivan, who’d recently suffered a heart attack. Since this had long been a classic mafiosa ploy to avoid court, O’Sullivan became the inside joke while nonetheless being spared the questioning that would have revealed either his incompetence or possible treachery in protecting Bulger at every turn.

Meanwhile, the rats fled the sinking ship and began to consume each other. Connolly turned on Morris, Morris turned on Connolly, and Connolly turned on everyone except himself. Even loyalist John Martorano, fresh from hearing testimony that Bulger and Flemmi had given him up to the feds, redefined his own code by ratting out those who’d first ratted him out. His philosophy said it was okay to rat on a rat. But he did two extra years in prison instead of cueing the feds to the truth about his brother and Pat Nee, and they received more lenient sentences as a result.

All I could think of was how so much of it could’ve been avoided if Larry Sarhatt and HQ had simply acted on my recommendation to close Bulger as an informant in 1981. The lives that could have been spared, the embarrassment that could have been avoided …

Don’t embarrass the Bureau.

From my perspective, one especially revealing exchange on this subject took place once Stephen Flemmi took the stand to be examined by a frustrated, fuming U.S. attorney, Fred Wyshak.

“You had a good thing going,” Wyshak said at one point. “You were committing crimes at will, putting money in your pockets, and, in your view, being protected from prosecution.”

“You’re forgetting one thing, Mr. Wyshak,” Flemmi replied. “The LCN was taken down. That was the FBI’s main goal. They were completely satisfied with that. We fulfilled our bargain.”

“Do you think, Mr. Flemmi, that you and Mr. Bulger single-handedly took the LCN down?”

“I’ll tell you something, Mr. Wyshak, we did a hell of a job.”

“That’s what you think?”

“I think we did. The FBI thought we did.”

“And when the FBI did that, you and Mr. Bulger were top dogs in town, weren’t you?”

Flemmi, dejected, said, “I’ll assert the Fifth on that.”

26

BOSTON, 1998

As I sat down with the Strike Force attorney in a preliminary interview on the morning the Wolf hearings began in 1998, I was apprehensive and wary. Why had the Department of Justice scheduled this interview so late and what could I tell them in this short time period? I had already provided Wyshak’s team with other dates and times for an appointment, but they didn’t seem responsive. The government’s Strike Force attorney, James Herbert, greeted me cordially, skipping the usual pleasantries that preclude opening questioning. We opened with my tenure at the FBI Boston office and I named the characters involved. My apprehension in discussing Connolly and Morris and the whole corruption angle proved justified when Herbert flipped his pencil in the air, shaking his head and muttering something to the effect that he would never finish in time.

“Was it something I said?” I asked him.

“No,” he abjectly responded, “it’s just that we’ve run out of time.”

“Are you pissed at me?” I asked, sensing his sudden tension.

He had a sullen look on his face underlying an even deeper hurt. Something serious was bothering him, but I was in no position to understand what. He apologized and then, obviously upset and writhing with indignation, left the room to head for his opening day in court. Connolly’s pals had clearly bad-mouthed me to him, and I think Herbert had begun to see that, contrary to what he might have heard, I was telling the truth and that many others in the Bureau had lied to him.

My interview with James Herbert indicated that the prosecutors didn’t have a grasp of how deep this went, even as the hearing was about to begin. Fred Wyshak had built a bookmaking case in masterful fashion. But the tentacles around the bookies inevitably reached out into murder and corruption inside the FBI. There was no way to separate one from the other. Bulger and Flemmi were literally joined at the hip to Connolly and Morris. I realize now that my answers must have scared the hell out of James Herbert and he couldn’t wrap his arms around the breadth of what I was telling him.