Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (3 page)

The Bureau took its motto—Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity—seriously. But in Boston, if suspicions about Richie Castucci’s murder were true, that motto had become more option than mandate.

My new job as Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) of one of the top ten Bureau offices in the country was to handle all organized crime for New England and command the Drug Task Force. Other duties that comingled with the organized crime investigations included White Collar Crime (WCC), Public Corruption (PC), and so-called nontraditional Organized Crime (OC) involving the Irish thugs who roamed free through the closeted, insular society of Charlestown, Somerville, and South Boston.

Larry Sarhatt, the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Boston office, picked me up at the downtown hotel that served as my temporary residence on a damp chilly day in early 1981—the rain that had been forecast had yet to come. He drove me to the FBI office at Government Square, near the Italian North End in the heart of the former Irish bastion, Scolley Square, where we occupied the whole of the sixth floor. My office overlooked the front of the building, the infamous Boston traffic jams leading to snarled streets virtually all day long, the honking of horns and blowing of sirens providing a background din that became as familiar as the clanking of the corner radiator or the soft hum of the air conditioner. I could walk out my door and view the workings of most of the agents serving on any number of the squads I’d been placed in command of. Some of the more junior ones worked out of spaces that were little more than cubicles or shared cramped offices—well, smaller than mine. The office floor was always busy but never frantic, since so many of the agents spent their days in the field on active investigations, of which there were plenty. We had agents who lived for the blue lights and sirens, and those who did not. I’d met a number of them and knew others by reputation, enough to be sure they made for a good lot with plenty of solid casework and convictions to their credit.

Larry Sarhatt was eager to get on with business and welcomed any assistance, especially in the manpower area. He went through the prospective “priority one” La Cosa Nostra (LCN) cases on deck in Boston, specifically the investigation of Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo, who reported directly to the head of the New England mob, Raymond Patriarca, out of Providence, Rhode Island.

Jerry Angiulo was the underboss of the New England LCN, presiding over sixteen ranking members who reported to him. Everything about these wiseguys was steeped in their own bloody traditions, such as the initiation ceremonies that offered a sense of code and moral backing to their actions, as loathsome and reprehensible as they were.
The Godfather
movies and “mafia” pulp fiction glamorized the culture, enticing wannabes to emulate the fictionalized images.

Not so the case for the members of the Winter Hill Gang. These Somerville wiseguys were decidedly Irish muffs tagged by the FBI as a nontraditional group of the organized crime element. We knew approximately twenty of these guys were in leadership positions, supervising three hundred soldiers and grunts, all under the auspices of Bulger and his right-hand man, Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi. It was abundantly evident that both groups had their preferred methods of violence and murder. The Irish wiseguys would “frag” a bunch of people to get their target, while the Italian wiseguys would just garrote the one target and stuff him in the trunk of some car. The Irish were definitely more homegrown, all in all, than the Italian mob, which led them to be even more insular.

I knew Bulger as a thug, a street enforcer who’d spent a quarter of his life behind bars, including a stretch at Alcatraz and another at Leavenworth in Kansas. I’d heard he prided himself on being a tough guy who inspired fear in allies and enemies alike. Ruthless and brutal, as his rise to the top of the Winter Hill Gang in the wake of Howie Winter’s imprisonment attested. He wasn’t a big guy physically, and word was he wasn’t just street smart; he was smart, period, capable of playing chess while those around him opted for checkers. But he played for real, to which the forty-three murders he’s allegedly responsible for more than demonstrate.

Sarhatt briefed me on the informant situation, explaining that a major informant against the Angiulo family, Bulger himself, was being videotaped and surveilled at a mob garage on Lancaster Street in downtown Boston by the Massachusetts State Police (MSP). MSP grew incensed when Bulger and his associates suddenly and inexplicably clammed up, claiming that FBI agents John Connolly and John Morris, Bulger’s Bureau handlers, had leaked word of the investigation to their prized informant. Sarhatt informed me that Colonel John O’Donovan, the much decorated and current head of the MSP, suspected as much and was livid over the fact that nothing had been done about it. Worse, he was convinced this was an ongoing problem.

An old-fashioned cop to whom a bad guy was a bad guy, O’Donovan was a stout, rangy man with sinewy muscles born of boxing as a kid and old-fashioned weightlifting into his fifties. He had a shock of balding gray hair that shifted with every toss of his head, and a single piercing blue eye that looked tired whenever I saw him. He had been shot in the eye by a gangster early in his career, earning him a much-deserved reputation. The real deal when it came to tough. In O’Donovan’s mind, Bulger and Flemmi were nothing short of stone killers and the last people the FBI should be doing business with. He followed protocol by informing the Boston FBI office of his intentions to find incriminating evidence against Bulger and Flemmi in any number of crimes, specifically murder. Sarhatt’s and the FBI office’s dilemma was that they could not officially tell the MSP that their targets were informants for the FBI. Politics and internecine conflicts never entered the picture for O’Donovan or, if they did, were superseded by the bad blood Bulger was tracking through the city.

Larry Sarhatt was caught in the middle of this dilemma between loyalty to his own agents and his greater responsibility to the Bureau. The only way he could reconcile things was to determine whether to keep Bulger on the FBI books as an informant or “close” him. In his heart, I knew he wanted Bulger cut loose. He’d come to that conclusion after interviewing Bulger himself barely a year before, only to be overruled by Jeremiah O’Sullivan, the prosecutor running the federal Organized Crime Strike Force. O’Sullivan, along with FBIHQ in Washington, wanted Bulger to remain open as a top echelon criminal informant as long as he continued to provide information about the mob families out of Boston and Providence. He was, in their minds, too valuable to close. But the real question was just how valuable was Whitey Bulger, and answering it became my first mandate.

I wasn’t a fan of O’Sullivan from the get-go. He seemed too much the button-down bureaucrat who wore his ambition on his sleeve. He was thin and pale, fond of flashing a narrow condescending smile to create a sense of false camaraderie. I remember his hair looked to be glued into place, every word and gesture made as if the cameras weren’t too far away. I saw him in federal court several times, his spine straight, every move looking rehearsed—from the moment he first stepped into the building to the time he climbed back into his car parked outside Government Center.

Sarhatt, on the other hand, was a traditionalist whose nonflashy, by-the-book, pragmatic style had him running afoul of agents beholden to the more popular criminal agent SAC he’d replaced over a year before. So he told me he was relying on my background to make sense of the muddle. For manpower and resource management, he looked to my previous major case and experience at HQ; for assessment, he looked to my training in the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy, where I gained expert knowledge in profiling and polygraph as well as expertise in the area of abnormal criminal psychology. He knew operationally I had conducted major investigations all over the country—from New Orleans to Mississippi to Memphis to Miami—both undercover and not, and had handled complex cases, always achieving favorable resolutions. In other words, I was a “closer,” and that’s exactly what he needed on his side now.

More to the point, in retrospect, I was sent to Boston to offer all parties political cover. The thinking on the part of McKinnon and others was that the success I’d achieved in the ABSCAM investigation would trump the dueling viewpoints that had all but obscured any rational assessment of how much Bulger was actually contributing to the cause. And since I was an outsider, my objectivity could not be called into question.

Larry Sarhatt and I ended our first meeting with a simple mandate: If everything suggested by the Richie Castucci murder was true, we would tackle the problems in Boston once and for all.

4

BOSTON, 1980

Prior to my transfer to Boston, I was an instructor and supervisor at the FBI Academy, where Massachusetts State Police chief Colonel John O’Donovan attended one of my death investigations courses. Each attendee had to bring an unsolved case that was presented to the other forty-nine death investigators from across the country. These were cold cases, and tackling them with seasoned investigators was as informative as it was rewarding.

O’Donovan’s contribution, his unsolved case, was the 1976 Richie Castucci murder in Boston. The colonel was pretty outspoken and criticized the Boston FBI office for “hanging” with criminals and “fixing” cases for the wiseguys. His presentation included the fact that Castucci was a sometime informant for the MSP, so he’d taken a personal interest in Castucci’s murder. Upon arriving in Boston, then, one of my first orders of business was to discuss the case with both a former Boston SAC, Dick Bates, and the man I was replacing, Joe Yablonski, who served as co-ASAC with Weldon Kennedy. They filled in most of the blanks that O’Donovan had left out in the sordid tale, both having been intimately acquainted with different aspects of the case.

Castucci, they told me, had enjoyed a long association with Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang. A bookie who reveled in their protection and profited richly off the positioning and posturing they allotted him, Richie also fancied himself an entrepreneur. He owned a nightclub on Boston’s north shore in Revere. With the stench of stale beer and cigarettes imbedded in its plank flooring and walls, the Ebb Tide was hardly about to attract patrons based on its décor. But luckily for Richie he didn’t have to rely on normal clientele for business. Instead, the club boasted a customer base drawn almost entirely from local criminals with whom Richie felt most comfortable.

The Ebb Tide had overcome a bad refrigeration system, outdated wiring, and windows that did little to keep the cold out in the winter to become a prime place for wiseguys and wannabes to hang out. A place to be seen, a place to congregate, to figure out where money was ripe for the taking. Castucci, for his part, loved the crowd and the attention, but hated the building that had fallen into a perpetual state of disrepair. Accordingly, for some time he’d been planning to sell his interest in the Ebb Tide in favor of a classy strip joint he called the Squire Club, which promised to be an even better hangout for his mob contacts and, thus, better for his business.

There weren’t many patrons of the Ebb Tide who didn’t enjoy a first-name familiarity with Richie. He was polite, affable, and pretty much liked by everyone on both sides of the tracks. He dressed in the style of
Saturday Night Fever,
an extremely popular film at the time. Richie fancied himself a poor man’s version of the Tony Manero character played by John Travolta, adopting a disco seventies theme highlighted by his pointed shoes, perfectly coiffed hair, and manicured nails. He carried himself flamboyantly, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, and for a time, he didn’t.

Richie’s real business was taking bets from his Boston clientele as well as most of the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville and South Boston. Always looking to branch out and expand his interests, he also purchased horses and raced them at a track outside Boston called Suffolk Downs. His dealings in this arena were usually made under pseudonyms so he could avoid tax and revenue problems and keep his profit margin on an even keel. Richie might not have been nearly as big as he made himself out to be, but he knew how to talk the talk and walk the walk.

He also distinguished himself from the average muffs by driving “big” in his Cadillac, a symbol that he was a comer. He had a rep for being generous enough to let late payers slide and for trying to please everybody, the go-to guy whenever anyone on either side of the street needed a favor.

But no one was more important to Richie Castucci than Whitey Bulger. Bulger was the boss to whom Richie paid “tribute,” allowing him to work the Somerville, Southie, and Boston crowds. But Richie was also important to Bulger. Being somewhat of a made guy with his Italian friends positioned Richie as a conduit between them and Whitey’s Irish gang out of South Boston. He served as a kind of early warning system, there to keep Bulger apprised of potential trouble, for the truce between the Irish gang and Italian mob seemed ready to collapse at any moment. The canary in this particlar coal mine, so to speak.

Outside of Boston, most of Richie’s closest friends came from New York City. In an emergency situation, Bulger summoned Richie with news about a couple of Boston muffs who got caught up with the feds over a strong-arm robbery and instructed Richie to get them a place in Manhattan to hide out. Eager to make his bones with the Winter Hill crew, especially Whitey and his chief henchman Stevie “The Rifleman” Flemmi, Richie was more than willing to oblige.

Aware of his easy reach into the Winter Hill Gang, the FBI paid Richie a routine visit around this same time. A baby-faced agent, nicknamed “Opie” because of his resemblance to Andy Griffith’s son in the popular television show, claimed in droll fashion that Richie’s wife was seeing Sal Caruana, a known drug dealer and cartel importer of marijuana.

“We don’t want anything from you,” Opie insisted, smiling as if they were old friends. “We’re just giving you the heads-up so you don’t look like an asshole to your associates.”