By the 1980s, Nee was in business with Bulger. They took part in an arms-smuggling operation in an attempt to send weapons to the Irish Republican Army. Nee was arrested and served eight years in prison. Afterward, Nee began to have suspicions about Bulger. “I knew something wasn’t right,” he says. “Others were getting arrested and sent to jail, but Bulger and Flemmi never seemed to get touched. We knew they had a relationship with Connolly; our understanding was that they were paying Connolly, he was on the take. But we didn’t know Whitey and Stevie were rats, supplying Connolly and the feds with information about us.”
Whitey’s power, says Nee, was based on his ability to play the game. “He was a master at keeping everyone in the dark. He had his relationship with Howie Winter in Somerville, with the Italians in the North End, with us in Southie. And he made sure we didn’t know what he was doing with those other groups.”
When asked what Bulger will do now that he’s been caught and faces seemingly insurmountable charges, Nee says, “All I know is that Bulger probably planned for this. He was always five or six steps ahead of everybody else.”
Bulger may want to exact revenge and manipulate his current predicament, but the question remains: Does he have any cards to play? His court-appointed attorney is J. W. Carney, a respected Boston lawyer known as the Patron Saint of Hopeless Cases. Carney’s last big case involved John Salvi, who shot up two abortion clinics in suburban Boston, killing two and injuring others. Salvi was found guilty at trial and sentenced to life without parole. Currently, Carney’s law firm is pouring over more than 17,000 pages of discovery material related to the Bulger case delivered to them by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. At a press conference in front of the Moakley courthouse in Boston, Carney told reporters, “I am always at the direction of my client, and I will do whatever Mr. Bulger instructs me to do.”
Bulger’s choices are limited. He could possibly plead guilty to the murder charges in exchange for a better deal for Greig, his companion, who is facing five years in prison for aiding and abetting a fugitive. He might also cop a plea to avoid the death penalty, like Flemmi did. Or he could throw a Hail Mary pass and go to trial.
Paul Griffin is an attorney who represented the family of Debra Davis in a civil lawsuit against the FBI and U.S. government. The suit alleged that the Davis family and other families of Bulger and Flemmi’s victims were entitled to damages, since the U.S. Justice Department had virtually underwritten the criminal careers of two notorious mobsters. Griffin is a former Boston cop. He believes that Whitey currently faces insurmountable odds. “Any plea that he agrees to, he gets a telephone pole shoved up the ass. If he goes to trial, he gets a telephone pole shoved up the ass.”
Bulger’s maneuverability is hindered by the fact that all of his criminal co-conspirators have already cut deals with the feds. Flemmi pleaded guilty to ten murders in October 2003 and was spared a lethal injection in exchange for his testimony. He is currently serving a life term in prison. Johnny Martorano, another prolific hit man who did murders with Bulger, confessed to twenty killings in 1999. In exchange for his testimony, he received a light fourteen-year prison sentence and was released in 2007. Kevin Weeks also cut an immunity deal with the feds, and will likely be called to testify against his former mentor in the Boston underworld.
“I hope Bulger enjoyed his years on the run,” says Anthony Cardinale, a criminal defense attorney who was among the first to uncover the Bulger-Connolly informant relationship. “Because now he’s late to the game. All of the others have made their deals, told their version of events. Bulger is facing a solid wall of discovery evidence going back decades, and there’s no one left for him to take down.”
For many, the deep stain of the Bulger years will never be expunged until his alliance with the government is exposed and supervising agents in the FBI are prosecuted or at least publicly excoriated. Bulger’s case agent, John Connolly, is in prison on obstruction of justice and second-degree murder charges stemming from his relationship with Bulger. Connolly’s supervisor, John Morris, pleaded guilty to taking $7,000 in bribes and gifts from Bulger; he was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony. But others in the FBI and the political arena who facilitated Bulger’s “unholy alliance,” from Boston to Washington, D.C., have never been held accountable.
Retired FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick, a lonely voice during the Bulger years who tried to call attention to corruption in the bureau’s Boston office, has always maintained that the culpability should be spread far and wide. “I don’t believe in the rogue agent theory,” he says. “Connelly didn’t do it alone. His dealings with Bulger were facilitated by the entire system.”
For nearly a decade, Fitzpatrick tried to right the ship. A veteran special agent who served at the Academy as an instructor on how to develop informants, Fitzpatrick was sent to Boston by his supervisors to evaluate Bugler’s “suitability” as an informant. Specifically, there had been complaints by the Massachusetts State Police that an investigation they had initiated into Bulger’s gambling operations was being undermined by the Boston FBI, who were leaking confidential details to Bulger.
Fitzpatrick was brought by John Morris, who supervised the FBI’s organized crime squad in Boston, to see Bulger at his condo in Quincy. “On the way there, in the car, Morris can’t stop telling me what a great guy Bulger is. He was overselling the guy, which made me suspicious.”
When Fitzpatrick met Bulger, the Mob boss was wearing a Red Sox’s baseball cap and sunglasses, even though they were indoors, standing in Bulger’s kitchen. Fitzpatrick extended his hand for Bulger to shake, but Whitey would not shake his hand. “He proceeds to tell me what a tough guy he is, starts bragging about his prison experiences in Leavenworth and Alcatraz.” Bulger bristled when Fitzpatrick referred to him as an informant; he made it clear that although he would supply the agents with underworld scuttlebutt, he would not testify in court.
“I got the impression that he was withholding,” says Fitzpatrick. “The meeting was a half hour to forty-five minutes. I cut it short. It was clear to me that Bulger could not be trusted, and that he likely had a propensity for violence. He was dangerous.”
The FBI agent filed a two-page report recommending that Bulger be “closed” as a confidential informant. Not only was the report overruled, but thus began a long period in which Bulger-related cases initiated by Fitzpatrick were mysteriously derailed. “We had four Bulger-related informants murdered, as we now know, by Bulger and Flemmi. Information about CIs was leaked to Bulger by our own people in law enforcement.” After five years of trying to close Bulger, Fitzpatrick became frustrated. “I was becoming a pain in the ass to people. I was bucking the tide. I started to feel as though I wasn’t part of the team. I lost my trust in the system.”
In the years since the Bulger House of Horrors began to unravel, Fitzpatrick has emerged as a rare good guy in the story, and his concerns have been proven correct. Now, Fitzpatrick worries that Bulger will resume his Svengali-like gaming of the system. “This guy controlled the entire criminal justice system in the state of Massachusetts. And he’s still got that attitude. He’s going to be cute. He’s going to try to manipulate people, just as he’s always done.”
Like many people who had encounters with Jim Bulger over the years, Fitzpatrick is clear about how he would like to see things play out for the most infamous mobster in Boston history. “I hope they fry the bastard,” he says.
The prospect of a trial has many in Boston licking their chops. Howie Carr, a popular radio personality and author of a bestselling book on the Bulger brothers, thinks that a long criminal proceeding with many witnesses would be good for the city. “There are still a lot of loose ends,” he says.
Of all the loose ends relating to the Bulger story, some of the most intriguing involve Billy Bulger. “I would like to see Billy indicted,” says Carr. The feeling among many is that Whitey would do almost anything to protect his brother.
With subpoenas being rendered and grand jury hearings underway, the U.S. Attorney’s Office appears to be focusing on who may have aided Bulger while he was a fugitive. Fresh criminal charges stemming from Bulger’s years on the run could be used to implicate others, perhaps, say, Billy Bulger, which would aid prosecutors in their efforts to demythologize the Bulger Mystique once and for all.
Meanwhile, Bulger is locked away at Plymouth County Correctional Facility. He has a lot to be concerned about, given that his life literally hangs in the balance. But according to those familiar with Bulger from his years as boss of the Boston underworld, he is likely hunkered down, feeling vengeful, while plotting to get even.
In the two decades that James “Whitey” Bulger served as a secret FBI informant while extorting citizens, peddling cocaine and killing people to protect his Boston-based criminal empire, there is only one federal agent who tried seriously to shut him down: Robert Fitzpatrick.
For his efforts, Fitzpatrick was frustrated at every turn, not by Bulger and his fellow gangsters, but by his own, the FBI.
After being introduced to Bulger in 1981, Fitzpatrick warned his regional supervisor that Whitey was “sociopathic … untrustworthy … likely to commit violence” and suggested that he be “closed” as an informant. Not only were his memos and recommendations ignored, some in the FBI sought to discredit Fitzpatrick and destroy his reputation.
The aggrieved former G-man finally has the opportunity to tell his side of the story in
Betrayal
, an explosive memoir of his years as assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office. The book has the feel of an ongoing therapy session, as Fitzpatrick seeks to make sense of a sprawling conspiracy of agents, cops, judges, criminals, and politicians who for decades enabled Bulger and made it possible for his campaign of corruption and terror to infect an entire city. Currently, Bulger awaits trial on nineteen counts of murder, after having been on the lam for sixteen years.
It is a sickening story, one that Fitzpatrick and his coauthor Jon Land allow to unfold slowly, like a toxic oil spill that envelopes and destroys the surrounding ecosystem—in this case, the entire criminal justice system of the state of Massachusetts.
It is now common knowledge that Special Agent John Connolly, Bulger’s primary handler in the Bureau who is presently in prison on murder charges, and former state senator William “Billy” Bulger, Whitey’s powerful politician brother, formed a support system that made it possible for the Bulger era to sustain itself. But in
Betrayal
, Fitzpatrick broadens the conspiracy, detailing the culpability of a vast matrix of enablers, including, most notably, the late Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan, who, as lead prosecutor for the state’s Organized Crime Strike Force, undermined potential prosecutions of both Whitey and Billy Bulger, and Lawrence Sarhatt and James Greenleaf, successive special agents in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, who buried reports, including Fitzpatrick’s recommendation that Bulger be “closed” as an informant.
Fitzpatrick does not attempt to portray himself as a hero; the dominant tone of the book is one of frustration and astonishment as the author, who was sent to Boston by FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., with the expressed task of evaluating Bulger’s “suitability” as a Top Echelon informant, encounters malfeasance and corruption at every level.
Early in the book, he describes being a young boy at the infamous Mount Loretto orphanage in Staten Island, New York, where he encountered bullies and institutional abuse. Late at night, he sought solace by laying in the dark and listening to the popular radio program
This Is Your FBI
. Fitzpatrick’s belief in the FBI as both an avenue of personal salvation and an institutional force for justice haunts the book, as the reality of corruption and careerism crushes his idealism much the same way Bulger strangled, shot, and mutilated his murder victims.
Fitzpatrick came to Boston well suited to deal with subterfuge and corruption. He had gone undercover in the Deep South in the mid-1960s in an attempt to penetrate and bring down white supremacist organizations. In the 1970s, he’d been one of the lead agents on the ABSCAM investigation, a sting operation involving corrupt public officials that led to numerous high-profile arrests, including the indictment of a sitting U.S. senator.
In Boston, Fitzpatrick spent nearly a decade trying to unravel what he calls “the Bulger arrangement.” As a veteran G-man who had trained budding agents on the proper cultivation of criminal informants at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia, he recognized all the telltale signs of a disaster in the making. He saw that Connolly and his supervisor, John Morris, were too close to Bulger. Also, as Fitzpatrick noted to anyone who would listen, the Bulger situation violated one of the most basic tenets of informant cultivation: The proper strategy with informants is to get someone mid-level who can help take down the boss and therefore an entire organization. You cannot have an organized crime kingpin as an informant, because it is inevitable that person will choose to manipulate the information they reveal to their handlers as a way of
staying
in power.
When it became apparent to Fitzpatrick that his warnings about the Bulger relationship were being ignored, he sought to build his own cases against the Mob boss. He developed informants like Brian Halloran, a sad-sack career thug who worked for Bulger, and John McIntyre, a naive Irish Republican Army (IRA) sympathizer who partnered with Bulger on a scheme to send guns to Northern Ireland in exchange for shipments of marijuana and cocaine. Agents in Fitzpatrick’s own office leaked information to Bulger about the informants; Halloran and McIntyre were both brutally murdered by Bulger, as were other informants whose identities were compromised and revealed to local gangsters by Connolly and Morris.