Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (2 page)

TO US, the idea seemed far-fetched, even self-serving.

For Cullen, who lived in South Boston, it cut against everything then known about a gangster with a reputation as the ultimate stand-up guy, a crime boss who demanded total loyalty from his associates. It defied the culture of Bulger’s world, South Boston, and his heritage, Ireland. The Irish have long had a special hatred for informants. We’d seen, some of us more than once, the famous John Ford 1934 movie
The Informer,
with its timeless and unmatched portrayal of the horror and hate the Irish have for a snitch. More local was a South Boston wiretap that became a classic in the city’s annals of wiseguy patter. The secret recording captured one of Bulger’s own underlings talking to his girlfriend.

“I hate fuckin’ rats,” John “Red” Shea complained. “They’re just as bad as rapists and fuckin’ child molesters.” And what would he do if he found an informant? “I’d tie him to a chair, okay? Then I’d take a baseball bat, and I’d take my best swing across his fuckin’ head. I’d watch his head come off his shoulders. Then I’d take a chainsaw and cut his fuckin’ toes off.

“I’ll talk to you later, sweetheart.”

This was Whitey’s world, where feelings about informants cut wide and deep, from the lowbrow to the high. Even brother Billy voiced a more refined version of Red Shea’s sentiments. In his 1996 memoir, he recalled the time when he and some boyhood chums were playing baseball and broke a streetlight. The kids were told they’d get the ball back once they identified the offender. None broke rank. “We loathed informers,” wrote Billy Bulger. “Our folklore bled with the names of informers who had sold out their brethren to hangmen and worse in the lands of our ancestors.”

Since this was Whitey’s folklore too, the four of us back in 1988 were flat-out incredulous about the informant theory. We turned the idea over and inside out and decided, no way. The claim had to amount to nothing more than the wild and reckless flailings of embittered investigators who’d failed in their bid to bust Whitey Bulger. The idea of Bulger as informant seemed preposterous.

But the notion nagged, an irresistible itch that stayed close to the surface. What if it were really true?

The big news in Boston in 1988 was the presidential candidacy of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, but all during these months of presidential politics we grew more intrigued and committed to the Whitey story. So Cullen went back out. Lehr joined in. There were more interviews with the investigators who’d stalked Bulger and tried to build cases against him. The investigators painstakingly reviewed their case-work, all of which ended the same way: Bulger walked away, uncharged and unscathed, laughing over his shoulder. They talked about a certain FBI agent, John Connolly, who, like the Bulgers, had grown up in Southie. Connolly had been seen with Whitey.

We wrote to the FBI in Boston and requested, under the Freedom of Information Act, intelligence files and material on Bulger. It was a formality; that the request was stonewalled came as no surprise. But we certainly could not write a story reporting that Bulger was an FBI informant. We had only the strong suspicions—but with no proof—of others in law enforcement. No confirmation was forthcoming from inside the FBI. The best we had, we decided, was a story about how Bulger had divided local law enforcement. It would be a piece about cop culture, with troopers and drug agents always coming up short and then hinting at their dark suspicions of the FBI. In a way, Bulger had divided and conquered; he’d won.

THE BOSTON underworld and the interplay between investigators involved ghost stories, smoke and mirrors; the idea of Bulger as an informant still seemed unlikely to us. Nonetheless, we launched a final round of reporting to test what we’d learned on our FBI sources. The gist of that reporting is described in chapter 16 of this book. In the end we were indeed able to confirm, from within the FBI, that the unthinkable was true: Bulger was an informant for the FBI and had been so for years.

The story in September 1988 was published to heated denials from local FBI officials. In Boston, FBI agents were used to playing the press, feeding information to reporters thankful for a scoop that, of course, made the FBI look good. In this context, it came as no surprise that the Boston FBI acted offended, betrayed. And many people accepted their denials; after all, who was more believable? The FBI, the stand-tall G-men who’d been getting good ink for taking down the Italian mob? Or a group of reporters whom the FBI portrayed as having an ax to grind? With the utter unlikeliness of Bulger being an informant and the sheer vehemence of the FBI denials, the story was seen as speculation, not the dark truth.

Nearly a decade would pass before the FBI was required by court order to confirm what it had steadfastly denied for so long: that Bulger and Flemmi had in fact been informants, Bulger since 1975 and Flemmi since before that. The disclosures were made in 1997 at the outset of an unprecedented federal court examination of the corrupt ties between the FBI and Bulger and Flemmi. In 1998 ten months of sworn testimony and stacks of previously secret FBI files revealed a breathtaking pattern of wrongdoing: money passing hands between informants and agents; obstruction of justice and multiple leaks by the FBI to protect Bulger and Flemmi from investigations by other agencies; gift exchanges and extravagant dinners between agents and informants. Many of the agents’ remarks featured an unmistakable arrogance—as if they owned the city. It was easy to imagine the FBI and Bulger and Flemmi celebrating their secret, holding their wineglasses high and toasting their success in outwitting the state troopers, cops, and federal drug agents who’d tried to build a case against them, never realizing the fix was in.

OF COURSE, the Bulger case does not mark the first time trouble involving agents and their informants has exploded publicly for the FBI. In the mid-1980s a veteran agent in Miami admitted to taking $850,000 in bribes from his informant during a drug trafficking case. Better known is the affair involving Jackie Presser, the former Teamsters Union president, who served as an FBI informant for a decade before his death in July 1988. Presser’s handlers at the FBI were accused of lying to protect him from a 1986 indictment, and one FBI supervisor was eventually fired.

But the Bulger scandal is worse than any other, a cautionary tale that is, most fundamentally, about the abuse of power that goes unchecked. The arrangement might have made sense in the beginning, as part of the FBI’s war cry against La Cosa Nostra (LCN). Partly with help from Bulger and, especially, from Flemmi, the top Mafia bosses were long gone by the 1990s, replaced by a lineup of forgettable benchwarmers with memorable nicknames. In sharp contrast, Bulger was the crime boss who, throughout the years, was the constant fixture in the underworld. Whitey was the household name, and he and Flemmi the varsity players.

“Top echelon informant” means an informant who provides the FBI with firsthand secrets about high-level organized crime figures. FBI guidelines require that informants be closely monitored by FBI handlers. But what if the informant begins to “handle” the FBI agents? What if, instead of the FBI, the informant is mainly in charge, and the FBI calls him their “bad good guy”?

What if the FBI takes down the informant’s enemies and the informant rises to the top of the underworld? What if the FBI protects the informant by tipping him off to investigations conducted by other police agencies?

What if murders pile up, unsolved? If working folks are threatened and extorted, with no recourse? If a large-scale cocaine ring, time and again, eludes investigators? If elaborate government bugging operations, costing taxpayers millions, are leaked and ruined?

This could never happen, right, a deal between the FBI and a top echelon informant going this bad?

But it did.

Today we know that the deal between Bulger and the FBI was deeper, dirtier, and more personal than anyone had imagined, and it was a deal that was sealed one moonlit night in 1975 between two sons of Southie, Bulger and a young FBI agent named John Connolly.

DICK LEHR AND GERARD O’NEILL

Boston, April 2000

Whitey’s World

The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.

Under
a harvest moon, FBI agent John Connolly eased his beat-up Plymouth into a parking space along Wollaston Beach. Behind him the water stirred and, further off, the Boston skyline sparkled. The shipbuilding city of Quincy, bordering Boston to the south, was a perfect location for the kind of meeting the agent had in mind. The roadway along the beach, Quincy Shore Drive, ran right into the Southeast Expressway. Heading north, any of the expressway’s next few exits led smack into South Boston, the neighborhood where Connolly and his “contact” had both grown up. Using these roads, the drive to and from Southie took just a few minutes. But convenience alone was not the main reason the location made a lot of sense. Most of all, neither Connolly nor the man he was scheduled to meet wanted to be spotted together in the old neighborhood.

Backing the Plymouth into the space along the beach, Connolly settled in and began his wait. In the years to come Connolly and the man he was expecting would never stray too far from one another. They shared Southie, always living and working within a radius of a mile of each other in an underworld populated by investigators and gangsters.

But that came later. For now Connolly waited eagerly along Wollaston Beach, the thrum of the engine a drag to the buzz inside the car that was like an electric charge. Having won a transfer back to his hometown a year earlier, he was poised to make his mark in the Boston office of the nation’s elite law enforcement agency. He was only thirty-five years old, and this was going to be his chance. His big moment in the FBI had arrived.

The nervy agent was coming of age in an FBI struggling with a rare public relations setback. In Congress inquiries into FBI abuses had confirmed that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had for years been stockpiling information on the private lives of politicians and public figures in secret files. The FBI’s main target, the Mafia, was also in the news. Swirling around were sensational disclosures involving a bizarre partnership between the CIA and the Mafia, also unearthed during congressional investigations. There was talk of a CIA deal with mafiosi to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and of murder plots that involved poisoned pens and poisoned cigars.