Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (37 page)

BULGER: “$50,000 would be more like it.”

SLINGER: “I don’t have that kind of money.”

BULGER: “Well, I think you better find it.”

Slinger went straight to the downstairs bar to fortify himself before returning to his East Broadway Street office. He made a desperate call for help to city councilor James Kelly. After Kelly talked to Bulger, he told Slinger everything should be okay.

But it wasn’t. Two days later Slinger heard from Kevin O’Neil, the Bulger associate who ran Triple O’s. O’Neil told him “the man” wanted to see him again. Sensing the worst, Slinger returned to Triple O’s with a racing heart and a gun borrowed from a friend. Once inside, two of Bulger’s henchmen seized him immediately, pushing and shoving him up the stairs to the second floor, where a ranting Bulger was waiting. Slinger recalled that they “grabbed me and pulled me upstairs, frisked me, opened my shirt, took my gun away, and started belting me, beat me up.” Out of the melee, Slinger had the clear memory of Bulger kicking him.

Bulger and his underlings sat Slinger down hard in a chair. They made sure he was not wearing a wire and then upbraided him for talking to Kelly. Bulger took Slinger’s gun and placed the barrel pointing down on the top of Slinger’s head, explaining that the bullet would go down the spinal column and not cause a bloody mess. Bulger then ordered an aide to get him a “body bag,” and Slinger nearly passed out from fright. “I thought I was done.”

The moment passed, and Slinger was given a second chance to come up with the money. With a ripped shirt and scarred psyche, Slinger stumbled to the downstairs bar again. When he got back to his office, he called his sister and wife and lined up loans for a $10,000 payment. He also agreed to a weekly payment schedule.

About two months after he was slapped around and terrorized by Bulger, Slinger began to stagger under the burden of making the weekly $2,000 payments, which he put in a paper bag and handed over to O’Neil in a car outside the realty office. Slinger had paid half the debt, but he was so desperate that he turned to law enforcement. In the spring of 1987 he reached out to the FBI.

Without making an appointment, two agents showed up at the Old Harbor Real Estate office one day. Slinger opened his door to John Newton and Roderick Kennedy.

Later Newton would say that Slinger was willing to testify about a “shakedown” by Kevin O’Neil. But he claimed that Slinger never mentioned Bulger’s name. For his part, Kennedy could not remember a single detail about the interview, including whether it happened at all. And in an extraordinary departure from standard procedure, neither agent wrote a report on the session with Slinger.

In a classic example of what not to do with such a case, Newton discussed Slinger’s account with his boss, who talked it over with the assistant agent in charge. The top-level managers promptly dropped it, ignoring internal guidelines that they either refer it to prosecutors or explain their decision not to use it to FBI headquarters.

Ironically, the unproductive FBI interview helped Slinger get off the hook in his unexpected business relationship with Whitey Bulger. After the agents left his office, a worried Slinger immediately called O’Neil to cover himself by explaining that the unexpected visit by the FBI was none of his doing. O’Neil called him back the next day and told him he could cancel his installment plan. The $25,000 would be payment in full, a rare half-price sale from Bulger Enterprises.

Some years later Newton admitted that the bureau passed on what would have been a great extortion case. He was asked in court if there was a connection between the case dying and Bulger being an informant.

When an informant is involved in a crime, he said, “either you’re going to go ahead with this investigation or you’re going to have to figure something out.”

The something figured out was agent John Connolly telling Whitey to back off on the balance due from Slinger. That was what being a loyal friend was all about.

Late Monday morning,
February 8, I988, FBI agent John Connolly strode out of a hardware store near his FBI office and bumped into Dick Lehr, a reporter for the
Boston Globe
(and one of the authors of this book). Connolly had been at the store getting some duplicate keys made while Lehr was crossing town en route to an appointment with a source.

It was a chance encounter on a crisp winter day.

Connolly, recognizing the reporter, stopped on the sidewalk to say hello. They didn’t know each other very well, although Connolly was well known by a corps of reporters in the Boston media who covered organized crime as a regular beat. Of all the FBI agents in Boston, Connolly was the most accessible, the agent most eager to talk to the media about his work and the FBI.

Crime was not Lehr’s beat. But he had met Connolly the year before, in 1987. He was part of a team of
Globe
reporters who spent months interviewing FBI agents from the Organized Crime Squad about the Angiulo bugging. Lehr and the reporters had met with nearly a dozen agents— Connolly, John Morris, Ed Quinn, Nick Gianturco, Jack Cloherty, Shaun Rafferty, Mike Buckley, Bill Schopperle, Pete Kennedy, Bill Regii, and Tom Donlan. The series had been a hit with both the newspaper’s readers and the bureau, for it showed the FBI at its technical best: breaking into the Mafia’s inner sanctum to plant a listening device. Lehr had not seen or talked to Connolly since the newspaper project a year earlier. There was a round of greetings, and then the reporter asked the FBI agent how things were going.

Connolly, jingling the shiny keys in his hand, didn’t hesitate. He began talking about a new FBI bug, one targeting the post-Angiulo mafiosi who were jockeying for position and power. Connolly said that for about six months, from late 1986 to mid-1987, the FBI had monitored the new Mafia lineup conducting business in the back of a grinder shop located in a shopping plaza at the foot of a Boston landmark, the Prudential Tower.

“It was great,” the agent said about the bug that agents installed inside Vanessa’s Italian Food Shop.

Lehr listened intently, realizing right away that the information might make for a great story. But the reporter was also taken aback by Connolly’s loose manner. There was no talk of the conversation being “on background” or “off the record” or restricted in any of the ways information can be when passed along to reporters. To the agent, talking about Vanessa’s seemed to be the same as talking about the Boston Bruins, who the night before had beaten the Calgary Flames, 6-3, to take over first place in their division in the National Hockey League. Or politics. The Democratic Party’s Iowa caucus was under way that very same day, featuring a challenge by Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis to the front-runner status of Richard Gephardt. Connolly, it appeared, was used to putting tidbits into orbit and not having them traced back to him.

There had been no press coverage whatsoever of an FBI bug inside an eatery in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood. If anything, Boston reporters who covered crime had been puzzling over the status of the Mafia in the aftermath of the 98 Prince Street operation. It was known that a certain amount of Mafia disarray naturally followed the removal of a long-standing Mafia leader like Angiulo, and the names of a number of relatively unknown Mafia figures had begun to circulate. There was Vincent M. Ferrara, who combined a degree in business administration from Boston College with “a taste for blood”; an older mafioso named J. R. Russo; and Russo’s half-brother, Bobby Carrozza of East Boston. Those three men were serving as
capo de regimes,
or lieutenants, in the struggling Mafia, but not a lot was known about them. In addition, Cadillac Frank Salemme was finally coming home, released from federal prison after serving fifteen years for the 1968 bombing of a lawyer’s car, the assassination attempt for which his accomplice and pal Stevie Flemmi had never been prosecuted.

Outside the hardware store, Connolly was buoyant about the bureau’s ability to track the Mafia from its traditional base in the North End to the upscale plaza in the Back Bay. Vanessa’s Back Bay location constituted an altogether new twist, an unlikely spot for the Mafia, churlish bulls in a china shop. Polished shoppers and young urban professionals might be catching a quick bite at the counter while at the same time, in the back room, a fiery Ferrara was spewing vulgar ultimatums to bookmakers as he explained that a new Mafia day was dawning.

The windowless room was isolated and could only be reached by a convoluted route. The gangsters would park their cars in the Pru Center’s underground garage-maze, and no one could follow them without being made. Connolly delighted in the fact that the brazen Ferrara, Russo, and Carrozza all thought they’d found a place to meet that was impenetrable, and he relished the prospect of bringing down Ferrara. Ferrara was “arrogant” and “cocky,” “a real troublemaker.” He was hated by his peers for his vicious streak and disrespectful way. In fact, noted Connolly, Ferrara would be dead already if word hadn’t gotten around Boston’s underworld that the FBI was after him. The other wiseguys, said Connolly, could “sit back and let us chew him up.”

Subsequently, Lehr teamed up with fellow reporter Kevin Cullen and, after more reporting to confirm Connolly’s account, wrote a front-page piece about Vanessa’s that ran on Sunday, April 17, 1988, and started out: “It was a perfect spot. The cops couldn’t tail you, and you could park your car in the underground garage, walk to a freight elevator and ride up in secrecy.” Though the article included a lot of information, the reporters didn’t have the actual recordings from the Vanessa’s bug. That meant they couldn’t hear Connolly’s favorite recording: Ferrara’s shakedown of “Doc” Sagansky.

“We got a lot of guys in trouble, Doc,” Ferrara told Sagansky. Ferrara was going for the soft touch in his approach to his target, who, at eighty-nine, was the elder statesman in the world of bookmaking. Born at the end of the last century, Doc was a practicing dentist as a young man, a graduate of Tufts Dental School, but he became a millionaire as the city’s premier bookmaker. By the 1940s he was regarded by police as the “financial top man” in the city’s rackets and held ownership interests in two Boston nightclubs and a loan company. In 1941 he’d loaned $8,500 to James Michael Curley, the legendary Boston mayor and then congressman. In return, Sagansky was named a beneficiary in a $50,000 life insurance policy that Curley had taken out as security for a loan. That the two were linked publicly raised a few eyebrows and made headlines. Sagansky’s name had surfaced in every major gambling investigation in Boston since the Depression. In the storeroom of Vanessa’s on January 14, 1987, Ferrara was trying to come off as reasonable with the old man, explaining the Mafia’s hard times—five Angiulo brothers and many other soldiers gone, in jail.

“We have to help ’em,” Ferrara urged. “Their families, lawyers. Some of us are in trouble.” Ferrara wanted Sagansky and an associate who’d accompanied him, another aging bookie named Moe Weinstein, to start paying “rent.” During the regime of Gennaro Angiulo, Sagansky had operated without having to do so. But Ferrara said those days were over, and he wanted a show of good faith in the form of $500,000. He told Sagansky that such a sum was nothing to a millionaire like him, and that Sagansky had “class.” “Help us,” Ferrara said.

Sagansky would not. Even though he was seated in the windowless storeroom surrounded by Ferrara and his muscle, Sagansky tried persuading Ferrara that his gambling business was kaput, that it had “plummeted to nothing.”

Both sides cried poor for a while until Doc had enough. “I’m not gonna give you no bankroll,” he said.

Ferrara exploded. Mob enforcer Dennis Lepore leaned down to get into the eighty-nine-year-old’s face: “You don’t have no alternative. We want something now. And you’re lucky it ain’t more. This is a serious request. You understand?” The venom poured from Lepore’s lips: “What are we playin’, a fuckin’ game here, pal? You reaped the harvest all those fuckin’ years! This is something you’re going to pay now. We want it. We’re not asking.”

To induce cooperation, an angry Ferrara then threatened Sagansky that his pal Weinstein would be held hostage until he came up with the $500,000. Doc and Moe were given some time alone in the storeroom. “I’ll never see you again,” Doc said. “Now what should I do?” Weinstein stated the obvious: “Guess you’re going to have to give it to ’em.” The two old men promised to get the money, and Ferrara released them.

The next day, as investigators watched undetected from a safe distance, Weinstein carried a white plastic shopping bag into a restaurant at the Park Plaza Hotel. He handed the bag to Ferrara and Lepore. Inside was $250,000 in cash, the first installment. The two mobsters hurried back to the Vanessa’s storeroom and gloated as they split up the money into six shares of $40,000. “Those assholes, this better be real money,” a flush, cash-happy Ferrara joked to Lepore.

Even without all of the dialogue, the
Globe
story hit a nerve. FBI officials and federal prosecutors, particularly Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan of the Organized Crime Strike Force, were incensed. Their investigation of Ferrara was still ongoing, and they wanted to know how word about Vanessa’s had gotten out. But the reporters had no obligation or reason to explain to the authorities where their story had started. They were not about to complain about Connolly’s propensity for chatter.