Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (38 page)

IN FACT it turned out that Connolly wanted to talk a lot about Vanessa’s, or, as it was confidentially referred to, “Operation Jungle Mist.” The agent developed a kind of stump speech in which he described Vanessa’s as the second in a “trilogy” of major Mafia bugs (the first being the 98 Prince Street bug) that the FBI would never have gotten if not for his work with Bulger and Flemmi. “They were without a doubt the two single most important sources we ever had,” Connolly liked to say in a flourish at the end of this proclamation.

But as they so often did, Connolly’s claims upon closer scrutiny proved to be overstated. Bulger and Flemmi were the unnamed informants Connolly referred to during his sidewalk moment with Lehr of the
Globe
in early 1988. In this regard, it
was
a shining moment of genuine, singular intelligence. The evidence from the tapes later helped convict Ferrara, Lepore, Russo, and Carrozza of extortion and racketeering. But most of the credit for steering the FBI toward Vanessa’s actually belonged to Flemmi rather than to Whitey Bulger.

Even though Vanessa’s was listed in city records as being owned by a couple from the affluent suburb of Belmont, the eatery was in fact controlled by Sonny Mercurio, a Mafia soldier and pardoned murderer. (Later Mercurio himself would become an FBI informant.)

In April 1986 Flemmi began telling Connolly about Vinnie Ferrara, and how Ferrara was working with Mercurio, J. R. Russo, and Bobby Carrozza out of the Italian eatery. Flemmi, not Bulger, was attending the meetings, where the pending business was sorting out the underworld action between the Ferrara faction and Bulger’s gang. Following one meeting in early August, Flemmi explained that Mercurio was “friendly” with him and Whitey Bulger, “from the days when he was a messenger and liaison between ‘The Hill’ and Jerry Angiulo.” Flemmi added that Mercurio was in charge of setting up the session between the groups to discuss changing the payoff on the illegal daily numbers games so that they could all rake in even more profits.

Flemmi attended another meeting a week later; afterward he once again provided Connolly with a full account—about the ongoing negotiations to change the payoff odds on the illegal numbers games and about plans to distribute illegal football betting cards during that fall’s football season. He told Connolly, “The Mafia intends to chop up the whole city and state, if possible, by controlling all independent bookmakers.” He reported that the “Mafia was on the march” into the suburbs and said that he’d made his way to the secret session “by taking an elevator up from level 5 to the service area.”

The meetings continued, and Flemmi began providing more details about the storeroom’s location, layout, and security. “The storeroom is located two doors from Vanessa’s,” he told Connolly on August 18, 1986, “which is used for the meet, is wired with an alarm system, but the system does not seem to be operative. In addition to the alarm system, the area is patrolled by a security service.” During one of their late-night huddles at Connolly’s home at the end of August, attended by Bulger and Jim Ring, Flemmi even drew up a rough sketch of the Vanessa’s floor plan.

This kind of information provided ample probable cause for the FBI to win court permission to plant a bug inside the eatery’s storeroom—and then some. The diagram, for instance, was somewhat over the top, Ring said later. “I think it’s pretty stupid,” the supervisor said about Flemmi’s artwork. “I don’t need a diagram to figure out how they got in there,” he said. Better to have agents conduct surveillance than give away the FBI’s plans to a criminal informant. “You get too far down a discussion like that with an informant, the informant is learning too much from your questions,” said Ring. “Despite Mr. Flemmi’s great skills,” he added sarcastically, “the people we have are far better, and I relied upon our technicians to put the bugs in the right place so that they functioned.”

By the time the FBI’s bug began on Halloween, Flemmi had, not surprisingly or coincidentally, stopped attending the meetings in the storeroom at Vanessa’s. Once again, the FBI would capture the Mafia while Flemmi and Bulger would remain invisible. “I wasn’t intercepted because I knew it [the bug] was going to be in there,” Flemmi said. Just before the bug began, “John Connolly did tell me it was in.” For months policy meetings at Vanessa’s had involved the two powerful organized crime outfits in Boston, the Mafia and the Bulger gang. But once the FBI tapes began rolling, it was as if Boston was strictly a Mafia town.

The Sagansky shakedown coincided with the arrival of a new special agent in charge for the Boston office. Jim Ahearn, himself a veteran of organized crime cases in California, arrived in November 1986 at the same time the Boston squad was piling up taped evidence against the Ferrara faction. He was immediately impressed by the Organized Crime Squad’s work, and especially by John Connolly, who made sure others knew that the informants behind the bug belonged to him.

To rely on Flemmi at this time, however, the FBI also had to ignore mounting intelligence from other informants about the FBI’s two crime bosses. “Stevie Flemmi, of the Winter Hill gang, has been looking around for numbers agents to take over during the period of [Mafia] confusion and weakness,” one informant told John Morris on April 20, 1986. Flemmi began steering Connolly to Vanessa’s at the same time he and Bulger were moving about the city, flexing their own muscle. “The Winter Hill people are presenting a challenge to the old Angiulo regime, and Flemmi has been all over the city,” the informant went on. “The old Angiulo regime is not in a position to stop Flemmi.”

In this regard, Flemmi’s tip about Vanessa’s proved self-serving, a way to keep a staggered Mafia back on its heels. The FBI could do the dirty work.

Then there was the third in the trilogy of FBI bugs that Connolly would invoke in the 1990s as proof that Whitey Bulger had all-world status. The bugging operation itself, which unfolded on a single night, October 29, 1989, indeed warrants a spot in the FBI’s hall of fame. For the first time ever, agents that night secretly recorded a Mafia induction ceremony. Present were Vinnie Ferrara, J. R. Russo, Bobby Carrozza, thirteen other Mafia figures, and, most important, the reigning Mafia boss in New England, Raymond J. Patriarca, son of the deceased Raymond L. S. Patriarca. In the dining room of an associate’s home in Medford, Massachusetts, the band of mafiosi went through their legendary ritual—the pricking of fingers, the sharing of blood oaths—that culminated in the “making” of four new soldiers. It was also a ceremony that was part of the mob’s ongoing effort, post-Angiulo, to ease tensions between competing factions and establish a better working order.

“We’re all here to bring some new members into our Family,” welcomed the presiding Patriarca, “and more than that, to start making a new beginning. ’Cause they come into our Family to start a new thing with us.” One by one, the four new soldiers were administered the oath of Mafia office. Each drew blood from his trigger finger for use in the ceremony. “I, Carmen, want to enter into this organization to protect my Family and to protect all my Friends. I swear not to divulge this secret and to obey, with love and
omerta.
” Each was then told he had become a “brother for life,” and each responded, “I want to enter alive into this organization and leave it dead.”

Carmen Tortora, along with the other three, was also run through a test of loyalties: “If I told you your brother was wrong, he’s a rat, he’s gonna do one of us harm, you’d have to kill him. Would you do that for me, Carmen?”

“Yes.”

“Any one of us here for that?”

“Yes.”

“So you know the severity of This Thing of Ours?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want it badly and desperately? Your mother’s dying in bed, and you have to leave her because we called you, it’s an emergency. You have to leave. Would you do that, Carmen?”

“Yes.”

In the 1990s the famous induction ceremony became an integral part of Connolly’s ode to Bulger. But once again, the facts got in Connolly’s way. FBI files revealed that of the four informants the FBI used for its affidavit to win court approval to record the ceremony, Bulger was not one of them. For probable cause, the FBI relied almost exclusively on another of Connolly’s informants, Sonny Mercurio. Sonny had all the hard information about the time and place of the Mafia induction—not Bulger. For his part, Flemmi was used as one of the four informants, but his contributions paled compared to Mercurio’s. In fact, Flemmi later conceded that during the early autumn of 1989 the few tidbits of information he picked up for Connolly came only after the agent told him about the planned event. Until then, Flemmi didn’t know anything about the scheduled Mafia ceremony. “He asked me to monitor all sources and to report to him any information that I obtained, which I did.” Then, once the FBI had captured the ceremony on tape, Flemmi added that he was told about the bureau’s success—a disclosure that may have seemed matter-of-fact to Flemmi but that violated FBI rules. Who told him? “John Connolly,” said Flemmi.

If anything, Connolly’s later stump speech reflected not only a habit for hype but also his knack for embellishing Bulger at the expense of Flemmi. Throughout the years Connolly sometimes filed duplicate reports for each —attributing the same information in the exact same words to both Bulger and Flemmi. The only difference between the two reports would be the typewriters used to write them. Other times the wording wasn’t exactly the same but the information was, and both would get credit. To explain the duplication, Connolly said he wasn’t especially careful about how he kept the books and that he considered them one source. “Oftentimes they blurred,” he said. “The information almost came as one.”

The technique benefited Bulger, for between the two, Flemmi was the one with long personal ties to the Mafia. Flemmi, not Bulger, had the juice; he was the frequent visitor inside Mafia dens. Flemmi, not Bulger, was then later able to describe to Connolly the layout and floor plans. Larry Zannino, Patriarca, and other Mafia leaders repeatedly tried to persuade Flemmi to join La Cosa Nostra. But by his “blurrings,” Connolly spread the credit to include Whitey, pumping up—and thus protecting—his old friend from the neighborhood.

TIPS like Vanessa’s were to be treasured, and unlike the other two FBI bugs cited by Connolly, Vanessa’s was truly the result of working with Flemmi and Bulger. Without their intelligence, there would have been no Back Bay bugging of the new Mafia, no extortion of Doc Sagansky.

But by the late 1980s, at what price?

The deal between the Boston FBI and Bulger was by now so out of whack that any good that came the FBI’s way was offset by a wave of concessions and corruption. Of course, such aspects of the deal never showed up in any of the official FBI paperwork—indeed, the annual reviews perfunctorily filed by Connolly and Morris always putatively put Bulger and Flemmi on notice that they fell under the bureau’s guidelines just like any other informant. No favors. No license to commit crimes. No looking the other way. For example: “Informant shall not participate in acts of violence or use unlawful techniques to obtain information for the FBI or initiate a plan to commit criminal acts.” Each year Connolly signed an internal FBI memo saying he’d given this and ten other “warnings” to Bulger and Flemmi, including: “Informant has been advised that informant’s relationship with the FBI will not protect informant from arrest or prosecution for any violation of Federal, State, or local law, except where the informant’s activity is justified by the Supervisor of SAC pursuant to appropriate Attorney General’s Guidelines.” And in all the FBI’s files on Bulger and Flemmi, covering hundreds of pages over two decades, no documents ever surfaced showing that the mobsters’ crime spree was authorized.

Instead, Connolly and Morris and the Boston FBI office had fashioned a side deal, a fine-print, invisible-ink addendum of sorts. It was simple and relatively straightforward. It called for agents to commit crimes to protect the two informants. Up had become down.

Sometimes the FBI protective zeal extended beyond Bulger himself to include sidekicks on Bulger’s rim. Bars on the lower end of West Broadway were letting out in the early morning hours of Mother’s Day 1986. A
pop-pop
of gunshots rang out, and in a car parked across from the entrance of Triple O’s, Tim Baldwin, twenty-three, of South Boston, an ex-con who’d just gotten out of jail, slumped forward, dead.

Within days Boston police homicide detectives had a suspect—twentysix-year-old Mark Estes, another ex-con who’d been drinking inside Triple O’s just prior to the killing. Police learned that two weeks earlier Estes had been beaten by Baldwin with a tire iron in a dispute over a girlfriend. Police had eyewitnesses to the shooting among the hundred or so people spilling out of the bars at closing time. The witnesses told police they saw Estes shoot Baldwin, saw Estes shoot at bystanders as he fled, and saw Baldwin commandeer a car driven by a woman in a futile attempt to escape.

But at a court hearing in late June the case against Estes hit a big-time snag. The witnesses recanted their identification. The murder charge was dismissed, and afterward police complained about the long-standing neighborhood “code of silence”: residents would balk at cooperating with the authorities. “I’m from South Boston,” shrugged one of the witnesses, trying to explain the turnabout to the judge. “We keep things to ourselves.”