Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (40 page)

O’Neill said he wasn’t sure yet what would come of it. But they both knew something had happened, something pivotal. This was the rare kind of information that precipitates movement in the way things are, information that causes a correction in the history of a city as it is understood by its citizens, so that ultimately one version of history is replaced by a more complete and truer one.

UNKNOWN to the reporters, Morris was already well informed about the
Globe
’s project even before O’Neill telephoned. Connolly had told Morris that Billy Bulger, the senate president, was cooperating and doing interviews focused on growing up in Southie. But Connolly had fresh concerns about an apparent turn in the journalists’ reporting: word had gotten back that the
Globe
was asking around about Whitey and the FBI. Connolly suggested that because Morris knew O’Neill better than any of the other FBI agents, he should put in a call and spin O’Neill off of any trouble spots. Connolly, recalled Morris, “requested that I contact him to attempt to learn about the true direction of the articles and to set him straight.”

The supervisor’s decision to verify the
Globe
’s reporting was hardly high-minded. “My principal concern was my own skin,” he conceded. “I was trying to minimize damage in my career.” By his calculation, “outing” Bulger seemed to offer a new solution. Publicity might force the FBI’s hand and lead finally to closing down shop with the two informants. If that happened, his own wrongdoing—“that I had accepted money, gifts, and in turn had compromised an investigation”—might be buried forever. There was also a darker possibility—that the Mafia or someone else would assassinate an “outed” Bulger. This would truly end any risk to Morris that Bulger would ever disclose his own wrongdoing. But Morris insisted that bringing about this “potential harm” was not his intent. “I wanted them closed,” he said.

He also sensed, however, that he was just fooling himself to think that if only the FBI would close down Bulger then he would be safe. “My thinking there really wasn’t very clear,” he said. “I think that part of it, if Connolly were surfaced, that would mean that I would be surfaced; and I think at that point in time I in fact wanted my own involvement surfaced.” Full of fear and self-loathing, Morris lacked the courage to confess to the authorities.

Back at the
Globe,
O’Neill shared his findings with the other reporters. Everyone was dumbstruck, and there was discussion about whether the information could run in the newspaper, whether it might spur underworld bloodshed. But before any decision about publication could be made, the reporters knew more work was required. They had only a single source. There are times when an unnamed but well-placed source is enough to go with a story, but a single source for this kind of explosive disclosure did not cut it. Morris’s information needed to be tested.

In July, O’Neill and Cullen flew to Washington, D.C., to see William F. Weld. Weld had just resigned from his post as head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department in a much-publicized policy dispute with Ed Meese, the attorney general. Over lunch, and on background, Weld was careful and cautious. He said he’d heard the rumors from agencies like the state police. He even said he’d thought the rumors were true. But he had no proof, and he did not give the two reporters anything they could use in their story.

Then, during the last week of July, Lehr called Bob Fitzpatrick, a name he’d been given along the way. The New York native had joined the FBI in 1965. He’d worked in New Orleans, Memphis, Jackson, Mississippi, and Miami. He’d worked the Martin Luther King assassination. He’d worked several bombing cases involving the Ku Klux Klan. He’d taught at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The now former agent had served as the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of the Boston office from 1980 to 1987. During that time he’d been Morris’s boss and overseen the Organized Crime Squad. In 1988 he was working in Boston as a private investigator.

Lehr drove to Fitzpatrick’s home in Rhode Island, and Fitzpatrick took him for a walk to a nearby beach. The day was muggy and overcast. The beach was empty. Far away in Atlanta, Democrats were nominating Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis at their convention.

“What do you know?” Fitzpatrick asked abrasively.

“We know.”

Pacing in the sand, Fitzpatrick seemed edgy. Then he started, and for the next few hours he talked about Whitey Bulger and the FBI, about Connolly and Morris.

“He became a fuckin’ liability,” Fitzpatrick said about Bulger. He said that during his tenure at the Boston office he’d had increasing concerns about the quality of Bulger’s information and about Bulger’s rise to the top as the biggest wiseguy in the city. “You can never have the top guy as an informant,” he said at one point, his voice rising in anger. “You have the top guy, he’s making policy, and then he owns you. He owns you!”

It began to rain, and the interview moved into Lehr’s car and then back to Fitzpatrick’s house. The wide-ranging discourse became a primer of sorts about informant handling, the dangers and benefits of the bureau’s reliance on informants, a beachside course on informant dos and don’ts. He repeatedly voiced regret that what he saw as a major internal scandal had gone untreated. The few times Bulger was reviewed internally, the pro-Bulger forces prevailed.

“The FBI is being compromised. That’s what pisses the shit out of me. I mean the FBI is being used.” The root of the problem, he said, came down to the most basic seduction facing any FBI handler of a longtime informant. Connolly, he said, had long before “overidentified with the guy he was supposed to be running, and the guy took him.” The agent, said Fitzpatrick, had “gone native.”

TWO MONTHS later a four-part series about the Bulger brothers published in the
Boston Globe
included an installment devoted to what was described as the “special relationship” between Whitey Bulger and the FBI.

In the hectic weeks prior to publication, Cullen and
Globe
photographer John Tlumacki, acting on a tip from a local cop, succeeded in taking fresh photographs of Whitey Bulger late one sunny afternoon in a city park near Neponset Circle in Dorchester. Bulger was walking Catherine Greig’s poodle, wearing his trademark sunglasses and baseball cap.

By this time too the FBI was well aware of the
Globe
’s storyline and took a shot across the newspaper’s bow. Tom Daly, a veteran agent, called up Cullen one afternoon at the office. Daly acted miffed, wanting to know why Lehr had been trying to contact “Fat Tony” Ciulla, the former government witness he’d handled in the 1979 race-fixing case against Howie Winter. Then the conversation turned to Bulger. First off, Daly said that if he was ever asked, “this conversation never took place.” (True to form, a decade later Daly denied calling Cullen.) Daly also said he was calling as a “friend,” although Cullen barely knew him.

Daly wanted to know where the
Globe
was headed with the Bulger story. First he denied that Bulger was an FBI informant. Then he said that he wanted to make sure Cullen understood what he and his colleagues were up against. He said Ciulla, who was now in the federal witness protection program, had a warning for the
Globe:
“Whitey is a dangerous guy. You don’t want to piss him off.”

Daly said Ciulla had cautioned that Bulger would not tolerate anything written about him that either was untrue or caused his family any embarrassment. “The guy would never live with that,” said Daly about Bulger. “He wouldn’t think nothing of clipping you.”

The intimidation tactic left Cullen briefly rattled. But by the next day the reporters and their editors had all agreed that Whitey Bulger did not get where he was by killing reporters. The story was seen as something that simply had to be published.

The series ran in late September 1988, a few weeks after Bulger turned fifty-nine, and included unequivocal denials from FBI officials. In public remarks, Jim Ahearn, the top agent in Boston, exuded certitude. “That is absolutely untrue,” he declared. “We specifically deny that there has been special treatment of this individual.”

Backstage, however, a scramble was under way to assess the fallout. “I read the article,” said Flemmi, and “I discussed it with Jim Bulger.” In early October they met at Morris’s condo. “I went there with John Connolly and Jim Bulger,” Flemmi said. It was too soon to wonder how the
Globe
got the story; their first worry was damage control. “He was upset about it,” said Flemmi of Bulger. “But I don’t believe he at that point in time said anything about who leaked the information. I don’t think he knew.”

“It was brief,” continued Flemmi, the meeting marking the last time Bulger and Flemmi ever met with Morris face to face. The agents, recalled Flemmi, were “talking about distancing themselves from us.” But Flemmi also detected that Connolly wasn’t happy about this kind of talk and was under pressure. He was against a breakup. “John Connolly, he wanted us to hang in there, and we did,” said Flemmi.

In fact, Morris and Connolly had already gone over the story and figured maybe they would all be okay. Even though the in-depth stories “left little imagination” regarding Bulger’s status, the
Globe,
noted Morris, had never used the I-word: informant. The article called the deal a “special relationship.” Working in their favor, the story was followed by the FBI’s public denials. Maybe, they thought, they could ride it out. Maybe their best asset was Bulger himself, and the myth that he was the ultimate stand-up guy. “Connolly and I both thought the informant would be okay because no one in the underworld would believe it,” said Morris, playing along once again to cover his tracks.

In the weeks after the story their hunch proved correct. Flemmi and Bulger went to work calling the story a hoax. The FBI agents, meanwhile, took the underworld’s pulse. In late September, Sonny Mercurio passed along to Connolly that his associates were thinking the story was “bullshit.” Mercurio said Ferrara and J. R. Russo were talking about hidden agendas, deciding the newspaper story was actually a bid to embarrass Billy Bulger. The agents wondered if the Mafia’s quick dismissal was actually a reflection of the Mafia’s fear of Whitey. If the mafiosi believed Bulger was an FBI informant, then they would have to take action; they would probably have to get rid of Bulger. Maybe the Mafia didn’t want to believe.

In October yet another government source indicated that the disclosure was not provoking undue concern. The source, who was actually passing along word of Bulger’s continued drug profiteering, mentioned that Bulger and Flemmi, although still “very concerned about the newspaper article,” now believed they were “weathering the storm of present.” The two crime bosses, said the tipster, had taken to calling the story a lie planted by their enemies and other informants who were out to get them.

It was the talk of the town for a while. By the end of October, however, the storm had passed. In short order, Connolly turned his attention to another important matter. He’d met her at the office nearly a decade before, and on November 5, 1988, Connolly walked down the aisle to marry Elizabeth L. Moore. The crowd watching the happy couple included many of Connolly’s pals from the office, especially from the old Organized Crime Squad, among them Nick Gianturco, Jack Cloherty, and Ed Quinn. The affair was joyous, and John Connolly had begun to entertain thoughts of retiring. But even if he stuck around, despite the troubling publicity about the FBI’s Bulger deal, the coast now seemed awfully clear.