Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (44 page)

But as always seemed to happen when events veered dangerously close to Bulger, there was a derailment in federal offices. One of the top prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, A. John Pappalardo, decided to use Tim Connolly to get into Bulger’s finances. He turned Tim Connolly over to two handpicked FBI agents who had no ties to John Connolly. They wired the mortgage broker as a way to get an inside look at Bulger’s money laundering. But then Whitey Bulger suddenly stopped dealing with Tim Connolly.

In the end Tim Connolly was not used in the DEA and Boston police case against Bulger Drug Network because they never knew about the extortion in the back room. And the FBI’s attempt to use Tim Connolly on Bulger’s money laundering never got off the ground. But if investigators and even some prosecutors never knew Tim Connolly’s value when it counted the most, the same cannot be said of Whitey Bulger. He knew all about the threat that Tim Connolly posed, almost immediately after the FBI had him wired.

Stevie Flemmi said that after Tim Connolly was sent to the FBI, “Mr. Bulger told me that Tim Connolly was wired up and that he was directing [at] us as a target . . . the information came from the FBI.” Flemmi was quite certain the tipoff came from John Connolly.

Kelly took all of this in. It was a lesson in how hard it would be to bring a case—any case—against Bulger. But it was also a reminder that perhaps, just perhaps, it could be done.

On a November day
that warned of winter, a state cop took a slow drive by a forbidding brick building with iron bars on the windows and an oversized Schlitz Beer lantern above the front door. Detective Joe Saccardo began nodding to himself as he rolled by slick cars on a skid row. Too many Cadillacs for downtown Chelsea, he thought. Heller’s Café is a bookie joint all right.

But inside the tavern the proprietor was doing more than logging betting slips. Michael London was shuffling checks, tallying part of the $500,000 in paper he converted into cash each week for the region’s biggest bookmakers. London was just hitting his stride as a back alley banker in 1983. Starting with a small book in a barroom inherited from his father, London had moved up the gambling chain by turning hot checks into cold cash. Bookies now called him “the Check Man.” At the beginning of the 1980s he began shifting away from a local clientele to the big sports-betting network run by Jewish bookmakers with ties to Winter Hill and, to a lesser extent, the Mafia. London had become the man to see when bookies and businessmen wanted to hide profits from the Internal Revenue Service.

When Saccardo pulled over to a curb, he did some tallying of his own. He had a dozen license plate numbers from the sleek cars that ringed Heller’s Café. Back at the office the state police computer took the numbers and spat out a who’s who of Boston bookmaking: Chico Krantz, Jimmy Katz, Eddie Lewis, Howie Levenson, Fat Vinny Roberto. Even Joey Y—Joseph Yerardi, a wiseguy more than a bookie who put money on the street for Winter Hill and was allowed to collect rents of his own.

Bingo. Saccardo had found much more than a bookie joint. He had discovered the mob’s bank, a place where gamblers’ losses—in five-figure checks made out to cash or joke names such as Ronald Gambling or Arnold Palmer—were converted into payouts and profits. At its height the bulletproof teller booth in the back of a saloon converted $50 million a year into cash. It also yielded about $1 million in fees to London, who was raking it in on a back street under a tired bridge in a run-down city.

Fittingly, it was left to Joe Saccardo of the Massachusetts State Police to target Boston’s version of Meyer Lansky. London juggled two accounts in a local bank with about $800,000 in family money and withdrew up to that amount each week as the checks cleared. It was a good deal all around. The local bank got use of the money without having to pay interest, and it winked at London having to report cash transactions of more than $10,000 to the IRS. He worked the system to buy a house in Weston, the wealthiest suburb in Massachusetts, and a summer home in West Hyannisport not far from the Kennedy family’s compound.

Though most of London’s bookmaking customers were affiliated with Bulger’s gang, he was drawn to the brash braggadocio of Vincent Ferrara, a flashy capo who became such a regular at Heller’s that he had his own table. London saw Ferrara as a comer in the Mafia and hitched his red tavern to Vinny’s rising star.

London and Ferrara were simpatico, understanding enough about money to see it as more than cash-in-the-pocket and a new car. London began helping to round up freeloader bookies for Ferrara, giving them intimidating pep talks. “You gotta pay one side or the other these days,” he told them. “I’m just letting you know how it works so ya don’t get hurt.” Over time London became the poor man’s version of the Wall Street broker who pushes clients toward an investment banker who gives him kick-backs. The two men had similar tastes. They both bought the same silver two-seater Mercedes, and Ferrara convinced London to take one of the small boutique dogs he bought in New York for $5,000. They also shared loan-shark profits.

AFTER Joe Saccardo brought the who’s who license plate printout to his bosses, they knew what they had. Instead of settling for a fast gaming raid, they called for reinforcements. A task force of state police investigators and FBI and IRS agents was formed. At times the various agencies did little more than get in each other’s way. It took three years of fits and starts before bugs were spliced into the teller’s cage inside Heller’s Café and taps were placed on two phones. Investigators monitored bugs from a nearby construction trailer for the last two months of 1986. When it ended, no one was quite sure of what they had, though they knew this much: Vinny and Mike had a problem. In December the police team rousted the bar, pushing everyone against the wall. But the jammed-up clientele was nothing compared to the boxes of checks carted away to FBI headquarters in Boston.

Soon afterward London told Jimmy Katz, a bookie whose own day would come, “It’s gonna be a big problem. Not, not immediately. But it will happen.” London knew that the boxes of checks from 1980 to 1986 would tally $200 million.

Though the confiscated boxes of checks and reels of tape were as rich a vein of evidence as police could have carried away, the whole case bogged down at the FBI in 1987. The bureau was sure there was a Mafia capo in the big stack of stuff but was halfhearted about investigating further. In the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Jeremiah O’Sullivan had just finished the Angiulo case and was ready to take on reckless newcomers. As federal prosecutors reviewed the tapes, O’Sullivan cherry-picked them for his strike force and tossed the rest back. His assessment: we’ll take Vinny, and somebody else really should do London. And, oh, there might be some other stuff in here too.

INDEED there was. Only doing Ferrara meant taking a pass on the bookies in the line at Mike London’s cashier window who were being extorted by Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi. London once told Chico Krantz, the premier bookmaker with a long-term deal with Bulger, to “shop Italian.” “Stevie can’t hold [Vinny’s] jockstrap. Vinny will work for ya . . . a collection agency, personal protection. Stevie don’t do nothin. This guy here will go to bat for you.” In another Mike London speech, a bookie nicknamed “Beechi” got the sad facts of life: pay Ferrara or “the other guys are gonna get your name . . . Stevie and Whitey.” But nobody in federal law enforcement seemed excited about the evidence implicating Bulger and Flemmi.

After O’Sullivan culled Vinny out of the tapes, the boxes of checks collected dust. Several prosecutors had taken one look at the evidence room and kept on going. No one wanted to wrestle a messy paper case to the ground to convict a Chelsea tavern owner. Joe Saccardo finally prevailed on a young eager prosecutor named Michael Kendall to take a look.

If the storage room was overflowing, the quality of the seized evidence was remarkable. Kendall had the patience to assemble the paper and prepare a chart showing how $200 million in gambling losses and loan-shark payments got turned into cash. Two years later London was convicted of money laundering and racketeering and sentenced to fifteen years.

CHICO KRANTZ was only a footnote in the London indictment, but Saccardo began to lobby for a second wave of prosecutions out of Heller’s Café—all the bookies who were paying rent. He didn’t know what the crimes should be, but he began to wonder if something in the mix could be used against Bulger. Kendall begged off, however, citing his caseload.

Then one of those mundane but magical things happened. Kendall recalled that Fred Wyshak had done a similar check-cashing case and went to talk to him about Chico Krantz. As luck would have it, Chico was just coming into focus out of a separate broad-based bookie investigation by state police in the Special Services Unit headed by Sergeant Tom Foley. The state police had set out to find bookies who dealt with Whitey Bulger, and as in Heller’s Café, Chico was at the head of the line.

Suddenly Chico, the whiz kid of betting lines, was overlapping himself as the perfect witness against Whitey Bulger. He had been paying tribute to the insular Bulger for nearly twenty years. He was one of the first to know about the new system of monthly rent payments when Bulger explained it to him in 1979. He was threatened with death by Bulger when he dragged his feet on paying a debt to another bookie. And his long history of payments to Bulger measured the expansion of Whitey’s empire. Over the years Chico’s monthly rent had climbed from $750 to $3,000.

Chico’s undoing began just about the time Mike London was indicted in 1990. State police targeted a bookie network with Mafia ties. Fat Vinny Roberto and his brothers handled daily action from thirty-five bettors who wagered up to $500,000 a week. But the big payoff from the Roberto investigation was the discovery that Krantz was his everyday boss, even setting the Roberto brothers’ work hours. Best of all, undercover state police followed Roberto to Chico’s suburban home, where he dropped off a package. A search warrant got them inside Krantz’s home, where they found keys to bank deposit boxes that were filled with $2 million in cash.

After Krantz was arrested on gaming charges in 1991 at the state police barracks outside Boston, he sought out Sergeant Foley. How come the police went to my house this time? Krantz asked.

Foley shrugged.

Where’s this thing going?

Foley shrugged again.

About a week later, with Krantz out on bail, Foley met with the master bookie at his Florida home, and they talked for two days about bookmakers and the Bulger gang. Krantz didn’t give up too much, talking in general terms about Flemmi, George Kaufman, and Joe Yerardi. But Krantz did agreed to be a “CI,” or a confidential informant.

With an ambivalent Krantz waiting in the wings, prosecutors and state police began to chase down leads from the Heller’s Café tapes and the related Middlesex County case that started with Fat Vinny Roberto. Wyshak soon focused on four check-cashing operations in greater Boston, including Heller’s. The investigators collated boxes of checks, much as Kendall had done in the London prosecution, isolating and tallying rafts of checks that exceeded the $10,000 limit that have to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.