Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (52 page)

Both the defense attorneys and the prosecutors suddenly asked Judge Wolf to summon Connolly back to court, now that he was repeatedly saying that he no longer wanted immunity. It was one of those rare instances when Cardinale and Wyshak agreed. “It’s time to put Mr. Connolly’s feet to the fire on this issue,” Cardinale told the judge. Wyshak’s colleague Jamie Herbert noted that during the media interviews Connolly “has lied about what takes place in this courtroom and outside this courtroom.”

The lawyers had called Connolly’s bluff, and on the morning before Halloween, October 30, John Connolly returned to federal court, his lawyer Robert Popeo at his side. The broad-shouldered Connolly cut a striking pose on the witness stand. He wore a dark, fitted suit, a smart-looking yellow silk tie, and a white handkerchief was neatly arranged in his breast pocket. His hair appeared recently cut and styled.

Tony Cardinale cut right to the chase.

“Mr. Connolly, in 1982, did you give any cash to an FBI secretary named Debbie Noseworthy, now Debbie Morris?”

Cardinale was looking to provoke Connolly. “I was hoping his arrogance would get the better of him,” he said later. He wanted an angered Connolly to blurt out a denial—no, he had not delivered Bulger’s money to Morris! “Then
boom
—there would have been an instant indictment for perjury,” said Cardinale. “It would have made my day, after what he’s done to my client and to so many other people in his so-called role as a defender of the law.”

The two men locked eyes, and the question that Cardinale had asked in his baritone voice echoed in the courtroom. Then Connolly shifted in his seat and removed a card from the pocket of his suit. He held the card in his right hand, delicately between the tips of his index and middle fingers.

“Upon advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer at this time and rely upon my rights under the United States Constitution not to give testimony against myself.”

CARDINALE: On April 30 of 1998, as the Court has pointed out, Mr. Connolly, you appeared before the Court and refused to answer questions, asserting your Fifth Amendment privilege, is that correct?

CONNOLLY: That’s correct.

CARDINALE: Since that time, you’ve been interviewed by a number of media representatives . . . have you not?

CONNOLLY: Upon advice of counsel, I repeat. . . .

Cardinale did not let up, firing off a string of questions: have you personally committed any criminal offenses with regard to any promise made to Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi? Did you at any time give Mr. Morris around Christmas a box of wine containing $1,000? Did you warn Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi of any existing investigative efforts that were targeting them? Did you know an individual by the name of Brian Halloran?

Each time, Connolly took the Fifth.

Then prosecutor Jamie Herbert had a turn.

HERBERT: Good morning, Mr. Connolly.

CONNOLLY: Good morning.

HERBERT: Mr. Connolly, you know what the term “bribery” means?

CONNOLLY: I assert my Fifth Amendment rights.

HERBERT: Mr. Connolly, you have told at least three different versions of this supposed deal that you had with Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi, isn’t that correct?

CONNOLLY: I assert my Fifth Amendment rights.

HERBERT: Mr. Connolly, in all your years with the FBI working with Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi, did you ever once document this supposed deal anywhere in the FBI files?

CONNOLLY: I assert my Fifth Amendment rights.

Inside of twenty minutes, Connolly took the Fifth nearly thirty times to the questions posed by Cardinale and Herbert. The judge broke off the give-and-take, ruling that the exercise was fruitless, that Connolly had not changed his mind and decided to testify without immunity. Robert Popeo told the judge his client was asserting the Fifth at his insistence, particularly “in light of the fact that there are two separate grand juries sitting in which we have been advised by prosecutors that Mr. Connolly is a target.” Even if Connolly was speaking boldly outside of court and proclaiming his innocence—a right of free speech under the First Amendment—he was not waiving his rights under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.

“To each and every substantive question put to the witness,” said Popeo, “he has been advised to invoke his privilege under the United States Constitution.”

The judge excused Connolly. “Mr. Connolly, you may go.”

Minutes later Connolly could be found outside the new courthouse on Fan Pier, holding forth to a circle of television cameras and reporters, resuming his bellicose stance toward prosecutors Wyshak, Herbert, and Kelly. He called them “character assassins” hell-bent on singling him out as their scapegoat. But even a renewed attack could not remove the lasting impression of a lackluster John Connolly reading from the Fifth Amendment card he’d just spent weeks telling the world he no longer needed.

THEN came the waiting game. In chambers, with the aid of his clerks, Wolf began the task of preparing a ruling, studying the testimony, the exhibits, and the applicable case law. Months passed, and by early 1999 the case had mostly fallen from public view. Occasionally, in other contexts, it popped up. The former U.S. attorney and ex-governor Bill Weld appeared on a radio show in 1998 to promote his first novel and ran into a host who wanted to ask about the Bulger affair with the FBI. Christopher Lydon of WBUR’s
The Connection
was incredulous that Weld hadn’t done more to dig out the Bulger mess. “Why aren’t you more outraged?” challenged Lydon. “Did your friend William Bulger know about it? Did you ever ask him about it?”

The usually garrulous Weld went mum. He replied no, a trace of annoyance in his voice. Lydon kept going, but mostly in monologue. Rather than join in, Weld allowed seconds of silence to fill the radio space. Of particular concern to Lydon was the recent suicide of Billy Johnson, the state trooper who had gotten tough with Whitey Bulger at Logan Airport over smuggled cash and later believed the encounter had cost him his career. “He killed himself !” said Lydon. “A miserable man at the end of a life that he thought had honorably been devoted to law enforcement.

“Where’s the outrage?” Lydon asked again.

The tense encounter ended finally, and the two got to talking about Weld’s novel. But Weld’s reluctance to get into it with Lydon seemed to capture symbolically the reluctance of Weld’s generation of Boston law enforcement leaders to ever seriously tackle the Bulger scandal.

By the end of the summer of 1999 word began spreading around town that Wolf, after ten months of rumination and writing, was applying the finishing touches to his ruling. In early August, FBI director Louis Freeh arrived in Boston and, at a press conference, acknowledged publicly that the FBI “made significant mistakes” during the Boston FBI’s twenty-year run with Bulger and Flemmi. The admissions were seen as an effort by a publicity-obsessed FBI to take some of the sting out of the upcoming federal court ruling. “We have a lot of mistakes to account for,” said Freeh. He promised that corrupt FBI agents from Boston would be brought to justice.

Two weeks later the FBI announced that the fugitive Whitey Bulger was finally being added to its Ten Most Wanted List. The move—more than four years after Bulger fled his 1995 indictment—was seen as long overdue. In the public’s mind in Boston, the perception had taken root that the FBI was never really interested in tracking down its former informant. But now Bulger joined the likes of fugitives Eric Robert Rudolph, a suspect in abortion clinic bombings, and Osama bin Laden, the Saudi terrorism suspect. And he held a distinction all his own: he was believed to be the first FBI informant to ever make the famous top ten list, which had posted 458 fugitives since its inception in 1950. His face would now appear across the country in post offices and federal buildings, on the FBI’s web site, and even in a Dick Tracy cartoon as part of an FBI Most Wanted promotion.

In cellblock H-3 three celebrated inmates were also eagerly awaiting the ruling—Frank Salemme, Bobby DeLuca, and Stevie Flemmi. Their high hopes were that the judge would find the evidence so compromised he would throw out the racketeering charges against the group—that Wolf would rule that the FBI had indeed promised blanket immunity for Flemmi and Bulger, and therefore the government could not now violate that immunity and prosecute them.

Ever since their arrest in 1995 the three mobsters had been kept at the Plymouth prison, a modern facility that opened in 1994 and was located forty-eight miles south of Boston. The new facility had been built atop an old landfill in an isolated, unwanted area of the historic community. It was also right off of route 3, a highway connecting Boston to Cape Cod, and Flemmi, from his cell, could hear the hum of freedom in the distance, the cars carrying commuters and vacationers along a route he and Bulger and John Connolly all used to take on their way to the Cape.

The cellblock could hold 140 inmates in 70 cells. It was a large rectangular space constructed as a self-contained “mini-prison,” meaning that the inmates spent virtually all of their time on the block and did almost everything there. Meals arrived on wheels from a central prison kitchen, and inmates ate at the tables in the unit’s common area. The cellblock had its own showers along one end, its own televisions, and its own pay phones. It was smoke-free. The unit had a “rec deck,” a small, outdoor recreation area that opened up off the far end of the unit. The area was essentially a fenced-in cage, but inmates could escape the stale air of the cellblock and get some exercise by going out there. The chin-up bar attached underneath a set of stairs was jokingly called “the gym,” and the cart of books positioned against one wall was “the library.” Two decks of cells, on a ground floor and a mezzanine level, lined the long walls of the cellblock. Salemme and DeLuca lived side by side in cells at the far end of one mezzanine level, near the entrance to the rec deck. Flemmi was on his own.

Over time Salemme had emerged as a model inmate and cellblock leader. The guards relied on him. He was given the top cellblock job, a position previously occupied by, of all people, Howie Winter, until Winter was moved out of the unit. Frank was the “meal server”: three times a day, while all the other inmates were locked down, he set up the common area for meals. He put ice in the juice pitchers, wiped down the tables, arranged the chairs. No job on the unit carried more responsibility—not cleaning the rec deck, emptying the trash bins, cleaning the showers, or sweeping the tiled floors and the mezzanine walkway. The guards wanted the unit as shiny and clean as a hospital ward, and Frank was the key inmate making that happen. It was a far cry from his old life as a high-rolling gangster, but the job, a way to help pass the days, kept the mobster busy.

DeLuca was not as motivated a worker. His job was sweeping the mezzanine. But like Salemme, he worked out and wanted to stay in shape. He regularly performed chin-ups to keep his upper body hard and muscular. Both watched their diet, especially Salemme, who avoided the high-fat prison offerings and preferred salads and fruits. Salemme also read a lot—boating magazines, Tom Clancy, and Dean Koontz.

Flemmi was another story. During the course of the hearings in court, as the extent of his FBI deal was exposed, Flemmi was pushed further and further to the margins of cellblock life. Inmates did not want to have anything to do with him. He was ostracized—a rat, the lowest form of underworld life. Salemme would not talk to him, would not even look at him. Flemmi sometimes approached DeLuca, but the encounters were curt and brief.

The alienation that came with being a career informant was bad enough, but Flemmi withdrew further into himself the day Johnny Martorano was whisked away to commence cooperating with the prosecutors. The prison guards surely weren’t going to miss the hitman. Martorano gave them the creeps—a surly, cold-blooded troublemaker who strutted around the cellblock as if to say: Get out of my way, I’m John Martorano, and I kill people. But Martorano’s departure was devastating to Stevie Flemmi. It meant that Martorano was implicating Flemmi and Bulger in murder—particularly the 1981 assassination of Roger Wheeler. It meant that even if Flemmi’s lawyer Ken Fishman succeeded in persuading Judge Wolf to throw out pending racketeering charges, the prosecutors were preparing to come back with a new indictment for murder.

In early September, as everyone was waiting on Judge Wolf, the news broke that Martorano and the government had completed negotiating the terms of a plea bargain for Martorano’s testimony. In exchange for a sentence of twelve and a half to fifteen years, Martorano had agreed to plead guilty to twenty murders spanning three decades and three states, including the murder of Roger Wheeler, a killing he claimed was committed on orders from Bulger and Flemmi. “The people he’s giving up are people who have enjoyed the protection of the FBI for many years while committing heinous crimes,” said David Wheeler, son of the slain Jai Alai executive, voicing support for the hitman’s deal.

Flemmi retreated to his prison cell. In cellblock H-3 the former crime boss was shunned, and he spent most of his time alone, seated on his bunk. “Just there,” said one guard. “He’s like the bag of golf clubs sitting in my closet.” Flemmi didn’t have a cellblock job to keep him busy. He didn’t have anyone to talk to. “He’s about as despondent as you can get without going insane,” one officer noted. Flemmi rarely, if ever, went out on the rec deck for the fresh air or the sun. It was the eve of one of the most eagerly awaited court rulings in the biggest organized crime case in Boston’s history, and Flemmi’s face had turned pallid, almost translucent. His skin had turned the color of the prison walls, one guard observed—a ghostly “popcorn white.”