American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  The prospect of a trial has many in Boston licking their chops. Howie Carr, a popular radio personality and author of a bestselling book on the Bulger brothers, thinks that a long criminal proceeding with many witnesses would be good for the city. “There are still a lot of loose ends,” he says.

  Of all the loose ends relating to the Bulger story, some of the most intriguing involve Billy Bulger. “I would like to see Billy indicted,” says Carr. The feeling among many is that Whitey would do almost anything to protect his brother.

  With subpoenas being rendered and grand jury hearings underway, the U.S. Attorney’s Office appears to be focusing on who may have aided Bulger while he was a fugitive. Fresh criminal charges stemming from Bulger’s years on the run could be used to implicate others, perhaps, say, Billy Bulger, which would aid prosecutors in their efforts to demythologize the Bulger Mystique once and for all.

  Meanwhile, Bulger is locked away at Plymouth County Correctional Facility. He has a lot to be concerned about, given that his life literally hangs in the balance. But according to those familiar with Bulger from his years as boss of the Boston underworld, he is likely hunkered down, feeling vengeful, while plotting to get even.

  2.

  THE MAN WHO SAW THROUGH WHITEY

  The Daily Beast, January 27, 2012

  For more than twenty years, crime boss Whitey Bulger was protected by the FBI. Now former agent Robert Fitzpatrick tells his story of trying to stop the gangster and why the FBI wouldn’t listen.

  In the two decades that James “Whitey” Bulger served as a secret FBI informant while extorting citizens, peddling cocaine and killing people to protect his Boston-based criminal empire, there is only one federal agent who tried seriously to shut him down: Robert Fitzpatrick.

  For his efforts, Fitzpatrick was frustrated at every turn, not by Bulger and his fellow gangsters, but by his own, the FBI.

  After being introduced to Bulger in 1981, Fitzpatrick warned his regional supervisor that Whitey was “sociopathic … untrustworthy … likely to commit violence” and suggested that he be “closed” as an informant. Not only were his memos and recommendations ignored, some in the FBI sought to discredit Fitzpatrick and destroy his reputation.

  The aggrieved former G-man finally has the opportunity to tell his side of the story in Betrayal, an explosive memoir of his years as assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office. The book has the feel of an ongoing therapy session, as Fitzpatrick seeks to make sense of a sprawling conspiracy of agents, cops, judges, criminals, and politicians who for decades enabled Bulger and made it possible for his campaign of corruption and terror to infect an entire city. Currently, Bulger awaits trial on nineteen counts of murder, after having been on the lam for sixteen years.

  It is a sickening story, one that Fitzpatrick and his coauthor Jon Land allow to unfold slowly, like a toxic oil spill that envelopes and destroys the surrounding ecosystem—in this case, the entire criminal justice system of the state of Massachusetts.

  It is now common knowledge that Special Agent John Connolly, Bulger’s primary handler in the Bureau who is presently in prison on murder charges, and former state senator William “Billy” Bulger, Whitey’s powerful politician brother, formed a support system that made it possible for the Bulger era to sustain itself. But in Betrayal, Fitzpatrick broadens the conspiracy, detailing the culpability of a vast matrix of enablers, including, most notably, the late Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan, who, as lead prosecutor for the state’s Organized Crime Strike Force, undermined potential prosecutions of both Whitey and Billy Bulger, and Lawrence Sarhatt and James Greenleaf, successive special agents in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, who buried reports, including Fitzpatrick’s recommendation that Bulger be “closed” as an informant.

  Fitzpatrick does not attempt to portray himself as a hero; the dominant tone of the book is one of frustration and astonishment as the author, who was sent to Boston by FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., with the expressed task of evaluating Bulger’s “suitability” as a Top Echelon informant, encounters malfeasance and corruption at every level.

  Early in the book, he describes being a young boy at the infamous Mount Loretto orphanage in Staten Island, New York, where he encountered bullies and institutional abuse. Late at night, he sought solace by laying in the dark and listening to the popular radio program This Is Your FBI. Fitzpatrick’s belief in the FBI as both an avenue of personal salvation and an institutional force for justice haunts the book, as the reality of corruption and careerism crushes his idealism much the same way Bulger strangled, shot, and mutilated his murder victims.

  Fitzpatrick came to Boston well suited to deal with subterfuge and corruption. He had gone undercover in the Deep South in the mid-1960s in an attempt to penetrate and bring down white supremacist organizations. In the 1970s, he’d been one of the lead agents on the ABSCAM investigation, a sting operation involving corrupt public officials that led to numerous high-profile arrests, including the indictment of a sitting U.S. senator.

  In Boston, Fitzpatrick spent nearly a decade trying to unravel what he calls “the Bulger arrangement.” As a veteran G-man who had trained budding agents on the proper cultivation of criminal informants at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia, he recognized all the telltale signs of a disaster in the making. He saw that Connolly and his supervisor, John Morris, were too close to Bulger. Also, as Fitzpatrick noted to anyone who would listen, the Bulger situation violated one of the most basic tenets of informant cultivation: The proper strategy with informants is to get someone mid-level who can help take down the boss and therefore an entire organization. You cannot have an organized crime kingpin as an informant, because it is inevitable that person will choose to manipulate the information they reveal to their handlers as a way of staying in power.

  When it became apparent to Fitzpatrick that his warnings about the Bulger relationship were being ignored, he sought to build his own cases against the Mob boss. He developed informants like Brian Halloran, a sad-sack career thug who worked for Bulger, and John McIntyre, a naive Irish Republican Army (IRA) sympathizer who partnered with Bulger on a scheme to send guns to Northern Ireland in exchange for shipments of marijuana and cocaine. Agents in Fitzpatrick’s own office leaked information to Bulger about the informants; Halloran and McIntyre were both brutally murdered by Bulger, as were other informants whose identities were compromised and revealed to local gangsters by Connolly and Morris.

  In the end, Fitzpatrick’s reputation within the Bureau as a potential whistleblower and general “pain in the ass” began to wear him down. It took a personal toll on him and his wife. Fitzpatrick began to get the sense that Bulger and his gangster partner Steve Flemmi, who was also a longtime FBI informant, were more important to the local office than he was. “Apparently, Bulger and Flemmi were the FBI’s ‘guys’ while I, somehow, wasn’t,” writes Fitzpatrick. “While busting [the Mafia] remained every bit a top priority in Washington, my efforts and accomplishments were being demeaned by a group-think mentality that led to a scenario of ‘us versus them,’ with me inexplicably linked with ‘them.’ ”

  When Fitzpatrick, frustrated and disillusioned, resigned from the Bureau in 1987, the full dimensions of Bulger’s partnership with the FBI was not yet known, even to the agent. It wasn’t until the late-1990s, when Bulger went on the lam allegedly after being tipped off by his FBI contacts that he was about to be arrested, that the truth started to come out. In a series of hearings and depositions, the Bulger cohorts who were left behind turned “rat” and testified in court. In a groundbreaking hearing presided over by federal judge Mark Wolf, Fitzpatrick testified, and for the first time the story of his efforts to rectify the Bureau’s sinister alliance with Bulger began to take shape.

  In January 2000, after Whitey’s right-hand man provided details on a series of murders, including where the bodies were buried, Fitzpatrick stood in the rain alongside Dorchester gully as the remains of John McIntyre, his one-time i
nformant, were dug up. “As I stood on that embankment,” writes Fitzpatrick, “steaming over confirmation of what I’d suspected ever since John McIntyre had disappeared in 1984, I never imagined I was looking at the means to achieve my long sought vindication.”

  Fitzpatrick’s vindication would come in court, where he testified as part of a civil lawsuit brought by the McIntyre family—and other families of Bulger’s victims—against the FBI and the U.S. government for having underwritten Bulger’s murderous criminal career. In 2006, the McIntyre family was awarded $3.1 million in damages. All told, litigation from cases related to the Bulger debacle would result in damages more than $20 million.

  Betrayal provides the most complete overview to date of the culture of corruption that made Bulger possible. Fitzpatrick names names and offers an appendix filled with FBI memos, letters, and excerpts from depositions and court proceedings. The cumulative effect is a devastating reaffirmation of the findings of a U.S. congressional committee that declared the Bulger-FBI relationship to represent “one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement.”

  The final chapter on Bulger has not yet been written. Whitey is scheduled to stand trial sometime in 2012, and Fitzpatrick will likely be called to testify.

  In this sordid saga of homicidal gangsters and dirty federal agents, Fitzpatrick’s perspective—and his book—offers a rare beacon of light.

  3.

  THE UNLIKELY MOLL

  The Daily Beast, March 14, 2012

  Catherine Greig’s guilty plea means she is unlikely to receive more than thirty-two months in jail for conspiracy and identity fraud—an outcome that outraged relatives of the victims of boyfriend James “Whitey” Bulger’s many alleged murders.

  You can hardly hear the voice of Catherine Greig, sixty, longtime paramour of notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, as she stands before a federal judge and says the words, “Guilty, your honor.”

  Dressed in blue prison fatigues over a long-sleeved white T-shirt, her gray hair cropped short, Greig is a figment of her former self. An attractive woman who once lavished money on various surgical procedures to further enhance her beauty, Greig’s vanities have been punctured—if not decimated—by nine months of maximum-security incarceration. The permanent tan she acquired after sixteen years on the lam with Bulger in such sunny climes as the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Santa Monica, California—where she and the Most Wanted gangster were apprehended in June—is long gone now, replaced by the permanent gray pallor of a convict.

  As had been leaked to the media earlier in the week, Greig is in U.S. District Court in Boston to plead guilty to charges of conspiracy to harbor a fugitive, conspiracy to commit identity fraud, and identity fraud. By signing a statement that she “engaged in conduct that was intended to help Bulger avoid detection from law enforcement and to provide him with support and assistance during his flight from law enforcement,” Greig avoids a trial and any further charges U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz may have been planning on bringing against her.

  Bulger, currently in prison at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, faces nineteen counts of murder stemming from his twenty-year reign as the Mob boss of Boston. After being indicted on racketeering charges and fleeing with Greig in January 1995, it was revealed that Bulger also had been a confidential FBI informant since 1975.

  Last June, when Bulger and Greig were arrested in Santa Monica—after a tip from a woman who had spotted Greig at a local beauty parlor—federal agents found an arsenal of weapons on the premises, along with more than $800,000 in cash hidden in the wall of their apartment.

  Known as a bright but subservient woman, Greig is believed to have had little involvement in Bulger’s life as a racketeer. She enjoyed the financial largesse of his criminal pursuits without having to partake of his crimes, until they set out together on the lam. For sixteen years, Bulger and Greig lived as con artists, opening bank accounts and making medical appointments and purchases under false identities, using stolen birth certificates and Social Security numbers to create fraudulent identities.

  Wednesday, at the Moakley Courthouse in Boston, Greig was brought into court in handcuffs, which were removed once she was seated at the defense table. The hearing lasted just over one hour. Greig showed emotion only once, when Judge Douglas Woodlock asked her a series of routine questions about her health.

  “Have you ever sought or been through psychiatric evaluation or therapy?” asked the judge.

  “One time,” said Greig. She attempted to explain that she sought therapy following the suicide of a family member but was too overcome with emotion to finish her sentence. As Greig wept openly, her attorney, Kevin Reddington, seated beside her at the defense table, patted her on her shoulder.

  Greig regained her composure and listened without emotion as prosecutor Jack Pirozzolo outlined details of the charges against her. Later, after it was explained to Greig that she could still be called to testify in a criminal proceeding against Bulger, and that her sentencing would be determined by the judge irrespective of the guilty plea, Judge Woodlock asked, “Do you understand that?”

  “I do, Your Honor,” responded Greig.

  After Greig entered her plea and the hearing ended, she was again handcuffed by a court officer. On the way out of court, she waved to her twin sister, Margaret McCusker, who had observed the proceeding from the front row of the spectators’ gallery.

  Outside the courtroom, family members of victims of Bulger’s many alleged murders vented their frustration. Steve Davis, brother of Debra Davis, who, at the age of twenty-six, was allegedly strangled to death by Bulger, called Greig “a monster.” In an exclusive interview with the Daily Beast, Davis said, “For thirty years, my family has been waiting for justice to prevail. That woman helped keep a mass murderer at large. She knew exactly what she was doing. She doesn’t deserve a break.”

  U.S. Attorney Ortiz, speaking to the press following the hearing, denied that Greig had received any kind of “sweetheart deal.” Said Ortiz, “We believe that bringing this to a swift conviction is in the best interest of justice.”

  Ortiz noted that Greig faces a maximum charge of five years on each count to which she pleaded guilty. The sentences, however, would run concurrently, meaning that even if she receives the maximum sentence, Greig is unlikely to receive more than thirty-two months, of which she has already served nine.

  Says Steve Davis, “For sixteen years, the families been paying for her actions, suffering, not knowing. For what? So Catherine Greig can be back on the street in two years? It ain’t fair.”

  Greig is due back in Judge Woodlock’s courtroom to be sentenced on June 12.

  4.

  WHITEY’S WOMEN

  The Daily Beast, June 11, 2012

  As Catherine Greig awaits sentencing for helping fugitive Whitey Bulger, she becomes the latest girlfriend of the Mob boss to suffer for her love. T. J. English exclusively speaks to “the other woman” in the Bulger saga, Teresa Stanley, and other mobster ex-girlfriends about the terror and glamour of their lives.

  When Catherine Greig, girlfriend and fugitive partner of gangster James “Whitey” Bulger walks into U.S. District Court in Boston this week, she will face her moment of reckoning. After sixteen years on the lam with Bulger, most of those years spent living in an apartment in Santa Monica, California, under assumed names and false identities, Greig, age sixty, pleaded guilty three months ago to charges of identity fraud and harboring a fugitive. She is expected to receive a sentence somewhere between three and five years. Having already served one year in prison, she could walk free in thirty-three months. Not bad, considering that some of the women who entered the realm of Bulger and his gangster partner, Steve Flemmi, were strangled to death and buried in a shallow grave.

  When twenty-six-year-old Debra Davis sought to end her relationship with Flemmi, she was lured to an apartment on Third Street in South Boston and strangled in the basement, allegedly by Bulger. Four years later, a simila
r fate befell Deborah Hussey, also twenty-six, Flemmi’s stepdaughter from a relationship with his common-law wife, Marion Hussey. When Deborah Hussey openly accused Flemmi of having sexually molested her as a teenager, she wound up garroted by Bulger, her teeth extracted, and her body dumped in a grave not far from Whitey’s condominium in Quincy, Massachusetts.

  The killings are disturbing enough, but for the women who circulated in the orbit of Bulger and Flemmi, there were other costs. Appearing in U.S. District Court for her guilty plea, Greig seemed fragile and traumatized. Her voice rarely rose above a whisper. When asked by the judge if she had ever sought psychiatric counseling, Greig wept openly.

  At least two other women who had relationships with Bulger and Flemmi can identify with the state of post-traumatic stress that Greig might be experiencing. To them, her story is a cautionary tale. These women also could have wound up dead, or on the run with a murderous gangster and psychotic control freak, or in prison awaiting sentencing. Instead, they are alive and free, though, like Greig, they carry with them a lifetime’s worth of psychological baggage from their years of deceit and paranoia as the girlfriends of underworld criminals.

  For nearly twenty years, Teresa Stanley has endured a checkered legacy as “the other woman” in the Whitey Bulger saga. Her feelings about this are mixed. On one hand, she regrets that she was ever any kind of woman to Whitey Bulger, a man who romanced, dominated, and then betrayed her. On the other hand, she resents being known as a second-class paramour when, in fact, she lived with Bulger for thirty years. If anything, Stanley believes it was Catherine Greig who was the other woman.

  “It’s hard to live with,” says Stanley. “Not only did I share my life with a man who is now accused of these terrible things. But he deceived and betrayed me by having this other life with Catherine. He humiliated me in the eyes of the town.”