Though Di Silva moved out of the area, to Arizona and Costa Rica and Florida, she never stopped worrying about her past connections to Flemmi and Bulger, partly because she was frequently contacted by the FBI and other law enforcement sources seeking details about her time with the gang. In the late 1990s, when Bulger went on the run and Flemmi turned stool pigeon, the lurid details started to come out.
“I was shocked,” says Di Silva. “I’m still shocked.” The grisly details of Flemmi and Bulger strangling Debbie Davis, who Di Silva knew, and Deborah Hussey were “sickening,” but equally disturbing was the revelation that Flemmi began a sexual relationship with the fourteen-year-old daughter of his common-law wife. “I remember him always asking me about my oldest daughter,” she says. “Did he have his eyes on her so he could move in when I got older? Was that his plan?”
Like Teresa Stanley, Di Silva is haunted by the knowledge that she could have circulated among men who were psychopathic killers, and what that says about her. “You can’t take back the past,” she says. “It is what it is. But when I think back about it, it gives me the creeps.”
To some, Catherine Greig, like Teresa Stanley and Marilyn Di Silva, is guilty only of having made bad choices. She fell for a professional criminal and likely became enamored by the excitement and, most of all, the financial security it provided. She remained loyal to Bulger for thirty-six years, with sixteen of those years under extreme pressure as co-fugitives from the law. Greig was either in love with Whitey, or living in fear, or under the throes of some manner of Stockholm syndrome.
Others see a more conniving co-conspirator. In the wake of Greig’s guilty plea, it was revealed in court that she was attempting to transfer co-ownership of her house and bank accounts into the name of her twin sister, Margaret McCusker. Rather than a woman in a state of trauma, claimed federal prosecutors, she was calculating ways to protect her property and bank accounts. U.S. District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock has ordered that her assets be frozen until after she is sentenced.
One person who could feel vindictive toward Greig but does not is Teresa Stanley. “I have nothing to gain by Catherine doing a long time in prison,” she says. Stanley remembers a day last summer, after Bulger and Greig were apprehended, when she was approached by Catherine’s sister, who said, “Teresa, I’m sorry about what you’re having to go through,” adding, “you know, Whitey really loved you.”
“I thought about that,” says Stanley. “Did he love me? Really? How can you say that about a person who deceived you and lived a double life and shamed you in the eyes of everybody?”
Still, she does not blame the other woman. “All those years cooped up with Jimmy, traveling, living on the run, having to answer to his every command, that couldn’t have been easy.”
5.
THE SCAPEGOAT
Newsweek, June 25, 2012
FBI Agent John Connolly went to jail for enabling the bloody reign of gangster Whitey Bulger. Now, in his first interview since Bulger was caught, he says the extent of the Feds’ cover-up may never be known.
In the twelve months since notorious mobster James “Whitey” Bulger was captured, he has been revealed to have feet of clay. Stripped of his power, with few cards to play, Bulger awaits some form of justice, be it death from old age (he’s eighty-two), or adjudication in federal court, where he stands accused of nineteen murders. Either way, Bulger will be made to pay, though, increasingly, it has become apparent that the many people and institutions of government that made Bulger possible will not be held accountable. One of the most violent and pernicious criminal conspiracies in the history of America is over, but for those who hoped that the prosecution of Bulger would be some form of final exposé on the Bulger era, the trial is shaping up to be a whitewash.
Having lived sixteen years on the run, twelve of those in an apartment near the beach in Santa Monica, California, with $822,198 cash and an arsenal of weapons stashed in a wall, Bulger was finally pinched after a tipster contacted the FBI with information about his fugitive girlfriend, Catherine Greig. Bulger and Greig, age sixty-one, were arrested on June 23, 2011 and returned to Boston, where Whitey had for nearly a quarter century maintained a criminal business that included extortion, loan sharking, narcotics, fraud, illegal gambling, and murder.
Last week, Catherine Greig received an eight-year prison sentence and $150,000 fine for aiding and abetting a federal fugitive. With time served and allowable reductions for “good behavior,” she is likely to serve seventy-six months. Bulger’s trial is scheduled to begin on November 5.
The evidence against Whitey is formidable. Since he went on the run in January 1995, most of his closest associates have cut deals with the government and testified at various hearings and trials, and they are likely to testify against Whitey at his trial. Any attempt to prosecute Bulger, however, is complicated by the fact that at the same time he was committing most of the alleged murders, he and his gangster partner, Steve Flemmi, were also working as top informants for the FBI.
It is Bulger’s role as a government informant, and how that role was fostered, facilitated, and kept confidential by a vast array of public servants, that has led many to suspect that the true nature of Bulger’s criminal career will never be fully explored in a court of law. Actions taken since Whitey’s arrest one year ago underscore these claims.
“The prosecution of Bulger is being carefully orchestrated,” says Harvey Silverglate, a renowned Boston criminal defense attorney and author who has written about the case. Silverglate uses the word cover-up to describe the prosecution’s motives, adding, “If they wanted to convict Bulger swiftly, they could have tried him in California on gun possession charges. Would have been an open-and-shut case. He’d have received a thirty-year sentence. Or in Oklahoma, where one of the murders occurred, they have the death penalty. But the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston is not about to let this case out from under its control. Because then details might come out that show a pattern of secrecy and cover-up going back generations.”
The cover-up kicked into gear last July when the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced they had dropped all counts in the indictment except for the murder charges. “It is in the public interest to protect public resources—both executive and judicial—by bringing the defendant to trial on the government’s strongest case,” said U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz. Dropping the racketeering counts had another benefit: It greatly diminished the possibility that Bulger’s trial would explore how his racketeering career was underwritten, in large part, by the U.S. Department of Justice.
One person who concurs with the cover-up theory is John Connolly, the former FBI man who was Bulger’s case agent in the years that he was an informant. Since 2002, Connolly has been in prison on numerous charges stemming from his relationship with Bulger and Flemmi, including a second-degree murder conviction. “The Justice Department is going to do everything within its power to try to make sure the full story never comes out,” says Connolly, via phone from a correctional facility in Chipley, Florida, where he is currently serving a forty-year sentence. Since Bulger’s apprehension, Connolly has not granted any public interviews—until now.
Born and raised in the insular blue-collar neighborhood of South Boston (Southie), Connelly knew Bulger from childhood. He was even closer friends with William “Billy” Bulger, Whitey’s younger brother, who would rise through the ranks of state politics to become president of the state senate and, arguably, the most powerful politician in the Massachusetts state legislature.
In 2008, after a two-month trial in Miami, Connolly was convicted of having fed information to Bulger’s crew that led to the murder of John Callahan, a crooked business partner of Bulger’s who the mobster was concerned might cooperate with a criminal investigation. Callahan was shot in the head by a Bulger associate, his dead body left in the trunk of a Cadillac near Miami International Airport. Before being convicted for his involvement in the Callahan murder, Connolly was sentenced to ten years on a federal con
viction in Massachusetts for accepting gratuities, falsifying evidence, and obstruction of justice, including the charge that he tipped off Whitey about his imminent arrest back in late-1994, making it possible for Bulger to run.
Says Connelly, “[The Justice Department] put a hit out on me back in 2000. They decided I would be targeted to take the fall for this whole arrangement. And they’ve stuck to it ever since.”
Connolly hopes that the apprehension of Bulger will lead not only to his murder conviction being overturned, but also to his public exoneration. “My lawyers have information that since Bulger was brought in, he spoke to FBI agents and told them I had nothing to do with tipping him off [about a pending federal indictment]. And he told them I had nothing to do with this murder in Florida, not one damn thing.”
From 1975, when Connelly first enlisted Bulger as a Top Echelon informant, until 1990, when Connelly retired from the FBI, Bulger and the agent met often, shared meals, and traded information. Connolly acknowledges that Bulger was involved in criminal activity, but, he says, “I didn’t ask about that. My role was to protect Bulger and Flemmi so we could make cases against criminals based on information they gave us. That was my job. Everyone knew that they were top criminals and murderers.”
Though he insists there was nothing criminal in his relationship with Bulger, Connolly acknowledges there was a natural affinity between him and the Bulger brothers based on their shared Southie upbringing. In fact, in the early-1990s, following his retirement, Connolly says he’d heard that criminal investigations of “Jimmy” (Bulger’s friends never called him Whitey) were under way. He had a friendly conversation with Senator Billy Bulger, saying, “You know, I hear your brother is involved in things that could get him into big trouble. You should tell him maybe it’s time to change his lifestyle and retire to Florida.” Says Connolly, “Billy sighed, looked at me, and asked, ‘John, you ever try to tell an older brother what to do?’ I knew what he meant.”
The crucial question about Bulger’s trial is whether or not the evidence might reveal that Connolly was merely a foot soldier in a much larger campaign of secrecy and corruption that spanned generations. The forces that sustained Bulger involved not only the entire Boston office and regional supervisors of the FBI, but stretched into the U.S. Attorney’s Office and possibly involved federal judges.
Federal prosecutors are on a track to make sure this version of the Bulger narrative does not surface at his upcoming trial. “The DOJ has no appetite for any kind of self-examination,” says Thomas Foley, a former colonel with the Massachusetts State Police who spent the better part of his career in law enforcement trying to take Bulger down. “To air all this out now would give a lot of people a black eye. They just want it all to go away.”
The roots of Bulger’s “special relationship” with law enforcement goes back before Bulger was a big player in the city’s underworld. In the early hours of March 12, 1965, in a dark back alley in Boston, a low-level hood named Teddy Deegan was filled with lead and left for dead. Deegan had fallen afoul of a psychotic Mafia-connected hit man named Joe “the Animal” Barboza. It was Barboza who murdered Deegan after asking for permission from Raymond Patriarca, boss of the Patriarca crime family, which then controlled New England. Barboza was assisted in murdering Deegan by another gangster named Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi, brother of Steve Flemmi, who would one day be Bulger’s partner in crime. The murder of a small timer like Deegan would normally have been a minor event. But the government had a problem. The killers, Barboza and Flemmi, were both Top Echelon informants for the FBI.
The feds knew that these two men murdered Deegan. In fact, the FBI had bugged Raymond Patriarca’s home in Providence, Rhode Island, and captured on tape the conversation where Barboza asked for and received permission to whack Deegan. But the FBI did not want to lose their highly prized Top Echelon informants. What they did next would alter the trajectory of criminal justice in the region for a generation. The FBI and prosecutors had Barboza take the stand and tell a fabricated version of the murder that would lead to the conviction of two innocent men, Peter Limone and Joe Salvati. After being declared guilty, Limone and Salvati were sentenced to death row.
The framing of innocent citizens in a capital murder case by withholding evidence and suborning perjury—all to protect notorious criminals who were government informants—became the dirty secret of federal law enforcement in New England. In the years that followed, the convictions of Limone and Salvati would be challenged in various local jurisdictions but the government always fought back. It is difficult to know how many agents, assistant U.S. attorneys, district attorneys, and cops were in on the conspiracy. Prosecutors understood that they were to do everything within their power to preserve the convictions and ensure that no further examinations of the evidence would ever take place in court. Virtually the entire system became part of an effort to safeguard the false conviction so that criminals, protected by the government, could remain free.
By the time John Connolly recruited and signed up Whitey Bulger as a FBI informant in the mid-1970s, the Boston underworld had descended into a murky, murderous pit of rats with cops and federal agents as active players. Connolly’s predecessor and mentor in the Boston FBI office, Special Agent H. Paul Rico, would eventually be indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and murder. Rico was believed to have supplied key information for gangland murders, and may have even taken part in actual Mob hits himself. He died in prison in January 2004 while facing prosecution.
The Boston FBI office has been publicly excoriated for its handling of Bulger and Flemmi, and rightfully so. Connolly and many others in law enforcement defend the concept of using criminals to catch other criminals. “Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made, but in the real world that’s how cases get made,” says Connolly. At the very least, the Bulger case reveals a shocking lack of oversight. Federal agents fed information to two mobsters that led to murders and the thwarting of potential criminal investigations spearheaded by other law enforcement agencies. They helped turn Bulger and Flemmi into the most powerful gangsters in the history of Boston.
Connolly’s supervisor, Special Agent John Morris, head of the Organized Crime Squad, pleaded guilty to charges of accepting bribes and gratuities from Bulger, and obstructing justice. He served no jail time, in exchange for his testifying at 1998 hearings into the Bulger affair. In his testimony, Morris put forth a scenario—since expounded upon by prosecutors and the media—that John Connolly was a “rogue agent” who promoted and protected Bulger’s informant status within the Bureau solely for personal profit and aggrandizement.
John Connolly is not without culpability, but he did not devise the Top Echelon Informant Program, and whatever he did to maintain Bulger’s viability as an informant was authorized and, in many cases, rewarded via promotions and special citations from six different FBI directors.
“There were enablers throughout the system, from top to bottom,” says retired FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick. An assistant special agent in charge of the Boston office, Fitzpatrick was Connolly’s nemesis. After meeting Bulger and Connolly together, Fitzpatrick recommended that Bulger be “closed down” as an informant. His recommendations were ignored and his two-page report about Bulger was buried by two successive special agents in charge of the Boston office. Over time, Fitzpatrick began to sense that the conspiracy to protect Bulger went all the way to headquarters in Washington, D.C. His suspicions were later verified in U.S. congressional hearings that concluded, “What happened in New England over a forty-year period is, without doubt, one of the greatest failures in federal law enforcement history.”
That conspiracy went beyond the FBI. Among the friends of Whitey Bulger who ran interference for the mobster was Jeremiah O’Sullivan, head of the U.S. Attorney’s Organized Crime Strike Force, who would, thanks to his successes during the Bulger years, rise to become U.S. attorney in Boston.
As early as 1977, agent Connolly informed O’Sullivan that he
had “turned” someone who could help them make major cases against the Mafia. When O’Sullivan heard it was Bulger, he wanted to meet him. Remembers Connolly, “I asked him, ‘Are you sure? You don’t have to.’ ” It was highly unusual for an assistant U.S. attorney to meet face-to-face with a top informant while an investigation was still ongoing. O’Sullivan insisted.
Connolly set up a meeting between the city’s top mobster and its top organized crime prosecutor in a hotel room on a rainy afternoon around Christmas. “I was there,” says Connolly. “Jimmy met Jerry. As I remember it, they were both quite impressed with one another.”
Jeremiah O’Sullivan was one of the best things that ever happened to Bulger. In 1979, when an investigation targeted an array of mobsters on charges of fixing races at horse tracks, O’Sullivan dropped Bulger and Flemmi from the indictment. As Flemmi would later put it, “We believed we were authorized to commit crimes as long as we didn’t kill anybody. That’s what we were told.”
O’Sullivan’s desire to protect his prize informants didn’t end with Whitey and Stevie. In 1989, information was brought to O’Sullivan that Billy Bulger, Whitey’s senator brother, had received a legally questionable payment of $240,000 as part of a real estate deal at 75 State Street in downtown Boston. According to Bob Fitzpatrick, who investigated the deal, “It was a clear violation of the Hobbs Act. We had Billy Bulger dead in his tracks.” But O’Sullivan made the decision to not go forward with charges against Senator Bulger. After the deal was exposed in the media, Bulger gave the money back.
In 2003, long after Whitey went on the run and his associates began cutting deals with the government, pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Hearings were held by the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform that proved to be an unprecedented foray into the criminal history of the Bulger era. The hearings most famously exposed Billy Bulger, who was forced to resign from his job as president of the University of Massachusetts after it was revealed he had been in contact with his fugitive brother.
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