American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  Far more revealing was the testimony of O’Sullivan, also retired, who, in the years since Bulger’s disappearance, had publicly denied that he’d known that Bulger was an informant until he read about it in the press. This bold-faced lie was exposed when internal Justice Department memos were produced that showed O’Sullivan had known about Bulger since the late-1970s. “You got me,” said the former U.S. attorney to the congressional committee.

  Even more damaging were FBI and DOJ memos and correspondence subpoenaed by the committee, after a fierce legal battle with the Bush administration. Records showed that O’Sullivan’s mentor and predecessor as U.S. attorney, Edward Harrington (later a federal judge), had been complicit in the framing of Limone and Salvati for the Deegan murder. At the hearings, a picture began to emerge of a generation of agents and prosecutors who were the metaphorical offspring of those who had conspired to make sure that the truth about the Deegan murder would never be revealed. Thus, protecting Bulger and Flemmi became a way of repressing this potentially explosive history—Whitey and Stevie became the keepers of the Justice Department’s dirty little secret.

  A final report on the findings of the House Committee was issued in 2004. Entitled Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers as Informants, it remains the single most detailed exposé on the Bulger era. The findings helped expedite a financial settlement for Peter Limone and Joe Salvati, who had their convictions overturned in 2000. In 2007, they were awarded $101.7 million in damages—paid by U.S. taxpayers—for having unjustly served thirty-four years in prison. The U.S. government has also been forced to pay, collectively, $20 million in damages to family members of some of Bulger’s victims, who filed suits against the FBI and DOJ, claiming that the man who killed their loved ones did so while being sponsored and protected by the government.

  Those who advocate for the U.S. attorney’s current streamlined prosecution of Bulger make the argument that the Bulger conspiracy has been fully aired at various hearings and trials in the sixteen years that Bulger was basking in the California sun. In 1999, the justice department claimed they were going to get the bottom of the Bulger fiasco, and that no one would be spared. John Durham, a Connecticut prosecutor, was appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno to spearhead an investigation, but the Durham report was never completed or delivered, and the government has never explained why. The sole significant result of Durham’s efforts was the prosecution of John Connolly.

  Despite decades of corruption, obstruction of justice, and suppression of evidence, no government official in a supervisory position has ever been held accountable. Many who benefited most from Bulger’s tenure as an informant have since passed away.

  Some doubt that a trial will ever come to pass. Bulger may choose to stall and run out the clock and eventually die in prison, though his lawyer denies that is the case. The prosecution—though they claim to be eager to proceed—also has reason not to be overly enthusiastic about a trial, given the potential for unanticipated revelations.

  Amidst the uncertainty, one thing is clear: As the U.S. Justice Department prepares to put on trial one of the most murderous gangsters in the last half century, it is in no position to claim the moral high ground.

  6.

  R.I.P. TERESA STANLEY

  TJ-English.com, August 26, 2012

  Her life was defined and perhaps ruined by thirty years as the common-law wife of Mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger. Now, maybe, Teresa Stanley has finally found peace.

  I was saddened to hear of the death of Teresa Stanley, seventy-one, long-time companion of James “Whitey” Bulger who passed away last August 16 of lung cancer.

  I interviewed Teresa on two separate occasions earlier this year, before she knew anything about the cancer. I found her to be haunted by the legacy of personal deception and violent crime left by her ex-common-law husband, James Bulger. Teresa was a twenty-six-year old divorcée with four kids when she first met Bulger in 1966. He was not the legendary crime figure he would later become. By her own account, she became comfortable in her life with Bulger, who she knew was in “the illegal gambling business” and possibly a loan shark. She says she did not know of Bulger’s many murders.

  I first met and interviewed Teresa at Marisola’s restaurant in South Boston, a neighborhood bistro well known to the locals. I was introduced to Teresa by Pat Nee, a friend and former criminal rival of Bulger’s who, among other things, once did eight years in prison for smuggling guns to the Irish Republican Army back in the 1980s. Teresa used to chuckle whenever I mentioned Pat’s name, because she knew Pat didn’t care for Bulger, and, in fact, tried to kill him once or twice before they finally formed an uneasy partnership. Teresa later conceded that Nee was probably right in his negative assessment of Whitey.

  The second time I interviewed Teresa was over breakfast at the Seaport Hotel on the harbor in Boston. Both interview sessions were lengthy—two hours or more. And Teresa was very forthcoming and frank about her feelings and emotions. I liked her instantly. My feeling was that she was a good person, very sensitive and sweet, who had made a horrible choice in her life by settling down with a master deceiver like Bulger. She would later pay a heavy price for her associations with Bulger, as she became the subject of FBI and other investigations, was called to testify numerous times at hearings and trials, and was ultimately painted with a “scarlet letter” for having been Bulger’s paramour for thirty years.

  I spoke with Teresa one last time, earlier this year, when I called her on behalf of Newsweek magazine, which was looking to take her photo to accompany my article. Though she had not told anyone outside her closest family members of her cancer, she told me. I was shocked. Not only had she just learned of her condition, she was told that the cancer was far advanced. I told her I was sorry and that she deserved better; she was a good person.

  There are those who vilify Teresa and hold her partly responsible for Bulger’s crimes. I do not. She made a bad choice in love, was perhaps naive, maybe even chose to stick her head in the sand during Whitey’s reign of power. When it came out that her lover was alleged to have killed so many people, including young women, she was stunned. When I met her, she still seemed to be partly in a state of shock about the whole thing.

  Teresa has now arrived at her place of peace. Let the haters spew their venom. They never had to walk in her shoes.

  Epilogue

  January 2013: It is a gloomy drive through the frozen tundra of upstate New York to Sullivan County, for another visit with Mad Dog Sullivan. As we greet one another in the prison visiting room, as usual, I joke with the aging gangster about the fact that he is named Sullivan, incarcerated at the Sullivan Correctional Facility, in Sullivan County. “They were so worried you were gonna try to escape,” I say, “they wanted you to feel as welcome as possible.”

  Sully looks amazingly fit considering the cancer surgeries and his most recent prognosis: There is a cancerous field in his one remaining good lung. It is only a matter of time before the cancer becomes active. Sully’s days are numbered. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, though, thanks to his daily visits to the prison gym and a rueful acceptance of his mortality. “Nobody lives forever,” says the former hit man.

  We settle into our regular spot in the prison visiting room. As usual, Sully reminisces, and I take it all in. These days, he doesn’t have much to hide. There is a Wikipedia entry about Mad Dog Sullivan on the Internet that details a criminal life that is almost impossible to believe. Son of a New York police detective who died when Joe was thirteen; institutionalized and later criminalized by a hardscrabble life on the streets; many hired killings carried out under contract with the Genovese crime family and other organized crime groups; more time spent in prisons than on the street.

  It’s all true, Sully admits, except for one fact on the page that gets his goat. Wikipedia and other Internet sources claim that Sully was given the moniker “mad dog” in prison, so named by other inmates due to a salivary gland problem.
“Total bunk,” says Sullivan. He tells me the true story about the origins of the nickname.

  It was 1981, and Sullivan had been contracted to murder a mobbed-up Teamster official named John Fiorino. Sullivan killed Fiorino with a shotgun blast in a restaurant parking lot in Rochester, New York. He and his getaway driver were pursued. After their car crashed into a large snowbank, the driver was captured, but Sullivan got away by hiding in that freezing snowbank for nearly eight hours. A team of state police and FBI agents descended on the scene in pursuit of Sullivan. The lead lawman told the others, “Be careful. This man is armed and dangerous. He is a mad dog killer.”

  That night, Sullivan got away, but the nickname stuck when the New York Post and other newspapers, upon his eventual arrest weeks later, plastered it in headlines such as MAD DOG HIT MAN NABBED! and HOW COPS PUT LEASH ON MAD DOG.

  In most accounts of Sully’s life, his many murders stand out like a horrible gash, an open wound so gruesome that anyone pondering the life of this man is unable to see anything beyond his penchant for destruction. I have never asked Sullivan exactly how many people he murdered. It is a long list. He knows now that these killings were the product of a deep-seated sickness, though he notes that the people he killed were almost always people in the criminal life—gangsters, or even killers themselves. Sullivan did not have a psychological compulsion to kill people. He did it for the money. He did it because it was his job.

  Sully is not proud of his role as an angel of death, but there is one aspect of his long criminal career that does warm his heart, and that has to do with his many escapes from jails and prisons. His early life was driven by a deep-seated fear of entrapment, which, subconsciously, led him to embrace a philosophy based on Newton’s third law of motion, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Up until his most recent extended incarceration, Sully’s life was a cycle of entrapment and escape, escape and entrapment.

  At the age of fourteen, not long after his father died, he ran away from home. He was apprehended by police and sent to the New York State Training School for Boys in Warwick, and later the New York State Vocational Institution in Coxsackie, both notorious reformatories in upstate New York. When Sullivan was released at the age of nineteen, he went on a petty burglary spree out west with a boyhood friend. They were apprehended by police in Cheyenne, Wyoming. There, Sully pulled off his first escape by diving through a plate-glass window at a police station. Bloodied and on the run, he walked into an Army recruitment station and joined up, mostly as a means to escape the law.

  In the Army, he went AWOL on numerous occasions and fled back to New York City, where he was captured and thrown in a military stockade on Governor’s Island, in New York harbor. Sullivan escaped from that facility by covering his body with Vaseline, throwing himself into the frigid waters of the harbor, and swimming all the way to Brooklyn.

  Sully’s course in life was set: His hatred of institutional authority meant that he would never hold a legitimate job. In his early twenties, he undertook a more serious life of crime, with a series of robberies and stick-ups, until he was caught and thrown in prison in New Jersey. In Trenton State Prison and later in Rahway, Sully witnessed prison rapes and killings, and was in the middle of a horrific prison riot. He was released in 1965. Not long after that, he killed a man at the Willow Bar and Grill, near his home neighborhood in Queens, and was sentenced to prison for manslaughter. This led to his most daring escape, in 1971, from Attica, a maximum-security facility.

  The Attica escape is perhaps the most noteworthy item on Sully’s résumé. Using a pole constructed from pieces of pipe, he shimmied over a prison wall, dropped to the ground, and sweet-talked an unwitting visitor in the parking lot to drive him to the nearest town. From there, he hopped a Greyhound bus to parts unknown. He was captured a couple of months later in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, with a sawed-off shotgun stuffed in the leg of his pants.

  Sullivan smiles when I tell him that I live two blocks from where he was pinched, at East 10th Street and University Place. “Nice area,” he says. “Some nice diners, a few good bars. I used to go down there to visit my wife. That’s how I got caught. They staked out the office building where Gail worked and nailed me when I tried to see her.”

  Talk of Gail, Sullivan’s wife of thirty-seven years, is a subject that often brings a tear to the eyes of this unreconstructed tough guy. They were married in 1976, after Sully—having served ten years for manslaughter—was paroled, thanks in part to the help of former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who had befriended Sullivan and served as his attorney before the parole board. Gail was an account executive at a small advertising firm who met Joe through a friend. They soon had a child who they named Ramsey, in honor of the man who got Joe out of jail. Three years later, they had another boy named Kelly.

  Gail did not know that her husband was a hired killer for the Mob. It was her understanding that he worked at various construction jobs that he had secured through union connections.

  After my first prison visit with Sullivan, I met Gail at a diner in Manhattan, and she told me, “Joe could be difficult. He had a problem with drugs and alcohol, and I suspected he was having affairs, but he was a good provider. He cared about his family and his kids. Most of the time, he was a good man.”

  Gail is no dummy. She is not naive. Through arrests, trials, and incarceration, she has stuck by Sullivan because she believes, “inside of him, along with everything else, there is a good person. That’s the part of him I fell in love with.” Gail made sure their two boys grew up knowing their father, with regular visits to prison. They have become fine young men, never in trouble with the law, with kids and families of their own.

  The idea that Sullivan has somehow managed to maintain a marriage and healthy nuclear family while being a hit man and longtime prison inmate does not fit the profile of a psychotic mad dog. Sully gives Gail most of the credit. “I told her if she wanted to leave me and get on with her life, I would understand,” says Sullivan. “I told her, ‘You have a choice.’ She stayed. I owe everything I have to her, no doubt about that.”

  The dedication that Gail has shown to the man she married, and the relationship Sullivan has been able to salvage with his two sons, is—in the savage narrative of Joe Sullivan’s life—as miraculous as the Immaculate Conception. Improbably ennobled by family relationships that have survived and grown stronger over a forty-year period, Sullivan, the inveterate gangster and cold-blooded killer, can’t talk about any of this without choking up: “Gail, my sons, the grandkids—it’s more than I deserve. I don’t know why or how I got to be this lucky. It’s all I have to live for.”

  It’s getting late in our visit, and Sully wants to hear more about Whitey Bulger. He has followed my writing about Bulger in Newsweek magazine, and he is fascinated by how Whitey maintained his power by gaming the system for all those years.

  The Bulger story, of course, is right up Sully’s alley. He never met Bulger, but he knows the type. “He reminds me of Joey Gallo,” says Sully. “Machiavellian. Always playing one side against the other.” Gallo was one of numerous Mafia bosses who, in the late-1970s, hired Sully to whack out their enemies in the underworld.

  Sully admires Bulger’s mastery of the criminal universe in which he operated, but he is not pleased to hear that Whitey’s attorney has announced that Bulger will take the stand at his trial and reveal all about his criminal career, particularly as it relates to his relationship with the U.S. Department of Justice. Sully sees my excitement as I detail how Bulger, realizing he has nothing left to lose, will finally tell all and name names of people in the government who, he says, promised him immunity from prosecution as long as he supplied them with information about the Mafia. Says Sully, “See, you’re all for it because you’re a writer and it makes for a good story, but from where I’m sitting, it’s the lowest thing a guy can do.”

  Sully, of course, is referring to “the code,” the principle that under no circumstances does a
person rat out anyone, not even his enemies. Sully is in prison because his accomplice in the Fiorino hit cooperated with the government and testified against him at trial. Sully would rather be dead than be a rat, and he has paid a heavy price for adhering to the code. It is likely that he would be out on the street right now, his sentence reduced by many years, had he offered up testimony against the many Mob bosses with whom he did business.

  Sticking to this principle of never being a rat under any circumstances has caused Sully distress within his own family.

  “Him and his code,” says Kelly Sullivan, Sully’s son, whom I met and interviewed after my first meeting with Sully. Kelly told me that he and his father have often had arguments over the issue. “I’ve said to him, ‘Dad, what good has your code done for you? Many of your enemies are out on the street because they cut deals with the government. You’re in here … in prison for life. What you’re saying is that your code means more to you than your own family.’ ”

  Sully knows that it is hard for anyone to understand, especially law-abiding citizens—civilians—who have never been in his shoes.

  I attempt to explain the nuances of the Bulger situation, how this is slightly different, Bulger naming names of people in the government who he feels have sold him out, but Sully is not interested. He’s spent an entire lifetime living by his code; it is the only thing he has, other than his family. Though, like his son, I may have issues with it, I respect Sully for sticking to what he believes is the highest principle of the streets—even if, in this day and age, it makes him seem like the last of the Mohicans.