In the World

by Richard Stratton

  The TE program worked for John Connolly and his supervisors in the bureau for many years. The FBI was even able to record an actual Mafia induction ceremony based on tips from Bulger and Flemmi, and the recording was used as evidence in organized crime cases all over the country to prove the existence of the various crime families. But then, a decade after Connolly retired, having been feted and decorated, extolled as a hero, a new federal prosecutor arrived in Boston. Around this time, the Scarpa case involving FBI handler Linley DeVecchio broke in New York. The Justice Department and FBI circled the wagons and went into cover-up mode. The new prosecutor in Boston reviewed the Bulger and Flemmi file and decided to renege on the deal, to go after Bulger and Flemmi and deny there ever was a “special relationship” between the two gangsters and the FBI. Even though he was retired, Connolly was called in and told he would have to go along with the change of policy, admit everything he knew about the crimes of Whitey and Flemmi, and disclaim their covert relationship with the FBI—indeed, maintain that no such relationship ever existed—and disclose everything he knew about other Boston-based FBI agents who may have been involved in working with TE criminal informants. More importantly, Connolly was ordered to divulge everything he knew about Whitey’s younger brother, William Bulger, the former president of the Massachusetts State Senate, and current president of the University of Massachusetts—specifically what Billy Bulger may have known about his brother’s criminal activity and his current whereabouts as a fugitive. Connolly refused.

  When he refused to go along with the cover-up, Connolly was charged with accepting cash gifts from Whitey and with obstruction of justice for allegedly tipping Whitey off that he was about to be indicted and arrested in Boston, thus supposedly enabling Whitey to flee. When Connolly and I meet, Whitey is still the subject of one of the largest international manhunts ever mounted. He is second only to Osama Bin Laden on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and will assume first place after Bin Laden is captured and killed.

  Like many others, I was surprised to learn that Whitey had been an FBI informer. Still, it made perfect sense. When one considered how an Irish crime boss from South Boston associated with the ragtag, infiltrated, and much-indicted Winter Hill Gang had managed to survive and even thrive during the bloody Boston gang wars, there had to be more to the story. And when one saw how Whitey remained unscathed on the sidelines and then rose to power as the Patriarca Crime Family was wiped out with dozens of arrests and convictions based on multiple informers, wiretaps, and surveillance videos, including the recording of a Mafia induction ceremony, the pieces of the puzzle came together when it was revealed that Whitey had been protected by the FBI, and much of the success of the FBI’s war on organized crime in New England and New York could be attributed to Whitey, Flemmi, and other TE informers.

  Of course. That’s how it works. It’s the art of war, right out of Sun Tzu. Whitey was a student of military warfare tactics. He would have seen the advantages of working both sides to his benefit.

  Connolly is relieved to know that not only is there no need for him to try to explain the TE program and the handler/informer relationship and process to me, but that I’m sympathetic, even respectful of his decision not to double-cross Whitey and Flemmi. That is the agreement he made, and it is not a deal one reneges on for too little. Certainly, I respect Connolly’s resolve not to rat on his fellow agents or give evidence on his close friend, Billy Bulger, whether or not Billy actually had any substantive information on the whereabouts of his fugitive older brother. I’m willing to believe Connolly is not corrupt, that in fact he was just doing his job and doing it well, as directed by his superiors in the bureau, and with approval from the highest levels within the Department of Justice, going all the way up to the attorney general’s office. The government had declared war on organized crime, specifically on Cosa Nostra, and in such a war it is often necessary to make deals with enemy combatants and turn them into spies.

  How then to account for the fact that there were now federal and local prosecutors eager to make Connolly and fellow FBI agent and TE handler Lin DeVecchio scapegoats or fall guys for the controversial program? The simple answer is careerism. Prosecutors in Boston and New York are willing to hang Connolly and DeVecchio out to dry, make them take the heat for the inevitable scandal once the TE program is revealed, in order to enhance their own careers while protecting higher-ups in the Justice Department and federal government who had signed off on the TE program. The TE program itself was to be covered up and denied, with the Bulger and Scarpa cases made out to be aberrations rather than part of bureau policy.

  I like Connolly. Despite my long career as an outlaw, or perhaps because of it, I understand what it takes to survive in that world both as a criminal and as a cop. You are only as good as your word, and you are only successful if you are working with reliable information and dependable, loyal partners. No matter that Whitey and Flemmi are vicious criminals; that was understood. They had valuable inside intelligence on high-ranking members of the Patriarca Family. They had access to the bosses’ inner sanctums, the backrooms where the conspiracies were conceived. Of course, it gets dicey working with gangsters and killers like Flemmi, Scarpa, and master manipulator and murderer James Whitey Bulger. Innocent civilians suffer and die. That was never part of the deal, but such is war. Look at how many innocent women and children perished in Vietnam or in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  In New York, the bureau rallies around Lin DeVecchio, and he beats the case brought against him by prosecutors in Brooklyn. It’s another story for John Connolly in federal court in Boston. There are other factors at work. Connolly is caught up in a local power struggle that goes back decades and involves class and ethnic warfare. Whitey is still at large, and Billy Bulger still has powerful enemies who would like nothing better than to see him disgraced and jailed along with his brother.

  At trial in federal court in Boston in 2002, Connolly’s FBI supervisor, John Morris, an admitted corrupt alcoholic who accepted cases of wine, airplane tickets, and money from Whitey and Flemmi, had made a deal with the government to avoid prosecution and testified against Connolly. Morris told of a phone call he got from a “Mr. White” after Bulger fled Boston. Morris was so terrified when he picked up the phone and heard Whitey tell him that, if he went down Morris was coming with him, that Morris suffered a massive heart attack and had to be rushed to the hospital. Such was the infamy of Whitey Bulger in the criminal underworld: a phone call from Whitey could give a man cardiac arrest.

  A few weeks after we meet, Connolly is acquitted in Boston on the corruption charges of accepting money and gifts from Whitey, but he is convicted of obstruction of justice for supposedly tipping Bulger and Flemmi off about the pending indictments. This count in the Connolly indictment strikes me as being fabricated and ridiculous, but it’s typical of how the feds work. When they have a weak case, prosecutors will pile up a number of charges on the assumption that if the jury decides against some or most of them, they will assume the defendant must have done something wrong for the government to have charged them with so many crimes, and they will often vote to convict on those charges that are the most difficult to prove and to defend against.

  Connolly had already retired; he was working for Con Edison, and he was no longer privy to investigative details in the Bulger and Flemmi case. Whitey was on the lam and had been gone from Boston on an extended road trip with one of his girlfriends for months by the time the indictments came down and Flemmi was arrested. Connolly didn’t have to tip Whitey off about anything; Whitey was always the one with access to information. He was savvy enough to understand that once Connolly retired and the new federal law enforcement regime came to power in Boston, the deal he and Flemmi had with the FBI would be scrutinized by ambitious Justice Department prosecutors. Whitey had amassed a fortune in cash, and he knew that once word got out that he had been a longtime rat for the feds, not only was he going down but so were his allies in the bureau, and he was as good as a dead
man in the Boston and New England underworld. He picked up one girlfriend first and then dropped her off when she said she wasn’t up to a life on the run, then he picked up another longtime lover, Catherine Greig, and they took off. It’s not until sixteen years later, with Connolly still in prison, that Whitey would finally be captured hiding in plain sight in an apartment complex near the beach in Santa Monica, California. The elusive crime boss was located based on a tip from an actress living in Iceland who recognized Catherine Greig in a TV report on the fugitive couple.

  When I meet John Connolly a second time in 2009, he had been convicted after the 2002 trial, sentenced to ten years on the obstruction of justice charge in the Boston federal case, and served close to seven years of his sentence. Then, just weeks before his release, Connolly is indicted again, charged with conspiracy to commit murder in a 1982 Miami case. The body of a shady Boston businessman, John Callahan, had been found in the trunk of his Cadillac in long-term parking at Miami International Airport. Prolific Boston hitman John Martorano is convicted of murdering Callahan on orders from Whitey, who, Martorano claims, had been tipped off by Connolly while he was still with the FBI, and told that Callahan was about to cooperate with federal investigators. At trial in Miami in 2008, Connolly is acquitted on the conspiracy to commit murder count, but he is convicted of a lesser-­included offense, “second degree homicide with a firearm,” that the prosecutors had added to the indictment in case they couldn’t prove the conspiracy. Although Connolly was fifteen hundred miles away, at his home in Massachusetts in 1982 when the murder of Callahan took place in Miami, and although the firearm Martorano used to kill Callahan was never in Connolly’s possession, Connolly is convicted on the theory that he was in possession of a firearm—his government-­issued FBI service weapon—at the time Martorano killed Callahan. Connolly is sentenced to sixty years in Florida state prison. Numerous appeals all fail. At the time of this writing, Connolly is still locked up, the only person in the whole bloody Bulger, Flemmi, FBI/TE informer scandal to remain in prison nineteen years after the case first went to trial in Boston.

  It doesn’t seem possible. When I tell people the circumstances that led to Connolly’s conviction in Miami and his long imprisonment, they find it hard to believe. Things like this don’t happen in America, particularly not to decorated ex-FBI agents. Oh, but they do. If you piss off the right people, and if you refuse to knuckle under and go along with the program, woe is you. Connolly’s Miami prosecution and imprisonment begs credulity until one looks into the hidden facts of the case and understands all the high-level machinations at work to cover up Department of Justice malfeasance and protect the careers of men still in office and currently in the news. It takes years of firsthand experience with the US criminal justice system to understand how powerful, vindictive, and duplicitous the men working for the government can be when their agenda is to bring you to your knees and have you beg to do their bidding, including lie for them, to enhance and protect their careers. Even Whitey got his comeuppance, however indirectly, when he was left to be beaten to death by convicts in a West Virginia prison.

  AFTER OUR FIRST meeting with Connolly, Sonny Grosso hired me to write a screenplay on the Whitey Bulger and John Connolly story. I am fascinated, and I want to focus the story on the complicated, intimate, and parlous relationship between the FBI handler Connolly and his TE informer Whitey. It’s like a marriage made in hell. Vows are taken: I will not leave or forsake you till death do us part; our lives must and will depend on our faith in one another. Inevitably in such a relationship, one member of the couple will become dominant. Connolly’s success in the bureau depended on the high-level intelligence he got from Whitey and Flemmi. That in turn gave the gangsters a certain amount of control over Connolly as well as his boss, John Morris. The same is true of Greg Scarpa’s relationship with his FBI handler. Their lives become inextricably entangled in a secret relationship fraught with risk—and with the promise of abundant reward. Street-smart criminals, unscrupulous men like Bulger and Scarpa are adept at manipulating people and controlling relationships. Often the TE informer ends up handling the handler.

  The French Connection director William Friedkin signs on to direct the film based on a screenplay I write. While working on the script for Sonny Grosso with Friedkin, I write two articles on the Bulger and Connolly story, both published in Playboy. “Super Rat” appears in the January 2009 issue while Whitey is still in the wind, the subject of alleged sightings at remote locations all over the world—Ireland, supposedly protected by the IRA, South America, and Europe. “The Secret Life of Whitey Bulger” is published in December 2012 after Whitey’s capture in California in June 2011. When Friedkin reads my finished draft of the screenplay, he pronounces it too condensed. He tells me that he and Sonny have come to believe that the story is too big and cannot be told adequately in a two-hour film. They decide to take it to Kevin Reilly at NBC and pitch it as a four-hour miniseries. I’m paid for writing the feature screenplay and then hired to expand it for NBC. Now, with an enlarged canvas, I am free to look deeper into the character of superrat James Whitey Bulger and even to see him, his brother Billy, and John Connolly as archetypes of the American immigrant experience: the cop, the politician, and the gangster bound together in an emblematic covenant.

  These men grew up in the same South Boston housing projects at a time when there were signs in shop windows in Boston that read HELP WANTED. NO IRISH NEED APPLY. I want to know more about the Bulger household, to try to understand and show how conditions that produced one brother who grew up to be a vicious, powerful gangster and informer for the FBI in a relationship with an agent he had known since childhood also nurtured his younger brother to become what is known as a “Triple Eagle”: graduate of Boston College High School, a classics scholar at Boston College, and awarded a law degree from Boston College School of Law. Billy Bulger went into local politics and became a fierce defender of his tight-knit Southie neighborhood, no more so than during the violent street wars over the forced busing of schoolchildren, which both Bulger brothers actively resisted: Whitey with threats of violence, and Billy with his political clout. Billy spent seventeen years as a member of the Massachusetts State Senate, and he was that body’s president for over a decade. During his long, controversial tenure, Billy made his share of powerful enemies from among the Yankee Protestant bluebloods of Beacon Hill and wealthy Boston suburbs, who perceived him as a presumptuous, despotic, ­shillelagh-wielding mick usurper from the wrong side of town.

  Renowned for his iron-fisted rule, Billy Bulger displayed stubbornness, loyalty to family and neighborhood, an incisive intelligence, and a charming Irish wit that endeared him to his constituents often at the expense of his political rivals. Upon his retirement from the state senate in 1995, Billy was named president of the University of Massachusetts. Long hounded by allegations of corruption and plagued by innuendo about his relationship with his notorious older brother, Billy Bulger was ultimately driven from public life by then Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. He was threatened with obstruction of justice when he refused to testify before a grand jury investigating his infamous brother’s disappearance. Billy told his interrogators, “The Fifth Amendment’s basic function is to protect innocent men who might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances. I find myself in such circumstances.” He refused to testify.

  I was born in Boston, that city on a hill known as “the Athens of America,” also arguably the most ethnically divided city in the country. And though I grew up in the WASP bastion of Wellesley, Massachusetts, while in the marijuana underworld, I met Whitey. He interceded on my behalf and backed down a Boston wiseguy with connections to the family in Providence when he tried to shake me down and muscle in on a hashish importing operation run through an air freight catch at Boston’s Logan Airport.

  Who better to tell the Bulger brothers/John Connolly story? And how I want to tell it, and really get into developing it over several hours on TV. I also want to explore Whitey
’s relationship with his father. Bulger senior was injured in a work-related accident and lost one arm. He was unable to work, became bitter sitting around the cramped tenement apartment watching the Red Sox on TV, and the family fell on hard times. Young Jimmy, as the oldest boy, a smart, tough, and ambitious kid, went out on the streets at an early age and began to hustle, embarking on a life of crime as a bank robber in part to augment the family income as well as to show up his disabled father. Like many ruthless gangsters, Whitey was devoted to his mother. A vicious, good-looking kid with platinum blond hair, as a teenager Jimmy Bulger was the idol of the younger boys, like John Connolly, growing up in the Old Colony housing projects in South Boston. At sixteen, Whitey was driving a red convertible and dating a red-headed stripper from the Old Howard Theater in Boston’s Scollay Square.

  No doubt I am the man to write the saga of Whitey Bulger, Billy Bulger, and John Connolly, and to show the inner workings of FBI’s Top Echelon Informant Program. But, alas, it is not to be—at least not yet, not in this configuration. Just as we are getting ready to go into production at NBC, Kevin Reilly leaves the network.

  Once again, the executive shuffle results in a derailed opportunity. The project is abandoned.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE BRAND

  I GET A call from a woman named Lisa Fielding, a producer who lives in LA. Lisa tells me she has formed a new partnership with a producer who optioned an article from The New Yorker magazine. They would like to talk to me about possibly adapting The New Yorker piece as a screenplay.

  “You are the perfect person for this project, Richard,” Lisa tells me.