Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down

by Robert Fitzpatrick

  My two older brothers, Larry and Gerard, and older sister, Diane, had been moved to the Mount as well. But I hardly ever saw them. The older children almost never mixed with the younger under any circumstances, siblings or not. I’d often stare out the windows or across the fields, hoping I’d spot one of them. In my mind I saw myself lighting out toward Larry, Gerard, or Diane. But even if I’d glimpsed them, I’d never have done it. I was much too scared to dare challenge authority or break the rules. We were sometimes able to sit together in church on Sundays, but that was it. Regimentation and regulation were everything. Corporal punishment was the rule, not the exception.

  There was brutality in this world where power was the only currency. I remember walking across the bridge that ran near a drainage ditch between the dormitory and dining hall. The bridge’s structure was worn and it shook a bit when packed with young boys rushing to lunch to beat the February cold.

  One wind-blown dreary day, as our counselors led us across the bridge, one of the ten-year-olds from my cottage yelled out, “Fuck you!”

  “Who yelled that?” the counselor named Scarvelli demanded, stopping everyone in their tracks.

  All of us remained silent.

  “I’m gonna ask youse guys again: who yelled that?”

  “Last chance,” another especially sadistic counselor, Farber, chimed in. “Or you all pay.”

  But there were no rats in this group, so the counselors marched us straight back to our cottage where we were told to stand fast near our “boxes” directly beneath the hissing steam pipes that heated the buildings—or at least were supposed to.

  “All right, you little assholes, grab the pipes,” counselor Farber ordered. “Everybody holds on until somebody talks. Let go and we’ll beat the shit out of you.”

  The pipes clanked and hissed as the hot steamed water coursed through them. I held tight, feeling my hands beginning to blister, and watched my first cottage mate drop to the floor to be beaten and interrogated, then the second, followed by a third and a fourth. When the bulk of us finally dropped, it was too much for the counselors to handle. They had us stand at our boxes and demanded each boy come into the wash-up area where one by one we were systematically berated and beaten again. Since I was the last to fall, they beat me only once but twice as hard. They had the power.

  No supervisor interceded. Either they didn’t know what was going on or they didn’t care. Scarvelli and Farber beat some of the boys worse than others, including me since I was one of the youngest and smallest. But I didn’t tell them what they wanted to know. No one did.

  And neither did anyone rat out Scarvelli and Farber. We all knew that if we ratted out the counselors, we’d be beaten much worse and end up longing for the blisters the steam pipes left on our small hands. The message was clear and all of us got it: They were bullies and we were helpless against them.

  My escape from times like these came in the form of the old-time radio programs playing over Sister Mary Assumpta’s radio. She was kind enough to leave her door open after lights out so the sound filtered out into the dormitory. It was often garbled and not very loud, but I was entranced, whisked away to a world dominated by heroes where the good guys always won and the bad guys, the bullies, lost.

  I’d lie in my second-floor dormitory bed listening to The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and especially, This Is Your FBI. I say especially because I was already “old” and jaded enough by experience to know the difference between what was real and what wasn’t. Neither the Lone Ranger nor the Shadow could swoop in and save me, because they weren’t real, but the FBI was. I would lie there and imagine myself becoming a swashbuckling, crime-fighting hero someday, in large part because my life up to that point had been so bereft of them. In all of the “cops and robbers” games, I was always the FBI agent who got his man. I thought of O’Rourke and the others at the 114th and how kind they were.

  It might sound corny, but in the Mount’s big, Gothic church there was a huge stained-glass window. It showed Jesus with children around him and the inscription read, “Suffer the little children come unto me for their’s is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Jesus became my rescuer, to be replaced later, in my “cops and robbers” game, by the FBI.

  In those minutes, as I lay with my eyes closed listening to the garbled tales of This Is Your FBI, I was spirited far away from the Mount to places where I was happy and secure, reliant on no one and fearing not a single soul. And maybe someday I was going to become for the world, and the country, what no one had ever been for me.

  I’d found my dream, and through the years and pain that followed, I never let go of it.

  3

  BOSTON, 1981

  The FBI had lacked an authoritative face since the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign as chief. His fall from grace had exposed plenty of what was thought wrong with the Bureau and unfairly dwarfed much of what was right. Certainly no one individual could restore the lost luster and repair a tarnished image. But appointing successful, high-profile agents in top-level positions seemed the next best thing. My wife and two young boys, unfortunately were less thrilled about the prospects of moving yet again. It seemed as if, in my fifteen years with the Bureau since my marriage, every time we’d just about get settled, I was transferred. Coming to a top-ten office like Boston to take over as ASAC (Assistant Special Agent in Charge) represented the pinnacle of my career, and I could see myself staying in the city for some time.

  But my wife wasn’t buying that, and my marriage dissolved. My wife was tired of sharing me with a dream that knew no end. I tried to convince her that Boston could be just that, the final stop. But she feared I’d end up returning first to Washington en route to yet another promotion and posting. She believed I loved the Bureau more than her.

  She was both wrong and right, something I considered often on long, lonely nights in my small apartment, where it always seemed dark outside.

  My entry into Boston had been through the proverbial back door. On the face of it I appeared to have a routine FBI transfer with no ulterior motive; there was no paperwork about my “official” mandate. Just an Irish guy going to an Irish city on another assignment.

  I came to Boston straight from my post as head of the investigative nerve center of the FBI in Washington, D.C., the Special Agent Transfer Unit. SATU, an unusual sounding acronym, was the FBI unit from which agents were transferred from particular offices throughout the U.S. and abroad to other assignments, and from where investigative resources and funding were allocated to the FBI field offices worldwide. Not a single major case unfolded without my knowledge and involvement. As a bureau chief I had the responsibility to make recommendations after reviewing requests for manpower, investigative resource allocation assistance, and “specials.” Major cases and specials were defined as the most important investigations, demanding supplemental manpower and sometimes extraordinary technical assistance in the form of surveillance equipment as advanced as any in the world at the time.

  That’s how I first became acquainted with the problems in Boston. Word was the agents there had taken their mandate to bring down the Italian mafia too far by allowing their informants, including one named James “Whitey” Bulger, free rein on the streets in return for providing intelligence that often produced nothing. Some in the Massachusetts State Police were livid that the FBI was letting a former street thug, like Whitey Bulger, currently running the vicious Winter Hill Gang out of South Boston, get away with murder—literally. Specifically, the execution of a major bookie and FBI informant named Richie Castucci. The Massachusetts State Police (MSP) didn’t buy the Boston FBI office’s conclusion that the Italian mob was responsible for Castucci’s murder, not for one minute. More specifically, the MSP even accused a pair of FBI agents, John Morris and John Connolly, of feeding intelligence directly to Bulger, protecting him and aiding his ascent up the ladder of criminal power in the New England underworld.

  The Bureau took its motto—Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity—seriously. But in Bos
ton, if suspicions about Richie Castucci’s murder were true, that motto had become more option than mandate.

  My new job as Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) of one of the top ten Bureau offices in the country was to handle all organized crime for New England and command the Drug Task Force. Other duties that comingled with the organized crime investigations included White Collar Crime (WCC), Public Corruption (PC), and so-called nontraditional Organized Crime (OC) involving the Irish thugs who roamed free through the closeted, insular society of Charlestown, Somerville, and South Boston.

  Larry Sarhatt, the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Boston office, picked me up at the downtown hotel that served as my temporary residence on a damp chilly day in early 1981—the rain that had been forecast had yet to come. He drove me to the FBI office at Government Square, near the Italian North End in the heart of the former Irish bastion, Scolley Square, where we occupied the whole of the sixth floor. My office overlooked the front of the building, the infamous Boston traffic jams leading to snarled streets virtually all day long, the honking of horns and blowing of sirens providing a background din that became as familiar as the clanking of the corner radiator or the soft hum of the air conditioner. I could walk out my door and view the workings of most of the agents serving on any number of the squads I’d been placed in command of. Some of the more junior ones worked out of spaces that were little more than cubicles or shared cramped offices—well, smaller than mine. The office floor was always busy but never frantic, since so many of the agents spent their days in the field on active investigations, of which there were plenty. We had agents who lived for the blue lights and sirens, and those who did not. I’d met a number of them and knew others by reputation, enough to be sure they made for a good lot with plenty of solid casework and convictions to their credit.

  Larry Sarhatt was eager to get on with business and welcomed any assistance, especially in the manpower area. He went through the prospective “priority one” La Cosa Nostra (LCN) cases on deck in Boston, specifically the investigation of Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo, who reported directly to the head of the New England mob, Raymond Patriarca, out of Providence, Rhode Island.

  Jerry Angiulo was the underboss of the New England LCN, presiding over sixteen ranking members who reported to him. Everything about these wiseguys was steeped in their own bloody traditions, such as the initiation ceremonies that offered a sense of code and moral backing to their actions, as loathsome and reprehensible as they were. The Godfather movies and “mafia” pulp fiction glamorized the culture, enticing wannabes to emulate the fictionalized images.

  Not so the case for the members of the Winter Hill Gang. These Somerville wiseguys were decidedly Irish muffs tagged by the FBI as a nontraditional group of the organized crime element. We knew approximately twenty of these guys were in leadership positions, supervising three hundred soldiers and grunts, all under the auspices of Bulger and his right-hand man, Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi. It was abundantly evident that both groups had their preferred methods of violence and murder. The Irish wiseguys would “frag” a bunch of people to get their target, while the Italian wiseguys would just garrote the one target and stuff him in the trunk of some car. The Irish were definitely more homegrown, all in all, than the Italian mob, which led them to be even more insular.

  I knew Bulger as a thug, a street enforcer who’d spent a quarter of his life behind bars, including a stretch at Alcatraz and another at Leavenworth in Kansas. I’d heard he prided himself on being a tough guy who inspired fear in allies and enemies alike. Ruthless and brutal, as his rise to the top of the Winter Hill Gang in the wake of Howie Winter’s imprisonment attested. He wasn’t a big guy physically, and word was he wasn’t just street smart; he was smart, period, capable of playing chess while those around him opted for checkers. But he played for real, to which the forty-three murders he’s allegedly responsible for more than demonstrate.

  Sarhatt briefed me on the informant situation, explaining that a major informant against the Angiulo family, Bulger himself, was being videotaped and surveilled at a mob garage on Lancaster Street in downtown Boston by the Massachusetts State Police (MSP). MSP grew incensed when Bulger and his associates suddenly and inexplicably clammed up, claiming that FBI agents John Connolly and John Morris, Bulger’s Bureau handlers, had leaked word of the investigation to their prized informant. Sarhatt informed me that Colonel John O’Donovan, the much decorated and current head of the MSP, suspected as much and was livid over the fact that nothing had been done about it. Worse, he was convinced this was an ongoing problem.

  An old-fashioned cop to whom a bad guy was a bad guy, O’Donovan was a stout, rangy man with sinewy muscles born of boxing as a kid and old-fashioned weightlifting into his fifties. He had a shock of balding gray hair that shifted with every toss of his head, and a single piercing blue eye that looked tired whenever I saw him. He had been shot in the eye by a gangster early in his career, earning him a much-deserved reputation. The real deal when it came to tough. In O’Donovan’s mind, Bulger and Flemmi were nothing short of stone killers and the last people the FBI should be doing business with. He followed protocol by informing the Boston FBI office of his intentions to find incriminating evidence against Bulger and Flemmi in any number of crimes, specifically murder. Sarhatt’s and the FBI office’s dilemma was that they could not officially tell the MSP that their targets were informants for the FBI. Politics and internecine conflicts never entered the picture for O’Donovan or, if they did, were superseded by the bad blood Bulger was tracking through the city.

  Larry Sarhatt was caught in the middle of this dilemma between loyalty to his own agents and his greater responsibility to the Bureau. The only way he could reconcile things was to determine whether to keep Bulger on the FBI books as an informant or “close” him. In his heart, I knew he wanted Bulger cut loose. He’d come to that conclusion after interviewing Bulger himself barely a year before, only to be overruled by Jeremiah O’Sullivan, the prosecutor running the federal Organized Crime Strike Force. O’Sullivan, along with FBIHQ in Washington, wanted Bulger to remain open as a top echelon criminal informant as long as he continued to provide information about the mob families out of Boston and Providence. He was, in their minds, too valuable to close. But the real question was just how valuable was Whitey Bulger, and answering it became my first mandate.

  I wasn’t a fan of O’Sullivan from the get-go. He seemed too much the button-down bureaucrat who wore his ambition on his sleeve. He was thin and pale, fond of flashing a narrow condescending smile to create a sense of false camaraderie. I remember his hair looked to be glued into place, every word and gesture made as if the cameras weren’t too far away. I saw him in federal court several times, his spine straight, every move looking rehearsed—from the moment he first stepped into the building to the time he climbed back into his car parked outside Government Center.

  Sarhatt, on the other hand, was a traditionalist whose nonflashy, by-the-book, pragmatic style had him running afoul of agents beholden to the more popular criminal agent SAC he’d replaced over a year before. So he told me he was relying on my background to make sense of the muddle. For manpower and resource management, he looked to my previous major case and experience at HQ; for assessment, he looked to my training in the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy, where I gained expert knowledge in profiling and polygraph as well as expertise in the area of abnormal criminal psychology. He knew operationally I had conducted major investigations all over the country—from New Orleans to Mississippi to Memphis to Miami—both undercover and not, and had handled complex cases, always achieving favorable resolutions. In other words, I was a “closer,” and that’s exactly what he needed on his side now.

  More to the point, in retrospect, I was sent to Boston to offer all parties political cover. The thinking on the part of McKinnon and others was that the success I’d achieved in the ABSCAM investigation would trump the dueling viewpoints that had all but obscured any rat
ional assessment of how much Bulger was actually contributing to the cause. And since I was an outsider, my objectivity could not be called into question.

  Larry Sarhatt and I ended our first meeting with a simple mandate: If everything suggested by the Richie Castucci murder was true, we would tackle the problems in Boston once and for all.

  4

  BOSTON, 1980

  Prior to my transfer to Boston, I was an instructor and supervisor at the FBI Academy, where Massachusetts State Police chief Colonel John O’Donovan attended one of my death investigations courses. Each attendee had to bring an unsolved case that was presented to the other forty-nine death investigators from across the country. These were cold cases, and tackling them with seasoned investigators was as informative as it was rewarding.

  O’Donovan’s contribution, his unsolved case, was the 1976 Richie Castucci murder in Boston. The colonel was pretty outspoken and criticized the Boston FBI office for “hanging” with criminals and “fixing” cases for the wiseguys. His presentation included the fact that Castucci was a sometime informant for the MSP, so he’d taken a personal interest in Castucci’s murder. Upon arriving in Boston, then, one of my first orders of business was to discuss the case with both a former Boston SAC, Dick Bates, and the man I was replacing, Joe Yablonski, who served as co-ASAC with Weldon Kennedy. They filled in most of the blanks that O’Donovan had left out in the sordid tale, both having been intimately acquainted with different aspects of the case.

  Castucci, they told me, had enjoyed a long association with Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang. A bookie who reveled in their protection and profited richly off the positioning and posturing they allotted him, Richie also fancied himself an entrepreneur. He owned a nightclub on Boston’s north shore in Revere. With the stench of stale beer and cigarettes imbedded in its plank flooring and walls, the Ebb Tide was hardly about to attract patrons based on its décor. But luckily for Richie he didn’t have to rely on normal clientele for business. Instead, the club boasted a customer base drawn almost entirely from local criminals with whom Richie felt most comfortable.