The great paradox here was that Connolly was a self-proclaimed loyal agent who idolized and idealized the FBI in every way. In ironic counterpoint, he had that diamond ring Bulger had given him engraved with the motto of the Bureau: Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity. I would later learn that the ring was stolen property. If the suspicions of Colonel O’Donovan and others were correct, Connolly had already provided Bulger plenty in return, in clear violation of the FBI’s Manual of Investigative Operations and Guidelines. That manual clearly states that agents are “to insure that [informants] are not provided any information other than that necessary to carry out their assignment.” The manual might have been vague about what crimes were permissible for informants, but made very clear the informant could not be a murderer or the head of a criminal enterprise. The head of a gang, like the Winter Hill organization, then, should have expressly been off limits.
Early one evening in late March of 1981, Morris drove me to Whitey’s condo in Quincy; it stood amidst a neat row of others just like it, plain vanilla and innocuous. Along the way he regaled me with story after story of his own experiences with the gangster, finishing each story with, “You’re gonna like this guy.”
I asked Morris about Whitey being described as the head of the Winter Hill Gang.
“Howie Winter is in jail,” he told me. “So it’s just a temporary appointment.”
“For how long?”
“Don’t know.”
“As long as Winter is in?”
“Could be.”
“That’s a long time.”
Morris seemed to have no problem with the fact that Bulger, as an FBI informant, was the acting head of an organized crime gang. After all, Morris was the “pencil” who could write up the reports in a way that convinced his superiors that Whitey was at the time the best informant to get the Bureau what it wanted. Everything else he covered was vague, noncommittal, and even muddled. I knew about informants; I had run enough of them myself in high-profile cases to know when the tail was wagging the dog.
In 1967, I was on special assignment in Mississipi from Memphis, where I’d been assigned after beginning my Bureau career in New Orleans two years earlier. I was charged with infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and trying to develop informants. There had been a rash of murders down there, including hanging and shooting blacks and bombing synagogues.
My job was to get probable cause and evidence on Sam Bowers, the head of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi (WKKKKOM) and the perpetrator behind all the violence. There were klaverns, the Klan clubs, in my area around Hattiesburg and Laurel where I played the undercover role of a New Yorker going to school in Jackson. I would act naïve around people, especially those I suspected of being Klan sympathizers, in no small part because these “kluckers,” as we called them, were fundamentally proselytizers.
I’d always choose a propitious moment to reveal my true identity and attempt to develop an individual as an informant who could penetrate the klavern in question. The key was knowing how to identify kluckers or members of the WKKKKOM. Distinguishing the wannabes or would-bes from the true players being the trick.
The first person I tried to turn was anything but a wannabe. Joe Danny Hawkins turned out to be the head of the klavern in Jackson, as well as an avowed hater of law enforcement. Nothing I could say or do was going to change his mind. And the mere fact he was head of the klavern rendered him off limits to me as a potential Klan informant, anyway; opening him, in the Bureau’s eyes, would be an endorsement that the FBI approved some actions taken by him in the klavern. That made him a target as opposed to a potential RI, or Racial Informant.
Instead, I stepped down from Hawkins to go after lower-ranking members as informants, kluckers who weren’t in a position to make us complicit in their actions while they snitched on the Klan. Otherwise, we were no better than they, condoning any number of heinous acts that may or may not pay off in the end. That’s called professionalism, the polar opposite of what I found was transpiring when I got to Boston.
In one instance, I worked diligently on a female klucker named Kathy Ainsworth who was an elementary school teacher in the Jackson school system. She hailed from Brooklyn, New York, and I used our common roots to get friendly. Kathy was also the girlfriend of Thomas Tarrants, a hit man for the WKKKKOM and a member of the Silver Dollar Club, the secret group responsible for most of the killings and bombings throughout Mississippi.
Kathy rejected my overtures initially; she was a racist but against killing, and knew full well what was going on. I appealed to her humanitarian side, challenged her with the question of what kind of role model she was for her students? By condoning Tarrants’s actions, I made her see she was also effectively complicit in them. As a former social worker, I was able to appeal to her moral side. She’d gone into teaching “to do the right thing,” and I was offering her the opportunity to do another right thing.
Through “fisur,” or physical surveillance, and other techniques, we found the hideout and factory where the Silver Dollar Club made bombs and planned attacks on the black and Jewish communities. After accumulating probable cause and evidence, we followed Tarrants and Ainsworth to Meridian, Mississippi, for their planned attack on the Meyer Davidson Synagogue.
Tarrants arrived at the synagogue, whereupon he got out with a satchel of explosives to be placed at the back of the building, leaving Kathy in the car. At the time, the FBI did not have exclusive jurisdiction, so we turned the takedown over to the locals, including the Mississippi State Police. The targets were bull-horned by these law enforcement officials and told to drop the satchel.
Outside, Tarrants opened fire with a 9mm machine gun, drawing return fire from law enforcement immediately. Kathy was shot and killed at the wheel of the car. Tarrants threw her out of the car and began a wild chase through town. He was captured and taken into custody after taking several shots to his legs and chest.
The information ultimately provided by him and others we drew into our net was instrumental in stopping the bombings and murders. Director Hoover gave us all commendations. My “attaboy” recognized my informant development and contribution to the arrest of none other than Sam Bowers himself, the mastermind behind all the Klan’s activities. Our real FBI investigative code name, Bombings in Mississippi, came to an end soon thereafter in what remains a crucial, game-changing moment for the civil rights movement that would be immortalized in the Gene Hackman film Mississippi Burning.
To this day I feel ambivalent about what happened to Kathy. She had helped us nail Tarrants and ultimately Bowers, and she had given her life in the effort. On the other hand, she knew who these people were and supported them every way imaginable. While she may not have condoned killing, she was apparently a self-avowed racist who’d enabled the actions of Tarrants and others in causing pain and heartache for countless victims while terrorizing an entire region. I was sorry she’d been killed but I couldn’t let myself be waylaid by her death. No one forced her to take the wheel of the car that day, any more than the other times she’d been along for the ride on Tarrants’s murderous escapades.
I told the story of my experience with Bombings in Mississippi and ABSCAM to Morris and others to make them understand that the FBI cannot have the leader of an organization as an informant. Morris listened attentively but showed no sign that my message was getting through. Maybe he had learned to lie so well, he was successfully doing it to himself.
I wanted both him and Connolly to know going into the meeting with Bulger that they were operating under my rules and standards now. At that point I thought I had FBIHQ backing me up. I thought this play was mine to make alone.
Maybe Morris and Connolly’s smug attitudes should have told me something then and there. In retrospect, it was clear that they knew something I didn’t.
What I did know was that I was about to meet the gangster guilty of presiding over an unprecedented reign of terror throughout the city of Boston, much of it condoned and supported by
two FBI agents who knew I was about to interrogate him.
“Here we are,” John Morris said, pulling up to Bulger’s condominium in Quincy.
7
QUINCY, MASSACHUSETTS, 1981
I directed Morris to stay in the car and “lay chickie,” a euphemism for watching someone’s back from my days at Mount Loretto. Morris responded with a look of bemusement. The truth was I didn’t want Morris present because I wanted to get an independent, objective assessment of Bulger. Morris, it was becoming more and more evident, was too enamored with Whitey to be anything but counterproductive to my task.
“You’re gonna like this guy,” he said one more time as I climbed out of the car in front of Bulger’s condo, reaffirming my decision.
Prior experience with informants conditioned me to know that Morris might actually be right. The informants I had developed and met through other agents have led me to believe that they were mostly decent people doing whatever they could to please for whatever motive: money, ego, revenge, or simply to avoid incarceration. I’ve learned over the years that there are good informants and bad informants. Good informants are all alike, while the bad ones are all different.
Bulger opened the door, his face hardened and expressionless, looking like a guy who clearly thought he had something better to do. He was wearing a Boston Red Sox cap angled low over his forehead to cast his face in shadows, gnawing at a toothpick wedged into the side of his mouth. In the foyer, I greeted him with an extended palm. He ignored it and just walked away, placing himself behind an island in the kitchen area.
I felt his eyes on me the whole time, something we called the “long eye” at the Academy. Always the tough guy, Bulger must have been figuring he could intimidate me as easily as he’d intimidated so many others. Well, Morris and Connolly might have read of my previous exploits, but Bulger clearly hadn’t. It was doubtful they would’ve shared the information with him for fear of making him think he was doing business with someone more powerful than they were.
As I returned his stare, more of a snarl really, I noticed John Connolly lurking to the right of Bulger in a darkened corner. I was surprised to see him there, since I was supposed to be conducting the interview alone and had not been forewarned of his presence. I would later ream out Morris, Connolly’s supervisor, for allowing this. But it was clear to me now that he wasn’t the one calling the shots, nor had he ever been. Neither was Connolly. Indeed, the way Connolly positioned himself had left little doubt as to who the alpha dog here was. Everything about his body language suggested utter subservience to Bulger, a “suck-up” in the truest sense of the word. But I determined that if Connolly had so much as opened his mouth, I’d have his ass right then and there.
The light in the kitchen was dimmed, casting shadows around the room. I could picture Bulger doing that on purpose as a means of increasing his own ability to intimidate. It could also have been that the relative darkness masked his relatively small stature. Age had robbed him of the physical attributes he’d once relied on, leaving him with only his brutal reputation and glare. He was no more than five-eight, maybe five-nine, with a lean, sinewy build. Hardly imposing, but a testament to his violent reputation.
To Bulger’s left stood a woman later described as his girlfriend to whom I was not introduced. I recall that Connolly faintly said hello and then disappeared back into his shadowed alcove. Bulger’s girlfriend pressed out one cigarette and lit up another, blowing the smoke from her mouth and nose in plumes that wafted upward to hang heavy in the air. Her presence here was also clearly designed to unsettle me, Bulger’s witness if he needed one.
Everything about Bulger, every quirk and gesture, was about control. He hadn’t greeted me cordially in order to better control the situation. He had me follow him into the kitchen and left us to speak across the island, controlling our discussion by putting a physical barrier between us, his dark side against a brighter one.
One of the psychological concepts I taught at the FBI Academy was “Body Space,” scientifically called “proxemics.” By working the distance between us to his liking, Bulger projected that he was running the situation instead of me. He made a show of letting Connolly walk right up to him to demonstrate who he needed to pay deference to and it wasn’t me. Again, the alpha dog! He never once took off his sunglasses, which, with the soft, diffused light, prevented me from seeing his eyes. “No eyes,” I thought, recalling a movie where the prisoner on a chain gang tested the guard who always wore dark sunglasses. The prisoner couldn’t see the guard’s eyes and had to calculate whether or not he’d be shot if he tried to escape. As it turned out, he was.
Based on the game Whitey was playing, maybe he had read up on me after all.
My psychological training taught me to understand eyes as elements of “pupilimetrics” or “chromatics.” And if the eyes were in fact the window to the soul, then Bulger had shut the blinds over them. He wore a T-shirt over his surprisingly lithe frame, wore it out over his shiny slacks as if to make me think he had a gun wedged in the waistband. More intimidation, as if I was going to turn tail and run before the questioning even began.
I knew I was looking at a stone killer, a psychopath, and it was hardly the first time. There’d been others, lots of them, but the one that came to mind the most as I faced Whitey Bulger for the first time was James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr.
Soon after returning to Memphis from the Sam Bowers investigation in Mississippi, I was thrust into yet another, and tragic, high-profile case. I’d been serving mostly as relief supervisor for the Memphis Special Agent in Charge, Bob Jensen, and dealing with any number of civil rights investigations. In Memphis, a lot of these issues focused on an ongoing strike by sanitation workers. Almost all the workers were black and the city mayor refused to negotiate a new contract. So they went on strike and I was put on “special” again at the exclusive direction of the Department of Justice in Washington to investigate the considerable, escalating violence that remained an upshot of the strike.
My new schedule entailed coming into the office at four in the afternoon, either staying through the night or at my post at a local fire station across the street from the Lorraine Hotel in downtown Memphis, where Martin Luther King was staying. The interesting, and unfortunate, thing here was that King had actually come to Memphis at the behest of the striking sanitation workers who wanted him to rally them and solidify their commitment to a labor action that by then had stretched into months. Since I was still supervising the case, I had voluntary informants inside the church where King gave what they described as a “rousing” speech in which he stated, ironically, that he didn’t care if his commitment to the workers’ cause got him killed.
The next afternoon I was at the fire station, eyeballing the Lorraine Hotel where King and his entourage were staying, when our dispatcher, Leah Bramlett, called on the radio.
“Bob, we’ve got reports that Martin Luther King’s been shot!”
I had been watching the hotel with binoculars on an intermittent basis and hadn’t seen anything threatening or suggesting anything had happened. Nor had I heard any shots.
“Look,” I told Leah, “I’m gonna check this out right away and get back to you.”
I ran outside into the flood of responding Memphis police, including the Tactical Squad, arriving at the scene and finding a man named Charlie Stephens, a resident of the boardinghouse with the odd address of 422½ South Main Street. He told me he’d heard a “loud noise” coming from a bathroom containing a window that looked right across at the Lorraine Hotel balcony where King had been standing when he was shot. Stephens, who was clearly drunk but nonetheless lucid, reported seeing a man running from Room 5B down the stairs carrying a “wrapped” object in his hands.
“Bobby, Bobby!” called Captain Zachary, in charge of the Memphis PD. “Over here!”
I followed him into the rooming house, and, guns drawn, we stormed up the stairs. We had called for additional backup,
but there was no time to wait for it. So while the rest of his “Tac” team secured the building, we went in.
I realized right away this was a flophouse, used by bums and transients in a part of the city that was in transition. The stench of booze, urine, and body odor filled the stairwell and the decaying steps creaked under our pounding. The building’s panicked occupants had seen all the activity and were rushing about everywhere. Zachary and I tensed, aware that any of these men could have been the shooter. I scrutinized their movements as they surged past us, knowing body clues would give the perpetrator away. None did.
The landlady looked too old and withered to be running such a place. She directed us to Room 5B, which she said she’d rented earlier that day. Inside that room we found a box of rifle shells and a pair of Bushnell binoculars. Then back downstairs, wrapped up inside a rooming house bedspread tucked in an alcove, I spotted a rifle. The 30.06 Game Master with a Redfield scope, it turned out, was the one that had just been used to assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. Later, we found a transistor radio bearing the number “00416,” later shown to be James Earl Ray’s prison ID at the Missouri Penitentiary, along with a pair of men’s underwear hand sewn by Ray while he was imprisoned there.
Deliberately false information and constant chatter was flying wildly over the radios. Everything was chaos. We had dozens of separate sightings. Racial aspects of the shooting were evident in these false reports. I assigned agents to gather more intelligence and to identify what kind of car the suspect had driven off in. I sent agents to interview everyone in view of both the flophouse and the Lorraine Hotel, while I rushed to the airport with the rifle and bedspread tucked in an evidence bag for delivery to the FBI lab in Washington. The last plane out of Memphis for Washington that night had already taxied onto the tarmac, so my agent driver and friend Andy Sloan chased the 727 down the runway as the Memphis FBI office frantically ordered the Memphis tower to hold the flight.
Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down Page 5