I never lost sight of the Mount and, in fact, worked full-time there through my college years. The classes I’d taken over in Germany enabled me to work as a social worker for the Catholic charities that administered Mount Loretto, a role that was sorely needed at the Mount and one I was prepared to embrace. Not only did that help me fund my studies in a small way, it also allowed me to give back to the place that had, for all intents and purposes, saved me and then raised me. I saw so many kids in those years who weren’t much different from me. They had the same scowl, the same fear and hatred of life, and I endeavored to help each and every one of them in any way that I could.
The world of the Mount was full of unpredictable problems, sometimes fraught with aggression that could turn violent. You always had to watch your back, and I think part of why I lay awake those long nights listening to This Is Your FBI was that I was afraid to fall asleep. There were always enemies, varying by the day, week, or even hour. One of the reasons I joined the boxing team was for survival. Now I was back “home,” no longer needing an outlet for survival and with a hopeful desire that the current Mounties wouldn’t either.
I can remember Father Kenny sitting in on my sessions, smiling and nodding as he watched, and I couldn’t help but recall his pronouncement that “You know people, Fitz.” As a kid from the Mount myself, I understood the plight of these boys and could guide them through their problems from an experienced point of view. I figured Father Kenny still harbored hopes I’d join him in the priesthood and, perhaps, even return to the Mount on a full-time basis.
The formative college years, combined with full-time “social work” at the Mount, gave me a keen practical sense of fulfillment. I was able to advance from child-care counselor to child-care supervisor to full field social worker. I drew the worst cases involving the most troubled youth from Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, the Bronx, and Corona, Queens. I worked some family cases where a child was killed, and others where children had to deal with the killing of a parent. I also worked gang-related cases, becoming an amicus curiae for the kids in State court.
My life had come full circle, with the wealth of my experiences being utilized in the very last way I’d ever imagined. There were so many nights when I’d lay awake fretting, hating this place and wishing I was anywhere else. Now I was back and determined to help other children shedding late-night tears just as I did. These years were crucial not only for the sense of fulfillment they provided me, but also for the “people experience” they allowed, something I am convinced to this day was paramount in my success in the Bureau. Later on I used to tell the good Father that you really get to know people when you live among twelve hundred children each day; that’s a lot of different stories coming at you all at once.
I remember when my college days and my work at the Mount were coming to an end. Father Kenny had yet to give up his hope I would enter the priesthood and asked one last time what my plans were.
“Father, I’m going to join the FBI.”
I thought he’d try to talk me out of it, make a case for all the good I had done and could continue to do. Instead he just smiled that warm, reassuring smile I knew so well. He’d aged badly over the years, wracked by a bad heart condition that he hid well, but the smile made him seem young again.
“Fitz,” he said, “there’s not a more honorable thing in this world you could do.”
13
BOSTON, SPRING 1981
Listening to This Is Your FBI while growing up at the Mount, one thing was certain: The FBI always got their man, always did the right thing. That’s the way my career had played out so far and I had no reason to believe Boston would prove to be any different. I had done my due diligence, interviewed Whitey Bulger himself, and came to the only conclusion I could draw: He should be closed as an informant there and then.
I filed my report with Special Agent in Charge Larry Sarhatt, recommending we close Bulger as an informant, and pretty much figured that would be the end of it since my mandate in coming to Boston was clear, and Sarhatt gave me no reason to believe anything to the contrary. In fact, my discussions with him right up until my fateful interview with Bulger more than confirmed this. He seemed to have one burning desire, which was to find out whether Bulger should remain an informant or not. And since Morris and Connolly’s handling of him had become a mess for Sarhatt administratively, I believe to this day that he wanted Bulger off the books once and for all. I was the cover he needed to get that done, especially since the Boston office was about to undergo a vigorous inspection.
The Inspection Division sends agents on a regular basis to audit all offices for compliance and attention to rules and regulations. My memo advising that Bulger be closed as an informant would come under review and give Sarhatt just the ammunition he needed when he sat down with the inspectors to justify his position.
Before and after I’d filed my memo to close Bulger, this evaluation of the agents’ priorities and prowess (or lack thereof) was echoed by others with no axe to grind at all. Dick Bates, a former SAC at Boston who used to be my boss in Washington, D.C., when I was a supervisor in the Criminal Division, was one of them. We met periodically for coffee after he called me upon my reporting to Boston, sometimes at a Dunkin Donuts in Dorchester not far from where informant John McIntyre’s body would be found twenty years later. Bates was also a Deputy Assistant Director in Division 6, the Criminal Division at HQ when I was assigned to the Name Check section. We handled the most secret files in the Bureau, which were available to only selected agents. We had access to J. Edgar Hoover’s most sensitive documents, which were needed to answer inquiries from foreign governments and super-sensitive intelligence agencies in the U.S. government and governments worldwide.
In effect, our liaison duties were extremely complex in view of the myriad of rules and regulations governing the release of this info. Hoover’s documents were the most interesting since they shed light on the Director’s thoughts and dealings with the internal workings of the FBI and other agencies.
Once, a memo from Hoover came across my desk in relation to an FBI investigation nationally. Hoover was responding to a field office about a particularly sensitive matter. The memo to Hoover had requested permission from HQ to conduct this investigation. The memo’s writer had taken the entire page in his request and left no room for pagination or handwritten comments. Hoover squeezed into a space at the very bottom of the memo: “Watch the borders!” The file was replete with actions to be taken upon Hoover’s instructions. So virtually every field office across the country was instructed to “watch the borders.” Of course, no one knew exactly what they were “watching” for, but dutifully did so anyway, not daring to ask Hoover for an explanation.
Hoover, though, had simply meant that he had no place to put his remarks and pithily noted that the writer should watch the borders, or pagination, so he could remark uninhibited by such a lack of space. Hoover, either in person or on paper, was never disputed. No one ever asked him for an explanation nor would anyone dare to. Dick and I would recall these amusing moments and get a chuckle here and there, even with the ever-escalating situation I was facing during the first months in my new job.
When I first got together with Bates for coffee in Boston, he was fighting to quit smoking. We met at a diner where it was still permitted and Bates wore his displeasure in the lengthening of the spider veins that crisscrossed his cheeks. He’d always been a suit-and-tie guy, and the casual dress just didn’t fit him well. His discomfort increased when he imparted to me that the Bureau office was “in a mess.” While not directing criticism at Sarhatt, he did clue me in on the office rivalries and “turf” battles that had been brewing for a long time and now seemed on the verge of erupting into an all-out war. He cautioned me about certain agents “backdooring” decisions made in the field only to be countered by HQ later on. He found that the office had become “too political,” especially with regard to the Organized Crime 3 Squad, now under the leadership of John
Morris, John Connolly’s supervisor.
Bates’s opinion was that some of the decisions regarding sensitive investigations were discussed privately by agents with HQ instead of following the established chain of command. He found this particularly offensive and disconcerting. He spoke of “cabals” in the office and noted a situation involving one Organized Crime squad supervisor being too “close” with Strike Force head Jeremiah O’Sullivan, a U.S. attorney, and of ex-agents Dennis Condon’s and Paul Rico’s “closeness” with people outside the FBI.
He’d also heard all the rumors about Morris and Connolly and did not like them one bit. Like Colonel O’Donovan, Bates was old school, believing there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, a line never to be crossed. Yet by all indications, by the time I got to Boston, that line had already been crossed. Bates became my go-to guy. He was tight-lipped and not given to rumor, focused instead on factual situations in which he explained the history of the hornet’s nest I had walked into in Boston. I called him Merlin for his wizardlike proclamations about incidents and his knowledge of the territory and turf battles by agents and others. Dick expected anonymity and he got it. This is the first time I’ve ever mentioned his name in any writings, filings, or discussions stemming from my years in Boston.
We chatted about the Massachusetts State Police complaints. While there were some FBI agents Bates did not trust, he did not entirely trust the MSP either. Bates was a very loyal spokesperson for the Bureau and would never embarrass it. He defended the informant program as a necessary evil, yet had reservations about certain informants and the agents handling them. He cited Condon and Rico as being “too big for their britches” when they ignored FBI rules and regulations in their handling of Top Echelon informants like Joseph Barboza. He thought Connolly was “brassy” and too “immature” for his position. Morris he described as “bright” but “fawning,” meaning he could be influenced by others and was too dependent on Condon as a mentor.
He warned about the politics, especially the Strike Force under the leadership of Jerry O’Sullivan. He saw O’Sullivan as a “climber” who was extremely ambitious and obsessive over his war on the mafia. And Bates brought me up to date on the infamous Race Fix case of 1979 that had taken down a number of muffs while letting Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi off scot-free. To Bates this was all the proof he needed that O’Sullivan, as head of the Strike Force, knew they were FBI informants, another sharp deviation from established protocol. An unethical, if not illegal, breech of policy that O’Sullivan himself would later admit to.
Bates was further of the school that the FBI should plan investigations and present facts to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for a prosecutorial opinion. It’s here that he saw the politicking of O’Sullivan around the La Cosa Nostra investigations, and the handling of informants like Bulger and Flemmi, as having twisted everything around. The internecine struggle for power, especially in the Organized Crime area, had regrettably become a prime component in the fight against LCN that clouded the issue and made it increasingly difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
Still, the handling of Bulger and Flemmi remained an anomaly in Bates’s mind and mine, too. We had reliable informants that provided the key evidence to support affidavits by agents required for Title III applications for wiretaps against LCN. Boston agent Jim Knotts’s informants, for example, furnished great info and that became a sore point with Connolly. There was no room for two in Connolly’s ego-driven vision of the limelight, and Knotts evolved into a spoiler for him by providing truthful evidentiary info that revealed LCN activities in Boston and throughout New England. Knotts got that done without pandering to the likes of Bulger and Flemmi, much less facilitating their criminal activities. With him there was never a doubt as to who was controlling the situation—quite the opposite of Connolly.
Knotts also provided info about nontraditional organized crime like the Winter Hill Gang out of Somerville, now run by Bulger. These were the Irish guys commonly referred to as the “Irish Mafia.” By the time I reached Boston, they had about three hundred gang members reporting directly to Bulger and Flemmi. By contrast, there were about seventeen confirmed LCN members with about one hundred and thirty associates. Add to that the fact that plenty in law enforcement, especially Colonel O’Donovan’s State Police, rightfully viewed Irish gangs as more violent than their Italian counterparts, and you had the recipe for continued and expanded strife between the various law enforcement bodies.
One of the Strike Force prosecutors confided to me one day that there was suspicion around the 209 submissions Connolly was making. These were the forms filed by handlers detailing the intelligence provided by their informants, composing a critical part of the investigative, evidentiary, and prosecutorial processes. This same prosecutor was assigned to the Organized Crime squad to guide the agents in the legal application of affidavits and provide general legal counsel around probable cause issues and similar legal issues. The prosecutor was aware, unofficially anyway, that Connolly was running Bulger and Flemmi, and I detected a certain amount of trepidation in the chats focusing on them. This prosecutor also felt that O’Sullivan, the chief of the Strike Force, was a major concern. All this left him to conclude that the probable cause furnished by Connolly in his 209s was not accurate, that it was at best in doubt and at worst fabricated to justify him keeping Bulger open as an informant to serve his own career-based needs.
O’Sullivan was also seen as being too close to the Bulger and Flemmi crew, especially since he had been the recipient of their info for an inordinately long period of time as such things go. The prosecutor felt that O’Sullivan was far from “impartial” and, in fact, may have come to hate the “Italians” in the same way that the Irish mob hated them, forming a twisted alliance that was a prime recipe for the corruption I’d been sent to clean up. The last thing Boston wanted or needed was what this prosecutor described to me as a “racial” war, but by all indications that’s where all this was heading.
Not long after my arrival in Boston, Agent Knotts came to see me in my office so anxious and upset he couldn’t sit down.
“You’re not going to believe this, Fitz.”
“Try me.”
“I think John Connolly’s stealing my 209 files. He’s giving Bulger credit for info actually being provided by my TEs.”
I leaned forward in my chair. “You tell this to Sarhatt?”
“Yup, and nothing happened, so now I’m telling you.”
Sarhatt hadn’t acted on Knotts’s suspicions clearly to prevent the closing of Bulger and Flemmi. His hands, I’d later learn, were tied by higher-ups in Washington who were buying Bulger’s act hook, line, and sinker. I do not think for one minute that Sarhatt was party to the corruption already running rampant in Boston when I arrived; he was, instead, the victim of circumstances that had spiraled out of his and everyone else’s control. Still, assimilating Knotts’s claims left me in a quandary. I couldn’t tell anyone since I received them in the strictest confidence. And yet his report convinced me still more that the problems in Boston ran much deeper than I’d been led to expect.
In spite of the inspection by HQ and special meetings at Quantico, the squabbles between the FBI and the Massachusetts State Police continued. MSP’s Colonel O’Donovan made it plain that he disliked Connolly and Morris for their actions at Lancaster Garage. Inside the FBI, Connolly and Morris took the stance that O’Donovan was a “good guy” but misguided in this area and well past his prime. They went to the Strike Force and enlisted O’Sullivan’s support to back up their contention that Bulger and Flemmi were solid informants crucial to the takedown of LCN in Boston. Not surprisingly, O’Sullivan agreed.
Another bomb was tossed when Agent Jim Knotts reported Bulger again, this time for drug running and exacting “tribute” from other gangsters to allow drugs in Boston. Connolly’s mantra was always that Bulger did not work the drug trade, and that he was obsessively devoted to keeping them out of his native Southie. Y
et another fabrication, as it turned out. It was Knotts’s info that first divulged the relationship between Bulger and the drug cartel leadership diametrically opposed to Connolly’s insistence that Whitey was clean in this regard. Knotts also named others, including Sal Caruana, the drug distributor who once supposedly had an affair with the wife of Richie Castucci, for their association with a “friendly” Strike Force attorney named Dave Twomey.
An investiation conducted by agents Matt Cronin and Jim Crawford, in fact, revealed that Twomey was a snitch for the cartels. Cronin and Crawford went to O’Sullivan who dismissed their findings by claiming their informant lacked credibility. So Twomey was allowed to remain with the Strike Force even though agents on my squad were convinced he was leaking. When Morris and Connolly learned Knotts had evidence of this unholy alliance, in the form of a body recording made in a North End mob restaurant, they warned Bulger off, even as Twomey did the same for the cartels. I personally warned O’Sullivan that he had a leak, but he disparaged the info by again claiming the informant was a known “drunk” and thus unreliable. His strategy became one of disregarding and discrediting Knotts, as well as Cronin and Crawford, instead of acting on the intelligence they provided. Anything to protect his cherished informants, Bulger and Flemmi, who in reality were giving him no actionable intelligence at all.
And it would get worse.
Connolly kept his daily liaison with his mentor, former agent Dennis Condon, then with the Department of Public Safety, and became a constant conduit of information that would subsequently be funneled to others. Connolly would learn of O’Donovan’s strategy from Condon while Condon would become aware of the FBI tactics in stopping the MSP wiretaps. It was Condon who primed Connolly to take over Bulger as an informant, and now the vicious circle was closing with me caught squarely in the middle.
Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down Page 9