His body language, lack of surprise, and interest at what I was telling him left me no choice. Halloran’s info was so sensitive that I walled it off from much of the Boston FBI office. This was the first time in my career that I actually couldn’t trust the agents in my own office. I removed Halloran’s informant files and cases from the squad bay and placed them in my office safe. I had become a “mole,” funneling extremely sensitive information to HQ only to have supervisors in Washington funnel it back on the “Q.T.” to Morris and Connolly. So, in ironic and ultimately tragic counterpoint, the prime beneficiary of my info was none other than Whitey Bulger.
I have never seen a major case handled with so much ineptitude. My reporting to O’Sullivan on the Wheeler murder for prosecutive action should have led him to set up a coordinated effort with Oklahoma prosecutors, while procedure dictated FBIHQ similarly coordinate the investigations of different FBI offices toward prosecution. O’Sullivan took no steps in this regard at all and ultimately decided against putting Brian Halloran in the Witness Protection Program, claiming I hadn’t made a strong enough case.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office had jurisdiction in such matters, so, livid, I went over O’Sullivan’s head to Bill Weld, the U.S. attorney at the time and eventual governor of Massachusetts. I told Weld flat out that Halloran would be killed if we did not protect him. The Strike Force controlled the purse strings, so to speak, and we needed money to safeguard Halloran appropriately. Weld said he would look into it. The problem was O’Sullivan was saying and doing just enough to appear as if he wanted to prosecute Bulger and Flemmi, but claimed the evidence hadn’t developed against them. He didn’t think Halloran’s claims held any validity and he argued that point to Weld.
“Fitzy said to me, ‘You know people always say there’s a danger for this snitch or that snitch,’” Weld conceded in court years later in his testimony during the Wolf hearings. “‘They may be killed for cooperating. I’m telling you this guy [Halloran]—I would not want to be standing next to this guy.’”
Ultimately, Weld opted against overruling O’Sullivan’s decision.
O’Sullivan, most likely at Morris and Connolly’s request, was stalling—just long enough for Whitey to get to Halloran before I got what I needed from him: enough to get Callahan to squeal on his pals, too. Based on Halloran’s assertions that John Connolly spoke to Bulger “all the time,” I turned the focus of my investigation toward him. Proving that he was giving information to Bulger would allow me to kill two birds with one stone: nail Bulger and begin the process of rooting a myriad of corruption out of the Boston office. Because of a similar experience during my time in Miami, I had no compunction about investigating Connolly, a fellow agent, as the pipeline to the Irish wiseguys.
I recalled that shortly after my ABSCAM case wrapped up, Tom Kelly had reminded me about the story in Miami wherein Title III tapes were found that should’ve been in the Miami evidence room. These tapes were found in one of the supervisor’s desk drawers, and when listened to proved to be explosive, since they indicated that the Miami police homicide detectives were being used as hit men against drug couriers in the Miami area.
Tom asked me to review the tapes and I did, becoming both alarmed and upset by the fact that drug cartels had infiltrated the Miami Police Department, and more critically the FBI. What was not known was that the drug cartel traffickers had infiltrated law enforcement in such a way that cops were not only killing people but were also selling drugs.
I learned through sources that one of the agents on my squad in Miami had an association with the cartel through a drug lord named Rodriguez. The source advised me that the agent had a six-figure balance at the local bank, the same bank where the drug lord kept most of his drug money.
When I started to nose around, the agent grew scared and confronted me.
“What the fuck you think you’re doing? I’m clean. You think I’m on the take, you piece of shit?”
“If you’re not, the investigation will prove it.”
“I got the best fucking informants down here. You know what that means? It means you’re shit in this office.”
“Get back to your desk. Get back to work.”
“I don’t have to listen to you.”
“Yeah, you do. Now get outta my office and back to what you’re supposed to be doing.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
I got up in his face, hoping he’d take a swing at me, feeling like I was back in the boxing ring. “You wanna take your best shot, go ahead. Otherwise, get back to work.”
The agent shrank back and stormed out of my office, rushing upstairs to tell his side of things to the Special Agent in Charge of the office.
I called Tom Kelly to alert him. I briefed him and succinctly related the information I had with regard to the Miami agent having possible involvement with the drug lord. Unbeknownst to Tom and me, the agent told a different story, whereupon the SAC sought our input in this matter. I briefed the SAC about the information I had and about the sensitivity involved, including the agent’s possible association with the drug lord. The SAC simply told the ASAC to handle it and that if I had any problems I should return to him immediately. But I had a penchant for handling things on my own, man-to-man, face-to-face.
In retrospect, I should have heeded the advice of a seasoned agent about the consequences of high-profile cases and taking down powerful people.
“Watch out, Fitz,” he warned me, “they will never let you forget this!”
Back in Boston, as if to make that agent a prophet, HQ personnel involved in the day-to-day handling interceded and in effect left Connolly to work Bulger, meaning it was business as usual even though a preponderance of evidence indicated it should be anything but. I was already following up an astounding number of leak cases when Agent Jim Knotts reported Connolly again for “robbing” sensitive informant information from his case files. I reported the matter in a memo to SAC Sarhatt who filed it without taking any action.
HQ listened to me, in effect, to keep me quiet, while Sarhatt and O’Sullivan didn’t listen to me at all. It didn’t matter what I said or what evidentiary material I produced. The minds of all seemed already made up, and no one was about to spoil a potential takedown of the mafia.
Ultimately it was Brian Halloran who paid the heaviest price for this. His days might have been numbered, and the nights he spent in various safe houses might have been sleepless ones, but Brian Halloran had a lot to live for. His wife had just checked into Deaconess Hospital in Boston to give birth to the couple’s second child. Just before dusk on May 11, 1982 Halloran was sitting in a Datsun with a friend, construction worker Michael Donahue, outside the Topside Lounge in Southie when a blue Chevy pulled alongside. Inside the car he spotted Whitey Bulger and another man wearing a mask.
According to testimony given years later by Bulger lieutenant Kevin Weeks, who claims he was serving as “lookout” at the time, Halloran got a look at Whitey and lurched from the car. He tried to flee as gunfire rang out, spraying the car and killing Donahue instantly. Halloran managed to get part way across the street before falling to a hail of bullets fired from a silenced Mac-10 submachine gun and Bulger’s own .30 caliber carbine. A third shooter lunged from the backseat and rushed toward Halloran, firing several shots from a pistol into him from point blank range.
Seconds later, the Chevy screeched away from the scene as sirens wailed in the distance. When police arrived on the scene, they found Halloran’s friend Michael Donahue dead (guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time) and Halloran himself soon to be.
A Winter Hill Gang operative named Jimmy Flynn, also an FBI informant for John Connolly, was wrongly arrested for the murders. Whitey had framed him with the help of his police and Bureau sycophants. Flynn was finally tried and acquitted in 1986 and went on to appear in bit parts in films, including Good Will Hunting.
O’Sullivan’s refusal to place Brian Halloran in Witness Protection, or even reco
gnize him as an informant, had left my squad unable to offer Halloran the protection he desperately needed. He had been more willing to talk than ever, but the only thing we could promise him in return were bullets over Boston.
Actually, it turned out to be twelve.
John Connolly quickly went into cover-his-ass mode by filing a report claiming that Charlestown gangsters Halloran had long been at odds with, including Flynn, were responsible for his execution. I knew full well that Halloran was killed because Connolly had told Bulger he was talking, making him a direct accessory to murder, as the Wolf hearings revealed sixteen years later. But what about Jeremiah O’Sullivan, the Strike Force head, and Bill Weld, the then U.S. attorney? Hadn’t they also failed to act on my recommendation to do everything possible to protect Brian Halloran?
They could try and mount a zero-sum game argument, Brian Halloran becoming a necessary sacrifice to assure the takedown of the Providence and Boston La Cosa Nostra families under Raymond Patriarca and Jerry Angiulo. I can’t understand myself, much less explain, how the vision of so many became so warped and narrowed that they couldn’t see the truth that was right before their eyes. In that respect, those far above John Connolly used him to do their dirty work, knowing full well what would happen if they didn’t move to close Bulger as I repeatedly recommended. They had basically chosen Whitey, who was giving them nothing, over the preponderance of evidence I was giving them.
There was more. Instead of moving him closer to us, Halloran’s murder pushed John Callahan away, at least temporarily. After all, we were relying on Halloran’s testimony, naming him as an accessory to Roger Wheeler’s murder, in an effort to make Callahan turn state’s evidence. With Halloran out of the way, Callahan figured he’d gotten a reprieve. While he might have been on the numbers side of things, Callahan fancied himself a wiseguy and loved the lifestyle that had him entertaining the Winter Hill boys down for a time in his native Miami. Halloran’s murder filled Callahan with a strange sense of vindication and freedom, as if he no longer had anything to fear in his world of punks, two-timers, stone killers, and muffs.
Meanwhile, Tulsa homicide detective Michael Huff, the lead investigator on the Wheeler murder, continued to work that killing. Huff was a methodical, by-the-book cop who followed the trail where it took him, which in this case was Connecticut (home of another fronton owned by World Jai Alai), Miami, and Boston. He found plenty of cooperation in Connecticut and Miami, but little in Boston since both Connolly and Morris and Strike Force head O’Sullivan stonewalled his efforts to dig deeper into the doings of the Winter Hill Gang at every turn. Huff tried me but in the wake of the Halloran killing, my squad was effectively disenfranchised from the work being done by Morris’s Organized Crime squad and O’Sullivan’s Strike Force.
In fact, our work was paralleling Huff’s in the sense that we were trying to work Callahan into a formal suspect, thereby making it easier to turn him by offering him immunity from prosecution for his part in the Wheeler murder. The problem was that word got around the office that Detective Huff was nosing around Boston in search of his Tulsa killers. Since the Winter Hill Gang had already surfaced in his investigation, John Connolly would have been a natural for him to talk to. While I’m not sure they ever spoke, I’m reasonably sure Connolly let Bulger know, as he had done with Halloran, that the investigation was honing in on Callahan, who could pin Wheeler’s murder on Whitey.
Again, the actions themselves were John Connolly’s. But he must have figured he was doing the bidding of Jeremiah O’Sullivan, John Morris, and the Organized Crime staff at FBIHQ. Protect Bulger at all costs had become the code he lived by, but I doubt he conceived it alone. All of these people were in so deep at this point they must have felt the very real concern that Whitey could take them down at the same time. So their actions weren’t just self-serving, they were also about self-protection. Imagine if I had been able to arrest Bulger for the Wheeler murder and he decided to turn on his former protectors by confessing how he had bamboozled them and used their auspices to fuel his own murderous rise through the Boston underworld.
Whitey may have been a psychopath, but he was far from stupid. He had found that the path to criminal power without fear of censure was paved with 209 informant forms and commendations to the agents beholden to him. As long as he appeared to be giving the FBI what it wanted, he could steal, extort, terrorize, and even murder without any fear of repercussions. And because the cadre that allowed this to be was in so deep with him, they had to let it continue in order to save their own asses.
Mike Huff and his associate detectives in Connecticut, meanwhile, kept at it, gradually accumulating evidence that would be enough to get an arrest warrant for John Callahan. They intended to fly down to Miami personally to serve it. Callahan must have gotten word of his pending arrest and quickly made overtures to Miami agents working with my squad to pick up the discussions that had been abruptly halted with Brian Halloran’s murder. The problem was the Boston office must have picked up on that, too, likely from Huff and his Connecticut partners. As traditional cops with no real grasp of the depths to which the Boston office had sunk, they were strictly following protocol since their investigation involved another ongoing one.
Again the word came down from on high, in this case north in Boston, about what was soon to go down. In August 1982, Huff and his Connecticut counterparts headed to Miami. They landed and boarded a cab that drove right past a parking garage where John Callahan’s body had been stuffed in the trunk of his Cadillac, shot in the back of the head. The twentieth victim of John Martorano.
This particular murder also profoundly affected me on a personal level, once my fiancée Jane witnessed the look on my face when I received the fateful call about Callahan’s murder. As a nurse who worked reglarly in emergency situations, she’d seen more than her share of deaths from gunshot wounds and other forms of violence. Suddenly she began to obsess about my life and safety, anxious over what seemed like the very real possibility that I might be next on Bulger’s hit list, and for good reason. Jane feared for our future, the family we had every intention of starting. She was my second chance at happiness, and the whole sordid mess in Boston was now jeopardizing that.
John Connolly, and the culture of corruption surrounding and protecting him, had struck again, this time much too close to home for comfort. Bulger was still free and still killing, the FBI now a willing and unambiguous accomplice in his rise to the pinnacle of the New England underworld.
PART THREE
BEYOND BULGER
“Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.”
17
BOSTON, 1982
“I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
I recited the FBI oath on a warm fall day at the age of twenty-five with the rest of my graduating class in the Old Post Office Building in 1965. It was a cavernous space and our voices echoed, reverberating in a din kind of like PA-speaker feedback. I remember hoping J. Edgar Hoover himself would be there, but he wasn’t. I remember listening to similar words spoken during the introduction to those old radio shows. It should have been a happy moment, and I guess it was. But it was tinged by melancholy. Thoughts of my mother and memories of the Mount, how cold the concrete floor felt in winter. I don’t know why I thought about that then, but I did.
But my melancholy swiftly vanished with my first posting in New Orleans in 1965. My supervisor, John Reynolds, commanded the #4 squad which was made up of about eighteen agents ranging from me, a shave-tailed twenty five year old, to Regis, a senior twenty plus veteran who was assigned to the JFK assassination case in New Orleans.
Reynolds used to yell across the glass partition, “Fitzpatrick, get your ass in here
!”
Wry smiles flashed on the faces of my brother agents; we were all male agents back then in 1965, always a step away from a “whupping” by Reynolds, reputed to be the toughest supervisor in the FBI.
“I know you were a social worker in your other life,” he said. Reynolds had thick bushy eyebrows and spoke in a voice permanently hoarse from cigarettes. He had a picture of his family framed on his desk but sometimes, when the discussion grew especially unpleasant, he’d turn the picture away so that his family wouldn’t bear witness. “But, dammit, you’re an agent now and these pabulum reports tell me you better get on the ball! You’ll have to testify to this and the jury could care less about how you feel! Facts are facts and, dammit, from now on your reports will only contain facts. Do you read me, Fitzpatrick?”
The only thing I could mutter was, “Yes, sir.”
“Then get the hell out of here!”
For all of the bluster, John Reynolds taught me how to write a report; an FBI report, one that would hold up in court under the best scrutiny. As a first office agent this was part of my indoctrination and probationary period. Hoover made sure all new agents went through such a probationary period, extending from training school to the first-year evaluation. Some agents were let go even before their first-year-evaluation rating, several more afterwards.
The fact that my initial reviews were positive led to my first bump up the ladder to an assignment as a lookout; specifically for two cop killers out of Oklahoma who had escaped from prison and were on the lam. The identification order claimed they liked to hang out around YMCAs, hitting the customers in violent smash-and-dash robberies. My assignment was to surveil a certain YMCA and watch for suspicious vehicles or persons.
Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down Page 12