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

by Robert Fitzpatrick

  Along about ten or eleven one night, lo and behold, two guys drove into the YMCA parking lot and took a position in a darkened corner diagonally across from me. After a few minutes, I sneaked up and grabbed the license plate number which, unbelievably, matched a car stolen by the Oklahoma escapees a few days earlier.

  I crept toward the car and IDed two men in the front seat, apparently asleep and drunk. The driver had a gun in his left hand at the ready while the other guy’s hand was hidden from sight. I staked out the car and called for backup. The case agent arrived and I briefed him on the facts at hand. A plan was drawn up to take the individuals down. The case agent, a hard-nosed FBI lifer named Ziggy, would make the arrest, while I covered him from the driver’s side.

  Being a brand new agent, I’m sure the seasoned agents were covering me, throwing me a bone as a gesture for alerting them to this potential grab. As Ziggy approached the car he wrapped on the window, startling both fugitives. When he yanked the passenger door open, the fugitive on that side made a sudden movement that ended when Ziggy stuck a gun in his face. The fugitive I was eyeballing slowly raised his hand, and I immediately wrapped on his window pointing my gun directly at his head.

  “Gun!” I yelled, keeping with protocol.

  The apprehension team responded in a flurry of movement that left the two fugitives squirming facedown on the ground.

  Later, I was given the assignment and honor to fingerprint the fugitive cop killers. Still a little drunk and hostile, they fought my attempt to photograph and fingerprint them. The third time they resisted I gave one last warning. When they still refused to cooperate, I looked to a senior agent who nodded, the implication of his gesture clear. I pulled the third finger of one of the fugitives back until I heard a pop! as it broke. After howling and jumping up and down he settled in to be fingerprinted. The other fugitive offered no resistance at all.

  We brought the first fugitive before the magistrate in New Orleans. The subject immediately protested that I had brutally broken his finger. The magistrate questioned me about it and I told him these cold-blooded killers wouldn’t let me do my job. I cited that I had to establish identity in making sure that the subject was indeed the shooter since we recovered the gun that allegedly killed a police officer. The magistrate agreed that force was necessary and refused to concede that I had committed police brutality.

  * * *

  I’d graduated the Bureau’s Training Academy certain that as long as I was an agent, I’d never lose sight of the FBI oath’s words or its meaning. In my mind, that’s what the whole Bulger mess was about. Agents were plainly violating that oath and sometimes much worse. But for me to have turned a blind eye to what was going on, to have not continued to pursue Bulger and his enablers at all costs, would have run counter to everything I tried to stand for as an agent. Some would call that stubborn, Irish stubborn, as they say. Some would call it simply tenacious. Bucking the system, while some would just call it stupid.

  I call it simply right and it explains why I wasn’t going to stop until the mess was cleaned up, no matter what. Until I was transferred to the Boston FBI office in 1981 I never had reason to question the integrity of a fellow agent or even the FBI as a whole. My fifteen-year tenure with the Bureau up until this time was marked by a steady climb, experiencing major roles in a series of high-profile and successful investigations. My assumption, based on that experience, was that all agents were like me. They had taken the oath, too, hadn’t they?

  Not John Connolly, apparently.

  The culture of the Boston FBI office allowed him to set the tone and act as if he were in charge. This was best exemplified by a “point shaving” case involving the Boston College basketball team. A wiseguy by the name of Paul Mazzei was convicted for his involvement in a basketball scheme featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. There were three groups involved: a Pittsburgh connection that involved a student named Tony Perla; a Boston College player named Rick Kuhn; and a New York connection with gangsters Henry Hill (from the movie Wiseguy who became an informant for the FBI in 1979 when I was in Miami) and James Burke, a Westie from Hell’s Kitchen who ran away from Mount Loretto when I was there. The gangsters created “protection,” and the players received $2,500 per game in exchange for ensuring that Boston College did not beat the point spread in games where the betting gangsters wagered against the team.

  While this took place during the 1978–79 season, the trials came to a head early into my tenure as Boston ASAC. I was sitting in my office when my secretary buzzed to tell me that a high-ranking official from Boston College was on the phone. Perplexed, I took the call.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” I asked politely.

  Making small talk, the official said he was happy to chat with the FBI head in Boston and congratulated the office for a fine job cleaning up the town.

  “So what I can do for you today?” I repeated.

  “John Connolly said you might be able to do the school, and me, a favor.”

  “John Connolly?”

  “Well, these kids are fine boys, but sometimes they get into trouble. Boys, you know.”

  “Pardon me, but are you talking about the Boston College basketball betting scandal?”

  “These are good boys, Mr. Fitzpatrick.”

  “The case is currently being investigated by the FBI.”

  “Agent Connolly thought you might be able to help us out a bit.”

  “Agent Connolly is on one of the squads I manage, but he’s not involved in the Boston College investigation.”

  “He said maybe there is something you can do.”

  “Bringing the boys into my office for a chat would be fine.”

  “I was hoping for something more.”

  I found it hard to believe that this official was hinting, on the suggestion of John Connolly, that I could make the case go away. I was both dumbfounded and livid at the thought. In spite of all my interactions with him and the clear displeasure I’d expressed over his job performance, Connolly still thought I was ripe for the taking. In Connolly’s Boston and in Connolly’s FBI, that was the way things were done.

  I called John Morris, Connolly’s supervisor, and ordered him in for an interview. I went up one side and down the other, leaving no doubt he and Connolly were in trouble before I got around to the Boston College official’s thinly veiled request.

  “Is this guy stupid or what?”

  “No,” Morris replied, somewhat indignantly, “the guy’s an important man.”

  As if that’s the way things were done in Boston, business as usual, as if I could be sucked into the culture of corruption. You go along to get along, right?

  Not a chance.

  I was called down to FBIHQ about this time for a special assignment designed to stop the leaks and, more important, the informant killings. HQ didn’t let on but they were leery of the information about cases getting out. Continue working me as a “Serpico” was one idea, in that I’d be bypassing the traditional chain of command to make sure my reporting itself didn’t fall victim to the same kind of leaking that plagued the office. So an even more secure system was set up whereby all of my communications with HQ would be through secret and clandestine contacts in person or by secure, coded teletype communications. Soon after the meeting FBIHQ sent out an “All Employees” warning to report all allegations of impropriety and criminal misconduct immediately. These requirements were usually a yearly edict to constantly remind all FBI personnel to report misconduct and breaches of FBI rules and regulation to FBIHQ. Failure to do so would be a serious matter, but equally important was an unwritten rule second only to the oath itself: Don’t embarrass the Bureau.

  You won’t find that written anywhere, but it’s imbedded in the minds of all agents. As much or perhaps even more than the military, the FBI is an insular organization that polices itself and expects everyone to toe the party line. Problems are dealt with from within the system and by the system. Of course, nothing like the problems in Boston
had ever surfaced before, and I intended to solve them by sticking to established procedure and protocol in doing my job.

  A job that was about to become even more difficult.

  Larry Sarhatt’s tenure as Special Agent in Charge came to an end right around the time of John Callahan’s murder and my subsequent trips to headquarters in Washington. He’d had enough, although some said he was “pushed out” by HQ. In late November 1982, he was replaced by James Greenleaf, whom I’d met a few times back in HQ but didn’t know that well. Greenleaf had been an assistant director at HQ in the Inspection and Planning Division, so his coming up to run the Boston office took plenty by surprise. After all, Boston was a coveted job, a top ten office amid a hotbed of activity. I knew that much from my tenure as chief of the Transfer Unit when I saw how many SACs coveted the top job there, to the point where some of them actively criticized Greenleaf’s appointment as an “in thing” move.

  I picked Greenleaf up at Logan Airport and we drove to Portland, Maine, where he hailed from, an opportunity for him to inspect the resident agency there. Our drive started out with small talk about our common acquaintances and experiences in Washington. Greenleaf was tall; an inch or two over six feet, blessed with an athletic build and a not unpleasant demeanor that should have made him the kind of public relations asset the Boston office was sorely in need of. I kept an open mind, even though chatter and rumor had Greenleaf involved with less than savory sorts in and out of the Bureau. I was warned in house by several agents to watch him because he was “a company guy.” They provided me with several examples that put his character in question and spoke of possible involvement in ongoing criminal issues at HQ.

  Greenleaf intimated that Sarhatt was forced out as Boston SAC because the feeling at HQ was that he wasn’t running the office well enough, resulting in embarrassment and a tarnished image for the FBI in Boston. Could this have had something to do with the fact that Sarhatt agreed with me that Whitey Bulger should be closed as an informant? Dick Bates, my old SAC pal, thought so.

  Before we got around to discussing Bulger or anything else of substance, Greenleaf asked me to stop at a liquor store where he purchased a six-pack of dark Heineken beer that he proceeded to drain during the course of our drive north. I thought this odd since drinking on duty was strictly prohibited by Bureau rules and regulations, but I gave my new boss a pass since he needed time to settle in. We talked about how the Boston office was set up, the different personalities and politics. At the time, all ten squads under me were making great strides in taking down all classifications of crime, since many of the operational and organizational changes I’d put into place were finally taking hold in the form of collars and convictions.

  The difference between Sarhatt and Greenleaf, meanwhile, couldn’t have been more pronounced. Sarhatt lived and breathed the Bureau; it dominated his life, all he ever talked about. Not so with Greenleaf. For him, taking over as SAC in Boston was just another rung to mount on his laddered career path.

  “Jim, how exactly did you get Boston?” I asked him. “Everybody wants Boston.”

  He laughed and acknowledged it was a who-you-know proposition. This was apparent, since Greenleaf didn’t have a lot of field or case experience and wasn’t used to supervising squads or agents. His strengths were technical and procedural; he’d never really distinguished himself in the capacity of on-the-scene leadership that would be required of him in any SAC position. But he was savvy enough, politically anyway, to make a point of revealing HQ’s perception that I was “combative” and “bellicose.” Even though I didn’t view his comment as confrontational necessarily, I did regard it as a thinly veiled threat that my dogged pursuit to close Whitey Bulger wasn’t about to be tolerated any longer.

  In that respect, maybe James Greenleaf was actually the perfect guy for the job—living proof of an unspoken message from HQ about Boston that I never quite read right. Could be it was about choosing sides, and his assignment clearly indicated HQ wasn’t choosing mine, no matter what they said to the contrary. Clear now, but not nearly as so then.

  These were heady, productive times for the Boston office, and Greenleaf’s performance reports on me graciously reflected that. He continued to write me up as an exceptional ASAC, in spite of some clear areas of conflict that drove a wedge between us. Very early in his tenure, the new SAC instructed me to close a case at the Bath Shipyards in Maine, territory that fell under the Boston office’s “resident agency” status. The case involved multimillion-dollar kickbacks and bribes by government officials. We identified a DOJ employee through informants showing he was involved in the bribery matter and we were close to presenting the case for prosecution when Greenleaf ordered me to close the investigation.

  “I can’t do that,” I told him.

  “I don’t think you heard what I just told you.”

  “I heard you.”

  He hesitated before responding, clearly not used to be challenged. “Close the case, Fitz.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “You bet it is.”

  “Then I respectfully decline to follow it.”

  Another heated pause, after which he asked, “What’s it going to take to get you to close this case?”

  I said that if the Director of the FBI advised me in writing to close the case I would close it. Amazingly, the next day I received a teletype from Director William Webster instructing me to do exactly that. My oath was on the line and this order was unprecedented in my FBI career. To me it was tantamount to case fixing. But the order was approved by Washington, so I guess that took Greenleaf off the hook.

  Greenleaf’s next questionable decision was to replace John Morris as head of the Organized Crime squad with an agent named Jim Ring. On its own this was a fairly innocuous move, but Greenleaf also changed the office’s chain-of-command structure whereby Ring would report directly to him, bypassing me entirely. Almost immediately Ring coddled up to John Connolly and, thus, Whitey Bulger. The implication of the move was as clear as the signal it provided: I was being taken out of the Bulger business. Nobody, from HQ on down, wanted to hear anymore that Bulger should be closed as an FBI TE.

  Despite the success the office encountered under my stewardship, there were so many leaks and infractions of policy under this new regime that the office became paralyzed by in-house investigations. I had my suspicions that Greenleaf was behind at least some of the problems, but it was nothing I could prove or chose to pursue further. Since I was now officially working undercover, reports to HQ and the Director’s Office were made confidentially in person and by written or verbal communication to HQ personnel outside of Boston. That should have assured the sanctity of the information I was providing. But I later learned through court testimony and federal appellate court briefs that Greenleaf had been fully briefed on my confidential status from the beginning in stark contrast to my stated mandate.

  On one occasion the Department of Justice’s U.S. attorney asked to speak with me privately. We met behind closed doors and he informed me he had knowledge that an agent was “on the take” and leaking info to LCN. This involved a $17,000 kickback from the wiseguys that was disclosed during an audit revealing missing informant money. Morris was not known at the time to have taken money himself from the wiseguys, but as the drug coordinator, this was his domain and his responsibility. Morris’s response: telling his agents to watch their collective ass. I advised SAC Greenleaf and he took no action. In fact, I later learned that he, too, warned the agents of a possible investigation!

  When I asked this particular U.S. attorney why he didn’t just report this crime to SAC Greenleaf, he replied, “Because I don’t trust him.”

  It’s no wonder that the office became even more corrupt, instead of less. Agents know their job and are excellent investigators. Because the FBI is a militarylike organization, though, there remains a direct line of order, passing from one to another upward in a strict protocol. Every agent is reluctant to deliver the news that spells corru
ption, especially if it happens to involve the boss. Even my old pal and former SAC of Boston Dick Bates underestimated how bad things had gotten. He never spoke of the true gravity of the situation, thinking it would pass. Perhaps he had seen it all before and now in retirement he had no desire to watch the same show again.

  Headquarters should have taken the drastic action required, both before SAC Greenleaf’s arrival in Boston and after. As the former transfer agent at HQ, and one who previously handled every major case of this kind prior to coming to Boston, I knew that Morris and Connolly should have been transferred to another division to avoid any hint of impropriety and for preventative reasons. It was far more than a hint at this point. Informants’ lives had already been lost and more certainly would be if something wasn’t done.

  What message was HQ sending by giving Greenleaf the Boston office? I thought a hefty part of it was about getting me to back off Bulger. Back then I took my undercover status as a sure sign of HQ’s commitment to make things right in Boston. Now I see it more as a means to keep the information I was funneling under control.

  Don’t embarrass the Bureau.

  Meanwhile, I turned my focus to the other major cases assigned to the Organized Crime squad I was running. There was no shortage of them. In fact, shortly after James Greenleaf’s arrival, I had seven leak cases relating to corruption, graft, extortion, payoffs, and organized crime, several of them extremely high profile.

  The LCN case fell under my domain and I was determined to bring down the Angiulo mob through traditional means and technical assistance, not relying at all on the bogus intelligence supplied by Bulger. I never took my eyes totally off Whitey, still determined to see justice done. But the atmosphere between rival agents in the office had become so venomous that my original mandate was just that. Agents knew I’d lost two informants who could have given me Bulger, and as the new guy in town, it was easy to side against me in favor of imbedded agents like Connolly and Morris. And it was becoming alarming to me which side SAC Greenleaf came down on.