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

by Robert Fitzpatrick

  Rico died at the age of seventy-eight in 2004 prior to his trial, his appearance so wan and weak in those final months that even his most fervent enemies and accusers expressed sympathy for his plight. Justice had hardly been served, neither in Rico’s case nor the Boston office itself, since only one of the perpetrators spawned by the era, John Connolly, had actually been jailed. The justice system had failed. Those at FBIHQ who’d continued to fight and belittle me and my efforts thought they could breathe easier.

  They were wrong.

  Because the floodgates had been opened and could not be shut. The failure of the criminal justice system sent those wronged by the actions of corrupt FBI personnel to civil court, backed up by the inescapable conclusions reached in the Wolf hearings, the Connolly trial, and the Rico arrest. The corruption I had fought for so long had at last found the proper forum; Joseph Salvati, for example, sued the Bureau for $680 million for wrongful conviction in 2003, and that was just the beginning.

  In the ensuing years, more than a dozen civil cases were filed against the Bureau directly related to the actions I had been stymied from stopping or exposing. After fighting for years to make people listen, suddenly I had a willing and captive audience eager to depose me for what I knew that for so long nobody wanted to hear. Appearing on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2001, I had extemporaneously held the Bureau guilty in answering a question about responsibility. Every plaintiff’s attorney had a copy of that show. In one case, there were no less than thirteen lawyers in a conference room during my deposition, too many for all the chairs to accommodate.

  In a separate venue with government lawyers alone, I got a taste of what shape their hostility would take later in open court.

  “Don’t answer that,” my crusty lawyer, Bill Brown, instructed in response to a relatively simple question from a Department of Justice attorney.

  “You can answer the question, Mr. Fitzpatrick,” she extolled.

  “No, he can’t,” came Brownie’s retort.

  The attorney kept her eyes squarely on me, avoiding Brownie altogether. “Answer the question, please. You have nothing to fear.”

  At which point, Brownie leaned over the table toward her. “Are you Mr. Fitzpatrick’s lawyer?”

  “No,” she replied feebly.

  “That’s right. So stop giving my client legal advice. He won’t be answering the question.”

  This episode made for a prime counterpoint to the way I’d been handled by the FBI following the shooting incident in Cape Cod. Back then, FBIHQ agents ordered me to attend a class at Quantico that I’d already taken. I was actually taken out of class one day and ordered to FBIHQ where I was grilled yet again without counsel or any legal recourse. I told my interrogators I wanted an attorney and was rebuffed repeatedly. It was like a scene from the classic novel Darkness at Noon in which Communist interrogators continue to question and berate Nicholas Rubashov until he falsely confesses his guilt just to make it stop. And if they did this to me, it made perfect sense that they’d follow the same track with agents used to concoct the case against me, one of whom later admitted he was so scared that, as in Darkness at Noon, he made up a lie they wanted to hear rather than sticking to the truth. Make no mistake about it, though, I remained Rubashov in this twisted tragedy.

  I wish I’d had Brownie on my side back then, since his intervention with government lawyers had been a prime example of his working to protect me. Wolf, in his hearings, had inadvertently made a finding that now included me as a defendant in most of the civil cases brought against the government. One defense attorney told me he had to name me as a defendant to assure my testimony at trial to win the civil case.

  The battle lines had been drawn, and this time I had Brownie watching my back. There were enough cases and depositions to make all the Q and A’s run together, with one exception that would provide me with an opportunity to achieve the justice I’d been seeking for twenty years. A case that was still etched into my memory from a cold, blustery January day in 2000 when I stood watching the remains of a long-buried body being lifted from the frozen ground.

  The body of John McIntyre.

  29

  BOSTON, 2006

  As I stood on that embankment in 2000, steaming over confirmation of what I’d suspected ever since John McIntyre disappeared in 1984, I never imagined I was looking at the means to achieve my long-sought vindication. The coroner’s report on McIntyre’s death and remains only strengthened my resolve, as it brought me back to a dark period that had sewn the first seeds of my departure from the Bureau.

  McIntyre wasn’t a made guy like Brian Halloran, or a wannabe like Richie Castucci or John Callahan. He wasn’t even a businessman with something Whitey Bulger wanted, like Roger Wheeler. John McIntyre was just an ordinary guy from Southie who got himself jammed up with the cops and was looking for a way out. And Bulger didn’t just kill him, as he’d had John Martorano do to John Callahan with a bullet to the back of the head. No, he tortured McIntyre to death. Clearly Whitey wanted something he was convinced McIntyre wasn’t giving him. The IRA intelligence? Maybe—if, as I suspected at the time, it was Bulger who told Scotland Yard about the arms shipment that had started out on the Valhalla. Nothing scared Whitey, nothing in Boston anyway. The IRA was something else again. If he’d ratted the IRA shipment out, for whatever reason, the IRA would close Bulger in a way far more permanent than what I’d been seeking.

  Yes, what Bulger, already a fugitive for five plus years in 2000, had done to John McIntyre made me want to get him even more. And if I couldn’t get him, I wanted to get his enablers, the keepers of the corruption that had cost McIntyre and so many others their lives while the FBI turned a blind eye.

  Between the Wolf hearings, the Connolly conviction, the Committee on Government Reform’s report, and the arrest of Paul Rico, McIntyre’s family figured there was a smoking gun that could prove the FBI was complicit in his brutal murder. So they filed a civil suit in district court, drawing a wheelchair-bound, old-school, no-nonsense judge named Reginald Lindsay in a case that became known on the docket as The Estate of John McIntyre, Plaintiff v. The United States of America, Defendant. And, in large part, I was to become the smoking gun they needed.

  Bill Brown, my attorney, called me on an unseasonably chilly late spring day in 2006. “Get your ass up to Boston, Fitz. Big trial coming down.”

  “Okay,” I responded. “What’s up?”

  Brown went on to tell me that Judge Lindsay was going to have a bench trial in the McIntyre case. “No jury,” Brownie said. “Just a trial before the judge; in our case Judge Lindsay.”

  Up until this point I had been deposed numerous times involving about eleven cases, all seeking big bucks from Uncle Sam for “estate” suits in Boston’s U.S. district court. That meant the McIntyre trial could make for a precedent-setting case with major consequences for the government, especially the FBI.

  On another unseasonably cool, windy morning I boarded Amtrak in West Kingston, Rhode Island, for the hour-long trip to Boston. The sky was gray, like my thoughts, with a foreboding feel of cold rain. My thoughts were coldly calculated in remembering the McIntyre case and what it had meant to me. My trip that morning would become a ritualistic endeavor over the ensuing weeks of trial.

  As the train chugged into the station I made out Brownie waiting with a huge satchel, his old brown boxlike carrier that could hold all the government documents necessary for the trial. It was like some wizardly thing out of a Harry Potter movie, the way he seemed able to pull infinite reams of material from it, inevitably knowing where every piece of paper had been filed. Brownie and I exchanged the pleasantries of reunion and he ushered me to a great restaurant where we talked about McIntyre and the impending trial for hours.

  “You know they’ll be coming at you,” he said. “The government has an axe to grind and doesn’t really want to pay out any money in these suits.”

  I nodded and Brown continued, “Fitz, you are a key witness in this case because of wha
t you know and who you were. We both know you’re not on anybody’s side per se and only want to tell the truth.”

  My eyes glazed over as Brown opened his bottomless satchel, producing endless reams of depositions and discovery material relating to the case.

  “This discovery stuff,” he explained, “is your testimony over the past three years and will be used in the trial. I need you to get familiar again with the material so you’ll be ready.”

  I shot a look back at Brown, “Brownie, when you tell the truth, you don’t have to worry about what you’ll say.”

  Brown, the experienced attorney and savvy courtroom expert, rolled his eyes with nuanced skepticism. “Fitz, just do as I tell you and we’ll be all right.”

  We chatted about how all of the Bulger murders had a common theme. Most notably the fact that Bulger the rat didn’t like rats, and he was especially vicious when dealing with other rats. Psychologically, I suppose this was a type of reaction formation or self-loathing often born of a long stretch in prison. Bulger, on the outside anyway, was a constant show of machismo, force, and bravado. But inside lurked a thug with low self-esteem buttressed only by the security he found in wielding power through intimidation and brutality. The very definition, in my mind, of weakness. A bully, plain and simple. A psychopath.

  “Why did Bulger have to maul and torture McIntyre the way he did?” I asked Brownie, posing a question I’d never been able to answer for myself.

  “Because that’s the way he is,” he replied simply.

  Brownie told me Bulger was the worst criminal he’d ever dealt with, shocked at how he’d co-opted the FBI.

  “This case is gonna be a tough one, Fitz,” he advised in what sounded more like a warning.

  When I was a kid in the Mount we used to queue up for confession every Saturday afternoon about four p.m., before dinner, which was at five. The usual priests were there: the “good” priest with a Hail Mary and Our Father for penance; the inquisitive one always asking for more detail; the “hard-of-hearing” priest who made all of us speak louder to the snide snickers of boys within earshot. This priest would come out of his “box” and grab those kids from other lines because his was empty.

  I recall Father Kenny lecturing me about “scrupulosity” in confessing. Father cautioned me that I offered too much detail in confessing about situations that weren’t as significant as I thought them to be. Wow, I thought, I was confessing too much, actually a good thing for the priests because it showed a good examination of conscience. But, on Saturday, with all the kids going to confession, it might be considered a waste of the priest’s time. They wanted to eat on time, too.

  I found out when the trial started that when asked a question in court I had a tendency toward scrupulosity. Brownie picked up on this and said, “Fitz, you know you can say ‘I don’t know.’”

  I explained to him the problem was that I did know and only wanted to tell the truth. Like Father Kenny at the Mount, Brownie was only trying to cover my back.

  He observed that a defendant like Greenleaf had already been singled out by at least one judge, Mark Wolf, remarking on his tendency “not to remember” or simply testifying “I don’t know” even if he did. Brownie emphasized that the judges know who is telling the truth and that’s exactly what I intended to do.

  The courtroom in Boston boasts a formal setup that belies its new setting on the waterfront facing Boston Harbor. The judge sits atop a box higher than anyone else in a courtroom smaller than what movies and television normally depict. It was also unusually quiet, no background noise whatsoever with the heavy doors managing to keep even the clacking of footsteps in the hallways from being heard inside. Beginning on June 12, 2006, I sat in a box alongside the judge and followed his body language throughout the trial. Judge Lindsay would rub his semi-bald head whenever he became perplexed or anxious with testimony. Generally, he was an empathetic listener.

  When McIntyre’s mother heard testimony from Flemmi describing her son’s death, her grief and sad whimpering could be heard throughout the courtroom. Recognizing her pain and anguish Judge Lindsay called out, “Mrs. McIntyre, do you need some time?”

  She declined and with reverence he accommodated her distress as best he could. The courtroom was extremely quiet as the testimony continued about how Bulger and Flemmi tortured and murdered her son. I thought to myself about how each court had a unique personality set by the individual judge in tone and process. In spite of the obvious tension, Lindsay set a standard of fair and just decorum in his courtroom.

  I was pretty much considered a hostile witness to both the plaintiff and the defendant over my six days of testimony. The former, as represented by John McIntyre’s family, wanted to use me as a pawn to show how the malfeasance and incompetence running through the Boston office was a major contributing factor to the murder of their loved one. The latter, as represented by the government, wanted to impeach my credibility by proving I was part of the problem and not the solution. Based on the line of questioning both sides pursued, I must say neither seemed terribly interested in the truth.

  But that’s what they were going to get from me anyway.

  In court there were three attorneys for the plaintiff and three more representing the Department of Justice. Most everything was stored and displayed on computers in addition to “hard paper” evidence like the kind tucked neatly into Brownie’s well-worn satchel. There was a screen shared by all participants, including the judge. The formality and rigid procedure allowed for a high state of alertness. Testifying provides little room for error as testimony is about fact and direct knowledge with no guesswork intervening. Doing this over an extended period proved stressful and mind numbing, since the same questions were asked over and over again in different ways. The repetition was maddening at times, designed to trip me up at more turns than I could count. The judge intervened in unprecedented fashion, determined to get at something in which none of the other parties seemed nearly as interested in as they made their cases:

  The truth.

  30

  BOSTON, 2006

  Spring was stepping into summer the day I boarded the Amtrak train for Boston. Once at Boston’s South Station, I hustled on this historic day to Fan Pier’s U.S. District Court overlooking Boston Harbor for a momentous day in the beginning of testimony at John McIntyre’s “estate” trial that would decide a legal battle between the government representing the FBI and the family of McIntyre mourning his murder.

  Courtroom 2, a usually sparsely attended courtroom, was packed to the gills with all sorts of people. Attorneys both in and out of the case were there, as was the media representing print and TV reporters. The families of the victims, including the McIntyre family, were in attendance, along with former FBI and other law enforcement officials and a plethora of individuals wanting to see history in the making.

  Just as I arrived the bailiff announced, “Hear ye, hear ye, all rise!” as the judge entered in his wheelchair from his chambers to take his high seat among the gallery. It was 9:17 a.m. and the bailiff wasted no time in calling “Robert Fitzpatrick” to the stand. My heart was pounding as I walked up the aisle, took my place in the “testimonial box” and recited “I do!” to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.…

  Those in attendance were probably unaware of how flushed and nervous I was in the courtroom. I recognized a few faces in the gallery, but before I knew it, the trial had begun. The plaintiff’s attorney, Steven Gordon, began by reviewing my FBI background and experience to establish my credibility and expertise. It was midday before he got around to the subject at hand.

  THE FIRST DAY, JUNE 12, 2006

  “And as a result of that background and experience, did you undertake specific work at the FBI in that area?” Gordon asked me.

  “At the Academy I was assigned to the behavioral science unit. My job was primarily an area developing programs: homicide, sex crimes, profiling, hostage negotiation, terrorism, mostly the psychological
application of that program.”

  “And as part of that training, how many hours of specific training in that area would you say you have within the Academy?”

  “Hours?” I asked him back. “It was years, three years. I traveled throughout the country and the world, traveled about half the year teaching classes, giving instruction, and visiting crime sites.”

  “And would part of this training and experience be an ability to work with particular informants to assess their credibility?” Gordon followed immediately.

  “Yes, yes. I taught a course, the psychology of informants and the psychology of all kinds of crime regarding informants. What we were doing was giving attendees an opportunity to understand the psychology of informants, which is, well, among other things, that they go both ways.”

  “What do you mean by both ways?”

  “Well, some informants tell the truth and some don’t.”

  “Would you train other agents how to identify factors to determine whether an informant was being truthful?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you lecture or train with regard to informants having to do with organized crime?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did that pose any special issues for you or for the FBI?”

  “Yes. It’s a higher echelon informant.”

  “Mr. Fitzpatrick,” Gordon started next, leaning forward as if he was coming to an important point. He looked down at the pages before him. “If you go down to the third paragraph, ‘While the FBI recognizes the LCN as not being the only organized criminal element, it is nonetheless dominant and therefore continues to receive the prime investigative emphasis within the overall FBI organized crime program.’ Do you see that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “In the prosecution of LCN, what role did informants play in the C-3 [Organized Crime] squad?”

  “Well, most of the informants are at least members of the organized crime syndicate, gang, whatever, and as such they are inside and able to afford information that we would normally not get.”