by Dick Lehr
What if murders pile up, unsolved? If working folks are threatened and extorted, with no recourse? If a large-scale cocaine ring, time and again, eludes investigators? If elaborate government bugging operations, costing taxpayers millions, are leaked and ruined?
This could never happen, right, a deal between the FBI and a top echelon informant going this bad?
But it did.
Today we know that the deal between Bulger and the FBI was deeper, dirtier, and more personal than anyone had imagined, and it was a deal that was sealed one moonlit night in 1975 between two sons of Southie, Bulger and a young FBI agent named John Connolly.
DICK LEHR AND GERARD O’NEILL
Boston, April 2000
Whitey’s World
PART ONE
The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ACT III, SCENE 4),
KING LEAR
CHAPTER ONE
1975
Under a harvest moon, FBI agent John Connolly eased his beat-up Plymouth into a parking space along Wollaston Beach. Behind him the water stirred and, further off, the Boston skyline sparkled. The ship-building city of Quincy, bordering Boston to the south, was a perfect location for the kind of meeting the agent had in mind. The roadway along the beach, Quincy Shore Drive, ran right into the Southeast Expressway. Heading north, any of the expressway’s next few exits led smack into South Boston, the neighborhood where Connolly and his “contact” had both grown up. Using these roads, the drive to and from Southie took just a few minutes. But convenience alone was not the main reason the location made a lot of sense. Most of all, neither Connolly nor the man he was scheduled to meet wanted to be spotted together in the old neighborhood.
Backing the Plymouth into the space along the beach, Connolly settled in and began his wait. In the years to come Connolly and the man he was expecting would never stray too far from one another. They shared Southie, always living and working within a radius of a mile of each other in an underworld populated by investigators and gangsters.
But that came later. For now Connolly waited eagerly along Wollaston Beach, the thrum of the engine a drag to the buzz inside the car that was like an electric charge. Having won a transfer back to his hometown a year earlier, he was poised to make his mark in the Boston office of the nation’s elite law enforcement agency. He was only thirty-five years old, and this was going to be his chance. His big moment in the FBI had arrived.
The nervy agent was coming of age in an FBI struggling with a rare public relations setback. In Congress inquiries into FBI abuses had confirmed that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had for years been stockpiling information on the private lives of politicians and public figures in secret files. The FBI’s main target, the Mafia, was also in the news. Swirling around were sensational disclosures involving a bizarre partnership between the CIA and the Mafia, also unearthed during congressional investigations. There was talk of a CIA deal with mafiosi to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and of murder plots that involved poisoned pens and poisoned cigars.
Indeed, it suddenly seemed like the Mafia was everywhere and everyone wanted a piece of the mysterious and somehow glamorous organization, including Hollywood. Francis Ford Coppola’s movie masterpiece, The Godfather, Part II, had played to huge audiences when it opened the year before. A few months earlier the picture had won a slew of Oscars. Connolly’s FBI was now deeply into its own highly publicized assault on La Cosa Nostra (LCN). It was the FBI’s number-one national priority, a war to counter the bad press, and Connolly had a plan, a work-in-progress to advance the cause.
Connolly surveyed the beachfront, which at this late hour was empty. Occasionally a car drove past him along Quincy Shore Drive. The bureau wanted the Mafia, and to build cases against the Mafia, agents needed intelligence. To get intelligence, agents needed insiders. In the FBI the measure of a man was his ability to cultivate informants. Connolly, now seven years on the job, knew this much was true, and he was determined to become one of the bureau’s top agents—an agent with the right touch. His plan? Cut the deal that others in the Boston office had attempted, but without success. John Connolly was going to land Whitey Bulger, the elusive, cunning, and extremely smart gangster already a legend in Southie. The stylish FBI arriviste wasn’t the type to take the stairs. He was an elevator man, and Whitey Bulger was the top floor.
The bureau had had its eye on Bulger for some time. Previously, a veteran agent named Dennis Condon had taken a run at him. The two would meet and talk, but Whitey was wary. In May 1971 Condon managed to elicit extensive inside information from Whitey on an Irish gang war that was dominating the city’s underworld—who was allied with whom, who was targeting whom. It was a thorough, detailed account of the landscape with an accompanying lineup of key characters. Condon even opened an informant file for Whitey. But just as quickly, Whitey went cold. They met several times through the summer, but the talks didn’t go well. In August, reported Condon, Whitey was “still reluctant to furnish info.” By September Condon had thrown up his hands. “Contacts with captioned individual have been unproductive,” he wrote in his FBI files on September 10, 1971. “Accordingly, this matter is being closed.” Exactly why Whitey ran hot then cold was a mystery. Maybe the all-Irish nature of the intelligence he’d provided had proved discomforting. Maybe there was a question of trust: why should Whitey Bulger trust Dennis Condon of the FBI? In any event, the Whitey file was closed.
Now, in 1975, Condon was on the way out, his eye on his upcoming retirement. But he’d brought Connolly along, and the younger agent was hungry to reopen the Whitey file. After all, Connolly brought something to the table no one else could. He knew Whitey Bulger. He’d grown up in a brick tenement near the Bulgers’ in the Old Harbor housing project in South Boston. Whitey was eleven years older than Connolly, but Connolly was oozing with confidence. The old neighborhood ties gave him the juice others in the Boston office didn’t have.
Then, in an instant, the waiting was over. Without any warning, the passenger side door swung open, and into the Plymouth slipped Whitey Bulger. Connolly jumped, surprised by the suddenness of the entry, surprised he was caught unaware. He, a trained federal agent, had left his car doors unlocked.
“What the hell did you do, parachute in?” he asked as the gangster settled into the front seat. Connolly had been expecting his visitor to pull up in a car alongside him. Bulger explained that he had parked on one of the side streets and then walked along the beach. He’d waited until he was sure no one else was around, and then he’d come up behind from the water.
Connolly, one of the younger agents on the prestigious Organized Crime Squad, tried to calm himself. Whitey, who’d just turned forty-six on September 3, sat in the front seat, larger than life, even if he just barely hit five-feet-eight and weighed an ordinary 165 pounds. He was hard-bodied and fit, with penetrating blue eyes and that signature blond hair, swept back. Under the cover of darkness, the two men began to talk, and then Connolly, properly obsequious to a neighborhood elder who was also an icon, made his offer: “You should think about using your friends in law enforcement.”
THIS was Connolly’s pitch to Whitey: you need a friend. But why?
In the fall of 1975 life in the city was tumultuous and changing unpredictably. From where they sat along the vacant beach, the two men could see the Boston skyline across the water. At the time the citizens of Boston were electrified by the unexpected good fortunes of their Red Sox. Yaz, Luis Tiant, Bill Lee, Carlton Fisk, Jim Rice, and Fred Lynn—who, after the season, would be honored as both the rookie of the year and the American League’s most valuable player—were in the midst of a glorious run for the World Series title against the powerful Reds of Cincinnati.
But closer to home the world was dark and unstable.
The nightmare of busing had begun its second year. In 1974 a federal court order to bus black students from Roxbury to South Boston High School in order to achieve racial balance in the city’s segregate
d public schools had turned the neighborhood into a war zone. The rest of the country tuned in, and people were getting to know Southie through televised images and front-page newspaper photographs featuring riot police, state troopers patrolling school corridors, rooftop police snipers, and legions of blacks and whites screaming racist chants at one another. The Pulitzer Prize in photography was awarded for a jaw-dropping 1976 picture of a black man being rammed with an American flag during a disturbance outside of city hall. Nationwide the neighborhood was seen through a prism of broken glass—a bloodied first impression that was searing and horrific.
Whitey’s younger brother, Billy, was in the middle of it all. Like all the neighborhood’s political leaders, Billy Bulger, a state senator, was an implacable foe of the court-ordered busing. He never challenged the court’s findings that the city’s schools were egregiously segregated. He did, however, strongly oppose any remedy that forced students to travel out of their home school districts. He’d gone to Washington, D.C., to complain and present their case to the state’s congressional delegation, and once there, he delivered a speech to a group of anti-busing parents in the pouring rain. He hated the view outsiders were getting of his neighborhood, and he denounced the “unremitting, calculated, unconscionable portrayal of each of us, in local and national press, radio and television, as unreconstructed racists.” To him the issue was his neighbors’ legitimate worry for the welfare and education of their children. Back home Billy Bulger spoke out regularly against the unwanted federal intervention.
But busing would not go away, and the summer just ended had not gone well. In July six young black men had driven to Carson Beach in South Boston and ended up in a fight with a gang of white youth that left one black hospitalized. In his younger days John Connolly had been a lifeguard along the beaches of South Boston, just as Billy Bulger had been before him, and now the sandy beaches had become another battleground. On a Sunday in August police helicopters circled over Carson Beach and Coast Guard boats patroled offshore while more than one thousand black citizens drove to the beach in a motorcade of several hundred cars. They were accompanied on their “wade-in” to the beach by more than eight hundred uniformed police officers. The cameras rolled.
By the time Connolly had arranged to meet Whitey along Wollaston Beach, the schools had reopened. Student boycotts and fights between blacks and whites were regular events. Thinking it might help ease the racial tension, officials for the first time tried to integrate the football team at South Boston High School. But the four black players who reported to the first practice had to do so under police protection.
The neighborhood was torn apart, and Connolly knew that, could feel that pain, because it was his neighborhood as well, and he had played off this bond in lining up his meeting with Bulger. But while the bond might have gotten him an audience with Whitey, he now had to pitch a deal to his boyhood hero. Connolly most of all wanted to exploit the wider underworld troubles brewing between the Boston Mafia and a gang Bulger had signed on with in neighboring Somerville. Bulger, in charge now of the rackets in Southie, had hooked on with the Somerville crime boss Howie Winter. The gang operated out of a garage in the Winter Hill section of the small city just across the Charles River to the west. In the past year Whitey had paired off with another member of the gang, Stevie “The Rifleman” Flemmi. They got along, found they had certain things in common, and had begun to hang out.
By the time Connolly and Bulger met, the young FBI agent had done his homework. He knew Bulger and the Winter Hill gang were facing a two-pronged threat from a local Mafia that for decades was controlled by the powerful underboss Gennaro J. Angiulo and his four brothers. Pending at that moment was a dispute between the two organizations over the placement of vending machines throughout the region. There had been wiseguy bluster about shoot-outs as a way to settle the matter. With all this instability, Connolly argued, a wiseguy could use a friend.
Besides, Angiulo was wily and inscrutable. He had a knack for setting up for arrest those he no longer had any use for. For example, a few years earlier a mob enforcer had veered out of his control. Angiulo, the story went, had reached out to his contacts inside the Boston Police Department, and the mob renegade was soon picked up on phony gun charges after crooked cops planted weapons in his car. No one knew for certain whether Angiulo in fact had the kind of access to manipulate an arrest like that. But this was the story making the rounds, and Whitey Bulger and the rest of Howie Winter’s gang believed it. As Connolly well knew, perception was all that actually mattered.
Bulger was clearly concerned about Angiulo setting him up. “What if three cops stop me at night and say there was a machine gun in my car,” Whitey had complained. “Who is the judge gonna believe? Me or the three cops?” Connolly had positioned himself to play off such crosscurrents of underworld paranoia.
The two men sat in the Plymouth, the city lights rippling on the water. You should use your friends, Connolly stressed, a line that caused Bulger to consider the agent intently, sensing an opening for the upper hand.
“Who?” Whitey said at last. “You?”
“Yeah,” replied Connolly to a ruthless man who used up people and threw them away. “Me.”
CONNOLLY’S proposal was simple: inform on La Cosa Nostra and let the FBI do the rest. Bulger knew, Connolly recalled, “that if we were chewing on the Mafia, it was very difficult for the Mafia to be chewing on them.”
In fact, the moment Connolly had indicated he wanted a meeting Bulger knew what the FBI wanted. For weeks Bulger had already been working the proposition over in his mind, weighing the pros and cons, figuring the angles and potential benefits. He’d even gone and consulted with Stevie Flemmi. Bulger brought up the subject one day when the two of them were in Somerville at Marshall Motors, the auto repair shop owned by Howie Winter. The one-story garage was a faceless building made of cinder blocks. It resembled a concrete bunker and served as a business front for the gang’s wide-ranging illegal enterprises, which since 1973 had expanded to include fixing horse races up and down the East Coast.
Bulger told Flemmi that the FBI agent John Connolly was making a bid for his services. “What do you think?” Bulger asked Flemmi when the two were alone. “Should I meet him?”
The question hung in the air. Flemmi later decided that, if Whitey Bulger was confiding in him about an FBI overture, he was signaling that he already knew something about Flemmi’s own secret “status.” Flemmi had a history with the Boston FBI, and what a history it was. He was first enlisted as an FBI informant in the mid-1960s. Flemmi adopted the code name “Jack from South Boston” for his dealings with his FBI handler, an agent named H. Paul Rico (who was Dennis Condon’s partner).
Rico, a dashing senior agent who favored a Chesterfield topcoat and French cuffs, cultivated Flemmi because of his access to the New England Mafia. Flemmi was not a made Mafia member, but he knew all the leading players and was frequently in their company. The Mafia liked Flemmi, a former army paratrooper who went from a juvenile detention center at age seventeen to serve two tours of duty in Korea with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team. He had a reputation as a tough killer, even if he was only average in height, five-feet-eight, and in weight about 140 pounds. Flemmi worked on his own, out of his Marconi Club in Roxbury, a combination bookie joint, massage parlor, and brothel, where he got messages, took calls, and held meetings. A popular guy with his curly chestnut hair and brown eyes, a guy who enjoyed cars and the late-night company of young women, Flemmi got around.
Even the New England godfather, Raymond L. S. Patriarca, revealed a fondness for him. In the winter of 1967 Flemmi was summoned to Providence. He dined with Patriarca and Patriarca’s brother Joe, a lunch that lingered long into the afternoon. They talked about family. Patriarca asked Flemmi where his parents were from in Italy. They talked about business. Patriarca promised to steer cars to the new auto body shop Flemmi had opened. They talked a bit about Flemmi’s brother, Jimmy the Bear, who was in prison ser
ving time on an attempted murder rap. In a gesture of goodwill, Patriarca gave Flemmi $5,000 in cash to put into the auto shop.
Back in Boston, Flemmi mostly moved around with a boyhood pal, Frank Salemme, whose nickname was “Cadillac Frank.” The two had grown up in Roxbury, where Flemmi’s family lived in the Orchard Park housing project. His father, Giovanni, an immigrant from Italy, had worked as a bricklayer. Flemmi and Salemme worked the streets together as enforcers, bookmakers, and loan sharks. They frequented the North End, the tight-knit Italian neighborhood where underboss Gennaro Angiulo had his office, and they often ended up at late-night blowouts in the company of hard-drinking Larry Zannino.
Zannino was the brutal and bloodless mafioso whom Angiulo relied on to bring muscle to the Boston LCN enterprise. In turn Zannino relied on Flemmi and Salemme to put some of his loan-sharking money out on the street. But while everyone liked Stevie, the feeling was not mutual. Flemmi didn’t trust the North End, not Angiulo and especially not Zannino. When drinking with Zannino, Flemmi would pace himself, careful not to let down his guard. But Zannino and the others didn’t notice, and they took Flemmi further in. There was the night, for example, in the summer of 1967 at Giro’s Restaurant on Hanover Street, a night spent with a lineup of local wiseguys. Zannino, Peter Limone, Joe Lombardi. Flemmi was with Salemme. They ate, drank, and then Zannino insisted they retire to a nearby bar, the Bat Cave.
Over more drinks a slobbering Zannino and Limone indicated that they’d all decided to sponsor Flemmi and Salemme “for membership in our organization.”