by Dick Lehr
But the profusion of mob talk about LCN joint ventures with Winter Hill was ignored by an FBI in denial. The tapes were used exclusively to pursue mafiosi, and the FBI put a score in jail, including all the Angiulo brothers and Jerry’s son Jason. The only action Connolly took after the Prince Street bugs ended was to tell Bulger it was safe to go back in the water.
DESPITE the smashing success of his Prince Street operation, supervisor John Morris was now flying blind. Even with the afterglow of the Angiulo case lighting his path, Morris’s compass was broken. Within days of the bugs being turned off, he arranged a private celebration with Bulger and Flemmi at the Colonnade Hotel in Boston. Bulger brought two bottles of wine for “Vino” at the gathering in the upscale hotel. In the next two hours Bulger and Flemmi each had only a glass or so and Morris finished off the rest.
Feeling no pain, Morris played a tape from Prince Street for the two informants. They heard Angiulo and Zannino talking about the need to deal with the loose-lipped girlfriend of Nicky Giso because she’d shown bad judgment in talking openly about how one of Angiulo’s henchmen had cut up a North End man.
To be sure, John Morris had coordinated a seven-days-a week bugging operation that required around-the-clock staffing by forty agents. He’d handled a crisis a day for four months. Operation Bostar wiped out the Angiulo crime family, an enduring law enforcement triumph that Morris hoped would carry him to a job as special agent in charge in a major city.
But Morris was also failing just as surely as he was succeeding. He left telling signs of his slowly unfolding destruction behind in the Colonnade room. Besides emptying more than two wine bottles, Morris had stumbled out of the hotel leaving behind the top-secret government tape recording he had so proudly played for Bulger and Flemmi. Indeed, the tape was retrieved only when Flemmi realized it was being left behind and went back for it himself.
Though the turning point had been long before, perhaps nothing so summed up just how masterfully Bulger had turned the tables on the FBI and just how corrupted the FBI had become than the end of the Colonnade night. A drunk Morris was driven home in his own car by Whitey Bulger. Flemmi followed in the black Chevy. Morris and Connolly may have once thought they were in control of the relationship, but they and the FBI were now just intoxicated passengers. It was midnight in Boston.
CHAPTER NINE
Fine Food, Fine Wine, Dirty Money
John Connolly and John Morris were now the keepers of the Bulger flame inside the FBI. And for Boston’s increasingly fearsome foursome—Connolly, Morris, Bulger, and Flemmi—an era of good feeling had begun all around as the boundary lines between the good guys and bad guys blurred.
Perhaps they had always been blurred. Certainly Flemmi saw that there was something special between Connolly and Whitey Bulger. It was South Boston, for sure, and maybe part of it was a father-son thing. But Flemmi didn’t mind; he’d come to like Connolly in his own way. The brash agent, Flemmi said, “had a personality.” Bulger and Flemmi had grown fond of Morris as well, and Connolly made a point of telling his boss the good news. “These guys like you and will do anything for you,” said Connolly, according to Morris. “If there’s anything you ever need, just ask, and they will do it.”
Theirs was a mutual admiration society.
Morris, in turn, continued to envy the swagger, the confident style, the influence that Connolly had around town. The local agent seemed to have friends everywhere. Inside the office he may not have been particularly close to Sarhatt, or even Sarhatt’s successor, James Greenleaf, who took over in late 1982, but Connolly had strong friendships with many agents on the Organized Crime Squad as well as with other FBI managers. Nick Gianturco, for one, was enamored of Connolly. “He was by far the best informant developer I’ve ever seen in the bureau,” Gianturco said. More important, Connolly maintained ties with key agents he’d worked with earlier in New York City who by now had been promoted to headquarters and held high-ranking positions, particularly in the criminal division. John Morris was fully aware that Connolly’s FBI friends in Washington “had influence on me personally and my career.”
Then there was Billy Bulger, who had emerged as the state’s most powerful—and feared—politician since being elected president of the Massachusetts State Senate in 1978. Connolly had made sure to take Morris over to meet Bill Bulger, and the supervisor was impressed by Connolly’s easy access. “He just seemed to know a lot of politicians.”
Connolly, recalled Morris, liked to talk up his influence. The two agents might be chatting, looking ahead to life after the FBI, and Connolly, noting his cache of contacts, would say that “there would be a lot of good opportunities for jobs and so forth once we left the bureau.” The friendships that Connolly had inside the FBI and in Boston were like money in the bank.
Morris carefully tracked these matters. He was ambitious too and wanted to make a name for himself. Connolly seemed to be everything, however, that he was not. The intense Morris envied Connolly’s easy style, his ability to turn any problem that arose into someone else’s concern. In Connolly, Morris saw a fixer, and therefore, thought Morris, “it was important to me that he liked me.”
It was also a time for Connolly and Morris to count their professional blessings. Connolly had spun, Morris had covered, and together they rebuffed the suitability review of Bulger and Flemmi that began in late 1980 and lasted into 1981. They’d kept Sarhatt at bay, displaying a genius for exploiting loopholes in the FBI’s oversight of informants.
FOR his part, Connolly was soaking up the good vibes.
Ordinarily an informant handler worked mostly alone, in a kind of isolation —all part of protecting the informant’s confidentiality. And Connolly was mostly by himself when he met Bulger and Flemmi, either at one of their apartments or, in good weather, in the middle of the Old Harbor housing project where he and Bulger had both grown up, at Castle Island, a Revolutionary War fort overlooking the water at the easternmost point of South Boston, or along Savin Hill Beach.
But everyone on the Organized Crime Squad seemed to know he was handling the legendary Bulger, and Connolly seemed to like it that way. Besides Morris and Gianturco, agents Ed Quinn, Mike Buckley, and Jack Cloherty all knew. The word even spread beyond the squad. It was as if Connolly wanted others in the FBI to know about his prize. He was showing off.
“I have two guys you may want to meet,” Connolly told rookie agent John Newton one day at work. Newton had been transferred to the Boston office in 1980. He’d been assigned to an entry-level squad running background checks on new government hires—a far cry from a coveted assignment like Connolly’s on the Organized Crime Squad. Looking for a place to live, Newton was steered to John Connolly, and Connolly had helped Newton find an apartment, right in South Boston. They’d become friendly. Connolly learned that before Newton had become an FBI agent he’d served in the army’s Special Forces Unit. “John seemed interested in that,” Newton later said about his new pal.
“He said he had, you know, two informants, Jimmy Bulger and Stevie Flemmi,” continued Newton, “and that they were interesting guys.” Given Flemmi’s army background, Connolly suggested that Newton might “have something in common with them.”
You want me to hook you up with them? Connolly asked.
Newton figured, why not?
The meeting was scheduled for around midnight at Whitey’s. Newton rode with Connolly, who knew his way around Southie blindfolded. Connolly might have chatted on about what a good thing the FBI had in Bulger, maybe even replayed for the new listener the excitement of the Wollaston Beach rendezvous. Enlisting Bulger had been the stuff that FBI legends were made of, and Connolly liked to make it clear that he had the starring role.
Connolly pulled over a few blocks from the apartment Bulger had begun using after closing down his mother’s place in Old Harbor following her death. Once inside, Newton just sat and kept his mouth shut for the first hour or so, as the other three talked business, mostly about the Mafia’s Angi
ulo. Then, said Newton, “we just had a general conversation.” They talked about “military topics and things.” They opened a bottle of wine. They all drank, including Whitey, a sign that he was completely at ease.
This was the first of a number of times Newton tagged along for a session with the two informants. Just like that, Connolly had enlarged his circle.
By now Connolly was right back into the old neighborhood. He had bought a house at 48 Thomas Park in 1980, on a street atop one of Southie’s rolling hills; more than a few notches above the Old Harbor project in status, these hills, two centuries earlier, had been a windswept pasture of rich grass with a commanding view. Like all the surrounding streets, the natural topography had long since been covered by rows and rows of double- and triple-deckers and shingled houses built right up against one another. They formed the wall of residences in the tightly woven Irish-American community. The FBI agent’s new home was also situated across from South Boston High School, the battleground over forced busing just a few years earlier.
In Connolly’s work, day was night; Bulger usually came around for a secret meeting after hours, while most of Boston slept. Sometimes even Connolly was asleep, dozing off on the couch with the TV on. He’d leave his door unlocked for Bulger and Flemmi, and the two mobsters would walk right in and make themselves at home.
Connolly appreciated the company. Now in his early forties, he was also officially single again. Citing an “irretrievable breakdown” after a four-year separation, his wife had filed for divorce in January 1982. Marianne, a registered nurse, was making do on her own. They’d split up their things long before, and with no children, the divorce was a routine, uncontested matter that became official a few months later. Now Connolly was out and around town, the ladies’ man others in the office knew him to be. Like Bulger and Flemmi, he showed a preference for younger women. The twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth L. Moore, a stenographer at the office, had caught the flashy agent’s eye, and the two were an item. They were soon off together to a getaway on Cape Cod, where Connolly, fulfilling the dream of so many who grow up in Boston, now owned his own place, an $80,000 condo in Brewster.
Morris was jealous of the new couple. His own marriage was also irretrievably broken down, and he struggled seeing Connolly free to escort a new young girlfriend in the city while he could only sneak around with his: Debbie Noseworthy, an FBI secretary who worked directly for Morris and his Organized Crime Squad. The adulterous affair was an open secret at the office, but for Morris it was a lie that began to eat away at him. There would soon be more and far worse deceptions to come.
EVEN though Morris and Connolly had dodged a bullet during the Sarhatt review, the two agents did not want to take any chances. They had to make sure no one would again second-guess their ties to Bulger and Flemmi. To carry this off they would have to play off the high-minded provisions in the agency’s guidelines for monitoring informants. There was a fundamental tension in the guidelines that could be exploited. To secure intelligence, agents like Connolly and Morris were, on the one hand, encouraged to court gangsters like Bulger and Flemmi. And for the deal to work, gangsters were going to have to be given some breathing room.
The question was, how much? How much criminal activity could the FBI tolerate? In theory, no deal was without limits. FBI managers and handlers were always supposed to be evaluating their informants. The crux of oversight could be reduced to two issues: balancing the value of the informant’s intelligence against the severity of his crimes. The trick in the Boston office was to manipulate those two sides of the equation, and inside the FBI no two agents were better positioned to shape the hierarchy’s views than a handler and his supervisor.
Connolly and Morris were right there at ground control. To keep the flame burning bright, the two began creating the FBI paperwork that downplayed Bulger and Flemmi’s dark side while inflating the value of the intelligence they provided. Connolly was the Bulger chronicler, and Morris signed off on the narrative. They possessed enormous influence up the chain of command and, between them, seemed to have every FBI angle covered. The Irish of South Boston have long been known for being great storytellers. In the Bulger file, native son John Connolly showed himself to be one of the great spinners of tall tales. John Morris would do pretty well for himself too.
THE crudest technique involved outright lying.
During the late 1970s, as the FBI’s reliance on Bulger and Flemmi hardened, Morris had shown a knack for mendacity in his internal reports about Bulger in the race-fixing case. He’d reported that contacts with Bulger had ceased when, in truth, Connolly was seeing him regularly. Morris then lied in reports he’d filed to Sarhatt during the internal inquiry about leaks in the state police’s bugging of Bulger and Flemmi at the Lancaster Street garage. For his part, Connolly sometimes filed reports to satisfy certain FBI rules that Morris afterward admitted were false. In one instance Connolly described a meeting he and Morris supposedly had had with Bulger and Flemmi to go over the warnings and ground rules agents were required to discuss with their informants. The report documenting the so-called annual review included a time and date, but Morris later admitted: “I do not believe such a meeting took place.”
The more artful moves employed to downplay Bulger’s crimes not only served to make Bulger appear less bad but, more important, provided a way around the bureau’s guidelines requiring a strict evaluation of any unauthorized criminal activities. If a complaint or tip against a prized FBI informant could be rendered too vague or unreliable, then there would be nothing solid for the FBI to pursue. Morris and Connolly could then continue to pay lip service to the guidelines—offering assurances that if they ever did get a hard and fast tip against Bulger they would certainly perform their duty and run it down.
But somehow, in their hands, tips regularly turned to sand. It was a pattern Connolly established early on in the way he parried the vending machine executives who complained to the FBI that Bulger and Flemmi were shaking them down, and again, in the way the extortion of Francis Green fizzled once the matter landed in the FBI’s lap.
The new challenge in the early 1980s was what to make of the information other FBI agents were gathering from their own informants about Bulger and Flemmi’s widening criminal empire. The gangsters, said one informant, were taking over gambling operations in communities surrounding Boston. In early 1981 yet another informant reported that “James Bulger, aka Whitey, is a known bank robber and is trying to finance the funds from bank robberies into gambling activities.”
The juiciest intelligence broke new ground. Crossing Morris’s desk for the first time was information about Bulger grabbing a piece of the action in cocaine, the big-money narcotic that was red-hot in the early 1980s. South Boston, it turned out, was no different from any other part of the city: drugs were rolling down Broadway in a tidal wave, despite Bulger’s glamorized reputation as the neighborhood’s protector. Bulger might continue to promote himself as the anti-drug crime boss, but the kids shooting up and snorting in the alleyways of the housing projects knew otherwise. They might never deal directly with him, and they rarely, if ever, actually saw him, but they all knew that without his blessing there would be no “product.” Bulger was riding the crest of the coke wave.
In February 1981 an informant told one of Morris’s agents that Brian Halloran, a local Boston hood, was “dealing in cocaine with Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi.” Halloran had been linked to Bulger and Flemmi for years, especially Flemmi. He used to ride with Flemmi and often served as an advance man who checked out a club or meeting place prior to Flemmi’s arrival, much as Nicky Femia did. The next month a different informant told one of Morris’s men that “Brian Halloran is handling cocaine distribution for Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi. Other individuals involved with Halloran are: Nick Femia, responsible for ripping off 30 drug dealers thus far. Word has been placed on the street that any drug dealer involved in cocaine has to give a ‘piece of the action to Bulger and Flemmi’ or they will be
put out of business.”
In June 1982 another informant told the FBI that a South Boston gangster was overseeing loan-sharking and drug-dealing out of a particular neighborhood bar. “He is reportedly making $5,000 a week from drugs and is paying Whitey Bulger a large percentage for the right to operate.”
When these intelligence reports landed on Morris’s desk, he’d review them, initial them, and file them away. Ordinarily FBI reports containing charges were indexed by the target’s name, so that other agents could locate the intelligence in the investigative files. But Morris often sabotaged the process by not indexing the reports properly, making the negative material hard, if not impossible, to find. There was virtually no follow-up. The state police may have observed Bulger’s tie-in with major drug dealers. The FBI’s own informants may have begun reporting the same development. But Morris would have none of it. Not once did he initiate a probe or refer any of the tips for action.
Out of sight, out of mind.
While Morris directed traffic at the supervisory level, Connolly took care of padding the Bulger file. Following a drug bust at a South Boston warehouse in early 1983, Connolly filed a Bulger report saying the crime boss was “upset” with the drug dealers for “storing the grass in his town.” In other FBI files Connolly always described Bulger as staunchly anti-drug, abetting the mythic portrayal Whitey clung to.