Black Mass

by Dick Lehr

  Flemmi was out of town, in Mexico, and a jumpy Bulger hunkered down. Eluding the investigators, he met with John Connolly the very next day, on March 8. Then, three days later, DEA agents Reilly and Boeri followed Bulger as he drove his black Chevy into a garage beside the liquor mart in Southie.

  The next words they heard from Bulger signaled the end.

  “He’s right—they did put a bug in the car.”

  The agents jumped out of their van and raced in to retrieve their electronic surveillance equipment. The last thing agents ever wanted was for targets to know exactly what kind of technology was being used against them. They found Bulger tearing open the door panel and Kevin Weeks standing nearby holding a radio frequency detector that located bugs just like the bug the DEA had used. Facing down Reilly, Boeri, and two other DEA agents inside the garage, Bulger resumed the take-charge bounce that usually characterized his interplay with cops. He said he was surprised they’d been able to install a bug. “I got a pretty good alarm system,” he said as Reilly stepped forward and fumbled around the door panel to pull out the microphone. Bulger mentioned he knew something was up after bumping into Bergeron and Reilly in the condo’s parking lot a few nights earlier. He did not, however, mention his FBI contacts.

  Boeri noticed that Bulger wore a fancy belt buckle—inscribed with the words “ALCATRAZ: I934—I963.” Making small talk, the agent pointed out the handsome buckle, but Bulger didn’t dare mention how he’d come to possess it.

  The crime boss and the agents kept up their banter, with Bulger nagging them for details about when the bug was installed and how long it had been running. He guessed “seven or nine days.” Weeks offered his guess the bug had been in place for about two months. They probably had a bug in his car too, Weeks added.

  “You want to buy my car—cheap?” Weeks wisecracked.

  Boeri asked Bulger where Flemmi was.

  “He’s around,” Bulger lied.

  The talk went around in circles. Hey, announced Bulger at one point to the DEA agents, “We’re all good guys.”

  How so?

  “You’re the good good guys. We’re the bad good guys.”

  The agents took their equipment and went home. Two days later Boeri and Bergeron were driving past Theresa’s house when Bulger waved them down. He kept up his gangster panache, advising the investigators they shouldn’t believe all the things they heard about him. He showed them that the car panel had come loose and asked for their help securing it.

  “Pretty ingenious installation,” Bulger told Boeri, returning again to the bug, fishing for information.

  Flemmi returned from Mexico and ran into Boeri and Reilly in the parking lot of the Marconi Club in Roxbury, where he often hung out. They talked about the “excitement” earlier at the garage over the bug. Flemmi asked about the quality of the transmissions. “Doesn’t the cold weather affect the batteries?” he taunted. The agents said everything worked fine. They weren’t going to give an inch.

  Flemmi urged that they all get along. Instead of chasing each other, they should be scratching each other’s backs. “Whaddya want?” he joked. “We don’t need Miranda. We can wrap a rope around anyone’s neck. Just tell us what you want.” Then he asked where all this was headed. He hoped the agents were not going to bother them much longer. “You’re not going to make Jimmy and me a lifetime investigation?”

  “Well, we’re really just getting started,” said Boeri.

  Bulger and Flemmi knew this was bluff. The two gangsters had already huddled again with Connolly. “John Connolly said that Jim Ring told him that the DEA investigation was collapsing, or it collapsed, words to that effect,” Flemmi said. “Connolly told me. We had frequent meetings at John Connolly’s house, independent of the meetings we had with supervisors.”

  In the garage, the moment Bulger had uttered the line “He’s right—there is a bug in the car,” DEA agent Reilly was convinced that the FBI had tipped off Bulger. Reilly had his suspicions but couldn’t prove exactly who in the FBI Bulger was referring to. But the words were like the exclamation point to long-harbored concerns about Bulger’s ties to the FBI. From then on, Reilly, Boeri, and Bergeron all believed their effort was compromised.

  Even so, no governmental inquiry was ever undertaken to examine this belief. No postmortem was conducted to try to find out exactly why Operation Beans failed. Everyone walked away, moved on. It was as if yet another investigatory dud gave rise to a numbness, with police agencies now unwittingly ready to accept the FBI’s protective shield of Bulger and Flemmi as a fact of life, the way things were in Boston, part of the city’s fabric.

  Outwardly, the gangsters made the best of it. “I didn’t think they appeared to be concerned,” Ring recalled. Bulger and Flemmi acted like the car bug was a pretty funny joke. “It was more a matter of, I guess I’d have to call it ‘Gotcha.’”

  The truth was that the close call was no laughing matter. The year-long chase had proved grueling. Bulger and Flemmi had felt harassed at every turn. Despite the FBI, the DEA had actually managed to accomplish a first—a bug on Bulger. Detective Bergeron and DEA agents Reilly and Boeri had revealed the man behind the myth, though not in a way that could result in a criminal indictment. But what Bergeron and the agents knew would remain locked in confidential law enforcement files. John Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi resumed their anti-drug mantra. They had beaten the DEA’s Operation Beans.

  But it had been way too close for comfort. The scrutiny was tiring, and not the good life the gangsters had in mind as part of their deal with the Boston FBI. So, in April 1985, just days after Flemmi’s repartee with the DEA agents at the Marconi Club, Bulger and Flemmi were looking for reassurance that things were okay and would stay that way. John Morris was back in town, and it was time to pay him a visit.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Black Mass

  Tight-lipped and intense, the John Morris of 1985 was still enjoying the glow of having overseen the successful bugging of Mafia headquarters in early 1981. He was viewed as a seasoned veteran, thoughtful and determined. He was also leading the double life of a libertine, as were the other members of the cabal—John Connolly, Whitey Bulger, and Stevie Flemmi. Each had a public pose that contrasted sharply with a private reality. Morris and Connolly were FBI agents by day who at night caroused with the two gangsters they now zealously protected, even if it meant bending rules and breaking laws. Bulger and Flemmi feasted off reputations as the ultimate stand-up guys who cunningly outwitted the police at every turn, when in fact they had for years given the FBI tidbits about underworld friends and foes and enjoyed a protective shield from the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

  Morris was essentially in Bulger’s back pocket—having solicited and taken $1,000 in 1982 to fly Debbie Noseworthy to Georgia. And during the early days of 1984, amid the start-up of the DEA’s Operation Beans, Morris had taken a second bite from the apple Bulger held out for him.

  “Connolly called me and said, ‘I have something for you from these guys. Why don’t you come on over and pick it up?’ I went over; I picked it up. It was a case of wine. On the way out he said, ‘Be careful with it, there’s something in the bottom for you.’ So I took the case of wine, and then when I opened the case I found that there was an envelope on the bottom that contained $1,000 in it.” It was as if Morris needed more moments like this one to keep the high going. The concern was not whether he should march into the office of the special agent in charge of the Boston office and turn them all in; instead, his narrow eyes darted this way and that to make sure no one was watching. He picked up a corkscrew, opened a bottle, pocketed the Bulger money, and savored it all.

  But if Bulger saw the case of wine as a second premium on his FBI insurance plan, he was suddenly disappointed. The FBI that considered Morris a model of integrity dispatched the supervisor off to Miami to oversee a special team of agents investigating—of all things—the corruption of an FBI agent in Florida. The timing was horrible, given the detec
table increase in scrutiny Bulger and Flemmi were getting from the drug agents and the Quincy police. Throughout the remainder of the year and into early 1985, Bulger and Flemmi weathered Operation Beans with the help of Connolly and, to a lesser degree, Jim Ring. It had not been easy, however, and now that federal drug agents were stymied and John Morris was resurfacing, it seemed like the time for a reunion. Time to clarify their secret alliance over a good meal. Time to review some old business—Operation Beans—as well as discuss pressing new concerns, such as the long-delayed, upcoming racketeering trial of the Mafia’s Gennaro Angiulo, featuring the FBI’s extensive tape recordings of Mafia talk at 98 Prince Street. The trial—the biggest criminal trial in Boston in decades—was finally due to start any week, and Bulger and Flemmi had a list of worries about the tapes.

  Going into the dinner, Connolly had already disclosed the fact that Mafia leaders Jerry Angiulo and Larry Zannino often got to talking on the tapes about Bulger and Flemmi, “conversations,” said Flemmi, about “different criminal acts.” Of particular concern to Flemmi was the Mafia talk about his role in the 1967 slayings of the three Bennett brothers. But there was plenty more. Connolly provided a full telling of the wiseguy dialogues. “The Bennetts were mentioned on the tapes,” Flemmi said, and John Connolly also “mentioned the gambling, if I can recall, some bookmakers on there that were—that we were involved with. I think Jerry [Angiulo] mentioned the fact that Whitey had all of South Boston, Stevie had all of the South End, and we were extracting X amount of dollars from bookmakers. He mentioned an amount—Whitey probably gets . . . $50,000 a week from extracting payments from bookmakers.”

  Flemmi and Bulger were alarmed. Prior to the 1981 bugging of the Mafia, this was the exact situation Bulger and Flemmi had voiced concern about—that even if they avoided appearing at 98 Prince Street the Mafia bosses would nonetheless talk about their mutual business interests. They needed reassurance of a promise Morris and Connolly had made at the time, that in return for their help against Angiulo the tapes would not be used against them.

  While Morris was off in Miami, the gangsters had talked all of this over with Connolly, asking the FBI handler about the precise danger the tapes posed to them. Connolly tried comforting them. “That’s when he said not to be concerned about it,” Flemmi recalled. But better to hear the same from Morris, to have the promise restated.

  “The meeting was set up by John Connolly,” Flemmi recalled. Connolly got in touch with Bulger, and Bulger lined up Flemmi. “We just became available.” They picked a weekday night in early spring. The city was emerging from the darkness of winter, and the weather was mild, hinting at summer. Connolly picked up Bulger and Flemmi in a South Boston parking lot. He said another old friend would be joining them, Dennis Condon, the former FBI agent who’d been with them all at the start of their deal in 1975 and was now a high-ranking public safety official overseeing the state police. Condon was an elder statesman, a veteran of FBI tricks from the I960s. “They knew each other,” Morris recalled, “and Connolly and I felt that Condon would enjoy the opportunity of seeing them.” It went without saying that having Dennis Condon attend what was essentially a fifty-thousand-mile checkup in the FBI’s Bulger deal made sense. Condon was ex-FBI and now sitting atop the state police, and Bulger and Flemmi were constantly distracted by the attention they were drawing from other police agencies. Why not try to touch as many bases as possible?

  Driving into the rush-hour traffic, Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi headed out of the city for dinner with John Morris.

  MORRIS, meanwhile, was busy puttering around the kitchen of his Lexington home. He seasoned the steaks and got the meat ready for the oven. He set the table in the dining room for five. His wife Rebecca would not be joining them. “I refused to cook dinner for them,” she said later. John might be upbeat about his dinner party, but his wife was downcast. They circled one another in the kitchen, wary and mistrustful. Her head shaking, she voiced again her strong opposition to having two gangsters in their home—what about their son and daughter? John tried calmly to explain again the necessity of maintaining Bulger’s and Flemmi’s trust. Rebecca knew nothing about the Bulger money or any of the other peculiarities of her husband’s ties to the crime bosses. But she knew something wasn’t right. Rebecca had been an FBI wife long enough to sense that something was irregular about the long-running arrangement.

  So she would have none of it. John might try to soften the terms of the disagreement by always referring to Bulger and Flemmi as “the bad guys,” a kind of concession to her that he never forgot who Bulger and Flemmi were and that, rest assured, he knew exactly what he was doing by having them over. He even tried saying he was actually concerned about John Connolly and Connolly’s closeness to Bulger, and that he, as Connolly’s friend and former supervisor, had a duty to keep an eye on things. But Rebecca was not impressed. She didn’t want them or their gifts in her house.

  The maple trees in the yard were sprouting buds and inside the kitchen John Morris was doing his best to let the marital tension drain from him. He was feeling pretty good otherwise, riding a professional high from the Florida special assignment he was in the process of wrapping up. Morris thought about what he’d done down south. The agent he’d investigated, Dan Mitrione, had been considered a role model—smart, always physically fit, an ex-marine and Vietnam vet with solid law enforcement blood-lines. He was the son of a former police chief and State Department employee who had been murdered by terrorists in Uruguay in 1970. In the early 1980s Dan Mitrione had begun working undercover as part of a major FBI drug investigation. Mitrione worked his way into the inner circle of a major cocaine cartel. But he fell under the spell of the key smuggler, an older man who began treating Mitrione like a son. Mitrione eventually began aiding the smugglers he was supposed to catch. By 1984 Mitrione was under investigation.

  John Morris was in charge of a team of FBI agents assembled from around the country and sent to unravel the mess. By the fall of 1984 Mitrione had confessed to the special task force that he’d taken $850,000 in bribes from the drug smugglers. Mitrione pleaded guilty in federal court and was sentenced to serve a decade in prison. The federal judge, at his sentencing, was clearly dismayed at the undoing of an agent with such an exemplary career. “The Lady of Justice may have a blindfold on, but she also has a tear on her cheek today,” the judge said from the bench.

  Morris had come home to applause from superiors for a job well done. But it had to be an eerie experience. He’d gone off to Florida within weeks of accepting wine and $1,000 from Bulger. He realized that the dirty money he had taken amounted to chump change compared to Mitrione’s eye-popping $850,000. But imagine the fallout if the FBI brass realized they had sent one corrupt agent to investigate another. And there were other secrets to keep, including hiding from Rebecca the romantic affair with his secretary Debbie.

  The husband and wife maintained their big chill in the kitchen of their suburban home when, around seven o’clock, the doorbell rang. The special guests had arrived. Rebecca stiffened. John surveyed the kitchen, saw the meal was coming along fine, and headed to the front door. “I felt that my house was a very safe place,” Morris said about hosting gangsters at his home. “I did not think that they were an immediate threat to my family. I was concerned later on about them knowing where I lived, but at the time I was not concerned for the safety of my wife and children.” It would be good to see Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi again. He had already picked up talk from the office that the group was not all that happy with Jim Ring.

  Morris pulled open his front door. He heartily greeted his guests. There were handshakes all around. Welcome, welcome. The gangsters had brought along not just wine but a bottle of champagne as well. John Morris and Flemmi headed into the kitchen to put the bubbly on ice. Rebecca Morris stood at the sink washing her hands. The moment Flemmi entered her kitchen she turned off the water and abruptly left the room. Morris shrugged. He turned his attention to his guests, offered a thin, wan
smile, and asked how things were.

  THE trio of Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi was just as happy to see Morris as Morris was to see them. Especially Connolly. Jim Ring had been a tough mark. Connolly had tried his best to get off on the right foot by arranging get-togethers so everyone could get to know one another. (“John Connolly came to me and used the expression, ‘The boys want to meet with you,’” Ring said later.) But Ring had studied Connolly, grown increasingly concerned at the agent’s breezy style, and was left momentarily speechless at the end of the dinner at Mrs. Flemmi’s house when, “as we were leaving, Whitey Bulger’s brother, Bill Bulger, came into the kitchen to give him some photographs.

  “‘What the hell is going on?’” Ring blurted at Connolly afterward about the pileup of breaches in protocol—the casual dinner atmosphere with two crime bosses, the involvement of an informant’s mother, the entrance of one of the state’s most powerful public figures. No one in the room had even blinked—one big happy family. Connolly didn’t understand Ring’s question. He simply pointed out to his supervisor that Bill Bulger lived next door—that was the explanation for the unexpected drop-in.

  Ring’s dismay had culminated in private sit-downs with the Boston office’s star handler of informants. The supervisor’s list of grievances covered just about every basic ground rule the FBI or any police agency had on how to work informants. “I had a meeting with John Connolly in my office,” Ring said later, “and I told him that what I was observing was contacts with Mr. Flemmi and Mr. Bulger with mistakes made that a first-year agent wouldn’t make.” Ring complained that Connolly’s friendly manner was way over the top, that instead of treating the two informants as criminals he treated them as if they were colleagues at the FBI office.