Black Mass

by Dick Lehr

  Ring immediately noticed that information was flowing the wrong way—to Bulger and Flemmi. Connolly, Ring said, “gave away too much. He could have rephrased the question in a different way. You could have buried the question among five others, and the one thing—I think it was the second meeting—that struck me was Connolly turned to me and said something to the effect, ‘Oh, tell them about such and such.’”

  The meetings at Connolly’s home in South Boston were also a problem. “It was crazy,” Ring said. He ordered Connolly to stop hosting Bulger and Flemmi at his home. Connolly responded like a merry schoolboy prankster determined to fool the stern, humorless schoolmaster. He sought out another agent, John Newton, and asked if he could move the gatherings to his South Boston apartment. Newton, the agent Connolly had befriended upon his arrival in Boston, was happy to help. Newton opened up his home to his FBI friend, and when they all showed up for these unauthorized encounters, Newton would take his two dogs out for a stroll. The considerate Bulger eventually began bringing along dog biscuits.

  Connolly then reported back to Ring that he’d obeyed the order and halted the practice of meeting at his house. But word got to Ring that Connolly had simply pulled a fast one, relocating down the street. “Unprofessional, stupid, not the way business is done by FBI agents. I was just not happy,” Ring said. “Why go into a neighborhood where two people are known? You can go to New York City. You can go to Canada. Go someplace. This is being lazy.”

  And Ring didn’t even know about the dinner parties—at Nick Gianturco’s house, at John Morris’s house. In addition, Ring noted that seeing two informants together—an accepted fact at this point in the history of the FBI’s deal with Bulger and Flemmi—was highly irregular. “If you could control the situation,” noted Ring, “you’d meet Bulger and Flemmi separately.” But of course the FBI was not in full control.

  In response to Ring’s criticisms, Connolly unleashed his well-rehearsed defense of Bulger and Flemmi as indispensable to the FBI’s war on the Mafia. Included was Connolly’s patented story that pulled the heartstrings of every FBI agent—how Bulger and Flemmi had saved Nickie Gianturco’s life.

  But Ring even had the gall to question this piece of Bulger hype. Rather than take Connolly at his word, he went and asked Gianturco about the tale. “I asked him, what was the story? And he went back and related that there was this undercover operation which he had been in, that there was some scheduled meeting he was supposed to attend, and that reportedly Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi had sent him information warning him not to attend.

  “I was saying to him: ‘You didn’t answer my question. My question was, “Are you reporting to me that you believe that these two people saved your life?”’ And I recall his response being that the case was over.” Ring never got a straight answer.

  For all of his concerns, Ring kept the matter between himself and Connolly. He did not document his criticisms or share his concerns at the time with any of the other FBI supervisors in the Boston office. He did not discipline Connolly. Ring didn’t think discipline was warranted “for doing something stupid. What I thought I needed to do was to manage the people that I have and start doing that.” Instead, Connolly’s personnel files continued to fill with glowing reports about his work.

  No surprise, then, that in the spring of 1985 at Morris’s house Jim Ring was not standing in the kitchen alongside Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly. In fact, around the time of the dinner Ring and Connolly had even discussed the issue of “Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi not liking me,” recalled Ring, “and my position being I really didn’t care, because they were informants.” But Morris did care about being liked—by everyone.

  “CONNOLLY, Flemmi, and Bulger had arrived together,” Morris recalled. Dennis Condon showed up thirty minutes later, around 7:30 P.M. He had driven directly from his executive office at the state Public Safety Department in Boston. Morris hustled from living room to kitchen, the dutiful host and cook.

  The men headed into the dining room. It had been years since Bulger and Flemmi had seen Condon. The night in Lexington marked “the first meeting that I’ve had since 1974 with Dennis Condon,” Flemmi recalled. The year 1974 had certainly been a pivotal one for Flemmi. He’d returned to Boston after spending nearly five years on the lam, a forced departure triggered by his indictment in 1969 for a car bombing and the William Bennett murder. Flemmi believed that Condon had paved the way for his eventual return from Canada by seeing that the two major felony charges were dropped along with a third charge that had been added as soon as he fled the country to avoid prosecution. After Flemmi’s return there had been the get-together with Condon at the coffee shop as part of his handoff to the very useful Connolly. In Flemmi’s eyes, Condon had been the stage manager behind many of these moves, and he was grateful. “I hadn’t seen him for quite a while. I asked him how he was doing, how he felt. I thanked him for disposing of the federal flight warrant that I had. I asked him how Mr. Rico was, who was a partner of his, and I says, ‘If you ever have the opportunity to see him, say hello for me.’”

  The men took their seats at the table. Morris served up the steak. The men poured more wine. For the first hour or so they chatted about old times.

  “It was light banter,” Flemmi recalled. Bulger recounted stories from his time in federal prison during the late 1950s for robbing banks. “Most times he does most of the talking,” Flemmi said about Bulger. “Quite a variety of subjects. He’s very knowledgeable, very intelligent. He kind of captivates his audience.”

  But if Bulger was a chatterbox, Condon was not. The graying veteran of Boston’s law enforcement circles sat there picking at his food and listening politely. He felt ambushed, he said, surprised to find Bulger and Flemmi in Morris’s home. He’d gotten his invitation during a telephone call late in the afternoon—c’mon and swing by on your way home. He said that all he’d been told was that Morris and Connolly were going to be there, “and a couple of people were coming by, and they’d like to say hello.”

  Of course there was an outward collegiality to the occasion, the appearance of a simple gathering of old friends sharing wine and war stories. But beneath the easygoing veneer were pressing concerns that Bulger and Flemmi had about their protection. In a way each law enforcement official present at the dinner was a symbol of the history and the scope of the alliance. The past, the present, and, they hoped, the future were represented at the table in Condon, Morris, and Connolly. But Condon, who potentially covered two police agencies, the FBI and the state police, was hardly having a regular old time. Morris said about Condon, “I could tell from the way he looked when he came in . . . he didn’t look real comfortable.”

  “I thought that it was extremely unusual that Mrs. Morris was there and I was there, and neither of us at the time were members of the FBI,” said Condon. “I also felt that in the position that I occupied I shouldn’t have been there.”

  Dennis Condon did not protest to anyone at the time, did not pull Morris and Connolly aside and ask for an explanation. “I hung in there for, I would say, for politeness and diplomacy.” (He would also keep the dinner a secret, telling no other official about it for at least another decade.) But the others at the table that night got no hand-holding from him. Finishing his food, Condon made his exit less than sixty minutes after he’d arrived. Flemmi was taken aback. To him, Condon “didn’t seem to be uncomfortable,” and he was sorry to see him leave.

  The party was now minus one.

  Even so, Bulger and Flemmi still had Connolly and Morris at hand. They poured more wine and got down to business.

  John Connolly, Flemmi said later, provided updated accounts on who the two crime bosses should avoid in their underworld activities. He disclosed the identities of several police informants. The talk then turned to the upcoming Mafia trial, the FBI’s tapes, Bulger’s possible vulnerability, and, most important of all, the keeping of promises the agents had made.

  “I don’t know who raised it,” said Flemmi. “We wer
e concerned because we believed our names would be, during conversation at Prince Street, would be mentioned regarding criminal matters.

  “I knew at that particular time there was conversation on them wiretaps between Jerry [Angiulo] and Larry [Zannino], and they were discussing Jim Bulger and myself. I was concerned about them at some point in time being used against us. I asked John Morris and John Connolly about that. And they said to me that that would be of no concern because I was not going to be prosecuted for anything that would be on those tapes.

  “Well, when we were discussing the tapes, the flow from that conversation led into a statement that John Morris made to me and Jim Bulger.”

  It was better than any promise Morris and Connolly had ever made to them. Morris, his wine nearby but clearly sober, said: “You can do anything you want as long as you don’t clip anyone.”

  Flemmi liked what he heard. “I said to John, I says, well, I says, ‘John, can we shake on that?’ And he says, ‘Yes.’

  “And we shook hands, and Jim Bulger shook hands.”

  They had finally reached a champagne moment.

  THE DINNER lasted three hours but did not run late. Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly drove away around 10:30 P.M. Morris tidied up before heading off to bed.

  Condon may have departed prematurely, unable to enjoy the highlight of the night, but Bulger and Flemmi nonetheless left feeling pretty good. The gangsters thought their FBI agents had sanctioned what they did best: committing crime.

  “That’s the way I interpret it,” Flemmi said later of the wonderful life he’d been promised. “Short of murdering someone, I think that, yes, they could give that kind of assurance.”

  In Flemmi’s mind, the two agents had reaffirmed a group protection policy featuring a full menu of services: snuffing out trouble before an investigation could even get going, as the agents had done in the past in matters involving the Melotone vending machine executives, Frank Green’s extortion, the many unsolved murders, and the takeover of the Rakes family liquor store; tipping them off to wiretaps against them, as they had done in the state police’s Lancaster Street garage case and, most recently, the DEA’s Operation Beans; pulling them out of any indictment that actually made it to the development phase, as they had done in prosecutor Jeremiah O’Sullivan’s horse race-fixing case; and finally, if all else failed and Bulger and Flemmi were actually facing indictment, giving them a head start.

  It was as if at the tenth anniversary of their secret deal they all renewed their vows. Bulger and Flemmi could leave the table feeling recharged. Ring might be unpredictable and therefore unreliable, but they could count on Morris and Connolly. The timing for this revived good cheer turned out to be fortuitous too. Though no one realized it that night, another Bulger, brother Billy, was about to have his own need for a friendly FBI.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Shades of Whitey

  By 1984 Billy Bulger was securely on top of the state senate, running it smoothly and firmly with vinegar and honey. Yet he had ignored his private law practice with a boyhood friend from Old Harbor and was having trouble financing his hectic household of nine children. He worried about the roof falling in on a house full of kids and about paying their tuitions. He fretted that his battered car would drop dead by the side of the road, stranding his wife Mary as she gamely transported youngsters hither and yon. Even though he earned between $75,000 and $I00,000 that year, he was swimming upstream, with more money going out than coming in. In his memoir, he lamented that while he was not bankrupt, he was “not far from it.”

  Then, according to Billy, a miracle client walked into his downtown law office out of the blue. Two brothers wanted to buy back property from a customer, and Bulger got them a $2.8 million loan from a friendly South Boston bank to do it. In exchange for his help in negotiating the loan and the property buyback, Billy was offered a prodigious fee. The prospect flooded Bulger with happy visions of hearth and home. “A new car for Mary... a new roof.”

  After paying sporadic attention to the buyback, Bulger settled it in 1985 and agreed on a deferred fee of $267,000, more than enough for Mary and Bill to stop worrying about the car and the tuitions. But the cash flow problem persisted because Bulger agreed to take the fee in 1986. He told his law associate from South Boston, Thomas Finnerty, that he would be among the “impoverished rich” until his money came through.

  But Tom leaped to the rescue. He offered to give Bulger a $240,000 loan against the fee. Bulger was ecstatic, but his relief was short-lived. A few weeks after taking the loan, he learned that Finnerty had been working with Boston developer Harold Brown. Bulger flushed with alarm when he heard that Finnerty was dealing with the likes of Brown and warned him that the disreputable landlord was trouble. But Finnerty laughed it off and teased Bulger about being a compulsive worrier. Besides, he said, a $500,000 fee from the developer was already in a trust fund Finnerty had set up.

  Recoiling at the mention of the fund, Bulger realized that his recent loan came from Brown money. “You didn’t tell me that,” Bulger objected. “I’m paying it back—and right now. I want no connection, however remote, with Brown.” Back went the Brown money, with repayments totaling $254,000 with interest by the end of 1985. Mary was told to put plans for easy street on hold.

  The next year Bulger felt more than justified in his cautious reaction when Brown was convicted of bribery in federal court. Brown began wearing a wire for the FBI, seeking out conversations with politicians. Bulger and Finnerty joked about avoiding Brown in a rainstorm for fear of being electrocuted. They had a good laugh.

  BUT Harold Brown told an entirely different story.

  The Bill Bulger case started in 1983 when federal investigators caught a corrupt city inspector taking a bribe and converted him into an undercover agent. In 1985 he put on a hidden wire to record conversations and revisited regular customers, including Harold Brown. The hands-on landlord paid the inspector $1,000 to “lowball” the cost of a housing project so that Brown could save $24,000 in permit fees.

  Brown then walked into a trap after being subpoenaed before a grand jury. He did not know he was on tape with the inspector and thought he was up against some bumbling police work. He tried to lie his way out of it, telling grand jurors he never gave anyone a dime and perish the thought. He was quickly indicted for perjury and bribery and just as quickly turned into a government agent, wire and all. He was looking for a plea bargain that would get him out of doing prison time. The prosecutors asked Brown, what do you have? Brown said Tom Finnerty and Bill Bulger.

  Brown’s bruising encounter with Finnerty had its origin in the mid-1970s when Brown saw the potential for a skyscraper at the run-down lower end of State Street, one of downtown Boston’s colonial-era boulevards. He began buying up property one decrepit lot at a time. As the state’s largest landlord, with holdings worth between $500 million and $I billion, Brown foresaw the building boom of the 1980s and waited for it to reach him.

  The push to develop the site started in 1982 when the city, reeling from the first year of a new statewide reduction of property taxes, found itself stuck with a $45 million bill from tax abatements due commercial property owners. Mayor Kevin White needed help from the legislature to get bonding authority to underwrite rebates, and Bulger pushed it for him—with the proviso that the city would sell property to the state to launch a convention center authority. The new state agency was immediately controlled by Bulger and White appointees.

  Another part of the legislation required the city to sell five parking garages, including one that became part of Brown’s project. The garages were not auctioned off to the highest bidder but transferred to the city’s redevelopment authority, which could sell them to developers as it pleased. It was a closed shop, and Bulger was part of the planning process.

  After White and Bulger struck their deal, Brown and his partner, a prominent architect, became the odds-on favorites to develop the State Street site. The designer had the endorsement of the Boston Societ
y of Architects, and Brown already had most of the land. Then Brown was approached by a White confidant, former Massachusetts attorney general Edward McCormack. McCormack asked for an outlandish stake in the project in exchange for monitoring the city hall approval process. When that was rejected, Finnerty suddenly appeared as a lesser-known lawyer willing to take less money.

  At the time Finnerty began negotiating for a piece of the skyscraper, he was a criminal defense lawyer with no track record in big-time real estate. The crossover is so daunting that it is seldom tried in Boston. The two law specialties require two different skills—low-key urbanity versus hard-nosed advocacy. Finnerty, a former district attorney, was in the brassy South Boston tradition and had little in common with the muted lawyers from white-shoe firms who usually handled downtown developments. Brown danced with Finnerty for months, never saying no, never saying yes, pushing the project along its route in city hall as they talked between late 1983 and February 1985.

  When Finnerty saw Brown racing to the finish line on his own, the negotiations became more intense. Brown capitulated in 1985, agreeing to “buy” Finnerty’s self-proclaimed interest that never existed for about $I.8 million. Finnerty never appeared at any design or development hearing on the project and did not represent Brown when another developer sued him over the size of the office tower.

  Nevertheless, Finnerty deposited the first installment of $500,000 in July. In a rapid sequence, Billy and Tommy, the two old friends from Old Harbor, split $450,000 in August and $30,000 more in October. But a month later the other shoe dropped for Bulger. In November Brown was indicted by a federal grand jury for bribing the city inspector and “other public officials.” Bulger returned his money to the trust three days later, calling it a repaid loan.