by Dick Lehr
There had been no press coverage whatsoever of an FBI bug inside an eatery in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood. If anything, Boston reporters who covered crime had been puzzling over the status of the Mafia in the aftermath of the 98 Prince Street operation. It was known that a certain amount of Mafia disarray naturally followed the removal of a long-standing Mafia leader like Angiulo, and the names of a number of relatively unknown Mafia figures had begun to circulate. There was Vincent M. Ferrara, who combined a degree in business administration from Boston College with “a taste for blood”; an older mafioso named J. R. Russo; and Russo’s half-brother, Bobby Carrozza of East Boston. Those three men were serving as capo de regimes, or lieutenants, in the struggling Mafia, but not a lot was known about them. In addition, Cadillac Frank Salemme was finally coming home, released from federal prison after serving fifteen years for the 1968 bombing of a lawyer’s car, the assassination attempt for which his accomplice and pal Stevie Flemmi had never been prosecuted.
Outside the hardware store, Connolly was buoyant about the bureau’s ability to track the Mafia from its traditional base in the North End to the upscale plaza in the Back Bay. Vanessa’s Back Bay location constituted an altogether new twist, an unlikely spot for the Mafia, churlish bulls in a china shop. Polished shoppers and young urban professionals might be catching a quick bite at the counter while at the same time, in the back room, a fiery Ferrara was spewing vulgar ultimatums to bookmakers as he explained that a new Mafia day was dawning.
The windowless room was isolated and could only be reached by a convoluted route. The gangsters would park their cars in the Pru Center’s underground garage-maze, and no one could follow them without being made. Connolly delighted in the fact that the brazen Ferrara, Russo, and Carrozza all thought they’d found a place to meet that was impenetrable, and he relished the prospect of bringing down Ferrara. Ferrara was “arrogant” and “cocky,” “a real troublemaker.” He was hated by his peers for his vicious streak and disrespectful way. In fact, noted Connolly, Ferrara would be dead already if word hadn’t gotten around Boston’s underworld that the FBI was after him. The other wiseguys, said Connolly, could “sit back and let us chew him up.”
Subsequently, Lehr teamed up with fellow reporter Kevin Cullen and, after more reporting to confirm Connolly’s account, wrote a front-page piece about Vanessa’s that ran on Sunday, April 17, 1988, and started out: “It was a perfect spot. The cops couldn’t tail you, and you could park your car in the underground garage, walk to a freight elevator and ride up in secrecy.” Though the article included a lot of information, the reporters didn’t have the actual recordings from the Vanessa’s bug. That meant they couldn’t hear Connolly’s favorite recording: Ferrara’s shakedown of “Doc” Sagansky.
“We got a lot of guys in trouble, Doc,” Ferrara told Sagansky. Ferrara was going for the soft touch in his approach to his target, who, at eighty-nine, was the elder statesman in the world of bookmaking. Born at the end of the last century, Doc was a practicing dentist as a young man, a graduate of Tufts Dental School, but he became a millionaire as the city’s premier bookmaker. By the 1940s he was regarded by police as the “financial top man” in the city’s rackets and held ownership interests in two Boston nightclubs and a loan company. In 1941 he’d loaned $8,500 to James Michael Curley, the legendary Boston mayor and then congressman. In return, Sagansky was named a beneficiary in a $50,000 life insurance policy that Curley had taken out as security for a loan. That the two were linked publicly raised a few eyebrows and made headlines. Sagansky’s name had surfaced in every major gambling investigation in Boston since the Depression. In the storeroom of Vanessa’s on January 14, 1987, Ferrara was trying to come off as reasonable with the old man, explaining the Mafia’s hard times—five Angiulo brothers and many other soldiers gone, in jail.
“We have to help ’em,” Ferrara urged. “Their families, lawyers. Some of us are in trouble.” Ferrara wanted Sagansky and an associate who’d accompanied him, another aging bookie named Moe Weinstein, to start paying “rent.” During the regime of Gennaro Angiulo, Sagansky had operated without having to do so. But Ferrara said those days were over, and he wanted a show of good faith in the form of $500,000. He told Sagansky that such a sum was nothing to a millionaire like him, and that Sagansky had “class.” “Help us,” Ferrara said.
Sagansky would not. Even though he was seated in the windowless storeroom surrounded by Ferrara and his muscle, Sagansky tried persuading Ferrara that his gambling business was kaput, that it had “plummeted to nothing.”
Both sides cried poor for a while until Doc had enough. “I’m not gonna give you no bankroll,” he said.
Ferrara exploded. Mob enforcer Dennis Lepore leaned down to get into the eighty-nine-year-old’s face: “You don’t have no alternative. We want something now. And you’re lucky it ain’t more. This is a serious request. You understand?” The venom poured from Lepore’s lips: “What are we playin’, a fuckin’ game here, pal? You reaped the harvest all those fuckin’ years! This is something you’re going to pay now. We want it. We’re not asking.”
To induce cooperation, an angry Ferrara then threatened Sagansky that his pal Weinstein would be held hostage until he came up with the $500,000. Doc and Moe were given some time alone in the storeroom. “I’ll never see you again,” Doc said. “Now what should I do?” Weinstein stated the obvious: “Guess you’re going to have to give it to ’em.” The two old men promised to get the money, and Ferrara released them.
The next day, as investigators watched undetected from a safe distance, Weinstein carried a white plastic shopping bag into a restaurant at the Park Plaza Hotel. He handed the bag to Ferrara and Lepore. Inside was $250,000 in cash, the first installment. The two mobsters hurried back to the Vanessa’s storeroom and gloated as they split up the money into six shares of $40,000. “Those assholes, this better be real money,” a flush, cash-happy Ferrara joked to Lepore.
Even without all of the dialogue, the Globe story hit a nerve. FBI officials and federal prosecutors, particularly Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan of the Organized Crime Strike Force, were incensed. Their investigation of Ferrara was still ongoing, and they wanted to know how word about Vanessa’s had gotten out. But the reporters had no obligation or reason to explain to the authorities where their story had started. They were not about to complain about Connolly’s propensity for chatter.
IN FACT it turned out that Connolly wanted to talk a lot about Vanessa’s, or, as it was confidentially referred to, “Operation Jungle Mist.” The agent developed a kind of stump speech in which he described Vanessa’s as the second in a “trilogy” of major Mafia bugs (the first being the 98 Prince Street bug) that the FBI would never have gotten if not for his work with Bulger and Flemmi. “They were without a doubt the two single most important sources we ever had,” Connolly liked to say in a flourish at the end of this proclamation.
But as they so often did, Connolly’s claims upon closer scrutiny proved to be overstated. Bulger and Flemmi were the unnamed informants Connolly referred to during his sidewalk moment with Lehr of the Globe in early 1988. In this regard, it was a shining moment of genuine, singular intelligence. The evidence from the tapes later helped convict Ferrara, Lepore, Russo, and Carrozza of extortion and racketeering. But most of the credit for steering the FBI toward Vanessa’s actually belonged to Flemmi rather than to Whitey Bulger.
Even though Vanessa’s was listed in city records as being owned by a couple from the affluent suburb of Belmont, the eatery was in fact controlled by Sonny Mercurio, a Mafia soldier and pardoned murderer. (Later Mercurio himself would become an FBI informant.)
In April 1986 Flemmi began telling Connolly about Vinnie Ferrara, and how Ferrara was working with Mercurio, J. R. Russo, and Bobby Carrozza out of the Italian eatery. Flemmi, not Bulger, was attending the meetings, where the pending business was sorting out the underworld action between the Ferrara faction and Bulger’s gang. Following one meeting in early August, Flemmi
explained that Mercurio was “friendly” with him and Whitey Bulger, “from the days when he was a messenger and liaison between ‘The Hill’ and Jerry Angiulo.” Flemmi added that Mercurio was in charge of setting up the session between the groups to discuss changing the payoff on the illegal daily numbers games so that they could all rake in even more profits.
Flemmi attended another meeting a week later; afterward he once again provided Connolly with a full account—about the ongoing negotiations to change the payoff odds on the illegal numbers games and about plans to distribute illegal football betting cards during that fall’s football season. He told Connolly, “The Mafia intends to chop up the whole city and state, if possible, by controlling all independent bookmakers.” He reported that the “Mafia was on the march” into the suburbs and said that he’d made his way to the secret session “by taking an elevator up from level 5 to the service area.”
The meetings continued, and Flemmi began providing more details about the storeroom’s location, layout, and security. “The storeroom is located two doors from Vanessa’s,” he told Connolly on August 18, 1986, “which is used for the meet, is wired with an alarm system, but the system does not seem to be operative. In addition to the alarm system, the area is patrolled by a security service.” During one of their late-night huddles at Connolly’s home at the end of August, attended by Bulger and Jim Ring, Flemmi even drew up a rough sketch of the Vanessa’s floor plan.
This kind of information provided ample probable cause for the FBI to win court permission to plant a bug inside the eatery’s storeroom—and then some. The diagram, for instance, was somewhat over the top, Ring said later. “I think it’s pretty stupid,” the supervisor said about Flemmi’s artwork. “I don’t need a diagram to figure out how they got in there,” he said. Better to have agents conduct surveillance than give away the FBI’s plans to a criminal informant. “You get too far down a discussion like that with an informant, the informant is learning too much from your questions,” said Ring. “Despite Mr. Flemmi’s great skills,” he added sarcastically, “the people we have are far better, and I relied upon our technicians to put the bugs in the right place so that they functioned.”
By the time the FBI’s bug began on Halloween, Flemmi had, not surprisingly or coincidentally, stopped attending the meetings in the storeroom at Vanessa’s. Once again, the FBI would capture the Mafia while Flemmi and Bulger would remain invisible. “I wasn’t intercepted because I knew it [the bug] was going to be in there,” Flemmi said. Just before the bug began, “John Connolly did tell me it was in.” For months policy meetings at Vanessa’s had involved the two powerful organized crime outfits in Boston, the Mafia and the Bulger gang. But once the FBI tapes began rolling, it was as if Boston was strictly a Mafia town.
The Sagansky shakedown coincided with the arrival of a new special agent in charge for the Boston office. Jim Ahearn, himself a veteran of organized crime cases in California, arrived in November 1986 at the same time the Boston squad was piling up taped evidence against the Ferrara faction. He was immediately impressed by the Organized Crime Squad’s work, and especially by John Connolly, who made sure others knew that the informants behind the bug belonged to him.
To rely on Flemmi at this time, however, the FBI also had to ignore mounting intelligence from other informants about the FBI’s two crime bosses. “Stevie Flemmi, of the Winter Hill gang, has been looking around for numbers agents to take over during the period of [Mafia] confusion and weakness,” one informant told John Morris on April 20, 1986. Flemmi began steering Connolly to Vanessa’s at the same time he and Bulger were moving about the city, flexing their own muscle. “The Winter Hill people are presenting a challenge to the old Angiulo regime, and Flemmi has been all over the city,” the informant went on. “The old Angiulo regime is not in a position to stop Flemmi.”
In this regard, Flemmi’s tip about Vanessa’s proved self-serving, a way to keep a staggered Mafia back on its heels. The FBI could do the dirty work.
Then there was the third in the trilogy of FBI bugs that Connolly would invoke in the 1990s as proof that Whitey Bulger had all-world status. The bugging operation itself, which unfolded on a single night, October 29, 1989, indeed warrants a spot in the FBI’s hall of fame. For the first time ever, agents that night secretly recorded a Mafia induction ceremony. Present were Vinnie Ferrara, J. R. Russo, Bobby Carrozza, thirteen other Mafia figures, and, most important, the reigning Mafia boss in New England, Raymond J. Patriarca, son of the deceased Raymond L. S. Patriarca. In the dining room of an associate’s home in Medford, Massachusetts, the band of mafiosi went through their legendary ritual—the pricking of fingers, the sharing of blood oaths—that culminated in the “making” of four new soldiers. It was also a ceremony that was part of the mob’s ongoing effort, post-Angiulo, to ease tensions between competing factions and establish a better working order.
“We’re all here to bring some new members into our Family,” welcomed the presiding Patriarca, “and more than that, to start making a new beginning. ’Cause they come into our Family to start a new thing with us.” One by one, the four new soldiers were administered the oath of Mafia office. Each drew blood from his trigger finger for use in the ceremony. “I, Carmen, want to enter into this organization to protect my Family and to protect all my Friends. I swear not to divulge this secret and to obey, with love and omerta.” Each was then told he had become a “brother for life,” and each responded, “I want to enter alive into this organization and leave it dead.”
Carmen Tortora, along with the other three, was also run through a test of loyalties: “If I told you your brother was wrong, he’s a rat, he’s gonna do one of us harm, you’d have to kill him. Would you do that for me, Carmen?”
“Yes.”
“Any one of us here for that?”
“Yes.”
“So you know the severity of This Thing of Ours?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want it badly and desperately? Your mother’s dying in bed, and you have to leave her because we called you, it’s an emergency. You have to leave. Would you do that, Carmen?”
“Yes.”
In the 1990s the famous induction ceremony became an integral part of Connolly’s ode to Bulger. But once again, the facts got in Connolly’s way. FBI files revealed that of the four informants the FBI used for its affidavit to win court approval to record the ceremony, Bulger was not one of them. For probable cause, the FBI relied almost exclusively on another of Connolly’s informants, Sonny Mercurio. Sonny had all the hard information about the time and place of the Mafia induction—not Bulger. For his part, Flemmi was used as one of the four informants, but his contributions paled compared to Mercurio’s. In fact, Flemmi later conceded that during the early autumn of 1989 the few tidbits of information he picked up for Connolly came only after the agent told him about the planned event. Until then, Flemmi didn’t know anything about the scheduled Mafia ceremony. “He asked me to monitor all sources and to report to him any information that I obtained, which I did.” Then, once the FBI had captured the ceremony on tape, Flemmi added that he was told about the bureau’s success—a disclosure that may have seemed matter-of-fact to Flemmi but that violated FBI rules. Who told him? “John Connolly,” said Flemmi.
If anything, Connolly’s later stump speech reflected not only a habit for hype but also his knack for embellishing Bulger at the expense of Flemmi. Throughout the years Connolly sometimes filed duplicate reports for each —attributing the same information in the exact same words to both Bulger and Flemmi. The only difference between the two reports would be the typewriters used to write them. Other times the wording wasn’t exactly the same but the information was, and both would get credit. To explain the duplication, Connolly said he wasn’t especially careful about how he kept the books and that he considered them one source. “Oftentimes they blurred,” he said. “The information almost came as one.”
The technique benefited Bulger, for between the two,
Flemmi was the one with long personal ties to the Mafia. Flemmi, not Bulger, had the juice; he was the frequent visitor inside Mafia dens. Flemmi, not Bulger, was then later able to describe to Connolly the layout and floor plans. Larry Zannino, Patriarca, and other Mafia leaders repeatedly tried to persuade Flemmi to join La Cosa Nostra. But by his “blurrings,” Connolly spread the credit to include Whitey, pumping up—and thus protecting—his old friend from the neighborhood.
TIPS like Vanessa’s were to be treasured, and unlike the other two FBI bugs cited by Connolly, Vanessa’s was truly the result of working with Flemmi and Bulger. Without their intelligence, there would have been no Back Bay bugging of the new Mafia, no extortion of Doc Sagansky.
But by the late 1980s, at what price?
The deal between the Boston FBI and Bulger was by now so out of whack that any good that came the FBI’s way was offset by a wave of concessions and corruption. Of course, such aspects of the deal never showed up in any of the official FBI paperwork—indeed, the annual reviews perfunctorily filed by Connolly and Morris always putatively put Bulger and Flemmi on notice that they fell under the bureau’s guidelines just like any other informant. No favors. No license to commit crimes. No looking the other way. For example: “Informant shall not participate in acts of violence or use unlawful techniques to obtain information for the FBI or initiate a plan to commit criminal acts.” Each year Connolly signed an internal FBI memo saying he’d given this and ten other “warnings” to Bulger and Flemmi, including: “Informant has been advised that informant’s relationship with the FBI will not protect informant from arrest or prosecution for any violation of Federal, State, or local law, except where the informant’s activity is justified by the Supervisor of SAC pursuant to appropriate Attorney General’s Guidelines.” And in all the FBI’s files on Bulger and Flemmi, covering hundreds of pages over two decades, no documents ever surfaced showing that the mobsters’ crime spree was authorized.