Black Mass

by Dick Lehr

  After O’Sullivan culled Vinny out of the tapes, the boxes of checks collected dust. Several prosecutors had taken one look at the evidence room and kept on going. No one wanted to wrestle a messy paper case to the ground to convict a Chelsea tavern owner. Joe Saccardo finally prevailed on a young eager prosecutor named Michael Kendall to take a look.

  If the storage room was overflowing, the quality of the seized evidence was remarkable. Kendall had the patience to assemble the paper and prepare a chart showing how $200 million in gambling losses and loan-shark payments got turned into cash. Two years later London was convicted of money laundering and racketeering and sentenced to fifteen years.

  CHICO KRANTZ was only a footnote in the London indictment, but Saccardo began to lobby for a second wave of prosecutions out of Heller’s Café—all the bookies who were paying rent. He didn’t know what the crimes should be, but he began to wonder if something in the mix could be used against Bulger. Kendall begged off, however, citing his caseload.

  Then one of those mundane but magical things happened. Kendall recalled that Fred Wyshak had done a similar check-cashing case and went to talk to him about Chico Krantz. As luck would have it, Chico was just coming into focus out of a separate broad-based bookie investigation by state police in the Special Services Unit headed by Sergeant Tom Foley. The state police had set out to find bookies who dealt with Whitey Bulger, and as in Heller’s Café, Chico was at the head of the line.

  Suddenly Chico, the whiz kid of betting lines, was overlapping himself as the perfect witness against Whitey Bulger. He had been paying tribute to the insular Bulger for nearly twenty years. He was one of the first to know about the new system of monthly rent payments when Bulger explained it to him in 1979. He was threatened with death by Bulger when he dragged his feet on paying a debt to another bookie. And his long history of payments to Bulger measured the expansion of Whitey’s empire. Over the years Chico’s monthly rent had climbed from $750 to $3,000.

  Chico’s undoing began just about the time Mike London was indicted in 1990. State police targeted a bookie network with Mafia ties. Fat Vinny Roberto and his brothers handled daily action from thirty-five bettors who wagered up to $500,000 a week. But the big payoff from the Roberto investigation was the discovery that Krantz was his everyday boss, even setting the Roberto brothers’ work hours. Best of all, undercover state police followed Roberto to Chico’s suburban home, where he dropped off a package. A search warrant got them inside Krantz’s home, where they found keys to bank deposit boxes that were filled with $2 million in cash.

  After Krantz was arrested on gaming charges in 1991 at the state police barracks outside Boston, he sought out Sergeant Foley. How come the police went to my house this time? Krantz asked.

  Foley shrugged.

  Where’s this thing going?

  Foley shrugged again.

  About a week later, with Krantz out on bail, Foley met with the master bookie at his Florida home, and they talked for two days about bookmakers and the Bulger gang. Krantz didn’t give up too much, talking in general terms about Flemmi, George Kaufman, and Joe Yerardi. But Krantz did agreed to be a “CI,” or a confidential informant.

  With an ambivalent Krantz waiting in the wings, prosecutors and state police began to chase down leads from the Heller’s Café tapes and the related Middlesex County case that started with Fat Vinny Roberto. Wyshak soon focused on four check-cashing operations in greater Boston, including Heller’s. The investigators collated boxes of checks, much as Kendall had done in the London prosecution, isolating and tallying rafts of checks that exceeded the $10,000 limit that have to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

  Now the pressure on Krantz went up a notch. The state dropped the gaming charges against him in 1992 and turned the evidence over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In September, Foley told Krantz that he and his wife, who cashed checks for Chico while he was sick, were going to be indicted for money laundering. Foley even showed him draft copies of indictments. Chico sighed and asked to sleep on it.

  The next day Krantz got a new lawyer and finally stopped playing games. He graduated from CI status to the witness protection program. He filled in holes in his earlier statements and finally talked about Whitey Bulger and his one-way loyalty.

  In November, Chico and seven other bookies from Heller’s Café were indicted for money laundering in a massive check-cashing scheme. About the same time that London was sentenced in 1993, Chico Krantz slipped into another federal courtroom under tight security and pled guilty. He formally forfeited his $2 million in cash, with a wink and a nod on half of it that the government agreed to give back if he cooperated. And he admitted guilt on washing $2 million in checks, much of it at Heller’s. He also became number one on the witness list in the developing case against Bulger and Flemmi.

  Jimmy Katz, who had also washed big money through Heller’s, found himself mired in the quicksand between Fred Wyshak and Stevie Flemmi. Just before Katz went to trial, Flemmi met him at a hamburger joint in downtown Boston. Flemmi offered him the parable of Eddie Lewis, another bookie in the Chico camp. Lewis had refused to give immunized testimony to a grand jury about rent and had gone off to do eighteen months for contempt. Stevie then got to the point: if Katz went off quietly to jail like stand-up Eddie, he would be well taken care of in prison. It would be worth his while.

  They parted, and Katz went to trial. But he lost and was sentenced to four years. As his wife and daughter cried quietly beside him in the courtroom, Katz said he was standing on principle by refusing to cut a deal with Wyshak. “I won’t do that,” he said. “The government is turning everyone into rats. It’ll become Russia. Every other day they call me: ‘You wanna go with Chico?’”

  Katz went off to prison in Pennsylvania. After he settled in and made a few friends, he was abruptly transferred to a spartan holding cell in Massachusetts. He was put in front of a grand jury to answer questions about rents. If he refused, it would mean eighteen more months in prison.

  After a year in jail Katz rolled, deciding he did “wanna go with Chico” to the witness protection program after all. He became another key witness against Bulger and Flemmi.

  JOE YERARDI was next up in the march toward Winter Hill. Going after Joey Y was cutting closer to the bone. Krantz and Katz paid to be left alone. But Yerardi was a leg-breaker who worked for Bulger and Flemmi, putting over $1 million of their money on the street and collecting their debts. Yerardi did run some bookies, but loan-sharking was his thing. And his criminal record was far different from the other customers at Heller’s. There were firearm violations and several assault and battery convictions in state court.

  Yerardi’s main line of work had become handling usurious loans for the bad-to-the-bone Johnny Martorano. His formal ties with Flemmi and Martorano made him a prime target for Wyshak as he assembled his witness list. Yerardi knew that too. And so did Stevie and Whitey.

  By the middle of 1993, with Krantz in hand and Katz up against it, the writing was on the wall. A grand jury was going strong, and indictments were in the air. Whitey pulled Stevie aside: time for a vacation. Stevie lit out for Canada, just as he had two decades earlier. Bulger took one of his slow drives across America with Theresa Stanley.

  And Yerardi fled too, heading to Florida with $2,500 sent him by Martorano. But he made the mistake of using an old alias from Massachusetts, and six months after he was indicted the Massachusetts State Police found him living in Deerfield Beach as Louis Ferragamo. The fatalistic if bumbling Yerardi asked the troopers, “What took you so long?”

  Joey Y became the Gordon Liddy of Heller’s Café. He continued making loan collections while under house arrest and never complained about the United States becoming Russia. He could have croaked Flemmi, with whom he had extensive dealings. In fact Stevie was on a tapped line talking business with Yerardi. But Yerardi stood up, taking an eleven-year sentence as the price of saying no to Wyshak, and law enforcement had to move forward with Chico and Kat
z and others who lined up at the cashier’s cage in Heller’s Café.

  THE BOOKIE brigade had become the soft underbelly of the Bulger gang. It kept Whitey and Stevie on the firing range and shifted the prospect of indictments from the outlandish to the inevitable. And it left the FBI scrambling for a piece of the action, if only to avoid the embarrassment of sitting on the sidelines while a major case was made against the most renowned gangsters in Boston by the Massachusetts State Police. The bureau saw the train leaving and jumped on board at the end.

  By the middle of 1994, with London and Yerardi in prison and all the Heller Café tapes deciphered, prosecutors began assembling the rest of the racketeering case that involved historical evidence from 98 Prince Street, Vanessa’s Italian Food Shop, and the 1989 mob induction. This required the FBI to designate someone to help round up the material, and that job fell to Edward Quinn, the hero of the Angiulo case who now headed the Organized Crime Squad.

  Though Quinn commanded respect from other investigators, the intramural jockeying continued and showed itself in a spate of news stories, several from the FBI, that reported promising developments in the quest for Bulger. Stories with unnamed sources said, “It’s getting close to Bulger, but it’s not quite there.” The analysis could be read as a warning for Bulger to stay gone. And behind the news stories, John Connolly had been keeping Bulger and Flemmi updated on grand jury progress. In particular, they discussed the Yerardi investigation, which had veered toward Bulger’s gang.

  THOUGH bookies were the mainstays in the percolating case, prosecutors also finally broke through the South Boston code of silence. In addition to Timothy Connolly’s testimony, there was the momentous flip of true believer Paul Moore, a skilled boxer and renowned street fighter whose nickname “Polecat” derived from his fast hands and feet. Moore had headed one of Bulger’s cocaine distribution networks and was the real deal, a genuinely tough guy who had pled guilty in the 1990 drug case. He went off to do nine years at a federal prison in Pennsylvania, tight-lipped but buoyed by expectations that were also part of the code—a good lawyer, family support, home insurance. But after a few years in prison he felt that his questions about an appeal were falling on deaf ears. His wife was not getting the support she needed. And a bank foreclosed on his home.

  In 1995 Moore had the epiphany that comes to those sitting in a prison cell while other more deserving candidates are walking the streets back home. By this time he was hearing stage whispers from the prison network that Whitey was a rat. He began asking himself the rhetorical question that prosecutors count on: what am I, an asshole? The process accelerated when Moore was hauled before a grand jury and faced another year and a half in prison if he didn’t answer questions about Bulger. Breaking with Whitey the Rat was the easy part. The code was a different story. But Moore had had enough. He asked one thing: put me near the water so it will be as much like South Boston as a modest house and a small shoreline can make it. He entered the witness protection program as someone who would testify against Bulger.

  AS THE doggedly determined prosecution moved forward, the strategy remained the same, even as the witness list was reshuffled. Katz and a half-dozen bookies replaced Krantz, who was diagnosed with the leukemia that eventually killed him. Paul Moore and loan officer Timothy Connolly replaced the adamant holdout Yerardi as belly-of-the-beast witnesses.

  But the heart of the matter remained the mundane business of Bulger and Flemmi shaking down vulnerable bookies from Heller’s Café. Though the bookies had dealt mostly with Bulger’s out-front man, George Kaufman, most had endured at least one moment alone with the marble eyes of Whitey Bulger or the unfriendly smile of Stevie Flemmi. The “other” crimes that supported racketeering charges against the pair reached back into the ancient history of Bulger’s early work in Winter Hill’s sports-betting network in the I970s. Flemmi’s racketeering was linked to gangland murders from the 1960s.

  Frank Salemme was the next mob figure to get into trouble. Despite his years on the mean streets, Salemme remained oblivious about the dangers of his boyhood friend Stevie Flemmi. He had no clue that he had spent fifteen years in jail for attempted murder because Stevie tipped off the Boston FBI about where to find him.

  After his 1988 release from prison, Salemme soon began taking the easy money that Stevie pushed his way from independent bookies who had broken free from the Ferrara network. It left Salemme as vulnerable to bookie extortion charges as the Bulger gang. But Salemme fell into another deep hole on his own. About a year out of prison he began working on an ill-advised deal brought to him by his son. He allegedly began extorting a Hollywood production company that wanted to avoid paying expensive union workers as it made a movie in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. For a price, Salemme got the Teamsters to go along. The fatal catch: the head of the production company was an undercover FBI agent. The spider’s web had caught Cadillac Frank.

  BY THE middle of 1994 prosecutors had assembled a sturdy, intricate mosaic to support racketeering charges. The plan had been to arrest Bulger, Flemmi, and Salemme in rapid succession to avoid escapes by any of them. But while, by mid-December, Salemme could still be found at his usual haunts, Stevie and Whitey had been in and out of town for several weeks. The FBI insisted that Salemme, as the Mafia man of the moment, be arrested first. But top officials at the U.S. Attorney’s Office overruled the agents, concluding that the case was about Bulger and Flemmi. Indeed, most of the evidence concerned Flemmi, since he was the man in the middle, standing at the junction of Bulger and La Cosa Nostra. Fittingly, the arrest warrant for Flemmi charged him with extorting money from Chico Krantz.

  As 1995 got under way the latest law enforcement intelligence was that Flemmi had been seen at Quincy Market, a tourist shopping center in downtown Boston where Flemmi’s two stepsons were renovating a restaurant. It was staked out by state troopers Thomas Duffy and John Tutungian and DEA agent Daniel Doherty, who were all part of the ad hoc team that had first gathered in Fred Wyshak’s office. Their orders were to arrest Flemmi the minute he “went mobile” by getting in a car.

  In winter’s enveloping nightfall, the arrest team moved into action when Flemmi and a young Asian woman left Schooner’s Restaurant and got into a white Honda at 7:00 P.M. The team boxed them in with two cars and then raced at the Honda with guns drawn. After instinctively trying to hide under the dashboard, Flemmi calmly got out of the car and asked for permission to call his lawyer. The detectives relieved him of a knife and some mace and unsuccessfully tried to persuade the woman to accompany them to FBI headquarters, if only to keep her from warning others. But she knew the drill and refused to go without a warrant.

  ALTHOUGH the FBI had brought in its elite Special Operations Group to do surveillance on Salemme with a helicopter, he escaped that night. Cadillac Frank fled to West Palm Beach, Florida, a favored sanctuary for mafiosi on the run. He would eventually be arrested there eight months later, but his easy escape fueled the barely suppressed anger of investigators working the same case. One denounced the Special Operations Group as an over-the-hill gang. “They suck,” he said bitterly. “It’s part of the facade over there. Those guys are looking for retirement homes. And they’re nine-to-five. Once their shift ends, they’re out of there. They have no personal interest in the case.”

  For his part, Stevie Flemmi was an unflappable presence inside FBI headquarters, a calmness rooted in his belief that thirty years of FBI service would save him. He was expecting a quick bail and a night flight to Montreal. It was only as the night wore on with no side door opening that he realized he was all alone in his adversity. He thought that John Connolly or Paul Rico would help, as they had in the past. But Flemmi was like the Hollywood celebrity arrested for drunken driving. Protests about his importance would only make things worse. No one could save him now. He belonged to trooper Tom Duffy.

  Flemmi had expected more because Connolly had kept him posted on grand jury developments throughout the year, at times using his continuing contact
with the bureau’s Organized Crime Squad. But both Connolly and Morris, who was also close to retirement and working in Los Angeles, had left the scene and taken their early warning system with them.

  In fact there had been a wholesale changing of the guard within the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI that left Bulger’s barrier beach unprotected. But hardly abandoned.

  Bulger had become a dirty little secret that evolved into a tacit policy administered by new players who may not have fully understood the history but held fast out of institutional loyalty. They viewed any attempt to change the system as a challenge by upstarts who had the bad taste to urinate inside the tent. The lingering commitment became grounded in the fear that Bulger had become a time bomb by attracting too much public attention, especially after the 1988 Boston Globe article. The fierce personal friendship of John Connolly was replaced by the knee-jerk protectionism of one special agent in charge after another. The credo became: Bulger may be a skunk, but he’s our skunk.

  But Flemmi’s arrest by state police told the FBI that the gig was up. And when it realized what had happened, the bureau backed away as quickly as it could. The only contact Flemmi had with his old allies after his arrest was when he hailed agent Edward Quinn at a bail hearing. The awkward encounter made Flemmi realize that he was no longer a prized informant. He was just another unhappy wiseguy in a courtroom.

  “What’s going on here?” Flemmi asked the startled Quinn as he walked by. “How about a break on bail?” Flemmi persisted in a plea that meant “Get me outta here.”