by Dick Lehr
It was now seven months since the government had obeyed the court’s order in June to identify Bulger as an FBI informant. But since that pivotal moment, weeks and months had come and gone as the judge and the lawyers prepared for the hearings and argued over their scope and ground rules. The racketeering case was already almost three years old and still stuck in its pretrial phase. But by now all the parties had realized that nothing about the case would ever move quickly, as the judge moved ponderously into unknown legal terrain: the backstage, inner workings of the FBI.
In the months leading up to this moment, the Justice Department had been downloading to defense attorneys hundreds of pages of previously secret FBI files covering the FBI’s history with Bulger and Flemmi. Cardinale, Fishman, and the others devoured the documents. “We started to realize there were all kinds of new motions, including government misconduct,” said Cardinale. “We began to ask, ‘If Flemmi was an informant for that many years, how in the world can this indictment be any good?’”
For his part, Flemmi, having decided he had nothing more to lose, began filing sworn affidavits describing juicy details of his double life. It was the legal equivalent of flirting, revealing selective and sensational examples of FBI protection he claimed went to the heart of “informant defense.” In one, Flemmi said that Morris had promised him and Bulger they could commit any crime “short of murder”; in another, that the FBI regularly tipped them off to other investigations, including the timing of the 1995 racketeering indictment that he was now fighting to get booted out of court. By year’s end Fishman had refined the Flemmi defense, arguing that Flemmi had been “authorized,” mainly by Morris and Connolly, to commit many of the crimes for which he stood accused. Because the FBI had promised Flemmi “immunity,” he could not now be prosecuted for those crimes.
Wyshak, meanwhile, had staked out the government’s response to the various disclosures by Flemmi that now regularly made front-page headlines in the city’s newspapers. The actions of “rogue agents,” Morris and Connolly, Wyshak argued, should not undermine the racketeering case; any promises of protection they may have given Bulger and Flemmi were illegal and therefore could not possibly constitute anything close to legal “authorization.” Wrote Wyshak: “Extensive reviews of [FBI informant] files by the parties as well as by the Court have failed to unearth a single shred of objective evidence that Bulger and Flemmi were authorized to commit the crimes alleged in the indictment.”
It was a high-wire argument of sorts, as prosecutors sought to protect the evidence against the mobsters but, at the same time, acknowledge the stomach-turning corruption of FBI agents. Then, late in the year, Morris was granted immunity in return for testimony that would buttress the government’s point of view; he would confess, on the one hand, to crimes and FBI misconduct, but also testify that Bulger and Flemmi had never been given any formal immunity.
The two positions were reflected in the opening remarks that winter morning when the Wolf hearings finally began.
“The focus here is on the promises made to my client, Stephen Flemmi, by the FBI,” Fishman told the court. “In exchange for his very unique and special cooperation, he would be protected, he would not be prosecuted.”
Hogwash, replied Wyshak when his turn came. Bulger and Flemmi had never had any official deal guaranteeing they would not be prosecuted for their crimes. The defense attorneys, said Wyshak, were portraying Flemmi as if he were some kind of “Junior G-man with a license to kill.
“Isn’t that preposterous?” mocked Wyshak.
BUT of course it wasn’t so preposterous after all.
In the months to come Fishman and Cardinale may not have been able to uncover a paper trail showing a formal promise of immunity, but they showed that the Boston FBI was a House of Horrors when it came to Bulger and Flemmi—that agents coddled, conspired, and protected the mobsters in a way that for all practical purposes had given them a license to kill.
Right from the start, Wyshak and Wolf tangled, and the tension between the prosecutor and the judge erupted regularly as Wyshak fought Wolf on the range of the questions put to government officials and the growing pile of government files that were being unsealed. It wasn’t as if Wyshak was trying to cover up FBI corruption—by now he was overseeing an active investigation of Connolly and others—but he opposed Wolf’s approach to staging a court inquiry that, to Wyshak, seemed without limits and restraints.
“You might as well put the whole file in!” Wyshak barked at the judge just two days into the hearings, on January 8. “Why don’t you just put the whole file in?”
“Why don’t you just sit down, Mr. Wyshak?” Wolf said.
Wyshak would not, and he continued arguing against allowing a new batch of FBI files to be made public.
“Have a seat,” Wolf interrupted.
“What is the relevance?”
“Have a seat.”
Wyshak remained standing.
“Do you want to be held in contempt? Sit down!”
The hearings lasted most of 1998. The testimony of the 46 witnesses filled 17,000 pages of transcripts, and 276 exhibits—mostly lengthy internal FBI documents—were admitted into evidence. Taking the stand and swearing to tell the whole truth were a former Massachusetts governor and U.S. attorney (William Weld); a sitting Superior Court judge and former protégé of prosecutor Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan (Diane Kottmyer); the three FBI supervisors who ran the Boston office during the Bulger years (Lawrence Sarhatt, James Greenleaf, and James Ahearn); and a long line of federal drug agents, other FBI supervisors, and many of the FBI agents who’d worked alongside Connolly (Nick Gianturco, Ed Quinn, and John Newton). It was a who’s who of the federal law enforcement establishment, and there was a touch of the surreal as former FBI agents on the witness stand sometimes seemed to mimic tactics usually displayed in court by the gangsters they pursued.
The godfather of the FBI’s Organized Crime Squad, Dennis Condon, the retired supervisor who had first matched Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi together back in the mid-1970s, took the stand in early May and eluded tough scrutiny. The lawyers were hoping he would shed light on the early years of the FBI and Bulger, but Condon pleaded a blank memory. He set the standard for responding, “I don’t recall.” Even when an attorney showed him an FBI document he’d prepared, Condon would shrug, say he didn’t recall writing it, and was therefore unable to elaborate further. Cardinale and the other attorneys were left rolling their eyes, exasperated.
Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan eluded scrutiny altogether. In late February the fifty-six-year-old former prosecutor suffered a heart attack, was hospitalized, and had an adverse reaction to medication. Facing a lengthy rehabilitation, he was spared sharp questioning about removing Bulger and Flemmi from the horse race-fixing case in 1979. O’Sullivan would also have been grilled on claims he’d made publicly and to government investigators that his hands were clean because he’d never even known Bulger and Flemmi were FBI informants. The evidence to the contrary was substantial, and defense attorneys had been eager to put O’Sullivan on the hot seat.
The missing prosecutor quickly became a target of dark courthouse humor. Lawyers and commentators couldn’t resist suggesting that the heart attack enabled O’Sullivan to assert a claim many mafiosi had tried to pull off—too ill to testify. In fact a fiery O’Sullivan, back in the mid-1980s, had aggressively fought Mafia enforcer Larry Zannino’s medical claim that he was too sick to come to court. The prosecutor forced Zannino to appear, even though he was in full medical regalia, strapped into a wheelchair and breathing from an oxygen tank. Now people began to joke that O’Sullivan had “pulled a Zannino.” Though by the end of the hearings O’Sullivan would recover and resume his private law practice at one of the city’s prestigious, old-line firms, Choate Hall and Stewart, the man who for sixteen years had fought the Boston Mafia never once took the stand.
Theresa Stanley was granted immunity and compelled to testify about her life with Whitey Bulger—and his getaway when th
e 1995 indictment came down. In a soft voice, the blue-eyed fifty-seven-year-old, with snow-white hair and dressed in an orange floral top and black slacks, described how she and Whitey had been an item for nearly three decades. She’d cooked dinner for Bulger at her South Boston home nearly every night, and he’d spent most holidays with her family. Stanley spoke about mysterious trips to Europe. She didn’t ask Bulger why they were just moving about, because such questions always ended in an argument. She recalled their hasty drive around the country—to Long Island, to New Orleans, where they spent New Year’s Eve, to Graceland in Memphis, and to the Grand Canyon. Bulger made lots of calls from pay phones, but she didn’t ask who he was talking to or what the calls were about. Stanley also testified that Bulger ultimately abandoned her for the much younger Catherine Greig, who he’d been seeing secretly for twenty years.
“He was leading a double life with me,” a spurned Stanley concluded, “and a double life with the FBI.”
Unsealed in court were FBI reports revealing that Flemmi had ratted on Salemme for three decades. Flemmi was quoted in one FBI report as calling Frank Salemme “a jerk.” After hearing this, Frank Salemme moved, making sure DeLuca sat between himself and Flemmi. Cadillac Frank’s affection for Stevie evaporated; indeed, Salemme became “just sickened by the sight of him,” Cardinale concluded. The FBI files also clearly showed that Bulger and Flemmi had informed on Howie Winter and other Winter Hill gangsters, including Johnny Martorano, who, like Salemme, began pulling away from Flemmi in the courtroom.
Throughout, Flemmi tried to keep up his game face, coached that his only hope for freedom was to have all this surface to prove the FBI had promised not to prosecute him.
“To be in court every day with a smile on his face,” Cardinale remembered, “it’s crazy. I mean, one day I just got through telling the judge what a murderous piece of crap I thought he was, and he called me over. I thought he was going to say something to me, like, you know, ‘Don’t you ever say things like that about me again.’ He calls me over and he says, ‘Jesus, you’re doing a great job.’ It’s like, whoa! That’s all I can think: I-yiyi-yi-yi. I mean, it’s not even registering here. I had just literally gotten through saying he’d killed, you know, Halloran, that he’d done all kinds of horrendous, diabolical, murderous things, and I thought, Ohmygod, I went too far, he’s going to say something, and he says, ‘Look, you’re doing a good job.’”
THE unfolding debacle for the FBI hit rock bottom when John Morris walked into court and began testifying on April 21. In the months leading up to the hearings, Morris had negotiated immunity with the prosecutors for the crimes he’d committed. During the private debriefing with FBI agents and prosecutors that accompanied those negotiations, he wept. He’d thrown his career away by getting too close to Bulger, and he knew it. Now on the witness stand for eight grueling days, a wasted Morris sought to project the composed manner of an aging monsignor as he matter-of-factly described his descent from agent to liar and criminal, confessing to taking Bulger’s money and obstructing justice by warning Bulger about investigations.
Going back to the 1970s, when the unholy alliance was forged, Morris recalled a “time frame” of “intense pressure on agents to have informants” against the Mafia. “There was a lot of pressure,” he testified. He talked about how he teamed up with John Connolly and, together, they rode Bulger and Flemmi to stardom in the Boston FBI office as the master agents in the war against the Mafia, even if, in truth, the ride was a free fall into hell. Morris rued the day he hitched his star to Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly and ended his professional life in Boston in fear of both Bulger and Connolly—Whitey because of his hold on him through the $7,000 in bribes he’d taken, and Connolly because of his network of political allies, most notably Billy Bulger.
Despite a relentless effort by defense attorneys to get Morris to concede that he’d promised Bulger and Flemmi immunity from prosecution, Morris disagreed. He admitted he’d leaked investigations, but that hardly constituted a grant of immunity. He testified he didn’t have the authority as a supervisor to confer immunity on the mobsters. “Immunity was a very formal process, and there’s actual documentation,” he said. There was none for Bulger.
Toward the end Morris began to wobble. Following questions about yet another instance where his shady work with Bulger may have cost a man his life, one of the defense attorneys suddenly departed from the set sequence of questions. Turning to Morris, the lawyer catapulted to a higher meaning, demanding to know what Morris could have been thinking all these years: did the FBI’s crusade against the Mafia justify the Bulger evil? “Do you agree that your conduct as an FBI agent in connection with Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi was consistent with that concept, that the end justifies the means?” Brought up short, Morris sagged noticeably, and he struggled to regain his monsignor’s placid demeanor. He sighed and looked sadly off to the side.
“I’m not certain of that,” he testified softly.
By the end there was nothing left except for Morris to acknowledge the part he’d played in all that had gone wrong. Urged by defense attorneys to explain “more fully for us” how he was compromised, Morris said that he “had violated standards, integrity, rules, regulations.” Was John Connolly part of that process of compromise?
“I felt that he participated in it,” Morris replied, “but I accept responsibility for my own actions.”
THE shocking confessions made headlines, and about this same time John Connolly began to speak out—not in court but outside of court to reporters. From the sidelines the retired agent, now fifty-seven and still working as a lobbyist for Boston Edison, began offering sound bites to rebut the testimony given under oath before Judge Wolf. Each time a retired agent or government official took the stand and provided testimony that in any way criticized him, Connolly would sound off and call the witness a liar. So, for example, when retired FBI supervisor Robert Fitzpatrick testified that agents complained about Connolly “rifling” their files to find out what they had on Bulger, Connolly reacted, “That’s ludicrous.” Connolly angrily told reporters that Fitzpatrick’s testimony was nothing more than “unmitigated nonsense.”
The list of “liars” grew and grew. But Connolly saved his best lines for Morris, whom he began calling “the most corrupt agent in the history of the FBI.” Each day after Morris finished testifying, Connolly would condemn his former friend and supervisor. Morris may have only met with Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi a dozen times over the years—while Connolly saw the mobsters hundreds of times—but Connolly insisted that he himself was a model FBI agent who’d never broken a single rule. All of Morris’s wrongs, said Connolly, “he did that on his own.”
Talking about the difficulty of the job he’d performed so well, Connolly said that handling informants was “kind of like a circus,” and “if the circus is going to work you need to have a guy in there with the lions and tigers.
“That was me. I was no John Morris, back in the office with a number 2 lead pencil. My job was to get in there with the lions and tigers. And I am no liar like Morris.”
Near the end of Morris’s testimony Connolly even made a brief court appearance. Having teamed up with a prominent defense attorney, R. Robert Popeo, Connolly strode into the courthouse in an expensively tailored suit and brushed past throngs of TV cameras and reporters saying he wanted to clear his name. He was a hero, not a villain, and now this band of prosecutors led by Fred Wyshak was out to bust him. He’d become the government’s scapegoat, a victim of runaway prosecutorial rage, when the truth of the matter was that he was a highly decorated FBI agent who’d done nothing wrong. “The proof is in the pudding,” Connolly said, defending the Bulger deal. “Look at the decimated New England Mafia.”
Then, standing in court on April 30 before Judge Wolf, the lawyer Popeo explained that unless Connolly was granted immunity from prosecution—like John Morris—he would not let his client testify. He would not allow Connolly to be “blindsided” when the government had m
ade it known that Connolly was under investigation. Connolly then asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, walked outside, and resumed a tirade against Morris, who was still inside waiting to wrap up his eight days of testimony.
“I made him look away,” Connolly said of Morris. “He couldn’t even look me in the face.”
The Connolly sideshow continued into the summer, and a pattern developed: an affronted Connolly would issue heated public denials to any witness’s incriminating words. He disputed most of former supervisor Jim Ring’s testimony, particularly Ring’s account of the concerns he’d had for the “stupid” way Connolly met Bulger and Flemmi for dinner. Connolly wasn’t the only one in denial. Billy Bulger, now retired from politics and the president of the University of Massachusetts, joined the Connolly chorus after Ring in court told about Billy Bulger dropping in on one meeting. “I never met the man,” Billy Bulger said about Ring. “It never took place, but the business of denying such things is to make it appear as if something sinister had happened.”
By midsummer Massachusetts representative Martin T. Meehan announced plans to hold congressional hearings into the FBI’s long affair with Bulger, saying the revelations tumbling out in the federal courthouse in Boston raised concerns about “establishing, maintaining, and monitoring relationships between agents and informants.” But like much of the nation’s business during late 1998, the inquiry was soon pushed aside by President Clinton’s impeachment.