Black Mass

by Dick Lehr

  HERBERT: Mr. Connolly, you have told at least three different versions of this supposed deal that you had with Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi, isn’t that correct?

  CONNOLLY: I assert my Fifth Amendment rights.

  HERBERT: Mr. Connolly, in all your years with the FBI working with Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi, did you ever once document this supposed deal anywhere in the FBI files?

  CONNOLLY: I assert my Fifth Amendment rights.

  Inside of twenty minutes, Connolly took the Fifth nearly thirty times to the questions posed by Cardinale and Herbert. The judge broke off the give-and-take, ruling that the exercise was fruitless, that Connolly had not changed his mind and decided to testify without immunity. Robert Popeo told the judge his client was asserting the Fifth at his insistence, particularly “in light of the fact that there are two separate grand juries sitting in which we have been advised by prosecutors that Mr. Connolly is a target.” Even if Connolly was speaking boldly outside of court and proclaiming his innocence—a right of free speech under the First Amendment—he was not waiving his rights under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.

  “To each and every substantive question put to the witness,” said Popeo, “he has been advised to invoke his privilege under the United States Constitution.”

  The judge excused Connolly. “Mr. Connolly, you may go.”

  Minutes later Connolly could be found outside the new courthouse on Fan Pier, holding forth to a circle of television cameras and reporters, resuming his bellicose stance toward prosecutors Wyshak, Herbert, and Kelly. He called them “character assassins” hell-bent on singling him out as their scapegoat. But even a renewed attack could not remove the lasting impression of a lackluster John Connolly reading from the Fifth Amendment card he’d just spent weeks telling the world he no longer needed.

  THEN came the waiting game. In chambers, with the aid of his clerks, Wolf began the task of preparing a ruling, studying the testimony, the exhibits, and the applicable case law. Months passed, and by early 1999 the case had mostly fallen from public view. Occasionally, in other contexts, it popped up. The former U.S. attorney and ex-governor Bill Weld appeared on a radio show in 1998 to promote his first novel and ran into a host who wanted to ask about the Bulger affair with the FBI. Christopher Lydon of WBUR’s The Connection was incredulous that Weld hadn’t done more to dig out the Bulger mess. “Why aren’t you more outraged?” challenged Lydon. “Did your friend William Bulger know about it? Did you ever ask him about it?”

  The usually garrulous Weld went mum. He replied no, a trace of annoyance in his voice. Lydon kept going, but mostly in monologue. Rather than join in, Weld allowed seconds of silence to fill the radio space. Of particular concern to Lydon was the recent suicide of Billy Johnson, the state trooper who had gotten tough with Whitey Bulger at Logan Airport over smuggled cash and later believed the encounter had cost him his career. “He killed himself !” said Lydon. “A miserable man at the end of a life that he thought had honorably been devoted to law enforcement.

  “Where’s the outrage?” Lydon asked again.

  The tense encounter ended finally, and the two got to talking about Weld’s novel. But Weld’s reluctance to get into it with Lydon seemed to capture symbolically the reluctance of Weld’s generation of Boston law enforcement leaders to ever seriously tackle the Bulger scandal.

  By the end of the summer of 1999 word began spreading around town that Wolf, after ten months of rumination and writing, was applying the finishing touches to his ruling. In early August, FBI director Louis Freeh arrived in Boston and, at a press conference, acknowledged publicly that the FBI “made significant mistakes” during the Boston FBI’s twenty-year run with Bulger and Flemmi. The admissions were seen as an effort by a publicity-obsessed FBI to take some of the sting out of the upcoming federal court ruling. “We have a lot of mistakes to account for,” said Freeh. He promised that corrupt FBI agents from Boston would be brought to justice.

  Two weeks later the FBI announced that the fugitive Whitey Bulger was finally being added to its Ten Most Wanted List. The move—more than four years after Bulger fled his 1995 indictment—was seen as long overdue. In the public’s mind in Boston, the perception had taken root that the FBI was never really interested in tracking down its former informant. But now Bulger joined the likes of fugitives Eric Robert Rudolph, a suspect in abortion clinic bombings, and Osama bin Laden, the Saudi terrorism suspect. And he held a distinction all his own: he was believed to be the first FBI informant to ever make the famous top ten list, which had posted 458 fugitives since its inception in 1950. His face would now appear across the country in post offices and federal buildings, on the FBI’s web site, and even in a Dick Tracy cartoon as part of an FBI Most Wanted promotion.

  In cellblock H-3 three celebrated inmates were also eagerly awaiting the ruling—Frank Salemme, Bobby DeLuca, and Stevie Flemmi. Their high hopes were that the judge would find the evidence so compromised he would throw out the racketeering charges against the group—that Wolf would rule that the FBI had indeed promised blanket immunity for Flemmi and Bulger, and therefore the government could not now violate that immunity and prosecute them.

  Ever since their arrest in 1995 the three mobsters had been kept at the Plymouth prison, a modern facility that opened in 1994 and was located forty-eight miles south of Boston. The new facility had been built atop an old landfill in an isolated, unwanted area of the historic community. It was also right off of route 3, a highway connecting Boston to Cape Cod, and Flemmi, from his cell, could hear the hum of freedom in the distance, the cars carrying commuters and vacationers along a route he and Bulger and John Connolly all used to take on their way to the Cape.

  The cellblock could hold 140 inmates in 70 cells. It was a large rectangular space constructed as a self-contained “mini-prison,” meaning that the inmates spent virtually all of their time on the block and did almost everything there. Meals arrived on wheels from a central prison kitchen, and inmates ate at the tables in the unit’s common area. The cellblock had its own showers along one end, its own televisions, and its own pay phones. It was smoke-free. The unit had a “rec deck,” a small, outdoor recreation area that opened up off the far end of the unit. The area was essentially a fenced-in cage, but inmates could escape the stale air of the cellblock and get some exercise by going out there. The chin-up bar attached underneath a set of stairs was jokingly called “the gym,” and the cart of books positioned against one wall was “the library.” Two decks of cells, on a ground floor and a mezzanine level, lined the long walls of the cellblock. Salemme and DeLuca lived side by side in cells at the far end of one mezzanine level, near the entrance to the rec deck. Flemmi was on his own.

  Over time Salemme had emerged as a model inmate and cellblock leader. The guards relied on him. He was given the top cellblock job, a position previously occupied by, of all people, Howie Winter, until Winter was moved out of the unit. Frank was the “meal server”: three times a day, while all the other inmates were locked down, he set up the common area for meals. He put ice in the juice pitchers, wiped down the tables, arranged the chairs. No job on the unit carried more responsibility—not cleaning the rec deck, emptying the trash bins, cleaning the showers, or sweeping the tiled floors and the mezzanine walkway. The guards wanted the unit as shiny and clean as a hospital ward, and Frank was the key inmate making that happen. It was a far cry from his old life as a high-rolling gangster, but the job, a way to help pass the days, kept the mobster busy.

  DeLuca was not as motivated a worker. His job was sweeping the mezzanine. But like Salemme, he worked out and wanted to stay in shape. He regularly performed chin-ups to keep his upper body hard and muscular. Both watched their diet, especially Salemme, who avoided the high-fat prison offerings and preferred salads and fruits. Salemme also read a lot—boating magazines, Tom Clancy, and Dean Koontz.

  Flemmi was another story. During the course of the hearings in court, as the extent of his FBI deal was exposed, Fl
emmi was pushed further and further to the margins of cellblock life. Inmates did not want to have anything to do with him. He was ostracized—a rat, the lowest form of underworld life. Salemme would not talk to him, would not even look at him. Flemmi sometimes approached DeLuca, but the encounters were curt and brief.

  The alienation that came with being a career informant was bad enough, but Flemmi withdrew further into himself the day Johnny Martorano was whisked away to commence cooperating with the prosecutors. The prison guards surely weren’t going to miss the hitman. Martorano gave them the creeps—a surly, cold-blooded troublemaker who strutted around the cellblock as if to say: Get out of my way, I’m John Martorano, and I kill people. But Martorano’s departure was devastating to Stevie Flemmi. It meant that Martorano was implicating Flemmi and Bulger in murder—particularly the 1981 assassination of Roger Wheeler. It meant that even if Flemmi’s lawyer Ken Fishman succeeded in persuading Judge Wolf to throw out pending racketeering charges, the prosecutors were preparing to come back with a new indictment for murder.

  In early September, as everyone was waiting on Judge Wolf, the news broke that Martorano and the government had completed negotiating the terms of a plea bargain for Martorano’s testimony. In exchange for a sentence of twelve and a half to fifteen years, Martorano had agreed to plead guilty to twenty murders spanning three decades and three states, including the murder of Roger Wheeler, a killing he claimed was committed on orders from Bulger and Flemmi. “The people he’s giving up are people who have enjoyed the protection of the FBI for many years while committing heinous crimes,” said David Wheeler, son of the slain Jai Alai executive, voicing support for the hitman’s deal.

  Flemmi retreated to his prison cell. In cellblock H-3 the former crime boss was shunned, and he spent most of his time alone, seated on his bunk. “Just there,” said one guard. “He’s like the bag of golf clubs sitting in my closet.” Flemmi didn’t have a cellblock job to keep him busy. He didn’t have anyone to talk to. “He’s about as despondent as you can get without going insane,” one officer noted. Flemmi rarely, if ever, went out on the rec deck for the fresh air or the sun. It was the eve of one of the most eagerly awaited court rulings in the biggest organized crime case in Boston’s history, and Flemmi’s face had turned pallid, almost translucent. His skin had turned the color of the prison walls, one guard observed—a ghostly “popcorn white.”

  TONY CARDINALE, the lawyer who had kicked open the Pandora’s box hiding the FBI’s affair with Bulger and Flemmi, began the day the ruling finally came out with a workout at the Boston Athletic Club. Then he picked up his associate John Mitchell, who’d flown in from New York City, at his hotel. They swung by the courthouse, where a clerk handed the lawyers a box containing seven copies of the ruling. Immediately Cardinale dispatched a messenger to take a copy down to the Plymouth prison for Frank Salemme. Then, huddled in shirtsleeves in Cardinale’s office, the Dunkin Donuts coffee and donuts spread out on the desk, the two lawyers opened up the thick ruling and began reading.

  Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr would later wisecrack that Mark Wolf must have fashioned himself the Edward Gibbon of New England organized crime, penning The Rise and Fall of the Bulger Empire: it ran 661 pages. Cardinale and Mitchell both enjoyed the way Wolf opened his treatise, quoting from Lord Acton. “In 1861,” the judge began, “Lord Acton wrote that ‘every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice. ’” To that the judge added: “This case demonstrates that he was right.”

  The donuts sat uneaten. The lawyers couldn’t put the ruling down. The legal part—the immediate impact on the status of the racketeering case—was inconclusive. For example, the judge refused to find that all of the protection the FBI had provided Bulger and Flemmi—much of it illegal—amounted to blanket immunity from prosecution. But he had decided that some of the wiretap evidence was tainted by past FBI promises to Bulger and Flemmi and that those tapes would never be used against them. The judge said he was going to suppress that evidence, and possibly more. With that, the racketeering case seemed to be hanging by a thread. But to reach a final decision on the disputed evidence the judge had decided he would need still more information, drawn from even more pretrial hearings. “In essence,” concluded Wolf, “the record for deciding Flemmi’s motions to dismiss and suppress is incomplete. Therefore, the court will hold the hearings necessary to determine whether this case must be dismissed and, if not, the scope of the evidence to be excluded at trial.” It meant that, for now, the case would go on.

  But the legal part of the judge’s ruling was not the story of the day. The hard news was the judge’s “findings of facts” about the FBI and Bulger and Flemmi. More than half of the text—368 pages—was devoted to factual findings about all that had gone wrong in the FBI’s deal with Bulger, judicial findings resulting from sworn testimony and the mountains of FBI documents and files.

  The judge acknowledged that Bulger and Flemmi were “very valuable and valued confidential informants” for the FBI, but then proceeded to describe in minute detail the corruption, rule-breaking, and misconduct that defined the deal, almost from its start three decades earlier. The leaks—from the Lancaster Street garage to the DEA’s car bug to the Baharoian wire—were all there, along with the long list of tips the crime bosses got about other wiseguys who posed a threat to them. “In an effort to protect Bulger and Flemmi, Morris and Connolly also identified for them at least a dozen other individuals who were either FBI informants or sources for other law enforcement agencies.” The judge cited the Brian Halloran leak and the fact that, a few weeks after he had talked to the FBI, “Halloran was killed.”

  The judge concluded that, to protect Bulger and Flemmi, agents essentially fictionalized the FBI’s internal records on a regular basis, both to overstate their value and to minimize the extent of their criminal activities. The FBI’s files showed “recurring irregularities with regard to the preparation, maintenance, and production in this case of documents damaging to Bulger and Flemmi.” And despite Connolly’s claims to the contrary, Wolf ruled that the handler did indeed handle Morris’s bribe money. “Morris solicited and received through Connolly $1,000 from Bulger and Flemmi.”

  The judge also cleared up some of the smaller details of the sordid saga. Despite Billy Bulger’s public comments to the contrary, the judge ruled that the powerful politician had in fact made a cameo appearance. “William, who was the President of the Massachusetts Senate and lived next door to the Flemmis, came to visit while Ring and Connolly were there.”

  “Man-o-manischevitz!” Cardinale exclaimed. He and John Mitchell began a duel of sort, reading passages aloud, each one trying to top the other with a juicier factual finding.

  In all, Wolf identified eighteen FBI supervisors and agents as having broken either the law or FBI regulations and Justice Department guidelines. Paul Rico, John Connolly, and John Morris were at the hub of the wrongdoing, and the list included supervisors Jim Greenleaf, Jim Ring, Ed Quinn, Bob Fitzpatrick, Larry Potts, Jim Ahearn, Ed Clark, and Bruce Ellavsky, and agents Nick Gianturco, Tom Daly, Mike Buckley, John Newton, Rod Kennedy, James Blackburn, and James Lavin.

  “John Connolly is fucked,” said Cardinale, shaking his head, pausing at the section in Wolf’s ruling where he addressed a central question: how Whitey got away in early 1995. Even though Flemmi had testified that the leak came from Morris, the judge found that Flemmi, while generally truthful in his testimony, was not always “candid” and “at times attributed information received from John Connolly to other agents of the FBI in an evident effort to protect Connolly.” Despite Connolly’s strident public statements, Wolf had ruled that Connolly was the culprit.

  “The court concludes that in early January 1995, Connolly, who remained close to Flemmi and, particularly, Bulger, had been monitoring the grand jury investigation in part through his contacts in the FBI, and was in constant communication with Bulger and Flemmi about the investigation, was the source of the tip to Bulger.”<
br />
  Finally, despite Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan’s public comments to the contrary, as well his statement to federal investigators in 1997, the judge ruled that O’Sullivan had known Bulger and Flemmi were informants since 1979.

  The ruling exposed the ugly addiction the Boston FBI had for Bulger, and it was not a pretty picture. By sheer coincidence the ruling came out just twelve days after a personal milestone for Whitey Bulger: he turned seventy years old on September 3, 1999. But the 661-page treatise was hardly the sort of birthday greeting he would have wished for. James J. “Whitey” Bulger may still have had his freedom, but there was little else to celebrate.

  “Judge Blasts FBI for Deal with Bulger and Flemmi” was the front-page headline in the next day’s tabloid Boston Herald. “Judge Says Hub FBI Broke All the Rules.”

  The headlines had captured the moment, and they were headlines that no doubt reached Whitey Bulger himself—out there, somewhere, still on the run, riding the back roads of rural America with a bleached blonde by his side, false papers in his wallet, and packets of $100 bills stashed in safety deposit boxes around the country.

  Epilogue

  Hi there. So many tough questions for John Connolly, but so little time. Number one, I think there’s a number of people lined up to testify that Whitey and Stevie controlled all the cocaine and marijuana in South Boston, and shame on you ... for not going after them on that.

  JACK FROM SOUTH BOSTON,

  WBZ-AM RADIO, OCTOBER 27, 1998

  First, I would like to say to John Connolly, I think you have a lot of courage for standing up to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in this case. It’s nice to know there’s at least one FBI agent out there who will keep his word.

  CHRISTINE FROM SOUTH BOSTON,