Black Mass

by Dick Lehr

  WBZ-AM RADIO, OCTOBER 27, 1998

  Predictably, John Connolly was not happy with Judge Mark L. Wolf’s factual findings issued on September 15, 1999. Previously, Connolly had been complimentary toward the judge, as if he were wooing him. On one radio talk show Connolly had referred to Wolf as a jurist “who I believe is a guy who seeks the truth.”

  But after a ruling that put Connolly in the middle of nearly every instance of FBI wrongdoing, Connolly changed his tune. The former agent was particularly angry that Wolf had pinned on him the 1995 leak of the racketeering indictment.

  “I did not tip Bulger, Flemmi, or anyone with respect to the indictment returned by the grand jury in 1995,” he said in a prepared statement he issued the night of Wolf’s ruling. He said, “Judge Wolf has engaged in irresponsible speculation on a matter involving my integrity.”

  The rest of the reaction was vintage Connolly: attack the critic personally. The federal judge, Connolly claimed, was retaliating for an old informant report he’d written containing rumors that Wolf once leaked information that ended up in the Mafia’s hands when Wolf was a federal prosecutor in the early 1980s. (The report had surfaced during the 1998 hearings and was discredited.) Connolly reached for that small moment in time to explain Wolf’s findings: it was payback.

  The Wolf findings notwithstanding, Connolly continued to assert his innocence, though more selectively than during his media blitz of 1998. During the fall of 1999 he even sat for a Dateline NBC interview, spinning and bragging about all the good he’d done.

  But Connolly had more than the judge’s findings of fact to worry about. For more than a year he and other former agents (such as Paul Rico) had been targets of a federal grand jury probe into FBI corruption. Then, three days before Christmas, John Connolly was busted. FBI agents showed up at his home in Lynnfield, a suburb north of the city, early in the afternoon. Connolly had stayed home that day with the flu. He was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the federal courthouse in Boston. He appeared in the courthouse, after dark had fallen, not in a fancy suit but wearing a gray sweatshirt, black jeans, and sneakers. His hair, usually coiffed to perfection, was tussled. It had been a long journey into night, and in some ways, after so much, it ended here. Once upon a time John J. Connolly, Jr. had taken an oath to uphold the law. What happened was closer to a holdup.

  In a five-count indictment, Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi were charged with racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and obstruction of justice. In the government’s seventeen-page filing, Connolly was charged with acting as the middle man for the $7,000 in bribes to John Morris, with regularly falsifying reports to cover up Bulger’s crimes, and with illegally leaking to Bulger and Flemmi confidential information about grand jury probes and wiretaps. Included in the leak charges was Connolly’s tip-off to Whitey about the 1995 indictment so that Bulger could flee and start a fugitive life.

  In court Connolly pleaded innocent and was released on $200,000 bail. Prosecutors mentioned that the investigation was continuing, and it was widely reported that the focus of the ongoing probe was the role that FBI agents might have played in the murder of those men, like Brian Halloran and John McIntyre, who had posed a risk to Bulger and Flemmi’s hegemony. In launching the probe, Attorney General Janet Reno had gone outside the incestuous Boston law enforcement community. Overseeing the corruption case was veteran Connecticut federal prosecutor John Durham. Durham had assembled a team of investigators from around the country, and they began the process of trying to figure out how everything had gone so wrong.

  MEANWHILE, a number of major developments during the autumn of 1999 contributed to the great undoing of the Bulger years.

  The John Martorano deal went public in late September when Martorano walked into court and calmly admitted to killing ten people as the key hitman for Bulger’s gang. In exchange for his confession—and his testimony against Bulger, Flemmi, and FBI agents—prosecutors recommended he receive a fifteen-year prison sentence. The plea bargain proved controversial, with some appalled at the apparently light sentence for a cold-blooded killer. U.S. attorney Donald Stern conceded that cutting deals with killers was “distasteful” but argued that it would have been even more distasteful not to have made the deal to get more evidence against bosses Bulger and Flemmi. Martorano implicated Bulger in three of the murders and Flemmi in half a dozen.

  Then, in early December, Cadillac Frank Salemme bailed. He pled guilty to racketeering charges that he’d run a joint venture with the Bulger gang to control the Boston underworld. In return, prosecutors agreed to drop murder charges against him. The deal did not require Salemme to testify, but Salemme voluntarily appeared before the Connolly grand jury to testify against the former agent. Wyshak and Cardinale jointly filed a sentencing recommendation that Salemme serve from ten to thirteen years. It meant that Salemme would be free in about six years, since he got credit for the five years he’d spent behind bars since his arrest in 1995. Judge Wolf accepted the plea bargain on February 23, 2000. “He’s tired of fighting,” Cardinale said afterward, adding that his client also wanted to get away from Flemmi. “Frank doesn’t want to be next to Flemmi for another second, never mind another two years.” Flemmi’s attorney Ken Fishman sought to put the best face on the plea: “As far as we’re concerned, we’re happy to have the courtroom to ourselves.”

  BULGER’S in absentia foothold on the city continued its rapid erosion with the indictment of two key lieutenants. The “two Kevins,” forty-three-year-old Kevin Weeks and fifty-one-year-old Kevin O’Neil, were charged with racketeering and shaking down drug dealers and bookies for more than two decades. The indictment also put both men alongside Bulger and Flemmi in the takeover of the Rakeses’ liquor store and the extortion of Raymond Slinger. It cited O’Neil as the longtime operator of Triple O’s, which one columnist had nicknamed the “Bucket of Blood.” It accused Weeks of carrying out Bulger’s commands in the daily operation of the gang’s criminal activities as Bulger found ways to keep in touch by using calling cards to reach Weeks at the businesses and homes of friends.

  Initially, Kevin Weeks kept up the bounce and bluster he’d displayed publicly as a supreme Bulger loyalist. He’d been a man about the neighborhood, even appearing in a tuxedo for the Oscar party in 1998 to honor the nomination of the set-in-Southie film Good Will Hunting at the L Street Tavern. Standing by him at his arraignment on November 18 was lawyer Tom Finnerty, Billy Bulger’s old friend and former law partner. Weeks pleaded not guilty, and on his way out of the courtroom he turned to columnist Howie Carr of the Boston Herald. “Be kind, Howie. Be gentle.”

  In a matter of days Weeks was a different man. He’d never in his life faced serious criminal charges like this—racketeering, extortion, loan-sharking, drug trafficking, with murder charges probably in the offing. Finnerty was soon gone, replaced by another lawyer. Then word spread that Weeks was talking.

  The morning of January 14, 2000, the city awoke to news reports that state police had spent one of the coldest nights of the winter digging up the remains of two men and a woman stacked in a makeshift grave in Dorchester. Kevin Weeks, looking now to cut a deal for leniency but first having to demonstrate his bona fides, had pinpointed the burial site in the gully across from a popular meeting hall, down an embankment from the Southeast Expressway. By daylight, TV camera crews and reporters circled the troopers’ big dig about eight feet under to recover the remains. The site was once a mostly marshy area, located conveniently right off the routes that Bulger and Flemmi drove between Southie and Quincy.

  Based on dental records, one of the bodies was soon identified as John McIntyre. The parking lot where McIntyre’s abandoned truck and wallet had been found the day he disappeared in 1984 was less than a mile from the burial ground. Though not positively identified, the other bodies were believed to be Deborah Hussey, missing since the fall of 1984, and Arthur “Bucky” Barrett, the safecracker who disappeared in 1983.

  For the victims�
�� families, the discovery brought some relief. For investigators, having Weeks turn on Bulger was like holding a stake to drive into the gang’s heart. Negotiations continued in secret regarding Weeks’s deal; in the street Whitey’s surrogate son acquired a nickname to play off how long it had taken him to fold: “Two Weeks.”

  BY early 2000 John Morris had moved on to Florida after losing his job with an insurance company in Tennessee. He occasionally flew to Boston to appear before the ongoing grand jury. Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan and Jim Ring continued working together at the Boston law firm of Choate Hall and Stewart. Bill Bulger continued in his second career as president of the University of Massachusetts. Though his appointment by then-governor Weld was at first controversial, Bulger generally has won passing grades for his stewardship of the state university.

  The Boston FBI office had become the most heavily investigated field office in the bureau’s history. Retired and current FBI agents grew defensive and weary, wondering, who’s next? Paul Rico? Dennis Condon? Both were under the intense scrutiny of the ongoing grand jury overseen by prosecutor Durham, along with a number of other agents, such as Mike Buckley and Nick Gianturco. Connolly’s pal John Newton was notified that he was going to be fired for allegedly lying to protect Connolly during court hearings in 1998 before Judge Wolf. Newton pledged through his lawyer to fight the move.

  Beyond the bureau, the city continued to assess the damage and to ask what went wrong. Was it two guys from the projects—Connolly and Bulger—whose loyalty to one another outweighed everything else? Deeply flawed government oversight? Man’s capacity for evil and self-deception? Probably all of the above. The Bulger harm had certainly been felt in ways immeasurable and difficult to quantify. There were some who felt that the corruption had seeped not only into the heart of Southie and the FBI, but into almost everything—the State House, law enforcement, and public life.

  The writer James Carroll, winner of the National Book Award and a regular columnist for the Boston Globe, identified a “moral blindness” at work when it came to the Bulger brothers in a column written in late 1999.

  For many years, large parts of the Massachusetts political establishment willingly winked at the savage behavior of James Bulger, and that succession of winks eventually became a pervasive moral blindness. The explicitly expressed tolerance for James Bulger polluted not only law enforcement but government itself, fueling public cynicism, spreading fear, and turning the public sector into a murderer’s accomplice.

  Obviously all of this is tied to the role of James Bulger’s brother William Bulger, the former Senate president. No one can lay the crimes of James Bulger at his brother’s feet, and no one can fault William Bulger for his expressions of brotherly love despite everything. But the former Senate president went much further than that. It was his winking at the exploits of James Bulger that sponsored everyone else’s.

  “In the magical curl of William Bulger’s wit,” wrote Carroll, “James Bulger emerged as a figure of fun.”

  Carroll singled out the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts that Billy hosted, in particular the one in 1995—just two months after Whitey got an FBI tip and hit the road—when then-governor Weld sang a “ditty” he had composed to the gathering of public leaders that included both U.S. senators from Massachusetts and the city’s mayor. “Weld’s song was to the tune of ‘Charlie on the MTA,’” Carroll reported, “and once again it was about the killer. ‘Will he ever return?’ Weld sang. ‘No, he’ll never return. No, he’ll never come back this way. I just got a call from the Kendall Square Station. He’s with Charlie on the MTA!’ The gang loved it, but imagine how pleased James Bulger’s tipster must have been.”

  Weld, in these instances, provides a measure of the depth of this corruption. He had served, after all, as a U.S. attorney, with direct knowledge of James Bulger’s crimes. A wink from him could make even the most compromised FBI agent relax, and it could enable so many others to stifle their misgivings and sign on to this deadly arrangement.

  James Bulger, still at large, is an embarrassment to the FBI. He is a danger to the public. And in the way in which his fate became entangled with his brother’s and in the way they then used each other to advance their separate agendas, the entire story remains a mark on the soul of the Commonwealth.

  STEVIE FLEMMI, meanwhile, continued to keep his own counsel in cellblock H-3 of the Plymouth County Correctional Facility. Over time the crime boss had developed a twitch in one eye. There were times when his arm would jerk involuntarily. He seemed to fidget. The facial tic and spasms had not gone unnoticed.

  “It’s the Devil eating his body,” Salemme told others.

  Flemmi was moved out the cellblock early in the new year amid growing concerns for his safety.

  Whitey continues to elude investigators. Since his indictment in 1995, he’s been spotted in New York, Louisiana, Wyoming, Mississippi, even in his old neighborhood, Southie. He’s been added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and featured on the television show of the same name. But no amount of FBI talk about how hard it was trying to capture Bulger could overcome the public’s impression that the FBI didn’t really want to.

  New Orleans? Dublin? Southie?

  By the end of 1999 the dark history of the FBI and Bulger may have been revealed. It was all there in 17,000 pages of sworn testimony, Judge Mark L. Wolf’s 661-page ruling, and a fresh round of sensational criminal indictments. But none of those historic records contained the one answer a bedeviled city was still dying to know:

  Where’s Whitey?

  Sources

  Since 1987 we have written a number of in-depth articles for the Boston Globe about the Mafia, the Bulgers, John Connolly, and the FBI in Boston. This book is based on the more than 180 interviews conducted over the years in connection with those articles—interviews with officials from all levels of law enforcement and government, with Bill Bulger, with many residents of South Boston, and with a number of underworld figures.

  In addition, we have relied on the official record—most notably the sworn testimony of forty-six witnesses during pretrial hearings in 1998 before U.S. District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf in the racketeering case United States v Francis P. Salemme, James J. Bulger, Stephen Flemmi, et al., U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 94-10287. On September 19, 1999, Wolf released a 661-page memorandum and order (hereafter Wolf, “Memorandum and Order,”), more than half of which was devoted to “findings of fact” about the FBI’s relationship with Bulger and Flemmi.

  The witnesses at the Wolf hearings included present and past FBI agents, federal prosecutors, Justice Department officials, and Stephen Flemmi. The testimony took about 115 days, spread out over nine months, and produced 17,000 pages of transcripts. The Wolf hearings were nothing short of a judicial excavation into the history of the FBI and Bulger.

  The use of unattributed quotations is an exception; we almost always use names.

  The book is also based on thousands of pages of once-secret government records, mostly from the FBI, that were unsealed as part of the hearings before Judge Wolf. In addition, we drew on hundreds of pages of other records and documents regarding the Bulgers, the Mafia, and the FBI that we have accumulated during our own reporting.

  Through interviews, government records, and sworn testimony, we had ample material from which to reconstruct the history of the Boston FBI’s ties to Bulger and Flemmi. Even so, we attempted during the writing of this book to conduct further interviews with several key persons. Many who have figured in this story were willing to talk to us. Unfortunately, John Connolly, John Morris, Jeremiah O’Sullivan, and Bill Bulger were not, despite our effort to seek their comment about particular events.

  We have also relied on a number of other criminal and civil cases. Many of these cases included court-approved taped conversations that became the basis for the dialogue that is reconstructed in the book. The main cases are:

  • United States v Patrick McGonigle et al., U.S. Distri
ct Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal dockets 79-111-MA; 79-112-MA; 79-113-MA.

  • United States v Howard T. Winter, James Martorano, et al., U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 79-42-MA.

  • United States v Gennaro Angiulo et al., U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 83-235.

  • Thomas E. Finnerty v Harold Brown, Suffolk County Superior Court, Massachusetts, civil action 87-2479, along with a counterclaim by Brown against Finnerty.

  • United States v Paul E. Moore et al., U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 90-10203.

  • United States v Edward J. MacKenzie et al., U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 90-10204.

  • United States v Nicholas L. Bianco et al., U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut, criminal docket H-90-18.

  • United States v Howard T. Winter, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 92-10008.

  • United States v Stephen M. Rakes, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 96-10131.

  • United States v Kevin P. Weeks and Kevin P. O’Neil, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 99-10371.

  • United States v John J. Connolly Jr., James Bulger aka “Whitey,” and Stephen Flemmi, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 99-10428.

  We have also relied on a number of books and articles for information about the Mafia, the FBI, the history of South Boston, the history of Boston, and the use of informants.

  BOOKS