When the phone conversation ended, Morris was shaken. He reported the encounter to his supervisor and was instructed to fill out a report, which he did, leaving out details of the conversation that would be self-incriminating. FBI technicians tried to put a trace on the origins of the call from Bulger, but it was too late. The location of the call would remain unknown.
After leaving work that day, Morris began to feel a pain in his chest. He checked himself into a medical clinic, where he proceeded to go into cardiac arrest. Had it not happened when he was already at the clinic, Morris likely would have died from a heart attack that was precipitated by his phone call from Bulger.
Morris recovered. He retired from the FBI on December 31, 1995. Two years later, when he received a call from someone representing the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, Morris knew the jig was up. He cut a deal with Fred Wyshak, who was putting together a case against John Connolly. In exchange for telling all that he knew, Morris was given immunity. He testified over eight days at the Wolf hearings, which began a seemingly never-ending series of depositions, hearings, and trial testimony that was now culminating with the Bulger trial.
“Good morning, Mr. Morris,” said Wyshak.
“Good morning,” said the witness.
Morris had the unenviable position of representing the face of corruption at the trial. Connolly had been rendered useless as a witness in the eyes of both the prosecution and the defense. For more than three weeks, jurors and spectators had been listening to a steady diet of stories about Connolly that portrayed him as being at the heart of a duplicitous and criminal relationship with Bulger and Flemmi. Now here was Connolly’s supervisor, the man who helped implement that strategy.
After having Morris take the jury through a distillation of his career in law enforcement, Wyshak got to the heart of the matter. “Now, all right, did you come to know a man named James Bulger?”
“Yes,” answered Morris.
“Do you see him sitting in the courtroom today?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Would you point him out.”
“Right there,” said Morris, pointing toward the defendant.
Bulger continued to disdainfully ignore the witness.
“Indicating the defendant, Your Honor,” said the prosecutor.
“The record may so reflect,” noted Judge Casper.
Morris was asked to describe his very first meeting with Bulger. It was 1978, and he had just taken over as supervisor of the C-3 squad. Back in the early 1970s, he’d been a rank-and-file member of the squad, along with John Connolly, with whom he had developed a close friendship. Now that he had taken over as supervisor, Morris and Connolly rekindled their relationship and began to chart out a plan for making a major case against the Mafia in Boston. The linchpin, as Connolly described it, involved bringing Bulger into the fold.
“Where did you meet with Mr. Bulger?” Morris was asked.
“My home in Lexington.”
“Why did you choose that location?”
“John [Connolly], in discussing where we could possibly meet, and describing the type of relationship that he was trying to develop with Mr. Bulger, he wanted it to be pleasant surroundings, not the type of surroundings that you would ordinarily meet an informant, in an automobile, possibly in a hotel room, and so forth. He wanted Mr. Bulger to be comfortable, and essentially, he wanted him handled in a manner in which informants typically aren’t handled.”
Thus, from the beginning, Bulger was coddled by his FBI handlers. The relationship was obsequious and adoring. Morris and Connolly kissed Bulger’s ass, and before long the entire supervisory structure of the bureau would also be kissing the ass of Whitey Bulger.
After that first meeting, Morris’s descent into corruption seemed preordained. There were at least two other meetings at his home in Lexington involving Bulger and, later on, Steve Flemmi. The gangsters brought bottles of wine for their host, and Morris cooked pasta for his guests, as if he were a paramour courting a new lover. When John Connolly told Morris, “Hey, these guys really like you,” Morris beamed. He was a quasi-nerd from the Midwest, and he was liked by two of the most powerful street hoodlums in Boston. This meant a lot to Morris.
Throughout his direct examination, the former FBI supervisor detailed his acts of corruption in a mostly matter-of-fact manner. He was aided in his attempts to demystify his lack of ethics and criminal inclinations by Wyshak, whose questioning allowed Morris to persistently shift the blame to John Connolly. In Morris’s telling of events, Connolly was the engine behind the FBI’s relationship with Bulger and Flemmi. This was the prosecution’s narrative: Bulger corrupted Connolly, and then Connolly seduced Morris. The corruption spread throughout the C-3 squad, and there it ended.
With his diffident manner on the stand, which occasionally gave way to awkward moments of false humility and regret, Morris was slippery and disingenuous. He made a show of his willingness to accept responsibility for his own actions and express sorrow but at the same time consistently portrayed Connolly as the instigator of his criminal actions. It was as if he were merely along for the ride.
At one point, Wyshak asked the retired special agent if he ever had a conversation with Bulger and Flemmi about what they wanted in exchange for providing information to the FBI.
“I did not,” answered Morris.
“Did you ever have a conversation with anybody about that?”
“I asked John Connolly. . . . I don’t recall which meeting it was. I think it was at my home, and John and I were in the kitchen. And I asked, What is it that these guys want from us? And he told me, A head start.”
“What does that mean, ‘a head start’?”
“If they were going to be indicted, charged, arrested, to tip them off and let them flee.”
Wyshak then asked if the term “fair game” had come up in his conversation with Connolly about Bulger and Flemmi.
“Yes,” said Morris. “I remember Connolly using that term. I think it may have come up in connection with the circumstances surrounding the race-fix case. . . . And I remember, I’m pretty sure it was John, neither Mr. Bulger nor Mr. Flemmi, who said that they realize they are fair game. . . . If it ever came to the point that they were charged, and if one of the alternatives was to go to the judge and make their cooperation known, they did not want that.”
“So what did you understand that the term ‘fair game’ meant?”
“Well, that meant that they knew they’re engaged in criminal activity and that at some point they might get charged, and in the event that happened, they did not want their identity disclosed, and, specifically, they did not want it disclosed to a judge.”
Wyshak did not ask the obvious follow-up questions: Did you, Mr. Morris, object to the arrangement that was being suggested by Connolly and Bulger and Flemmi? Did you, as John Connolly’s supervisor, say that the FBI could never agree to such an arrangement?
In truth, if Morris had ever once said no to the various corrupt and criminal schemes that were suggested to him by his subordinate co-agent, the entire Bulger era might never have happened.
On the first day of Morris’s testimony, the court adjourned for a twenty-minute midmorning break. As the jury was led out of the courtroom, it was clear that prosecutor Brian Kelly was peeved about something. Judge Casper told the witness that he could “step down.” Morris was led out of the courtroom by a U.S. marshal.
“Everyone can be seated,” said the judge. “Counsel, before we break, Mr. Kelly, did you want to be heard on anything first?”
“I do, Your Honor,” Kelly answered, standing to address the court. “Obviously, Mr. Bulger has got a Sixth Amendment right to confront his accusers, but he doesn’t have the right to sit at the defense table and say to the witness, ‘You’re a fuckin’ liar’ when the witness testifies. Which is what he did earlier in Mr. Morris’s testimony when Morris was talking. . . . Now, I know he spent his whole life trying to intimidate people, including fifteen
-year-old boys in South Boston, but he should not be able to do that here in federal court in the midst of trial.” Kelly’s voice crackled with emotion. He asked that Judge Casper admonish Bulger to “keep his little remarks to himself.”
Bulger had mostly been a nonpresence during the proceedings so far, but he now throbbed with an anger that seemed ready to boil over. Few people had heard Bulger’s aside during Morris’s testimony—though neither Bulger nor his counsel denied that he had said it—but his reaction to Kelly’s tirade was clear for all to see. He would have strangled Kelly with his bare hands were he the Whitey Bulger of old.
As Jay Carney rose to his feet and the spectators in the courtroom rustled and buzzed in reaction, the judge interrupted. “Counsel, I did not observe that, but, Mr. Carney, do you want to be heard?”
“Your Honor,” said Carney, “I’ll speak to Mr. Bulger at break and convey the sentiments that I know your honor would want me to.”
Sensing that her effectiveness as a jurist in the case might be evaluated by this dramatic interlude, Casper quickly added, “And just for the record, Mr. Bulger, so it’s clear, you’re well served by both counsel in this case, and they are to speak for you in this courtroom at the present time. Do you understand that, sir?”
Bulger answered, “Yes, Your Honor. Yes.”
Court adjourned for recess. Bulger was led from the courtroom, and the media rushed to file their reports on the trial’s first genuinely confrontational moment.
THE DIRECT TESTIMONY of John Morris took up the better part of two full days that spanned over a weekend. The following week, on cross-examination, Hank Brennan was not about to let Morris get away with presenting himself as a dedicated civil servant who had regretfully allowed himself to be “compromised” by a junior partner. Carney set out to show that Morris was not only the person most responsible for his own demise, but that at the same time he was involved in one of the most corrupt relationships ever devised between FBI agents and an underworld figure, he was being heralded within the law enforcement bureaucracy as, according to one internal FBI evaluation, a “consistently excellent, highly motivated and capable supervisor”; and in another, “A very effective leader . . . Among the supervisory staff Morris is seen as a leader, and other supervisors rely on his leadership”; and in still another, “In the area of informant development and direction he has been directly involved in the development of one of the most valuable top echelon informants” in the bureau’s history.
While being lauded internally as an ideal FBI supervisory agent, Morris took payments of cash stuffed in envelopes from Bulger, on one occasion five thousand dollars; he received gratuities of a fancy silver wine bucket and cases of wine, slipped to him in a parking garage at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, so that the transaction would not be seen. Once, when Morris was in Glencoe, Georgia, for a law enforcement training conference, he arranged for Bulger and Connolly to purchase an airplane ticket for his secretary, Janet Noseworthy—who was also his mistress—so she could be flown down to Florida, where Morris and his paramour were put up in a condominium owned by another underworld figure.
Being bought off by gangsters was the least problematic aspect of Morris’s alternate existence as a fraudulent “exemplary agent.” In January 1980, the C-3 squad was successful in planting a Title III wiretap, an act of audio surveillance authorized by a federal warrant. A bug was planted in the headquarters of Jerry Angiulo. Known as “the Dog Pound,” Angiulo’s modest headquarters at 98 Prince Street in the North End was thought to be at the center of all decision making in the Boston Mafia. It had been a dream of the FBI since at least the fall of Raymond Patriarca, back in the early 1970s, to plant a bug at 98 Prince Street.
From the witness stand, Morris continued to peddle the fiction that Whitey Bulger had played a key role in giving the FBI information that helped make it possible to plant the bug. “Substantial assistance” was the term Morris used, though it had long ago been revealed that the placement of the bug had been aided by a hand-drawn schematic of the interior of the Angiulo headquarters that was provided not by Bulger, but by Steve Flemmi. Connolly lied, deliberately placing the information in Bulger’s file and later insisting that Bulger’s confidential informant number be added to the affidavit requesting Title III authorization to plant the bug. Morris reviewed and signed off on these fabrications.
To Connolly and Morris, the fiction was needed: Jeremiah O’Sullivan had earlier dropped Bulger from the race-fix indictment, upon request from the two agents, on the grounds that Bulger and Flemmi were necessary to take down the Mafia. Here was the “proof.”
The bug at 98 Prince remained in place for more than a year. As supervisor of the C-3 squad, Morris received regular audio surveillance reports and transcripts of the recordings. On one occasion, Morris was so impressed with the recordings that he arranged to meet Bulger and Flemmi at the Colonnade hotel in Boston. He brought along actual tapes and played them for the gangsters in the hotel room. Morris and Connolly, Bulger and Flemmi all drank wine and slapped each other on the back and listened to a tape in which Mafioso Nicky Giso talked about his girlfriend.
The impropriety of this meeting was breathtaking: the supervisor and a lead agent in the FBI’s organized crime squad playing a confidential Title III recording to two of the city’s most notorious mobsters. Morris got so drunk that Flemmi had to drive him home. Later, in a state of panic, he realized that in his drunken state he had left the 98 Prince Street tape in the room at the Colonnade. He had to rush back to the hotel and retrieve the tape.
The extent of Morris’s corruption seemed to know no bounds. In 1981, he was temporarily transferred from the C-3 squad to oversee an investigation concerning—of all things—officers of the Boston Police Department taking gratuities from known criminals. This was a subject of which Morris had become something of an expert, since he’d been taking gifts and money from two of the biggest gangsters in the city. Eventually, Morris’s investigation of the Boston police would lead to nearly a dozen officers pleading guilty to charges, with some being sent away to prison.
“You saw to it that these men inevitably lost their jobs for what they did,” said Brennan to Morris on the stand. Brennan was commenting on the damage that Morris had wrought, destroying people’s careers for doing the same things that he was doing.
“Yeah, it made me sick,” said Morris
“It made you sick, but you didn’t stop, did you?”
“Objection,” said Fred Wyshak. “Badgering the witness, Your Honor.”
“Overruled,” said the judge. Brennan was allowed the question.
Morris answered with a long, tortured explanation about when exactly he started to feel bad about what he was doing. “I changed my image of myself a long time ago,” he said.
By early 1982, Morris’s moral gauge hit empty: he was not only corrupt but also desperate to conceal his corruption. Sometime in April, he was approached by two agents from the labor racketeering squad, Gerald Montanari and Leo Brunnick. They explained to Morris that they had begun to cultivate Brian Halloran, the Southie hoodlum, as a potential informant. The two agents had come to Morris to ask him what he thought of Halloran’s suitability as a CI (confidential informant). In the course of this debriefing, Montanari and Brunnick also revealed to Morris that Halloran was claiming that he had been offered the contract to murder Roger Wheeler, owner of World Jai Lai, by Bulger and Flemmi, and that he had turned it down.
Mention of the Wheeler murder jangled Morris’s nerves. Wheeler had been gunned down in Tulsa, and local and state police in Oklahoma had already traced a link to Boston. The investigator in charge—an aggressive Oklahoma state policeman named Mike Huff—had contacted Boston FBI with questions about Bulger, Flemmi, et al. As the FBI’s liaison with the Oklahoma investigation, Morris had assigned John Connolly. It was Connolly’s job to protect the FBI’s prize informants.
In his conversation with the two agents, Morris was further alarmed to hear that it wa
s their intention to wire up Brian Halloran and have him meet with John Callahan, the former president of World Jai Lai. Morris was aware that Callahan had quite possibly initiated the murder of Roger Wheeler. Any conversation between Halloran and Callahan, memorialized on a secret recording device, would be devastating to Bulger and Flemmi.
Not long after his conversation with Montanari and Brunnick, Morris was in his office when John Connolly entered. Connolly had been away from the office taking a master’s course in public administration at Harvard University. Although Morris’s conversation with Montanari and Brunnick had been confidential, Morris blurted out “spontaneously” to Connolly that Halloran was being cultivated as a CI. Morris noted that Halloran was spilling the beans about the Wheeler murder and would imminently be used to gather potentially devastating evidence against Bulger and Flemmi via a wired-up conversation with Callahan.
Special Agent Connolly didn’t need to be told more than once; he got the message. Within a matter of days, Connolly went directly to Bulger and told him that he had a potential problem he needed to take care of: Brian Halloran.
On the witness stand, Morris looked stricken. The deviousness of his former self was an unpleasant memory, like looking in the mirror and seeing something ugly, not the person you perceive yourself to be. Morris squirmed in his seat. He had testified in court about these facts many times over the last sixteen years, but that didn’t make it any easier. Of all his many crimes, this may have been one that Morris, a Catholic, knew could result in the eternal damnation of his soul.
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