Mercurio’s job was to lead them to the Holy Grail. That wasn’t going to be easy. At the time, there was a moratorium on inducting new soldati into the New England Mafia. So the agents and Mercurio, with an assist from Bulger and Flemmi, needed to create a scenario that would lead to the Mafia having to induct new members. Mercurio fomented a dispute between two factions of the Mafia. On the wiretap at Vanessa’s, the FBI’s C-3 squad heard it being decided that there was going to be a series of mob hits. What the agents did next might be considered shocking, except that it was a continuation of what had occurred during the Teddy Deegan murder twenty years earlier. The agents, though they had foreknowledge, did not warn the targets about the pending hits.
One of the targets was Frank Salemme, former partner of Steve Flemmi. Salemme had returned to Boston after a nine-year stint in prison and, in the wake of the Angiulo convictions, was looking to take over as boss. The FBI and its informants—Bulger, Flemmi, and Sonny Mercurio—were looking to use Salemme as a stepping-stone on their way to the Holy Grail.
On the morning of June 16, 1989, Salemme sat down at an outside table at the International House of Pancakes in Saugus, Massachusetts, to have breakfast and some coffee. Four gunmen opened fire. It was a sloppy attempt. Bullets flew high and off the mark, shattering glass and sending innocent bystanders ducking for cover. Salemme was hit multiple times but survived.
The second hit that had been planned—and overheard on the Vanessa wire—was successful. A New England Mafioso named William “Billy” Grasso was shot in the back of the head, his body left alongside the Connecticut River.
The FBI investigators and prosecutors had stood by and let the mayhem take place, knowing that it would lead them to their goal. Sure enough, the induction ceremony transpired, on October 29, 1989, at a private home of a mobster in Medford, Massachusetts. Present at the ceremony was Sonny Mercurio.
Numerous criminal trials rose out of the induction ceremony tapes, one of them involving a client of Tony Cardinale. The attorney still had no idea of Bulger and Flemmi’s role, and he was unaware that Sonny Mercurio was an informant—though co-counsel knew there had to be a rat for the feds to have known where the ceremony was going to take place. Cardinale and the other attorneys in the case discussed who it might be. “It was beyond anything that we could imagine that a guy like Sonny Mercurio could be an informant,” said Tony.
Then he listened to the tape of the induction. Just as the ceremony was about to begin, someone in the room had gone over and turned down the television. Said Cardinale to the other attorneys, “Find out who turned down that TV and we know who our informant is.” The person who turned down the TV was Sonny Mercurio.
The induction ceremony tapes were a tremendous coup. U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh and FBI director William Sessions flew in from the nation’s capital for a press conference announcing the arrest and indictment of twenty-one mobsters. Director Sessions later sent a personal letter to Connolly praising his talent for cultivating informants. Connolly was given a fifteen-hundred-dollar bonus and held up as the standard of an enterprising special agent.
“They got what they wanted,” said Cardinale. “The Holy Grail. Using Bulger and Flemmi they got Mercurio, and through him they fomented a dispute. Billy Grasso was killed. They knew he was going to get killed. And Frank Salemme was supposed to get killed. And luckily a bunch of little kids and mothers didn’t get killed that morning outside the pancake house in Saugus. The FBI knew it, planned it, pushed it. So this is what this Bulger trial is all about. This is why the FBI was willing to get into bed with such reprehensible lowlifes and give them the run of the town.”
Cardinale finished his grappa and shook his head in amazement. When he looked back over the last thirty years in Boston, like many people, he still found it unsettling. “A big part of what I do as a criminal defense lawyer,” he said, “is to try and stop cops, prosecutors, and judges from playing God. Because these guys couldn’t care less if they have a guy who is guilty or not guilty. They’ll manufacture evidence; they’ll do whatever it takes to secure a conviction. And the way they can shave in the morning without slitting their throats is by saying to themselves, ‘If he didn’t do this, he did something else. Fuck him.’ That’s playing God. And it shouldn’t be allowed to happen that way.”
At the Bulger trial, there was little mention of Sonny Mercurio, the attempted murder of Salemme, or the Medford induction ceremony, nor did it seem likely that these events would be touched upon in any depth. The prosecution had no desire to cast a bad light on what had been some of the most illustrious mafia prosecutions in the very jurisdiction and office for whom they worked, the very office that was now prosecuting Whitey Bulger. As for Bulger’s defense lawyers, they were claiming that their client had never been an informant, so a detailed explication of how these prosecutions came about was not in their interest.
THE BEGINNINGS OF an effort to burrow through layers of deceit in the criminal justice system in Boston occurred in May 2001. It had its origins not in the city itself, but in Washington, D.C. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched an investigation into the FBI’s use of criminal informants. Chaired by Representative Dan Burton, a conservative Republican from Indiana, the committee announced its intentions to hold public hearings, both in Boston and in the nation’s capital, at which many prominent players in law enforcement, both past and present, would be subpoenaed to testify.
The hearings are best remembered for bringing about the public demise of former state senator William Bulger, who since his retirement in 1996 had gone on to be appointed president of the University of Massachusetts. Bulger fought the subpoena, and when called before the committee he took the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify, on the grounds of self-incrimination. Later, the committee voted to give him full immunity from prosecution, and on June 19, 2003, Billy Bulger appeared before the committee in Washington, D.C., at the Rayburn House Office Building.
Bulger denied many things that day, including having ever heard of the Winter Hill Mob. The committee tried to get at Billy Bulger’s close friendship with John Connolly and other FBI agents affiliated with the C-3 squad.
It was common knowledge in South Boston that Connolly and the senator were close. Throughout his time with the organized crime squad, Connolly routinely brought fellow FBI agents over to Bulger’s office in the statehouse, where they were treated as though they were having a sitting with the pope. The understanding was that if they did right by the senator—which meant looking out for his brother, Whitey—then the senator would take care of them. When Connolly retired in 1990, Senator Bulger was a featured speaker at his retirement party and said of the agent, “John Connolly is the personification of loyalty, not only to his friends and not only to the job that he holds but also to the highest principles. He’s never forgotten them.” Senator Bulger helped Connolly land a cushy retirement job as head of security at Boston Edison, a public utility.
Nicholas Gianturco, John J. Kehoe Jr., Robert Sheehan, and other FBI agents also went to work at Boston Edison upon retirement. In his testimony at the congressional hearing, Bulger professed to have no recollection of having helped these people and even went so far as to produce a signed affidavit from the CEO at Boston Edison claiming that he had nothing to do with these hirings.
Then there was Dennis Condon, Whitey Bulger’s first FBI handler in the early 1970s and a regular at Billy’s St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts over the years. On a written recommendation from the senator, Condon landed a post-FBI job as commissioner of the Massachusetts State Police.
Even though he had been granted immunity, Bulger’s testimony was a study in obfuscation. One thing he couldn’t deny was that since his brother had gone on the lam, he had spoken with Whitey in a private phone call that was prearranged by Kevin Weeks, who testified about the call before a grand jury. By admitting that this call took place, Bulger was acknowledging that he lied to FBI agents who had asked him, years later, if he had any con
tact with his brother. Bulger’s immunity deal precluded his being charged with a crime, but it was an ethical impropriety that cost him his job as president of UMass.
Billy Bulger’s testimony garnered the headlines, but it was not the most revealing information to be unearthed at the hearing. Most noteworthy was the committee’s unprecedented exploration of the Teddy Deegan murder case. That line of inquiry immediately set off a high-stakes struggle between committee lawyers and the FBI over whether or not the bureau would be compelled to produce documents that the committee requested. The Boston SAC, Charles Prouty, made a request directly to President George W. Bush that they not be forced to turn over documents. Prouty said publicly, “We didn’t conceal information. We didn’t frame anyone.”
One day before the committee was scheduled to begin hearing testimony, President Bush invoked executive privilege, the first time he had done so in his presidency, and ordered the attorney general to not turn over documents. The lengths the FBI was willing to go to keep the Deegan case buried were extreme. Eventually, after five months of legal wrangling, a compromise was reached. The executive privilege order was lifted and some documents were released, but they were heavily redacted.
Even for those who were aware of malfeasance in the criminal justice system in New England, the findings of the committee were devastating. Nearly forty years after Teddy Deegan was gunned down in an alleyway in Chelsea, the public learned for the first time the full magnitude of the conspiracy. They learned there was an illegal wiretap conversation in which Barboza and Jimmy Flemmi asked for permission to murder Deegan from Raymond Patriarca. The committee learned that the FBI had been told after the murder that they were pursuing a wrongful prosecution, and they buried this information. A detailed file-by-file, memo-by-memo re-creation of the Deegan case showed either knowing or willfully ignorant collaboration at many levels of the criminal justice system.
One person who was not aware of the conspiracy was Jack Zalkind, lead prosecutor at the Deegan trial, who was deliberately left in the dark. After being shown documents relevant to his case, Zalkind told the committee, “I must tell you this, that I was outraged—outraged—at the fact that if [the exculpatory documents] had ever been shown to me, we wouldn’t be sitting here. . . . I certainly never would have allowed myself to prosecute this case having that knowledge. No way. . . . That information should have been in my hands. It should have been in the hands of the defense attorneys. It is outrageous, it’s terrible, and the trial shouldn’t have gone forward.”
Over the course of the next fifteen months, in periodic public hearings in front of the committee. many key players were called to testify, including:
H. Paul Rico—Seared by his years in the Florida sun, surly and unrepentant, Rico came before the committee in May 2001. Having retired as a legendary and highly decorated agent, Rico testified as if he had nothing to fear. In the hallway outside the committee hearing room, he stuck his finger in the chest of committee counsel James Wilson and said, “What are you going to do to me, Mr. Wilson? I’m seventy-six years old. What the fuck are you going to do?”
In his testimony, Rico admitted that a memo, written by him, had first been sent to his supervisor in the organized crime squad noting that a hit on Deegan had been discussed and authorized. That memo was initialized and forwarded to the SAC of the Boston division, then sent to a regional supervisor in Washington, D.C. Eventually that memo landed on the desk of Director J. Edgar Hoover, who micromanaged every aspect of the informant program and was kept abreast of the Deegan case. The FBI, all the way to the top man, allowed the murder of Deegan to take place. They knew their star witness, Barboza, was involved. They knowingly allowed Barboza to take the stand and give a version of the killing that was markedly different from what they were hearing from other sources.
Many people within the criminal justice system had reason to believe the Deegan convictions were tainted, and they did nothing. Two of the four men wrongfully convicted were sentenced to the death penalty and incarcerated on death row. Two of them died in prison before the truth became known.
A congressman asked Rico, “Does it bother you that an innocent man spent thirty years in jail?”
Said the witness, “It would probably be a nice movie or something.”
“Do you have any remorse?”
“Remorse for what?”
“So you don’t really care much and you don’t have any remorse. Is that true?”
“What do you want, tears?” answered the agent.
Paul Rico would accept no blame and faced no consequences for the framing of innocent men. In October 2003 he was indicted for his role in another crime, the murder of Roger Wheeler, owner of World Jai Lai. He was arrested at his condominium in Miami Shores by Sergeant Mike Huff of the Tulsa Police Department, lead investigator in the Wheeler homicide case.
Three months later, at the age of seventy-eight, Rico died in a Tulsa hospital, where he had been moved from prison while awaiting trial.1
Dennis Condon—As Rico’s partner, Condon was another key player in the cultivation of Barboza and the fraudulent Deegan murder convictions. Condon did not appear before the committee, but he was deposed under oath by committee investigators, and his deposition was an integral aspect of the committee’s final report.
Condon was forced to admit that Barboza had made it clear to him and Paul Rico that he would never testify against his friend Jimmy the Bear Flemmi, who had been an accomplice in the Deegan murder. Barboza told the agents, in so many words, If you put me on the stand I will lie to protect my friend. This fact was memorialized in FBI 209 field reports and airtels that went from field agents to supervisors all the way to Hoover.
By this time, Barboza had been a witness at the Patriarca trial and helped deliver the biggest mafia prosecution in the history of the bureau. Part of protecting the sanctity of the Patriarca conviction involved preserving the credibility of Barboza. That’s why the FBI was willing to put him on the stand and have him commit perjury.
When Dennis Condon was first approached in 1997 and asked about James Bulger, he said he had no recollection of ever having met the man. It didn’t take long to jog his memory; there were voluminous FBI file reports of his having opened Bulger as an informant in 1971. At the Wolf hearings in 1998, Condon’s friend and fellow agent John Morris and Steve Flemmi both testified about Condon attending dinner gatherings at Morris’s home in Lexington, in the company of Bulger and Flemmi.
The FBI and the criminal justice system in New England had for so long been successful at keeping their dirty secrets buried, that for someone like Condon, who was a devout Catholic with a sterling public reputation, the revelations were a nightmare come true. Though he was never indicted for his actions or legally held accountable in any way, when Condon died of natural causes in 2009, he did so knowing that his name will forever be associated with the FBI’s legacy of corruption in Boston, from the Deegan murder case to the Bulger scandal.
Edward “Ted” Harrington—In the late 1960s, as an assistant U.S. attorney, Harrington seemed willing to do almost anything to protect Joe Barboza. Under questioning by the Burton committee, Harrington admitted that, previous to the Deegan murder trial, he reviewed a confidential FBI memo that revealed Barboza and Jimmy the Bear Flemmi were behind the Deegan murder and had, they believed, been given permission to kill Deegan by Patriarca. That memo included references to the gypsy wire planted at Patriarca’s office in Providence. Harrington was required by law to have released that evidence to lawyers representing the codefendants at the Deegan murder trial. He did not, which was possibly a crime or at least an act of criminal negligence. Confronted with these facts, Harrington told the committee that he simply forgot about the memo.
“For you to say you didn’t remember it stretches my imagination,” said Burton.
Harrington conceded nothing. When asked if he regretted having flown to California with agents Rico and Condon to testify as a character witness at Barboza’s murd
er trial, Harrington said no. To him, defending Barboza was a consequence of the need to preserve the government’s informant program, which had became the single most important tool in law enforcement’s war against the mafia.
For his actions, Harrington received kudos and rose in his career from an assistant U.S. attorney to chief of the New England Organized Crime Strike Force to U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, and, finally, the crown jewel, when in 1987 he was nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan. Judge Harrington presided over criminal cases in Boston for the next twenty-five years.
In 2008, during the trial of John Connolly on murder charges in Miami, Harrington put his reputation on the line and took the stand on behalf of the defense. Just as he had with Barboza forty years earlier, he was there to defend the accused on the grounds that he had been a valuable compatriot in the government’s war against organized crime.
Much had changed since 1969, when, at Barboza’s murder trial in California, Harrington portrayed the war against the Mob as a battle between clearly defined good and evil. By the time of Connolly’s trial, the story of how Bulger and Flemmi had been protected by multiple FBI agents, a top organized crime prosecutor, and higher-ups in the DOJ, and kept out on the street to commit murders and other crimes, had entered the public consciousness. Despite Judge Harrington’s testimony on behalf the disgraced agent, Connolly was found guilty of murder in the second degree.
In September 2013, Harrington retired from the federal bench as a highly lauded and esteemed veteran of the criminal justice system.
Jeremiah O’Sullivan—Members of the Burton committee were especially intrigued by the prospect of having former prosecutor O’Sullivan come before them as a witness.
Four years earlier, O’Sullivan had suffered a heart attack and missed having to testify at the Wolf hearings. At the time, defense lawyer Tony Cardinale noted that back in 1980, prosecutor O’Sullivan had fought vociferously when Mafioso Larry Zannino used a medical claim that he was too sick to come to court. O’Sullivan challenged the claim and had Zannino dragged into court, even though he was in a wheelchair and on an oxygen tank. Hearing that O’Sullivan was now utilizing a similar tactic, defense lawyers in Boston said he had “pulled a Zannino.”
Where the Bodies Were Buried Page 33