Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal
Read Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal Online
Authors: Dick Lehr,Gerard O'Neill
Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Political Science, #Law Enforcement, #Sociology, #Urban, #True Crime, #Organized Crime
CHAPTER FIVE - Win, Place, and Show
CHAPTER EIGHT - Prince Street Hitman
CHAPTER NINE - Fine Food, Fine Wine, Dirty Money
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Bulgertown, USA
CHAPTER TWELVE - The Bulger Myth
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Shades of Whitey
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Connolly Talk
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Secrets Exposed
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Fred Wyshak
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Heller’s Café
CHAPTER NINETEEN - In for a Penny, in for a Pound
CHAPTER TWENTY - The Party’s Over
Black Mass
“A parable of what happens when law enforcement officers get too close to their informers. It is a story that the FBI almost succeeded in suppressing.
Black Mass
should prompt a re-evaluation of the uses and misuses of informers by law enforcement officials throughout the country.”
—Alan Dershowitz
,
author of
Reversal of Fortune: Inside the Claus Von Bulow Case
,
The New York Times Book Review
“This is a heartbreaking and enraging story of corruption and crime, but it has its heroes, especially Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. These reporters were among the first to shine light on the shadowy collusion of heinous murderers and an FBI cut loose from its moral center. Now, with this powerful book, Lehr and O’Neill bring the whole story into the open.
Black Mass
is a work of rare lucidity, high drama, journalistic integrity, and plain courage.”
—James Carroll, author of
An American Requiem
and
Boston Globe
columnist
“More than an exposé on the abuses of power,
Black Mass
tells of the shameful betrayal of all things decent.... Lehr and O’Neill give us all the details with a journalistic precision that does not sacrifice the power of the story. After reading
Black Mass
, you might wonder if any of us really knows who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”
—Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
“What a marvelous read
Black Mass
is.”
—Dominick Dunne, author of
Justice: Crimes, Trials and Punishments
“A jaw-dropping, true life tale of how two thugs corrupted the FBI ... a disturbing account of corruption, blind ambition, and official complicity in dark deeds.”
—
The Baltimore Sun
“You don’t have to be a Mafia buff to enjoy and appreciate the story as told in
Black Mass
....
Black Mass
is all about the nation’s premier law enforcement agency gone bad, with two or more of their own leading the way. . . . What makes
Black Mass
simply great is not the fantastic reporting and writing of the sordid story, but the way the two authors bring readers into the world of South Boston. The story reveals the parochial ‘clan’ attitude that prevails in the neighborhood where one’s word is higher measure of a man than his life’s accomplishments.... It is a great story, a great book, and a rare look at how deadly boyhood friendships in a neighborhood like ‘Southie’ can be.”
—
The Providence Journal
“The book is a great read—it reels you in and holds you. O’Neill and Lehr have the remarkable ability to put you in the room and on the street where the action takes place. The dialogue is vital, gutsy, down and dirty.”
—William Bratton, author of
Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic
(with Peter Knobler),
The Boston Globe
“[Lehr and O’Neill] vividly capture the turbulent culture and conflicting loyalties of the Boston underworld.”
—
Library Journal
“Black Mass is the hair-raising true story of the cozy and corrupt relationship between the FBI, Bulger, and his sidekick Steven the ‘Rifleman’ Flemmi ... an unholy alliance that shifted the balance of criminal power in Boston from the Italians to the Irish and left Bulger and Flemmi shielded from prosecution for two decades.... Lehr and O’Neill assemble a breathtaking account of corruption, crime, and gross legal negligence.”
—
The Legal Times
“A triumph of investigative reporting, this full-bodied true-crime saga by two
Boston Globe
reporters is a cautionary tale about FBI corruption and the abuse of power.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“An eye-opening true-crimer. . . . The authors offer a pile of evidence that (in South Boston at least) politics is all too local.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“
Black Mass
tells a story of abuse of power and betrayal by those sworn to protect the public and uphold the law. It leaves me wondering whether standard operating procedures and agent-informant relationships throughout the country should be reviewed.”
—
The Federal Lawyer
“The corruption laid out by Lehr and O’Neill is pervasive and horrifying enough to make even the most inveterate cynic gag.”
—
The Boston Phoenix
ONE SUMMER DAY in 1948, a shy kid in short pants named John Connolly wandered into a corner drugstore with a couple of his pals. The boys were looking to check out the candy at the store on the outskirts of the Old Harbor housing project in South Boston, where they all lived.
“There’s Whitey Bulger,” one of the boys whispered.
The legendary Whitey Bulger: skinny, taut, and tough-looking, with the full head of lightning-blond hair that inspired cops to nickname him Whitey, even if he hated the name and preferred his real name, Jimmy. He was the phantom tough-guy teen who ran with the Shamrocks gang.
Bulger caught the boys staring and impulsively offered to set up the bar with ice cream cones all around. Two boys eagerly named their flavors. But little John Connolly hesitated, heeding his mother’s instructions not to take anything from strangers. When Bulger asked him about his abstinence, the other boys giggled about his mother’s rule. Bulger then took charge. “Hey, kid, I’m no stranger,” he told Connolly. “Your mother and father are from Ireland. My mother and father are from Ireland. I’m no stranger.”
Whitey asked again: What kind of cone you want?
In a soft voice Connolly said vanilla. Bulger gladly hoisted the boy onto the counter to receive his treat.
It was the first time John ever met Whitey. Many years later he would say the thrill of meeting Bulger by chance that day was “like meeting Ted Williams.”
IN THE SPRING of 1988 we set out to write for the
Boston Globe
the story of two brothers, Jim “Whitey” Bulger and his younger brother, Billy. In a city with a history as long and rich as Boston’s, brimming with historical figures of all kinds, the Bulgers were living legends. Each was at the top of his game. Whitey, fifty-eight, was the city’s most powerful gangster, a reputed killer. Billy Bulger, fifty-four, was the most powerful politician in Massachusetts, the longest-serving president in the state senate’s 208-year history. Each possessed a reputation for cunning and ruthlessness, shared traits they exercised in their respective worlds.
It was a quintessential Boston saga, a tale of two brothers who’d grown up in a housing project in the most insular of Irish neighborhoods, South Boston—“Southie,” as it was often known. In their early years Whitey, the unruly firstborn, was frequently in court and never in high school. There were street fights and wild car chases, all of which had a kind of Hollywood flair. During the 1940s he’d driven a car onto the street-car tracks and raced through the old Broadway station as shocked passengers stared from the crowded platform. With a scally cap on his head and a blonde seated next to him, he waved and honked to the crowd. Then he was gone. His brother Billy set off in the opposite direction. He studied—history, the classics, and, lastly, the law. He entered politics.
Both made news, but their life stories had never been assembled. So that spring we set out with two other
Globe
reporters to change all that. Christine Chinlund, whose interests lay in politics, focused on Billy Bulger. Kevin Cullen, the city’s best police reporter at that time, looked into Whitey. We swung between the two, with Lehr eventually working mostly with Cullen and O’Neill overseeing the whole affair. Even though we usually did investigative work, this project was seen as an in-depth biographical study of two of the city’s most colorful and beguiling brothers.
We’d all decided that central to Whitey Bulger’s story was his so-called charmed life. To be sure, Whitey had once served nine years of hard time in federal prison, including a few years at Alcatraz, for a series of armed bank robberies back in the 1950s. But ever since his return to Boston in 1965 he’d never been arrested once, not even for a traffic infraction. Meanwhile, his climb through the ranks of the Boston underworld was relentless. From feared foot soldier in the Winter Hill gang, he’d risen to star status as the city’s most famous underworld boss. He had teamed up along the way with the killer Stevie “The Rifleman” Flemmi, and the conventional wisdom was that they were taking an uninterrupted underworld ride to fame and riches because of their ability to outfox investigators who tried to build cases against them.
But by the late 1980s the cops, state troopers, and federal drug agents had a new theory about Bulger’s unblemished record. Sure, they said, the man is wily and extremely careful, but his Houdini-like elusiveness went beyond nature. To them, the fix was in. Bulger, they argued, was connected to the FBI, and the FBI had secretly provided him cover all these years. How else to explain the complete and utter failure of all their attempts to target him? But there was a catch to this theory: not one of these theorists could show us proof beyond a doubt.