Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (32 page)

BERGERON believed Bulger and Flemmi had murdered McIntyre. He didn’t know exactly how they’d found out about his cooperation, but he suspected the FBI. Bergeron and, especially, DEA agents Reilly and Boeri already knew about the rumors circulating throughout law enforcement in the Boston area that Bulger and Flemmi were informants for the FBI. In planning for Operation Beans, they had consulted with trooper Rick Fraelick, who provided the new team of investigators with photographs of the targets, informant reports, and other intelligence that state troopers had assembled. He also gave them a full accounting of the failed bid at electronic surveillance at the Lancaster Street garage in Boston. Fraelick was convinced the FBI had “dimed them out.”

The new investigators were not naive. They harbored suspicions about Bulger’s possible ties to the FBI. But no one had hard proof. From their own informants, they also knew that Bulger was supremely confident, that he liked to boast about outfoxing anyone who might try to pursue him. Bulger would rank on the state troopers, calling the failed Lancaster Street garage effort “a joke.” It was similar to the wiseguy bluster the troopers had witnessed from their perch in the rooming house, spying Bulger posing outside the garage, sucking in his stomach.

In fact Bulger had taken the Lancaster Street garage challenge to heart. Post-Lancaster, the ever-wary Bulger and Flemmi had grown increasingly careful in their ways. Bulger installed a sophisticated alarm system in the condo he shared with Greig. He did the same with the 1984 Black Chevy Caprice he and Flemmi drove. (The car was registered to Kevin Weeks’s sister Patricia, who worked as a clerk for the Boston police.) In the condo Bulger now always had the TV and stereo turned up. In the car he always blared the radio and a police scanner crackling with noise to mask his low talk. Then at the end of his day Bulger parked the car right up against the condo’s door, where he could watch it.

Moreover, Bulger and Flemmi had further insulated themselves, especially Bulger. Instead of exposing himself to a steady stream of underworld figures—as he had each day at the Lancaster Street garage—Bulger pulled back. Bulger, one informant told investigators in 1984, “will converse with subordinates only when necessary. Subordinates cannot directly contact Bulger and Flemmi. Contact is directed to George Kaufman, and Kaufman will relay information.”

The extra Bulger caution was in addition to his already well-established countersurveillance habits, such as the driving techniques he employed to check to see if anyone was following him: suddenly pulling over; suddenly reversing direction, especially on a one-way street; suddenly veering from the high-speed lane on the highway to take an exit. Bergeron and DEA agents Reilly and Boeri took note that Bulger and Flemmi seemed to function on high alert at all times.

Bulger and Flemmi and the new investigators periodically bumped into one another. Bergeron and Boeri were tailing Bulger one summer night along Dorchester Avenue in Southie when Bulger spotted them. Bulger waved and smiled. But Whitey wasn’t always so jaunty. Bergeron and another detective one night set up surveillance at the condo in Quincy with a white Ford van the DEA had provided. It was 2:02 in the morning, and Bulger came out of unit 101, got into his car, and drove around the parking lot while staring suspiciously at the van. Then he parked, got out, and looked into the van’s rear window. He walked all around the van, checking out the front plate. Visibly agitated, he went back inside the condo. Investigators hustled over to drive the van away, and as they did, Bulger appeared in the rearview mirror in a car that pulled out of the shadows by the Dumpster.

The investigators realized from these cat-and-mouse encounters that Bulger and Flemmi were aware of their interest in them. But even while recognizing that Operation Beans was unfolding in a high-risk atmosphere, they never thought of not going for it. Bergeron, Boeri, and Reilly had frequently worked over the possibility that Bulger and Flemmi were FBI informants. But in the end, so what? The bottom line in 1984 was actually quite simple. Bulger and Flemmi, Reilly concluded, “were the strongest organized crime figures remaining in Boston, since the recent downfall of the Angiulo organization.” Even if they were informants, noted Reilly, “informants aren’t given any particular free pass.” They all recognized it would be a lot easier to build a case if they could line up witnesses to testify in court against Bulger and Flemmi, but that wasn’t realistic, not with Bulger’s insular lifestyle, not with the widespread fear of Bulger that persisted in the underworld, not when men like John McIntyre disappeared off the face of the earth. Thus, the central game plan for Operation Beans was to capture Bulger’s own words. For much of 1984 the investigators worked to assemble the probable cause they’d need to win a judge’s okay to install bugs.

Even though the FBI was notified as a matter of courtesy in April 1984, the goal in putting together Operation Beans was to limit the FBI’s knowledge and participation in the drug investigation. “I wanted to keep it away from the FBI and go on with it,” said Reilly. The case, he said, was, “DEA initiated, DEA sustained, DEA funded. We did everything.” The whole operation was specifically set up to try to keep certain Boston FBI agents from knowing about it. That autumn, when agents from the FBI’s crack “tech team” arrived from New York City to consult with the DEA on installing a bug in Bulger’s car and condo, the out-of-town FBI agents were ordered not to check in with the Boston FBI office. The two local FBI agents who were eventually loaned to the DEA to help monitor the bugs were newcomers to the city. The office for Operation Beans was even moved off-site to the Fargo Building in downtown Boston, away from the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, where DEA agents and FBI agents often passed each other, ate lunch together, and might gossip about cases.

BUT the FBI did know, and the way Flemmi saw it, the FBI’s role in Operation Beans was “no more than a surreptitious effort to ensure that the investigation was ultimately unsuccessful.” Connolly, it turned out, had caught wind of Operation Beans right from the start—early on in 1984, even before the investigation had a name and before the DEA had assembled its plan of action. Immediately after the telex was sent from Boston notifying FBI headquarters about DEA’s planned investigation, a top FBI official in Washington, D.C., named Sean McWeeney picked up the telephone to call Jim Ring. McWeeney was chief of the Organized Crime Section at FBI headquarters.

Instead of Ring, John Connolly took the call.

“Aren’t these our guys?” McWeeney asked the handler.

And if Connolly knew, Bulger and Flemmi knew. They continued to meet regularly throughout the year, and, said Flemmi, the talk often turned to the intensifying interest the DEA and Quincy police showed in them. They had a kind of cross-fertilization going, each sharing with the other whatever information they’d picked up. Connolly got additional information from other agents, either directly or through Ring. It would have been helpful to have John Morris’s input as well, but not only was Morris no longer running the squad, he was out of town: the former supervisor had been dispatched to Florida on a special assignment and would not return until early 1985.

During one key session in September 1984, Bulger and Flemmi and Ring and Connolly huddled at Connolly’s apartment in South Boston. Connolly’s apartment had been chosen because of all the cops spotted skulking around Bulger’s condo all hours of the night. The foursome, recalled Flemmi, had an “animated discussion” about Operation Beans. Flemmi and Bulger made their self-serving denials to Ring about the drugs. Ring and Connolly told them not to worry, insisting that he and Bulger “hang in there and stay, you know, stay on the team.” In addition, Bulger and Flemmi were told that Operation Beans was working out of the Fargo Building in Boston. This enabled Bulger to stake out the building and pick up the makes, models, and plates of the undercover cars the investigators were driving.

By the time DEA investigators, on Christmas Eve, won a court order to place a wiretap on George Kaufman’s telephone, Flemmi and Bulger were one step ahead. John Connolly had provided a holiday treat: a warning about the telephone wiretap. Thus, instead of capturing criminal conversations, all DEA agents Reilly and Boeri overheard was Flemmi talking nonsense or in code to George Kaufman. The agents never picked up Bulger using the phone at all.

Given the heads-up, it was a wonder that Bergeron and the DEA’s Reilly and Boeri actually succeeded in planting microphones in Bulger’s car and condo. But they did do it, briefly, for a few weeks in 1985. The DEA agents and Bergeron had been left to their own devices after the FBI technical team called in for a consultation was unable to offer any surefire method to implant a microphone in Bulger’s car and condo. Both contained sophisticated alarm systems designed to detect any intrusion inside the condo or the car. The technical team, looking at the condo and the car from a distance, concluded that unless the local agents could come up with the codes to defeat the alarms, there was no way agents could sneak inside to install the bugs. The other option the FBI mentioned was replacing Bulger’s car with an exact duplicate wired for sound. Reilly considered that proposal ridiculous. After a day the FBI tech team returned to New York. Their anemic proposals simply fueled Reilly’s worries about the FBI, even if the tech team had been ordered not to tell local FBI agents about being in town. “I thought they didn’t put their best effort forward.”

So Reilly, Boeri, and Bergeron took matters into their own hands. They obtained a Chevy exactly like Bulger’s and began studying it, looking for a way to insert a bug without having to break into the car. They found a point of entry low on one of the door panels, and they practiced drilling into it until they could install a microphone that worked. They took the same approach with the condo—they practiced drilling into window sills to plant a bug from the outside.

In early 1985, under the cover of darkness, the agents got a bug inserted into the condo’s window. “The bug worked fine,” Bergeron said. The problem, he said, was that Bulger blasted the stereo and television once Flemmi arrived, and the two gangsters would go upstairs to talk business. The attempt was a bust.

Then, on February 2, 1985, while Bulger slept, the agents installed a bug in the door panel of the black Chevy. But the next day, after Bulger got into his car and drove into South Boston, all the agents got was an earful of road noise. The microphone was picking up the bump and grind of the car’s wheels turning along the highway. Even after repositioning the bug the next night, the agents were faced with a persistent “lack of clarity” in catching Bulger talk. Part of the problem was that the technology they’d been forced to use had severe limitations. They were using a tiny device that transmitted a signal to a surveillance vehicle, where the actual recordings of the conversations were made. This meant that their ability to tape anything depended on keeping the van close to Bulger’s car—no easy task. Moreover, the agents were always competing with the road noise and Bulger’s habit of playing the car radio as he and Flemmi chatted quietly, managing their affairs in a general state of wariness.

It was a constant struggle to decipher who exactly was talking in the car and what they were saying. The best night came on February 17, 1985, with the two DEA agents and Bergeron tailing Bulger and Flemmi to a meeting with George Kaufman at Triple O’s. It was after 10:00 P.M. when Bulger and Flemmi emerged from the bar and drove off. Fighting through the radio and road noise, the agents then heard Bulger and Flemmi talking about the revised underworld order. They heard the gangsters talking about Howie Winter, who was due soon to come out of prison. “Fuck Howie,” Bulger said.

The agents heard the talk veer briefly toward drugs.

“This fuckin’ coke deal,” said Flemmi.

“I’m running the business and everything over the phone,” replied Bulger.

It was tantalizing stuff, but never more than a tease. They got snatches of talk about money, about “drug outlets,” and about Bulger’s gambling operations. They even captured what they thought was a reference to one of the local FBI agents, but they didn’t know what it meant: “Connolly has been a little fuckin’ nervous,” Flemmi remarked at one point.