Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (53 page)

TONY CARDINALE, the lawyer who had kicked open the Pandora’s box hiding the FBI’s affair with Bulger and Flemmi, began the day the ruling finally came out with a workout at the Boston Athletic Club. Then he picked up his associate John Mitchell, who’d flown in from New York City, at his hotel. They swung by the courthouse, where a clerk handed the lawyers a box containing seven copies of the ruling. Immediately Cardinale dispatched a messenger to take a copy down to the Plymouth prison for Frank Salemme. Then, huddled in shirtsleeves in Cardinale’s office, the Dunkin Donuts coffee and donuts spread out on the desk, the two lawyers opened up the thick ruling and began reading.

Boston Herald
columnist Howie Carr would later wisecrack that Mark Wolf must have fashioned himself the Edward Gibbon of New England organized crime, penning
The Rise and Fall of the Bulger Empire:
it ran 661 pages. Cardinale and Mitchell both enjoyed the way Wolf opened his treatise, quoting from Lord Acton. “In 1861,” the judge began, “Lord Acton wrote that ‘every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice. ’” To that the judge added: “This case demonstrates that he was right.”

The donuts sat uneaten. The lawyers couldn’t put the ruling down. The legal part—the immediate impact on the status of the racketeering case—was inconclusive. For example, the judge refused to find that all of the protection the FBI had provided Bulger and Flemmi—much of it illegal—amounted to blanket immunity from prosecution. But he had decided that some of the wiretap evidence was tainted by past FBI promises to Bulger and Flemmi and that those tapes would never be used against them. The judge said he was going to suppress that evidence, and possibly more. With that, the racketeering case seemed to be hanging by a thread. But to reach a final decision on the disputed evidence the judge had decided he would need still more information, drawn from even more pretrial hearings. “In essence,” concluded Wolf, “the record for deciding Flemmi’s motions to dismiss and suppress is incomplete. Therefore, the court will hold the hearings necessary to determine whether this case must be dismissed and, if not, the scope of the evidence to be excluded at trial.” It meant that, for now, the case would go on.

But the legal part of the judge’s ruling was not the story of the day. The hard news was the judge’s “findings of facts” about the FBI and Bulger and Flemmi. More than half of the text—368 pages—was devoted to factual findings about all that had gone wrong in the FBI’s deal with Bulger, judicial findings resulting from sworn testimony and the mountains of FBI documents and files.

The judge acknowledged that Bulger and Flemmi were “very valuable and valued confidential informants” for the FBI, but then proceeded to describe in minute detail the corruption, rule-breaking, and misconduct that defined the deal, almost from its start three decades earlier. The leaks—from the Lancaster Street garage to the DEA’s car bug to the Baharoian wire—were all there, along with the long list of tips the crime bosses got about other wiseguys who posed a threat to them. “In an effort to protect Bulger and Flemmi, Morris and Connolly also identified for them at least a dozen other individuals who were either FBI informants or sources for other law enforcement agencies.” The judge cited the Brian Halloran leak and the fact that, a few weeks after he had talked to the FBI, “Halloran was killed.”

The judge concluded that, to protect Bulger and Flemmi, agents essentially fictionalized the FBI’s internal records on a regular basis, both to overstate their value and to minimize the extent of their criminal activities. The FBI’s files showed “recurring irregularities with regard to the preparation, maintenance, and production in this case of documents damaging to Bulger and Flemmi.” And despite Connolly’s claims to the contrary, Wolf ruled that the handler did indeed handle Morris’s bribe money. “Morris solicited and received through Connolly $1,000 from Bulger and Flemmi.”

The judge also cleared up some of the smaller details of the sordid saga. Despite Billy Bulger’s public comments to the contrary, the judge ruled that the powerful politician had in fact made a cameo appearance. “William, who was the President of the Massachusetts Senate and lived next door to the Flemmis, came to visit while Ring and Connolly were there.”

“Man-o-manischevitz!” Cardinale exclaimed. He and John Mitchell began a duel of sort, reading passages aloud, each one trying to top the other with a juicier factual finding.

In all, Wolf identified eighteen FBI supervisors and agents as having broken either the law or FBI regulations and Justice Department guidelines. Paul Rico, John Connolly, and John Morris were at the hub of the wrongdoing, and the list included supervisors Jim Greenleaf, Jim Ring, Ed Quinn, Bob Fitzpatrick, Larry Potts, Jim Ahearn, Ed Clark, and Bruce Ellavsky, and agents Nick Gianturco, Tom Daly, Mike Buckley, John Newton, Rod Kennedy, James Blackburn, and James Lavin.

“John Connolly is fucked,” said Cardinale, shaking his head, pausing at the section in Wolf’s ruling where he addressed a central question: how Whitey got away in early 1995. Even though Flemmi had testified that the leak came from Morris, the judge found that Flemmi, while generally truthful in his testimony, was not always “candid” and “at times attributed information received from John Connolly to other agents of the FBI in an evident effort to protect Connolly.” Despite Connolly’s strident public statements, Wolf had ruled that Connolly was the culprit.

“The court concludes that in early January 1995, Connolly, who remained close to Flemmi and, particularly, Bulger, had been monitoring the grand jury investigation in part through his contacts in the FBI, and was in constant communication with Bulger and Flemmi about the investigation, was the source of the tip to Bulger.”

Finally, despite Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan’s public comments to the contrary, as well his statement to federal investigators in 1997, the judge ruled that O’Sullivan had known Bulger and Flemmi were informants since 1979.

The ruling exposed the ugly addiction the Boston FBI had for Bulger, and it was not a pretty picture. By sheer coincidence the ruling came out just twelve days after a personal milestone for Whitey Bulger: he turned seventy years old on September 3, 1999. But the 661-page treatise was hardly the sort of birthday greeting he would have wished for. James J. “Whitey” Bulger may still have had his freedom, but there was little else to celebrate.

“Judge Blasts FBI for Deal with Bulger and Flemmi” was the front-page headline in the next day’s tabloid
Boston Herald.
“Judge Says Hub FBI Broke All the Rules.”

The headlines had captured the moment, and they were headlines that no doubt reached Whitey Bulger himself—out there, somewhere, still on the run, riding the back roads of rural America with a bleached blonde by his side, false papers in his wallet, and packets of $100 bills stashed in safety deposit boxes around the country.

Hi there. So many tough questions for John Connolly, but so little time. Number one, I think there’s a number of people lined up to testify that Whitey and Stevie controlled all the cocaine and marijuana in South Boston, and shame on you ... for not going after them on that.

First, I would like to say to John Connolly, I think you have a lot of courage for standing up to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in this case. It’s nice to know there’s at least one FBI agent out there who will keep his word.

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.