Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob (36 page)

Dick was in a sensitive position where a lot of information on the investigation and its budget approval went directly across his desk. At our first meeting, I talked to him about the investigation and what was going on with the state police. After he put the dog back in the car, the two of us stood outside in the cool fall night and continued to talk. I hadn’t been afraid of the dog. I had a pistol with me and would have shot him if there had been any problem.

That night, Dick reaffirmed what Connolly had told me, that the FBI and state police were at their lowest point of cooperation. He said he would find out what he could and get back to me. I met with him about a dozen times, usually in the same place. He told me he had a counterpart in the Rhode Island State Police, as well as some other sources, and he was going to see what he could find out about the investigation. I told Stevie whatever he told me and repeated the information to Jimmy whenever he called.

But with each new meeting, I got the feeling that Dick didn’t know much and was jerking me around. It seemed to be a waste of time to meet with him, but Stevie wanted me to continue. One night, Dick and I were talking about books and I told him I was reading a book by Vinny Teresa called
My Life in the Mafia,
and he told me he was in the book. I went home that night and finished the book. In it, the only mention of anybody in the state police was a Richard Schneiderhan, so now I knew Dick’s and Eric’s real name.

After our twelfth meeting, I decided the meetings were a waste of time. Dick was giving me bits and pieces, but for the most part I felt he was trying to distance himself from the whole thing. He’d gotten a lot of money over the years from Stevie but now, with Stevie in jail and Jimmy on the run, there was nothing they could do financially for him. He was just placating them with lip service and nothing more. Jimmy used to brag that he could ask six FBI agents to jump into his car with machine guns, but Schneiderhan was Stevie’s one state police connection. Eventually Schneiderhan was arrested and convicted. His final stay was recently denied and he’s going to have to go to jail now for eighteen months.

However, in the spring of 1997, less than a year after I had started to meet with Connolly, I got some news that literally shattered my world. One night while I was home reading a book and watching the ten o’clock news on Channel 56, I heard that Stevie Flemmi had gotten up on the stand at the evidentiary hearings in front of Judge Wolf and announced that he and Jimmy were FBI informants and had been given immunity from prosecution, that they had been told they could commit any crime short of murder. I dropped the book I had in my hands, put my feet down on the floor, and leaned forward, yelling,
“What the fuck?!”
Stunned, there was nothing I could do except sit there on my couch, flipping the channels and waiting until the eleven o’clock news to make sure I had heard it right. When that broadcast repeated the news, I kept shaking my head in disbelief as I got up to grab a beer and kept flipping some more, waiting for the two o’clock news and any reruns I might get. All I kept thinking was,
Did I get it right? How could that be possible?
After the two o’clock news, I turned off the TV, still unable to believe that I had heard it right, unable to understand the whole thing. It made no sense. We
killed
guys because they were informants. And now I was learning that Jimmy and Stevie were informants themselves.

The next day I went out and got a paper, and there it was in black and white. Jimmy and Stevie, FBI informants. For twenty-five years, I had believed that Jimmy was corrupting the FBI through greed and money, paying them for information to help us. But I couldn’t deny what I had just seen and read. Sure, I knew that the media all too frequently got it wrong or outright lied. But this time Stevie had said on the stand, under oath, that he and Jimmy were FBI informants. The words had come right from his mouth, not from a reporter’s pen. It was incomprehensible. I thought about how intelligent Jimmy was, how he had always turned percentages in his favor. But we had always said the criminals take the good with the bad. You don’t give up your friends. I knew that a lot of criminals had connections in law enforcement and that they were given information in return for money and favors. But it was not supposed to be the other way.

I had really liked and respected Jimmy. He had treated me well. But I couldn’t understand this. You just don’t cooperate with law enforcement. If you have enemies, you don’t talk about them to law enforcement. Rather, you take it to the street and handle it that way. You don’t rat on them and sic the law on them. You don’t eliminate the competition that way. Much later, I came up with my own theory on why Jimmy might have become an FBI informant—that he had been coerced into it by crimes he had committed with Stevie—but on that spring day I was still reeling from the shock of finding out that twenty-five years of my life had been a lie.

After I got the papers, I went down to the store and talked to Kevin O’Neil, who was as shocked as I was. In disbelief himself, Kevin had no idea what was going on. I tried to find a few other people and see if they had heard what I had. Some people hadn’t heard it and those who had had no idea what was going on. But most of the people around us couldn’t believe it. The only thing all of us knew was that we were the ones getting info. A few said they had suspected it but could never prove it. I had never even
thought
it.

But the one thing I knew for sure was that I now had a problem. People would be thinking I had something to do with these two guys being informants. No one was saying anything, but from that minute on, I was walking around with two pistols to protect myself. I made sure I had plenty of firepower, usually carrying two .45s or two .38s. I kept the pistols in my waistband or inside my coat pocket. I wore a coat with the pockets cut out so when my hands were inside the coat, they were actually on my pistols.

The night after I heard the news, Stevie called me at eight, the way he usually did. As always, there was the recorded voice informing us that the call was being taped. Stevie was in his usual cheerful mode, having just finished another day in the hearings. Everything was hunky-dory. Nothing was wrong. “What’s going on?” I asked him.

“Oh, that thing you heard was nothing,” he told me. “Wait till the whole story comes out.”

The next day I went up to Plymouth to see him. At that time, I was usually going once a week, as was his brother Mikey, his sons, Stevie Junior and Billy, and Phil Costa. I sat down opposite the glass partition separating the two of us and picked up the phone. “What are you doing?” I asked Stevie.

“I know what I’m doing,” he told me. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Do you know you put a bull’s-eye on my back?” I asked him. “I’ve been around you all these years and now you’re putting a bull’s-eye on me?”

“You weren’t involved in all that,” he said. “You don’t have to worry. It’s nothing. Wait till the whole story comes out.”

“Stevie,” I said to him, “it’s all over the news that you and Jimmy are informants.”

“Well, we never said anything about you,” he said.

That’s when I put the phone down and said, right into the glass partition, “How could you? Everything I did, I did with the two of you.” He couldn’t give me up without giving himself up.

The next time I saw John Connolly at the Top of the Hub, he, too, told me to wait until I heard the whole story. “The Mafia was going against Jimmy and Stevie,” he said. “So Jimmy and Stevie went against them.” He had a three-inch-thick leather case with him, filled with the 302 reports the field agents filed regularly that he had written up on Jimmy and Stevie. Obviously, since he had retired from the FBI seven years earlier, he had made copies of the reports for his own personal files. There were lots and lots of them, but he took out all the papers and I started going through them. The reports discussed things about the Mafia, but there was also stuff about friends of ours, about Irish guys, members of Winter Hill, guys Jimmy and Stevie had given up.

I looked at Connolly and said, “They were giving up everybody.”

“No, they weren’t,” he said, pointing out some letters on the pages I was holding. “Look at the bottom of each report. See? ‘Not to be disseminated without case agent’s approval.’ No one could see them without me. I had to approve anyone looking at these reports.”

But I knew that was bullshit because some of those people had already been arrested for the same exact crimes that were listed in the reports.

“There’s nothing in there about you,” Connolly told me as I continued, incredulous, to read over hundreds of reports. Again, those words didn’t mean anything to me because everything I had done, I had done with Jimmy and Stevie. There was nothing they could say about me without incriminating themselves.

As I read over the files at the Top of the Hub that night, Connolly kept telling me that 90 percent of the information in the files came from Stevie. Certainly, Jimmy hadn’t been around the Mafia the way Stevie had. But, Connolly told me, he had to put Jimmy’s name on the files to keep his file active. As long as Jimmy was an active informant, Connolly said, he could justify meeting with Jimmy to give him valuable information. Even after he retired, Connolly still had friends in the FBI, and he and Jimmy kept meeting to let each other know what was going on. I listened to all that, but now I also understood that even though he was retired, Connolly was still getting information, as well as money, from Jimmy. As I continued to read, I could see that a lot of the reports were not just against the Italians. There were more and more names of Polish and Irish guys, of people we had done business with, of friends of mine. Whenever I came across the name of someone I knew, I would read exactly what it said about that person. I would see, over and over, that some of these people had been arrested for crimes that were mentioned in these reports.

It didn’t take me long to realize again that it had been bullshit when Connolly had told me that the files hadn’t been disseminated, that they had been for his own personal use. He had been an employee of the FBI. He hadn’t worked for himself. If there was an investigation going on and his supervisor said, “Let me take a look at that,” what was Connolly going to say? He had to give it up. And he obviously had.

I thought about what Jimmy had always said. “You can lie to your wife and to your girlfriends, but not to your friends. Not to anyone we were in business with.” Maybe Jimmy and Stevie hadn’t lied to me. But they sure hadn’t been telling me everything.

Soon after that, Stevie actually mentioned my name at his hearing in front of Judge Wolf. When he took the stand, he was asked, “How are you corresponding with John Connolly now?”

He answered, “Through Kevin Weeks.”

When I read it in the paper, I was bullshit. It was the first time my name had been brought up in the courtroom. Nice of him to put another fucking bull’s-eye on my back when I was out there helping him. I had no choice but to continue to help Stevie because if he flipped on me, I was gone. I was getting life. I was hostage to him, walking a thin line because I had to placate Stevie in what he was doing in his case, while on the street I had to distance myself from him. But after that day in the courtroom, I realized Stevie didn’t give a fuck about me. All Stevie was worried about was Stevie.

A short time later, Stevie asked me to help him get some evidence suppressed that was being used against him. In particular, they were tapes of Stevie and Frankie Salemme that had been obtained through a roving bug that had been placed in a house at 34 Guild Street in Medford. On October 29, 1989, the tapes had secretly recorded, for the first time ever, a Mafia induction ceremony for four made guys.

Stevie alleged that there had been no need to set up the roving bug, which is the most intrusive form of surveillance available. The need for a roving bug had been based on the fact that the FBI didn’t know where the induction ceremony would take place. However, the truth was they had known seven to ten days beforehand exactly where the ceremony would be. But the FBI was so paranoid of leaks in the office getting back to the Mafia that they lied to U.S. Attorney Diane Kottmeyer, the strike force chief who was overseeing the case, and said they didn’t know where the ceremony would take place. They also didn’t inform the judge that they had informants who were going to be at the ceremony who could have been wired up. It was just another case of the ends justifying the means. Stevie wanted to show that the FBI had broken the law and, therefore, everything obtained on the roving bug should be thrown out.

Stevie wanted me to find out exactly when the FBI had gone to the Department of Corrections to make sure Vinnie Federico, who was one of the four men scheduled to be inducted, was granted a furlough from MCI-Shirley so he could attend the ceremony at a relative’s house on Guild Street. Stevie also wanted the names and file numbers of the Top Echelon informants, the high-ranking members of organized crime, that the FBI had used to get that authorization for the roving bug. When I asked Connolly for the names of these informants, he told me four of them were his, including Jimmy, Stevie, Sonny Mercurio, and a made guy from Boston who later died of cancer. The fifth one, a made member of the Rhode Island Mafia, Anthony “The Saint” St. Laurant, belonged to Bill Shea, the FBI agent from Rhode Island. When I got the identities of all five informants, along with the rest of the information, from Connolly, I told it to Stevie when I visited him at Plymouth.

Personally, back in 1989, I had never known anything about the induction ceremony. Jimmy and Stevie had been involved, but I never heard about it till it was over. About a week after the ceremony took place, Jimmy and Stevie had been talking about it, saying how the feds got the whole ceremony on tape. They had heard how someone who was leaving had said, “Only the ghosts know what happened here tonight.”

“Oh, yeah,” Stevie had said to Jimmy, “only the ghosts and the feds.”

When I had heard them talking about it like that, I figured they had learned what had happened from the feds and were not personally involved. Since at that point I didn’t know the true relationship between Jimmy and Stevie and the FBI, as far as I knew, it was a one-way street and the feds were giving us information. Now I understood that Stevie and Jimmy’s involvement in the ceremony must have boosted their importance as FBI informants. As it turned out, the evidence intercepted at Guild Street was presented to the grand juries that indicted Stevie.