Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (32 page)

A year later, O’Callaghan was given an assignment. An assassination. There was a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s Special Branch, Peter Flanagan, whom the IRA wanted dead. Flanagan was hated not only because he had proved an effective interrogator of IRA members but also because he was Catholic. The IRA went out of its way to murder as many Catholic police officers as possible, to dissuade others from joining the force.

O’Callaghan tracked Flanagan to a pub where he drank while off-duty. Flanagan was reading a newspaper and nursing a pint when he looked up and saw O’Callaghan pointing the gun.

The brazen daylight assassination earned O’Callaghan praise from his superiors. But, at twenty, he had already begun to question what he was doing. He was in an apartment with other IRA men, making tea, when a news program on television reported that a female police officer had just been killed by an IRA bomb. “I hope she’s pregnant,” one of the IRA men laughed, “and we get two for the price of one.”

O’Callaghan, disillusioned by the bloody amorality of it all, returned to Tralee and quietly resigned from the IRA. He moved to London, started an office cleaning business, and got married. But he was haunted by what he had done for the IRA, and by what he considered his naïveté. After spending most of his life convinced it was necessary to kill to bring about a united Ireland, he now had second thoughts. He gradually grew to hate the IRA, believing it indulged in the very acts of sectarianism and barbarism that it condemned in the British forces.

The IRA had trained him in duplicity. He decided to use those skills against his old band, eliminating operatives and frustrating its mission. In 1979, he moved back to Ireland, rejoined the IRA, and secretly offered his services to the Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police force. O’Callaghan contends that there is nothing worse in Ireland than being an informer but that he was willing to become one because he believed that the IRA had no right to take impressionable teenagers and turn them into killers.

O’Callaghan compromised many IRA operations, including one in which he was supposed to blow up the Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be near the Royal Box at the Dominion Theatre in London for a Duran Duran concert in 1983. His actions resulted in dozens of former comrades going to prison.

And it was O’Callaghan who would eventually, without knowing it, send Whitey Bulger scurrying to find, and kill, an informer—the man he thought had sold out the glorious voyage of the
Valhalla.

O’Callaghan knew something big was afoot
when an aide to a top IRA commander in Belfast showed up in Tralee in the spring of 1984. The emissary from Belfast told O’Callaghan that the IRA needed underground bunkers to hide a huge consignment of weapons from America that would be landing soon in Kerry. O’Callaghan said he would make the arrangements, but privately he was appalled. The idea of Americans importing weapons that would be used to kill Irishmen was anathema to him. “No American has any right to send guns to my country, whether for financial gain or for some spurious political reasons,” he later said.
²⁷
He had another reason to foil the plot. His longtime local nemesis in the IRA, Martin Ferris, was planning to be on the
Marita Ann
when it took the weapons from the
Valhalla
in the open sea transfer.

O’Callaghan worried that Ferris suspected he was an informer. Too many missions that had O’Callaghan’s fingerprints on them had been compromised. Besides, O’Callaghan didn’t like Ferris and considered him a bully. Their extended families were close, but O’Callaghan despised Ferris as one of the IRA’s top recruiters, someone who talked young people into throwing their lives away.

When O’Callaghan pressed for more details about the upcoming weapons shipment, Ferris told him to concentrate on his job of securing the bunkers. Everything else was being done on a need-to-know basis, standard IRA procedure. O’Callaghan found another way in. Having learned that a local fishing boat captain and IRA member, Michael Browne, had been recruited to sail his boat, the
Marita Ann
, to collect the weapons from the American ship, O’Callaghan began plying Browne with drinks at a pub and soon knew more about the upcoming mission. O’Callaghan invited Browne to live with him over the summer as the gunrunning mission entered its final planning stages. O’Callaghan only knew that the arms shipment involved American sympathizers; even Browne didn’t know they were criminals.

By August, Browne was acting so erratically that O’Callaghan saw an opening to provide himself some cover. He reported Browne’s behavior to other IRA men. “There’s something wrong with Michael,” he said. “It’s not just the drink. He’s acting odd. We’d better keep an eye on him.”

O’Callaghan persuaded Browne to enter a clinic—to get healthy before the big mission. O’Callaghan assured a worried Ferris that Browne would be back in time, and he was. O’Callaghan delivered a fit and chipper Browne to Ferris in early September, weeks before the
Marita Ann
was supposed to rendezvous with the
Valhalla
somewhere near Porcupine Bank, 120 miles off the west coast of Ireland. Ferris was impressed.

A few hours before the
Marita Ann
set sail, Ferris and O’Callaghan met in a Tralee café for what would be the last time.

Ferris suggested that O’Callaghan join him for the historic mission.

O’Callaghan stirred his tea and shook his head.

“I’ll see you,” he told Ferris, “when you get back.”

The
Marita Ann
had barely left port when O’Callaghan called his police handler.

Back aboard the
Valhalla
,
nothing was going well. The September seas were hard on the small boat, especially with seven tons of weapons onboard. South of Nova Scotia, on the first day of sailing,
Valhalla
ran into the butt end of a small hurricane, and fifteen-foot seas battered her. It got worse. On the third night out, Andersen spotted a small blip on the radar screen: they were being followed. It was a small blip but a big ship; Andersen assumed it was military, probably Canadian. If it was the Canadian navy, it was keeping its distance—three miles. But it was definitely following
Valhalla
. “Wake up the others,” Andersen told Crawley.

While Andersen kept a steady course, the crew moved the weapons up on deck and covered them with a tarp. Andersen told Crawley what he didn’t want to hear: If whatever was following them sped up, they’d have to dump their payload into the ocean.

Then Andersen tried an evasive maneuver. He slowed
Valhalla
to a trawl and lit up the ship, to make it appear as if they were any other vessel out swordfishing. Whatever was following them suddenly changed course. The blip disappeared from the radar screen. But the delay would cost them hours.

At the end of the first week, a hurricane that had been in the Bahamas when
Valhalla
left Massachusetts suddenly caught up to them. A forty-foot wave swamped
Valhalla
and blew out the windows of the pilot house. Broken glass left deep cuts on Andersen’s right hand. McIntyre wrapped it with black electrical tape and Andersen kept the bow pointed into the waves.

McIntyre suggested they head to Newfoundland to fix Andersen’s hand and the
Valhalla
’s assorted knocks. But Andersen knew that the Canadian authorities would board the ship and that they’d all be arrested. He stayed on course, toward Ireland. McIntyre went down below to repair the soaked generator and restore electricity.

The gangster crewmen were useless. They couldn’t drive a boat, and when the seas started rocking they were too sick to do anything. “They wouldn’t even get out of their cabins,” McIntyre complained.
²⁸

The storm finally ended, and over the next week
Valhalla
made steady progress over calm seas. On the fourteenth day, Andersen was climbing to the pilot house when he spotted a plane. The only planes he’d seen in the open seas were weather planes, but this didn’t look like one of them. It was flying too low. Andersen was convinced it was a military plane, flying at reconnaissance altitude to take photos.

After nightfall, the
Valhalla
was two hundred miles off the coast of Ireland when the radio crackled. “You’re two days late!” Martin Ferris barked. Ferris was one of the most senior and most feared leaders of the IRA. But Bob Andersen was in no mood to be lectured by someone who hadn’t just crossed the Atlantic, dodging two hurricanes, in an eighty-seven-foot fishing boat. Crawley took the microphone away from a seething Andersen and calmed everyone down. They set the time and coordinates for exchanging the weapons.

The two boats drew alongside each other, but the seas were choppy. The waves were rising to ten feet, and
Valhalla
kept smashing against the
Marita Ann
, damaging the
Marita Ann
’s hull. The ships separated and Andersen suggested ferrying the weapons over by dinghy.

McIntyre volunteered to be the ferryman. They attached the ends of a hundred-foot rope to each of the ships, and McIntyre drew himself across the churning seas, hand over hand. With each trip, another crate of weapons was loaded into the rocking dinghy. On the fourteenth and final trip, Crawley was ferried over to the
Marita Ann
with the last of the guns.

Crawley reached down to shake hands with McIntyre.

“You were brilliant!” the IRA man shouted.

McIntyre gave a thumbs-up and made the final leg, hand over hand, back to the
Valhalla
. It was daybreak.

Andersen pointed
Valhalla
south and sailed away. The
Marita Ann
turned toward the southwest coast of Ireland, where a welcoming party awaited.

With Whitey’s blessing,
Pat Nee and Joe Murray had flown to Ireland with their wives and had hoped to be on the
Marita Ann
when the weapons were transferred at sea. But the IRA vetoed that plan at the last minute. Nee broke the news as they sat in the lounge of the Shelbourne, the most luxurious hotel in Dublin.

Joe Murray was furious. “I pay for the fuckin’ thing,” he fumed. “They use my fuckin’ boat. They use my fuckin’ people. I fly the fuck all the way over here, and now I can’t go?”

“Joe,” Nee told him, “this is IRA business. This is how they do things. We can’t second-guess them on this stuff.”

Murray downed his pint, made some excuse about his wife, three months pregnant, being sick, and headed for the airport. He was back in Charlestown before the
Marita Ann
left port.

Nee rented a car and headed to the countryside with his wife and another couple. A few days later, they were driving through Charlestown—the one in County Mayo—when a bulletin came on the radio: A fishing trawler off the southwest coast had been fired on and seized by the Irish navy. A large trove of weapons had been found, and a group of IRA men onboard had been arrested. Nee and his companions headed for a ferry on Ireland’s east coast. They sailed to France, fearing that they might be arrested if they went to an Irish airport.

Nee knew this wasn’t simply chance: Someone had ratted out the mission.

As Martin Ferris, Mike Browne, John Crawley, and the other IRA men were marched into a courthouse in Dublin, Joe Cahill, the founder of the Provisional IRA, stood nearby watching.
²⁹
The gunrunning mission that had been born that day he stood in a bar in Southie, asking Whitey Bulger and the rest of the Irish mob in Boston to become the IRA’s patrons, was a resounding failure. The resulting propaganda, showing the IRA in bed with Boston criminals, could be much more damaging than losing seven tons of weapons.

At about the same time Cahill was standing in the shadows in Dublin, Whitey Bulger, standing in his condo in Quincy, heard the news come on TV about a boat loaded down with weapons being seized off the coast of Kerry. There was a DEA bug planted in the wall of Whitey’s condo at the time, and, for a moment, his usual discretion abandoned him. “That’s our stuff,” Whitey said.
³⁰

Staring at the TV screen, Whitey Bulger knew someone had given them up. And as
Valhalla
headed back across the Atlantic toward Boston, he was already trying to find out who.

Valhalla
docked at Pier 7 in Boston Harbor not long before midnight, Friday, October 12, 1984. Andersen told the crewmen to scatter. He and McIntyre assessed the damage to the boat with furrowed brows. “We’ve got to fix this,” Andersen told McIntyre. “If we go back to Gloucester looking like this, we’re done for.” But within twenty-four hours, before he could even begin the repairs, McIntyre was under arrest. Not for gunrunning, but for trying to visit his estranged wife. He’d rung the doorbell at her house in Quincy, and when no one answered he’d climbed to the balcony. A neighbor reported a burglary in progress. When the police showed up, ordered him down, and checked his ID, an old warrant for failing to appear in court on a drunken driving charge popped up on the computer. He was arrested but wouldn’t go to court before Monday morning. McIntyre had been pushed to the limit after six harrowing weeks cooped up on a boat, dodging hurricanes and forty-foot seas. The prospect of spending the next twenty-four hours in a jail cell sent him to a desperate place. He started babbling about drugs and guns and the IRA and gangsters. The cop who booked him didn’t know what McIntyre was talking about, so he called Dick Bergeron, a Quincy detective who was known to know the wiseguys.

Ever since he realized Whitey Bulger had made Quincy his home away from Southie, Bergeron had made the pursuit of him something of an obsession. He had been instrumental in getting the DEA bug into Whitey’s condo. Bergeron had been working with a DEA agent, Steve Boeri, trying to nail Bulger for drugs, and when he heard that some fisherman was in the lockup, talking about guys from Southie and Charlestown and the IRA and drug boats, he hustled down to the station and called Boeri.