Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (40 page)

But even Thistle wasn’t prepared for what Stanley told the FBI agents who brought them to a room at the Sheraton in downtown Boston for a debriefing. “Do you know what name he might be using?” one of the agents asked. “Yeah,” Stanley replied, “Thomas Baxter.”

During the series of meetings that followed, she revealed Whitey’s early hideouts on Long Island, New York, and the location of safe deposit boxes where he had stashed money and documents. Stanley and Thistle accompanied FBI agents to Selden, New York, where she showed them the dealership where Whitey had bought a car, the motel with a glass-enclosed pool where he swam, the gym where he worked out, and the house where Whitey had stayed with cousins of Kevin Weeks. A black Grand Marquis belonging to Whitey was parked in a garage near the house.

“Let’s feel the hood and see if it’s warm,” Thistle said excitedly.
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Instead, the agents sent Thistle and Stanley home, saying they needed to set up surveillance; they’d let them know when they got him. “We thought, ‘This is it,’” said Thistle, who returned to South Boston with Stanley, waiting for word of Whitey’s arrest. Days and then weeks went by and nothing happened. Stanley was growing increasingly anxious and regretted what she had done. She was angry after learning that Whitey had picked up Greig after dropping her off, but she did not want to be the one whose tip led to his capture.

Still, she wasn’t about to take relationship advice from her old, two-timing lover. Not only did she ignore Whitey’s long-distance order to break up with Thistle, but she resented it. Weeks decided to pay her a visit and try to reason with her. “This guy is a bum,” Weeks told her. “He’s an informant. Everything you tell him, he’s telling the cops. He’s just pumping you for information.”
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Weeks spent almost three hours in her living room, trying to get Stanley to promise to stay away from Thistle. Finally, he slapped his thighs and got up to leave.

“Well,” Stanley sighed. “It’s too late anyways.”

Weeks stopped dead in his tracks.

“What do you mean, too late?”

Stanley got up, and Weeks followed her into the kitchen. She lit a cigarette and held it her hand, which shook. She did not want Thistle to take the blame for what she had done. She went to her purse and handed Weeks a business card. It was FBI agent John Gamel’s. “I told him everything,” Stanley said. “Thomas Baxter. Selden, New York. Everything.”
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Weeks knew he had to tell Whitey. But he had no way to reach him; all he could do was wait for him to call, and more than a week passed before he did. Whitey wasn’t panicked when Weeks told him the extent of Stanley’s betrayal. “At least I know,” he said. He knew he could never return to Selden; that he had to ditch his Baxter alias and the two black Mercury Marquis he had registered in New York under that name. One of the cars—the one the FBI was watching—was still on Long Island. He and Greig climbed into the other one in Grand Isle and drove to Chicago. They left the car in a parking lot and later made arrangements for Weeks’s cousin to drive it back to New York.

As he scrambled to get new identities, Whitey called Weeks with a plan. He needed his brother Jack to be brought in to help. He instructed Weeks to get a phony mustache, put it on Jack, and take some photos that Whitey could use to create new identification. Though Whitey was nine years older than Jack, the two strongly resembled each other. They had the same broad forehead and similar features. Before they hung up, Weeks asked Whitey if he wanted him to kill Alan Thistle. Whitey thought about it for a moment. “Nah,” he said. “Going out with Thistle is Teresa’s punishment.”
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As the clerk magistrate of Boston Juvenile Court, Jack Bulger was a sworn officer of the court. But he didn’t hesitate to break the law to help his fugitive brother. He paid the monthly rental fee for a safe deposit box Whitey kept at a bank in Clearwater, Florida, and had spoken to him twice during prearranged telephone calls. Twice he lied when he was subpoenaed to testify before federal grand juries, insisting he hadn’t spoken to his fugitive brother and didn’t know where he hid his money. “He sounded good,” Jack Bulger told Weeks after speaking briefly to Whitey late one night on the phone at a physical therapy clinic in Southie. It was no surprise that Jack Bulger agreed to help his brother obtain bogus identification. When Weeks showed up at his South Boston home with a fake mustache, he glued it over his lip and struck a serious pose as Weeks snapped several photographs.
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And whereas Whitey was willing to let Stanley off the hook for cooperating with the FBI, Jack was less forgiving. Later, when he bumped into her while strolling around Castle Island in South Boston, he snarled, “I wish you were dead. Look at what you’ve done, all the trouble you caused.”
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Weeks enlisted a well-known local forger to craft a bogus driver’s license, using Jack Bulger’s photograph and the name and Social Security number of a Massachusetts man, Mark Shapeton. Then Weeks drove to Chicago with a girlfriend in a rental car. Whitey and Greig were waiting for them at the Water Tower, one of Chicago’s most famous landmarks, located on the Magnificent Mile. Whitey frowned when he looked at the new ID. The photo was all wrong. Whitey’s mustache was pencil-thin. Jack’s was big and bushy. It looked like he had a caterpillar over his lip.
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They went to a department store and bought a blue bed sheet, then went to Whitey’s motel room and took some new photos of Whitey in front of the blue backdrop—the same color used on Massachusetts driver’s licenses. Whitey ordered Weeks to take the photos back to Boston and have the forger come up with some new names and make him a handful of Massachusetts driver’s licenses.

Whitey seemed outwardly calm, but inside he was agitated and preoccupied with securing new IDs. That night, the two couples strolled to a Japanese restaurant for dinner. Three young men outside made some remarks about Greig and Weeks’s girlfriend. “What are you looking at, you motherfuckers,” Whitey shouted. He pulled the switchblade from the sheath on his calf. Weeks pulled a knife, too. The three men ran off. It wasn’t exactly a show of discretion for a man on the run, but Whitey could never completely control himself. Then, almost as quickly as his rage surfaced, it was gone. They walked into the restaurant, and Whitey seemed his old self again. He was even philosophical. “Every day out there is another day I beat them,” he told Weeks. “Every good meal is a meal they can’t take away from me.”
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Tom and Helen Baxter never left Chicago. As they walked into Union Station on July 23, 1996, past crisp limestone walls, through the Great Hall, Whitey and Greig became Mark and Carol Shapeton. They boarded an Amtrak train bound for Penn Station in New York. They spent the next seven weeks moving from one New York City hotel to another—looking, to all they encountered, like a couple of tourists, and waiting for Weeks to arrive with more fake identification.

Back in Boston,
the FBI’s relationship with Whitey had created a rift within law enforcement, resulting in two competing fugitive investigations. The FBI’s Boston office fueled the perception that it didn’t really want to catch Whitey by putting the manhunt in the hands of its organized crime squad—John Connolly’s old unit, which had protected Whitey for so many years. The state police–DEA team that had built the extortion case against Whitey suspected that FBI agents were leaking information to Connolly and sabotaging efforts to capture Whitey. When an informant told Tom Foley’s group of investigators about Whitey’s efforts to get new identities, they made a calculated decision not to share the news with the FBI.

The informant said Weeks had enlisted him to get fake driver’s licenses for Whitey. The informant’s job was to come up with a few more names of people with no criminal histories. Then he got his associate, a local counterfeiter, to make the fake identities.
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Foley dispatched state police sergeant Steve Johnson to the state Bureau of Vital Statistics, where he combed through records and came up with a handful of names of recently deceased people with unexpired licenses.
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The informant delivered those names to the counterfeiter, who created the bogus IDs that were handed over to Weeks. Whitey would get his IDs, but the state police could trace the new names.

The state police–DEA team stepped up surveillance of Weeks, determined not to lose him when he went to deliver the new IDs to Whitey. The plan went awry when Weeks concluded that it was too risky for him to meet Whitey again.
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He noticed helicopters and planes hovering overhead when he left his house. He had already found a tracking device on his car and knew he was being followed by the FBI, the DEA, and the state police. Whitey wasn’t happy about the plan, but Weeks told him he was afraid he would lead investigators to him if he tried to deliver the identities in person. He gave the package to Peter Lee, a longtime friend from South Boston who was not part of Whitey’s organization and drew no attention from law enforcement.
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Lee took an Amtrak train to Manhattan and met Whitey and Greig outside the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. They headed to a nearby Irish pub for lunch, and Lee handed Whitey the package. But even as he was trying to restore his cover, Whitey again drew unnecessary attention to himself. The waitress who was serving them casually tucked her bra strap under her blouse after it slipped off her shoulder. Whitey, always phobic about germs, flew into a rage, ranting that she was serving his food with the same tainted hand.
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After they left the pub, Whitey asked Greig to wait for him while he took a walk with Lee. The two men had only walked a short distance when Whitey suddenly pushed Lee down a subway stairway that was no longer in use, following close behind him. At six foot three, Lee towered over Whitey, but he was gripped by fear as he stood alone with him in a darkened hallway. He was convinced Whitey was going to kill him, and perhaps he was. But suddenly a door opened and several transit police officers appeared. “What are you doing here?” one of them asked. “Screw.”
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Lee scrambled to the top of the stairs. “That’s it, I’m outta here,” he shouted. As Lee ran off, Whitey just stood on the sidewalk.

Foley assigned a trooper to check law enforcement databases every day, hoping Whitey would get caught using one of his new identities. But Whitey didn’t slip up and the trail went cold.

He and Greig had taken a train back to Chicago after Labor Day, still posing as Mark and Carol Shapeton. A couple of months later, Weeks managed to rendezvous with Whitey in New York City for what would be their last meeting. Whitey was relaxed and even stopped a police officer to ask for directions. “The best place to get lost is a big city,” he told Weeks as they walked away from the unsuspecting cop.
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“People are just walking around thinking about their own problems. You don’t stand out there.”

They had a last supper, and then, as they walked toward Penn Station, Whitey turned serious, repeating something he had said to Weeks months before in Chicago: “If anything ever comes down, put it on me.”
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They paused at one of the entrances to Penn Station. “I’ll be in touch,” Whitey said.

But he never called again. Weeks wasn’t surprised. He sensed that Whitey knew that Steve Flemmi was growing antsy in jail. As Whitey was living it up on the run, his criminal sidekick was cooped up in a small cell. He’d always said Flemmi couldn’t do time, and he knew Flemmi had only one card to play. He was right. A few months after Whitey disappeared down the stairs into Penn Station, Flemmi decided to tell his story and to offer his defense: How could he and Whitey be guilty of the crimes the federal government had charged them with? They had committed those crimes with the permission of the FBI.

14

Where’s Whitey?

T
he hum of hair dryers
and the clatter of conversations in both English and Vietnamese washed over Cathy Greig when she opened the door at Fountain Hair & Nails one day in January 2000. Sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a barbershop in a small strip mall, the salon was right off a main road in Fountain Valley, California, a sprawling suburban community in Orange County not far from Disneyland. It is one of those places, one of many in that part of California, where everything seems pleasant enough but nothing sticks in memory and nobody stands out, which made it a perfect place for Greig and the gruff-looking, elderly man behind the wheel to stop. Smiling politely, Greig said she didn’t have an appointment and asked if anyone was available to color her hair quickly. She was pressed for time, she said, her husband waiting impatiently in the car. She held up a package of blonde dye she had purchased herself. The salon was filled with customers, but the owner, Kim, smiled and steered Greig toward an empty chair. Did her husband want to wait inside? No, thanks, said Greig, and the man stayed in the car, facing the shop’s large plate glass windows, keeping Greig in sight the whole time. She made little conversation, paid cash—sixteen dollars for the coloring, plus tip—then slid into the passenger seat and they were gone.

Nothing about the visit seemed remarkable to Kim, the salon owner, until some FBI agents showed up a couple of weeks later flashing Wanted posters of Whitey Bulger and Cathy Greig. They had been tipped by a regular customer who watched
America’s Most Wanted
and recognized the fugitive couple. The customer had been in the salon when Greig had had her hair colored and had noticed the elderly man waiting and watching.
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The FBI had been fruitlessly searching for Bulger for five years, and there had been no reliable sightings of late. Surely this was the big break they had been hoping for, a clear sign that Whitey had adopted Southern California as his hiding place.

But nothing about Whitey and the FBI was ever as it should be. After quietly investigating the lead for a few months, the FBI’s Los Angeles office went public, announcing that Whitey and Greig had been spotted at the salon and might still be in Southern California. But the FBI’s Boston office, in charge of the search, was less impressed with the tip and immediately downplayed its significance. It issued a press release saying an individual “resembling” Greig had been spotted, and that there was “no confirmed sighting of Bulger.”
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It was the sort of bureaucratic bobble and turf-conscious bickering that had typified the search thus far, and had contributed to the image of the bureau, or at least its Boston branch, as either remarkably inept in its search for Whitey or insincere in its desire to catch him. For the FBI, Whitey Bulger the fugitive was Public Embarrassment Number One. Despite spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours on the search, with agents running down look-alike sightings all over the world, the bureau had come up empty time and again.

Those who believed the FBI failure was no accident had plenty of reason for their suspicions. After Whitey disappeared just before Christmas in 1994, having been tipped to the pending indictment by John Connolly, the FBI assigned control of the search for him to Connolly’s old unit, the organized crime squad. With many options at hand, the least defensible was chosen. Worse than that, the agent eventually put in charge of the hunt was none other than Charlie Gianturco, a man whose family felt personally indebted to Whitey after he’d been credited with saving the life of Gianturco’s brother, Nick, during an undercover operation. It was a disastrous start, indicating to all involved that the FBI’s effort would be a farce, and, at least during Whitey’s first two years on the run, a farce it seemed to be. Whitey slipped back into Boston at least a couple of times during that stretch, once to drop off Teresa Stanley and pick up Cathy Greig. But neither Greig nor Kevin Weeks, who drove her to the rendezvous with Whitey, was under surveillance at that time. FBI agents waited more than a year to approach Stanley. And when they finally did and she agreed to cooperate, they were slow to follow up on the leads she provided. Agents performed a cursory check of a calling card found in a car Whitey had abandoned in New York, mistakenly believing he had made only one call instead of dozens. Agents didn’t interview Connolly until two years after Whitey had vanished. And then, when they did finally sit down with the retired agent in his office at Boston’s Prudential Center, he was completely unhelpful and spoke fondly of Whitey. He recalled Whitey’s having bought him the ice cream cone when he was a boy—an anecdote he told the agents he planned to include in the first chapter of his autobiography. He insisted that former supervisor John Morris had promised Whitey and Flemmi protection from prosecution because they were such “good informants.” As the agents stood up to leave, Connolly made it clear where his loyalties lay. “I hope he’s never caught,” he said.
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He very nearly got his wish, as the litany of FBI missteps continued. The agency waited two years before it offered a reward—two hundred fifty thousand dollars—for information leading to Whitey’s arrest, and more than four before adding him to its Ten Most Wanted list in 1999, a designation that provided more resources for the manhunt and committed all of the bureau’s field offices to treat tips about Whitey as a top priority. But by then, the trail had been cold for years. The best chances to catch Whitey had been early in his run, especially after his initial alias had been compromised by Teresa Stanley. They were squandered as the FBI tried to keep the search to itself—and was glacially slow to act on leads.

Indeed, it seems possible that the FBI would never have ramped up the search for Whitey had it not been for relentless focus on the case by a man little known to the public but something of a legend in the law, Mark Wolf. The federal judge assigned to hear the racketeering case brought against Whitey, Steve Flemmi, Frank Salemme, John Martorano, and another mobster, Bobby DeLuca. Wolf was in many ways the perfect person for the job. He was a former federal prosecutor but, even more significantly, a protégé of former US Attorney General Edward Levi, who had made his name as a crusader against government corruption in the 1970s. Wolf had grown up just outside Boston, very much a child of the region. His father was the accountant for Red Auerbach, the legendary Boston Celtics coach. As a boy, Wolf accompanied his father for business-and-pleasure sessions with Auerbach, which usually included copious amounts of Chinese food, hilarious stories, and blunt wisdom. He learned from Auerbach and his father an uncompromising, no-nonsense approach that followed him to the bench. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1971, he signed on as a deputy to Levi, who had been appointed by President Gerald Ford with the mission to restore credibility and transparency to the Justice Department after the lawless excesses of Watergate. One of Wolf’s tasks as a thirty-year-old Justice Department lawyer was to revise, in 1976, the guidelines for proper handling of informants by federal agents. It was an unintentionally prophetic assignment. Twenty years later, Wolf found himself hearing a case in which agents broke just about every rule he’d crafted.

The idea that Whitey was an informant had been floated since 1988, when the
Boston Globe
first reported it. Anthony Cardinale, an aggressive criminal defense lawyer who represented Mafia boss Frank Salemme, had long demanded to know whether Whitey or anyone else charged in the case was an informant. The FBI and the Justice Department had steadfastly refused to answer. Now Wolf forced their hand. He ordered the FBI to publicly and unambiguously answer the question. And of course the answer was yes.

As Wolf vowed to get to the bottom of Whitey and Flemmi’s relationship with the FBI, the FBI’s insistence on keeping control of the Whitey manhunt was criticized as a conflict of interest. But the bureau, which traditionally tracks its own fugitives, refused to relinquish the search to the US Marshals, whose specialty is tracking wanted criminals. Only after two fruitless years of going it alone did the bureau finally, in August 1997, assign a three-member task force—comprised of an FBI agent, a Boston police detective, and a state correctional officer—to track Whitey full-time.

Months later, Wolf initiated what became perhaps the most extraordinary, and consequential, evidentiary hearing in Boston history, lasting almost a year and featuring a parade of nearly fifty witnesses. Many of them were John Connolly’s fellow agents and supervisors. None offered testimony as devastating as that of John Morris, whose career had prospered and then spectacularly collapsed because of his association with Connolly and Whitey. Even though Morris was Connolly’s boss, he had managed to negotiate an immunity deal for himself with the Justice Department: If he gave up Connolly, he’d stay out of prison. During eight days of riveting testimony, Morris exposed the FBI architecture that supported Whitey’s world. He showed how the national prioritization of Mafia hunting led the FBI in Boston to make deals with criminals who killed as freely as the Mafia and in some cases had killed people for the Mafia. Morris came across as pathetic, a careerist and philanderer who used Connolly and Whitey to pump up his personnel file and used Whitey’s bribes to fly his mistress in for a tryst. But while the other FBI agents who took the stand denied or deflected the accusations of wrongdoing, Morris’s testimony emerged as the most compelling and the most damning.

Sitting day after day in the witness box, he had the manner of a meek and unassuming accountant, his demeanor utterly at odds with what he was saying. He acknowledged, to a packed courtroom, that he feared he’d gotten two men killed by telling Connolly that Brian Halloran was shopping their informants. As Morris spoke, spectators looked at each other knowingly, as if they knew this was a moment of history, that something long hidden was finally being exposed. The defendants—Flemmi, Salemme, DeLuca, and John Martorano—sat in the jury box. Flemmi shifted uncomfortably as Morris explained how FBI agents had shared leisurely meals with Whitey and him. Martorano glared. Law enforcement officers whose attempts to snare Whitey and Flemmi had been compromised over the years sat in the gallery, their heads nodding almost imperceptibly: Everything they had suspected, and even more, was true. During a break in the proceedings, Morris sat alone on a bench outside the courtroom. FBI agents stared at him from a distance. He was alone, a pariah, and, though he was serving the cause of justice with his testimony, by no measure a hero.

As Wolf peeled away at the layers of the FBI’s relationship with Whitey and Flemmi, Connolly, seeing the disaster headed his way, quietly launched a counterattack, a campaign of dirty tricks that he hoped would persuade Wolf to dismiss the racketeering case. He leaked internal FBI informant reports and information to Flemmi’s lawyer that could be used to discredit several FBI agents who had denied in their testimony before Wolf that the two informants had been promised immunity.
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In an attempt to portray Morris as an unreliable drunk, Connolly gave Flemmi an FBI tape of conversations that had been bugged years earlier at the Mafia’s Boston headquarters. Then Flemmi falsely testified before Wolf that Morris played the tape for Whitey and Flemmi during one of their secret meetings and got so drunk he left it with the two informants.
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Connolly was determined to smear anyone in law enforcement who contributed to the case against Whitey and Flemmi. He got a supply of Boston Police Department letterhead and sent an anonymous letter to Judge Wolf, falsely accusing Boston Police Sergeant Detective Frank Dewan of planting evidence against Whitey and Flemmi. He wrote a second anonymous letter bashing Dewan to the Boston Police Department on
Boston Globe
stationery.
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Dewan had spent much of his career trying to put Whitey in prison and was instrumental in helping the DEA build a case against the fifty-one people in the cocaine distribution ring that the DEA busted in 1990. He had a reputation as an honest cop who could not be bribed.
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Connolly’s machinations were not only futile, they would boomerang. He had not taken the measure of the man he was trying to sway, Mark Wolf.

When the judge released a scathing 661-page opus outlining his findings in September 1999, it was obvious that Whitey and Flemmi had been given a free pass by the FBI to pursue their criminal trade with impunity. Wolf painted a portrait of an FBI obsessed with keeping secret its history of accommodating, placating, and protecting Whitey and Flemmi. He rejected Flemmi’s claim that the two gangsters had been given true legal immunity in exchange for their information, but he accepted wholeheartedly that they had killed people while under the FBI’s protection. The judge cut to the chase: The FBI had not just enabled the Bulger-Flemmi partnership; the FBI had created it; in the name of taking down La Cosa Nostra, the bureau was willing to allow the two to do almost anything. “The FBI made Bulger and Flemmi, who were previously acquainted but not close, a perfect match,” Wolf wrote. “In Boston, Flemmi and Bulger uniquely shared an antipathy for [La Cosa Nostra], a desire to profit criminally from its destruction and, most notably, the promised protection of the FBI.”
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His findings forced the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation of FBI corruption, but Wolf made it clear that Connolly was not the only culpable party at the bureau. “I also do not view this case as a problem of what the government has at times referred to as a few ‘bad apples,’” said Wolf. He was convinced that more than a dozen FBI officials in Boston and Washington had engaged in misconduct to protect Whitey and Flemmi.
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By forcing the FBI to admit that Whitey and Flemmi were informants, Wolf had started an avalanche. One by one, Whitey’s henchmen turned on him. For months, John Martorano sat grim-faced beside Flemmi in the jury box as a parade of witnesses came before Wolf and exposed the cozy relationship between Whitey and Flemmi and the FBI. Martorano felt like a fool. He had murdered people for Whitey and Flemmi, and all the while they were giving up information on their friends, including him. Midway through Wolf’s hearings, Martorano decided he had heard enough and agreed to cooperate. He drove a hard bargain; he knew he had a lot to offer, especially on the murders. Prosecutors and investigators, desperate for such testimony, felt obligated to give him an exceptionally good deal: twelve years for twenty murders. The families of Martorano’s victims were outraged, but prosecutors defended such leniency, saying it led to solving the murders and, more importantly, put them in a position to charge Whitey and Flemmi with many of them. “If we didn’t go forward with this agreement, there would always be the lingering suspicion that part of the reason for not going forward with this agreement was to protect the FBI,” said US Attorney Donald K. Stern.
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