Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (41 page)

And Martorano’s testimony did not disappoint. In one particularly arresting moment, he explained in a chilling, matter-of-fact manner why and how he had shot Roger Wheeler between the eyes in the parking lot of the Tulsa country club. After hearing the testimony, even Wheeler’s son David ruefully accepted the sentencing deal as perverse but necessary. “I think it’s a sad state of affairs where we have to turn to mob hit men to find the truth about our FBI,” David Wheeler said.
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Two months after Wolf’s findings were issued, Kevin Weeks was indicted for racketeering. That was not good news for either Whitey or John Connolly. Ever since Whitey had taken off, Weeks had been meeting with Connolly regularly. They often had dinner at the Top of the Hub, the restaurant on the fifty-second floor of the Prudential Tower that offers sweeping views of the city and beyond. Weeks had grown deeply disillusioned when he’d found out that Whitey and Flemmi were informants. He was also afraid. Because he was so close to both men, he feared others would assume he was an informant, too. He started carrying two guns at all times.
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He visited Flemmi in jail and complained that they had put a bull’s-eye on his back. Flemmi was dismissive, saying that no one would think Weeks was an informant. At one of their Top of the Hub dinners, Connolly was equally dismissive, telling Weeks to wait until the whole story came out. “They were giving up everybody,” Weeks said. “No,” Connolly replied, “they weren’t.”
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Connolly tried to convince him it was all part of a brilliant plan to take out the Mafia, that Whitey and Flemmi had saved their own lives by helping the FBI prosecute their principal criminal rivals. But as he leafed through the FBI reports that Connolly handed him, Weeks could see that Whitey and Flemmi had given information on others, including old friends from the Winter Hill Gang. Connolly told him that Flemmi had given him 90 percent of the information, and that he had given Whitey credit for some of it to buff his reputation within the bureau. But Weeks wasn’t buying the story. He had packaged some of the cash that Connolly had taken from Whitey and Flemmi, and he knew there was a corrupt nexus among them.
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Weeks, forty-three and the father of two teenaged boys, was in custody only a few weeks when he agreed to cooperate. For all their years together, and for all the admiration with which he had long regarded him, Kevin Weeks felt he owed Whitey nothing now. He owed Flemmi nothing. He owed Connolly nothing.
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He admitted being an accessory to five murders and would serve five years in prison. If John Martorano gave police detailed accounts of murders, Kevin Weeks gave them the graves, the hidden places that exposed simultaneously the remains of Whitey’s victims and the depths of his conspiracy with the FBI.

It had been fifteen years, and the trees and brush that had provided such good cover as they reinterred the bodies from The Haunty were gone, but Weeks led the state police and DEA team right to the spot. It was a bone-chilling January night and snow was falling as a backhoe began digging up the frozen ground while traffic on the Southeast Expressway hummed above. A half-hour later, the heavy metal bucket dredged up human bones. The digging continued by hand, as workers painstakingly sifted the soil. They worked through the night, with heaters and tents shielding them from the howling wind as they gathered the remains of John McIntyre, Bucky Barrett, and Deborah Hussey.
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Judge Wolf’s hearings prompted two separate investigations. Prosecutors Fred Wyshak and Brian Kelly, who had brought the state police and DEA cases to fruition, began building murder cases against Whitey and Flemmi. The FBI, meanwhile, fielded a task force under a special prosecutor, John Durham, to build cases against Connolly and, presumably, the other FBI agents and supervisors who Wolf found had engaged in misconduct. Again, there was little confidence among other law enforcement agencies that the FBI would aggressively ferret out corruption within its ranks. And as the clock on the statute of limitations ticked down, it appeared Durham’s team would in fact strike out. Then they got some unexpected help from an unlikely source: the Mafia leader Frank Salemme.

It wasn’t exactly an altruistic gesture, given that it had been the young, ambitious John Connolly who arrested him in 1972 as he walked down a Manhattan street, landing him in prison for fifteen years. And even though Salemme had been able to briefly avoid arrest after Connolly’s tip-off allowed him and Whitey to skip town, the Mafia leader felt no obligation to keep quiet now—
omertà
didn’t apply to corrupt FBI agents. He testified that Connolly had promised he would be included in the head-start tip-off. That was enough to get Connolly indicted. Revenge was only one factor in the Mafia boss’s highly unusual decision to testify for the government. Salemme was trying to get his eleven-year sentence for racketeering reduced, and he was facing an additional eighteen months in jail if he refused to testify. “I wasn’t going to do 18 hours for anybody,” Salemme said, “never mind 18 months.”
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Connolly’s use of Whitey as an informant in the FBI’s war against the Angiulos had been, in effect, the Irish mob’s masterstroke against La Cosa Nostra. Salemme’s role in getting Connolly indicted was the Mafia’s revenge: The agent who brought down the Mafia was in turn brought down by the Mafia. Three days before Christmas, 1999, FBI agents knocked on the door at Connolly’s stately home in Lynnfield, an affluent suburb north of Boston. Arresting him so close to the holiday was not an attempt to humiliate him so much as a matter of beating the clock: The statute of limitations for tipping Whitey off so he could flee, two days before Christmas in 1994, was due to expire the next day.

Connolly was ashen, sick with the flu. The agents who arrested him did not share his view that certain defendants should be shown certain courtesies: They handcuffed him. When he walked into the courtroom, his hair, normally perfectly coiffed, looked unkempt. Instead of his usual tailored suit, he was wearing a sweat suit. Everything had changed, except for Connolly’s pride. He was unbowed. “This investigation should have been dubbed, if it wasn’t already, Operation Scapegoat,” Connolly’s lawyer said after he was released on bail to await trial.
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Connolly got a call from Bill Bulger offering support. “I was just expressing an interest in his situation,” Bill Bulger told a grand jury later, “and just giving him a call to tell him that I still have confidence in him.”
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As Connolly awaited trial, the digging resumed, this time at Tenean Beach in Dorchester. They found the remains of Paul McGonagle, the old Mullens gang leader. Months later, they found what was left of Tommy King along the shore of the Neponset River across Dorchester Bay in Quincy, about a hundred yards from the condo complex where Whitey had lived with Greig in the 1980s. The final dig was for Debra Davis. Her gravesite was near King’s, just across Dorchester Bay from the waterfront campus of the University of Massachusetts. When the digging began, the university president, Bill Bulger, was preparing to host a presidential debate between George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore. With the national spotlight about to fall on the university stage, generators hummed all night across the bay, fueling the spotlights that state police had set up at the dig. It looked like they would never find her when they came up empty after nearly two weeks. The search was suspended just days before the candidates and the national media swarm hit town. Then investigators, armed with new information, resumed the dig a couple of weeks later and finally found Debra Davis’s body.

In September 2000, Whitey was charged with nineteen murders in a sweeping new federal racketeering indictment; Flemmi was charged with participating in ten of them. Months later, state murder indictments carrying the death penalty were brought against Whitey, Flemmi, and John Martorano in Tulsa and Miami for the killings of Roger Wheeler and John Callahan. The small band of state police and DEA investigators, working with prosecutors Wyshak and Kelly, had found the bodies and cut controversial deals to build a staggering case against the two informants who had almost gotten away with murder. The idea propagated by Whitey’s apologists that he was simply the biggest bookie and loanshark in Southie was officially dashed. All that was left was to find him and hold him to account.

John Connolly’s fall from grace was swift and stunning. A jury sitting in Boston found the testimony of Connolly’s corrupt supervisor John Morris and Whitey’s grave digger Kevin Weeks more credible than all the awards and honors the FBI had bestowed on Connolly, who never took the stand. As the verdict was read, he stood next to his wife, Liz, nineteen years his junior and a young FBI secretary when she began dating him. He was convicted of racketeering, obstruction of justice, and lying to an FBI agent. His only solace was that the jury had acquitted him of the most serious charges: leaking information that led Whitey and Flemmi to kill potential witnesses against them. Connolly was allowed to remain free until his sentencing, and a few hours after his conviction he sat down with his three sons, a twelve-year-old and eleven-year-old twins, to explain the verdict. He called it the worst night of his life.
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More than two hundred people wrote letters to Judge Joseph Tauro asking him to show mercy to Connolly. Some of them, like Joe Pistone of
Donnie Brasco
fame, and William Friedkin, the Hollywood director, were famous.
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Most, however, were ordinary people who extolled Connolly’s generosity and kindness. The mother of a man who had been beaten to death at an ice rink during an argument over a youth hockey game explained how Connolly had become almost a surrogate father to the dead man’s boys; Connolly drove them to their hockey games and laced up their skates.
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Other letters noted how Connolly, who had suffered from skin cancer, regularly donated blood and platelets, and how he raised money for charities in Southie and beyond.
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Tauro was not much moved; he sentenced Connolly to ten years in prison. Connolly was stunned. He barely had enough time to hand his wedding ring to his wife before he was hustled off to prison, still insisting on his innocence. “I’m guilty of bad judgment, maybe, but I never intended to commit a crime,” Connolly said after the verdict.
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He had lost everything except his own illusions.

Sitting in solitary confinement
at the maximum security prison in Walpole, south of Boston, Steve Flemmi felt he was out of options. He was sixty-nine years old, he was doing hard time, and his once-taut body was withering. He had been locked up for almost nine years. His friends had turned against him. His former FBI handler was in prison. And Whitey was off somewhere, flying in the wind. Flemmi finally swallowed his pride and caved. In October 2003, he pled guilty to ten murders and agreed to testify for the government. For that, he was spared the death penalty. He spilled details of the long years of FBI corruption, including evidence that soon had Connolly facing a murder charge in Miami for helping to get John Callahan killed. Flemmi’s words also led to charges against retired FBI agent Paul Rico in Oklahoma for plotting with Whitey, Flemmi, and John Martorano to kill Roger Wheeler. Rico, unrepentant to the end, would die a few months later while awaiting trial. He was seventy-eight.

Even as Connolly awaited his murder trial, questions lingered about the other agents who received money and gifts from Whitey. What about the supervisors, in Boston and Washington, who had looked past Whitey and Flemmi’s crimes and rewarded Connolly with commendations and raises? Only Connolly had been called to account. John Durham, the special prosecutor, acknowledged those questions and promised to answer them with a final, full report. It was never produced, and no one in the FBI besides John Connolly ever faced charges for protecting Whitey Bulger.

While the world he had created imploded,
one sensational revelation at a time, Whitey was nowhere to be found. As the new millennium dawned, he was in his seventies and looked like any other balding grandfather with fair skin and blue eyes. The FBI had seized his assets—his condo in Clearwater, Florida, his lottery winnings, his various bank accounts and safe deposit boxes—hoping to cut off his money supply. But they had no idea how much money he had stashed all over the country and the world. There had been sightings in many places, most of them bogus, but in November 2000 the focus was squarely on California as the FBI quadrupled its reward for his capture, from two hundred fifty thousand dollars to one million dollars. It made the announcement with great fanfare at press conferences in Boston, San Diego, and Los Angeles—saying it now believed the sighting of Whitey and Greig at the beauty salon in Fountain Valley earlier in the year was credible. There was another reported sighting of Whitey around the same time in Venice Beach, California, where he had vacationed with Teresa Stanley before his years on the run.
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The FBI circulated Wanted posters of Whitey and Greig along the Mexican border, speculating, quite correctly, that he might follow the well-worn path into Tijuana for cheap, readily available prescription drugs.

They were finally closing in and also trying, it seemed, to close the yawning gap of trust between them and other law enforcement agencies. At the same time that it quadrupled the reward money, the FBI announced that it was teaming up with the state police and the DEA to find Whitey. It was a symbolic truce, aimed at ending decades of bad blood and mistrust engendered by the FBI’s association with Whitey. The move more than doubled the number of investigators assigned full-time to tracking him, from three to eight.
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State police Major Thomas Foley, Sergeant Thomas Duffy, Sergeant Stephen Johnson, and DEA agent Dan Doherty—the same investigators who had been busy debriefing John Martorano and Kevin Weeks and digging up bodies—cautiously agreed to join a task force that included two FBI agents, a Boston police detective, and a correctional officer. The enlarged team was moved out of the FBI’s Boston headquarters to spacious new quarters inside a building that houses the Coast Guard offices and overlooks Boston Harbor. It was neutral ground for the agencies that had clashed over the Whitey investigation, as well as a private and secure place to store sensitive files and interview people. Finally, it looked like tips would be shared, resources pooled, and grudges buried. But the best of intentions quickly collapsed in the face of old enmities and FBI high-handedness. Just before the new help was scheduled to arrive, the bureau, incredibly, slapped Foley, Duffy, and Johnson with subpoenas demanding their cell phone and work phone records. They were told they were targets of a Justice Department investigation into media leaks about the Whitey investigation, but they saw it as a poorly disguised attempt by the FBI to discover who their sources of information were. Stung, they refused to work with the FBI. It was an absurd situation that destroyed any chance of reconciliation or merging of the two manhunts. Several other state troopers and a DEA agent would later be added to the FBI-led task force, but it remained a strained partnership. Whitey was, as ever, the beneficiary of the divisions and the disarray.