Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (27 page)

During much of that same period, my own Merit Systems Protection Board case, stemming from the FBI’s refusal to live up their settlement agreement to expunge my record, wound its way through the court system, fought every step of the way by the government’s army of lawyers, both in and out of house. When I lost in district court, I appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals. When I lost there in 2005, I appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. My filing contained the results of a polygraph test that I took and passed in relation to the Greenleaf dispute. To my knowledge, Greenleaf had never taken a polygraph. Neither had any of the other antagonists from that era, including those who arose out of additional complaints I’d filed on still more corruption I’d uncovered during my post in Providence. It all fell on deaf ears.

And the Supreme Court refused to hear my case on a technicality.

I felt used all over again. I felt like the FBI was holding “something” over me during the years of evidentiary hearings, testimony, depositions, and motions. More retaliation? I knew only one thing: If I told the truth I could live forever with that, and no one could take my integrity away. But none of the cases I brought against the Bureau in any court brought me any sense of satisfaction or, even more, vindication.

That would come another way.

PART FIVE

VINDICATION

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

28

BOSTON, 2000

A team of Massachusetts state policemen pulled the body of John McIntyre out of a shallow grave in a Dorchester, Massachusetts, gulley on a cold, dark, and dismal morning in January of 2000. The gray sky hung over the town’s brick housing projects nestled apart from the rows of tenement homes finished in peeling paint or cheap siding, while the skyline of nearby downtown Boston winked with the first light of day. Across the street, a worker replaced letters on the marquee of Florian Hall, a popular banquet facility, to greet the attendees of a Chamber of Commerce luncheon later that day.

The gulley had been dug out as part of the “Big Dig,” a major highway project undertaken to reroute the traffic, currently buzzing above along the Southeast Expressway, underground—it would ultimately become the most expensive highway project in U.S. history. I stood on the lip of the gulley gazing downward at the scene, flanked on either side by local television news teams eager to scoop one another. McIntyre’s remains, limited to bones and body parts, were forced from an unforgiving frozen ground by uniformed officers wearing surgical masks over their mouths as a precaution both against germs and the potential stench of decomposition.

No priest or cleric had presided over the funeral of John McIntyre. No dark-dressed cortege stood in solemn silence, weeping in grief for a lost friend and loved one. There had been no wake, no eulogy, no visiting hours.

As I stood on the lip of the dirt pile, looking down at the assemblages of bagged and tagged pieces of what had once been a man, the war I’d waged against organized crime and my own associates in the FBI for that entire period hit me hard and fast. I would later learn how McIntyre’s last rites had been given in the basement of a two-story tenement house in Irish-dominated South Boston, where he’d been lured on the pretext of a party. For sixteen years, McIntyre’s disappearance remained unexplained and his body undiscovered until another informant’s tip drew the Massachusetts State Police to this burial spot.

I’d been out of the Bureau for almost fifteen years by this point, but calls from both the media and some leftover contacts in law enforcement had brought me to the scene just past dawn, where I stood frozen in the frigid air. It was 1984 again, John McIntyre was still alive, and once more I thought I had what I needed to clean up a mess in the Boston office of the FBI many years in the making.

And here now, almost two decades to the day of my arrival in Boston, the bones being pulled from the ground told the same story I’d spent the last fifteen years of my life telling. While my personal efforts to seek vindication were being stymied at every turn, justice was about to be served. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed an assistant U.S. attorney from Connecticut, a bespectacled, ordinary-looking special prosecutor with an organized crime background named John Durham to finally do what I’d been prevented from doing: sort out the corrupt mess that defined the Boston office and clean it up. Sounds like a simple enough mandate, and for Durham it was. Like Fred Wyshak he didn’t have to contend with superiors impeding his investigation, some of whom were corrupt themselves. He did have a substantial handicap, though. Durham knew most of the agents involved in the Boston organized crime debacle, which could influence him partially because he had worked with them on some of the same OC investigations.

Or, he could embarrass the Bureau all he wanted.

Durham turned his sights, initially anyway, on John Connolly. Connolly had always cultivated a high profile and now that would come back to haunt him by making him the most convenient target, especially since he’d left the Bureau and wouldn’t have the insulation that comes with being an active agent. Connolly bombastically and combatively took shots at the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, denigrating them in the media. Arrogance, I was reminded, was his calling card.

Authorities arrested Connolly shortly after Durham obtained an indictment on obstruction of justice and racketeering charges in December of 1999, just before the statute of limitations ran out. They arrested him as the holiday season was in full swing, Connolly led out dressed in pajamas with his usual neat and polished appearance in disarray.

His brashness and ego had made him an easy target. Believing himself immune to prosecution, ingratiating himself with the media, he had turned the Wolf hearings into his own personal sideshow both in and out of court by speaking out against his former colleagues and superiors. He lambasted John Morris by labeling him a liar and a fraud, while flatly rejecting the claims of another, Morris’s successor as head of Boston’s Organized Crime squad, Jim Ring. Everyone, from Connolly’s perspective, was a liar except him. He alone stood above all the corruption either revealed or hinted at during the hearings, contesting that he was a pillar of integrity. Connolly had insulated himself in his blanket of delusion that he had single-handedly taken down the Boston mafia, thanks to his turning Whitey Bulger as an informant. Profiling Connolly, I called this delusion superego lacunae, or “holes in the conscience,” opinion over fact.

Connolly had the ability to use defense mechanisms to see things as rosy as he desired. He was a hero, a legend in his own mind, and thus untouchable, and everyone else be damned. He brushed aside my claims about him; dismissing them out of hand while seeming insulted I’d even dare pose them. There were guys calling him “Cannoli” because he went over to the other side. He simply stopped listening to reason, along with whatever was left of his own conscience. I had dealt with a lot of aberrational subjects in my time and Connolly had dissolved into little more than one of them, having lived the lie so long that he now routinely accepted it as the truth.

But there was another side to the whole Connolly fiasco that has never gotten the attention it deserves, that being the real possibility that at this very time none other than Billy Bulger was putting Connolly’s name forward to become police commissioner for the city of Boston. I’d heard the rumors but dismissed them out of hand until questioning of Bulger in 2002 before a U.S. House of Representatives committee revealed that was exactly the case. Billy tried to double-talk his way out of it, saying in part, “Maybe way back. Many years before, there was a neighbor of ours who was mayor, and I may have suggested John to Raymond Flynn.… I may have suggested him as a candidate, somebody that might be looked at.”

Well, I ran the Boston Marathon with Boston mayor Ray Flynn during that period, and in my mind there was no way he’d ever even consider Connolly for such a positon. The point is that Connolly had always insulated and compartmentalized Billy from his brother, while protecting Whitey from arrest and prosecution at the same time. His taking me to meet Billy early into my Boston tenure was all about showcasing his power and making “we always take care of our own” a barely veiled promise. That’s what Billy was doing now by pushing the then lobbyist Connolly for a “commish” job that would have put him in charge of fighting crime in Boston.

How ironic that around the very time Billy Bulger may have been pushing John Connolly for police commissioner, another gangster-turned-informant, one Kevin Weeks, led FBI and Massachusetts State Police officials to the site in Dorchester where he’d buried the body of John McIntyre and two more of Bulger’s victims. Weeks had already admitted his involvement in five murders with Whitey and Stephen Flemmi while denying he ever killed anyone himself.

“It wasn’t that I wouldn’t shoot,” he said, as reported in the
Boston Globe
; he didn’t have to, since Bulger and Flemmi “liked killing people.”

Kevin Weeks was in the basement the night of John McIntyre’s murder. I stood on the lip of the gulley that cold January day thinking about how these three victims (other bodies recovered included those of Bucky Barrett, another informant, and an ex-girlfriend of Flemmi’s named Debra Davis, allegedly strangled by Bulger himself), whose lives had been reduced to the contents of black body bags, didn’t have to die. They’d all been murdered after my claims about Whitey Bulger and repeated recommendations that he be closed as an informant.

John Durham, though, had only John Connolly in his crosshairs, and it should have been like shooting fish in a barrel. As it was, though, the lengthy trial resulted in more charges being dismissed than upheld, due in large part to the fact that much of the testimony presented against Connolly came from convicted hit man John Martorano, as well as Frank “Cadillac” Salemme himself. Both had already cut deals with the government and were even less credible than Connolly himself. In truth, Salemme would actually perjure himself to get Connolly. The former crime boss was an advocate of “what goes around comes around,” and it was his turn to get even. Stephen Flemmi, too, from a witness chair not far removed from the jail cell where he was serving an abbreviated sentence thanks to a plea bargain, wasted no time in cutting Connolly down to size.

In May 2002, Connolly was convicted of racketeering, obstruction of justice, and lying to an FBI agent. The jury, though, failed to find him guilty of bribery or of receiving a two-carat diamond ring from Bulger. This in spite of the fact that Connolly had many times shown the ring off and made no secret of its origin as stolen property. Even agents on the OC squad heard the rumors of the infamous ring and winced each time Connolly ran it up the pole.

Connolly was ultimately sentenced to ten years in federal prison, stoically stewing there while prosecutors began to build a case against him in the 1982 murder of John Callahan in Miami. As that Florida trial was about to begin in 2008, I was interviewed by David Boeri for an article he was writing for
Boston Magazine.
In “The Martyrdom of John Connolly” (September 2008), Boeri expertly handled much of what transpired subsequent to John Connolly’s 2002 conviction with a scathing, eye-opening aplomb that stressed Durham’s myopic vision of the problems he’d been brought in to deal with.

“Nobody in this country is above the law, an FBI agent or otherwise,” Durham insisted in the wake of Connolly’s conviction, seeming to indicate a plan, at least an intention, to pursue other guilty parties.

Nothing could be further from the truth. More than a decade later now, no additional arrests or prosecutions have taken place, in spite of the fact that I and a number of other law enforcement officials laid out all the evidence of corruption and leaking for Durham. We basically served up everything he needed on a silver platter, which he apparently ignored then and has continued to ignore since.

I indicated to Boeri for his article that the Department of Justice threw Connolly under the bus. Clearly no fan or close friend of the man either then or now, I continue to stand by that statement. Connolly was the fall guy, the most convenient to go after and nothing more. But his conviction on charges that only scratched the surface of what he was truly guilty of did little to address the scope and magnitude of the corruption I’d found in Boston. Durham never charged the top leadership, including James Greenleaf or Jeremiah O’Sullivan, with a single thing. Whitey, after all, was
John Connolly’s guy.
Connolly had long proclaimed that to be so and had ridden Bulger’s coattails to a decorated career and cushy retirement. But now he was finally paying the price for it. Of course, O’Sullivan had been a willing partner ever since the 1979 Race Fix case, in which he’d let Bulger and Flemmi skate even though he knew they were guilty. That should have made them beholden to him; instead the reverse turned out to be the case.

Durham’s laserlike focus on Connolly, in my mind, made him appear little better than O’Sullivan and the Department of Justice that oversaw his Strike Force. Durham gave everyone else involved in or enabling Boston’s culture of corruption a pass, just as O’Sullivan had given Bulger and Flemmi a pass.

“In short,” David Boeri wrote me in an e-mail months before publication of his article for
Boston Magazine,
“Durham protected the FBI, and the very team he relied upon—the State Police and DEA agents—who arrested, interrogated, and handled the major witnesses, rebelled against him and consider him a fraud. They believe he could have and should have prosecuted other FBI agents. But that he chose not to investigate further.”

In hearings held in 2002 and 2003, though, the House Committee on Government Reform picked up the ball Durham had dropped. On November 20, 2003, the committee approved and adopted a report entitled “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers as Informants.” “The 1979 Ciulla race-fixing prosecution memorandum provides extremely important information about how prosecutorial discretion was exercised to benefit FBI informants James ‘Whitey’ Bulger and Stephen Flemmi,” the report said in part. “It demonstrates that former U.S. Attorney Jeremiah O’Sullivan’s testimony before the Committee is subject to question. Perhaps more important, it shows that a 1997 FBI Office of Professional Responsibility conclusion that prosecutorial discretion had never been exercised by the federal government on behalf of James Bulger and Stephen Flemmi was not correct.”