Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (7 page)

Bulger opened the door, his face hardened and expressionless, looking like a guy who clearly thought he had something better to do. He was wearing a Boston Red Sox cap angled low over his forehead to cast his face in shadows, gnawing at a toothpick wedged into the side of his mouth. In the foyer, I greeted him with an extended palm. He ignored it and just walked away, placing himself behind an island in the kitchen area.

I felt his eyes on me the whole time, something we called the “long eye” at the Academy. Always the tough guy, Bulger must have been figuring he could intimidate me as easily as he’d intimidated so many others. Well, Morris and Connolly might have read of my previous exploits, but Bulger clearly hadn’t. It was doubtful they would’ve shared the information with him for fear of making him think he was doing business with someone more powerful than they were.

As I returned his stare, more of a snarl really, I noticed John Connolly lurking to the right of Bulger in a darkened corner. I was surprised to see him there, since I was supposed to be conducting the interview alone and had not been forewarned of his presence. I would later ream out Morris, Connolly’s supervisor, for allowing this. But it was clear to me now that he wasn’t the one calling the shots, nor had he ever been. Neither was Connolly. Indeed, the way Connolly positioned himself had left little doubt as to who the alpha dog here was. Everything about his body language suggested utter subservience to Bulger, a “suck-up” in the truest sense of the word. But I determined that if Connolly had so much as opened his mouth, I’d have his ass right then and there.

The light in the kitchen was dimmed, casting shadows around the room. I could picture Bulger doing that on purpose as a means of increasing his own ability to intimidate. It could also have been that the relative darkness masked his relatively small stature. Age had robbed him of the physical attributes he’d once relied on, leaving him with only his brutal reputation and glare. He was no more than five-eight, maybe five-nine, with a lean, sinewy build. Hardly imposing, but a testament to his violent reputation.

To Bulger’s left stood a woman later described as his girlfriend to whom I was not introduced. I recall that Connolly faintly said hello and then disappeared back into his shadowed alcove. Bulger’s girlfriend pressed out one cigarette and lit up another, blowing the smoke from her mouth and nose in plumes that wafted upward to hang heavy in the air. Her presence here was also clearly designed to unsettle me, Bulger’s witness if he needed one.

Everything about Bulger, every quirk and gesture, was about control. He hadn’t greeted me cordially in order to better control the situation. He had me follow him into the kitchen and left us to speak across the island, controlling our discussion by putting a physical barrier between us, his dark side against a brighter one.

One of the psychological concepts I taught at the FBI Academy was “Body Space,” scientifically called “proxemics.” By working the distance between us to his liking, Bulger projected that he was running the situation instead of me. He made a show of letting Connolly walk right up to him to demonstrate who he needed to pay deference to and it wasn’t me. Again, the alpha dog! He never once took off his sunglasses, which, with the soft, diffused light, prevented me from seeing his eyes. “No eyes,” I thought, recalling a movie where the prisoner on a chain gang tested the guard who always wore dark sunglasses. The prisoner couldn’t see the guard’s eyes and had to calculate whether or not he’d be shot if he tried to escape. As it turned out, he was.

Based on the game Whitey was playing, maybe he had read up on me after all.

My psychological training taught me to understand eyes as elements of “pupilimetrics” or “chromatics.” And if the eyes were in fact the window to the soul, then Bulger had shut the blinds over them. He wore a T-shirt over his surprisingly lithe frame, wore it out over his shiny slacks as if to make me think he had a gun wedged in the waistband. More intimidation, as if I was going to turn tail and run before the questioning even began.

I knew I was looking at a stone killer, a psychopath, and it was hardly the first time. There’d been others, lots of them, but the one that came to mind the most as I faced Whitey Bulger for the first time was James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr.

Soon after returning to Memphis from the Sam Bowers investigation in Mississippi, I was thrust into yet another, and tragic, high-profile case. I’d been serving mostly as relief supervisor for the Memphis Special Agent in Charge, Bob Jensen, and dealing with any number of civil rights investigations. In Memphis, a lot of these issues focused on an ongoing strike by sanitation workers. Almost all the workers were black and the city mayor refused to negotiate a new contract. So they went on strike and I was put on “special” again at the exclusive direction of the Department of Justice in Washington to investigate the considerable, escalating violence that remained an upshot of the strike.

My new schedule entailed coming into the office at four in the afternoon, either staying through the night or at my post at a local fire station across the street from the Lorraine Hotel in downtown Memphis, where Martin Luther King was staying. The interesting, and unfortunate, thing here was that King had actually come to Memphis at the behest of the striking sanitation workers who wanted him to rally them and solidify their commitment to a labor action that by then had stretched into months. Since I was still supervising the case, I had voluntary informants inside the church where King gave what they described as a “rousing” speech in which he stated, ironically, that he didn’t care if his commitment to the workers’ cause got him killed.

The next afternoon I was at the fire station, eyeballing the Lorraine Hotel where King and his entourage were staying, when our dispatcher, Leah Bramlett, called on the radio.

“Bob, we’ve got reports that Martin Luther King’s been shot!”

I had been watching the hotel with binoculars on an intermittent basis and hadn’t seen anything threatening or suggesting anything had happened. Nor had I heard any shots.

“Look,” I told Leah, “I’m gonna check this out right away and get back to you.”

I ran outside into the flood of responding Memphis police, including the Tactical Squad, arriving at the scene and finding a man named Charlie Stephens, a resident of the boardinghouse with the odd address of 422½ South Main Street. He told me he’d heard a “loud noise” coming from a bathroom containing a window that looked right across at the Lorraine Hotel balcony where King had been standing when he was shot. Stephens, who was clearly drunk but nonetheless lucid, reported seeing a man running from Room 5B down the stairs carrying a “wrapped” object in his hands.

“Bobby, Bobby!” called Captain Zachary, in charge of the Memphis PD. “Over here!”

I followed him into the rooming house, and, guns drawn, we stormed up the stairs. We had called for additional backup, but there was no time to wait for it. So while the rest of his “Tac” team secured the building, we went in.

I realized right away this was a flophouse, used by bums and transients in a part of the city that was in transition. The stench of booze, urine, and body odor filled the stairwell and the decaying steps creaked under our pounding. The building’s panicked occupants had seen all the activity and were rushing about everywhere. Zachary and I tensed, aware that any of these men could have been the shooter. I scrutinized their movements as they surged past us, knowing body clues would give the perpetrator away. None did.

The landlady looked too old and withered to be running such a place. She directed us to Room 5B, which she said she’d rented earlier that day. Inside that room we found a box of rifle shells and a pair of Bushnell binoculars. Then back downstairs, wrapped up inside a rooming house bedspread tucked in an alcove, I spotted a rifle. The 30.06 Game Master with a Redfield scope, it turned out, was the one that had just been used to assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. Later, we found a transistor radio bearing the number “00416,” later shown to be James Earl Ray’s prison ID at the Missouri Penitentiary, along with a pair of men’s underwear hand sewn by Ray while he was imprisoned there.

Deliberately false information and constant chatter was flying wildly over the radios. Everything was chaos. We had dozens of separate sightings. Racial aspects of the shooting were evident in these false reports. I assigned agents to gather more intelligence and to identify what kind of car the suspect had driven off in. I sent agents to interview everyone in view of both the flophouse and the Lorraine Hotel, while I rushed to the airport with the rifle and bedspread tucked in an evidence bag for delivery to the FBI lab in Washington. The last plane out of Memphis for Washington that night had already taxied onto the tarmac, so my agent driver and friend Andy Sloan chased the 727 down the runway as the Memphis FBI office frantically ordered the Memphis tower to hold the flight.

“This better be good,” the pilot said, eyeing the bundle I was carrying as I ran up the manual gangplank and came on board.

“It is,” I told him.

He saw the evidence bag in my hand, his eyes begging for more information.

“This is the rifle that killed Martin Luther King,” I told him.

The pilot nodded and, in complete stunned silence, turned back to the controls. Minutes later, we were airborn, and the evidence bag lay across my lap for the entire trip.

Only we couldn’t land in Washington; radioed reports described gunmen shooting at our plane and the whole downtown D.C. area on fire from rioting. Word of King’s assassination had reached the streets and the FBI had to act fast to stop the violence from spreading across the country.

The plane landed in nearby Baltimore, where agents were waiting to drive me—and the rifle—to the lab at headquarters. Meanwhile, Memphis Special Agent Bob Boyle asked the FBI Indentification Unit to check the Bureau’s files on prison escapees. And a hand search of those 36,000 files managed to pinpoint James Earl Ray’s from fingerprints taken off the rifle I’d given to a special agent named Frazier in the Firearms Unit.

This was the FBI at its best. At the time it was the biggest investigation and manhunt in the FBI’s storied history, all the better when it came to a successful conclusion. Ray, our investigation revealed, had driven to Atlanta from Memphis, making his way to Canada and then England. Forensics gathered from our investigation at the scene, including marks on a window ledge on which a rifle had been steadied, left no doubt Ray was the shooter and that the rifle we recovered from the scene had killed Dr. King. To preserve the chain of evidence, I later returned to Memphis to personally secure the bullet as soon as it was removed during the autopsy. Before long FBI Most Wanted flyers featuring Ray’s face and aliases were distributed everywhere.

Thanks in large part to the speed and thoroughness of our response, Ray was apprehended at London’s Heathrow Airport by British authorities on June 8, two months after the assassination. After Ray emerged from a flight originating in Lisbon, an alert Immigration official recognized his face from our FBI Wanted poster and immediately summoned the Special Branch of Scotland Yard. Although I didn’t participate in his actual apprehension, Director Hoover ordered Bob Jensen and me, as lead investigators, to perform the first interviews with James Earl Ray at Brushy Mountain Prison. I remember how unimpressed I was when I first laid eyes on him. He looked squirrelly, his gaze shifting and constantly furtive. An utterly common guy who had taken on the stench of the flophouse where he’d been holed up waiting to take his shot at Dr. King.

Back in Boston, facing Whitey Bulger from across that kitchen island in 1981 made me think of facing James Earl Ray from the other side of a steel interrogation table. It was extremely uncommon among FBI informants to display such hostile behavior; we were on the same side, after all, at least that’s what they were supposed to think. Normally informants went out of their way to be cordial and make an impression, knowing the wrong word from one of us could land them back in the jam they were in at the start.

“Nice place you got here, Whitey,” I said, enjoying myself.

“I never got your name.”

“That’s ’cause you didn’t shake my hand. It’s Fitzpatrick.”

“You don’t understand,” he boasted. “I was in Alcatraz; I was in the toughest penitentiaries. I’m a bad guy, not somebody you wanna come out here and mess with.”

“Is that what I’m doing, Whitey? Messing with you?”

“You tell me.”

“I just asked you.”

“You got any idea of the stuff I’ve done?”

“That’s why I’m here, to find out what you’ve done and what you’re doing for us. See, you wanna tell me about all the stuff you’ve done when I want to hear what you’re doing for me. Because you’re the informant.” My last remark, a caustic taunt.

Bulger bristled when I said “informant.” I recognized that the word was explosive. Especially for an Irish guy who grew up loathing informants, and still did to this day. His reaction told me Whitey didn’t really consider himself an informant at all. In this case there was very little to be gained from a man who hated the very creature his handlers made him out to be, further explaining why Morris and Connolly had handled Bulger with kid gloves.

I measured his stance. Psychologically, the way he carried himself evoked a “tough guy” and an “in your face” attitude, coupled with a sinister bravado gained from his murderous deeds, aimed at further intimidating me. This man was every bit a tried-and-true, hardboiled thug who’d long ago grown weary of any sense of moral obligation, and had no need for the simple courtesies that might make him appear weak or, just as bad, ordinary. He relished his toughness. Wore it as a talisman.

“Whitey, what are you doing for the FBI?” I finally asked when he lapsed into silence, even though the answer was already written on the parts of his face I could see through the dim lighting. “What are you doing for
me
?”

I put the stress on the word “me” to let him know who he was dealing with now, to whom he needed to pay deference. I thought I caught Connolly wince in the shadows. I deliberately avoided looking at him and kept my focus on Bulger. I could smell the smoke from Whitey’s girlfriend’s cigarette.