Where the Bodies Were Buried (40 page)

As with other participants inside the secretive, clubhouse world of criminal prosecutions in New England law enforcement, O'Sullivan assumed his duties as an inheritor of all that came before, with great zeal. To say that the ends justified the means was a quaint way of putting it: in a jurisdiction where FBI agents had been enabling murderers, suborning perjury, and burying exculpatory evidence for at least a generation, O'Sullivan seized his moment in history.

Noted Cardinale, “We know that, in 1979, O'Sullivan takes Bulger and Flemmi out of the race-fix case: that's a fact. He did that because he was sold a bill of goods by Connolly and Morris that without those two he couldn't get what he wanted more than anything in the world, which was to take down the Angiulo organization. He got bullshitted by two completely corrupt motherfuckers, who would have done anything to protect their informants, because they were taking money, making cases, and their star was rising in the FBI because they were doing all this great work.”

The recording device that the C-3 squad was able to plant inside 98 Prince Street, thanks to a schematic provided by Flemmi, would prove to be
Jerry Angiulo's undoing. It remained in place for 105 days and picked up, among other things, killings authorized by Jerry Angiulo, who was recorded telling an underling, “You think I need tough guys? I need intelligent tough guys. . . . What do you want me to say? Do you want me to say to you do it right or don't do it? . . . Tell him to take a ride, okay? . . . Get out of the car and stomp him. Bing! You hit him in the fuckin' head and leave him right in the fuckin' spot. Do you understand? . . . Meet him tonight. . . . Just hit him in the fuckin' head and stab him, okay? The jeopardy is just a little too much for me. You understand American?”

On tape, Angiulo's diatribes sometimes came across as profane stream of consciousness, but always with a point. “Fucking, motherfucker, big-mouth cocksucker. Shut up,” he said to an underling whom he was attempting to school on the proper way to fix a dice game. “You motherfucker . . . Let me tell you something. I've been in the craps business when you weren't born, you cocksucker that you are. Don't you ever, ever have a pair of dice go more than one and a half or two hours without replacing it with a brand-new set, and that set goes in your fucking pocket and they're thrown down the fucking sewer. Do you understand that? That's a fucking order because you're a fucking idiot. Now shut up.”

“Yeah, but let me tell you,” said the underling.

“You talk and I'll hit you with a fucking bottle.”

The 98 Prince Street tapes were sometimes comical, but there was nothing funny about the charges. Cardinale, just thirty-three years old at the time, was Jerry Angiulo's lawyer during the trial. “We tried like hell to get those tapes declared inadmissible,” remembered Cardinale. “But keep in mind: at the time we knew nothing about Bulger and Flemmi's arrangement with the feds.”

I asked Cardinale, “Weren't your guys suspicious? Didn't they wonder who was working with the FBI from the inside?”

Cardinale was insistent: “My clients couldn't believe the FBI would ever deal with somebody as heinous as Whitey Bulger. They viewed Bulger and Flemmi as glorified hit men who would kill people for nothing. Murderous bastards. They knew Bulger had Connolly in his pocket, that he was paying Connolly for information. They were jealous and wanted in on that. That was something they would pay for. But they never believed that the FBI
had such a degree of institutional degeneracy as to be in bed with Bulger and Flemmi.”

In February 1986, after an eight-month trial, Jerry Angiulo and his three brothers were found guilty on multiple racketeering counts. Jerry Angiulo was sentenced to forty-five years in prison.

“So that was it, the Holy Grail,” I said to Cardinale.

“No. That was a big step on the way to the Holy Grail, but that's not the Holy Grail.”

In the history of the federal government's war on La Cosa Nostra, or LCN, there had never been a recording of a secret mafia initiation ceremony. In his testimony before Congress in 1963, Joe Valachi had described a mafia induction ceremony. From that point on, it had been a dream of the FBI and prosecutors to secretly record such a ceremony, and by so doing penetrate and discredit the mafia code of
omertà
.

Morris and Connolly decided, Why stop with Jerry Angiulo? Why not go for the Holy Grail?

The quest to bug a mafia induction ceremony began with the planting of yet another Title III wiretap inside Vanessa's restaurant, located at the Prudential Center, in Boston's Back Bay. Through Steve Flemmi, the FBI agents learned that the Mafia, in the wake of the devastating Angiulo convictions, had moved their meeting place outside the North End to a part of the city where, they figured, nobody would suspect a mafia confab would be taking place. Through the bug at Vanessa's, the FBI was able to record and ultimately coerce into cooperating an old-school Mafioso named Sonny Mercurio. Said Cardinale, “Mercurio was a tough guy who had done time for murder. The last kind of person you would suspect could ever be an informant.” But it happened: Mercurio became the latest feather in the cap of John Connolly, who enlisted the mobster as a Top Echelon Informant.

Mercurio's job was to lead them to the Holy Grail. That wasn't going to be easy. At the time, there was a moratorium on inducting new
soldati
into the New England Mafia. So the agents and Mercurio, with an assist from Bulger and Flemmi, needed to create a scenario that would lead to the Mafia having to induct new members. Mercurio fomented a dispute between two factions of the Mafia. On the wiretap at Vanessa's, the FBI's C-3 squad heard it being decided that there was going to be a series of mob
hits. What the agents did next might be considered shocking, except that it was a continuation of what had occurred during the Teddy Deegan murder twenty years earlier. The agents, though they had foreknowledge, did not warn the targets about the pending hits.

One of the targets was Frank Salemme, former partner of Steve Flemmi. Salemme had returned to Boston after a nine-year stint in prison and, in the wake of the Angiulo convictions, was looking to take over as boss. The FBI and its informants—Bulger, Flemmi, and Sonny Mercurio—were looking to use Salemme as a stepping-stone on their way to the Holy Grail.

On the morning of June 16, 1989, Salemme sat down at an outside table at the International House of Pancakes in Saugus, Massachusetts, to have breakfast and some coffee. Four gunmen opened fire. It was a sloppy attempt. Bullets flew high and off the mark, shattering glass and sending innocent bystanders ducking for cover. Salemme was hit multiple times but survived.

The second hit that had been planned—and overheard on the Vanessa wire—was successful. A New England Mafioso named William “Billy” Grasso was shot in the back of the head, his body left alongside the Connecticut River.

The FBI investigators and prosecutors had stood by and let the mayhem take place, knowing that it would lead them to their goal. Sure enough, the induction ceremony transpired, on October 29, 1989, at a private home of a mobster in Medford, Massachusetts. Present at the ceremony was Sonny Mercurio.

Numerous criminal trials rose out of the induction ceremony tapes, one of them involving a client of Tony Cardinale. The attorney still had no idea of Bulger and Flemmi's role, and he was unaware that Sonny Mercurio was an informant—though co-counsel knew there had to be a rat for the feds to have known where the ceremony was going to take place. Cardinale and the other attorneys in the case discussed who it might be. “It was beyond anything that we could imagine that a guy like Sonny Mercurio could be an informant,” said Tony.

Then he listened to the tape of the induction. Just as the ceremony was about to begin, someone in the room had gone over and turned down the television. Said Cardinale to the other attorneys, “Find out who turned
down that TV and we know who our informant is.” The person who turned down the TV was Sonny Mercurio.

The induction ceremony tapes were a tremendous coup. U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh and FBI director William Sessions flew in from the nation's capital for a press conference announcing the arrest and indictment of twenty-one mobsters. Director Sessions later sent a personal letter to Connolly praising his talent for cultivating informants. Connolly was given a fifteen-hundred-dollar bonus and held up as the standard of an enterprising special agent.

“They got what they wanted,” said Cardinale. “The Holy Grail. Using Bulger and Flemmi they got Mercurio, and through him they fomented a dispute. Billy Grasso was killed. They knew he was going to get killed. And Frank Salemme was supposed to get killed. And luckily a bunch of little kids and mothers didn't get killed that morning outside the pancake house in Saugus. The FBI knew it, planned it, pushed it. So this is what this Bulger trial is all about. This is why the FBI was willing to get into bed with such reprehensible lowlifes and give them the run of the town.”

Cardinale finished his grappa and shook his head in amazement. When he looked back over the last thirty years in Boston, like many people, he still found it unsettling. “A big part of what I do as a criminal defense lawyer,” he said, “is to try and stop cops, prosecutors, and judges from playing God. Because these guys couldn't care less if they have a guy who is guilty or not guilty. They'll manufacture evidence; they'll do whatever it takes to secure a conviction. And the way they can shave in the morning without slitting their throats is by saying to themselves, ‘If he didn't do this, he did something else. Fuck him.' That's playing God. And it shouldn't be allowed to happen that way.”

At the Bulger trial, there was little mention of Sonny Mercurio, the attempted murder of Salemme, or the Medford induction ceremony, nor did it seem likely that these events would be touched upon in any depth. The prosecution had no desire to cast a bad light on what had been some of the most illustrious mafia prosecutions in the very jurisdiction and office for whom they worked, the very office that was now prosecuting Whitey Bulger. As for Bulger's defense lawyers, they were claiming that their client had never been an informant, so a detailed explication of how these prosecutions came about was not in their interest.

THE BEGINNINGS OF
an effort to burrow through layers of deceit in the criminal justice system in Boston occurred in May 2001. It had its origins not in the city itself, but in Washington, D.C. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched an investigation into the FBI's use of criminal informants. Chaired by Representative Dan Burton, a conservative Republican from Indiana, the committee announced its intentions to hold public hearings, both in Boston and in the nation's capital, at which many prominent players in law enforcement, both past and present, would be subpoenaed to testify.

The hearings are best remembered for bringing about the public demise of former state senator William Bulger, who since his retirement in 1996 had gone on to be appointed president of the University of Massachusetts. Bulger fought the subpoena, and when called before the committee he took the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify, on the grounds of self-incrimination. Later, the committee voted to give him full immunity from prosecution, and on June 19, 2003, Billy Bulger appeared before the committee in Washington, D.C., at the Rayburn House Office Building.

Bulger denied many things that day, including having ever heard of the Winter Hill Mob. The committee tried to get at Billy Bulger's close friendship with John Connolly and other FBI agents affiliated with the C-3 squad.

It was common knowledge in South Boston that Connolly and the senator were close. Throughout his time with the organized crime squad, Connolly routinely brought fellow FBI agents over to Bulger's office in the statehouse, where they were treated as though they were having a sitting with the pope. The understanding was that if they did right by the senator—which meant looking out for his brother, Whitey—then the senator would take care of them. When Connolly retired in 1990, Senator Bulger was a featured speaker at his retirement party and said of the agent, “John Connolly is the personification of loyalty, not only to his friends and not only to the job that he holds but also to the highest principles. He's never forgotten them.” Senator Bulger helped Connolly land a cushy retirement job as head of security at Boston Edison, a public utility.

Nicholas Gianturco, John J. Kehoe Jr., Robert Sheehan, and other FBI
agents also went to work at Boston Edison upon retirement. In his testimony at the congressional hearing, Bulger professed to have no recollection of having helped these people and even went so far as to produce a signed affidavit from the CEO at Boston Edison claiming that he had nothing to do with these hirings.

Then there was Dennis Condon, Whitey Bulger's first FBI handler in the early 1970s and a regular at Billy's St. Patrick's Day breakfasts over the years. On a written recommendation from the senator, Condon landed a post-FBI job as commissioner of the Massachusetts State Police.

Even though he had been granted immunity, Bulger's testimony was a study in obfuscation. One thing he couldn't deny was that since his brother had gone on the lam, he had spoken with Whitey in a private phone call that was prearranged by Kevin Weeks, who testified about the call before a grand jury. By admitting that this call took place, Bulger was acknowledging that he lied to FBI agents who had asked him, years later, if he had any contact with his brother. Bulger's immunity deal precluded his being charged with a crime, but it was an ethical impropriety that cost him his job as president of UMass.

Billy Bulger's testimony garnered the headlines, but it was not the most revealing information to be unearthed at the hearing. Most noteworthy was the committee's unprecedented exploration of the Teddy Deegan murder case. That line of inquiry immediately set off a high-stakes struggle between committee lawyers and the FBI over whether or not the bureau would be compelled to produce documents that the committee requested. The Boston SAC, Charles Prouty, made a request directly to President George W. Bush that they not be forced to turn over documents. Prouty said publicly, “We didn't conceal information. We didn't frame anyone.”