Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (18 page)

“Angiulo,” I said in a firm voice, “I’m Bob Fitzpatrick, ASAC with the FBI, and you are under arrest!”

I flipped my FBI creds on him and held out a gold badge with black casing identifying myself as the ASAC of the Boston FBI office and chief of Organized Crime in New England. He was shocked, to say the least. I made it a point to tell everyone at his table that only Angiulo was under arrest. For now, at least. I then informed Angiulo of the charges, a multitude of them, including conspiracy to murder. He looked shaken, with pasta stains mixed with the blood draining from his pale cheeks. Before he could react, I hustled him from the table and directed him toward the door, politely explaining that I would not cuff him until we were outside unless he caused an embarrassing scene in the restaurant. He nodded and put up no fuss whatsoever. Apparently mob guys don’t want to be embarrassed in public anymore than the FBI does.

The plan was swiftly and skillfully executed. The only people eating in the restaurant that knew of the arrest were my agents secreted among the many diners. Angiulo’s own lieutenants were left speechless and flabbergasted. Outside, we slapped on the bracelets and rushed Angiulo across the sidewalk. The familiar pat on the head prior to getting in the car caused him some consternation but it quickly passed.

I advised Angiulo of his constitutional rights and, as he listened, he looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. His eyes, no longer enraged, were glassy. He still had a bit of spaghetti sauce on the side of his mouth. I thought I could hear his stomach grumbling instead of the usual mouthing off I’d become well acquainted with thanks to the secret wire that had led to his arrest.

“You got nothing on me,” he managed feebly.

“Angiulo,” I said, “don’t be pissed. You know it’s your yapping and your voice on the tapes. Maybe you should’ve kept your mouth shut.”

This was an allusion to the years of clandestine, court-ordered wire recordings of his house where he’d discussed the “secrets” of his criminal enterprise. The loan-sharking, the extortions, the planning of murders. By grabbing Angiulo we brought his criminal enterprise to a grinding halt. All of his money, all of his property, including houses and cars, were confiscated. Almost overnight he went from being one of the most powerful men in Boston to a virtual ward of the state. I turned Angiulo over to the agents for processing, where he was dutifully fingerprinted, photographed, and brought before the magistrate in Boston’s federal court where John Connolly showed up just to be photographed during Angiulo’s “perp walk,” in spite of the fact I’d deliberately kept him out of the Angiulo bust.

In 2009, a U.S. Navy honor guard would play taps at Jerry Angiulo’s graveside after a funeral at St. Leonard’s Church in Boston’s North End, not far from the restaurant where we arrested him. And, in an ironic counterpoint, Angiulo died on the eightieth birthday of Whitey Bulger, whom the
Boston Globe
on September 4, 2009, referred to as “a longtime FBI informant who helped the bureau send Angiulo to prison.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

“You’ll never close Bulger,” John Morris had told me the night I interviewed Bulger at his Quincy condo.

Bulger was thought to be invaluable, a lynchpin in bringing down La Cosa Nostra, a tale propagated by Connolly and Morris and taken in, hook, line, and sinker by FBIHQ. Because of that he’d been protected at all costs, up to and including making the FBI a willing accomplice in the murder of informants who could have given him and his handlers up for prosecution. But now Angiulo was behind bars, the Boston mob was in shambles, and not a single shred of evidentiary material or testimony that had gotten it done had come from the invaluable Whitey Bulger.

I prepared the communication to FBIHQ after calling the Director’s Office to announce the mafia chief’s arrest. This was a big deal in the OC section and the kudos were generous and genuine. The FBI chiefs in Washington were ecstatic. We had taken down the Boston mafia “without incident”; no reprisals, no problems, and no embarrassment to the Bureau. Later, I celebrated with my fiancée Jane over dinner at a North End restaurant and I never felt better. She had brought a light back to my life I feared extinguished forever with the breakup of my marriage, another casualty of the Bulger years.

I later learned that Jane was scared all through her dinner because she couldn’t understand how I could come back to the North End after arresting the mafia chief. We both laughed with a bit of trepidation. She was the director of nursing at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston at the time, living in a three-story tenement house we’d bought in Brookline, which was convenient both to the hospital and my office in the federal building.

“Cops marry nurses,” I told her. “We both lead exciting lives and meet all kinds of people under stressful situations.”

“Never thought of that,” she said.

I had accomplished a great portion of what I’d set out to do upon coming to Boston, and was understandably gratified that in this OC “leg” of my assignment I’d pulled off what would’ve been impossible prior to my arrival. But Whitey Bulger was still running free on the outside, while James Greenleaf was still in charge inside. Greenleaf usually made himself scarce in the office, and in court testimony would later repeat that he did not remember or recall, did not know, or flatly denied certain things that were clearly evident. Not surprisingly, Greenleaf could always remember and recall the things he wanted to take credit for. He was chided by agents and nicknamed “Greenleave” by those befuddled by his absentee management style. The Boston office, above all else, cried out for a hands-on approach to leadership. Greenleaf, in stark contrast, seemed adverse to taking charge and offering the kind of direction that was so sorely needed.

Greenleaf, I began to suspect, was in league with the same higher-ups in Washington like Sean McWeeney, head of the Organized Crime section, who had ordered me to report directly to them. In this scenario, they would control the information and he would control me. The fact that my squad had taken down Angiulo in spite of Bulger, not because of him, left them with no cover and further complicated their plight. They were more frightened than ever that the truth of possible FBI complicity in the murder of informants, as well as the enabling and abetting of Whitey Bulger’s rise to the top of the Boston underworld, would be revealed. Ultimately, that’s exactly what would happen years later in federal court, much too late to undue the damage done by such an unholy alliance.

Don’t embarrass the Bureau,
the unwritten rule might have said, but that didn’t stop the Bureau from embarrassing itself.

Greenleaf was the right man for the job, all right. I could only think that he’d been assigned to Boston to keep a lid on things, which required keeping a lid on me. As for Sean McWeeney, he continued to ignore the reporting he’d specifically requested I provide him. Several of these meetings were held in Washington with other members of the Organized Crime squad present, where I specifically detailed how leaks from the Boston office had led directly, at the very least, to the murders of Brian Halloran and John Callahan at the hands of Whitey Bulger. But Bulger remained open as an informant, again in spite of my protestations. And if that meant more informants had to die, then so be it.

18

BOSTON, 1983

It would be a year before my battle to close Bulger as an informant reached another crucial juncture. In the meantime, not only did one of my squads take down the mafia, but all of our priority Group I’s, major undercover cases, were reaching culmination.

In White Collar Crime we knocked down a couple of wiseguys in the organized crime infiltration of the Boston stock market. I ran an undercover gig in a main case called “Fitzpatrick’s Investments” that attracted wiseguys doing business in the penny stocks in play at the time. No one made the connection. In Public Corruption we grabbed public officials attempting to sell out the city. In one major undercover case called NECORR, New England Corruption, we were building a major case against Whitey’s brother, Billy Bulger, still president of the Massachusetts State Senate at the time, and were on our way toward making a major undercover payoff to one of Bulger’s cronies in the statehouse.

Some years later, Billy Bulger took the Fifth Amendment when questioned before the House Reform Committee about his involvement in the scandals and knowledge of his brother Whitey’s underworld activities. Even after being granted immunity to compel his testimony, Billy’s answers remained vague, often frustrating the committee members. Take his response to a specific question from Representative Dan Burton of Indiana in 2002 about what he and Whitey actually talked about in a call after Whitey’s disappearance in 1995:

“I’m his brother. He sought to call me. Or he sought to call me and I told his friend where I’d be and I received the call and it seems to me, um, that is in no way inconsistent with my devotion to my own responsibilities, my public responsibilities as a, well, at that time, uh, president of the Senate. I believe that I have always taken those as my first, my first obligation.”

In the drug area my squads were grabbing Irish and Italian cartel chiefs across a wide swath of drug involvement and smuggling. Marijuana cartel heads were arrested. All of a sudden, four years of planning an assault on crime in Boston was coming to fruition. Jerry Angiulo’s arrest had only been the beginning. We were on a roll!

In still another case, we busted a notorious chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang for trafficking in guns and drugs, especially methamphetamines. This chapter was at the forefront of setting up labs for making the stuff, archaic even by 1980s standards, and pushing their product throughout New England. The chapter’s chief enforcer, a very dangerous, tattoo-covered thug, was holed up in a cheap motel room near Logan Airport in Boston.

That’s where we cornered him. He was supposed to be “resting” following orders for another execution. We located his room and then got its layout in order to practice our incursion at a different location. This guy was a federal fugitive dimed by one of our Hells Angels informants. When we found a room similar to his we practiced entry so that the apprehension team, of which I was the lead agent, could grab the fugitive without incident. Each time the door was kicked open I was first to enter, and practiced taking the fugitive wherever he was in the targeted room.

This guy was one mean son of a bitch. He routinely severed the hands, legs, and heads of his victims to hide the evidence and foil identification through fingerprints and such. He was a cold-blooded killer steeled in the macabre art of “wasting” those marked by the Hells Angels for execution. His girlfriend traveled with him as a sometimes accomplice, used to seduce the victim if necessary, and was known for concealing sharp instruments or razors for “protection.” The Hells Angel was known to keep in his possession a Magnum, a .45 automatic, a sawed-off shotgun, and other firearms.

When it came time for the takedown, I laid a boot into the flimsy wood and sent the door to his room rocketing inward. My .357 Magnum service weapon drawn, I’d barely lurched into the motel room when the door bounced off the wall and ricocheted, smashing me in the face and knocking me back. Fortunately, the enforcer was passed out, zonked and snoring like a baby with his feet dangling off the end of the slight motel bed. It was the last time I ever kicked in a door. From that point on, I let the tactical specialists do their thing.

In another instance we got word back that a suspected snitch was going to be whacked by organized crime wiseguys. The plan was to garrote the guy with piano wire and put him in the trunk of a car. We had a moral dilemma in whether or not to warn him, since it would expose our informant and put his life in danger. But we figured out a way to alert the target without causing harm to our informant. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t take the warning seriously, and to the best of my recollection, he was garrotted in spite of our efforts.

Dealing with Whitey Bulger, then, was not the only part of my job in Boston, and I wasn’t going to let my frustrations affect the rest of what I’d been sent to the city to do. The leaks continued, even intensified. For instance, in the NECORR bribery and kickback case a state representative was investigated and accused of political corruption in violation of the Hobb’s Act, a federal charge. But Billy Bulger, still president of the Massachusetts State Senate at the time, was the ultimate target. Our undercover operation hit several bumps in the road along the way before finally hitting pay dirt when our undercover (UC) agent had finally positioned himself to make a payoff to Vincent Piro, the Massachusetts State House assistant majority leader. Our hope was that Piro would lead us to the Speaker of the Massachusetts State House along with Billy Bulger.

I was in the control room with the prosecutor when the deal went down. After our undercover agent paid Piro off, he reneged in an exculpation that sounded like script because that’s exactly what it was. Piro had rehearsed the entire “give back” and completely changed his tune, clearly aware that his words were being recorded. We were flabbergasted. We knew our sting had been leaked, and the entire operation had been compromised by the insidious cancer that had infected so many Boston cases over the years. But Connolly wasn’t to blame. I would later learn that the culprit this time was Connolly’s supervisor, John Morris.

An investigation revealed that the UC agent had “inadvertently” told Connolly and Morris about the NECORR sting. And Morris told his old friend and mentor Dennis Condon who just happened to work for Vincent Piro’s defense attorney. When I interviewed Condon about his role in blowing our case, he not only denied leaking or receiving info from agents but was livid that we would even suspect him. I believed Condon was lying and in my notes wanted to charge him with “1001,” lying to federal agents, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office took over the investigation and then dropped it. The case would eventually go to trial and Piro was acquitted.