Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (19 page)

Morris was involved in the investigation when the rep in question returned the UC payoff. The assistant U.S. attorney spoke with Morris and flat out asked him if he’d talked to Dennis Condon about the UC operation. Morris denied this vociferously and made a show of how insulted he was. A lousy act. I called the prosecutor and asked him to interview Morris again about the leak. Morris then admitted talking to Condon on the subject, but fabricated the details in an attempt to hide his complicity. A clear criminal action.

The fix was in, and the still-open case was given to a U.S. attorney who was a pal of Morris and Connolly. This attorney was the one who opposed using the consensual evidence that would certainly have resulted in the rep’s conviction. He argued against the tape and was backed up by James Greenleaf among others.

These were tumultuous times with great unrest in the Boston office. It seemed that virtually everything we were doing was leaked to someone, causing great distrust. In my view, the turmoil was exacerbated by in the absence of true SAC leadership on the part of Greenleaf, a faulty chain of command, and “end around” plays by Connolly and Morris. All the reservations and fears I had about Greenleaf from our initial meeting and drive to Maine had been confirmed. It had been folly to think him capable of taking the helm of a troubled office like Boston. But his friendship with Assistant Director John Otto, along with his willingness to hide the hole into which the office had plummeted, trumped all else. I had warned my supervisors that they were to report to me before others so that the information could be tracked and properly managed. If leaks happened, I wanted some tools to help determine the source, but it was like sticking my fingers in a crumbling dike.

One informant, for example, gave me strong intelligence on the North Community Co-Op Bank in the North End of Boston. The bank was involved in a huge Bulger money laundering operation that would, I later learned, become Whitey’s personal piggy bank after he fled in early 1995. Bulger could and should have been prosecuted by O’Sullivan’s office on the money laundering charge, but the case was thrown out in a veiled attempt to once again protect Whitey from prosecution.

During this period, agents of the Organized Crime squad, including Nicholas Gianturco and Michael Buckley, would receive gifts from Bulger as reported by Stephen Flemmi in court testimony, and later admitted to in court by several other agents. Flemmi told one jury that his and Bulger’s payoffs to John Connolly alone amounted to $235,000 over time. While conceding Gianturco and Buckley had indeed received some gifts from Bulger, the other agents minimized the value of them. Testifying before the same jury at John Connolly’s murder trial in 2008, Buckley went so far as to explain away his accepting a gift from a mob associate because the man’s daughter had handed it to him. “I accepted it because she handed it to me and it was a gesture of kindness,” Buckley recalled in his testimony as a witness for Connolly. “I didn’t see any other reason behind it. There was no favor. There was no quid pro quo.”

Maybe, but that wasn’t always the case. Under a grant of immunity years later, John Morris admitted to taking $7,000 in bribes from Bulger and Flemmi. Did the fact that he also tipped them off to federal wiretaps and confessed to leaking the fact that Brian Halloran had become an informant count as quid pro quo in that case?

As ASAC, it wasn’t that I didn’t know what was going on. From the time Greenleaf replaced Larry Sarhatt in 1982, it was clear to me that our office had spiraled into a descent of treachery and criminality. SACs are supposed to set the tone, and in my opinion (and as I later said in court testimony and depositions), Greenleaf did just that, letting agents like Connolly run free without fear of repercussions. From 1982 to 1986, any report I made to HQ on Greenleaf’s conduct was stifled and/or ignored and each time the bull’s-eye painted on my own back got bigger.

But there was more. As referenced earlier, Dave Twomey was an assistant U.S. attorney who worked organized crime and drug cases under Jerry O’Sullivan on the Strike Force. I was the New England drug task force commander, so Twomey, as part of the Strike Force, had to liaise with me in taking down and prosecuting druggers and OC members.

Even as my OC and drug squads started making real progress in bringing down the cartels, which included Whitey Bulger’s increasing involvement, Dave Twomey continued giving information to the very OC and cartel suspects we’d targeted. So I went to O’Sullivan to report this interference in our cases through the suspected leaking of highly sensitive material from the surveillance and “wires” that were going up, along with the names of other sources who were giving us information.

O’Sullivan was livid; not at Twomey, though, at me for insinuating such a thing was even possible. He demanded to know which Bureau informant had made the claim to my agents, Jim Crawford and Matt Cronin.

“You know I can’t tell you that,” I advised the Strike Force chief.

He scoffed and, some weeks later, proceeded to tell me that the informants, whose names I’d never provided, were “drunks” and thus should be considered unreliable at the time. Dave Twomey was neither relieved of his position nor reassigned, and no in-house investigation came to light. Generally, this information would have caused an OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) inquiry and investigation. Yet business was allowed to continue as usual, and that in itself was not
un
usual.

But I wasn’t about to let go of my pursuit of Twomey or anyone else. Here I was, ordered into a Serpico-like scenario where I was supposed to clean up the dirt in the Boston office, and all that dirt was now being swept under the rug. It was becoming increasingly clear that the people I was reporting to were potentially complicit in the very crimes on which I was reporting. Complicit because my reporting no longer allowed them to profess ignorance or claim plausible deniability later, even as another informant was about to die.

19

BOSTON, 1984

An unintended consequence of my squad’s takedown of mob boss Jerry Angiulo was a sudden void in the drug distribution market. For years the Irish Winter Hill Gang, under both Howie Winter and Whitey Bulger, had pretty much ceded that revenue stream to the mafia under Raymond Patriarca out of Providence. That said, the myth perpetuated by those like John Morris, that one of the things that made Bulger “a good guy” was that he stayed clear of the drug business in general and within Southie in particular, was just that: a myth.

“There were U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents like Steve Boeri and Al Reilly, backed by DEA bosses like Paul Brown and John Coleman, who were especially galled that Bulger’s defenders bogusly claimed he kept drugs out of South Boston,” Kevin Cullen of the
Boston Globe
wrote years later. “The DEA men knew the only drug dealers Whitey killed were the ones who didn’t pay him tribute.”

Other than take that tribute from the dealers who moved their product through Southie, Bulger steered his people away from drugs only to avoid an all-out war with La Cosa Nostra. With Angiulo out of the way, though, he was more than happy to step in and fill the void, and why not? The FBI’s providing him insulation from prosecution made him feel invincible and untouchable. If he could get away with murder, why not expand his reach into drug dealing? Whitey only needed to see the potential revenue that could further strengthen his hold on power in the Boston rackets, as well as the possibility of supplanting Patriarca as the most powerful gangster in all of New England. He was nothing if not ambitious.

Even if Bulger’s move into drugs didn’t lead directly to his downfall, it did yield another informant who could help me close him once and for all, an informant named John McIntyre. A veteran of the military, the gregarious McIntyre was a fisherman who built and repaired boats. But he was also heavily involved in the Irish gunrunning and drug deals out of Boston under the auspices of Joe Murray, another Irish gangster in competition with Bulger.

Murray traded in guns, drugs, and other contraband. He and Whitey might have been cut from the same cloth, so to speak, but they didn’t see eye to eye at all. Murray wasn’t part of the Winter Hill Gang, yet was still forced to pay tribute to Bulger for any drug dealing he did in Boston. Murray always suspected Bulger and Flemmi were informants, but to suggest such a thing would have been to assure his own death. So he remained silent and steamed over having to cut Bulger in on action Whitey otherwise had nothing to do with—a situation exacerbated by Jerry Angiulo’s exit from the Boston crime scene since it left Murray competing within Whitey’s expanding enterprise.

The one thing on which Murray and Whitey did see eye to eye was the IRA. Anything they could do for their Irish brothers in arms, they did, which mostly amounted to raising funds to purchase and smuggle guns back to the homeland. As a middleman for the deals, Bulger made his share of money, but he needed Murray’s operation and boats for the procurement and shipment of the arms.

One of these boats was the now infamous
Valhalla,
and among its crew was John McIntyre, who was arrested for his small part in the operation in September 1984, setting the stage for his brutal murder just two months later. People in the know were always suspicious about how the
Valhalla
escaped capture off the Irish coast. Looking back on things now, rumors that Bulger had been the one who snitched the IRA info to the Brits seem well founded indeed. After all, the eventual seizing of the
Valhalla
led to the takedown of Joe Murray, thus allowing Whitey to take over the few Irish gangs he didn’t already control and further consolidate his power in the drug world and beyond. Now, instead of taking tribute from Murray, the network was Whitey’s and Whitey’s alone. He had effectively cut out the middleman, yet again.

Once McIntyre began to talk, I was notified immediately through Rod Kennedy, an FBI agent who liaised with the DEA, and I began to visualize Bulger caught in a fisherman’s net. Kennedy represented me at a meeting in which McIntyre told of an upcoming drug shipment bound for Joe Murray, who, of course, paid tribute to Whitey in order to run his drugs in Bulger’s South Boston territory. McIntyre was on board a ship called the
Ramsland
when it sailed into Boston Harbor in mid-November 1984, carrying thirty tons of marijuana. The cargo was seized, turning Bulger livid over his sizable lost share of the profits and looking for someone to blame.

Strangely, joining my squad on the dock that day when the
Ramsland
motored into port was none other than Martin Boudreau, former Strike Force attorney under Jeremiah O’Sullivan who’d recently gone into private practice as a mob lawyer. The fact that someone had leaked the coming seizure to him gnawed at me. How else, after all, could he have learned about it? But I had a major drug bust to oversee in tandem with the DEA, so that issue would have to wait.

Not only had McIntyre proven himself, he began to spill additional evidence he had of a link between Murray and Bulger, whom he’d never actually met at this point. And several three-letter agencies saw this as payback time. The DEA had been subjected to much the same “leaking” that I had witnessed and had seen a number of cooperative investigations go south thanks to FBI leaks or downright malfeasance.

The DEA knew where I stood on the matter so they reached out to me. McIntyre was just hoping to preserve his young family and simply wanted out. But he turned down the FBI and Customs’ offer to enter the Witness Protection Program, while continuing to help them, and me, build a case against Bulger. We got an affidavit for a wire based on McIntyre’s info, but it was never installed because of procrastination and stalling that seemed the very definition of bureaucratic incompetence or, worse, purposeful stalling on the part of those protecting Bulger. The DEA’s involvement made this the greatest threat he’d faced yet since becoming an informant, and that was certain to reverberate all the way to Washington.

And then came the night that John McIntyre was lured to the house in South Boston to be tortured and killed by Whitey Bulger because he’d been given up by those he trusted to keep him safe. Given up to have his teeth pulled out, his body mutilated and then buried in another basement before being moved across from Florian Hall in Dorchester where he might never be found.

We know that now. At the time, though, all we knew was that John McIntyre had simply disappeared. All the intelligence he was providing was rendered moot since there was no one else around to corroborate it.

The existence of an informant willing and able to link Whitey to both guns and drug running, who could put Whitey on the docks as the weapons were being loaded onto the
Valhalla,
must have terrified his enablers no end. So, like Brian Halloran, John Callahan, and Richie Castucci before him, McIntyre had to be killed. The images of his brutal murder haunt me to this day. It’s hard to revisit the terrible pain Whitey Bulger caused McIntyre to assert his own sadistic power, a bully to the end. For what? For being an informant? Well, what about Bulger and Flemmi being informants? Bulger broke the supreme Irish code of ratting out to his so-called enemies, while Connolly and Morris ratted out their fellow agents and informants. All of them much more deserving of the fate McIntyre ultimately suffered.

When I appeared on the
60 Minutes
TV program in the wake of McIntyre’s body being recovered in early 2001, the now deceased Ed Bradley asked me, “As a former FBI agent, do you in, in any way hold other FBI agents, the Bureau itself, responsible for these murders?”

“Yes, I do,” I answered simply, with no equivocation. “Yes!”

It was the same answer I would have given in 1984, had anyone bothered to ask me.

There were plenty of hands to go around, all right, and plenty of blood to coat them all. But who had leaked John McIntyre’s name to Bulger in the first place? Who exactly had cost this young man his life?