Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (28 page)

Also included in the committee’s report was a scathing indictment of the work of Paul Rico and Dennis Condon. Rico and Condon were the ones who’d handled informant Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, going so far as to falsely imprison four innocent men in the 1965 murder of Teddy Deegan to keep Barboza from taking the heat.

“I must tell you this, that I was outraged—outraged—at the fact that if [the exculpatory documents] had ever been shown to me, we wouldn’t be sitting here,” testified the lead prosecutor in the Deegan case. “I certainly would never have allowed myself to prosecute this case having that knowledge. No way.… That information should have been in my hands. It should have been in the hands of the defense attorneys. It is outrageous, it’s terrible, and that trial shouldn’t have gone forward.”

In October of 2003, the very same week that testimony was given, police authorities from both Miami and Tulsa arrested Paul Rico at his Florida home on charges associated with his involvement in the murder of Roger Wheeler, owner of World Jai Alai, back in Oklahoma in 1981. The information they needed had come from none other than Stephen Flemmi, who was more than happy to give up anyone he could to get his own sentence reduced. To some hard-nosed investigators this kind of dealing by subjects in custody to get sentences reduced was called “getting on the bus.” Both strange and fitting, given that Rico had first tapped Flemmi as an informant, turning him over to John Connolly upon his retirement. Rico had managed to skirt the law for years, according to court records, and probably figured he’d gotten away with everything right up until that knock on his door, and he was arrested for involvement in the crimes he should’ve been fighting, according to federal court records.

The paradox in this irony was bitter and sweet at the same time, since so much of the culture that allowed the Boston office to spin out of control had been bred by Rico and his former partner Dennis Condon. Two of the four men they had wrongly jailed for the murder of Teddy Deegan, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco, died in prison. (Their death sentences, along with that of Peter Limone, were commuted to life in prison following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Furman v. Georgia, 1972.) Joseph Salvati and Limone, were finally freed not long before Rico’s arrest. Rico might not pay for the four lives he had needlessly destroyed, but he would now pay for a fifth whose murder he’d reportedly engineered.

Rico died at the age of seventy-eight in 2004 prior to his trial, his appearance so wan and weak in those final months that even his most fervent enemies and accusers expressed sympathy for his plight. Justice had hardly been served, neither in Rico’s case nor the Boston office itself, since only one of the perpetrators spawned by the era, John Connolly, had actually been jailed. The justice system had failed. Those at FBIHQ who’d continued to fight and belittle me and my efforts thought they could breathe easier.

They were wrong.

Because the floodgates had been opened and could not be shut. The failure of the criminal justice system sent those wronged by the actions of corrupt FBI personnel to civil court, backed up by the inescapable conclusions reached in the Wolf hearings, the Connolly trial, and the Rico arrest. The corruption I had fought for so long had at last found the proper forum; Joseph Salvati, for example, sued the Bureau for $680 million for wrongful conviction in 2003, and that was just the beginning.

In the ensuing years, more than a dozen civil cases were filed against the Bureau directly related to the actions I had been stymied from stopping or exposing. After fighting for years to make people listen, suddenly I had a willing and captive audience eager to depose me for what I knew that for so long nobody wanted to hear. Appearing on CBS’s
60 Minutes
in 2001, I had extemporaneously held the Bureau guilty in answering a question about responsibility. Every plaintiff’s attorney had a copy of that show. In one case, there were no less than thirteen lawyers in a conference room during my deposition, too many for all the chairs to accommodate.

In a separate venue with government lawyers alone, I got a taste of what shape their hostility would take later in open court.

“Don’t answer that,” my crusty lawyer, Bill Brown, instructed in response to a relatively simple question from a Department of Justice attorney.

“You can answer the question, Mr. Fitzpatrick,” she extolled.

“No, he can’t,” came Brownie’s retort.

The attorney kept her eyes squarely on me, avoiding Brownie altogether. “Answer the question, please. You have nothing to fear.”

At which point, Brownie leaned over the table toward her. “Are you Mr. Fitzpatrick’s lawyer?”

“No,” she replied feebly.

“That’s right. So stop giving my client legal advice. He won’t be answering the question.”

This episode made for a prime counterpoint to the way I’d been handled by the FBI following the shooting incident in Cape Cod. Back then, FBIHQ agents ordered me to attend a class at Quantico that I’d already taken. I was actually taken out of class one day and ordered to FBIHQ where I was grilled yet again without counsel or any legal recourse. I told my interrogators I wanted an attorney and was rebuffed repeatedly. It was like a scene from the classic novel
Darkness at Noon
in which Communist interrogators continue to question and berate Nicholas Rubashov until he falsely confesses his guilt just to make it stop. And if they did this to me, it made perfect sense that they’d follow the same track with agents used to concoct the case against me, one of whom later admitted he was so scared that, as in
Darkness at Noon,
he made up a lie they wanted to hear rather than sticking to the truth. Make no mistake about it, though, I remained Rubashov in this twisted tragedy.

I wish I’d had Brownie on my side back then, since his intervention with government lawyers had been a prime example of his working to protect me. Wolf, in his hearings, had inadvertently made a finding that now included me as a defendant in most of the civil cases brought against the government. One defense attorney told me he had to name me as a defendant to assure my testimony at trial to win the civil case.

The battle lines had been drawn, and this time I had Brownie watching my back. There were enough cases and depositions to make all the Q and A’s run together, with one exception that would provide me with an opportunity to achieve the justice I’d been seeking for twenty years. A case that was still etched into my memory from a cold, blustery January day in 2000 when I stood watching the remains of a long-buried body being lifted from the frozen ground.

The body of John McIntyre.

29

BOSTON, 2006

As I stood on that embankment in 2000, steaming over confirmation of what I’d suspected ever since John McIntyre disappeared in 1984, I never imagined I was looking at the means to achieve my long-sought vindication. The coroner’s report on McIntyre’s death and remains only strengthened my resolve, as it brought me back to a dark period that had sewn the first seeds of my departure from the Bureau.

McIntyre wasn’t a made guy like Brian Halloran, or a wannabe like Richie Castucci or John Callahan. He wasn’t even a businessman with something Whitey Bulger wanted, like Roger Wheeler. John McIntyre was just an ordinary guy from Southie who got himself jammed up with the cops and was looking for a way out. And Bulger didn’t just kill him, as he’d had John Martorano do to John Callahan with a bullet to the back of the head. No, he tortured McIntyre to death. Clearly Whitey wanted something he was convinced McIntyre wasn’t giving him. The IRA intelligence? Maybe—if, as I suspected at the time, it was Bulger who told Scotland Yard about the arms shipment that had started out on the
Valhalla.
Nothing scared Whitey, nothing in Boston anyway. The IRA was something else again. If he’d ratted the IRA shipment out, for whatever reason, the IRA would close Bulger in a way far more permanent than what I’d been seeking.

Yes, what Bulger, already a fugitive for five plus years in 2000, had done to John McIntyre made me want to get him even more. And if I couldn’t get him, I wanted to get his enablers, the keepers of the corruption that had cost McIntyre and so many others their lives while the FBI turned a blind eye.

Between the Wolf hearings, the Connolly conviction, the Committee on Government Reform’s report, and the arrest of Paul Rico, McIntyre’s family figured there was a smoking gun that could prove the FBI was complicit in his brutal murder. So they filed a civil suit in district court, drawing a wheelchair-bound, old-school, no-nonsense judge named Reginald Lindsay in a case that became known on the docket as
The Estate of John McIntyre, Plaintiff v. The United States of America, Defendant.
And, in large part, I was to become the smoking gun they needed.

Bill Brown, my attorney, called me on an unseasonably chilly late spring day in 2006. “Get your ass up to Boston, Fitz. Big trial coming down.”

“Okay,” I responded. “What’s up?”

Brown went on to tell me that Judge Lindsay was going to have a bench trial in the McIntyre case. “No jury,” Brownie said. “Just a trial before the judge; in our case Judge Lindsay.”

Up until this point I had been deposed numerous times involving about eleven cases, all seeking big bucks from Uncle Sam for “estate” suits in Boston’s U.S. district court. That meant the McIntyre trial could make for a precedent-setting case with major consequences for the government, especially the FBI.

On another unseasonably cool, windy morning I boarded Amtrak in West Kingston, Rhode Island, for the hour-long trip to Boston. The sky was gray, like my thoughts, with a foreboding feel of cold rain. My thoughts were coldly calculated in remembering the McIntyre case and what it had meant to me. My trip that morning would become a ritualistic endeavor over the ensuing weeks of trial.

As the train chugged into the station I made out Brownie waiting with a huge satchel, his old brown boxlike carrier that could hold all the government documents necessary for the trial. It was like some wizardly thing out of a Harry Potter movie, the way he seemed able to pull infinite reams of material from it, inevitably knowing where every piece of paper had been filed. Brownie and I exchanged the pleasantries of reunion and he ushered me to a great restaurant where we talked about McIntyre and the impending trial for hours.

“You know they’ll be coming at you,” he said. “The government has an axe to grind and doesn’t really want to pay out any money in these suits.”

I nodded and Brown continued, “Fitz, you are a key witness in this case because of what you know and who you were. We both know you’re not on anybody’s side per se and only want to tell the truth.”

My eyes glazed over as Brown opened his bottomless satchel, producing endless reams of depositions and discovery material relating to the case.

“This discovery stuff,” he explained, “is your testimony over the past three years and will be used in the trial. I need you to get familiar again with the material so you’ll be ready.”

I shot a look back at Brown, “Brownie, when you tell the truth, you don’t have to worry about what you’ll say.”

Brown, the experienced attorney and savvy courtroom expert, rolled his eyes with nuanced skepticism. “Fitz, just do as I tell you and we’ll be all right.”

We chatted about how all of the Bulger murders had a common theme. Most notably the fact that Bulger the rat didn’t like rats, and he was especially vicious when dealing with other rats. Psychologically, I suppose this was a type of reaction formation or self-loathing often born of a long stretch in prison. Bulger, on the outside anyway, was a constant show of machismo, force, and bravado. But inside lurked a thug with low self-esteem buttressed only by the security he found in wielding power through intimidation and brutality. The very definition, in my mind, of weakness. A bully, plain and simple. A psychopath.

“Why did Bulger have to maul and torture McIntyre the way he did?” I asked Brownie, posing a question I’d never been able to answer for myself.

“Because that’s the way he is,” he replied simply.

Brownie told me Bulger was the worst criminal he’d ever dealt with, shocked at how he’d co-opted the FBI.

“This case is gonna be a tough one, Fitz,” he advised in what sounded more like a warning.

When I was a kid in the Mount we used to queue up for confession every Saturday afternoon about four p.m., before dinner, which was at five. The usual priests were there: the “good” priest with a Hail Mary and Our Father for penance; the inquisitive one always asking for more detail; the “hard-of-hearing” priest who made all of us speak louder to the snide snickers of boys within earshot. This priest would come out of his “box” and grab those kids from other lines because his was empty.

I recall Father Kenny lecturing me about “scrupulosity” in confessing. Father cautioned me that I offered too much detail in confessing about situations that weren’t as significant as I thought them to be. Wow, I thought, I was confessing too much, actually a good thing for the priests because it showed a good examination of conscience. But, on Saturday, with all the kids going to confession, it might be considered a waste of the priest’s time. They wanted to eat on time, too.

I found out when the trial started that when asked a question in court I had a tendency toward scrupulosity. Brownie picked up on this and said, “Fitz, you know you can say ‘I don’t know.’”

I explained to him the problem was that I
did
know and only wanted to tell the truth. Like Father Kenny at the Mount, Brownie was only trying to cover my back.

He observed that a defendant like Greenleaf had already been singled out by at least one judge, Mark Wolf, remarking on his tendency “not to remember” or simply testifying “I don’t know” even if he did. Brownie emphasized that the judges know who is telling the truth and that’s exactly what I intended to do.

The courtroom in Boston boasts a formal setup that belies its new setting on the waterfront facing Boston Harbor. The judge sits atop a box higher than anyone else in a courtroom smaller than what movies and television normally depict. It was also unusually quiet, no background noise whatsoever with the heavy doors managing to keep even the clacking of footsteps in the hallways from being heard inside. Beginning on June 12, 2006, I sat in a box alongside the judge and followed his body language throughout the trial. Judge Lindsay would rub his semi-bald head whenever he became perplexed or anxious with testimony. Generally, he was an empathetic listener.