Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (21 page)

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Lancaster Street

W
ith the garage on Marshall Street
on the rental market, and their Winter Hill partners either locked up or on the run, Whitey and Flemmi needed a new base of operations. They found it on one of the narrow side streets near the Boston Garden, where the Boston Bruins and Boston Celtics play. Lancaster Street was perfect because it was within walking distance of the North End, where the Mafia had its headquarters, and where Whitey and Flemmi were expected to gather useful information for the FBI. The street was also one-way and didn’t connect to major thoroughfares, as surrounding streets did. There were few businesses on the block. If you didn’t belong there, you stood out. They set the place up as a working car repair shop. Like the one in Somerville, it had the look of a legitimate business. It became the meeting place of men whose business was anything but on the level.

It was also soon a target for surveillance. If the FBI, or a faction within it, was dedicated to protecting Bulger and Flemmi, the Massachusetts State Police was hell-bent on nailing them. The relationship between the FBI and the state police had long been tense, mirroring, in a way, the wary ties between the Mafia and Winter Hill: Both groups were ostensibly in the same business, and supposedly on the same side, but institutional and personality differences created divisions and sometimes open hostility. For years, the two agencies had attempted to make a common cause when it came to investigating and prosecuting organized crime in the Boston area, but the FBI’s insistence on leading any and every investigation, and its refusal to share information with colleagues, had engendered considerable friction and undercut progress. Part of the problem was cultural: The state police pride themselves on being a paramilitary force; getting through their academy is akin to a marine surviving Parris Island. They looked down on many FBI agents as soft, and resented what they considered the FBI’s unearned superiority complex. They felt patronized, disrespected. But it was more than that. It was about Whitey. The Staties had watched Whitey and Flemmi rise in power and malevolence, untouched by the FBI, and they thought they knew why.

Col. Jack O’Donovan, who for years led the state police detectives who specialized in organized crime, was the first to publicly articulate the unspoken tension between the two agencies. A legend on the force, O’Donovan was a former marine who had taken a bullet in the mid-1960s while chasing a fugitive across a rooftop and later tackled a shotgun-toting man who had taken hostages in a drugstore. O’D, as O’Donovan was known, was deeply respected for his clear thinking and gruff candor, and he displayed some of both in 1979 at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, as a student in a class being taught by an FBI agent named Bob Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick’s eyes widened as he listened to O’Donovan talk about how Whitey Bulger, Boston’s preeminent gangster, was getting away with murder because he was an FBI informant.
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He couldn’t prove it, of course, because the FBI denied it, but O’Donovan and a cadre of his detectives had begun pursuing Whitey in spite of the FBI.

It was that resourceful mentality that led Rick Fraelick, a state police detective, to walk into the dilapidated office of a flophouse on Merrimac Street in the spring of 1980. The building was known as a rooming house for older gay men, so Fraelick pretended that he was gay and asked to rent a room, preferably one that faced out toward Lancaster Street. “It’s quieter,” he told the guy with the keys.
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The Staties had known something was up when Whitey stopped showing up at Howie Winter’s old hangout in Somerville, but they’d found Whitey’s new base of operations quite by accident: A tip came in about a stolen car ring using an auto body shop on Lancaster Street, near the Boston Garden. Fraelick, who was accomplished at undercover surveillance, had driven over to check out the garage. He saw Whitey and Flemmi, the only members of Winter Hill not in jail or on the run, standing outside, and realized they had abandoned Marshall Street for this place. “Bob,” he said, walking into the office of his supervisor, Sergeant Bob Long, “you’re not going to believe this.” In fact, Long didn’t believe it until he saw it with his own eyes, sitting next to Fraelick in their unmarked cruiser. “Holy shit,” Long said, almost to himself. “They’re all there.”

The rooming house was to be their surveillance perch, so when Fraelick walked into the room and saw that it provided a clear vantage point, he said, “I’ll take it.” He set up a camera and started taking photos: Whitey Bulger standing outside like a guard dog, sunning himself. Whitey meeting with Larry Baione, now the local Mafia’s consigliere, and Danny Angiulo, brother of the Mafia underboss Jerry Angiulo. Whitey with Frank Lepere, one of the biggest drug dealers in Boston, who showed up regularly. It was a Who’s Who of the Boston underworld. Anybody who was anybody dropped by to shoot the breeze, or deliver tribute to Whitey and Flemmi. Sometimes the men went into the garage’s office and briefcases of money changed hands. It didn’t take long for the Staties to gather enough visual evidence to justify electronic surveillance—a bug.

Whitey and Flemmi liked to strut outside, checking themselves out in the reflective windows of cars parked out front. When the state cops weren’t chuckling at the blatant vanity of the two hoodlums, they were killing mouse-sized cockroaches that lumbered across the grimy floors of the flophouse. They noted the time of death and the size of their prey, and they mounted the dead bugs on the wall like big game hunters. It relieved the boredom of the stakeout.

Nicky Femia, a hulking hit man, served as Whitey and Flemmi’s bodyguard at the time and was left to prowl the sidewalk. Femia was as slovenly as Whitey was fit. One afternoon, he put a spread of McDonald’s burgers and fries on top of Whitey’s shining black Chevy. Whitey sprang from the garage in a rage, snatched the fast food off the car, and began pelting Femia with it.

The troopers in the room across the way watched it all. Bob Long, as the commanding officer of the state police team investigating the garage, met regularly with Jeremiah O’Sullivan, the prosecutor in charge of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force. Long had no idea it was O’Sullivan who had acceded to John Connolly and John Morris’s requests to keep Whitey and Flemmi out of the race-fixing indictments. O’Sullivan was committed to using them in an elaborate plan to bug the Mafia headquarters in the North End, just a ten-minute walk from the Lancaster Street garage. Recognizing that he couldn’t keep the state police entirely away from Whitey, O’Sullivan said that the feds would pay for the Lancaster Street operation but that the Staties were on their own beyond that. That was fine with Long. Jack O’Donovan was Long’s mentor, and, like O’D, Long believed the FBI was protecting Whitey and Flemmi; the less the Staties had to do with them the better.

They nicknamed their first try at planting a bug Trojan Horse. They created a false bottom in a van, and a trooper named Jack O’Malley got in it. Fraelick dropped the van off at the garage for service just before closing time. But O’Malley never got a chance to get out and plant the bug after a local wino deposited himself outside the garage, making a racket and drawing attention. Long thought the commotion made the operation too risky, so O’Malley slipped out of the garage and the Staties regrouped. The next time, the troopers simply broke into the garage and planted the bugs. One of the devices was crushed when Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Roberto, a four-hundred-pound mobster, plopped himself down on the chair where it had been hidden. Another didn’t function. But a third did pick up conversation, even though it was sometimes interrupted by radio transmissions from the city’s ambulance fleet. By purposely keeping the FBI out of the investigation, the state police had been forced to improvise their bugging operation; they did not have access to the FBI’s state-of-the-art technology. The Staties, in fact, bought some of the microphones they used at Radio Shack.
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But none of that mattered in the end, because Whitey and Flemmi suddenly, unexpectedly stopped doing business in the open. They climbed into cars when they needed to talk. Then they simply stopped coming to the garage. For more than three months, the Staties had watched Whitey and Flemmi take few to no precautions when meeting other gangsters. But as soon as their bug became operational, the garage ceased to function as the new clubhouse. “They were tipped,” Bob Long said, staring out the window. “Somebody tipped them.”

The initial blame fell on John Morris. “Do you guys have something going on Lancaster Street?” Morris had asked Bob Ryan, a Boston police detective. Morris had a glass of wine in his hand and it was a law enforcement party, and Ryan didn’t know what to say. Ryan was one of the chief investigators in the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, which had obtained the court authorization for the bugs to be installed. He feigned ignorance but called Bob Long. Long went to O’Donovan, who demanded a big sit-down with the FBI.

They met at a downtown hotel on an August morning. There had been a leak, and O’Donovan made it clear he believed the source was inside the FBI. In fact, he said, he believed it was Morris. Oh, and another thing, Jack O’Donovan said: We know that Bulger and Flemmi are FBI informants.
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The FBI guys promised to get to the bottom of it. Instead Connolly and Morris began to spread various stories, muddying the waters: The state police team was inexperienced in bugging (which was true) and had relied on someone with dubious skill for technical assistance (which was also true). The Staties were just trying to cover their asses, the FBI said.

John Connolly later said it was Jerry O’Sullivan, the strike force chief, who told him about the Lancaster Street bugging. Clearly, O’Sullivan knew about it, and Connolly said O’Sullivan told him to tip off Whitey and Flemmi. But Connolly said he startled O’Sullivan when he told him that there was no need to warn them because they already knew about it. “In the middle of the Lancaster Street case, Stevie told me the garage was being wired up,” Connolly said.
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For his part, Whitey told the FBI that they found out about the bug from a crooked state cop. And he had it right. The leak came from a Statie named Richard Schneiderhan, whom Flemmi had been paying for years.

Even though the FBI was not to blame, O’Donovan’s complaints about the leak caused havoc internally. The new special agent in charge of the Boston office of the FBI, Larry Sarhatt, called Morris in and told him to close down Whitey and Flemmi as informants and target them for prosecution. “I thought it was insanity,” Connolly said. “We were in striking distance of the Angiulos.” He and Morris went to see Whitey and Flemmi. “I think this whole business is over because of Lancaster Street,” Connolly told them. “I won’t be able to meet you anymore.”
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Then Connolly and Morris launched a final attempt to persuade Sarhatt to see the light. They told Whitey he needed to go see someone in the North End. And so, on a cool, late fall afternoon in 1980, Whitey stood on the sidewalk outside a nondescript apartment building at 98 Prince Street, waiting for the door to open. Flemmi stood next to him, having just knocked on the door. Their presence that day recalled a similar occasion a half-century before, when Whitey’s predecessor as Southie’s most powerful gangster, Frankie Wallace, had stood outside a door in the same neighborhood, paying a call on his Italian mob rivals. He was greeted by a hail of gunfire blasting through the door. That audacious ambush allowed the Mafia to push aside the Irish gangsters from the Gustin Gang and to dominate local bootlegging for years, establishing Italian gangland dominance in a city where the Irish, by dint of numbers, should have been as much in control of crime as they were of politics.

This time, the door opened and Whitey was greeted not with gunfire but with quizzical looks. The Mafia leader Jerry Angiulo and the rest of the men gathered inside the apartment that served as La Cosa Nostra headquarters in Boston didn’t expect to see Whitey walk in behind Flemmi. Flemmi was a regular visitor, but this was the first and only time Whitey would enter Angiulo’s lair. It was, though the Italian mob boss couldn’t know it, Frankie Wallace’s revenge: Whitey had been sent by the FBI to scope out the place as the bureau prepared to seek court authorization to bug the Mafia’s headquarters, a historic step toward dismantling the Italian crime syndicate.

That headquarters was a glorified bachelor’s pad on the bottom floor of a four-story brick apartment building where Angiulo, a compact man with thick glasses, a booming voice, and a shock of white hair, dressed down bookies. Whitey wasn’t there because FBI agents needed his help to get a judge to authorize the bugging operation—they had more than they needed from the aggrieved bookies who chafed under Angiulo. And the fruits of the visit, a crudely drawn sketch by Flemmi of the L-shaped room, with the TV by the windows and the kitchen where the Angiulos cooked many of their meals, wouldn’t have been of much use anyway. No, Whitey was there because Connolly and Morris sent him, to make Whitey seem more useful than he actually was and to make the Lancaster Street controversy seem trivial next to his value as a source. The FBI in Boston was preparing to launch its most ambitious effort ever—the bugging of Angiulo’s headquarters—so if Whitey was going to remain a protected informant, he had to get some credit for it.

Connolly understood the colliding cultures of the FBI and the state police, and as he scrambled to keep Whitey onboard he sought to exploit the historical animosities and biases of both. Connolly painted the Staties as inept finger-pointers, jealous of the FBI; the FBI were professionals, the Staties just a bunch of cowboys. Connolly wrote Sarhatt a memo, based on a conversation with Whitey, that tried to paint the state police in general, and O’Donovan in particular, as paranoid. “State Police hierarchy speculate that SA Connolly possibly tipped off Whitey Bulger through his brother, Senate President William Bulger. Source advised that they are very upset that their investigation was blown and they are looking to hang it on someone. Source added that Agent Connolly would be a prime target due to his involvement [in a murder case] in which the State Police were embarrassed.”
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