Whitey Bulger America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him To Justice (36 page)

After the story appeared, giving vague details about Litif being murdered because he had angered certain elements in the South Boston underworld, Baione called Corsetti. “No problem,” he told the relieved reporter. Left out of the story was a relevant detail, something Corsetti couldn’t have known at the time: Louie Litif was John Connolly’s informant, too. So one of Connolly’s informants was suspected of murdering another. And, as was Connolly’s pattern, he filed a report that distracted attention from the true killer, suggesting that Litif’s murder was done in gangland fashion but naming no suspects. The source of the report was Whitey Bulger.
⁴¹

The account of Corsetti’s brush with Whitey didn’t appear in print, but it spread through the ranks of journalists in Boston. The menace that Whitey projected helped explain why he was so seldom the subject of serious journalistic inquiry. Many people were simply afraid of him.

In September 1988, the
Globe
published its series, which included the bombshell that Whitey and John Connolly had a special relationship that had led other law enforcement agencies to conclude that the FBI was protecting Whitey. As a precaution, Cullen and his wife moved out of their South Boston condominium temporarily and stayed at a hotel in Cambridge. They moved back after an informant told the state police that the only thing Whitey was upset about in the series was a section that described him beating up a wino outside Teresa Stanley’s house. Whitey thought it made him look like a bully. “That was no wino,” Whitey told the informant.
⁴²

The truth was that Whitey was more than a little unhappy when he read the
Globe
stories, not because the paper was wrong on some sordid detail or other but because it was right about the most important thing, his gravest secret: his work for the FBI. That could get a man killed, even a man like him. And Whitey knew who had let the secret about him out. “That was that fuckin’ Morris,” Whitey told Connolly.
⁴³

He was right. John Morris, as he would later admit, had been one of the
Globe
’s sources, confirming the longstanding suspicion that Whitey was an FBI informant. Gerard O’Neill, the editor of the
Globe
’s Spotlight Team, had persuaded Morris to provide the confirmation. It was essential to getting the story in the paper. Morris claimed he wanted to force the FBI to drop Whitey and Flemmi, that they had become too dangerous, too emboldened.
⁴⁴
Whitey believed Morris was trying to get him killed. But he was also confident that his criminal associates would see the
Globe
story not so much as being about him but, rather, as an attempt to throw mud on his brother Bill.

That’s how John Martorano saw it from Florida, where he had been for almost a decade after he fled the horse race–fixing indictment. That’s how the Mafia saw it, too, according to Anthony Cardinale, a prominent defense lawyer who represented Mafiosi in both Boston and New York. Cardinale said he talked about the report with two of his clients, Jerry Angiulo and John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino crime family in New York. “They didn’t believe it,” Cardinale said. “They didn’t believe that the FBI would get into bed with someone as vicious as Whitey Bulger.”
⁴⁵

The FBI didn’t think anyone would believe it, either. The bureau kept Bulger and Flemmi as informants for another two years. Connolly, meanwhile, used his media contacts to dismiss the
Globe
’s story as fantasy, the disgruntled conjecture of state police and DEA agents who had to blame someone for their failed investigations. Ahearn, the FBI agent in charge of the Boston office, demanded that the
Globe
retract the story but got nowhere. A year later, as Ahearn prepared to leave Boston, his agents prepared for the annual office Christmas party. The door prizes were bottles of liquor purchased in South Boston, at Whitey’s liquor store. When the DEA and the Boston police raided the liquor store in 1990, they found a receipt for $205 and a piece of paper showing that an FBI agent who bought the door prizes for the Christmas party had come with a reference that was noted alongside the transaction: “Dick Baker—friend of John Connolly.”
⁴⁶

The records were seized by the Boston police and the DEA as part of an investigation that resulted in the August 1990 arrest of fifty-one people who sold cocaine in Southie. They were part of a ring that paid Whitey tribute to operate. As one of the dealers told an undercover agent, if you wanted to deal drugs in Southie, you had to pay Whitey “or you end up dead.”
⁴⁷
Whitey’s defenders, including his brother Bill and John Connolly, were quick to trash the drug case, pointing out the absence of any charges against Whitey. But the only reason Whitey wasn’t the fifty-second person indicted in the Southie drug ring was that federal prosecutors had turned a key witness over to the FBI instead of the DEA. The man, a mortgage broker named Tim Connolly, was one of the many Whitey had threatened in the name of extorting cash. Summoned to Rotary Variety, next to the South Boston Liquor Mart, in the summer of 1989, the broker was led to a storage room, where Whitey said, “I’ll let you buy your life.” Then Whitey pulled a knife from the sheath on his calf and began stabbing boxes to punctuate his demands for fifty thousand dollars. The broker went to the US Attorney’s office, offering up Whitey, but prosecutors decided not to turn him over to the DEA—even though the broker was connected to the big drug case—but to the FBI. In the bureau’s hands, no surprise, the case would languish for years.
⁴⁸

John Connolly had given Whitey
and Flemmi so much over the years that they wanted to give him something in return. Something more valuable than money. Something more personal than the diamond ring they’d sprung for when he got engaged.
⁴⁹
And so they gave him Sonny Mercurio.

Mercurio, a Mafia soldier, had approached Whitey and Flemmi back in 1986, after Jerry Angiulo and his brothers had been convicted and carted off to prison. Whitey and Flemmi had been extorting rent from bookies who had been operating on their own as the Mafia lay rudderless after the Angiulo arrests in 1983. Now, three years later, Mercurio told them the Mafia was back in business. Vinnie Ferrara, an ambitious Mafioso who was trying to replace the Angiulos, had assembled a new crew, and they were rounding up the bookies to explain the new arrangement. In particular, Mercurio told Whitey and Flemmi to stay away from a pair of elderly Jewish bookies, Mo Weinstein and Doc Sagansky. They belonged to the Mafia.

Whitey and Flemmi learned that the Mafia was using Mercurio’s sandwich shop in the Prudential Center downtown as a meeting spot, rounding up bookies like Weinstein and Sagansky.
⁵⁰
After Whitey and Flemmi reported all this to Connolly, the FBI was able to plant a bug in the sandwich shop and start building a case against the fledgling Mafia leadership. It was a feather in Connolly’s cap and a boon for Whitey and Flemmi. But Whitey went a step further. He told Connolly that Mercurio was disgruntled, vulnerable, ripe for the picking: He would make a great informant.

Connolly took a run at Mercurio and found that Whitey was right. Not only did Mercurio become Connolly’s informant, he provided him with the biggest coup of his career. With his help, the FBI was able to plant bugs inside a house in Medford where four men were inducted into the Mafia in 1989. Twenty-one Mafiosi were arrested on the strength of the tape recordings, but the induction ceremony’s significance went far beyond the arrests. It became the foundation for every Mafia prosecution in the United States that followed. It was hard for defense lawyers to argue that La Cosa Nostra didn’t exist when the tapes of the induction ceremony captured men swearing fealty to This Thing of Ours, promising to commit murder, pricking their trigger fingers, burning pictures of saints, and pledging themselves to
omertà
, the Mafia code of silence.

US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and FBI director William S. Sessions flew up from Washington for the press conference announcing the induction ceremony indictments. It was the ultimate humiliation of the Mafia and the ultimate vindication of John Connolly’s ability to develop informants. Later, Sessions sent Connolly an effusive letter, enclosing praise for his talent in cultivating informants and a fifteen-hundred-dollar bonus.
⁵¹
Connolly was now more than a valued agent; he was a role model. And his crowning achievement had been delivered to him by Whitey and Flemmi.

The induction ceremony even gave Connolly the working title for the memoir he planned to start writing after his December 1990 retirement. As he pulled the door shut on the house where the ceremony was recorded, a Mafioso remarked, “Only the fucking ghost knows what really took place over here today, by God.” So Connolly was going to call his book
Only the Ghost Knows
.
⁵²
He planned to model his account on the 1988 book written by his old friend Joe Pistone, an FBI agent whose ability to infiltrate a Mafia family in New York became the basis for the film
Donnie Brasco
, starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. When Pistone came to Boston for dinner in the mid-1980s, Connolly arranged for Whitey and Flemmi to join them—Connolly wanted to show them off.

Having reached the summit of his career, it was a perfect time for Connolly to retire in glory, to take a job with a plush office as director of security at Boston Edison, a local utility company. His retirement party was a must-attend event, held in the upstairs function room of Joe Tecce’s restaurant in the North End. It was filled with cops and politicians and those who ran charities in Southie. Whitey didn’t show—that would have been a little much—but Bill Bulger was a featured speaker. He stood at the lectern and, after making a few jokes, turned serious. He quoted one of his favorite philosophers, Seneca: “Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.”

“John Connolly is the personification of loyalty,” Bill Bulger said, “not only to his old friends and not only to the job that he holds but also to the highest principles. He’s never forgotten them.”
⁵³

When Connolly retired from the FBI, on December 3, 1990, so did Whitey and Flemmi. They couldn’t trust anyone the way they could trust Connolly; and besides, they were looking forward to retirement, too. Flemmi had invested more than one million dollars in property in the Back Bay and some Boston suburbs.
⁵⁴
Having used murder and mayhem to build his fortune, he intended to tap the easy riches of Boston’s booming property market. Whitey, meanwhile, had stashed money all over the country, and in Dublin, London, and Montreal. He was thinking ahead and was ready for whatever would come next, but he wasn’t ready for this: Just six months after he was closed as an informant for the FBI, he hit the lottery. He and three other men, including Kevin Weeks, came forward to claim their share of a $14.3 million winning ticket in the Massachusetts Lottery. No one could believe it was on the level, but Whitey’s share gave him a legitimate source of income for the first time since he’d worked construction following his release from prison in the 1960s. Years later, the feds would say it was a scam, based on informants’ claims that Whitey had paid seven hundred thousand dollars to the winning ticketholder—the brother of a close associate—in exchange for a one-sixth share. But Weeks insisted that Whitey had a legitimate stake in the winnings and concocted the payoff story to appease Flemmi, who was furious he didn’t get a share. Whitey told Flemmi that he was pretending to receive lottery proceeds to make it appear that he had legitimate income but was secretly returning the money to the real winner.
⁵⁵
Either way, thanks to the lottery, as Whitey began looking for a place to retire, he had eighty thousand dollars a year in after-tax income to spend. He could travel more freely, making contingency plans in case the retirement of his FBI handler stirred up old investigations. He had no guarantees that an FBI office that didn’t include John Connolly was willing to cover his back. As was often the case, Whitey was prescient in his fears.

Even after the
Globe
outed Whitey as an informant, even after the arrest of the fifty-one cocaine dealers bruised his carefully cultivated image as a benevolent gangster who kept drugs out of Southie, even after Connolly retired, neither Whitey nor Connolly was worried. They felt they could control the narrative in Southie and beyond. Bulger loyalists, many owing their jobs to Bill Bulger, clung to the fraying myth that Whitey made their streets safer. And Whitey was busy reinventing himself as a patriotic philanthropist. He had pumped money into the Korean War memorial on Castle Island, which includes the name of his sister’s husband and nineteen others from Southie who were killed in the war. He and Flemmi donated five thousand dollars for a stone bench at the Korean War statute in the Charlestown Navy Yard where his father once worked.
⁵⁶
And when Flemmi invited him to attend the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the US Airborne Division in Washington in July 1990, Whitey jumped at the chance. He listened intently as General William Westmoreland, the Vietnam War commander, extolled America’s paratroopers. Whitey had spent the last twenty-five years studiously avoiding being photographed in public, but at the reunion he proudly posed next to a Medal of Honor recipient in a ballroom at the Mayflower Hotel as cameras snapped away.
⁵⁷
At veterans’ posts in Southie, tales of Whitey’s generosity in the cause were swapped like war stories.

They were shaping up
as golden years for three conspirators. But even as they sought to reinvent themselves in their post-FBI careers, Whitey, Flemmi, and Connolly had two problems. The first was that Chico Krantz wasn’t from Southie. The second was that Tom Foley wasn’t with the FBI.

Burton “Chico” Krantz was the biggest bookie around. Tom Foley was a Massachusetts State Police sergeant. In the fall of 1990, Foley set his sights on Krantz, and it would be the beginning of the end of Whitey’s charmed life. Tall, prematurely gray, and with the military bearing typical of the state police, Foley had grown up in Worcester, a city in central Massachusetts where the politics were as parochial as Southie’s. Beginning in 1984, he’d worked on a task force with the FBI targeting Mafia-connected loansharks. Foley was monitoring conversations at a listening post when John Connolly, still at the time a star in the bureau, approached him with an outstretched hand. “You’re Dan Foley’s nephew, aren’t you?” Connolly said.