Whitey's Payback (29 page)

By the time John Connolly recruited and signed up Whitey Bulger as a FBI informant in the mid-1970s, the Boston underworld had descended into a murky, murderous pit of rats with cops and federal agents as active players. Connolly’s predecessor and mentor in the Boston FBI office, Special Agent H. Paul Rico, would eventually be indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and murder. Rico was believed to have supplied key information for gangland murders, and may have even taken part in actual Mob hits himself. He died in prison in January 2004 while facing prosecution.

The Boston FBI office has been publicly excoriated for its handling of Bulger and Flemmi, and rightfully so. Connolly and many others in law enforcement defend the concept of using criminals to catch other criminals. “Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made, but in the real world that’s how cases get made,” says Connolly. At the very least, the Bulger case reveals a shocking lack of oversight. Federal agents fed information to two mobsters that led to murders and the thwarting of potential criminal investigations spearheaded by other law enforcement agencies. They helped turn Bulger and Flemmi into the most powerful gangsters in the history of Boston.

Connolly’s supervisor, Special Agent John Morris, head of the Organized Crime Squad, pleaded guilty to charges of accepting bribes and gratuities from Bulger, and obstructing justice. He served no jail time, in exchange for his testifying at 1998 hearings into the Bulger affair. In his testimony, Morris put forth a scenario—since expounded upon by prosecutors and the media—that John Connolly was a “rogue agent” who promoted and protected Bulger’s informant status within the Bureau solely for personal profit and aggrandizement.

John Connolly is not without culpability, but he did not devise the Top Echelon Informant Program, and whatever he did to maintain Bulger’s viability as an informant was authorized and, in many cases, rewarded via promotions and special citations from six different FBI directors.

“There were enablers throughout the system, from top to bottom,” says retired FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick. An assistant special agent in charge of the Boston office, Fitzpatrick was Connolly’s nemesis. After meeting Bulger and Connolly together, Fitzpatrick recommended that Bulger be “closed down” as an informant. His recommendations were ignored and his two-page report about Bulger was buried by two successive special agents in charge of the Boston office. Over time, Fitzpatrick began to sense that the conspiracy to protect Bulger went all the way to headquarters in Washington, D.C. His suspicions were later verified in U.S. congressional hearings that concluded, “What happened in New England over a forty-year period is, without doubt, one of the greatest failures in federal law enforcement history.”

That conspiracy went beyond the FBI. Among the friends of Whitey Bulger who ran interference for the mobster was Jeremiah O’Sullivan, head of the U.S. Attorney’s Organized Crime Strike Force, who would, thanks to his successes during the Bulger years, rise to become U.S. attorney in Boston.

As early as 1977, agent Connolly informed O’Sullivan that he had “turned” someone who could help them make major cases against the Mafia. When O’Sullivan heard it was Bulger, he wanted to meet him. Remembers Connolly, “I asked him, ‘Are you sure? You don’t have to.’ ” It was highly unusual for an assistant U.S. attorney to meet face-to-face with a top informant while an investigation was still ongoing. O’Sullivan insisted.

Connolly set up a meeting between the city’s top mobster and its top organized crime prosecutor in a hotel room on a rainy afternoon around Christmas. “I was there,” says Connolly. “Jimmy met Jerry. As I remember it, they were both quite impressed with one another.”

Jeremiah O’Sullivan was one of the best things that ever happened to Bulger. In 1979, when an investigation targeted an array of mobsters on charges of fixing races at horse tracks, O’Sullivan dropped Bulger and Flemmi from the indictment. As Flemmi would later put it, “We believed we were authorized to commit crimes as long as we didn’t kill anybody. That’s what we were told.”

O’Sullivan’s desire to protect his prize informants didn’t end with Whitey and Stevie. In 1989, information was brought to O’Sullivan that Billy Bulger, Whitey’s senator brother, had received a legally questionable payment of $240,000 as part of a real estate deal at 75 State Street in downtown Boston. According to Bob Fitzpatrick, who investigated the deal, “It was a clear violation of the Hobbs Act. We had Billy Bulger dead in his tracks.” But O’Sullivan made the decision to not go forward with charges against Senator Bulger. After the deal was exposed in the media, Bulger gave the money back.

In 2003, long after Whitey went on the run and his associates began cutting deals with the government, pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Hearings were held by the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform that proved to be an unprecedented foray into the criminal history of the Bulger era. The hearings most famously exposed Billy Bulger, who was forced to resign from his job as president of the University of Massachusetts after it was revealed he had been in contact with his fugitive brother.

Far more revealing was the testimony of O’Sullivan, also retired, who, in the years since Bulger’s disappearance, had publicly denied that he’d known that Bulger was an informant until he read about it in the press. This bold-faced lie was exposed when internal Justice Department memos were produced that showed O’Sullivan had known about Bulger since the late-1970s. “You got me,” said the former U.S. attorney to the congressional committee.

Even more damaging were FBI and DOJ memos and correspondence subpoenaed by the committee, after a fierce legal battle with the Bush administration. Records showed that O’Sullivan’s mentor and predecessor as U.S. attorney, Edward Harrington (later a federal judge), had been complicit in the framing of Limone and Salvati for the Deegan murder. At the hearings, a picture began to emerge of a generation of agents and prosecutors who were the metaphorical offspring of those who had conspired to make sure that the truth about the Deegan murder would never be revealed. Thus, protecting Bulger and Flemmi became a way of repressing this potentially explosive history—Whitey and Stevie became the keepers of the Justice Department’s dirty little secret.

A final report on the findings of the House Committee was issued in 2004. Entitled
Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers as Informants
, it remains the single most detailed exposé on the Bulger era. The findings helped expedite a financial settlement for Peter Limone and Joe Salvati, who had their convictions overturned in 2000. In 2007, they were awarded $101.7 million in damages—paid by U.S. taxpayers—for having unjustly served thirty-four years in prison. The U.S. government has also been forced to pay, collectively, $20 million in damages to family members of some of Bulger’s victims, who filed suits against the FBI and DOJ, claiming that the man who killed their loved ones did so while being sponsored and protected by the government.

Those who advocate for the U.S. attorney’s current streamlined prosecution of Bulger make the argument that the Bulger conspiracy has been fully aired at various hearings and trials in the sixteen years that Bulger was basking in the California sun. In 1999, the justice department claimed they were going to get the bottom of the Bulger fiasco, and that no one would be spared. John Durham, a Connecticut prosecutor, was appointed by Attorney General Janet Reno to spearhead an investigation, but the Durham report was never completed or delivered, and the government has never explained why. The sole significant result of Durham’s efforts was the prosecution of John Connolly.

Despite decades of corruption, obstruction of justice, and suppression of evidence, no government official in a supervisory position has ever been held accountable. Many who benefited most from Bulger’s tenure as an informant have since passed away.

Some doubt that a trial will ever come to pass. Bulger may choose to stall and run out the clock and eventually die in prison, though his lawyer denies that is the case. The prosecution—though they claim to be eager to proceed—also has reason not to be overly enthusiastic about a trial, given the potential for unanticipated revelations.

Amidst the uncertainty, one thing is clear: As the U.S. Justice Department prepares to put on trial one of the most murderous gangsters in the last half century, it is in no position to claim the moral high ground.

I was saddened to hear of the death of Teresa Stanley, seventy-one, long-time companion of James “Whitey” Bulger who passed away last August 16 of lung cancer.

I interviewed Teresa on two separate occasions earlier this year, before she knew anything about the cancer. I found her to be haunted by the legacy of personal deception and violent crime left by her ex-common-law husband, James Bulger. Teresa was a twenty-six-year old divorcée with four kids when she first met Bulger in 1966. He was not the legendary crime figure he would later become. By her own account, she became comfortable in her life with Bulger, who she knew was in “the illegal gambling business” and possibly a loan shark. She says she did not know of Bulger’s many murders.

I first met and interviewed Teresa at Marisola’s restaurant in South Boston, a neighborhood bistro well known to the locals. I was introduced to Teresa by Pat Nee, a friend and former criminal rival of Bulger’s who, among other things, once did eight years in prison for smuggling guns to the Irish Republican Army back in the 1980s. Teresa used to chuckle whenever I mentioned Pat’s name, because she knew Pat didn’t care for Bulger, and, in fact, tried to kill him once or twice before they finally formed an uneasy partnership. Teresa later conceded that Nee was probably right in his negative assessment of Whitey.

The second time I interviewed Teresa was over breakfast at the Seaport Hotel on the harbor in Boston. Both interview sessions were lengthy—two hours or more. And Teresa was very forthcoming and frank about her feelings and emotions. I liked her instantly. My feeling was that she was a good person, very sensitive and sweet, who had made a horrible choice in her life by settling down with a master deceiver like Bulger. She would later pay a heavy price for her associations with Bulger, as she became the subject of FBI and other investigations, was called to testify numerous times at hearings and trials, and was ultimately painted with a “scarlet letter” for having been Bulger’s paramour for thirty years.

I spoke with Teresa one last time, earlier this year, when I called her on behalf of
Newsweek
magazine, which was looking to take her photo to accompany my article. Though she had not told anyone outside her closest family members of her cancer, she told me. I was shocked. Not only had she just learned of her condition, she was told that the cancer was far advanced. I told her I was sorry and that she deserved better; she was a good person.

There are those who vilify Teresa and hold her partly responsible for Bulger’s crimes. I do not. She made a bad choice in love, was perhaps naive, maybe even chose to stick her head in the sand during Whitey’s reign of power. When it came out that her lover was alleged to have killed so many people, including young women, she was stunned. When I met her, she still seemed to be partly in a state of shock about the whole thing.

Teresa has now arrived at her place of peace. Let the haters spew their venom. They never had to walk in her shoes.

January 2013: It is a gloomy drive through the frozen tundra of upstate New York to Sullivan County, for another visit with Mad Dog Sullivan. As we greet one another in the prison visiting room, as usual, I joke with the aging gangster about the fact that he is named Sullivan, incarcerated at the Sullivan Correctional Facility, in Sullivan County. “They were so worried you were gonna try to escape,” I say, “they wanted you to feel as welcome as possible.”

Sully looks amazingly fit considering the cancer surgeries and his most recent prognosis: There is a cancerous field in his one remaining good lung. It is only a matter of time before the cancer becomes active. Sully’s days are numbered. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, though, thanks to his daily visits to the prison gym and a rueful acceptance of his mortality. “Nobody lives forever,” says the former hit man.

We settle into our regular spot in the prison visiting room. As usual, Sully reminisces, and I take it all in. These days, he doesn’t have much to hide. There is a Wikipedia entry about Mad Dog Sullivan on the Internet that details a criminal life that is almost impossible to believe. Son of a New York police detective who died when Joe was thirteen; institutionalized and later criminalized by a hardscrabble life on the streets; many hired killings carried out under contract with the Genovese crime family and other organized crime groups; more time spent in prisons than on the street.

It’s all true, Sully admits, except for one fact on the page that gets his goat. Wikipedia and other Internet sources claim that Sully was given the moniker “mad dog” in prison, so named by other inmates due to a salivary gland problem. “Total bunk,” says Sullivan. He tells me the true story about the origins of the nickname.

It was 1981, and Sullivan had been contracted to murder a mobbed-up Teamster official named John Fiorino. Sullivan killed Fiorino with a shotgun blast in a restaurant parking lot in Rochester, New York. He and his getaway driver were pursued. After their car crashed into a large snowbank, the driver was captured, but Sullivan got away by hiding in that freezing snowbank for nearly eight hours. A team of state police and FBI agents descended on the scene in pursuit of Sullivan. The lead lawman told the others, “Be careful. This man is armed and dangerous. He is a mad dog killer.”

That night, Sullivan got away, but the nickname stuck when the
New York Post
and other newspapers, upon his eventual arrest weeks later, plastered it in headlines such as
MAD DOG HIT MAN NABBED!
and
HOW COPS PUT LEASH ON MAD DOG.