Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (12 page)

When I first got together with Bates for coffee in Boston, he was fighting to quit smoking. We met at a diner where it was still permitted and Bates wore his displeasure in the lengthening of the spider veins that crisscrossed his cheeks. He’d always been a suit-and-tie guy, and the casual dress just didn’t fit him well. His discomfort increased when he imparted to me that the Bureau office was “in a mess.” While not directing criticism at Sarhatt, he did clue me in on the office rivalries and “turf” battles that had been brewing for a long time and now seemed on the verge of erupting into an all-out war. He cautioned me about certain agents “backdooring” decisions made in the field only to be countered by HQ later on. He found that the office had become “too political,” especially with regard to the Organized Crime 3 Squad, now under the leadership of John Morris, John Connolly’s supervisor.

Bates’s opinion was that some of the decisions regarding sensitive investigations were discussed privately by agents with HQ instead of following the established chain of command. He found this particularly offensive and disconcerting. He spoke of “cabals” in the office and noted a situation involving one Organized Crime squad supervisor being too “close” with Strike Force head Jeremiah O’Sullivan, a U.S. attorney, and of ex-agents Dennis Condon’s and Paul Rico’s “closeness” with people outside the FBI.

He’d also heard all the rumors about Morris and Connolly and did not like them one bit. Like Colonel O’Donovan, Bates was old school, believing there was a right way and a wrong way to do things, a line never to be crossed. Yet by all indications, by the time I got to Boston, that line had already been crossed. Bates became my go-to guy. He was tight-lipped and not given to rumor, focused instead on factual situations in which he explained the history of the hornet’s nest I had walked into in Boston. I called him Merlin for his wizardlike proclamations about incidents and his knowledge of the territory and turf battles by agents and others. Dick expected anonymity and he got it. This is the first time I’ve ever mentioned his name in any writings, filings, or discussions stemming from my years in Boston.

We chatted about the Massachusetts State Police complaints. While there were some FBI agents Bates did not trust, he did not entirely trust the MSP either. Bates was a very loyal spokesperson for the Bureau and would never embarrass it. He defended the informant program as a necessary evil, yet had reservations about certain informants and the agents handling them. He cited Condon and Rico as being “too big for their britches” when they ignored FBI rules and regulations in their handling of Top Echelon informants like Joseph Barboza. He thought Connolly was “brassy” and too “immature” for his position. Morris he described as “bright” but “fawning,” meaning he could be influenced by others and was too dependent on Condon as a mentor.

He warned about the politics, especially the Strike Force under the leadership of Jerry O’Sullivan. He saw O’Sullivan as a “climber” who was extremely ambitious and obsessive over his war on the mafia. And Bates brought me up to date on the infamous Race Fix case of 1979 that had taken down a number of muffs while letting Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi off scot-free. To Bates this was all the proof he needed that O’Sullivan, as head of the Strike Force, knew they were FBI informants, another sharp deviation from established protocol. An unethical, if not illegal, breech of policy that O’Sullivan himself would later admit to.

Bates was further of the school that the FBI should plan investigations and present facts to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for a prosecutorial opinion. It’s here that he saw the politicking of O’Sullivan around the La Cosa Nostra investigations, and the handling of informants like Bulger and Flemmi, as having twisted everything around. The internecine struggle for power, especially in the Organized Crime area, had regrettably become a prime component in the fight against LCN that clouded the issue and made it increasingly difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

Still, the handling of Bulger and Flemmi remained an anomaly in Bates’s mind and mine, too. We had reliable informants that provided the key evidence to support affidavits by agents required for Title III applications for wiretaps against LCN. Boston agent Jim Knotts’s informants, for example, furnished great info and that became a sore point with Connolly. There was no room for two in Connolly’s ego-driven vision of the limelight, and Knotts evolved into a spoiler for him by providing truthful evidentiary info that revealed LCN activities in Boston and throughout New England. Knotts got that done without pandering to the likes of Bulger and Flemmi, much less facilitating their criminal activities. With him there was never a doubt as to who was controlling the situation—quite the opposite of Connolly.

Knotts also provided info about nontraditional organized crime like the Winter Hill Gang out of Somerville, now run by Bulger. These were the Irish guys commonly referred to as the “Irish Mafia.” By the time I reached Boston, they had about three hundred gang members reporting directly to Bulger and Flemmi. By contrast, there were about seventeen confirmed LCN members with about one hundred and thirty associates. Add to that the fact that plenty in law enforcement, especially Colonel O’Donovan’s State Police, rightfully viewed Irish gangs as more violent than their Italian counterparts, and you had the recipe for continued and expanded strife between the various law enforcement bodies.

One of the Strike Force prosecutors confided to me one day that there was suspicion around the 209 submissions Connolly was making. These were the forms filed by handlers detailing the intelligence provided by their informants, composing a critical part of the investigative, evidentiary, and prosecutorial processes. This same prosecutor was assigned to the Organized Crime squad to guide the agents in the legal application of affidavits and provide general legal counsel around probable cause issues and similar legal issues. The prosecutor was aware, unofficially anyway, that Connolly was running Bulger and Flemmi, and I detected a certain amount of trepidation in the chats focusing on them. This prosecutor also felt that O’Sullivan, the chief of the Strike Force, was a major concern. All this left him to conclude that the probable cause furnished by Connolly in his 209s was not accurate, that it was at best in doubt and at worst fabricated to justify him keeping Bulger open as an informant to serve his own career-based needs.

O’Sullivan was also seen as being too close to the Bulger and Flemmi crew, especially since he had been the recipient of their info for an inordinately long period of time as such things go. The prosecutor felt that O’Sullivan was far from “impartial” and, in fact, may have come to hate the “Italians” in the same way that the Irish mob hated them, forming a twisted alliance that was a prime recipe for the corruption I’d been sent to clean up. The last thing Boston wanted or needed was what this prosecutor described to me as a “racial” war, but by all indications that’s where all this was heading.

Not long after my arrival in Boston, Agent Knotts came to see me in my office so anxious and upset he couldn’t sit down.

“You’re not going to believe this, Fitz.”

“Try me.”

“I think John Connolly’s stealing my 209 files. He’s giving Bulger credit for info actually being provided by my TEs.”

I leaned forward in my chair. “You tell this to Sarhatt?”

“Yup, and nothing happened, so now I’m telling you.”

Sarhatt hadn’t acted on Knotts’s suspicions clearly to prevent the closing of Bulger and Flemmi. His hands, I’d later learn, were tied by higher-ups in Washington who were buying Bulger’s act hook, line, and sinker. I do not think for one minute that Sarhatt was party to the corruption already running rampant in Boston when I arrived; he was, instead, the victim of circumstances that had spiraled out of his and everyone else’s control. Still, assimilating Knotts’s claims left me in a quandary. I couldn’t tell anyone since I received them in the strictest confidence. And yet his report convinced me still more that the problems in Boston ran much deeper than I’d been led to expect.

In spite of the inspection by HQ and special meetings at Quantico, the squabbles between the FBI and the Massachusetts State Police continued. MSP’s Colonel O’Donovan made it plain that he disliked Connolly and Morris for their actions at Lancaster Garage. Inside the FBI, Connolly and Morris took the stance that O’Donovan was a “good guy” but misguided in this area and well past his prime. They went to the Strike Force and enlisted O’Sullivan’s support to back up their contention that Bulger and Flemmi were solid informants crucial to the takedown of LCN in Boston. Not surprisingly, O’Sullivan agreed.

Another bomb was tossed when Agent Jim Knotts reported Bulger again, this time for drug running and exacting “tribute” from other gangsters to allow drugs in Boston. Connolly’s mantra was always that Bulger did not work the drug trade, and that he was obsessively devoted to keeping them out of his native Southie. Yet another fabrication, as it turned out. It was Knotts’s info that first divulged the relationship between Bulger and the drug cartel leadership diametrically opposed to Connolly’s insistence that Whitey was clean in this regard. Knotts also named others, including Sal Caruana, the drug distributor who once supposedly had an affair with the wife of Richie Castucci, for their association with a “friendly” Strike Force attorney named Dave Twomey.

An investiation conducted by agents Matt Cronin and Jim Crawford, in fact, revealed that Twomey was a snitch for the cartels. Cronin and Crawford went to O’Sullivan who dismissed their findings by claiming their informant lacked credibility. So Twomey was allowed to remain with the Strike Force even though agents on my squad were convinced he was leaking. When Morris and Connolly learned Knotts had evidence of this unholy alliance, in the form of a body recording made in a North End mob restaurant, they warned Bulger off, even as Twomey did the same for the cartels. I personally warned O’Sullivan that he had a leak, but he disparaged the info by again claiming the informant was a known “drunk” and thus unreliable. His strategy became one of disregarding and discrediting Knotts, as well as Cronin and Crawford, instead of acting on the intelligence they provided. Anything to protect his cherished informants, Bulger and Flemmi, who in reality were giving him no actionable intelligence at all.

And it would get worse.

Connolly kept his daily liaison with his mentor, former agent Dennis Condon, then with the Department of Public Safety, and became a constant conduit of information that would subsequently be funneled to others. Connolly would learn of O’Donovan’s strategy from Condon while Condon would become aware of the FBI tactics in stopping the MSP wiretaps. It was Condon who primed Connolly to take over Bulger as an informant, and now the vicious circle was closing with me caught squarely in the middle.

I found myself part of a culture of corruption that had enveloped not only the Boston office of the FBI, but seemingly all of those whose mission was to prevent the very thing they had become party to. I became convinced U.S. Attorney Jeremiah O’Sullivan played a central role by his power of prosecution and protection of Bulger through immunity. Billy Bulger, Whitey’s politico brother who’d made his intentions plain enough to me, was a beneficiary as well. After all, the FBI’s protection of Whitey would keep him from ever embarrassing his brother, while continuing to let Billy’s adversaries think Whitey could “hurt” them if they bothered him. Whitey and Stevie Flemmi used their referred power to build an enterprise that competed against the LCN enterprise currently under intense investigation by the FBI.

On that subject, the House Government Reform Committee, in their report entitled “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers as Informants,” issued in 2003, chastised the Bureau for adopting an “ends justifes the means” approach. The report concluded that “No one disputes the proposition that destroying organized crime in the United States was an important law enforcement objective. However, the steps that were taken may have been more injurious than the results obtained.”

But the FBI rationalized that the number one priority was to destroy the mafia, and if the Irish guys could help so much the better, even if they were just as bad, if not worse. The MSP and DEA became more and more frustrated as they lost battle after battle to develop their own informants to counter Bulger’s and Flemmi’s erroneous and worthless intelligence. It couldn’t have gone any other way, since they were playing by the rules and everyone else wasn’t.

“The FBI,” Stephen Flemmi would admit years later in his plea bargain deal, “made Mr. Bulger and I aware of a number of drug investigations.”

Inside the Strike Force another power play was in motion. The cartel druggers were co-opting O’Sullivan’s office at the same time Bulger was co-opting the FBI. Twomey continued his leaking and informants reported the possibility of another former member of the Strike Force, a lawyer named Martin Boudreau who represented many of the druggers he once put away, being involved in the leaks that penetrated virtually every major case being investigated by the FBI and possibly DEA. Some agents, myself included, had come to believe O’Sullivan was trying to deflect evidence presented to him by FBI agents, especially in Bulger and Flemmi’s case, and blocked info from agents that would have exposed attorney leaks from his office.

Incredibly, it seemed to me that O’Sullivan would defame the same FBI reports he made sure were leaked to drug cartel attorneys containing top-secret prosecutorial info. The end result: the drug cartel was able to flourish and inundate Southie with dangerous drugs that ruined the lives of teens and young adults on the very streets where Bulger and Flemmi had grown up.

Bulger’s hypocritical claim of staying out of the drug trade was undermined as he sought tribute from the drug lords and provided them protection from law enforcement and prosecution. The inside information he obtained from the FBI made him the most powerful gangster in Boston’s history. Without John Connolly, John Morris, Jeremiah O’Sullivan, and all his other enablers, he would’ve been just another Irish thug from South Boston, always one bust away from prison.