Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (21 page)

Right around the time of McIntyre’s murder, for example, McWeeney learned that the DEA had launched a major drug operation called Operation Beans that was targeting Bulger and Flemmi, among other major New England drug figures. When he saw their names, he called Boston and got John Connolly on the phone.

“Aren’t these our guys?” McWeeney asked Connolly, as reported in
Black Mass.

So apparently Bulger and Flemmi were the FBI’s “guys” while I, somehow, wasn’t. The cadre at HQ had the data from all twenty-five organized crime national families. They were the experts and didn’t want anyone telling them how to do their job in spite of the success I achieved doing just that in Boston. While busting organized crime remained every bit a top priority in Washington, my efforts and accomplishments were being demeaned by a groupthink mentality that led to a scenario of “us versus them,” with me inexplicably linked with “them.” There was no middle ground and no room for what Organized Crime or any other section deemed dissidents in the Bureau.

But my Bulger experience had branded me just that, and the Organized Crime section in Washington preferred to paint me as a “crazy” relegated to a distant corner, rather than to weigh my work in its totality. The Bureau’s second in command, John Otto, who actually served as acting director between May and November of 1987, backed Greenleaf up at my expense. I believe that Otto served as both Greenleaf’s cover and protective blanket, another cog in the machine. But that didn’t stop him from jumping in when William Sessions was fired by President Bill Clinton after “findings by the Department of Justice that he engaged in legal and ethical misconduct.”

“What the bureau cannot tolerate is people trashing it, and that is what Sessions has done,” Otto told England’s
The Independent
in July 1993. “He put himself and his own interests before the bureau, and that is taboo.”

In a further bizarre twist, when Otto stepped down from his final post as associate deputy director of administration in April 1990, he was replaced by James Greenleaf.

The disconnect here was that I was lauded and given commendations for my accomplishments, while my warnings about the underlying cancer festering inside the Boston office were ignored. In an internal FBI Performance Appraisal Report issued on June 29, 1984, and still in my possession, my overall rating was called “Exceptional.” Under “Program Management” the report went on to detail that “Achievements in the Organized Crime Program and White Collar Crime Program are a direct result of ASAC FITZPATRICK’S interest and enthusiasm for directing the programs. During the ratings period, many problems surfaced that required ASAC FITZPATRICK to address. These problems were overcome and many of the cases achieved successful resolution. Modifications were made to Boston’s Organized Crime Program with the help of ASAC FITZPATRICK and Boston is now in a better position to address the narcotics and dangerous drug problem within its territory.”

The evaluation was written by James Greenleaf.

The SAC’s words, though, were backed up by neither his nor HQ’s actions. The procedure-driven Organized Crime section in Washington under Sean McWeeney controlled my purse strings and thus thought they controlled me. And, yes, money normally affected all of the critical thinking and decision making, but I wasn’t going to let it affect mine. I knew that Whitey Bulger and his right-hand man Stephen Flemmi were titular heads of the Irish OC families and that meant regardless of what anyone in Washington or Boston said, they would remain one of my top priorities. But the so-called experts subsumed all of my evaluations.

“You know, I have the advantage of overseeing all facets of Organized Crime and other crimes in Boston,” I once told McWeeney.

“Okay,” he replied, “what’s your point?”

“That I could see the failure of putting our eggs in the Bulger and Flemmi basket right from the beginning.”

I seem to recall him almost laughing at my insinuation. As my superior, he knew better; he knew
everything.
And he took his marching orders from John Otto who was Greenleaf’s “guy” in Washington.

But then came August 1985, when I married my sweetheart, Jane. At our glorious wedding the unexpected showing of agents and friends sharing my earlier years was overwhelming. Here were Andy, Davey, and Bones, my old partners in crime from my first post in New Orleans, running on the beach in Charlestown, Rhode Island, after a raucous night out recounting our early exploits. We laughed at our younger agent days in Memphis and other offices where we were assigned. As first and second low-ranking office agents we got the “dreg” cases, the bottom of the barrel, dog-eared file cases that remained unsolved.

There was one in particular where a fugitive I was after in New Orleans at the outset of my career had a propensity for racetracks. The file was full of leads and pages recounting how other agents had tried to apprehend this guy by going to the racetracks firsthand. The Fair Grounds in New Orleans was a splendid racetrack of the antebellum age, with all the accoutrements: the fanfare, the banners flying, the horses decorated in beautiful spring colors as they pranced for the gate. We “shot a balloon” that day and went to the Fair Grounds in search of the fugitive.

Bones, being the comic agent, used every chance he got to declare, “There he is! Look, climbing up the flagpole. No, there he is on the back of horse number five!” When we got our tickets for the horse race to make the outing respectable, Bones yelled, “He’s the guy behind the ticket window!” We all laughed and every fifteen minutes or so I would reexamine my photo of Harry, the fugitive, in the event that we might spot him among the huge crowd—not that any of us really thought we would.

A calm came over the crowd as the horses came to the gate. The announcer bellowed over the loudspeakers, “This is the third race at the Fair Grounds and the horses are nearing the gate.” The other agents were doing their thing and nowhere to be seen. Finally, Bones came into my line of sight and, as I glanced at that photo once more, lo and behold, standing not far from him there was Harry!

I checked the photo again and again. “Bingo!” I thought, excited. “Damn, that’s him!”

I sneaked behind the fugitive who was avidly screening the mounts at the gate, greeting him with, “Harry, how the hell are you?”

He turned around expecting to see a pal and, acknowledging my recognition, said, “Great!”

And then in the blink of an eye, he realized that this was an “aw shit” moment and tried to move away.

“Harry, I’m Bob Fitzpatrick, FBI, and you’re under arrest!”

The look on his face said it all. Disappointment as he realized that this was no friend or acquaintance, this was the feds. As I approached Harry he held out his hands symbolically and I slapped on the handcuffs, strapping him around a flagpole.

Man, he was pissed!

“Take me outta here,” Harry muttered.

Stalling for time, I told him I wasn’t alone and had to find the other agents. The crowd milled around us oblivious to the man in handcuffs, intent only on the third race about to go off.

I said, “Look, there’re other agents here and I’m afraid to take you in on my own.”

He looked at me incredulously and repeated, “Just get me outta here. I promise I’ll go quietly. No trouble.”

Of course, what I didn’t tell him was that I was stalling because I and the other agents had a bet on the race. The announcer barked, “They’re off!” And off went the horses, kicking up dirt as they started around the track with our horse at the head of the pack.

Bones showed up just as excited as I was, especially when he spied the handcuffs fastened around Harry’s wrists. “So, you won the race, eh, Fitz?”

Harry, getting more pissed by the second, just wanted to be arrested and taken away, while Bones and I were busy following our horses.

“Get me the hell outa here!” Harry bellowed this time, trying to be heard over the screaming crowd.

I finally relented. As I recuffed Harry and started to bring him around, the announcer gave the results of the race.

“Did you win, Harry?” I asked. “Because I did! Oh, that’s right,” I added, looking at his handcuffs, “you can’t check your ticket.”

The pissed-off look froze on his expression. We were ecstatic. Andy finally arrived and he laughed the loudest when we told him the story. And now all those years later here we were in Charlestown, Rhode Island, laughing out loud again. It was one of the greatest few days of my life, culminating in a marriage ceremony that was truly special, with all the most important people in my life gathered in the same place at the same time, including my brothers Larry and Gerard and my sister Diane.

Well, not everyone. My parents, obviously, were not in attendance. And neither was anyone from my years in the Mount. That period of my life was like a black hole that had swallowed my youth. But those same years had made me what I was, and the lessons of life in the Mount had been well learned, carried with me to this day.

At the reception, I looked over the group. Catching my eye were both Connolly and Morris, the two of them unusually sitting apart. Connolly in his flamingo tuxedo gabbing with table partners and seeming to lead the conversation, as was his custom. Morris was seated at a separate table in a dark suit, demur and quiet. Neither of them looked happy, making them stand out amid the revelry, and I was glad even for that small token of payback.

I thought about the reception dinner at the North End in Boston after the Angiulo takedown. My informant, Frankie, had thrown a party for the members of my squad and we had reveled in the excitement of being on top of the world. And on the night of my marriage to my beloved Jane I was on top of the world again, and no one, least of all John Connolly and John Morris, was going to bring me down.

Our honeymoon to Ireland continued the excitement. We traveled through our ancestral turf with Jane reading to me about the Troubles while I negotiated the troubles of the narrow Irish roads. We dropped into a different pub each day for “beer and soup,” reminiscing about the Ireland of old. From there, we sailed through Limerick, Galway, Tipperary before venturing into Northern Ireland, the seat of the Troubles. We made it in fine, but getting out was a problem. The resistance and tension of the North was unmistakable. I thought back to my teaching days at the Academy, when I taught a course on hostage negotiation to the RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. It was a unique experience because there were Irish Catholics in the class, a rarity in the mostly Protestant or British RUC. My course involved tactics and negotiation when dealing with hostage takers. The Protestants thought this was blarney, as the RUC had a much more severe approach toward the Catholic troubles.

Back in Boston, I had met the head of the Gardai, the police force of the Republic of Ireland, and knew a little something about how things were handled in Ireland, both North and South. Jane and I shared the history in what had become a major conflagration of fighting forces, the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Defense Force and other groups. We laughed at how there were two prominent flags in my Boston FBI office: the U.S. flag and the tricolor flag of Ireland. It reminded me of the Irish mob back home and their internecine warfare and fights with the Italian mafia, a microcosm of the trouble abroad.

Jane and I had enough of the North. We trekked south toward the Irish border surprised to see a huge blockade with roadblocks of Brit lorries and armored cars. As we got closer the soldier smartly requested, “Registration and passports, please.” I dutifully produced the documents and he inquired further, “Was your visit pleasure or business?”

I smiled at Jane and chuckled to no one in particular, “Pleasure, of course.”

He then said without a trace of humor, “License!”

I tried to ask if there was a problem but he steadfastly parsed, “License!”

When I reached into my jacket for my license, I discerned that the soldier brought his rifle to a ready position. I stared at him because of his apparent defiant move and demanded, “Is there a problem?”

He examined the license and angrily noted, “So, you’re from Boston and you’re Irish.”

Quizzically, I said, “Yeah?”

At that point, without giving my license and registration back, he ordered me to move to a different location in the blockade. I again inquired, “Is there a problem?”

He smugly gestured with his rifle in the ready position and said, “Move along.”

I rolled unto the new blockade position, whereupon another soldier asked, “Pleasure or business?”

“Pleasure,” I formally replied.

It became obvious to Jane that the soldier was all business and she became somewhat frightened, particularly as I pointed to a soldier camouflaged in a machine-gun nest directly in front of us.

“What’s going on?” she whispered.

“Nothing,” I said, feeling my own Irish temper rising, “they’re just being smart-asses because we’re Irish and we’re from Boston.”

The soldier overheard me and began to give me a ration of crap. I stared at him and demanded, “I want to speak to your supervisor!” The soldier came to attention as I saw his commanding officer approach the car, just as tense as his subordinates.

“Is there a problem?” I asked him now.

The officer asked for further identification and when I tried to ask him why, he abruptly and curtly demanded, “Do as I say.”

I reached into my inside pocket, leery of their rising anxiety, and pulled out my FBI credentials and badge. “I’m FBI, United States law enforcement,” I said in my sternest voice.

Both the officer and soldier were taken aback, even embarrassed, and did not know quite what to do from there. I knew from the teaching I did at the FBI Academy that the whole episode was recorded through hidden microphones on the soldiers’ persons and thus wasn’t surprised to see a higher-ranking officer approach the car. The officer greeted us with a huge and cheerful hello. He turned out to be a former student who recognized me from the Academy, of all places, where he’d been among the Royal Ulster Constabulary who took my course on hostage negotiation.