Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (32 page)

Two more days of testimony for me followed in the McIntyre trial. Day Five was mostly consumed by a seemingly endless line of questioning about “performance and evaluation” reports relating mostly to John Connolly. But it did feature one terrific exchange on the subject of James Greenleaf with the McIntyre family’s attorney again doing the questioning:

“Okay,” began Mr. Gordon, “I’d like to ask you a few questions regarding Mr. Greenleaf’s style of management. When Mr. Greenleaf was the SAC in Boston, how did he manage the office? Did he have a hands-on approach?”

“No, he was totally different than Mr. Sarhatt. While Sarhatt perhaps did have a hands-on, I would say that Mr. Greenleaf did not. He was gone most of the time. He wasn’t there a lot.”

“Did you have trouble finding him if you needed to speak to him?”

“At times.”

“And how did that come about? How long would it be that you would be trying to reach out to him and could not find him?”

“Sometimes I never found him.”

“And did you actually have a nickname for Mr. Greenleaf?”

“His nickname was ‘Greenleave.’ “

“‘Greenleave’?”

“Right. He was never there.”

This exchange became the precursor for Greenleaf’s own frustratingly evasive and pointless testimony dominated by “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember.” At one point, I remember Judge Lindsay just shaking his head at the absurdity of Greenleaf’s Nuremburg claims, once saying just loud enough for the microphone to pick up, in obvious frustration, “Incredible.”

And when Greenleaf did answer, his responses were ambiguous at best. As the appellate court would later note, on the fourteenth day of the trial Greenleaf would claim he “was not focused on reports that Bulger and Flemmi had sources within law enforcement generally or within the FBI.” Adding more fuel to the fire he had set himself, he claimed to have no awareness of any “investigation being conducted in response to those reports.” This in spite of the reports he was privy to from the Massachusetts State Police and DEA, just to name two, never mind my own reporting to HQ on the subject.

Peter Gelzinis picked things up from there in his column for the
Boston Herald
on Friday, June 23, 2006:

Stephen Flemmi, the homicidal maniac who moonlighted for 25 years as an FBI informant, took to the witness stand recently and portrayed the Boston FBI office as a ship of fools.

Yesterday, we met the captain.

James Greenleaf was the special agent in charge of J. Edgar Hoover’s Boston franchise from 1982 [to] 1986—the period known as Whitey and Stevie’s golden years.

Greenleaf was at the helm while the two “Top Echelon” gangsters were extracting teeth and tongues from doomed people, who were then dropped into holes.

Jim Greenleaf said he was clueless about all of it. Never mind that he was boss, or that the informant files his agents wrote were crammed with references to Bulger and Flemmi wreaking havoc under the care and protection of a gangster agent named John Connolly.

Captain Greenleaf said he never bothered to read the informant files and no underling bothered to mention what was in them. Asked about all the people in those files who turned up dead while he ran the Boston office, former SAC Jim Greenleaf turned into Sgt. Schultz. He knew nothing.…

“I don’t think I really focused on that issue,” Greenleaf said, referring to other law enforcement agencies pursuing the FBI’s two gangster stool pigeons. “I assumed a lot of other people were looking at them.”

Judge Reginald Lindsay, presiding over the no-jury trial, seemed baffled enough by the response to ask Greenleaf if he was “concerned” by the fact that a local DA, the state police and the DEA were all trying to get at Bulger and Flemmi, the gangsters hiding in plain view of the FBI.

Looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, Captain Jim Greenleaf looked at Lindsay and said, “That just didn’t register with me, judge.” With that, this captain of fools sailed back into his retirement.

I felt then that McIntyre, and with him the truth, was going to prevail, and I was right. In September 2006, Judge Lindsay found for the plaintiffs, the Estate of John McIntyre, and against the United States of America and thus the FBI.

In a 110-page decision, Lindsay wrote that the FBI failed to properly supervise Connolly and failed to investigate numerous allegations that Bulger and Flemmi were involved in drug trafficking, murder, and other crimes over decades. Even though the FBI investigated Bulger and Flemmi for four murders, including Wheeler’s, in the early 1980s, Lindsay wrote, “the truth is, however, that the FBI was not pounding the pavement looking for evidence that could ‘stick.’”

“Instead,” wrote Lindsay, “the FBI stuck its head in the sand when it came to the criminal activities of Bulger and Flemmi. The agents of the Boston office knew they had an obligation to report informants’ criminal activity, so they carefully avoided knowledge of criminal acts by their informants.”

The judge ordered the government to pay $3 million to McIntyre’s mother for the conscious suffering he endured before his brutal slaying, $100,000 for the loss of her son’s company, and $1,876 for funeral and burial costs. A princely sum on its own, but even more so when considering Lindsay had found the FBI guilty of clear wrongdoing, a virtual accomplice to John McIntyre’s murder. Small consolation for the family that had lost a son to a night of torture and violence, and perhaps for me as well, after my lifelong dream had ended in pain and anguish a generation before. But I chose not to see it that way. For me, it had always been about the truth, and finally, the truth had won out in clear and unambiguous fashion.

And on October 16, 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld Judge Lindsay’s decision finding the Bureau responsible for McIntyre’s death, saying in part, “because Connolly, acting within the scope of his FBI employment, disclosed information to Bulger and Flemmi sufficient for them to identify McIntyre as a government informant, and McIntyre’s death was a foreseeable consequence of that disclosure.”

Quoting Lindsay liberally, the Court of Appeals went on to state that “The McIntyre leak violated a bright-line law enforcement rule that informant identity never be revealed, and put at risk the life of an individual who was helping the FBI.” The Court of Appeals went on to label the government’s contention that it should not be held liable for a “rogue” agent’s actions basically absurd. “Connolly’s disclosure,” the court found, “was within the boundaries of the FBI’s long-standing method of handling Bulger and Flemmi through Connolly, and that it consequently is ‘just’ to treat the harm caused by the disclosure ‘as one of the normal risks to be borne by the business in which the servant is employed.’”

In arriving at their findings, both courts were assisted in ways they did not then know by Brownie’s co-counsel Doug Matthews. In the pretrial discovery that takes place in civil lawsuits, FBI lawyers had turned over some 170,000 pages of documents ranging from manuals of procedure, to intra-FBI memos, to raw 302s that were the original street agents’ reports. The numbered pages of discovery were assembled in an unindexed, pawed-over pile of thirty or forty 5,000-page file boxes in a dedicated research room in downtown Boston.

Figuring there might be something of value amid those reams, Doug sifted through the pages for most of the summer of 2006 before he found what he was looking for. It was a November 1982 memo hidden within an otherwise innocuous personnel file of an agent not even related to the case. The memo, sent from the Organized Crime section chief in Washington up the chain to an Associate Deputy Director, stated that there was “evidence” implicating the Winter Hill Gang, specifically Bulger and Flemmi, in the Wheeler, Callahan, and Halloran murders.

This proved crucial, not only because the memo affirmed everything I’d reported myself to HQ in 1982 but also because it stripped away the rationale that Bulger and Flemmi should be kept open until there was evidence to support my allegations. A direct contradiction
since the memo in question indicated such evidence already existed!
Doug made sure that McIntyre’s legal team was made aware of the apparently concealed document. And its exposure during the trial clearly had a profound effect on Judge Lindsay’s decision; he cited it multiple times, as would the First Circuit Appellate Court in its 2008 ruling.

The judgment ordered by Judge Lindsay was paid in full without further appeal.

Justice? I suppose but, assuming it was John Connolly who leaked McIntyre’s name, how exactly had Connolly learned McIntyre was an informant? Connolly wasn’t involved in the drug investigation centering on McIntyre’s intelligence at all, meaning he couldn’t possibly have leaked McIntyre’s name unless someone had given it to him first.

“Aren’t these our guys?” Sean McWeeney, head of the Organized Crime squad at HQ, had asked Connolly back in 1984 upon learning of the DEA’s efforts to nail Bulger for drug dealing and distribution.

The murder of John McIntyre, the blame for which was cast on Connolly, in large part put a stop to those efforts. So where had Connolly come by the information? Theoretically, he could have gotten it from Greenleaf or, I suppose, John Morris, both of whom were aware of McIntyre’s informant status. But whoever did the leaking, by connection, also remains in my view complicit in McIntyre’s murder. (Remember, mob attorney Martin Boudreau had inexplicably shown up on the dock when we busted the
Ramsland
after it sailed into port thanks to intelligence provided by John McIntyre. And I’d already reported Greenleaf for alleged disclosure of information to the very same Martin Boudreau.)

And there was more to follow.

My story, which had fallen on deaf ears for so long, suddenly found a bevy of eager listeners who had been similarly wronged in tragic fashion by the culture of corruption that consumed the Boston office of the FBI. The case that drew the most attention in this regard was unquestionably that of John Connolly. Already in federal prison on racketeering charges, Connolly was finally going to face trial in Miami on murder and conspiracy charges in the death of would-be informant John Callahan in the wake of Whitey Bulger’s failed attempt to take over World Jai Alai and the murder of its owner Roger Wheeler in Oklahoma. The trial, coincidentally enough, would be decided within days of the Lindsay decision being upheld by the Court of Appeals.

Prior to that, a virtual rogue’s gallery of faces from the past took the stand to shed light on the era that had seen the FBI co-opted from without and corrupted from within. “Whitey Bulger’s Ex-Pals Line Up to Bury John Connolly,” read the headline in the
Boston Herald
on September 14, 2008. There was Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi testifying that Connolly had told Whitey himself that “if they questioned [Callahan], he wouldn’t hold up” and would “end up turning against him.” And if there was any doubt whether Connolly knew what that meant, it was vanquished when Flemmi revisited the murders of bookie Richie Castucci in 1976 and Brian Halloran in 1982, both ordered killed by Bulger after tips furnished by Connolly.

“When you give us information on one person and they got killed,” Flemmi testified, “when you give us information on a second person and they get killed, when you give us information on a third person and they got killed. I mean, he’s an FBI agent. He’s not stupid.”

John Martorano added his own flavor to the pot, confirming much of Flemmi’s testimony while providing the intricate details of John Callahan’s murder at his hand from a bullet in the back of the head. As a sideshow, authorities like Tom Foley, former colonel of the Massachusetts State Police, were forced to defend the deals they cut with killers like Martorano.

“If John Connolly and the FBI had done their job, we wouldn’t have been in that situation,” he testified on Friday, September 19, 2008. “We were in a situation where we had no choice.” He went on to add that “Because of the twisted relationship John Connolly had with Bulger and Flemmi, it put us in a position where he had to make a decision like that.”

Foley had picked up the ball at MSP from my old pal Colonel John O’Donovan, inheriting the same mess that had led to my undoing with the Bureau. I followed the trial from my home in Rhode Island, convinced that the most unseemly thing about the whole tragic episode was not the deals the government had made with Flemmi and Martorano, but the fact that those deals had been necessary in the first place. Between them, Flemmi and Matorano killed dozens of people on direct orders from Whitey Bulger, a number of these occurring after I’d recommended Bulger be closed in 1981.

But he wasn’t.

The men and women he killed subsequently didn’t have to die.

But they did.

Thinking about those victims today still gives me chills. I get even more chills, though, when I think how the testimony of Flemmi and Martorano had indeed buried John Connolly while leaving so many other offenders unsoiled. Writing in the
Boston Globe
, Joan Vennochi skewered the Bureau’s actions in a column titled “If Connolly Is So Guilty, Can the FBI Be So Innocent?,” stressing the very absurdity that the culture of corruption began and ended with a single agent.

“Well, I knew they were protecting them because we were paying for the information,” Kevin Weeks, the gangster-turned-informant who had led authorities to the body of John McIntyre in 2000, told reporter David Boeri on WBUR in August of 2011. “[Whitey] used to claim he had six FBI agents up there that he could call on anytime and they would willingly hop in the car with him with a machine gun. In other words, he’s alluding to me that he’d call them anytime and they’d hop in the car and go on a hit with him.”

“Were you ever curious who they were?” Boeri asked him.

“I figure I was better off not knowing.”

John Connolly was convicted of second-degree murder on November 6, 2008, and was sentenced to forty years in prison the following January. James Greenleaf, the late Jeremiah O’Sullivan, Sean McWeeney, John Morris, and numerous others, meanwhile, have remained relatively unscathed, at least in criminal court. And right up until at least 1988, both O’Sullivan and James Ahearn, Greenleaf’s replacement as Boston SAC, were claiming they had no idea Whitey Bulger had ever been an FBI informant.