Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (35 page)

NOTES

General sources include author’s personal notes, recollections, daybook entries plus personal discussions with Colonel John O’Donovan, Dick Bates, Joe Yablonski, Jim Knotts, and Larry Sarhatt, as well as reports to FBI, DOJ, and federal courts.

PROLOGUE:
Murder of John McIntyre

According to testimony:
Descriptions of McIntyre’s murder drawn from court testimony and/or depositions and plea agreements by Stephen Flemmi, John Martorano, and Kevin Weeks; testimony from the 2006 McIntyre trial; sourcing from the
Boston Globe
, and
The Brothers Bulger
by Howie Carr (Grand Central, 2006, pages 265–66).

Torture of McIntyre:
Accusations supported by findings against FBI from decision by Judge Reginald Lindsay of the district court, upheld by the appellate court, finding the FBI complicit in McIntyre’s murder and ordering a $3.1 million judgment. Judge Lindsay wrote in part: “For decades preceding the McIntyre murder, agents of the FBI protected Bulger and Flemmi as informants by shielding them from prosecution for crimes they had committed.”

In upholding Judge Lindsay’s decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit went on to say 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.”

Part One: Coming to Boston

CHAPTER 1

ABSCAM and arrest of Senator Harrison Williams:
As detailed by
Time
magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,924247,00.html
.

Harrison Williams’s conviction:
Senator Harrison Williams was convicted of nine counts of bribery and conspiracy. He was fined $50,000 and sentenced to three years in prison. He died on November 20, 2001:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/20/nyregion/ex-senator-harrison-a-williams-jr-81-dies-went-to-prison-over-abscam-scandal.html
.

CHAPTER 3

Word was the agents there had taken their mandate:
Internal FBI memo dated August 6, 1980, to Boston SAC Lawrence Sarhatt from ASAC Weldon L. Kennedy. (See
Appendix
.)

Jerry Angiulo:
Jerry Angiulo’s life and status as a mob boss was neatly summed up in his
Boston Herald
obituary in August 2009:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1194144
.

Colonel O’Donovan:
Suspicions of Colonel O’Donovan of Massachusetts State Police raised in memo referenced immediately above.

CHAPTER 4

McDonald and Sims:
The status of Joe McDonald and James Sims as associates of Bulger and Flemmi and members of the Winter Hill Gang confirmed in
Black Mass
by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill (New York: Harper Collins Perennial, 2001, pages 65, 68).

Depiction of the meeting detailed here drawn from knowledge of former FBI agent Dick Bates and outgoing Boston office ASAC Joe Yablonski. Further affirmed later in testimony by John Morris in Wolf hearings after being granted immunity.

Connolly and Castucci:
Complicity of agent John Connolly in the murder of Richie Castucci supported by a superseding criminal indictment unsealed on October 11, 2000, accusing John Connolly of “leaking information to Bulger and Flemmi that led directly to the murders of three potential witnesses against the gang: Brian Halloran, John Callahan, and a third informant named Richard Castucci” (
Black Mass
, page 327). Also reported in a
Boston Herald
story that same week entitled “Blood on His Hands.”

CHAPTER 5

The MSP didn’t trust:
Colonel O’Donovan’s suspicions, as relayed to author, were the subject of an internal FBI memo from ASAC Weldon L. Kennedy to Boston SAC Lawrence Sarhatt, August 6, 1980.

racehorse fix case:
Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi’s part in the 1979 Race Fix case detailed in the testimony of Jeremiah O’Sullivan before the House Government Reform Committee 2002 as reported in the Third Report by the Committee on Government Reform entitled “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers as Informants (pages 5–6):
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/5997413/Everything-Secret-Degenerates-The-FBI’s-Use-of-Murderers-as Informants
.

This is further supplemented by John Morris’s own testimony under grant of immunity during the 1998 Wolf hearings. As the
Boston Globe
has written: “Granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony during 1998 federal court hearings, Morris confirmed scathing allegations of FBI misconduct, admitting that he had alerted Flemmi and Bulger to an investigation targeting bookmakers in 1988 and had asked a federal prosecutor to keep them out of a 1979 indictment for fixing horse races”:
http://www.boston.com/news/packages/whitey/characters/morris.htm
.

One Boston agent, Jim Knotts, even insisted that John Connolly was fictionalizing information:
This and additional allegations lodged on these pages further supported by “The Official Bulger FBI Files: Some Tall Tales” by Dick Lehr and the
Globe
staff,
Boston Globe,
July 21, 1998:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/1998/07/21/the_official_bulger_fbi_files_some_tall_tales/?page=2
.

CHAPTER 6

“
to insure that [informants] are not provided any information”:
from the
FBI Manual of Investigative Operations and Guidelines
, pages 137–38, 1978.

I was on special assignment:
Author’s part in the Bombings in Mississippi investigation detailed in
Heritage: The FBI Oral History Project,
as supported by court documents, author’s FBI personnel file, and testimony in federal court (SUPRA).

CHAPTER 7

Author’s account of his role in the Martin Luther King assassination detailed in
Heritage: The FBI Oral History Project,
as supported by court documents and author’s FBI personnel file.

Depiction of author’s interview with Bulger has been previously reported on
60 Minutes
and the National Geographic documentary
Bullets Over Boston.

CHAPTER 8

My two-page report:
Author’s two-page memo recommending Bulger be closed as informant allegedly lost, a fact testified to by author during the McIntyre trial and Wolf hearings as supported by trial transcripts. Its existence has never been the subject of any contention, except in findings against the FBI.

CHAPTER 9

Teddy Deegan was described:
Story of the murder of Teddy Deegan by Joseph Barboza, and covered up by FBI agents Paul Rico and Dennis Condon, was proven in court, a case in which the FBI was held liable for criminal wrongdoing and ordered to pay $101.7 million in damages to the plaintiffs (“Court Frees Limone After 33 Years in Prison,” by Ralph Ramalli,
Boston Globe,
January, 6, 2001). The Obama Justice Department, and Elena Kagan as solicitor general opted against appeal.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/05/01/us_wont_appeal_verdict_in_case_of_four_framed_by_fbi/
.

The House Government Reform Committee also weighed in on this to a great degree in the Third Report by the Committee on Government Reform entitled “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers as Informants” (pages 5–6):
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/5997413/Everything-Secret-Degenerates-The-FBI’s-Use-of-Murderers-as-Informants
.

CHAPTER 10

“The successful prosecution of these subjects”:
Associated Press, July 28, 2002:
http://truthinjustice.org/blood-bargain.htm
.

Barboza decided to get even:
Account of Joseph Barboza’s changing his story supported by,

Before long, however, he was threatening to recant his testimony unless given $9,000 for plastic surgery to change his appearance. If Barboza recanted, convictions “might be overturned and plunge the government into protracted and acrimonious litigation,” federal prosecutors Edward F. Harrington and Walter T. Barnes warned their supervisor in Washington. In their Feb. 12, 1970, memo, they urged that Barboza be given the money. Six months later, Barboza did recant—but soon changed his mind and stood by his original story.