Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (5 page)

At their next meeting, held on the pretext of expanding Richie’s gambling concerns, Bulger and Flemmi sat down with the now doomed informant. Martorano stood back a bit from the table, a fact that strangely mirrored his life inside and out of Whitey’s immediate circle. He dressed with style and class, seldom seen in anything but designer clothes that made him look more like a politician or even a celebrity. He spoke in complex, compound sentences and his deep-set eyes told you his thinking was always a step ahead of everyone else’s. He was a college graduate and had gone to a swanky prep school where he played football. Never the best on the team but always the hardest working and probably the toughest. Howie Carr has captured and chonicled the contradiction that is John Martorano in his very well done
Hitman.

Bulger had a macabre sense of humor, dark like his soul. He joked with Richie, coming up just short of revealing the truth.

“You gotta be careful all this new work doesn’t kill you,” Bulger grinned. “Can’t enjoy much when you’re dead.”

If Richie was suspicious, he didn’t show it. After all, he’d just lent Bulger nearly $800,000, easily enough to keep him in the boss’s good graces for some time. Wearing blinders like the horses he took bets on, Richie had no reason to suspect he’d been made as an informant. Smiles and laughs were exchanged, and as soon as Richie stood up to leave, Martorano shot him in the head.

When the news broke at the FBI office that Richie had been hit, Opie simply distanced himself from Connolly, Morris, and the whole Organized Crime squad. He couldn’t blame them entirely for what had happened since it had been his own indiscretion, in a bar no less, that had set the wheels in motion. Subsequently, he requested a transfer to a Resident Agency, one of the Boston FBI’s off-site offices. That left the investigation of Richie’s death in the hands of none other than John Connolly himself. Connolly filed a report that Richie had been killed by La Cosa Nostra (LCN) over a horse race debt. Not a single agent or supervisor at the Bureau disputed his conclusions, and Richie was laid to rest unceremoniously with that perpetual smile on his face. No one involved had any reason to suspect the story wouldn’t hold.

No one except Colonel John O’Donovan, head of the Massachusetts State Police.

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BOSTON, 1981

Of course, at this point I wasn’t privy to all the untold details leading to Castucci’s murder, most notably the fact that Connolly himself had done the leaking. But I did know that O’Donovan’s own findings in the investigation just didn’t jive with Connolly’s at all. The Massachusetts State Police had key informants in Somerville, Southie, and Charlestown who disputed the FBI’s conclusion that La Cosa Nostra was responsible for killing Richie. The MSP had developed their own criminal targets, namely Bulger and Flemmi, who had replaced the jailed Howie Winter as heads of the Winter Hill Gang. The MSP didn’t trust certain FBI agents, and as time went on O’Donovan himself actually made complaints to FBIHQ. In August of 1980 he went so far as to insist on a meeting with my predecessor as ASAC, Weldon Kennedy, at a Ramada Inn in Brighton.

There, O’Donovan aired a litany of grievances for an audience that included Jeremiah O’Sullivan and Joe Jordan, commissioner of the Boston Police Department. Those grievances encapsulated the undercurrent of animosity brewing among competing law enforcement organizations throughout Boston. Along with O’Donovan’s official complaint, the gripes grew more caustic as some Staties began accusing Connolly and Morris of actually covering up crimes committed by Bulger and Flemmi.

Sarhatt had taken over the Boston office in 1979 and was immediately thrust into the contentious and long-simmering battle between the FBI and the Massachusetts State Police that I was ostensibly sent in to settle. The Organized Crime squad celebrated their accomplishments with dinners that sat Bulger and Flemmi at the same table as their handlers and others. These contacts were never officially recorded, of course, since they were strictly off the books. The same year, to shore up control and gain prosecutorial support and protection, FBI agents Morris and Connolly (a fact Morris would testify to once granted immunity years later) informed Strike Force chief Jeremiah O’Sullivan that Bulger and Flemmi were, in fact, informants—another faux pas strictly against all Bureau regulations and protocol since Hoover first enacted the informant program. They had essentially ratted out their own rats, and for good reason, since O’Sullivan, in my view, was as petulant and self-serving as they were, and only too happy not to prosecute informants who might ultimately be helpful to his own OC cause.

But Morris and Connolly had another reason for breaking this hard-and-fast rule regarding informants. Indictments were to be handed down soon in the Tony Ciulla racehorse fix case, and the agents could not risk their prized informants getting pinched—something Strike Force head O’Sullivan backed them on one hundred percent.

Bulger and Flemmi paid their handlers back by tipping them off to a series of thefts from a trucking company called Interstate Shipping, along with a string of burglaries. John Morris put his imagination to work by using the RICO statutes to craft a case against a slew of co-conspirators served up for him on a platter. Morris claimed his case to be the “most successful law enforcement endeavor in the history of the Boston area.” Conveniently, these arrests also helped Bulger and Flemmi eliminate a large portion of their criminal competition, further consolidating their deadly hold on the city.

I sought Colonel John O’Donovan out again as the newly assigned Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Boston office. His mince-no-words allegations about the Richie Castucci murder and much more marked the first time I’d ever heard an entire FBI office criticized by someone of the highest authority in the state police. O’Donovan hadn’t changed his attitude one bit and, in fact, he was more vehement than ever, because, in his mind, the murder of Richie Castucci remained unsolved in large part because of Connolly’s falsified conclusions. O’Donovan was both befuddled and enraged by the FBI turning a blind eye and deaf ear to Connolly’s actions, which seemed so clear to him as to be irrefutable. What the colonel, an old-fashioned honest cop, could not comprehend was the Bureau’s arrogant, insular nature and overwhelming penchant to look after its own.
Never embarrass the Bureau
was the mantra, not to be violated under any circumstance. Of course, since agents were generally considered to be beyond reproach, the circumstances O’Donovan kept alluding to seemed inconceivable. Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity, after all, was the FBI’s motto.

The colonel used our former relationship to renew a unique trust and confidence, mostly on the phone since the Massachusetts State Police headquarters was located in Framingham, often a messy drive from Boston. But I did see him quite frequently at the 1010 State Police building, since I lived right around the corner. We, of course, threw a few beers down as we had at the FBI Academy beer hall in the past. Our other meetings normally took place in his office instead of mine, adorned with certificates, awards, and citations recognizing his many years of stellar service. I never recall seeing O’Donovan out of uniform, even when we met at a coffee shop halfway between Boston and Framingham. O’Donovan liked it here because he was a frequent enough customer to be left alone, especially when he took one of the back booths as his de facto office.

The colonel told me that the FBI in Boston had a history of complaints over a long period of time, at least from the MSP. He also confided that he was aware other law enforcement departments were complaining that some FBI agents were involved with wiseguys within their own jurisdictions. The colonel claimed he had proof that certain agents still in the FBI’s Boston office couldn’t be trusted either. His criticism was echoed by many law enforcement agencies in Boston and reached the ears of those at the FBI in Washington, D.C., especially the higher-ups. But the colonel believed his complaints had either been covered up or simply ignored.

“I’m telling you, Fitz, these guys are dirty,” he told me, referring to Morris and Connolly.

“But you can’t prove that.”

“We’re running the Lancaster Garage wire and everybody goes quiet once the FBI finds out.”

“That’s not proof, Colonel.”

“They’re protecting their informants. They’re letting them get away with anything, and that includes murder.”

“We’re talking about Bulger and Flemmi here.”

“That’s who we’re talking about, yes.”

O’Donovan didn’t know I had already met with the assistant director of the Administrative Services Division at SOG, the “seat of government” for the FBI in Washington, D.C., and the operational and administrative nerve center of the Bureau. It was the ADIC, Assistant Director in Charge, Roy McKinnon, who had sent me north and ordered me to “clean up that mess in Boston” because the office “was in trouble!” In addition to the colonel’s telling me about LE (law enforcement) issues, a pair of fellow agents contacted me about perceived “informant problems.” Matt Cronin and Jim Crawford, better known as the “C and C Duo,” tipped me off to the general atmosphere of mistrust inside the office. They had the best informants in the Boston Division and were instrumental in raising the red flags about Bulger and Flemmi. Because of the FBI’s quasi-military structure and strict chain of command, I was limited in naming them for fear of reprisal and retaliation, but their help in deciphering the enigma that was Boston proved invaluable to me.

Even Larry Sarhatt confided that there was a turf war within the office over informants and territory that emanated from the Organized Crime squad. The OC squad was one of thirteen separate and distinct squads that handled various criminal classifications. Among these were the squads I was going to be responsible for as ASAC, including public corruption, financial crimes, cartel drugs, and labor racketeering. Sarhatt identified the conflict over informants as the root cause of all the office’s troubles. One Boston agent, Jim Knotts, even insisted that John Connolly was fictionalizing information he received from Bulger and Flemmi, actually “stealing” the information from Knotts’s 209 informant reports and ascribing it to his own informants to make up for the fact they were giving him nothing of value.

Knotts went one step further by directing my attention to an infamous bank robbery that had looted the Depositors Trust in Medford, Massachusetts, around Memorial Day of 1980. Connolly gave Whitey the credit for naming the crooks, information that led to their eventual arrest. But Knotts told me that was a lie. He knew Medford police chief Jake Keating, and Keating had told him Bulger hadn’t provided the information at all. It had come from other sources, enabling Medford to build a successful prosecution.

According to Knotts, if Connolly wasn’t stealing or embellishing reports, he was downright making them up. A combination of that also came into play when Connolly gave Bulger credit for giving up Jimmy Chalmas in the murder of ex-FBI informant Joseph Barboza in 1976. Trouble was, Knotts told me, San Francisco homicide detectives had interviewed Chalmas the very night of the murder as a prime suspect three months before Connolly got the news from Bulger. So, too, Knotts utterly debunked the myth that Bulger’s intervention had saved the lives of two undercover FBI agents in the late 1970s, a story, he told me, that was blown way out of proportion. The agents in question were never in any real danger and, in fact, the operations in question had been shut down by the time of Bulger’s warning. Knotts suspected the entire episode had been concocted by Connolly to further build the efficacy of his prized informant and keep him active on the daily reporting “rotors.”

These rotors contained all of the Organized Crime 3 Squad’s informant files, making those files vulnerable for cherry picking or enhancing information. Although I would change this process during my tenure, plenty of damage had apparently already been done. To further complicate the situation, Connolly and Morris confided to the Boston SAC that the Massachusetts State Police was interfering with
their
informants. Of course, O’Donovan and the MSP had a different view. They were certain Connolly and Morris were thwarting their investigation and believed that leaks of information to Bulger and Flemmi were coming straight from the FBI, thereby preventing MSP from making a case against them for any number of violent crimes, including multiple murders.

I was told that Bulger and Flemmi were accused of violence, in many cases demanding tribute from the Italian mob and anyone else doing business in the territory their gang had carved out—the cost of doing business. Yet I was also told that they were central to the FBI getting probable cause against the Angiulo gang, promulgating more wires and deeper penetration of the mafia stronghold. But Matt Cronin and Jim Crawford, lead agents on the case, never trusted the Bulger and Flemmi “assistance.” They’d never seen evidence of any such thing and firmly believed it didn’t exist.

Bringing down La Cosa Nostra, though, presented the highest priority set by Department of Justice in conformance with the FBI Director’s official mandate. And powerful forces in both Boston and Washington continued to deem Bulger and Flemmi crucial to that goal no matter the indications to the contrary. At the same time, the Massachusetts State Police set an equally high priority on putting Bulger and Flemmi, in their estimation the two most dangerous gangsters in Boston, in jail as well.

Did the FBI lose a sense of perspective in letting the LCN investigation override all other concerns, even though the strategy left Bulger and Flemmi running loose in the streets? Was it an “Irish” thing that the mafia remained priority number one in Boston, even though the Irish mob was deemed far more threatening according to other law enforcement agencies?

Everywhere I turned and everywhere I looked for answers, everything kept coming back to Whitey Bulger. So, to do the job I’d been sent to Boston to do, it was time for a face-to-face meeting.

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