Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (24 page)

CONNOLLY served as gift coordinator, bearing presents to the agents from the gangsters and vice versa. Gianturco got a black leather briefcase, a glass decorative statue, and a bottle of cognac. The second time Bulger came to his house for dinner, recalled Gianturco, he “brought some wineglasses. I think the ones I had were the $I.25 Stop & Shop’s. He brought a better set of wineglasses the next time. Usually Mr. Bulger would bring a bottle of wine or a bottle of champagne when he came up for dinner.”

Gianturco happily reciprocated. While window-shopping during a trip to San Francisco, he spotted a belt buckle with an engraving of Alcatraz and thought of Whitey Bulger. He bought the buckle and then gave it to Connolly to give to Bulger. Bulger liked it and began wearing it. Connolly and Bulger, meanwhile, also exchanged books and wine, and Bulger once presented his handler with an engraved hunting knife.

“I received a sweatshirt from Nick Gianturco,” Flemmi recalled. “I received a book from John Connolly.” Morris, he said, once gave him a painting of Korea by a Korean artist. “It was a nice painting.” Said Morris: “I had picked it up in the army. I had served in Korea, and he had served in Korea, and I gave him that painting.”

Bulger noticed that the dinner table at Morris’s home lacked a bucket to keep wine chilled, so he surprised Morris with a gift of a silver wine bucket. The ornate gift infuriated Morris’s wife and sparked another round of marital grief. She didn’t want Bulger’s largesse and told her husband not to accept it. But Morris did, rationalizing again the need to maintain Bulger’s trust. Rebecca Morris banned the bucket from their home, and eventually John Morris, without ever telling Bulger, quietly threw it out.

Bulger and Flemmi continued to ply Morris with fancy wine—here and there a $25 or $30 bottle of French bordeaux. “I don’t think that I articulated a specific interest in it,” said Morris. “I think that it evolved, and I believe it evolved from the standpoint where they first brought wine. I believe conversation flowed from that as to my interest in wine.”

The two crime bosses even arranged once for a special delivery to Morris at the FBI office in Government Center in Boston. “Connolly gave it to me,” recalled Morris. “He said that he had something for me from these guys.” Morris was instructed to go to Connolly’s car in the parking garage. “I went down to the basement of the federal building, opened his trunk, and there was a case of wine.”

It was as if the gangsters were probing Morris’s weak spot. He’d showed himself capable of losing it at the Colonnade Hotel. Indeed, Flemmi had kept the audiotape that Morris left behind that night as a souvenir. And even though Morris knew full well that the growing intimacy and gift-giving were clearly wrong, he couldn’t stop himself. It was as if he got a charge out of the bizarre alliance with Bulger and Flemmi. With a little alcohol, it all went down even more smoothly. Morris liked the two gangsters. He liked Connolly. They all seemed part of an important secret.

In early June 1982 Morris left Boston to attend a two-week training session in Glynco, Georgia, at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. Sarhatt had approved the trip, as did the Boston office’s assistant special agent in charge, Bob Fitzpatrick. Morris was enrolled in a program entitled “Narcotics Specialization Training.” Even though another federal agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), already specialized in targeting drug traffickers, the FBI during the early 1980s was looking to enhance its own drug enforcement capabilities. Immediately Morris missed his girlfriend Debbie Noseworthy, and once in Georgia he got an idea.

“I called Connolly,” said Morris, and he reminded Connolly of the offer Bulger and Flemmi had made: if he ever needed anything, just let them know. “So I asked Connolly: ‘Do you think they could arrange for an airline ticket?’

“He said, ‘Yeah.’”

John Connolly had taken Morris’s call at the Organized Crime Squad. Debbie was seated nearby at her desk right outside Morris’s office. She could only wonder what Connolly and her boyfriend were discussing. Then Connolly hung up and left. He returned later, and he walked up to Debbie Noseworthy holding an envelope that he then gave to the FBI secretary.

“He said that John wanted me to have this,” she recalled. “I asked what it was, and he said, ‘Well, look at it.’” Debbie opened the plain white envelope and counted $1,000 in cash. She was startled and asked where the money had come from. Using a cover story that he and Morris had concocted, Connolly explained that her boyfriend had been saving up money and hiding it in his desk for an occasion just like this one. Morris, said Connolly, wanted her to take the money and fly down to see him in Georgia.

Debbie had not seen Connolly enter Morris’s office and go through the squad supervisor’s desk. She had been in her boss’s desk many times before and had never seen the money. But she wasn’t about to second-guess her good fortune. She was thrilled. Connolly, Debbie recalled, then said to her, “Isn’t that nice that you’re going to get to go?” Debbie arranged hastily to take a few vacation days. She rushed out and bought a ticket and then caught a departing flight from Logan Airport. Thanks to Connolly and Bulger, the couple were soon romancing in Georgia.

SIX MONTHS after Morris sought his first payoff, he turned over supervision of the Organized Crime Squad to Jim Ring. Morris was named coordinator of a new FBI drug task force. It was early in 1983, and Morris was feeling a little burned out. The public reason for the burnout was legitimate and understandable. Morris had overseen a squad of agents through the spectacular but exhausting bugging of the Mafia’s Boston headquarters. The investigation was now in the hands of Ed Quinn, who was overseeing a group of agents carefully listening to and transcribing the FBI tapes. The evidence against Gennaro Angiulo and his associates was stunning, and all of it was in the Mafia’s own words. But Morris’s burnout had a private side to it too—he was now thoroughly compromised.

No question, he’d taken a gift too far.

Between himself and Connolly, Bulger and Flemmi now had two agents cold. Morris tried to warn his successor, Jim Ring, about Bulger. Morris, of course, did not mention the money. He talked to Ring in FBISPEAK, suggesting to the new supervisor that perhaps Bulger and Flemmi had “outlived their usefulness” and should be closed down as FBI informants. It was Morris’s lame wish that Ring would somehow clean up his mess. Ring later said he had no memory of Morris ever advising him to close Bulger. In the office the two agents were regarded more as rivals than as friends. Ring was eager to make his own mark, not just serve as custodian to the picked-over remains of the Angiulo case.

Connolly immediately brought Ring around to meet Bulger and Flemmi—the start of a new chapter in glad-handing. Connolly made the initial introductions at his own apartment, and the two gangsters found that Ring wasn’t warm and soft like Morris. “I felt comfortable with John Morris, but Jim Ring was a different type of a person,” Flemmi said. “He seemed to be more focused in on details and didn’t seem to be the type of guy that wanted to maybe socialize.”

Soon enough, though, Ring joined the others at the dinner table, including a memorable night spent at the house of Flemmi’s mother. Billy Bulger, the senate president, walked into the Flemmi kitchen from his own home across the way. The startled FBI supervisor did a double take as Billy walked right in and gave Whitey some family photographs to look at. (Billy later denied this ever happened, but Ring testified about the cameo appearance under oath.)

But no other supervisor or fellow agent could ever replace what the group had had in John Morris. Maybe he wasn’t Connolly’s boss anymore, or in charge of the Organized Crime Squad, but Connolly and Bulger and Flemmi were going to stick close by. They had Morris in their grip, and he’d come cheap—a plane ticket for an illicit tryst. Morris soon sensed as much. He knew the moment Debbie Noseworthy buckled herself in for the flight out of Logan that it was over. He was finished, and it would only get worse as the 1980s continued. He’d try to rationalize as best he could, try to imitate Connolly—fluff everything up in earnest talk about the special deal and the special task they’d all undertaken to defeat the Mafia. But the protection they were providing Bulger and Flemmi was no longer just about gathering underworld intelligence, which was always good to get but never as vital and indispensable as the agents had portrayed it. The protection was now about FBI corruption.

Morris had been unable to hold his own, through the Colonnade and the dinners and the gifts, through the leaks about the state police’s attempted bugging and now the cold cash. He knew full well they’d all moved far beyond crafting distortions and lies for the FBI’s files, beyond the padding of the Bulger files so that their bosses thought only good thoughts about Bulger, beyond the stretching of the rules to their outermost limits.

They’d fallen completely off the game board during the eighteen months from late 1980 to mid-I982—now criminals all, FBI agents and two gangsters looking to deflect trouble of any kind, including charges of murder.

Shortly after
the new year arrived in 1981, Brian Halloran backed his ratty Cadillac into a space in front of the Rusty Scupper, a busy North End restaurant, and bounded upstairs to the loft apartment of his drinking buddy from the world of high finance. Accountant John Callahan had asked him to stop by to talk business, and that sounded like money to the usually strapped Halloran.

They were an odd pair that got on. Halloran, a rangy leg-breaker from the Winter Hill gang, and Callahan, a squat CPA and consultant to Boston banks, had struck up an unlikely friendship rooted in Boston’s nightlife. They had first bumped into each other in the early 1970s at Chandler’s, a wiseguy hangout in the South End controlled by Howie Winter. The extroverted Callahan liked to walk on the wild side, and that is where the scruffy Halloran lived, usually at loose ends, just getting by on the feast-or-famine cycle as an enforcer in the underworld’s brutal collection business.

Callahan talked to bankers by day and socialized with mobsters by night. Like Halloran, he took a drink and liked a good time. The wiseguys saw him as a big spender who knew how to make money and, more important, how to launder it. After hanging out at Chandler’s for a couple of years, Callahan tried connecting the corporate world with the underworld by proposing a deal that startled Halloran. One night in the mid-1970s Callahan asked Halloran if he would “rob” him as he lugged a money bag from his main place of business, a company called World Jai Alai that was a gambling cash cow. Halloran would hold him up as he walked the pouch to a Brink’s truck, and then afterwards they would split the money. The phony robbery never took place, but Halloran understood that Callahan was more than a “fun” guy with a fat wallet. He was a player.

AFTER Halloran was buzzed into Callahan’s apartment overlooking Boston Harbor, he was surprised to see Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi sitting in the living room. Callahan gave him an effusive greeting. Stevie said hello. Bulger said nothing. Whitey didn’t like Halloran much, and it showed. On the street Bulger’s silent treatment was seen as the kiss of death.

But Halloran was surprised only for a moment. In recent months, Callahan had been bragging to him about Bulger and Flemmi wanting to be partners in the “World Jai Alai action” Callahan had carved out of the heavy-betting that accompanied a court game mostly resembling racquetball and played at “frontons” in Connecticut and Florida. To Halloran, the presence of Bulger and Flemmi signaled the deal was past the negotiating stage—and it was also now clear Callahan was no longer just a hot shit accountant with a party personality and banking connections. In fact, Callahan was washing money for Bulger and Flemmi and, whether Callahan realized it or not, he’d traveled a long way from the city’s financial district and now belonged to Winter Hill.

There was some strained small talk all around and then, in a nervous patter, Callahan got right to the heart of the matter. He said a serious problem had come up at the World Jai Alai company in the form of a new owner from Tulsa named Roger Wheeler. The hard-driving CEO from Oklahoma “had discovered something was not right.” Wheeler, he said, had figured out someone was skimming one million dollars a year from the overflowing company coffers. Now the owner planned to fire the company’s top financial officers and replace them with his own people. This Wheeler was a danger, Callahan emphasized, and Callahan feared he’d end up in jail because of the owner’s plan to conduct an extensive internal audit.