Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (31 page)

Then the prosecutor pounced: “If you were shaking down drug dealers, you’d be in the drug business, right?”

“I assert the Fifth on that,” Flemmi responded.

Flemmi was stuck. Faced suddenly with extending the same logic to drugs, Flemmi blinked. If he hadn’t, he would have undercut the comfortable fiction that had served him and Bulger for years—the claim they were not involved in drugs.

Under the FBI’s informant guidelines, Bulger’s drug activities should have led to an abrupt end to the deal he and Connolly and Morris had worked so hard to preserve. Instead, the developing underworld intelligence putting Bulger together with drugs had to be discounted and deflected, and what better way to accomplish that than by cultivating a definition of drug activity that separated the money from the merchandise? Then Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly could share a refrain: shaking down drug dealers did not make Bulger the person he in fact was—a drug lord.

RIGHT from the start, Bulger and Connolly had begun drawing a portrait of Bulger as the anti-drug gangster. During the crucial powwow on November 25, 1980, when Larry Sarhatt was conducting his suitability review of Bulger, the gangster proclaimed that he was “not in the drug business and personally hates anyone who [is]; therefore he and any of his associates do not deal in drugs.” Inside the bureau Bulger’s words went untested: if Bulger said so, it must be true. And in January 1981, as other police agencies were documenting Bulger’s alliance with the drug trafficker Frank Lepere, John Connolly was padding the FBI files with the opposite. Connolly reported that Bulger and Flemmi were actually distancing themselves from Lepere because of the latter’s drug predilection. Bulger, wrote Connolly, had formerly associated with Lepere but more recently had “broomed him due to his involvement in the marijuana business.”

It was a Teflon coating that came in handy in 1984.

The FBI was not a major participant as the DEA and the Quincy police put together Operation Beans. But as a matter of courtesy, the Boston FBI had been notified by the DEA of its intentions. The Boston office now faced a dilemma: what to do with Bulger and Flemmi? To decide, FBI managers in Boston naturally turned to the agents in the best position to gauge what Bulger and Flemmi were up to: John Connolly and Jim Ring, who’d taken over from John Morris as supervisor of the Organized Crime Squad. The fortyish Ring had been fighting the Mafia in New England for nearly a decade, but mostly from Worcester, a city in central Massachusetts viewed by agents as a minor league outpost. From the moment he took over the squad, Ring recalled, Connolly insisted that Bulger and Flemmi “weren’t involved in drugs, they didn’t do drugs, and they hated drug dealers, and that they would never allow drugs in South Boston.” When managers began raising questions, Connolly, fixed in place as the bureau’s authority on all things Bulger, came armed with his FBI files discounting any possible link between the gangster and drugs.

Having to notify FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., about the DEA’s plans, the Boston office fired off a two-page telex to headquarters on April 12, 1984, explaining that the DEA was targeting Bulger and Flemmi, “whom DEA alleges are individuals who control a narcotics trafficking group.” But the FBI in Boston urged calm. It labeled the DEA’s allegations “unsubstantiated, and DEA has furnished no specific information relative to their involvement.” Bulger, the telex concluded, should not be “closed due to the past, present and future valuable assistance.”

Ring authored a more detailed memo later in the year explaining the Boston office’s hands-off position toward Operation Beans, and once again the FBI in Boston displayed its backing for the anti-drug version of Bulger. “The predication” for the DEA’s investigation, wrote Ring in October, “although it may be correct, is not consistent with our intelligence regarding the activities of these individuals.” Guided mainly by Connolly but also by Ring, the FBI brass in Boston would simply not accept the drug talk building around Bulger.

But behind Ring’s back, even Connolly was apparently engaged in hushed FBI talk about Bulger and drugs. In early April 1983 fifteen tons of marijuana were seized from a warehouse at 345 D Street in South Boston. The marijuana belonged to a trafficker named Joe Murray, and after the raid Connolly and agent Rod Kennedy got to talking. Connolly described specifically for his colleague how Bulger profited from Murray’s drug business, Kennedy said later.

“The conversation was basically that Joe Murray was required to pay rent to Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi for having used South Boston as a storage warehouse for his drug activity,” Kennedy recalled. He said Connolly told him that Murray had paid Bulger and Flemmi between $60,000 and $90,000 for that particular load. “It was like rent money for having used, you know, having gone into South Boston and using that area for illegal drug activity,” said Kennedy, adding that this amount was on top of more regular tribute.

But that was off the record. In a report he filed after the bust, Connolly did not write a word about the payments Murray was making to Bulger and Flemmi. Instead, Connolly stated that the “Murray crew” was worried about Bulger being “upset with them over their storing grass in his town.”

Kennedy, who worked briefly as the bureau’s liaison with the DEA for Operation Beans, did share some of his intelligence about Bulger’s drug activities with DEA agents Reilly and Boeri. (Kennedy had an informant who’d told him Bulger relied on a South Boston drug dealer named Hobart Willis to serve as his go-between with Joe Murray.) But Kennedy never told anything to FBI supervisor Ring. Nor did Kennedy tell Ring or the DEA agents about Connolly’s disclosure regarding Joe Murray and Bulger. That was Connolly’s responsibility, not his, Kennedy felt. Besides, Connolly had probably expected him “not to pass it on,” and he didn’t want to cross Connolly.

Eventually more FBI agents in Boston would have informants telling the bureau about Bulger and drugs. By the mid -I990s even some of Bulger’s own rank-and-file dealers—like Polecat Moore—had decided to testify against him. And other dealers too. David Lindholm told investigators that in 1983 he was summoned to East Boston, where Bulger and Flemmi held a gun to his head to persuade him to pay them their share of his illegal drug action. In 1998 federal judge Mark Wolf ruled that Flemmi lied to FBI supervisor Jim Ring in 1984 in denying his and Bulger’s drug involvement. “It’s my understanding that he [Flemmi] was at least involved . . . in extorting money from drug dealers,” Wolf said on September 2, 1998.

But Connolly never let up. He had played a key part in creating the myth, and he clung to it. “Well, you know, I’ve never seen any evidence that they ever did get into drugs,” he boasted in I998—six weeks after Judge Wolf’s comments in court. Never mind the evidence, the testimony, the federal judge’s findings. “I mean, to get involved with a drug dealer, to collect rent from them—they are the lowest form of animal life. A guy like Flemmi or Bulger is not ever going to put himself in a position to be dealing with these guys.”

Denial is not a river in Boston.

BERGERON soon developed another reason for wanting to take Bulger and Flemmi down. He believed he’d lost a promising informant to them. It began one Sunday night in early October 1984 when the detective got word he better hurry down to the station. He arrived and learned that some other cops on the Quincy force had brought in thirty-two-year-old John McIntyre, an army vet with a string of minor run-ins with the law, for questioning after he was found trying to break into his estranged wife’s home. Held in one of the claustrophobic, poorly lit cells, McIntyre’s talk soon went way over the heads of the patrol officers. The man was rambling on about marijuana, mother ships, gunrunning, and, most shocking, the
Valhalla.

The fishing trawler
Valhalla
had left Gloucester, Massachusetts, on September 14 for a few weeks of swordfishing. At least that was the cover story. In fact the trawler was carrying seven tons of weapons valued at a cool million—163 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition—destined for the IRA in Northern Ireland. Two hundred miles off the coast of Ireland, the
Valhalla
met up with a fishing boat from Ireland, the
Marita Ann.
The cache of weapons was transferred, and the operation seemed a success. But the Irish Navy had been tipped off and intercepted the
Marita Ann
at sea. The seizure of an IRA-bound arsenal made front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bergeron summoned Boeri, and they sat with McIntyre in the office of the chief of detectives at the Quincy police station, a tape recorder running. Bergeron sat transfixed as the names of some of the men he’d been targeting came tumbling off McIntyre’s lips: Joe Murray, the major drug smuggler who worked out of Charlestown, and Patrick Nee of Southie, who worked as a liaison between Bulger and Murray. Identifying himself as a member of Murray’s “cell,” McIntyre described a number of marijuana smuggling operations. He talked about how in the past couple of years Murray’s group had merged with the “South Boston organization,” and that meant Nee was around more often because “they wanted to bring some of their own representative people over, so they could keep an eye on everything.”

With regard to the botched IRA gunrunning mission that was so recently in the news, McIntyre confessed that he’d actually helped load the weapons and then served as the boat’s engineer, and he said that six men went along on the voyage—himself, a captain, an IRA member named Sean, and three guys from the Southie crew. He didn’t know them except by nicknames, and he didn’t like them. “You can tell them right away. All of them wear scally caps. They got the Adidas jumpsuits, and they ain’t got a speck of dirt on them. They don’t know the first thing about a boat. Every day they got to take two, three showers. These fuckin’ guys, running around flossing their teeth, takin’ showers. There was a storm so bad out there that me and the captain were driving about two days, three days. They wouldn’t even come out of their cabins.”

Murray, Nee, and “the guys from the liquor store” were behind the arms shipment, and, McIntyre added, theirs was a gang no one should take lightly. “They would tie you right up with piano wire to a pile and leave you there. That’s their idea of a joke.”

The night the
Valhalla
left port, Kevin Weeks had stood watch on a nearby hill. Kevin was tough, said McIntyre, but then there was “one guy above him.” Cross him, said McIntyre, and “he’ll just put a bullet in your head.” Bergeron could see McIntyre was shaky, almost petrified. “I’d like to start living a normal life,” he’d said earlier. “It’s almost like living with a knife in you. The last few years you don’t know where you’re going to end up or what kind of demise you’re going to come to. I mean, I didn’t start out in life to end up like this.”

He never actually uttered the name of the “one guy” above Weeks who oversaw the drug smuggling and the
Valhalla,
but everyone else in the room knew exactly whom he meant: Bulger.

Bulger was considered to be a chest-beating IRA sympathizer. But eventually some investigators came to believe that Bulger, just as he’d betrayed his neighborhood with his phony anti-drug posturing, had also betrayed the IRA. He might have played a key role in rounding up the weapons to sell to the IRA, but after taking payment he dropped a dime. “Whitey waved goodbye to the
Valhalla,
then made a phone call,” said one official later. Even if true, Bulger was not the only leak. The former head of the IRA in Kerry later admitted that he’d compromised the gun exchange at sea. Sean O’Callaghan, an assassin-turned-informer, said he did so to get revenge against the IRA. He immediately became a marked man for admitting his perfidy.

Bergeron at the time knew none of this. He was soaking up McIntyre’s words and feeling as if he’d won the lottery. “Seemed like an awful big gift at that particular point in time,” he was thinking. “This guy had a mountain of information.” Over the next several days he and Boeri notified the DEA, customs, and even the FBI. McIntyre was willing to cooperate, and plans were made to use him to gather more information about the gang’s drug trafficking. Then one day a few weeks after this seemingly huge break, McIntyre left his parents’ house in Quincy saying he was heading off to see Patrick Nee. McIntyre was never seen again. His truck and wallet were found abandoned in a parking lot. Bergeron was crushed. It was Halloran all over again. It was Bucky Barrett all over again. Disappearances that followed talk about Bulger and Flemmi. There was even one more disappearance that autumn that fell outside Bergeron’s jurisdiction. Stevie Flemmi and Deborah Hussey were having a bad time of it. The couple was fighting a lot, and Hussey was threatening to tell her mother about her affair with Flemmi. Of course, this would have made things difficult for Stevie. Suddenly Deborah Hussey disappeared. Like Debra Davis before her, she was twentysix. Flemmi went home to Marion Hussey in Milton. He wasn’t about to tell Marion he’d just buried Deborah in a basement in South Boston, a location he and Bulger had already used to dispose of John McIntyre’s body a few weeks earlier, and before that, Bucky Barrett’s. Instead he just shrugged his shoulders and did his best to console the girl’s mother.