Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (46 page)

BY THE middle of 1994 prosecutors had assembled a sturdy, intricate mosaic to support racketeering charges. The plan had been to arrest Bulger, Flemmi, and Salemme in rapid succession to avoid escapes by any of them. But while, by mid-December, Salemme could still be found at his usual haunts, Stevie and Whitey had been in and out of town for several weeks. The FBI insisted that Salemme, as the Mafia man of the moment, be arrested first. But top officials at the U.S. Attorney’s Office overruled the agents, concluding that the case was about Bulger and Flemmi. Indeed, most of the evidence concerned Flemmi, since he was the man in the middle, standing at the junction of Bulger and La Cosa Nostra. Fittingly, the arrest warrant for Flemmi charged him with extorting money from Chico Krantz.

As 1995 got under way the latest law enforcement intelligence was that Flemmi had been seen at Quincy Market, a tourist shopping center in downtown Boston where Flemmi’s two stepsons were renovating a restaurant. It was staked out by state troopers Thomas Duffy and John Tutungian and DEA agent Daniel Doherty, who were all part of the ad hoc team that had first gathered in Fred Wyshak’s office. Their orders were to arrest Flemmi the minute he “went mobile” by getting in a car.

In winter’s enveloping nightfall, the arrest team moved into action when Flemmi and a young Asian woman left Schooner’s Restaurant and got into a white Honda at 7:00 P.M. The team boxed them in with two cars and then raced at the Honda with guns drawn. After instinctively trying to hide under the dashboard, Flemmi calmly got out of the car and asked for permission to call his lawyer. The detectives relieved him of a knife and some mace and unsuccessfully tried to persuade the woman to accompany them to FBI headquarters, if only to keep her from warning others. But she knew the drill and refused to go without a warrant.

ALTHOUGH the FBI had brought in its elite Special Operations Group to do surveillance on Salemme with a helicopter, he escaped that night. Cadillac Frank fled to West Palm Beach, Florida, a favored sanctuary for mafiosi on the run. He would eventually be arrested there eight months later, but his easy escape fueled the barely suppressed anger of investigators working the same case. One denounced the Special Operations Group as an over-the-hill gang. “They suck,” he said bitterly. “It’s part of the facade over there. Those guys are looking for retirement homes. And they’re nine-to-five. Once their shift ends, they’re out of there. They have no personal interest in the case.”

For his part, Stevie Flemmi was an unflappable presence inside FBI headquarters, a calmness rooted in his belief that thirty years of FBI service would save him. He was expecting a quick bail and a night flight to Montreal. It was only as the night wore on with no side door opening that he realized he was all alone in his adversity. He thought that John Connolly or Paul Rico would help, as they had in the past. But Flemmi was like the Hollywood celebrity arrested for drunken driving. Protests about his importance would only make things worse. No one could save him now. He belonged to trooper Tom Duffy.

Flemmi had expected more because Connolly had kept him posted on grand jury developments throughout the year, at times using his continuing contact with the bureau’s Organized Crime Squad. But both Connolly and Morris, who was also close to retirement and working in Los Angeles, had left the scene and taken their early warning system with them.

In fact there had been a wholesale changing of the guard within the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI that left Bulger’s barrier beach unprotected. But hardly abandoned.

Bulger had become a dirty little secret that evolved into a tacit policy administered by new players who may not have fully understood the history but held fast out of institutional loyalty. They viewed any attempt to change the system as a challenge by upstarts who had the bad taste to urinate inside the tent. The lingering commitment became grounded in the fear that Bulger had become a time bomb by attracting too much public attention, especially after the 1988
Boston Globe
article. The fierce personal friendship of John Connolly was replaced by the knee-jerk protectionism of one special agent in charge after another. The credo became: Bulger may be a skunk, but he’s our skunk.

But Flemmi’s arrest by state police told the FBI that the gig was up. And when it realized what had happened, the bureau backed away as quickly as it could. The only contact Flemmi had with his old allies after his arrest was when he hailed agent Edward Quinn at a bail hearing. The awkward encounter made Flemmi realize that he was no longer a prized informant. He was just another unhappy wiseguy in a courtroom.

“What’s going on here?” Flemmi asked the startled Quinn as he walked by. “How about a break on bail?” Flemmi persisted in a plea that meant “Get me outta here.”

But all Quinn could do for him was get him a Coke.

Even then, as Quinn edged away and the government’s lawyer got in between them, Flemmi thought there might be a magic parachute. His mind drifted over the years of FBI intervention, back to how Paul Rico got attempted murder charges dropped in state court. Flemmi remembered being tipped off to state police bugs in the Lancaster Street garage, and the time he and Whitey were let out of the race-fixing case. And how the FBI in Boston helped cover up Winter Hill murders in Boston, Tulsa, and Miami. Surely his friends, Jim Bulger and John Connolly, would “get this all squared away.”

But the most Flemmi ever got were prison visits from Kevin Weeks, Bulger’s friend from South Boston, who conveyed the commiseration of John Connolly. The agent wanted Flemmi to know how badly he felt about the FBI letting them both down.

Flemmi never heard another word from Bulger.

BULGER quickly adapted to life on the lam. The wild teenager who sought attention by walking a pet ocelot around the Old Harbor housing project had developed the low to the ground discipline of an army ranger hiding in the jungle. When it was clear that indictments were on the way, he cut all ties with South Boston, except for an occasional call to prearranged pay phones.

Though Bulger was never known for sentimental attachments, it surprised Flemmi that he never heard another word from Bulger as his partner moved from one small city in middle America to another. Still, Bulger had done more for Flemmi than he did for most. He had warned him to stay out of Boston, and Flemmi had foolishly ignored him. It was a dumb mistake, and Whitey didn’t make those.

But Bulger had almost slipped up too. In January, shortly after trooper Tom Duffy put his gun to Flemmi’s temple, Bulger had been driving toward Boston himself. Theresa Stanley had grown tired of traveling on their extended “vacation.” Since the fall of 1994, while Bulger waited to see what would happen in Boston, they had traveled to Dublin, London, and Venice and then toured the southwestern United States. But Stanley was bored with sightseeing and tired of being alone with the aloof Bulger and his long silences. She missed her children and South Boston. In the last couple of weeks Stanley had hesitated to even ask simple questions like, where are we going now? It would only start an argument.

So in January 1995 they were making their way to the edge of Boston in stony silence, driving along route 95 in Connecticut, when Stanley heard a radio report about Flemmi’s arrest. Bulger took the next exit and headed back to New York City, where they checked into a Manhattan hotel. Bulger hung out at the hotel pay phones, getting whatever information he could. Theresa didn’t bother to ask him what was going on.

The next day they drove to a parking lot south of Boston where Stanley got out to wait for her daughter. Bulger said, “I’ll call you,” as he roared off forever. She never heard from him again.

Instead of heading off alone, he picked up his other girlfriend, Catherine Greig, and disappeared into rural America as a balding retired everyman with a younger wife.

On the road again with a different woman, Bulger lived for a while in the Louisiana bayou country and has reportedly been seen in the Midwest and Florida and even Mexico, Canada, and Ireland. Investigators traced phone calls he made from a New Orleans hotel and a restaurant in Mobile, Alabama. He stayed in touch with Kevin Weeks and some family members and even ventured back to the Boston area on a couple of occasions to rendezvous with Weeks. The meetings, which came early on, later in 1995 and in 1996, enabled Weeks to provide Bulger with some false identification and new intelligence about the ongoing investigation. Kevin O’Neil did his part too, funneling nearly $90,000 into Bulger’s bank account soon after Bulger was forced to flee. But no one outside his tight circle heard from him once he dropped off Theresa Stanley.

EXCEPT John Morris.

Morris’s last FBI station before retiring at the end of 1995 was training director at the FBI Academy in Virginia. One October afternoon his secretary told him that an insistent “Mister White” was calling. Ten months on the lam, the brazen Bulger was calling from a pay phone on the road.

He had a short message for Vino: If I’m going to jail, you’re going to jail.

“I’m taking you with me, you fuck,” Bulger said.

“I hear you,” said Morris. That night John Morris suffered a major heart attack. Bulger had nearly killed him with a phone call.

Their cells were
side by side on the mezzanine level of cellblock H-3 at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, number 419 belonging to Cadillac Frank Salemme and number 420 to Mafia soldier Bobby DeLuca. The seven-by-nine-foot cells had gray cement floors and walls painted a dull white. It was late summer 1996, and the racketeering case against the Mafia and Bulger and Flemmi, albeit with Bulger in absentia, was chugging along in low gear. The federal case was in discovery, a pretrial stage in every criminal case when the government discloses to the defense relevant evidence and potentially exculpatory material about the accused. The defense then studies the material, primarily to prepare for trial but even before that to see if it can gut the government’s case by finding legal fault with the way the evidence was developed. If defense lawyers can persuade the judge that all or part of the evidence was somehow obtained wrongly, the judge might throw it out. Depending on how much evidence goes, the case against the accused either shrinks or, better, evaporates.

Salemme and DeLuca huddled over a Sony tape recorder. They’d been given a homework assignment by their Boston attorney, Anthony M. Cardinale. Listen to the tapes, the lawyer had instructed—listen carefully. The lawyer had brought to the prison handfuls of tiny cassette tapes that were copies of recordings the FBI had made during covert electronic surveillances—from 98 Prince Street, Vanessa’s, Heller’s Café, a meeting of two mafiosi at a Hilton Hotel at Logan International Airport, the Mafia induction ceremony in 1989, and others.

Tony Cardinale was listening to the tapes himself, but he wanted Salemme and DeLuca listening too. Their ears were better trained for the Mafia talk. The voices belonged to their guys. All three were looking for a way to challenge the tapes’ admissibility, a way to knock them out of the ring so they could not be used in court. Listen, Cardinale instructed, for anything irregular.