Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal (57 page)

But just as in the Gianturco example, the life-saving scenario Connolly described is contradicted by other key officials who participated in the stolen art probe. The purported threat to Butchka’s life did not come up in the case proceedings in court, either as an issue at bail hearings or in the eventual dispositions. “I don’t remember him [Butchka] ever being threatened,” said Michael Collora in a 1998 telephone interview. Collora, now in private practice, was the federal prosecutor who oversaw prosecution of the burglary ring infiltrated by Butchka. (During 1998 he actually had John Morris as a client.) Said Collora: “I would have known about any threat because we would’ve had to make a decision whether to pull him off, and that was never done.”

Court records:
The sworn testimony at the Wolf hearings of John Morris, April 22, 24, 27, and 29, 1998; Stephen Flemmi, August 26 and 28, and September 1, 1998; former Massachusetts U.S. attorney William Weld, May 26 and 27, 1998; retired FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick, August 17 and 18, 1998; James Ring, June 10 and 11.

Interviews:
Tulsa homicide detective Michael Huff; retired FBI agents Robert Fitzpatrick, James Ring, and Gerald Montanari; an anonymous prosecutor about the decision by former assistant U.S. attorney Jeremiah O’Sullivan to not give Brian Halloran witness protection program status; Brian Halloran family cousin Maureen Caton; an anonymous former police investigator on the murders of Louis Litif and George Pappas; an anonymous Massachusetts State Police detective on the Roger Wheeler murder (1988 background interview); an anonymous 1998 interview with a Boston Edison executive about the company’s 1990 hiring of John Connolly.

News articles:
Articles about the 1981 murder of Roger Wheeler in the
New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
and
Boston Globe;
stories in the
Globe
and the
Boston Herald
on the murders of George Pappas, Brian Halloran, and John Callahan and the murder trial of James Flynn; an extensive 1997 article in the
Hartford Courant
on the World Jai Alai murders and the Boston FBI office.

FBI documents
: An extensive February 23, 1982, report of the six-week debriefing by agents of Brian Halloran and other documents released at the Wolf hearings as exhibits 47, 52-55, 83, 91, 155, 157, 225, and 226; John Connolly’s reports in October and December 1981 and April and May 1982 from Bulger and Flemmi on the danger to Halloran posed by the Boston Mafia.

Judge Wolf addressed the FBI’s role in the World Jai Alai murders.

Morris caused Connolly to tell Flemmi and Bulger that Brian Halloran was providing the FBI information that implicated them in the murder of Roger Wheeler. Halloran was murdered soon after. Morris believed Bulger and Flemmi were responsible. When Halloran was murdered, Connolly prepared a 209 stating that Flemmi reported that “the wise guys in Charlestown” had heard that Halloran was cooperating with the Massachusetts State Police and, therefore, had a motive to murder him. Similarly, shortly before John Callahan, another associate of Bulger and Flemmi implicated in the Wheeler investigation, was murdered in Miami in 1983 [
sic
], Connolly prepared a 209 stating that Flemmi had reported that Callahan was trying to avoid a “very bad” Cuban group. Flemmi and Bulger remain suspects in the still open Wheeler, Halloran, and Callahan murder investigations. (“Memorandum and Order,” p. 84)

Although John Connolly denied informing James Bulger about Halloran’s attempt to become a FBI informant, Wolf held otherwise: “In addition, when Brian Halloran became a potential witness against Bulger and Flemmi in the Wheeler homicide investigation, Morris told Connolly. As Morris anticipated, Connolly told Bulger and Flemmi. Several weeks later Halloran was murdered” (p. 163).

Wolf also addressed the FBI indexing issue.

With one exception, however, the many reports containing Halloran’s charges against Bulger and Flemmi were not properly indexed with a reference to their names. Thus, these documents were not found or considered by the Department of Justice officials who were assigned in July 1997 as a result of this case to review allegations that had been made by informants and witnesses against Bulger and Flemmi. (p. 173)

In the case of
United States v Kevin P. Weeks and Kevin P. O’Neil,
the November 1999 affidavit of Thomas B. Duffy in support of pretrial detention of the defendants Kevin J. Weeks and Kevin P. O’Neil addressed the murder of Brian Halloran. About a year after the murder of Roger Wheeler, “Bulger and Flemmi learned that a Boston resident, Brian Halloran, was providing information to the FBI regarding the murder of Wheeler. Bulger, Flemmi, and others shot and killed Halloran on the South Boston waterfront” (p. 12).

Main sources:
The 1998 sworn testimony of Julie Rakes, Joseph Lundbohm, Jean Miskel, Jamie Flannery, and Richard Bergeron at the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of Stephen M. Rakes,
United States v Stephen M. Rakes;
the sworn testimony at the Wolf hearings of Stephen Flemmi, August 26, 1998; Jim Ring, September 22, 1998; and Theresa Stanley, September 16, 1998; John Connolly’s 1998 interviews with the
Boston Globe
and
Boston Herald
during the Rakes trial; Wolf, “Memorandum and Order”;
United States v Kevin P. Weeks and Kevin P. O’Neil; United States v John J. Connolly Jr., James Bulger aka “Whitey,” and Stephen Flemmi;
FBI reports on meetings with Bulger and Flemmi from 1981 through early 1984; interviews conducted in connection with articles about Bulger and the FBI published in the
Boston Globe
in 1990 and 1998.

It is interesting to note that John Connolly, in media interviews in 1998, denied ever talking to Bulger about the Rakeses. In sworn testimony, Stephen Flemmi said he believed Connolly had tipped off Bulger, giving them a “heads-up” so that Bulger could issue Rakes a warning.

In his 1999 ruling, Judge Wolf found:

Following his 1998 perjury conviction, Stephen Rakes decided to cooperate with federal prosecutors. During late 1998 and 1999 he testified before the federal grand jury that indicted Bulger associates Kevin Weeks and Kevin O’Neil in November 1999. The racketeering charges against the two included the takeover of the Rakeses’ liquor store. In exchange for his cooperation, Rakes was spared prison when he was sentenced on November 22, 1999. Rakes told the judge he had “great remorse” for lying twice to earlier grand juries. He was placed on probation for two years.

Several other points are worth noting about the Rakes affair. The first is that Boston police detective Joseph Lundbohm eventually ran afoul of the law himself; he was convicted in 1990 of taking bribes to protect Mafia gambling operations. Also, the FBI’s apparent “hands-off” policy regarding Whitey Bulger covered small matters too. After the liquor store was taken over, FBI agent James J. Lavin III was notified by a
Boston Globe
photographer, Joe Runci, about unusual improvements under way on the store’s property. Runci provided the FBI with photographs showing city workers installing guard rails on the private property. During the Wolf hearings, Lavin testified that the construction work by city employees represented a possible case of public corruption. Lavin testified that he told John Morris about the photographs and that Morris told him to “run it by John Connolly.”

Lavin testified that he then sought out Connolly and explained the situation; Connolly asked him: “What are you going to do with that?” Lavin testified that Connolly then told him that Bulger had provided “valuable information to the office.” Lavin testified that one could infer from Connolly’s response that Connolly was suggesting to him to drop the matter. Lavin did just that. He testified that he stuck the photographs in his desk drawer at the Boston office of the FBI and never even wrote up a report. “I didn’t do anything with it,” he testified on May 6, 1998. The photographs sat in his desk until the 1998 Wolf hearings. During his testimony Lavin admitted it was unusual—a breach of standard procedure—to leave the photos in his desk and to fail to write a report. “In hindsight, I should have put [the photos] in the file.” Furthermore, Lavin said that shortly after his meeting with Connolly he got word that the guard rails had been taken down. It was an end-of-story twist mirroring the Rakeses’ experience—all roads seemed to lead to Bulger.

Lavin testified that he was surprised to hear the guard rails were removed so quickly. “It was a possibility that someone called Mr. Bulger, or it could have been a coincidence. I thought it was very odd.” He said he did not know if Connolly had alerted Bulger. “You know, it could have been. I just don’t know.”

Finally, there is Stephen Flemmi. Usually talkative on the stand during the Wolf hearings, particularly about the protection the FBI had provided him over the years, Flemmi turned remarkably mute when the questions turned to Stephen and Julie Rakes. On August 26, 1998, federal prosecutor Fred Wyshak and Flemmi had the following exchange:

Main sources:
The sworn testimony at the Wolf hearings of Stephen Flemmi, August 20, 24, 26, 27, and 28, and September 2, 1998; John Morris, April 21, 22, 23, 27, 29, and 30, 1998; Jim Ring, June 10 and September 22, 1998; FBI agent James R. Blackburn, Jr., May 7 and 22, 1998; retired FBI agent Roderick Kennedy, April 14, 1998; DEA agent Stephen Boeri, May 14, 15, 18, and 19, 1998; DEA agent Al Reilly, May 20, 1998; former assistant U.S. attorney Gary Crossen, May 11 and 12, 1998; former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts William Weld, May 26 and 27, 1998; former Quincy police detective Richard Bergeron, June 3 and 4, 1998; former Boston DEA agent in charge Robert Stutman, April 15, 1998; former Boston FBI agent in charge James Greenleaf, January 8, 1998; Theresa Stanley, September 16, 1998; Wolf, “Memorandum and Order.”

In addition, we relied on John Connolly’s 1998 interviews with WBZ-AM Radio, WRKO-AM Radio, the
Boston Globe,
and the
Boston Tab
. For background on Operation Beans, we relied on a number of internal investigative reports, particularly the surveillance logs kept by the Quincy Police Department for 1983 through 1985 and the DEA affidavits in support of the agency’s bid to obtain court permission to attempt electronic surveillance of Bulger and Flemmi. For information about John McIntyre’s cooperation, we relied on a forty-eight-page transcript of his debriefing with Quincy police and the DEA on October 14, 1984. For information on the burial of three bodies in the basement of a South Boston home, we relied on the superseding indictment unsealed on September 28, 2000, in
United States v Kevin P. Weeks and Kevin P. O’Neil,
U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts, criminal docket 99-10371. For information about the anti-drug poster in Bulger’s store and the perception of Bulger in South Boston, we drew on Michael Patrick McDonald’s 1999 memoir
All Souls.

We drew on extensive FBI internal reports, including reports about Bulger’s drug activities. The FBI documents include but are not limited to those released at the Wolf hearings as exhibits 11, 12, 14, 19, 45, 48, 63, 88, 89, 91, 102, 104-107, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 145, 146, 164, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 233, 237, 254, 255, 257, and 258.

We also drew on numerous interviews conducted in connection with articles in the
Boston Globe
about Bulger and the FBI published in 1988 and 1998. A number of other
Globe
stories were helpful regarding drugs in Southie—specifically, articles by Brian MacQuarrie published March 5 and April 16, 1997, and December 27, 1999, and an article by Charles Stein published in the
Globe
’s Sunday magazine on December 13, 1998.

It is interesting to note that during the 1998 Wolf hearings Flemmi testified that FBI supervisor Jim Ring was the one who called to tip Bulger and Flemmi to the telephone wiretap on George Kaufman’s telephone. “I heard from him in December of 1984,” Flemmi testified about Ring. “It was a telephone call to my mother’s home. Very, very brief conversation. It was Jim Ring telling me that there was going to be a wiretap coming down on George Kaufman’s phone as well as my own, and they advised me of that.” For his part, Ring testified that Flemmi’s “absolutely false” accusation was a bid to spread the corruption at the FBI from Connolly and Morris to himself. In his findings of fact, Judge Wolf ruled