Where the Bodies Were Buried (17 page)

According to Steve Flemmi—who had at the time only recently signed on as a Top Echelon Informant—Rico and his FBI partner, Special Agent Dennis Condon, came to him one day with an extraordinary request. Decades later, Flemmi revealed the nature of this request to federal
investigators Wyshak and Kelly. The information was recorded in Flemmi's confidential file, known as a DEA-6:

Rico was aware that Barboza, Flemmi, and Salemme had been hunting for George McLaughlin's brother, Punchy, with no luck. As an agent who was constantly on the lookout for ways to cultivate potential informants, Rico saw an opportunity. Again, from Flemmi's file:

Flemmi took the hint; Rico was telling him that tomorrow, while he
was out of the office, would be a good day for Flemmi and his team to take out McLaughlin.

On the morning of October 20, 1965, Punchy McLaughlin stood with a handful of commuters waiting for the bus at the exact spot identified by Rico. He held in his hand a brown paper bag that contained a gun.

The team of hit men used two cars, one for the shooters and the other a “crash car” driven by Joe Barboza.

Wearing wigs and fake beards, Steve Flemmi and Frank Salemme jumped out of the lead car and opened fire at McLaughlin. They hit him five times, once in the heart, lung, liver, and spleen. The last shot, as he lay on the pavement, was fired directly into his groin. The hit men fled. Punchy was found dead at the scene.

To Barboza, Paul Rico had revealed himself to be a valuable co-conspirator by providing crucial information that led to the murder of Punchy. But the Animal still played coy and refused to sign on as an official FBI snitch.

More than ever, Rico needed Barboza. In the fall of 1965, he lost Jimmy the Bear Flemmi as an informant when Flemmi shot a man and was identified by the victim as the shooter. The Bear went on the run and hid out in Vermont.

“In view of the fact that informant Jimmy Flemmi is presently a local fugitive, any contacts with him might prove to be difficult and embarrassing,” Rico wrote in a memo to his FBI superiors. “In view of the above, this case is closed.”

Over the next year, as the Boston gang wars continued to yield a staggering body count, Rico continued his pursuit of the man who had become his grand obsession. Eventually, surmised the master recruiter of street informants, he and Barboza's needs would converge, which is exactly what happened in October 1966.

In Boston's notorious vice district known as the Combat Zone (which no longer exists today), Barboza was arrested on gun possession charges while cruising in his car. Over the following months, as the Animal stewed at Walpole prison, several of his crew were killed by the Mafia. Barboza was feeling vulnerable and paranoid, but still he was refusing to meet with Rico and Condon. So the FBI agents enlisted the help of their newest Top Echelon Informant, Steve Flemmi.

Director Hoover approved Flemmi as an informant especially for this assignment. The date was February 14, 1967, Valentine's Day. The arrangement would prove to be a toxic love connection between mutual deceivers.

Many years before Flemmi ever formed his partnership with Whitey Bulger, he was hooked in with the FBI. This is a crucial fact often overlooked by people who seek to portray Bulger as the central figure in Boston's narrative of corruption. It was Flemmi who first established the key link between various spheres of corruption on both sides of the law, an inheritance he would later share with Bulger.

Flemmi's initial task as an informant was an important one: he was sent by Rico and Condon to visit Barboza at Walpole prison. The purpose of the visit was immortalized in a memo from Special Agent John J. Kehoe Jr., supervisor of the Boston division's organized crime squad, to the division's Special Agent in Charge (SAC) James L. Handley, who initialed the memo and sent it on to Director Hoover. Kehoe and Handley put special emphasis on the contributions of the division's two star agents, whom they were recommending for a “Quality Salary Increase”:

Steve Flemmi had delivered. Barboza saw the writing on the prison wall; he signed a deal with Rico and Condon to become a “cooperating subject.”

A cooperating subject was different from a Top Echelon Informant in that they were not being asked to circulate on the street and surreptitiously provide criminal intel. Rather, they were being asked to testify in court, a far more visible and direct form of underworld betrayal.

News of Barboza's cooperation rocked the Boston underworld. The Animal was moved to a compound on Thacher Island, a rugged, fifty-acre pile of rock about a mile off the coast of Rockport, Massachusetts, and kept under twenty-four-hour guard by armed U.S. marshals. Among his only visitors were Rico and Condon, who began the process of interviewing and prepping Barboza in anticipation of making a case against the target of their dreams, the top man in the New England Mafia, Raymond Patriarca.

FOR A LONG
time, J. Edgar Hoover had denied there was such a thing as the Mafia operating in the United States. Throughout much of the postwar years, the primary focus of the FBI was what it called “subversives”—alleged communists, labor organizers, and civil rights activists. In the 1950s, a major focus of the bureau was bank robbers, who, because they often crossed state lines while fleeing a robbery, had been a primary target of the FBI since the days of John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. But in November 1957 an event that took place in upstate New York changed all that.

The conference in Apalachin, about fifteen miles west of Binghamton,
was a seminal event not so much in the history of the Mob, but in the history of federal law enforcement's understanding of the Mob. When a local police officer in rural Tioga County stumbled upon a large-scale summit meeting of Mafiosi from all around the United States, the estimated eighty gangsters scattered into the woods. Some had outstanding warrants, and many were rounded up and detained. For those, like Hoover, who had been dismissive of the idea that there existed a ruling body of mobsters that met on a regular or semiregular basis, it was a dramatic public rebuke.

This revelation was further underscored several years later when mobster Joseph Valachi testified in front of a senatorial committee in Washington, D.C. A low-level mafia soldier from New York City, Valachi testified live on television. With his gravelly Bronx accent and colorful detailing of mob jargon and underworld folklore, his testimony captured the public imagination.

Valachi's cooperation was a major coup for Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who presented the Mafioso's testimony to the public, and an embarrassment to Hoover. When it came to the Mafia in America, it looked as though the FBI was years behind the curve. Hoover and his boys had some catching up to do.

In April 1961, Hoover dictated and sent out a memo to each of the SACs of various field offices around the country emphasizing the importance of intelligence gathering in the field of organized crime. The memo stated that it was “urgently necessary to develop particularly qualified, live sources within the upper echelon of the organized hoodlum element who will be capable of furnishing the quality information required.”

Thus, the Top Echelon Informant Program was born.

Paul Rico was in an excellent position to benefit from the FBI's newly energized mandate. Already, in his first decade as an agent, he had distinguished himself as a cultivator of informants. It was an informant that had tipped him off as to the whereabouts of James J. Bulger back in 1957, leading to the young bank robber's arrest and imprisonment. Rico had been polite and deferential during the arrest, on the outside chance that the kid might be a viable informant somewhere down the line.

Getting criminals to trust you and pass along usable information is a unique and highly valued skill in law enforcement. Especially in the FBI,
which had been designed by Hoover as an elite division of law enforcement, with agents chosen to give the impression of propriety, someone who could operate at the street level with real hoodlums was a rare item. Rico had the gift.

Born into a lower-middle-class household of Portuguese, Italian, and Irish ancestry, he was a microcosm of the New England criminal class. He would be described in later years as Runyonesque, like a character out of
Guys and Dolls
. Even Barboza, the Flemmi brothers, and some of the most hardened gangsters in Boston thought of him as one of their own.

One of Rico's weaknesses as an agent was that he could be sloppy with paperwork and bureau protocol. He had been censured early in his career for minor infractions such as administrative errors, inadequate filling out of reports, and, on one occasions, failure to report that he had misplaced his weapon. It was not uncommon for an agent who was good at the important things like developing informants and solving big cases to be weak when dealing with administrative details required by the system. It was the job of a special agent in charge, or SAC, to pair up an agent with someone who complemented his skill set, which is how Rico wound up with Dennis Condon as his partner.

Condon was from Charlestown, an upright Catholic who regularly attended Mass and never swore in public. He did not have Rico's street skills, but he was good at paperwork and expert at handling the bureaucracy. Together, they were a dynamic duo.

With Barboza, Rico and Condon had landed a big fish. Barboza was the most infamous mob turncoat in history, and would remain so until Sammy “the Bull” Gravano was used to take down mafia boss John Gotti in the early 1990s. Before he was finished, Barboza would be used as a witness in multiple trials, but the one where he was given an opportunity to truly prove his worth commenced in June 1967, when Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward “Ted” Harrington announced the indictment of Raymond Patriarca Sr. and two others on the charge of murder.

With Barboza as the lead witness, it was a strong case, and Patriarca knew it. Through an underling, he communicated to Barboza's lawyer that “the Office,” as mafia headquarters in Providence was known, would be willing to make a fifty-thousand-dollar payoff to Barboza to keep his
mouth shut. When told of this offer, Barboza responded, “Tell Raymond to go fuck his mother in the mouth.”

Predictably, the Mafia devised a counterresponse. The man enlisted to lead the charge was Barboza's own friend, Steve Flemmi.

No one in the Mob knew that Flemmi was a Top Echelon Informant, or that he had secretly met with Barboza at Walpole and talked him into testifying against the Mafia. All they knew was that he was a local gangster on the rise who would likely jump at the chance to prove his value to the Office. And so, Flemmi, playing both sides of the fence, took on the assignment from the Mafia of planting a bomb in the car of John E. Fitzgerald Jr., Barboza's lawyer. Flemmi undertook the job with his partner, Frank Salemme, who did not know that Flemmi was a covert informant for the FBI.

On the night of January 30, 1968, Barboza's lawyer left his office in Everett, Massachusetts, got in his car, and turned the key in the ignition, which ignited an explosive device. The car went up in a ball of flames. Fitzgerald crawled from the vehicle. Among his many injuries, Fitzgerald's right leg was severed at the knee, but he survived the attack.

The bombing had been devised to intimidate Barboza and make him change his mind about testifying, but it had the opposite effect. More determined than ever, Barboza took the stand and testified against Raymond Patriarca, helping to bring about what was, at the time, the most significant conviction of a high-ranking mafia figure since Hoover became director.