Where the Bodies Were Buried (30 page)

Wyshak stood to respond. “You know, if, yes, [Morris] made efforts to oppose [the Limone commutation] and he's denying it now, I think, you know, that's a basis for impeachment. . . . But I think what [the defense] is trying to do is to hang this whole misconduct by the FBI on this witness, who had absolutely nothing to do with it, and make it appear as though the reason that Mr. Morris opposed the commutation was some effort to cover up the misconduct. I think, you know, as they do with many other topics, they go far afield.”

Wyshak's comment was a rebuttal to an argument that Brennan had not yet made. Wyshak's need to counteract any link between the Bulger case and the dirty little secrets of the Barboza era was a knee-jerk reaction, and it roused Brennan to make the argument he should have made in the first place.

“If I could just add, Your Honor. There's one fact I left out that's important. Not only the fact of the manner in which [Morris] bullied Mr. Albano, but also the fact that this was a case where the impropriety was on behalf of other FBI agents, including Mr. Condon and Mr. Rico, who handled [the Limone] case. It's no coincidence that Mr. Condon is Mr. Morris's friend. It's no coincidence that Mr. Condon shows up at private social gatherings at Mr. Morris's house years later with Mr. Bulger. There is a link between Condon, Rico, and Morris. . . . There is an inference based
on the evidence that [Morris] is acting upon—the baton has been passed from Rico and Condon to Mr. Morris.”

This argument should have been at the center of the defense case, instead of tacked on only after Wyshak inadvertently put it out on the table. But it was too late. Judge Casper had been given an option, one that allowed her to appear judicious and accommodating by offering a bone to both sides. “Counsel,” said Casper, the monotone of her voice designed to reflect the evenness of her judgment, “I'm going to allow you to ask to the extent that you're trying to show that [Morris] has been untruthful in regards to these efforts, but to the fact that you're attempting to go into the whole Limone matter, I'm not going to allow you to go that far.”

It was a legal smackdown, couched in the niceties of modern jurisprudence.

AT THE END
of his final day on the stand, John Morris was dismissed; he stepped out of the witness box and walked from the courtroom.

Bulger eyeballed his former accomplice on the way out.

In the hallway, Morris shook hands with John Marra; they practically fell into each other's arms. Both men had been called to testify at least partly as a bulwark against broader accountability, and against history. Marra, the company man still operating from deep within the machine, and Morris, the disgraced supervisory agent, whose only remaining move was to fall on his sword and thus, hopefully, contain the damage. It seemed to have worked. The two G-men left the courthouse with smiles on their faces. And the prosecutors—Wyshak and Kelly—strutted from the courtroom with a look of satisfaction.

The prosecution of Whitey Bulger was on course.

EACH DAY AT
the completion of testimony in the Bulger trial, the media gathered behind a rope on the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the courthouse. With microphones and cameras at the ready, they shouted questions at anyone connected to the trial that happened to walk out the door. It was mostly an empty exercise. With a gag order in place, the legal representatives offered nothing of substance. Occasionally, the defense lawyers stopped at the microphones. Following the testimony of John Morris, Jay Carney, with co-counsel Hank Brennan at his side, stopped to say, “Today was one of the most dramatic and poignant days we've ever spent in a courtroom.” He would say no more than that.

Tommy Donahue, whose father had been killed partly as a result of Morris's criminal negligence, had a different interpretation of the day's event. “The whole thing disgusts me,” he said.

In the larger universe of media coverage, the trial had fallen into a predictable pattern. The prosecution solicited testimony on the horrible acts of Whitey Bulger, and the press reported on these acts with little cognizance or understanding of the historical context. On the stand, Morris had been slippery and hollow, and his testimony was interpreted by the media as the sad story of yet one more sleazy character who had been corrupted by Bulger. Even locally, where reporters had for decades been covering various aspects of the moral quagmire surrounding the case, there was little clamoring for a more complete picture. All roads led back to Bulger, and the local media seemed to be okay with that.

In some ways, this myopia was a continuation and culmination of the ways the Bulger story had been shaped from the beginning.

By the time of the trial, the Bulger saga had become a national
phenomenon, but for a long time the local press in Boston had the story all to themselves. The details had been reported on and presented by a handful of influential journalists and commentators in town, some of whom made a career off the case. Occasionally, the reporting was extraordinary, even groundbreaking, but much of what appeared in the press about Whitey Bulger was the result of leaks from government sources—prosecutors and people in law enforcement. Later, the accounts of cooperating witnesses and Bulger's enemies on the street were added to the mix. Consequently, a certain narrative, or point of view, of the Bulger story unfolded over the years that dovetailed nicely with the prosecution's theory of the case, that is, Bulger was a master manipulator who had corrupted the system, Connolly and Morris were his enablers, and it didn't extend much further than that.

It had taken congressional hearings generated in Washington, D.C., and lawsuits in federal court to expose the larger horrors of the Bulger conspiracy. Among institutions of government in Boston, there had been no clamoring to dig deeper into the scandal. In many ways, the local media reflected this ambivalence. As state trooper Colonel Tom Foley once told me when I asked why there had never been a comprehensive investigation or demand locally to fully explore the Bulger fiasco, “Nobody around here has any stomach for that.”

Back in the early and mid-1980s, the name of James J. Bulger was mostly a no-show in the Boston media. Even though Bulger had by then risen to become a top player in the city's criminal underworld by eliminating rivals and associates in South Boston and among the Winter Hill Mob; even though he had forged a relationship with the FBI that had been used to secure warrants and federal authorization to install electronic surveillance devices; even though his brother, Senator William Bulger, was one of the most powerful political figures in the commonwealth, James Bulger's name had never once appeared in a news article in the
Boston Globe
.

One name that did appear often in the
Globe
and elsewhere in the Boston media was that of Jerry Angiulo. Especially in the early and mid-1980s, as the FBI and federal New England Organized Crime Strike Force under Jeremiah O'Sullivan were building a major case against Angiulo and his brothers, Michele (Mikey), Donato (Danny), and Vittori Nicoli (Nick), articles on the Mafia frequently appeared in the front of the
Globe
's metro
section. These articles were based almost exclusively on law enforcement sources—cops, FBI agents, and prosecutors—who leaked information to the press with the understanding that their names would not appear in print.

It later years, it would become known that Special Agents John Morris and John Connolly were among those unnamed sources.

It is not unusual for big-city reporters to get their tips from off-the-record sources within law enforcement and the prosecutor's office; it is generally how the game is played. In Boston, where gangsters and cops had grown up in similar working-class neighborhoods, many of the city's best reporters were also from those same neighborhoods. Newsmen and lawmen meeting quietly for a drink in an out-of-the-way saloon was part of the city's daily discourse. Information could be exchanged that served the purposes of both sides. The reporter gets “exclusive” inside information, and the lawmen get to generate and, to an extent, control the parameters of how the story will be presented to the public.

In Boston in the early 1980s, the only organized crime stories to make it into the pages of the
Globe
and other media outlets were frequent exposés on the criminal activities of the Angiulo brothers and the local Mafia. This was a tremendous benefit to Whitey Bulger, whose relationship with Connolly, Morris, and Strike Force prosecutor Jeremiah O'Sullivan was, by that point, based entirely on his willingness and ability to help them take down the Mafia in Boston.

All of that changed in 1988, when the
Globe
ran an explosive four-part series of articles under the heading “The Bulger Mystique.” The series, put together by a group of four reporters designated the Spotlight Team, was as much about Senator Billy Bulger as it was about his alleged gangster brother. The articles delved into what became known as “the 75 State Street investigation,” a proposed federal probe into a real estate deal in which Senator Bulger had received a suspicious $250,000 payment that might have been an illegal transaction. Senator Bulger claimed the payment had been a loan; the money was returned to the person who made the payment. The transaction had nothing to do with Whitey Bulger. The investigation of the senator had been terminated and no charges were ever filed against Billy Bulger.

In the
Globe
series, the most explosive nugget to appear in print was the revelation that Whitey Bulger had what the paper called “a special relationship” with the FBI. At the time, the
Globe
's reporters and editors knew what the general public would not learn for years, that the unnamed source of that information was John Morris. On the stand at the Bulger trial, Morris claimed that he had leaked the information to the
Globe
to bring an end to the FBI's relationship with Whitey, so that other agents would not be compromised as he had been in his dealings with Bulger and Flemmi. Whitey Bulger believed that Morris had leaked it to the press in an effort to get him killed by underworld rivals.

The Spotlight Team's reporting did not suggest that the FBI was engaged in criminal activity. It did quote unnamed sources in the Massachusetts State Police who complained that the FBI was possibly protecting Bulger from investigation by other agencies. But there was no suggestion of overt corruption. Anyone who read the series might even have concluded that the use of Bulger as an informant was simply an ingenious tactic on the part of the lawmen, a successful and mutually beneficial ploy to crush the Mafia. Although Bulger's career as a racketeer, including a number of early gangland murders, was detailed in the
Globe
series, there was no mention of the FBI leaking information to Bulger so that he could murder potential informants or rivals, no mention of his possible role in the disappearances of Debra Davis, Deborah Hussey, and many others.

The Spotlight series was unprecedented in its public exposure of the Brothers Bulger. Not long after that series appeared in print, a member of the Spotlight Team—Gerard O'Neill—and another
Globe
reporter—Dick Lehr—went on to publish a book titled
The Underboss
. Originally published by St. Martin's Press in January 1989, the book was subtitled
The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family
. The primary narrative of the book was the investigation of the local Mafia as conceived by the FBI's C-3 Squad, led by John Morris, and the prosecution of Jerry Angiulo, led by Jeremiah O'Sullivan. The book bordered on hagiography of a group of agents and prosecutors some of whom, at the time, were involved in an insidiously corrupt relationship with Bulger and Flemmi.

Years later, in 2000, Lehr and O'Neill published a corrective, of sorts, titled
Black Mass
. By then, through public testimony under oath, the Wolf
hearings had spewed forth a staggering litany of corruption, some of it perpetrated by the same people the writers had lionized a decade earlier in
The Underboss
. Through the testimony of dozens of witnesses, it was learned that Bulger and Flemmi were far more homicidal and depraved than anyone had imagined, and that the criminal enabling of Bulger by the FBI was vast and scurrilous. Consequently, the tone of
Black Mass
was one of shock and revulsion—a point of view brought about, perhaps, by the fact that these same reporters had previously been played by their “friendly” FBI sources.

In the wake of the Wolf hearings and the Bulger indictment, which evolved as more and more informants came forward, a new narrative emerged in the media. The FBI's organized crime squad, and particularly John Connolly, now took center stage. With Bulger on the lam, Connolly became the primary target of Wyshak and Kelly, who became the driving force not only in how the various Bulger-related prosecutions would unfold, but also in how the story was to be shaped in the press.
¹
Following the double-whammy prosecutions of Connolly in 2001 (Massachusetts) and 2007 (Florida), Wyshak and Kelly were profiled by writer Dick Lehr, who since the publication of
Black Mass
—a number-one bestseller in Boston—had retired from the
Globe
and become a full-time author. In the pages of
Boston
magazine, Lehr wrote about Wyshak and Kelly in a manner similar to the way he and Gerard O'Neill had written about FBI agents Ed Quinn, John Morris, and others in
The Underboss
—that is to say, glowingly.

While Bulger was on the run, he became a figure of national prominence. As the legend grew, the chance that the popular media might be willing or able to look beyond Bulger, the man, to an examination of the universe that had created Bulger became less likely. The story became all about Whitey.

This was especially relevant to the Bulger trial, which, legally speaking, was likely to be the final chance for those public servants who had enabled
Bulger to be called to task for their actions. But this was not to be; the local media representatives best equipped to hold the government's feet to the fire and make sure that the trial was probative and transparent had, thus far in the proceedings, preferred that the trial be about Whitey “the monster” and little else.

Howie Carr had built a mini-career around his journalism and radio commentary about Bulger and also through the writing of numerous books, most notably
The Brothers Bulger,
a bestseller, and
Hitman
. His knowledge of the Boston underworld is vast and expansive, and through the popularity of his daytime radio talk show on WRKO radio, he had cultivated sources of information on many subjects, including crime and politics, that are second to none. But Carr had long since turned his analysis of the Bulger story into a personalized vendetta against Whitey—perhaps understandably so.

In 2005, in an interview that Kevin Weeks did with the CBS News program
60 Minutes,
it was revealed that Bulger and Weeks had considered killing Howie Carr because of his incessant lampooning of Senator Billy Bulger in print and on his radio show. Weeks had even gone so far as to stalk Carr to his summer vacation home, where he staked out the location with the intention of shooting the famed columnist when he came out his front door. When Carr emerged with his young daughter, the hit was called off.

During the trial, in his column in the
Boston Herald,
and on his radio show, Carr preferred to speculate endlessly about Bulger's sexual preferences, portraying the gangster as a covert gay hustler who liked young boys. Often irreverent, occasionally juvenile, and frequently entertaining in his on-air presentation, Carr seemed to have little interest in interpreting the trial as an occasion to examine the world that had created Bulger.

Kevin Cullen was another prominent journalistic voice in the city who had written about Bulger frequently over the years, as a reporter and prominent columnist for the
Globe
. In February 2013, on the brink of the Bulger trial, Cullen and Shelley Murphy, another veteran
Globe
reporter who had covered aspects of the Bulger story for decades, published a bestselling biography of Bulger titled
Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt that Brought Him to Justice
. The book was unprecedented in many respects, informed by sources the two writers had cultivated over an
extended period. Their portrait of Bulger was both horrifying and humanizing, as they sought to puncture the mythology that had developed around Whitey and bring him down to size.

Cullen's nuanced analysis of Bulger in his and Shelley Murphy's book was nowhere to be seen in his columns in the
Globe,
which were devoted almost exclusively to the trial during its duration. Cullen seemed to feel as though he needed to play the role of Bulger's primary tormentor, the one person who could make Bulger pay for his many years as a bully and psychopath who terrorized people in Southie, where Cullen had lived while working as a young reporter.