Rico and Condon were in court the day the verdicts against the four men were handed down. The Boston Strike Force commented to FBIHQ that “as a result of FBI investigation in state court in Boston, four more [gangsters] are convicted in the 1965 slaying of Teddy Deegan.” Two of these were sentenced to death while Salvati and another defendant identified by Barboza got life sentences. Shortly after the convictions, commendations direct from Hoover himself at FBIHQ kept arriving, praising Rico and Condon’s work on the case. Hoover wrote the agents personally that “The successful prosecution of these subjects was a direct result of your noteworthy development of pertinent witnesses.”
But the seeds of the nefarious doings and ultimate unraveling were firmly in place. In early 1970, Condon reached out to Barboza, now living in San Francisco, to let him know his life might be in danger, something the agent had learned through another informant. The Boston office of the FBI denied that Barboza was still cooperating as an informant and refused to offer him any further help. The temperamental Barboza decided to get even by recanting his testimony that convicted the four innocent men of the murder of Teddy Deegan. He also tried to give evidence that mob boss Patriarca should be exonerated due to additional perjured testimony he provided to FBI agents and the court.
“I got enough that will convince any court that I was lying,” he said at the time, determined to make Rico and Condon pay for abandoning him.
None other than F. Lee Bailey, acting as Barboza’s attorney, reiterated that Deegan’s slayers were convicted on false testimony by Barboza and that they were innocent. By October 1970, FBIHQ was advised that witnesses in affidavits “will allege that Barboza told them he lied about Deegan, about Patriarca and others,” naming the Strike Force and the FBI itself as being responsible for his perjured testimony. F. Lee Bailey went public insisting that Barboza had similarly committed perjury against Patriarca, Angiulo, and the Deegan suspects on the prodding of his corrupt handlers, Rico and Condon. Ultimately, Bailey’s strategy accomplished nothing from a legal standpoint, while casting even more aspersions on the FBI. But Barboza was then paid at least $9,000 by the FBI on the pretext of cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance. He first disavowed his new story, the truth, only to go back to telling it to anyone who’d listen until he was shotgunned to death on a San Franciso street in 1976.
Still, the blowback resulting from their protection of Joseph Barboza as an informant at all costs would haunt both Rico and Condon for years after they retired. During the House Committee on Government Reform’s hearings in 2003, Representative Dan Burton asked Rico about his complicity in sending an innocent man to jail for over thirty years. Rico replied curtly: “What do you want from me? Tears?”
Desperate to redeem himself with the Bureau decades before then, Condon had opened another informant, James “Whitey” Bulger, whom he knew through Whitey’s brother Billy, an aspiring Boston politician. Whitey had been arrested by Condon’s partner Rico on a bank robbery charge, so all the pieces seemed to be in place. Except in his first go-round as an FBI informant, Whitey Bulger proved utterly unproductive and was closed three months later and jailed soon after that.
But Bulger’s relationship with the FBI’s Boston office was far from over. In 1973, just when the careers of Rico and Condon were winding down and they were about to leave Boston, an upstart agent named John Connolly arrived.
11
BOSTON, 1975
Connolly had never forgotten how Whitey had bought him an ice cream cone as a boy. And he quickly saw an opportunity for the two Southie natives to serve each other, never grasping how one-sided that relationship would become.
John Connolly had enjoyed a successful, though hardly distinguished, career in the Bureau up until that point. He’d spent his formative years as a grunt with the New York office, his tenure fairly unremarkable save for his apprehension of Frank “Cadillac” Salemme in Manhattan in 1975. To hear Connolly tell it, the tale evoked images of the Wild West, two men coming face-to-face in a desperate confrontation only one of them could survive. In reality, Connolly caught Salemme because he happened to recognize him crossing the street. The inside FBI story was that Connolly was given the information as a “setup” to get Connolly back to his home turf in Boston. And, in fact, the routine arrest won him his prized transfer to the FBI office just a few miles from where he’d been born and raised.
Coming home represented the attainment of a career goal Connolly had long pursued and he took full advantage of it. He dressed in flashy suits, had his hair professionally styled, and carried himself with a swagger and cockiness not at all in keeping with limited achievements that hardly made him the epitome of the modern-day FBI agent. Ironically, he reminded some veterans in the Boston office of a more polished version of Richie Castucci, acting “big” with not a lot to back it up.
But Connolly had a plan to change that.
Intimately acquainted with the exploits of Whitey Bulger from their common roots in Southie, the thirty-five-year-old Connolly set his sights on opening him as an informant, believing he could succeed where Paul Rico and Dennis Condon had failed. Indeed, because of his Southie ties, the young agent had legitimate street credentials—something the Bureau lacked in Boston at the time.
Bulger, though, resisted Connolly’s initial overture, held in the agent’s Plymouth overlooking Wallaston Beach, and that may have proven fortuitous for the ambitious Connolly, since there had been a change in tenor and tolerance expressed by FBIHQ. In a warning about informants, U.S. attorneys at a national conference in 1974 expressed a “belief” that the FBI had become “overly protective” of informants and made “efforts so that informants are not prosecuted so that they continue to provide intelligence information.” With both Rico and Condon taking that as their cue to leave the Bureau, the Boston office escaped recrimination and business pretty much returned to normal, only with new players, led by John Connolly, in place. History was about to repeat itself, with Whitey effectively becoming a new incarnation of Joseph Barboza, the lessons of the past not being heeded whatsoever.
Connolly’s subsequent meetings with Bulger proved much more productive precisely because Bulger saw in the ambitious agent a new means to help him achieve his own nefarious ends. Among other things, he was facing a major rift with the Angiulos, the local Italian mob family, over the lucrative placement of vending machines in various area establishments. Since Connolly’s only reason for wanting his help was to bring down those very Angiulos, Bulger saw a way to enlist the agent as an unwitting accomplice in solving his current dilemma. Bulger brought along his right-hand man Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi, and Connolly saw his opportunity to find the same glory achieved by Rico and Condon while avoiding the excesses that led to their ultimate downfalls at the hands of Barboza.
At the outset anyway, he was not disappointed. In 1976, Stephen Flemmi and Bulger provided information that allowed Connolly to turn a co-conspirator into a cooperating witness, identifying Joe Russo as the killer of none other than Joseph Barboza, who was gunned down in San Francisco just days after his release from prison. In a typical execution-style murder, Barboza was clipped by Russo and his gang from inside a Ford Econoline van that pulled up next to Barboza’s car and pumped him full of bullets. The van was abandoned alongside Barboza, who was left lying in a pool of blood, eerily reminiscent of victims he had left behind.
Having proven himself to his handlers, Bulger wasted no time in taking over the Winter Hill Gang in the wake of gang leader Howie Winter’s incarceration. The fact that the Italian mob remained the Bureau’s number one priority gave Bulger carte blanche to run the Irish mob however he saw fit. In fact, the more powerful he could become, the more power he could exert on the Bureau’s behalf. At least that was the thinking at the time. Connolly and his supervisor, John Morris, and Bulger and Flemmi shared one thing in common: ambition. But that was enough to drive their relationship forward and sustain it so long as each was helping to promote the success of the othe
r.
Boston watched as the Winter Hill Gang under Bulger and Flemmi consolidated its vicious hold on the city’s rackets, thanks in large part to the federal arrests and subsequent incarceration of the competition they served up neatly on a plate. They fed names to Connolly and Morris, and the agents would take things from there. The relationship flourished, as the parties continued feeding off each other’s greed and opportunity.
But they did so at the expense of the residents of Boston, who found their lives adversely affected, even endangered, by a pair of sociopaths who had free rein to wreak havoc on the city. Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi had effectively replaced Barboza and Vincent Flemmi, among others; their actions now fully facilitated by their status as FBI informants. And they also replaced Barboza as informants with the same goal in mind: receive as many free passes as needed, so long as they appeared to be furnishing good intelligence—the operative word being appeared.
Some of that intelligence from Bulger, code named BS 1544–C-TE, helped net Joe Russo, which, in turn, netted Jimmy Charlmas, aka Ted Sharliss, for masterminding the hit on Barboza for “the Office.” When Connolly reported, though, he changed “Office” to “Outfit,” a euphemism for the New England mafia that the Boston office was still desperate to bring down. The subtle alteration was clearly designed to muddle a picture already blurred by false information. Something Connolly did quite well in his 209s, the internal vehicle for reporting informant information, whether true or not.
Connolly hit the street running on the same track as Rico and Condon, not only making the same mistakes they made, but even worse ones. Having grown up with Bulger in Boston’s Southie neighborhood, Connolly had no problem accepting a gift from the informant he also saw as his pal: that diamond ring he had emblazoned with the FBI motto: Fidelity Bravery Integrity. The ultimate irony and sadly so.
Connolly had betrayed the Bureau by going “native,” essentially choosing his Irish Boston roots over his loyalty to the organization he purported to love. There was no going back for Connolly at this point. In his determination to avoid the inglorious fates of Rico and Condon, he had assured himself a much worse one. He would later declare in court testimony, “We knew what these guys were.… All of them, top echelon informants, are murderers. The government put me in business with murderers.”
And he found a willing and able partner in fellow agent John Morris, who was promoted to supervisor and immediately got Connolly assigned to his squad. Internally, Morris was described as “imaginative, innovative and extremely industrious” with no hesitation to tackle “major projects.” They seemed perfectly matched, although Morris was as humdrum as Connolly was flashy. A family man with a receding hairline and a crumbling marriage, Morris was cut from the cloth, initially anyway, of more staid Bureau agents of the past, conservative and, you would think from appearances, by the book.
But his looks belied his cunning. And he plunged into his job as much as anything as a way to counterbalance his troubled personal life. The arrows were moving in opposite directions and the more the separation grew, the more Morris threw himself all-out into a career being propelled by none other than Whitey Bulger. He and Connolly were free to do whatever they wanted so long as they produced. Similarly, Bulger and Flemmi were free to do pretty much whatever they wanted, so long as they produced as well. “Quid pro quo,” as one agent put it.
It was a clear recipe for an impending disaster.
Indeed, Morris and Connolly would and did do anything necessary to protect their Top Echelon informants, whom they saw as fast-track tickets to fame and glory. They aspired to be viewed as crime-fighting heroes of the FBI, even though the means to those ends made them anything but. Bulger and Flemmi had to be kept out of jail and out of harm’s way. Priority one. Simple as that.
None of this was happening under the radar either. The Massachusetts State Police and Boston Police Department were hearing things from their own informants—rumors of feds who were enabling felons—and complaints were flowing into the Boston FBI office as a harbinger of the firestorm ignited by MSP head Colonel O’Donovan after the Lancaster Garage incident.
The FBI attempted to walk a fine line by ensuring that these clandestine Top Echelon relationships resulted in more good than harm. Summing up that ultimately impossible challenge, John Connolly would later tell me in reference to Bulger and Flemmi, “Sure, they’re bad guys, but they’re our bad guys.”
PART TWO
BLOWBACK
“You got me.”
12
MOUNT LORETTO, 1958
When I left the Mount in 1958 it was to enter still another institution—the U.S. Army. Without telling anyone, I enlisted as a young private and did my infantry training at Fort Dix in New Jersey. I had no money and needed a job, and for most of us kids in the Mount, the military was the way to go. I felt at home with a cot, three squares, and some pocket money to boot. My training took me to a succession of military instruction schools in Texas and New Mexico, the most exciting being a nuclear warhead school in Los Alamos—until, that is, I learned that we might have been guinea pigs for nuclear testing the whole time! Looking back, that became a strangely appropriate metaphor for what I’d later face in Boston, since the office was truly toxic.
Once my training was complete, I was shipped to Germany, just outside Mainz and Wiesbaden. The culture shock I experienced was disorienting at first. Here I was, a kid fresh from the Mount, finding myself in postwar Germany, where the ruins and spoils of war were still evident. Yet it was also mysterious and exciting, and I was being paid to do this. I was fortunate enough to take over the company supply unit, and within a year I had my sergeant stripes and more opportunity. Being overseas was a great adventure for me, and later, I’d reflect that I grew up in this new culture, which expanded my horizons beyond my wildest dreams.
It was wonderful. I went to schools at Wiesbaden and Mainz and Heidelberg, grabbing college credits for future enrollment. The barracks I stayed in was an old SS casern with a fair amount of history. As a basic infantry soldier with a “supply military occupational specialty,” I traveled throughout Europe increasing and enhancing my desire to know more. My boss, a Ranger captain, signed me up for OCS (Officer Candidates School) and even got me a nod to West Point, after which my Seventh Army commanding general put me in for a slot. I was achieving beyond my wildest expectations.
At the same time, Father Kenny, who’d long taken an interest in me at Mount Loretto, suggested a scholarship to St. Peter’s College in New Jersey in lieu of West Point. Father Kenny saw the priesthood in my future, believing my compassion made me ideal for the job. There had not been many successs stories like that from the Mount, and to the good Father I looked like a legitimate candidate.
“You know people, Fitz,” he told me once.
“What do you mean, Father?”
He just smiled in response, but I gathered that he recognized that I was an effective listener and that I had a way of understanding and interpreting information beyond the words people used when talking to me. Perhaps Father Kenny was sensing in me the traits that would later make me one of the FBI’s new profilers. I had used those skills in my one and only meeting with Whitey Bulger, learning from his body language more than he had thought he’d told me. I had a visceral sense that matched his. Bulger’s persona was pure selfish stuff to enhance his own perceived legend. But Father Kenny was also talking about my compassion, a compassion born of feeling for the weak, needy, and indisposed; I had been all of these things myself as a boy and had learned to recognize them in those I was drawn to help. A coping mechanism, I guess, but it helped me become the man I was and led ultimately to my rise through the ranks of the FBI, assisting other agents when necessary.
I finally decided to go back across the pond to New Jersey’s St. Peter’s College in 1961. Had I gone to the Point instead, I would’ve inevitably ended up in Vietnam, which I wanted no part of. It wasn’t that I was shirking my duty or wasn’t patriotic; I just
felt I’d already spent too much of my life fighting a war. Leading a charge up a proverbial hill was a metaphor for so much of my youth that the notion of doing it for real was just too much to bear. St. Peter’s was definitely the saner, safer choice.
College offered yet another structured environment in my life and development, and one in which I thrived. I’d always been scholastically minded, and even took my share of taunts from the Mount kids for being “too smart.” Back then, being selected to go to New York’s St. Peter’s Boys School on a scholarship from Mount Loretto allowed me to be “outside,” to see the world beyond the Mount’s shuttered walls. All I ever wanted to do was get my college education so I could join the FBI, and my years at St. Peter’s offered me that and more. A passport to a better life and a chance to be able to change my family history.
Having spent the better part of my life living communally, at both the Mount and in the military, freedom had been limited and decisions were pretty much made for me. College provided me with the freedom I needed to grow and learn. I had far more real-life experiences than my college classmates and pals, but this didn’t stop me from forming friendships that remain to this day. I also used the opportunity to get my fellow students engaged in projects to benefit the boys back at Mount Loretto. I went to college originally as little more than a precursor to joining the Bureau, but it became a wonderful experience on its own.
Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down Page 8
