Maybe, but that wasn’t always the case. Under a grant of immunity years later, John Morris admitted to taking $7,000 in bribes from Bulger and Flemmi. Did the fact that he also tipped them off to federal wiretaps and confessed to leaking the fact that Brian Halloran had become an informant count as quid pro quo in that case?
As ASAC, it wasn’t that I didn’t know what was going on. From the time Greenleaf replaced Larry Sarhatt in 1982, it was clear to me that our office had spiraled into a descent of treachery and criminality. SACs are supposed to set the tone, and in my opinion (and as I later said in court testimony and depositions), Greenleaf did just that, letting agents like Connolly run free without fear of repercussions. From 1982 to 1986, any report I made to HQ on Greenleaf’s conduct was stifled and/or ignored and each time the bull’s-eye painted on my own back got bigger.
But there was more. As referenced earlier, Dave Twomey was an assistant U.S. attorney who worked organized crime and drug cases under Jerry O’Sullivan on the Strike Force. I was the New England drug task force commander, so Twomey, as part of the Strike Force, had to liaise with me in taking down and prosecuting druggers and OC members.
Even as my OC and drug squads started making real progress in bringing down the cartels, which included Whitey Bulger’s increasing involvement, Dave Twomey continued giving information to the very OC and cartel suspects we’d targeted. So I went to O’Sullivan to report this interference in our cases through the suspected leaking of highly sensitive material from the surveillance and “wires” that were going up, along with the names of other sources who were giving us information.
O’Sullivan was livid; not at Twomey, though, at me for insinuating such a thing was even possible. He demanded to know which Bureau informant had made the claim to my agents, Jim Crawford and Matt Cronin.
“You know I can’t tell you that,” I advised the Strike Force chief.
He scoffed and, some weeks later, proceeded to tell me that the informants, whose names I’d never provided, were “drunks” and thus should be considered unreliable at the time. Dave Twomey was neither relieved of his position nor reassigned, and no in-house investigation came to light. Generally, this information would have caused an OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) inquiry and investigation. Yet business was allowed to continue as usual, and that in itself was not unusual.
But I wasn’t about to let go of my pursuit of Twomey or anyone else. Here I was, ordered into a Serpico-like scenario where I was supposed to clean up the dirt in the Boston office, and all that dirt was now being swept under the rug. It was becoming increasingly clear that the people I was reporting to were potentially complicit in the very crimes on which I was reporting. Complicit because my reporting no longer allowed them to profess ignorance or claim plausible deniability later, even as another informant was about to die.
19
BOSTON, 1984
An unintended consequence of my squad’s takedown of mob boss Jerry Angiulo was a sudden void in the drug distribution market. For years the Irish Winter Hill Gang, under both Howie Winter and Whitey Bulger, had pretty much ceded that revenue stream to the mafia under Raymond Patriarca out of Providence. That said, the myth perpetuated by those like John Morris, that one of the things that made Bulger “a good guy” was that he stayed clear of the drug business in general and within Southie in particular, was just that: a myth.
“There were U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents like Steve Boeri and Al Reilly, backed by DEA bosses like Paul Brown and John Coleman, who were especially galled that Bulger’s defenders bogusly claimed he kept drugs out of South Boston,” Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe wrote years later. “The DEA men knew the only drug dealers Whitey killed were the ones who didn’t pay him tribute.”
Other than take that tribute from the dealers who moved their product through Southie, Bulger steered his people away from drugs only to avoid an all-out war with La Cosa Nostra. With Angiulo out of the way, though, he was more than happy to step in and fill the void, and why not? The FBI’s providing him insulation from prosecution made him feel invincible and untouchable. If he could get away with murder, why not expand his reach into drug dealing? Whitey only needed to see the potential revenue that could further strengthen his hold on power in the Boston rackets, as well as the possibility of supplanting Patriarca as the most powerful gangster in all of New England. He was nothing if not ambitious.
Even if Bulger’s move into drugs didn’t lead directly to his downfall, it did yield another informant who could help me close him once and for all, an informant named John McIntyre. A veteran of the military, the gregarious McIntyre was a fisherman who built and repaired boats. But he was also heavily involved in the Irish gunrunning and drug deals out of Boston under the auspices of Joe Murray, another Irish gangster in competition with Bulger.
Murray traded in guns, drugs, and other contraband. He and Whitey might have been cut from the same cloth, so to speak, but they didn’t see eye to eye at all. Murray wasn’t part of the Winter Hill Gang, yet was still forced to pay tribute to Bulger for any drug dealing he did in Boston. Murray always suspected Bulger and Flemmi were informants, but to suggest such a thing would have been to assure his own death. So he remained silent and steamed over having to cut Bulger in on action Whitey otherwise had nothing to do with—a situation exacerbated by Jerry Angiulo’s exit from the Boston crime scene since it left Murray competing within Whitey’s expanding enterprise.
The one thing on which Murray and Whitey did see eye to eye was the IRA. Anything they could do for their Irish brothers in arms, they did, which mostly amounted to raising funds to purchase and smuggle guns back to the homeland. As a middleman for the deals, Bulger made his share of money, but he needed Murray’s operation and boats for the procurement and shipment of the arms.
One of these boats was the now infamous Valhalla, and among its crew was John McIntyre, who was arrested for his small part in the operation in September 1984, setting the stage for his brutal murder just two months later. People in the know were always suspicious about how the Valhalla escaped capture off the Irish coast. Looking back on things now, rumors that Bulger had been the one who snitched the IRA info to the Brits seem well founded indeed. After all, the eventual seizing of the Valhalla led to the takedown of Joe Murray, thus allowing Whitey to take over the few Irish gangs he didn’t already control and further consolidate his power in the drug world and beyond. Now, instead of taking tribute from Murray, the network was Whitey’s and Whitey’s alone. He had effectively cut out the middleman, yet again.
Once McIntyre began to talk, I was notified immediately through Rod Kennedy, an FBI agent who liaised with the DEA, and I began to visualize Bulger caught in a fisherman’s net. Kennedy represented me at a meeting in which McIntyre told of an upcoming drug shipment bound for Joe Murray, who, of course, paid tribute to Whitey in order to run his drugs in Bulger’s South Boston territory. McIntyre was on board a ship called the Ramsland when it sailed into Boston Harbor in mid-November 1984, carrying thirty tons of marijuana. The cargo was seized, turning Bulger livid over his sizable lost share of the profits and looking for someone to blame.
Strangely, joining my squad on the dock that day when the Ramsland motored into port was none other than Martin Boudreau, former Strike Force attorney under Jeremiah O’Sullivan who’d recently gone into private practice as a mob lawyer. The fact that someone had leaked the coming seizure to him gnawed at me. How else, after all, could he have learned about it? But I had a major drug bust to oversee in tandem with the DEA, so that issue would have to wait.
Not only had McIntyre proven himself, he began to spill additional evidence he had of a link between Murray and Bulger, whom he’d never actually met at this point. And several three-letter agencies saw this as payback time. The DEA had been subjected to much the same “leaking” that I had witnessed and had seen a number of cooperative investigations go south thanks to FBI leaks or downright malfeasance.
The DEA knew where I stood on the matter so they reached out to me. McIntyre was just hoping to preserve his young family and simply wanted out. But he turned down the FBI and Customs’ offer to enter the Witness Protection Program, while continuing to help them, and me, build a case against Bulger. We got an affidavit for a wire based on McIntyre’s info, but it was never installed because of procrastination and stalling that seemed the very definition of bureaucratic incompetence or, worse, purposeful stalling on the part of those protecting Bulger. The DEA’s involvement made this the greatest threat he’d faced yet since becoming an informant, and that was certain to reverberate all the way to Washington.
And then came the night that John McIntyre was lured to the house in South Boston to be tortured and killed by Whitey Bulger because he’d been given up by those he trusted to keep him safe. Given up to have his teeth pulled out, his body mutilated and then buried in another basement before being moved across from Florian Hall in Dorchester where he might never be found.
We know that now. At the time, though, all we knew was that John McIntyre had simply disappeared. All the intelligence he was providing was rendered moot since there was no one else around to corroborate it.
The existence of an informant willing and able to link Whitey to both guns and drug running, who could put Whitey on the docks as the weapons were being loaded onto the Valhalla, must have terrified his enablers no end. So, like Brian Halloran, John Callahan, and Richie Castucci before him, McIntyre had to be killed. The images of his brutal murder haunt me to this day. It’s hard to revisit the terrible pain Whitey Bulger caused McIntyre to assert his own sadistic power, a bully to the end. For what? For being an informant? Well, what about Bulger and Flemmi being informants? Bulger broke the supreme Irish code of ratting out to his so-called enemies, while Connolly and Morris ratted out their fellow agents and informants. All of them much more deserving of the fate McIntyre ultimately suffered.
When I appeared on the 60 Minutes TV program in the wake of McIntyre’s body being recovered in early 2001, the now deceased Ed Bradley asked me, “As a former FBI agent, do you in, in any way hold other FBI agents, the Bureau itself, responsible for these murders?”
“Yes, I do,” I answered simply, with no equivocation. “Yes!”
It was the same answer I would have given in 1984, had anyone bothered to ask me.
There were plenty of hands to go around, all right, and plenty of blood to coat them all. But who had leaked John McIntyre’s name to Bulger in the first place? Who exactly had cost this young man his life?
20
BOSTON, 1985
Remember Dave Twomey, the Strike Force attorney two of my agents had branded a leak? I did and I’d never let go of my resolve to see him brought to justice.
I got my chance in early 1985 when a DEA agent named Vinton reported he’d recently heard the very same thing through one of his own informants. Specifically that Twomey might well be funneling information to Martin Boudreau to aid in the defense of his mob clients whom the Strike Force was trying to put away. So at long last we arrested Twomey on charges of accepting bribes and obstruction of justice, among others. In December 1986 he was “convicted of four violations of federal law arising out of his sale of confidential law enforcement information to a drug smuggler whom he had investigated in the course of his official duties.” (The decision was later upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which has appellate jurisdiction in Massachusetts.)
By all indications, though, Twomey wasn’t the only one leaking. We knew the Boston office of the FBI itself had been plagued by leaks for years, and I was about to learn where at least some of them may have originated.
In June of 1985, Tom McGeorge, an agent who handled my Public Corruption squad, asked to see me in private.
“You’re not gonna believe this, Fitz.”
“What?” I asked him.
“I think I know who’s been leaking. It’s Greenleaf.”
The way McGeorge said it, I don’t think he could believe it himself. I was flabbergasted and nearly fell out of my seat. But the intelligence McGeorge related to me indicated that Greenleaf had, like Twomey, met with defense attorney Martin Boudreau, formerly of the Strike Force under Jerry O’Sullivan and now a known lawyer for the wiseguys. Greenleaf, according to McGeorge, told Boudreau that a “witness” to the drug cartel was prepared to dime Whitey Bulger and others. Was that witness John McIntyre? I’ll never know. All we knew then was that McIntyre had disappeared and, in fact, had been labeled a fugitive. Whatever I and other agents suspected aside, we had no evidence of an underlying crime having resulted from that leak. McIntyre could have gone AWOL, after all. We looked for him for about a month, a touchy situation in itself since we couldn’t give away his informant status either. McIntyre, like Halloran, was a key witness in getting the goods on Bulger so we could arrest him.
At this point I did recall Martin Boudreau’s presence on the dock when the Ramsland sailed into port the year before. Someone had alerted him to the major drug bust we were about to make, and now it was becoming clear to me just who that leak may have been.
If McGeorge’s assertions were correct, Greenleaf was furnishing federal grand jury information to a defense attorney in violation of federal statutes. Committing the very serious crime of revealing informant information that could not only jeopardize a case, but also get an informant killed.
I told McGeorge to make out a full report. In front of him I called the Strike Force chief and told him the story. In a cavalier manner O’Sullivan advised me that he “already knew about this.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I asked him.
“Because it’s none of your fucking business.”
“What are you gonna do about it now?”
“Well, I guess I’ll have to report it to OPR.”
“You guess?”
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t that he couldn’t believe leaking was taking place in his office; he knew it was. But he also knew that acknowledging that fact would undermine his credibility if revealed. And since the leaking filtered back to Bulger, and possibly Joe Murray, the results of a full investigation risked destroying the prized informant O’Sullivan had been protecting for years now.
I next called the Director’s Office in Washington, D.C., and got the Director’s standby John Glover. He was livid; more at me than Greenleaf, it seemed, and he ordered me not to write a report or tell Greenleaf anything.
The pit in my stomach was growing harder and I recalled one of my buddies saying, “If you take on the dragon you have to kill him!” I had laughed at the time, but I wasn’t laughing now. After all, wasn’t this my duty to report? Didn’t I take an oath to do this very thing?
Never embarrass the Bureau …
But the whole arrangement grew even more incestuous and complex once Whitey Bulger began exerting more and more influence over the drug trade in his native Southie enclave and Boston environs beyond. Ultimately, the DEA professed to have little interest in working their cases in tandem with the FBI and, by connection, with O’Sullivan’s Strike Force. No less a source than Stephen Flemmi himself would later admit that “Both in 1984 and 1989, the FBI made Mr. Bulger and I aware of a number of drug investigations.”
As I told the Boston Herald in a story entitled “Ex-Agent Details Treachery in HUB FBI Office” that was published in April 2001, “‘Innocent people were killed, murdered, and I hold certain agents responsible for that.’” The Herald reporters (Jonathan Wells, Jack Meyers, and Maggie Mulvihill) went further in linking everything together: “When the alleged leak occurred, Boudreau, a former federal Organized Strike Force prosecutor, was representing major drug traffickers. Also at the time, Bulger and Flemmi were collecting ‘tribute’ payments from traffickers doing business in the Boston area.”
Of course, at that point all we were sure of was that McIntyre had vanished, complicating a case I was trying to make against Greenleaf since I
couldn’t use what I knew in a report HQ had ordered me not to file anyway. I’d become a real thorn in their side, and since they could no longer ignore what I was telling them, they told me to put no further reports in writing that could—you guessed it—embarrass the Bureau.
But Justice Department protocol told me something else. In fact, that protocol was reiterated to all office employees in a memo dated June 3, 1985, a few days before my reporting, that read in part, “I wish to remind you that it is your responsibility to inform the Counsel on Professional Responsibility of all such allegations which come to our attention and to advise him when inquiries into these allegations have been completed.”
The memo was signed “Attorney General.” It was circulated by Special Agent in Charge James Greenleaf.
As I told the Boston Herald for that same story in 2001, I filed my own memo directly under the subject heading “Alleged Disclosure of Information by SAC Greenleaf.” My memo referred specifically back to our investigation of Strike Force lawyer Dave Twomey and the informant who told us about Twomey warning off the organized crime subjects of the Strike Force’s investigations. The memo detailed how James Greenleaf had leaked the informant’s name to former Strike Force attorney Martin Boudreau, who’d moved into private practice representing the kind of people he used to put away. This would not only allow Boudreau to impeach that confidential informant’s character but also could have placed his very life in danger. Remember what had happened to Brian Halloran and John Callahan, not to mention Richie Castucci?
Even though I’d left out the most pointed allegation from my report, Greenleaf was pissed that I’d done my job by reporting him, afraid this time it would stick since I’d bypassed the traditional channels offering him cover. His ire knew no bounds. I had initially struggled with the filing of charges against him and was forbidden by FBIHQ itself to discuss that filing with the SAC either before or after. I never thought of myself as a “snitch” or that I was “diming” the SAC. In Washington, though, among those who had installed Greenleaf as SAC in Boston and continue to support him to this day, I was ostracized and deemed a pariah for telling the truth. Not only did the DOJ OPR not contact me, but the Director’s Office continued to order me to keep everything I knew secret. The problem was I’d gone too far now to follow that order. I tried to report my suspicions about the SAC to the FBIHQ general counsel and the Director’s Office of the FBI, keeping a copy of that report in the event they weren’t acted upon, which, of course, they weren’t. My report should have triggered an investigation—that’s all. The allegation I leveled against Greenleaf was just that and nothing more. It was certainly explosive, but it was also procedure and should have been treated as such.
Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down Page 15
