But it wasn’t.
The FBI never asked for additional clarification of what I knew about John McIntyre’s disappearance; if they had, they’d have evidence of corruption inside the Boston FBI at the highest level. In all my years working major cases, I had never seen the kind of abject corruption that I witnessed in Boston. Until John McIntyre’s body was pulled from the ground on a cold day in January 2000, the truth behind his disappearance was never fully known. But the fact he had suffered the same fate, at the same hands, as Richie Castucci, Brian Halloran, and John Callahan was as unavoidable as it was obvious.
In that same 2001 article in the Boston Herald, Tom McGeorge was reported to have denied ever having that conversation with me during which he reported Greenleaf. McGeorge was running a private security firm in Florida at the time, and if he actually did deny our conversation to a reporter perhaps it was because he was afraid of getting involved. Interviewed by the same reporters, James Greenleaf offered no comment. Jeremiah O’Sullivan, meanwhile, flat out denied our subsequent conversation and my reporting.
“Absolutely and unequivocally this did not happen,” O’Sullivan said at the time.
This is the same O’Sullivan who would later confess to lying and misrepresentation in his testimony before the House’s Government Reform Committee in 2002, including an admission that he knew Bulger and Flemmi were murderers. He died in February 2009, and at the time of his death a lawyer named Robert Popeo told the Boston Globe that, “For those in the highest levels, the admiration he earned for his conduct will stay with him forever. And there are those who don’t know what it’s like to be down in the pit and make these decisions. His legacy of fighting crime in Boston stands.”
Popeo had once represented none other than Billy Bulger.
As for James Greenleaf, in 2006 he would testify in district court that investigations of Bulger and Flemmi “just didn’t register” with him. This in spite of the fact that the appellate decision later found that “[Greenleaf] was not focused on the reports that Bulger and Flemmi had sources within law enforcement generally or within the FBI.” The same court made note of the fact that “The FBI’s recognition of the apparent link between the Winter Hill gang and three murders—Wheeler’s, Halloran’s and Callahan’s—was reported in a November 1982 memo sent by the Chief of the FBI’s Organized Crime Section, Sean McWeeney, to Associate Deputy Director Oliver Revell. The memo stated that ‘there is evidence [the murders] were committed by an organized crime group in Boston, Massachusetts, the Winter Hill gang.’ James Greenleaf, who became the SAC of the Boston Office on November 29, 1982, was among those copied on the memo, which was generated at FBI Headquarters in Washington.”
I gave a deposition under oath for that same 2006 trial before a bevy of ten lawyers, including one representing James Greenleaf.
“At any time after McIntyre’s disappearance did you come to believe that McIntyre’s identity had been leaked?” the interrogatory attorney asked me.
“Yes,” I answered unequivocally.
“And can you describe how you came to that belief?”
I proceeded to relate the details of my meeting with Tom McGeorge, stressing that McGeorge had specifically mentioned Greenleaf as leaking the informant’s name to former Strike Force attorney Martin Boudreau and that I had immediately informed Jerry O’Sullivan of that.
No objections were offered by the attending attorneys.
“So you called the Director’s Office,” the attorney said, picking up the questioning. “And—”
“It was because it involved the SAC,” I interrupted.
“And what did you tell the Director’s Office?”
“That one of my supervisors just reported that the SAC of the Boston Division is a leak. We had a federal grand jury going on, and he had given away 6E, federal grand jury 6E information, which is a crime.”
“And what, if anything, was done as a result of that report?”
“Nothing,” I replied.
21
BOSTON, 1985
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
The opening line from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities described things perfectly as 1985 descended upon Boston. It started out as a great year, one of the best of my life. My squad’s takedown of the Boston La Cosa Nostra, which had begun with my arrest of the underboss Gennaro Angiulo in September 1983 had been parlayed into additional arrests as “made” guys turned against each other to avoid the same fate. Several of the public corruption cases came to fruition, and our financial squad and undercover cases netted several organized crime heavies in major cases involving infiltration into legitimate business and the illegal manipulation of stock on the OTC (over-the-counter) market.
Beyond that, my Miami experience in running ABSCAM had finally produced several trials and plea deals, and helped usher in a new age of accountability in Washington. That experience led directly to my investigations of illegal offshore financial corporations, a national con man indexing, a computerized crimes violations system that was way ahead of its time, undercover operations in PENDORF (a wiretap on Allen Dorfman, head of the AFL-CIO), BRILAB (our pursuit of bribery and labor racketeering in the unions), and multiple stings involving organized crime penetration of the New York Stock Exchange. The common denominator here was the Bureau’s first ever “hands-on” Economic Crimes Unit to monitor drug laundering, international bank scams, and to establish a watchdog unit with Interpol to monitor organized crime infiltration into legitimate business.
And amid all my accomplishments, amidst the many problems we had resolved in the Boston office, I continued to be at odds with HQ and my own SAC, James Greenleaf. The Organized Crime section at HQ under Sean McWeeney appeared insulted that the ASAC in Boston had dared criticize the way FBI business was done. McWeeney couldn’t get past my dogged pursuit of Whitey Bulger, because his Organized Crime section felt their judgment was being challenged and that represented a direct threat to the FBI’s quasi-military atmosphere. They also couldn’t get past the fact Bulger and Flemmi had become part of the FBI’s extended family.
Right around the time of McIntyre’s murder, for example, McWeeney learned that the DEA had launched a major drug operation called Operation Beans that was targeting Bulger and Flemmi, among other major New England drug figures. When he saw their names, he called Boston and got John Connolly on the phone.
“Aren’t these our guys?” McWeeney asked Connolly, as reported in Black Mass.
So apparently Bulger and Flemmi were the FBI’s “guys” while I, somehow, wasn’t. The cadre at HQ had the data from all twenty-five organized crime national families. They were the experts and didn’t want anyone telling them how to do their job in spite of the success I achieved doing just that in Boston. While busting organized crime remained every bit a top priority in Washington, my efforts and accomplishments were being demeaned by a groupthink mentality that led to a scenario of “us versus them,” with me inexplicably linked with “them.” There was no middle ground and no room for what Organized Crime or any other section deemed dissidents in the Bureau.
But my Bulger experience had branded me just that, and the Organized Crime section in Washington preferred to paint me as a “crazy” relegated to a distant corner, rather than to weigh my work in its totality. The Bureau’s second in command, John Otto, who actually served as acting director between May and November of 1987, backed Greenleaf up at my expense. I believe that Otto served as both Greenleaf’s cover and protective blanket, another cog in the machine. But that didn’t stop him from jumping in when William Sessions was fired by President Bill Clinton after “findings by the Department of Justice that he engaged in legal and ethical misconduct.”
“What the bureau cannot tolerate is people trashing it, and that is what Sessions has done,” Otto told England’s The Independent in July 1993. “He put himself and his own interests before the bureau, and that is taboo.”
In a further bizarre twist
, when Otto stepped down from his final post as associate deputy director of administration in April 1990, he was replaced by James Greenleaf.
The disconnect here was that I was lauded and given commendations for my accomplishments, while my warnings about the underlying cancer festering inside the Boston office were ignored. In an internal FBI Performance Appraisal Report issued on June 29, 1984, and still in my possession, my overall rating was called “Exceptional.” Under “Program Management” the report went on to detail that “Achievements in the Organized Crime Program and White Collar Crime Program are a direct result of ASAC FITZPATRICK’S interest and enthusiasm for directing the programs. During the ratings period, many problems surfaced that required ASAC FITZPATRICK to address. These problems were overcome and many of the cases achieved successful resolution. Modifications were made to Boston’s Organized Crime Program with the help of ASAC FITZPATRICK and Boston is now in a better position to address the narcotics and dangerous drug problem within its territory.”
The evaluation was written by James Greenleaf.
The SAC’s words, though, were backed up by neither his nor HQ’s actions. The procedure-driven Organized Crime section in Washington under Sean McWeeney controlled my purse strings and thus thought they controlled me. And, yes, money normally affected all of the critical thinking and decision making, but I wasn’t going to let it affect mine. I knew that Whitey Bulger and his right-hand man Stephen Flemmi were titular heads of the Irish OC families and that meant regardless of what anyone in Washington or Boston said, they would remain one of my top priorities. But the so-called experts subsumed all of my evaluations.
“You know, I have the advantage of overseeing all facets of Organized Crime and other crimes in Boston,” I once told McWeeney.
“Okay,” he replied, “what’s your point?”
“That I could see the failure of putting our eggs in the Bulger and Flemmi basket right from the beginning.”
I seem to recall him almost laughing at my insinuation. As my superior, he knew better; he knew everything. And he took his marching orders from John Otto who was Greenleaf’s “guy” in Washington.
But then came August 1985, when I married my sweetheart, Jane. At our glorious wedding the unexpected showing of agents and friends sharing my earlier years was overwhelming. Here were Andy, Davey, and Bones, my old partners in crime from my first post in New Orleans, running on the beach in Charlestown, Rhode Island, after a raucous night out recounting our early exploits. We laughed at our younger agent days in Memphis and other offices where we were assigned. As first and second low-ranking office agents we got the “dreg” cases, the bottom of the barrel, dog-eared file cases that remained unsolved.
There was one in particular where a fugitive I was after in New Orleans at the outset of my career had a propensity for racetracks. The file was full of leads and pages recounting how other agents had tried to apprehend this guy by going to the racetracks firsthand. The Fair Grounds in New Orleans was a splendid racetrack of the antebellum age, with all the accoutrements: the fanfare, the banners flying, the horses decorated in beautiful spring colors as they pranced for the gate. We “shot a balloon” that day and went to the Fair Grounds in search of the fugitive.
Bones, being the comic agent, used every chance he got to declare, “There he is! Look, climbing up the flagpole. No, there he is on the back of horse number five!” When we got our tickets for the horse race to make the outing respectable, Bones yelled, “He’s the guy behind the ticket window!” We all laughed and every fifteen minutes or so I would reexamine my photo of Harry, the fugitive, in the event that we might spot him among the huge crowd—not that any of us really thought we would.
A calm came over the crowd as the horses came to the gate. The announcer bellowed over the loudspeakers, “This is the third race at the Fair Grounds and the horses are nearing the gate.” The other agents were doing their thing and nowhere to be seen. Finally, Bones came into my line of sight and, as I glanced at that photo once more, lo and behold, standing not far from him there was Harry!
I checked the photo again and again. “Bingo!” I thought, excited. “Damn, that’s him!”
I sneaked behind the fugitive who was avidly screening the mounts at the gate, greeting him with, “Harry, how the hell are you?”
He turned around expecting to see a pal and, acknowledging my recognition, said, “Great!”
And then in the blink of an eye, he realized that this was an “aw shit” moment and tried to move away.
“Harry, I’m Bob Fitzpatrick, FBI, and you’re under arrest!”
The look on his face said it all. Disappointment as he realized that this was no friend or acquaintance, this was the feds. As I approached Harry he held out his hands symbolically and I slapped on the handcuffs, strapping him around a flagpole.
Man, he was pissed!
“Take me outta here,” Harry muttered.
Stalling for time, I told him I wasn’t alone and had to find the other agents. The crowd milled around us oblivious to the man in handcuffs, intent only on the third race about to go off.
I said, “Look, there’re other agents here and I’m afraid to take you in on my own.”
He looked at me incredulously and repeated, “Just get me outta here. I promise I’ll go quietly. No trouble.”
Of course, what I didn’t tell him was that I was stalling because I and the other agents had a bet on the race. The announcer barked, “They’re off!” And off went the horses, kicking up dirt as they started around the track with our horse at the head of the pack.
Bones showed up just as excited as I was, especially when he spied the handcuffs fastened around Harry’s wrists. “So, you won the race, eh, Fitz?”
Harry, getting more pissed by the second, just wanted to be arrested and taken away, while Bones and I were busy following our horses.
“Get me the hell outa here!” Harry bellowed this time, trying to be heard over the screaming crowd.
I finally relented. As I recuffed Harry and started to bring him around, the announcer gave the results of the race.
“Did you win, Harry?” I asked. “Because I did! Oh, that’s right,” I added, looking at his handcuffs, “you can’t check your ticket.”
The pissed-off look froze on his expression. We were ecstatic. Andy finally arrived and he laughed the loudest when we told him the story. And now all those years later here we were in Charlestown, Rhode Island, laughing out loud again. It was one of the greatest few days of my life, culminating in a marriage ceremony that was truly special, with all the most important people in my life gathered in the same place at the same time, including my brothers Larry and Gerard and my sister Diane.
Well, not everyone. My parents, obviously, were not in attendance. And neither was anyone from my years in the Mount. That period of my life was like a black hole that had swallowed my youth. But those same years had made me what I was, and the lessons of life in the Mount had been well learned, carried with me to this day.
At the reception, I looked over the group. Catching my eye were both Connolly and Morris, the two of them unusually sitting apart. Connolly in his flamingo tuxedo gabbing with table partners and seeming to lead the conversation, as was his custom. Morris was seated at a separate table in a dark suit, demur and quiet. Neither of them looked happy, making them stand out amid the revelry, and I was glad even for that small token of payback.
I thought about the reception dinner at the North End in Boston after the Angiulo takedown. My informant, Frankie, had thrown a party for the members of my squad and we had reveled in the excitement of being on top of the world. And on the night of my marriage to my beloved Jane I was on top of the world again, and no one, least of all John Connolly and John Morris, was going to bring me down.
Our honeymoon to Ireland continued the excitement. We traveled through our ancestral turf with Jane reading to me about the Troubles while I negotiated the troubles of the narrow Irish roads. We dropped into a dif
ferent pub each day for “beer and soup,” reminiscing about the Ireland of old. From there, we sailed through Limerick, Galway, Tipperary before venturing into Northern Ireland, the seat of the Troubles. We made it in fine, but getting out was a problem. The resistance and tension of the North was unmistakable. I thought back to my teaching days at the Academy, when I taught a course on hostage negotiation to the RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. It was a unique experience because there were Irish Catholics in the class, a rarity in the mostly Protestant or British RUC. My course involved tactics and negotiation when dealing with hostage takers. The Protestants thought this was blarney, as the RUC had a much more severe approach toward the Catholic troubles.
Back in Boston, I had met the head of the Gardai, the police force of the Republic of Ireland, and knew a little something about how things were handled in Ireland, both North and South. Jane and I shared the history in what had become a major conflagration of fighting forces, the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Defense Force and other groups. We laughed at how there were two prominent flags in my Boston FBI office: the U.S. flag and the tricolor flag of Ireland. It reminded me of the Irish mob back home and their internecine warfare and fights with the Italian mafia, a microcosm of the trouble abroad.
Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down Page 16
