Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down

by Robert Fitzpatrick

  In unspoken terms, that was what was expected of me in Boston. In presenting me as a candidate for Boston, Tom Kelly used Miami as proof of the trust in which I was held to solve problems, and Roy McKinnon agreed I was the perfect man for the job. But Boston presented a different set of problems. Things had gone too far and deteriorated too much to be dealt with aboveboard, as had been the case down in Florida. Weldon Kennedy, my predecessor as ASAC in Boston, wrote in his August 6, 1980, memo that “the FBI and more specifically John Morris and members of the C-3 squad have furnished information of a sensitive nature to organized crime elements in the Boston area.”

  I may have been the right man for the job, but I see now that HQ never intended to close Bulger as an informant; if they had, they would’ve done so before I arrived on the scene. It wasn’t that they didn’t know what was going on, as is often professed to this day; everyone knew. Colonel O’Donovan’s dogged pursuit of Bulger and Flemmi, as by far the most heinous and dangerous gangsters in the city, confirmed that much at least, along with the fact that their informant status was a badly kept secret. Later years would see the blame cast on a single rogue agent, John Connolly, whose performance, while reprehensible, represented just one spoke in a much larger wheel that churned through the Justice Department without any of the truth sticking.

  Jeremiah O’Sullivan worked for the DOJ, so DOJ knew. Connolly’s supervisor, Morris, knew; SAC Sarhatt knew; the U.S. attorney knew; the district attorney knew; Boston police knew; and, of course, Massachusetts State Police knew. They all knew that Bulger and Flemmi had committed at least a dozen murders, including at least one informant (Richie Castucci) by that point, and yet Bulger and Flemmi weren’t arrested. They survived and even prospered, and they did all this despite the fact that they were ineffective informants.

  You’ll never close Bulger.

  John Morris’s prediction to me after I told him my intentions following my one and only face-to-face with Whitey had become prophetic indeed. It was more than bravado talking. It was cold reason. My hands had been tied from the beginning, and as I neared my end in Boston, it all became clear, right down to James Greenleaf’s appointment as SAC. Since I was no longer toeing the line in the wake of the Halloran and Callahan murders, Greenleaf’s job, I believe, was to rein me in by whatever means were necessary.

  In the aftermath of the Cape Cod incident, he took any number of punitive steps meant to embarrass and isolate me. First off, I was denied the opportunity to make an oral or written reply to the original charges levied against me over the shooting. Nor was I permitted to add testimony and additional mitigating factors. I was then told I could no longer participate in the Bureau’s physical exercise program and was cut off from primary organized crime responsibilities even though I was handling major undercover operations at the time, including one against Billy Bulger, Whitey’s pol brother. Greenleaf’s intent was, it seemed, to cut me off from my squads as much as possible and render me a pariah in the office. This in spite of the accolades I had received for the many successful cases I’d made over the past four years, from arresting Angiulo to taking down the Hells Angels executioner, and many more.

  Then, in mid-December of 1985, a report from Attorney Rogers from the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that there was “no wrongdoing or criminal intent on the part of ASAC Fitzpatrick to deceive, cover up or omit details” in my reporting on the Cape Cod incident. This represented a Department of Justice edict, and by all rights and reason should’ve been the end of things. It turned out to be quite the opposite when Greenleaf introduced the notion and term “criminality” with regards to my reporting on the shooting.

  Criminality? I couldn’t make up a more ludicrous story. Even the Director himself, William Webster, wrote to the Bureau’s general counsel, John Mintz, that he was “satisfied from your review and from my own cursory review of the record that this was not an instance of fictionalizing interviews.” In the same letter Webster went so far as to recommend SAC Greenleaf be reprimanded but not censured, over the Cape Cod shooting incident. In spite of all this, I was never given the opportunity to air my accusations against Greenleaf. Nor to my knowledge was any investigation ever conducted regarding them. Greenleaf had HQ’s ear in the form of Sean McWeeney and John Otto, and HQ was deaf to the truth behind what was going on in Boston that I could have provided. Taking my side against his, no matter the right and wrong involved, would have upset the Bureau, as would closing Bulger and Flemmi when they should have been closed. The hole the Bureau was digging just kept getting deeper.

  The ensuing months passed in a blur that I only vaguely recall to this day. Despite the fact that I’d been cleared of the charges by the Director himself, the allegations continued to fester, rumors spreading of the actions Greenleaf intended to take against me with the apparent acquiescence of HQ in Washington. I was going to be transferred, demoted, suspended, or fired. It varied by the day, perhaps according to Greenleaf’s whims and appetite for unjust retaliation. Agents who could and did try to offer the facts that would have exonerated me were bullied, intimidated, or ignored. Agent Paul Cavanaugh apologized profusely and offered to stand up for the truth. But word was out that to stand up for me was to stand against SAC Greenleaf, who was backed up by Washington.

  Agent James Trout, the actual “shooter” in the Cape Cod incident, was convinced a cover-up was taking place, since all the reporting he provided was ignored. A seasoned field agent who’d been in dangerous undercover situations before, Trout felt that the additional HQ investigation was a gross waste of money for FBIHQ, given the fact that the shooting incident had resulted in neither a fatality or wounding with the suspect captured as a direct result of his actions. Paul Cavanaugh was convinced the Bureau was out to get both me and Trout. He claimed that the inspectors who interviewed him were deceitful and misleading, going as far as to insist to me that they “covered the FD-302 report so he could see only the bottom line.”

  I fought the spurious charges by filing a formal complaint with the United States Merit Systems Protection Board, the ultimate arbiter in such matters, in June 1986. In response to the question “Why do you think the agency was wrong in taking this action?,” I wrote three answers: that I wasn’t guilty; that I’d been denied due process by never having been given the opportunity to make an oral reply to the charges made against me; and that the charges had been brought against me in retaliation for being a whistle-blower. I had officially been removed as ASAC on March 6, 1986, and asked the board, in view of my exoneration by the Director himself, that I be reinstated to both my former position and pay grade, and that all Bureau records of any indications that the action ever occurred be purged. It only seemed fair.

  The board agreed and, as a result, the Bureau offered me a compromise. Since it was clear I couldn’t work under James Greenleaf anymore, they offered me the ASAC position in Omaha, Nebraska. But my wife Jane was pregnant and had built a great career for herself as director of nursing at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. All the moving around had already cost me one marriage and I didn’t want it to cost me another. So I rejected the Bureau’s offer and asked instead that I be reassigned to Providence as a “brick” agent, the same rank I’d held during the Martin Luther King investigation.

  To its credit, the FBI acquiesced, but, since Providence was a satellite office of Boston, I continued to be approached by Boston agents complaining of continued corruption and leaking. My five-year war to bring down Bulger and clean up the office had taken its toll. The FBI had been part of my life for nearly forty years—first as a dream born of an old FBI radio show, then as a goal, and finally as a dream come true. Everything in my life from an extraordinarily early age had been about first becoming an agent and then being the best agent I could be. I had been involved in the Bombings in Mississippi investigation, the Martin Luther King assassination conspiracy in Memphis, and the ABSCAM corruption conspiracy in Miami, and come through all of them with flying colors. But none of them riva
led the conspiracy I confronted in Boston. To stand behind me would have been to concede the corruption that dominated the office. To stand behind Greenleaf was to cling futilely to a standard of honor that had been darkened by Paul Rico and Dennis Condon and then blackened by John Connolly and John Morris.

  I could have stayed in Providence, but every man has a breaking point and I’d reached mine. So early in 1987 I tendered my resignation from the Bureau in bittersweet fashion, feeling I’d left too much undone.

  Because here’s the real rub. With all these crosshairs trained on me, a public corruption case against Billy Bulger floundered and finally collapsed under the weight of leaks.

  And nobody seemed to care.

  Whitey Bulger continued to consolidate his hold on power, murdering at will and whim.

  And nobody seemed to care.

  In late February 1986, as I was getting ready to pack my bags for Providence, Jerry Angiulo was found guilty for the RICO violations on which I arrested him. Not a single shred of evidence or information furnished by Bulger was ever entered at trial.

  The end came for me, in ironic counterpoint, around the same time an FBI Special Agent testified that he ignored evidence that Boston city workers had built guardrails on private property around a South Boston liquor store “controlled” by James “Whitey” Bulger. Why had the agent ignored such an egregious example of public corruption?

  Because John Connolly reminded him that Bulger was “an indispensable informant.”

  24

  BOSTON AND PROVIDENCE, 1987

  “Fitz, there’s not a more honorable thing in this world you could do.”

  I wonder now what Father Kenny at the Mount would make of my departure from the Bureau. It wasn’t dramatic or emotional really. I typed a series of letters to the appropriate parties to deal with retirement and pension issues, letters devoid of any inkling of the painful narrative that had taken me to this point. I had brought a cardboard box to pack my personal items, but hadn’t been in Providence long enough to accumulate many, so the box still had plenty of space when I carried it to my car.

  Another crucial part of the settlement agreement I’d reached with the Bureau was that my record and file be expunged so none of the false allegations stemming from the Cape Cod shooting incident could ever come back to haunt me in private life. I would later be told by a close source in the Bureau that Greenleaf had been formally reprimanded for pursuing charges against me stemming from the Cape Cod shooting incident. And by the time I turned in my retirement papers he’d already been transferred out of Boston and replaced as SAC by James Ahearn.

  I shed no tears, cast no fond gazes back toward the Providence building which held my office. The pain was still there, reduced to a dull, persistent ache over how my efforts to do the job I’d been sent to Boston to do had been thwarted at every turn.

  Ironically enough, a report issued by the President’s Commission on Organized Crime that characterized Whitey as “a killer and crime boss” was issued shortly after I left the Boston office in 1986. Enough to consider closing Bulger as an informant, according to established DOJ and FBI guidelines. I suppose my former colleagues had missed reading it, or perhaps they figured they could run the commission members out of town, too.

  But I took some solace in the notion of moving on, of turning my back at last on a phase of my life that held so many raw, angry memories. My many accomplishments seemed small consolation at that point. I thought in time that might change, that I’d learn to live with the betrayal experience and learn to put it behind me.

  I was wrong.

  Several years after my resignation from the Bureau, the federal government appointed Billy Brown, a former assistant U.S. attorney and current Boston lawyer, to counsel me during the many trials and depositions that resulted from the Bulger fiasco in court. It took Brownie a while to come around to the fact that I was actually telling the truth and not embellishing it at all. I can’t really blame him, not when you consider the enormity of my accusations and the mere thought that an organization as storied as the FBI could possibly have let things spiral so out of control.

  When it finally dawned on him that I was a man to be trusted and everything I was telling him was true, Brownie said, “You know, Fitz, in many ways, what happened in the Boston office is the same thing that happened in the religious scandal with priests abusing children in Boston. Just like Cardinal Law’s hierarchy turned a deaf ear to what was going on, so did the FBI.”

  “Brownie,” I told him, “it was different. Believe me. The complaints were so widespread and coming from the Staties, the Boston cops, the DEA, and even from inside our own office. It was useful for the FBI to pretend ignorance; I mean, after all, if you don’t know, you can’t be blamed for doing nothing.”

  As 1987 dawned, I looked ahead with a combination of excitement and trepidation. My wife Jane’s support, in the face of her own career issues, was vital. Because of that, along with a desire to prove worthy of her faith, I got my PI (private investigator) license. I never saw myself following deadbeats and shooting pictures of men or women carrying on affairs to use in divorce proceedings. Fortunately, my considerable contacts in law enforcement allowed me to pursue higher-profile cases in the areas of corporate espionage, professional protection, security consulting, and fraud investigation. Some of these cases eerily mirrored my work in the Public Corruption arena with the FBI, like the Pete Rose baseball case I worked for Major League Baseball. Rose had been caught up in a gambling scandal and I wrote a report outlining how I’d found evidence that he had bet on himself in games. It was quite an investigation and grabbed the headlines for a time. I was finally leaving the past behind me.

  But not for long.

  In my new role as a private investigator, I got a call from a client who wanted information concerning Whitey’s brother Billy, the still all-powerful president of the Massachusetts State Senate, and possible payoffs he may have gotten in the infamous 75 State Street scandal. Through sleuthing and contacts I managed to locate an account linked to something called St. Botolph Realty Trust that had made out two six-figure checks totaling nearly a half million dollars (as also reported in Black Mass) to Bulger for “a loan in anticipation of a legal fee.”

  I still wanted to see justice done and called John Morris, not knowing he was in trouble himself. Since John headed up the corruption case in the FBI, I gave him the information that I felt would have subjected Billy Bulger once and for all to a public corruption charge, or at least provide Morris with “probable cause” that a crime had been committed.

  Morris and acting U.S. attorney Jeremiah O’Sullivan formed the team that would ultimately affirm or decline prosecution in the investigation. I felt certain that I had given them the smoking gun and eagerly waited to see the news in the Globe; I just wanted justice done and didn’t care who received credit. But I was astounded to learn that O’Sullivan was declining prosecution on Billy, immediately recalling the same kind of inexplicable behavior that had characterized his treatment of Whitey in years past. I called Morris and was stunned to hear him stonewall me with nonresponsive answers to my questions. In retrospect, I’m glad it was a telephone conversation and we weren’t in the same room together.

  “What the fuck, John?”

  “Look, I can’t do anything. This was O’Sullivan’s decision entirely. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Nothing to do with it? You’re the one I brought it to.”

  “Yeah, but it’s O’Sullivan’s jurisdiction and his call. I gotta follow his lead.”

  I was steaming. “This whole thing’s gonna break sooner or later, John, and when it does it’ll be on your head.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You really think you can get away with this shit forever?”

  No less an authority than Alan Dershowitz later wrote that “Billy got a free pass from prosecution for extortion after he received a quarter of a million dollars from the developer of 75 State
Street, when the acting U.S. attorney [Jeremiah O’Sullivan] on the case just happened to be the only Justice Department lawyer in on the Connolly-Whitey secret.”

  In July 1988, shortly after the Bureau and Department of Justice, through O’Sullivan, failed to act on the intelligence I’d given them, Dick Lehr from the Boston Globe called, saying that he wanted to talk to me about the Bulger affair. He knew I had been Morris’s boss and that I’d overseen the Organized Crime and Public Corruption squads in the past. Lehr drove to my house in Rhode Island and we went for a walk on the beach. The day was muggy and overcast and, more important, the beach was empty. I was rather abrasive with Lehr because he had intimated that he had gotten my name from someone who said I knew the whole story.

  Walking alongside him on the beach that day, I really didn’t know what I was going to say at first. Then I figured I’d just stick with the most simple and basic: I’d tell the truth. So I spent the next several hours laying things out for Lehr, about how Whitey Bulger was a liability who’d never given the FBI any information of substance, especially regarding the Angiulo mob my squad had brought down. I told him the very notion of having an organized crime kingpin as an informant went against every tenet of smart law enforcement. Because, I explained to Lehr, you never own the top guy. He always owns you. Just like he owned John Connolly and John Morris and proceeded to corrupt virtually the entire Boston office. Washington had chosen sides as soon as they named James Greanleaf SAC in 1982. Bulger was their guy now, too.