The bull had broken free of the barn and was running loose in the China shop, and now the FBI and Justice Department were about to be called in for a reckoning.
What followed through much of 1998 in Judge Wolf’s courtroom was a virtual parade of the rogue’s gallery responsible for the entire sham. Everyone from Dennis Condon, who had gotten the ball rolling, to John Morris, who had kept it going through the years, to forty-four more witnesses, who took the witness stand—everyone shed a different light on the business the Bureau had been doing in the dark. Among those not to testify at all or only briefly, this time anyway, was Jeremiah O’Sullivan, who’d recently suffered a heart attack. Since this had long been a classic mafiosa ploy to avoid court, O’Sullivan became the inside joke while nonetheless being spared the questioning that would have revealed either his incompetence or possible treachery in protecting Bulger at every turn.
Meanwhile, the rats fled the sinking ship and began to consume each other. Connolly turned on Morris, Morris turned on Connolly, and Connolly turned on everyone except himself. Even loyalist John Martorano, fresh from hearing testimony that Bulger and Flemmi had given him up to the feds, redefined his own code by ratting out those who’d first ratted him out. His philosophy said it was okay to rat on a rat. But he did two extra years in prison instead of cueing the feds to the truth about his brother and Pat Nee, and they received more lenient sentences as a result.
All I could think of was how so much of it could’ve been avoided if Larry Sarhatt and HQ had simply acted on my recommendation to close Bulger as an informant in 1981. The lives that could have been spared, the embarrassment that could have been avoided …
Don’t embarrass the Bureau.
From my perspective, one especially revealing exchange on this subject took place once Stephen Flemmi took the stand to be examined by a frustrated, fuming U.S. attorney, Fred Wyshak.
“You had a good thing going,” Wyshak said at one point. “You were committing crimes at will, putting money in your pockets, and, in your view, being protected from prosecution.”
“You’re forgetting one thing, Mr. Wyshak,” Flemmi replied. “The LCN was taken down. That was the FBI’s main goal. They were completely satisfied with that. We fulfilled our bargain.”
“Do you think, Mr. Flemmi, that you and Mr. Bulger single-handedly took the LCN down?”
“I’ll tell you something, Mr. Wyshak, we did a hell of a job.”
“That’s what you think?”
“I think we did. The FBI thought we did.”
“And when the FBI did that, you and Mr. Bulger were top dogs in town, weren’t you?”
Flemmi, dejected, said, “I’ll assert the Fifth on that.”
26
BOSTON, 1998
As I sat down with the Strike Force attorney in a preliminary interview on the morning the Wolf hearings began in 1998, I was apprehensive and wary. Why had the Department of Justice scheduled this interview so late and what could I tell them in this short time period? I had already provided Wyshak’s team with other dates and times for an appointment, but they didn’t seem responsive. The government’s Strike Force attorney, James Herbert, greeted me cordially, skipping the usual pleasantries that preclude opening questioning. We opened with my tenure at the FBI Boston office and I named the characters involved. My apprehension in discussing Connolly and Morris and the whole corruption angle proved justified when Herbert flipped his pencil in the air, shaking his head and muttering something to the effect that he would never finish in time.
“Was it something I said?” I asked him.
“No,” he abjectly responded, “it’s just that we’ve run out of time.”
“Are you pissed at me?” I asked, sensing his sudden tension.
He had a sullen look on his face underlying an even deeper hurt. Something serious was bothering him, but I was in no position to understand what. He apologized and then, obviously upset and writhing with indignation, left the room to head for his opening day in court. Connolly’s pals had clearly bad-mouthed me to him, and I think Herbert had begun to see that, contrary to what he might have heard, I was telling the truth and that many others in the Bureau had lied to him.
My interview with James Herbert indicated that the prosecutors didn’t have a grasp of how deep this went, even as the hearing was about to begin. Fred Wyshak had built a bookmaking case in masterful fashion. But the tentacles around the bookies inevitably reached out into murder and corruption inside the FBI. There was no way to separate one from the other. Bulger and Flemmi were literally joined at the hip to Connolly and Morris. I realize now that my answers must have scared the hell out of James Herbert and he couldn’t wrap his arms around the breadth of what I was telling him.
The prosecutors, I believe, were caught totally off guard by that and the contents of Bulger’s FBI files. No one outside the Bureau had ever seen them before and the portrait of corruption they painted was utterly devastating.
Remember, the purpose of the Wolf hearings was to resolve a very complex issue of law; specifically, whether Bulger (his disappearance was a point of fact, not law) and Flemmi were going to be allowed to testify in the Salemme trial based on their status as informants. And now the prosecutors saw me as a guy who might not be in their camp. I’d already sat down with the other side—Salemme’s lawyer, Kenneth Fishman—as a matter of course, and Wyshak’s team must have thought they had reason to believe I was willing and able to blow their case up.
When my day and a half in the witness box finally came, I had to recollect the years of past investigations while manager of the FBI Boston field office and cases where leaks emanated from the information collected. Ken Fishman, who also represented Flemmi, grilled me on the stand about the administration of the FBI office and about Bulger’s status in relation to his handler Connolly. By the time I took the stand, there had already been much testimony related to Connolly’s “control” of Bulger and Flemmi as informants and subsequent complaints that had been made against Connolly for leaking info to the OC wiseguys.
“Did you ever report agents for leaking FBI information to criminals and others not supposed to receive this information?” Kenneth Fishman asked at one point.
A nervous titter ran through the courtroom gallery. I waited for it to die down before leaning in toward the microphone.
“Yes,” I replied.
Fishman then approached holding a document in his hand. He leaned in to ask me if I had ever bypassed my boss, SAC Greenleaf, to report such leaks directly to FBIHQ in Washington. In the dead quiet of the courtroom, I looked him square in the eye, feeling the gaze of Judge Wolf boring into me.
I felt nervous and my mouth was dry. I choked, “Yes,” yet again.
Fishman stepped back, surveyed the eerily quiet courtroom and then asked me to elaborate the details of this reporting. My heart was pounding when I explained in a low voice that I reported the SAC of Boston for leaking information that revealed an informant’s identity to a mob attorney. The gasps in the courtroom were palpable.
The prosecutor jumped to his feet, loudly objecting to my testimony. “The details of Mr. Fitzpatrick’s report of a leak are immaterial!”
The judge and the attorneys went silent again. The judge called for a sidebar conference out of earshot and subsequently prevented my further testimony. “So, the unchallenged testimony is that in one instance Mr. Fitzpatrick went over the head of the SAC to headquarters and complained about a leak, and we’re going to move on from here.”
That was it. The subject never came up during the Wolf hearings again. How could it? After all, the McIntyre file had never even been delivered to Judge Wolf. I was devastated. As originally reported to me by Tom McGeorge of my Public Corruption squad, Greenleaf’s alleged disclosure of information to mob and drug attorney Martin Boudreau, formerly of Jeremiah O’Sullivan’s Strike Force, if proven, represented a severe criminal violation. This should have been exactly the kind of information Judge Wolf wanted to hear. Ye
t once again, regardless of the scope of the Wolf hearings and Judge Wolf’s own good intentions, true justice was not served.
During subsequent trials and depositions, my memo accusing Greenleaf of disclosing information was submitted as evidence under the discovery rules of the federal court. This memo was furnished to the Director’s Office of the FBI, and to the DOJ through the Strike Force office at Boston.
Connolly would later be convicted for, among other things, leaking federal grand jury information. Greenleaf, however, escaped any punishment, or any recrimination whatsoever in the findings ultimately reached by Judge Wolf.
With Wolf about to release his ruling, Whitey Bulger was added to the FBI’s vaunted Ten Most Wanted list. The ruling itself ran 661 single-spaced pages, forming a chronological, blow-by-blow treatise on the entire blood-soaked era. While Wolf hadn’t gotten everything right by a long shot (he continued to extol Bulger’s and Flemmi’s value as informants), he came down hard on the leaking that I had reported throughout my tenure in the Boston office.
“In an effort to protect Bulger and Flemmi, Morris and Connolly also identified for them at least a dozen other individuals who were either FBI informants or sources for other law enforcement agencies,” the judge wrote, going on to say that, as a direct result of this, “Brian Halloran was killed.” He failed to mention any of the others.
As for the bombshell I’d lobbed regarding the then “disappearance” of informant John McIntyre, Wolf simply brushed aside the allegations, writing that “important FBI documents concerning John McIntyre were improperly withheld by agents of the Boston FBI until it was too late to question relevant witnesses concerning them.” His voluminous opinion went on to say John Connolly may have been informed “about McIntyre’s cooperation and claims and, in view [of] the Halloran matter, [there is] reason to be concerned that Connolly may have told Bulger and Flemmi. These issues cannot, however, be resolved on the present record.”
Diverting from the cop-out mentality that gave little weight to my testimony, Wolf aptly summed up the entire fiasco with a confirmation of “recurring irregularities with regard to the preparation, maintenance and production in the case of documents damaging to Bulger and Flemmi.” This finding was supplemented by Wolf’s conclusion that “Special Agent Paul Rico helped Stephen Flemmi escape the country before being prosecuted for a car bomb planted in defense attorney John Fitzgerald’s car and that Rico subsequently arranged to have the charges dropped.”
That the FBI had broken the rules was hardly news now; that a judge had issued a ruling, however incomplete, saying it had was something else again. The Bureau, long deemed beyond reproach, had gone down the wrong side of the road in spite of my best efforts to steer them right, and the price they would pay for that was just beginning.
Shortly after Judge Wolf issued his ruling, John Martorano struck a deal in which he admitted to killing twenty people, including Roger Wheeler and John Callahan, on orders from Bulger and Flemmi. The FBI’s sins I had known about for years were finally exposed for all to see. It was redemption in some small sense, but it produced no satisfaction in me. The vagaries of Wolf’s ruling left the recriminations against the Bureau as just that and no more.
“Prosecutors want to believe the system works,” Wyshak later stated in a Boston Magazine article in 2008. “I can’t say everybody who was responsible was brought to justice here, but the criminal justice system is served not only when people go to jail, but also when the wrongdoing is brought to light so that the public can see it.”
27
BOSTON, 1998
But much of the truth remained cloaked in darkness. Take the next chapter in my own battle with the Bureau. My departure, while contentious, was sealed based upon a “no reprisals” agreement, arrived at after complex negotiations, that included the expunging of my file so I would not face continued reprisal in my private life.
At least, it was supposed to be.
Shortly before the Wolf hearings began, I was representing a guy named John Parigian, who’d been accused of money laundering in federal court. My investigation, though, revealed accusations that the government had broken into his house, stolen his computer, and then charged him based on what they’d illegally found. Parigian had made allegations of government tampering, claiming that his computer had crashed with the hard drive being irrevocably damaged as a result of their tampering. That meant the evidence the government claimed they pulled off it, based on a falsely obtained search warrant, had been lost before they could’ve legally inspected the computer’s contents!
These allegations pissed off the government attorneys. What pissed them off more was my working on behalf of their target in my capacity as a former FBI agent. The government’s response: a threat to impeach me and my credibility based on the contents of my personnel file that was supposed to have been expunged in my settlement agreement with the FBI upon resigning back in 1987, over a decade before. The federal prosecutor made no secret he was out to demean my reputation, admitting in open courtroom discussion that “I recall that I asked the client’s lawyer whether I really had to get Fitzpatrick’s FBI file so that I could be prepared to impeach him and added, ‘I hear it’s a thick one!’” How could they use something that, for all intents and purposes, no longer existed?
Obviously my file had not been expunged; the FBI had broken their agreement with, and promise to, me.
Parigian had been a source of mine dating back to my days with the Bureau. He had given me information about Bulger and Flemmi’s involvement in offshore money laundering. His lawyer agreed to hire me because of my previous cases as a PI and the fact that, in his mind, I was a stand-up guy. Now I found the government was trying to use the old lies and smear tactics to destroy my client’s case in federal court.
I felt like I was stuck in some twisted version of the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, where I just kept reliving the same old Bureau bullshit. This all dated back to my accusing SAC Greenleaf of allegedly disclosing the identities of FBI informants to a mob attorney, a fact that was hardly in dispute based on the confidential memos in my possession. I’d broken the cardinal rule of embarrassing the Bureau and now that I was standing up to them again, they were up to their old tricks, trying to destroy my newfound career.
My exposure of corruption in the Boston office continued to haunt me and my family. According to her physician, my wife Jane miscarried as a direct result of stress. And I began suffering symptoms akin to post-traumatic stress disorder, later confirmed by physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital to be linked directly to the punitive retaliatory measures taken by the FBI.
And now here was the government attorney threatening me with impeachment, in front of my client, for reporting the FBI SAC for criminality associated with the alleged disclosure of information. More than ten years after I left the FBI I was still being slammed for doing my job. I realized that what I had hoped to be able to put behind me had come front and center again. The FBI had committed an egregious violation of our settlement agreement, leaving me no choice but to again bring suit before the MSPB, a veteran’s right in the Merit System Protection Bureau.
My case against the Bureau was about two things: showing serious corruption in the FBI for which a former FBI Director had publicly apologized, and insisting that the FBI remedy the effects of past corruption in addressing my problem. I put forth a prima facie argument of retribution and retaliation against me for trying to do my job faithfully in the face of corruption. The allegations were undisputed in court and were substantiated by my taking a polygraph, even as the stream of public revelations in the media and through other court testimony was emerging. I was able to show newly developed evidence in court that indicated undue pressure was applied by the FBI in the Cape Cod shooting incident, and I presented evidence of false and exaggerated statements that precipitated the action. I’d learn later that the FBI’s legal counsel withheld information in my court case because, “We believed it was appropriate to take fur
ther action in hiding exculpatory information.” Fidelity, bravery, and what?
Around the time of the Wolf hearings and ensuing court trials, improperly motivated charges were levied against me for something I’d already proven I didn’t do. That threat of impeachment in the Boston business environment eventually chopped off a major part of my business, including a potentially lucrative job with a Fortune 500 company. Finally, just when the government agreed to accept a just and fair resolution, the FBI reneged! I was under the impression that the current FBI was striving to correct injustices of previous leadership. I believed it capable of righting the past wrongs in achieving a fair and just resolution.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The apparent vindictiveness knew no bounds, especially for those who are perceived to have embarrassed the Bureau.
Back at the Wolf hearings, my attorney, Brownie, told me that the government could no longer interview me now that the hearing had begun. The law forbade it, even though it was obvious James Herbert, and Wyshak’s team, needed more information. Was it coincidence they’d waited until the last minute to interview me in the first place, essentially running out the clock? Was there something someone didn’t want Wyshak to know? Salemme’s attorneys had obtained my anticipated testimony and were in a better starting place as far as they were concerned. When questioning me about Morris, I had given them a book called Lying by Sissela Bok that Morris had given to me early into my Boston tenure. As I thumbed through it back then, I asked him, “Who’s the liar, John, you or me?”
The Wolf hearings would later reveal, through Morris’s own testimony under a grant of immunity, his pattern of lying and thievery in accepting bribe money from John Connolly and Whitey Bulger. I began to understand Strike Force attorney James Herbert’s frustration. While I believe his efforts were sincere, I similarly believe no one on the prosecution’s team had anticipated the depths of depravity they were about to encounter. I don’t believe DOJ or FBI had been happy about my anticipated testimony, as it would reveal a lot more than they were prepared to confront.
Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down Page 20
