Black Mass

by Dick Lehr

  JOHN CONNOLLY was worried. Green was the first big bend in the Whitey Bulger highway. But priorities were priorities, so Connolly quickly set out to ensure that the case would never leave the Organized Crime Squad where he worked.

  Two agents from the squad did some perfunctory poking around. The agents, both of whom worked side by side with Connolly in the close-knit squad, interviewed Francis Green. They even visited Delahunt and wrote down what he knew.

  Then they wrote up a report and put it in the FBI files. And that was the end of it. In about a year the agents asked their boss for permission to officially close the case against Bulger, noting that Green was reluctant to testify against him. Local prosecutors had heard that Connolly had conducted an interview in the case and asked for a copy of his report, but the FBI denied it had taken place and said there was no paperwork.

  In the years to come a similar pattern would emerge about witness “reluctance.” Time and again John Connolly and his colleagues would talk to a potential witness against Bulger and come back to the office and throw up their hands—the once promising person was now reluctant to cooperate. Or reluctant to testify. Or reluctant to wear a wire. And what was an agent supposed to do if the witness was so reluctant? Time and again leads went nowhere, and it was a pattern that began with Francis Green’s “reluctance.” Eventually Green would testify for federal prosecutors in an unrelated public corruption case, but no one ever contrasted his willingness in that case to his reluctance in the Bulger matter. Instead, once inside the FBI the extortion case had found its way to the back of a file cabinet. It would be the first of many.

  GIVEN the fast pace and short memory of law enforcement, the Green case drifted unnoticed into limbo. Bulger backed off Green because of the heat, while Delahunt assumed that the FBI was pursuing the issue. It would be months before the district attorney realized that nothing had been done on an easily made case.

  About a year after the initial contact, Delahunt ran into the top federal prosecutor, Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan, at a social function. Whatever happened with that Green thing? Delahunt asked him. “We checked it out, but there was nothing there,” he told Delahunt.

  Delahunt shrugged and thought, Okay, that happens. “And I meant it,” Delahunt said later. “Cases don’t work out.”

  But this one gnawed at him because, every time he thought about it, things didn’t compute. A district attorney as a witness who could put notorious gangsters at the scene. An owner’s compelling testimony. Why hadn’t the FBI picked up the ball and run hard with it against the infamous Bulger and Flemmi?

  Five years would go by before some answers began to crystallize for Delahunt. Over time his office’s relations with the Boston FBI would sour. Tensions between different police agencies and different prosecutors’ offices were not uncommon. It came with the turf, in Boston or in any jurisdiction. But this was different.

  First came a sensational murder case that Delahunt’s office got involved with not long after the Green matter was turned over to the FBI in early 1977. To solve the murder case and locate the bodies of two eighteen-year-old women from Quincy, Delahunt and his state police investigators cut a deal with an informant by the name of Myles Connor. Connor was a vicious con man who had a high IQ and a long history of trouble. He was a rock musician and an accomplished art thief and drug dealer. His past included a 1966 shoot-out with a state trooper who was badly injured. Even in the venal world of informants, Connor was a mixed bag of trouble. But he knew where the bodies were buried.

  Nonetheless, cutting a deal with Connor was controversial, both inside Delahunt’s office and beyond. The FBI was enraged because Delahunt, to win Connor’s help, had negotiated his early release from prison. Even though with Connor’s help Delahunt would find the bodies of the missing women and then convict the murderer at a trial in 1978, the FBI angrily challenged the district attorney’s unholy alliance. It was the FBI that had put Connor behind bars on a stolen art conviction. FBI agent John Connolly himself began urging the U.S. attorney to investigate what role, if any, Connor had in the grisly murders. Eventually Connor was charged with planning the killings. He went to trial and was convicted, an outcome that was overturned on appeal. During the subsequent retrial Connor was acquitted.

  Delahunt had known that cutting a deal with Connor would prove controversial. Key staff in his own office, whose judgment he relied on daily, had told him as much. But he’d had no idea the situation would explode into the open warfare that followed, with angry exchanges in court-rooms, in the newspapers and on television, and in more sinister ways that would have seemed unimaginable at the start.

  Some of the warfare got personal. One day John Connolly contacted one of Delahunt’s top assistants, John Kivlan. The young prosecutor was known to have had reservations about using Connor as an informant. Connolly called Kivlan and set up a lunch date. Kivlan showed up thinking the FBI agent wanted to discuss another murder investigation. But quickly Connolly began asking a lot of questions about Delahunt and the deal he’d cut with Connor. The FBI agent was especially curious to know if Delahunt and the state police had believed that Connor was guilty of the murders but had given him a pass anyway to bask in the glory and publicity that came with recovering the bodies.

  “It wasn’t long,” Kivlan said later, “before I realized the lunch was about getting some dirt on Bill.”

  Kivlan was taken aback by Connolly’s overture. “I thought to myself, ‘He must think everyone is an informer,’” Kivlan recalled. “I guess he thought my concerns would amount to trading information with him. It was a short lunch.”

  Looking back, and long after telling Delahunt about the bizarre encounter with Connolly, Kivlan would wonder if the rabid battle between Delahunt’s office and Connolly’s FBI was less about Connor and more about Bulger. In any case, when Connolly could have been busy fighting crime, he was spending much of his time in a down-and-dirty public relations battle. In fact, crime fighting was becoming less of a clear-cut priority for the young agent from South Boston.

  DELAHUNT had limped away from the bruising encounter with the FBI over using Myles Connor as an informant, chewed up in the FBI public relations maw. He was publicly chided by federal officials for using an informant who was involved in the kinds of crimes he was giving information about. By and large, the media sided with the FBI, mostly on the strength of John Connolly’s personal ties with reporters at the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald and with some television reporters. Indeed, Connolly was fast becoming a public relations maven and a talented improviser with the truth. Garrulous and engaging, he was breaking free of the grim, button-down G-man persona, a welcome change from the aloof, stone-faced demeanor of most federal agents. Connolly not only occasionally talked to reporters but regularly courted them.

  But this was early on, and there were only a few within law enforcement who suspected the FBI was tilting Bulger’s way. Delahunt was one of them, but he had learned there was a price to pay for confronting the Boston FBI. It was hardball. And being Boston, it was personal.

  In 1980 a rumor took hold that Delahunt had had an affair with a waitress from Quincy that ended badly, with a door broken at her apartment and raised voices overheard by neighbors. The media heard about it, and one television reporter began calling the woman. The calls continued for the next two years, and each time the woman was urged to take Delahunt to court and go on air for an interview. But each time the woman said there was no case, that there was nothing to the rumor, “not a speck of truth.” If any of it were true, she said, “Delahunt would not be DA today, believe me.”

  But the media weren’t the only parties interested in the rumors. Two FBI agents showed up at the restaurant in Quincy one day in late 1982 asking for the waitress. The chef told the agents she didn’t work there anymore. The agents took down some notes, thanked the chef, and left. They never called again.

  Then there was the call the woman got in January 1983. It was from a man in her past. She later descr
ibed the old friend to local police as “someone on the other side.”

  The two met for a drink in a Quincy lounge. The friend, Stevie Flemmi, shocked the woman by knowing about the Delahunt rumor. Flemmi really just wanted to know one thing—was it true?

  No, it wasn’t, the woman said one more time. Stevie never called again either.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bob ’n’ Weave

  The Boston FBI was convinced it needed Bulger and Flemmi, and Paul Rico, Dennis Condon, and John Connolly were going to make the match work, even if it meant dispensing with the Frank Greens of the world, and even if it meant juggling three regulatory hot potatoes—the FBI manual of operations, the attorney general’s guidelines for handling criminal informants, and federal criminal statutes. Luckily for them, Rico had fashioned a “unique” style in his approach to the messy business of managing informants and had set the tone for other handlers in Boston: rules were made to be broken.

  It was all worth it, they believed, to get at the Mafia. Throughout the United States the FBI’s field offices were under great pressure to develop informants of a certain kind—top echelon informants—to wage war against the mob. Much of the pressure was fallout from how embarrassingly late the FBI had been in acknowledging the Mafia. The problem had been J. Edgar Hoover’s intransigence. He preferred piling up statistics on bank robberies and hunting down Communists to taking a hard look at evidence of the Mafia’s existence.

  For instance, in November 1957 Mafia leaders convening in the upstate New York town of Apalachin became front-page news after a New York State Police sergeant stumbled upon the invitation-only event. Troopers set up a roadblock, and the Mafia delegates arriving from around the country were sent scurrying, some jumping from their cars and running into the woods. Others took refuge inside the hilltop mansion of their host, beer distributor Joseph Barbara. More than sixty mobsters were eventually rounded up and identified, many flush with wads of cash. The roster included figures from the Mafia’s hall of fame: Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, and Vito Genovese. The FBI did nothing.

  Two years later, on December 8, 1959, a larger group gathered closer to Boston, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The estimated 150 Mafia figures sneaked into the city, assembled at a downtown hotel, held all-night meetings, and then slipped away at dawn before any significant detection could occur. The news media and many experts in crime called these assemblies proof of a national criminal enterprise, an “invisible government,” that was meeting to set policy and solve disputes. But Hoover dismissed it as hype and media sensationalism.

  Only after Robert F. Kennedy became U.S. attorney general in 1960 did the FBI, slowly but steadily, move to take on the so-called enemy within. By the time of the historic public testimony of Mafia informant Joseph Valachi, during congressional hearings in 1963, the FBI was officially catching up. In cities around the country special FBI units were created to focus on La Cosa Nostra. In Boston, Dennis Condon and Paul Rico were among the handful of agents picked to staff the city’s first-ever Organized Crime Squad.

  The agents hit the street trying to figure out the scope and the power of the New England Mafia underboss Gennaro J. Angiulo, while Kennedy’s Justice Department in Washington, D.C., worked to beef up the legal tools available in the new national war.

  In 1961 Congress had passed legislation, at Kennedy’s behest, that elevated much of the Mafia’s criminal activity to federal status. Interstate travel in aid of racketeering, known as ITAR, now came under federal jurisdiction, meaning that the previously local crimes of extortion, bribery, gambling, and the interstate movement of gambling paraphernalia were within federal reach.

  Later on, in 1968, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. The act’s Title III set up procedures to obtain court approval for the use of electronic surveillance against mobsters. The new legislation signaled a relaxation in privacy rights, but the government viewed it as necessary, as the kind of trade-off between personal liberty and state power that had to be allowed, it was argued, if police agencies were to have a fighting chance in their efforts to break open conspiracies like the Mafia’s. Eventually the so-called Title III bugs were put to stunningly good use by the FBI in a series of major cases that toppled Mafia leaders in many cities in the United States, including Boston.

  In 1970 Congress passed a law that eventually became the government’s most powerful weapon against organized crime. The Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known simply as RICO, would be used in nearly every major prosecution against the Mafia during the 1980s. RICO made operating a criminal racket, for the first time, a major federal criminal offense carrying huge prison sentences. If the government could prove a pattern of racketeering—that is, show that the mobster was involved in several existing state and federal offenses—then the heavy RICO sanctions kicked in. The RICO penalties were not something mobsters took lightly. Instead of the softer sentencing that often accompanied a separate conviction for gambling or loan-sharking, the government began to win terms of twenty years and more.

  Finally, the organized crime strike forces created during the 1970 quickly assumed command in the anti-Mafia crusade. The commonsense idea behind the regional strike forces was to pool the resources of the various law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, along with local police agencies. The representatives from the different agencies then joined with federal prosecutors as a team in an organized, multipronged attack against their specific target, the Mafia.

  But for all the statutory enhancements, the anti-Mafia crusade was still going to be won or lost in the streets, and the best tool FBI agents possessed on that front was the criminal informant. “The way you solve crime, 99 percent of it is when people tell you what happened,” John Connolly once explained in a Boston radio interview. “I mean, every director of the FBI has said that informants are our most important resource.”

  Indeed.

  “Without informants, we’re nothing,” Clarence M. Kelley said after being named the new FBI director following J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972. The reason was simple: the police cannot be everywhere, and when investigators look to solve crimes they do not possess unchecked power to search and interrogate suspects and citizens. In a bid to fill in intelligence gaps, a police agency finds that informants are the essential tool—the eyes and ears of the police. Police agencies’ reliance on informants developed as a partial solution to limitations on police power in the United States.

  Like every FBI agent back in the 1970s, John Connolly knew full well the enormous value the bureau placed on cultivating informants. The message was drummed into rookie agents training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia: develop informants and win prestige. Later on, agents at work in the field saw that informant handlers were regarded as rain-makers. The FBI’s own manual reinforced in no uncertain terms a handler’s high-class status: working informants was the ultimate—a “source of great satisfaction because of the accomplishments which are obtained as a result of their successful operation.” In fact, compared to the numbingly dry prose of the rest of the FBI’s lengthy Manual of Investigative Operations and Guidelines (MIOG), the dramatic language used to cheer on agents regarding informants borders on the breathless. Operating informants, the manual proclaimed, “demands more of an agent than almost any other investigative activity. An agent’s judgment, skill, resourcefulness, and patience are tested constantly.” The work required “dedication and ingenuity. The success each agent enjoys normally depends on the strength of the agent’s personality and resourcefulness.” Not every agent had the knack for it. But an agent who established a reputation as a handler could achieve several aims simultaneously: advance an FBI investigation, impress the bosses, and dramatically shift upward the trajectory of his own status. In training agents and in fieldwork, the FBI culture made it clear that the working of informants was center stage.

  Just about the only cautionary
note amid the froth in the manual reflects longtime director J. Edgar Hoover’s obsession with the bureau’s public image. FBI agents, above all else, were never to shame the FBI, a commandment that covered their work with criminal informants. FBI handlers were not to sponsor an informant until they were “convinced that the potential informant [could] be operated without danger of embarrassment.”

  In early 1976 Bulger reported to Connolly about business meetings between the Winter Hill gang and the Mafia’s Larry Zannino and Joe Russo. In March 1976 Bulger reported that underboss Angiulo had sent an emissary to Winter Hill in Somerville “in an attempt to establish contact with Stevie Flemmi.” The continued Mafia courtship of Flemmi was good for relations between the two criminal outfits—and good for the FBI. Bulger added that there was word that gang leader Howie Winter was going to meet with Angiulo, and then godfather Patriarca, “to create a better relationship.” Later in 1976 Bulger told Connolly about the betting lines his gang and the Mafia had agreed to so that bookmakers for the respective organizations were working in sync.

  Flemmi served a key role in all of the Bulger-Connolly meetings, given his easy access to Angiulo, Zannino, and the rest of the Mafia crew. Flemmi passed along what he picked up to Bulger, who would pass it along to Connolly. Bulger’s reports were flavored with underworld tidbits —who was meeting with whom, who was mad at whom, who wanted to whack whom. For example, he told Connolly that a senior Mafia associate had faked a heart attack to avoid a federal grand jury subpoena. In April 1976 Bulger passed along a tip about a murder in an attempt to direct attention away from an enforcer who worked for him, Nick Femia. Bulger told Connolly: “Nick Femia had nothing to do with the hit of Patsy Fabiano.” Despite his earlier insistence that he would never inform about the Irish, Bulger regularly reported to Connolly about the jockeying of various Irish gangsters in his own South Boston.