by Dick Lehr
The next day at HoJo’s, on Friday, September 5, Femia caught the troopers’ attention when he tucked a small automatic handgun in his pocket before locking up his blue Malibu. Bulger and Flemmi pulled in, and then a short while later a gray Mercedes 450SL rolled into the lot. Driving the car was Mickey Caruana, who at forty-one was reputedly the biggest drug trafficker in New England. Caruana was the Mafia’s own drug kingpin, a brash high roller who answered to no one except Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the Providence-based godfather of New England. (In 1983 he would become a fugitive, fleeing a federal indictment for drug trafficking that charged him with netting $7.7 million between 1978 and 1981.) Bulger and Flemmi greeted Caruana. Femia stayed back while the three men went into the restaurant. The meeting lasted about ninety minutes. Outside, Bulger and Caruana shook hands heartily before splitting up.
It was all tantalizing stuff. There was another meeting with Kevin Dailey in Southie, and yet another encounter with the Mafia’s Larry Zannino, who arrived at HoJo’s in his blue Continental. Compared to the flophouse, the troopers’ command post was posh. They’d set up in a fourth-floor bedroom at HoJo’s overlooking the pay phones and were photographing and videotaping Bulger’s comings and goings.
Pulling all their intelligence together, the troopers went back to court. On September 15, 1980, Judge Barton approved their second bid to capture Bulger’s and Flemmi’s incriminating words. The troopers had all five pay phones tapped. The wiring was done two nights later, on a Wednesday night.
But once again the troopers came up empty. Eager and optimistic, they took up their position in their hotel room the next afternoon, awaiting their targets’ regular arrival. But one o’clock came and went. Two o’clock. Three o’clock. The hours passed. Bulger and Flemmi were no-shows. They didn’t show up the next day either, or the day after, or the day after that. Once again Bulger was gone.
Inside their hotel room the sullen troopers had a lot of empty time on their hands. The court order they had lasted until October 11, but Bulger never reappeared. They could have screamed and yelled, cursed the high heavens, but they didn’t. They didn’t trash the room. But they did talk obsessively about their plight, talk that went in dizzying circles. What the hell was going on?
MAYBE they were crazy, or at least too stubborn for their own good, but Long and his unit reviewed the intelligence they had amassed against Bulger and Flemmi and, despite their setbacks, decided to launch a third and final try. They all felt some pressure to produce something tangible—a prosecutable case—after investing more than six months of manpower and resources in the investigation. They also weren’t naive: with each failure the chances for success narrowed. Bulger and Flemmi were on high alert. But Long and the troopers were still fired up, and they decided to take a final shot at the high-riding crime bosses. “We didn’t think our chances were good,” Long recalled, “but we figured what the hell—go for it. If it doesn’t work out, we close the books on it and move on.”
Their target would be the black Chevy—installing a bug in the car would be their “Hail Mary” pass. The troopers had chased Bulger from the Lancaster Street garage and from the pay phones outside HoJo’s. From their surveillance, they now saw that Bulger was using the car as a mobile office. For a few weeks in the fall the troopers once again eased off to give Bulger and Flemmi some breathing room. Resuming their surveillance in late 1980, they saw that Bulger and Flemmi continued to conduct most of their business in the Chevy.
Bulger’s new routine was to drive into the North End in the early afternoon and park outside of Giro’s. The restaurant, located on one of the neighborhood’s busier streets, Commercial Street, was only a few blocks from Angiulo’s headquarters at 98 Prince Street. Giro’s, like the garage before it, was a hub of underworld activity: wiseguys were moving in and out of the restaurant throughout the early afternoon. Sometimes Bulger or Flemmi went inside and sat at a table for a meeting with various underworld figures, but most of the time they sat in their car and hosted a stream of wiseguys who climbed into the Chevy, talked a bit of business, and then got out.
Following Bulger into the North End, it was a wonder the troopers did not bump into the FBI. The troopers, of course, didn’t realize it at the time, but for most of 1980 the FBI had been putting the finishing touches on its sophisticated plan to bug 98 Prince Street. The operation, code-named “Bostar,” targeted Gennaro Angiulo and the top tier of Boston’s Mafia. Throughout the year FBI agents had been combing the North End, documenting the daily rhythms at 98 Prince. John Morris, as supervisor of the Organized Crime Squad, was in charge, along with case agent Edward M. Quinn. John Connolly and a dozen or more agents were part of the top-secret team.
By the fall of 1980 strike force attorney Wendy Collins had already gone through several drafts of the Title III application to win the federal court approval the FBI needed to break into 98 Prince Street to install bugs. Even though Bulger and Flemmi were Connolly’s prized informants, the two had not been used to develop the probable cause the FBI needed for Wendy Collins’s Title III work-in-progress. Instead, the FBI was mostly relying on five or six other informants—all of them gamblers and loan sharks—who, unlike Bulger and Flemmi, regularly met with Angiulo inside 98 Prince Street.
Of course, it wasn’t as if Bulger had not been discussing the Mafia in his surreptitious meetings with Connolly. He had, but Connolly’s FBI reports for those sessions contained mostly secondhand Mafia gossip. Early in 1980, for example, Bulger described a “brawl” that had erupted at a Mafia wedding reception after a young hothead made the stupid mistake of “ridiculing Larry Zannino.” Instantly some of Zannino’s men attacked the young man, who “suffered multiple lacerations and a couple of broken bones.” Bulger told Connolly about Nick Giso, who was Bulger’s daily Mafia contact at the Lancaster Street garage and then at Giro’s. The Mafia, said Bulger, “is supposed to be upset with Nick Giso ... because of Nick’s continual use of cocaine.” To his credit, Bulger did provide some information about the activities of the drug traffickers Caruana, Lepere, and Dailey. “Mickey Caruana and Frank Lepere were behind the load that was interrupted recently in Maine,” Bulger told Connolly in April. Bulger even gave Connolly Caruana’s phone number. But these Bulger reports did not include any disclosures by Bulger about the extent and nature of his own growing business ties to the marijuana and cocaine traffickers.
At Giro’s, Bulger and Flemmi met with a who’s who of Mafia associates of Gennaro Angiulo’s—Zannino, Danny Angiulo, Nicky Giso, Domenic F. Isabella, Ralph “Ralphie Chong” Lamattina, Vincent “Fat Vinnie” Roberto, and a steady stream of bookmakers and loan sharks. In March, armed with a 102-page, sworn affidavit authored by Rick Fraelick and with accompanying surveillance photographs of Bulger and his Mafia contacts, the troopers went back to court.
Superior Court Judge John T. Ronan authorized their third bid for electronic surveillance on March 19, 1981; that court order gave them five days to get their bug in the car. But five days later the troopers were back in court seeking an extension to the original court order. They hadn’t been able to get near the car long enough to install their one-watt transmitting microphone along with a tracking device. Flemmi kept the Chevy at night, either in Milton or in Brookline at the apartment complex, Longwood Towers. Neither location was accessible. In Milton, each time the troopers approached the car under the cover of darkness Flemmi’s dog went nuts. At Longwood Towers the state police technician actually got into the Chevy, but then a delayed car alarm went off. Fraelick threw a rag over the security camera, grabbed the technician, and fled, just ahead of a security guard and Flemmi himself.
The judge approved an extension, and the troopers, their hopes waning, devised their most ambitious plan. A trooper would stop Flemmi for a phony traffic infraction. The trooper would run Flemmi’s plate, inform him the Chevy had been reported stolen, and then order the car towed away. With the car in their possession, the troopers could install a bug before Flemmi retrieved it.
/> The trooper, Billy Gorman, stopped Flemmi one afternoon as he drove the Chevy through an intersection in Roxbury. Hidden but nearby, Long and the other troopers watched and monitored the cruiser’s radio. Gorman had been handpicked for the assignment; he was unflappable, and the mission called for a trooper who would not be drawn into an ugly exchange with the volatile gangster.
The cruiser’s lights flashed, and Flemmi pulled over. The trooper got out, and so did Flemmi. They headed for each other right there in the street. The trooper spoke first: “Did you see that old lady there you almost ran over?”
The many months of only being able to study gangster body language now ended abruptly, and at long last the troopers finally heard actual noise from one of their targets. Flemmi’s first words were hardly pleasant ones.
“What the fuck is this shit?” he shouted. No ordinary citizen, the gangster was not impressed by a trooper’s uniform and badge. His temper raced from zero to sixty in an instant. “Do you know who I am, you fuckin’ jerk? This is harassment!”
Methodically, Gorman asked Flemmi for his license and registration. “I don’t got no fuckin’ registration,” Flemmi yelled. “These are dealer plates, can’t you see?” The trooper calmly told Flemmi he should still have a registration. The trooper explained he was going to have to run the plate and that Flemmi would have to wait patiently. Gorman headed back to his cruiser, and Flemmi stormed off into a convenience store where he began making telephone calls.
In the cruiser Gorman consulted with Long. The tow truck was summoned. The installation crew was waiting in the back lot of the nearby abandoned Mattapan State Hospital. Flemmi came back out of the store, and Trooper Gorman explained that the car had been reported stolen. Gorman and Long even play-acted on the cruiser’s radio, with Long telling the patrol trooper, “Please be advised that the vehicle comes back as stolen from Nassau County, New York, in July 1979.” Gorman told Flemmi the Chevy was going to be towed.
Flemmi was apoplectic. Then he uttered the words that made Long’s and every other state trooper’s stomach turn to mush. “You tell fuckin’ O’Donovan that if he wants to bug my car so bad, I’ll drive it right up to fuckin’ 1010.” “O’Donovan” was obviously Lieutenant Colonel John O’Donovan, Long’s commander, and “1010” was a reference to state police headquarters. Flemmi knew.
It was over.
Flemmi went back inside the convenience store. The car was towed away, but even before its arrival behind the hospital Flemmi’s lawyer was telephoning O’Donovan screaming about the blatantly absurd seizure of the car. The state police commander kept a stiff upper lip and didn’t give the lawyer anything, saying the car had come back as reported stolen. But the troopers all knew the ruse was up. Long told the troopers not to even install the bug. Don’t give Bulger and Flemmi the satisfaction of taking apart the car and finding the bug, he said. Let them wonder, maybe they’ll get a little paranoid.
This was the troopers’ only consolation. They’d thrown the Hail Mary, and it had fallen woefully short. Despite their many months of successful surveillance, they’d lost in the streets against Bulger and Flemmi. They may have seen Bulger and Flemmi joined at the hip to the Boston Mafia, but they would not be taking them to court. They’d been outmaneuvered at every turn. But even in failure the state police had triggered, unbeknownst to them, a massive internal crisis over at the FBI, a crisis that, more than any other in the FBI’s long history with Bulger and Flemmi, posed the biggest threat to the cherished deal Connolly and Morris had with the two gangsters.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Betrayal
Responsibility for the stunning breach in security in the potentially devastating state police bugging of Bulger and Flemmi fell squarely in the FBI’s lap, and on one agent in particular. “It was Connolly,” Flemmi later admitted. But Connolly wasn’t the only FBI agent watching out for Whitey Bulger like a lifeguard monitoring shark-infested waters. Morris, Flemmi added, had also tipped them off. The supervisor, said Flemmi, had told Bulger that another agent had come to him looking for background information on the two gangsters. Morris interpreted the inquiry as groundwork for another group’s plan to launch electronic surveillance.
In fact, before he heard from Connolly and Morris, Flemmi had gotten an even earlier tip about a possible bug from one of the bookies he and Bulger were in business with. The bookie claimed to have picked up his information from a state police trooper. But Flemmi was the first to acknowledge that this was second-hand, underworld hearsay that could not compare to the solid confirmation Connolly soon provided. “His job was to protect us,” said Flemmi about Connolly’s help.
Years later Connolly would finally admit that he warned Bulger and Flemmi, but his version came with a self-preserving twist: he claimed O’Sullivan had asked him to alert his informants. Flemmi, in court testimony, backed up Connolly. “Jeremiah O’Sullivan told John Connolly . . . [we] were being bugged down at Lancaster Street and to provide us with that information.”
O’Sullivan’s camp has denied Connolly’s version, a strained account that did not square with the prosecutor’s passion for putting gangsters behind bars or his animated enthusiasm for the state police operation in his meetings with troopers. Flemmi’s testimony was simply seen as a bid to protect the agent who for years had protected him. The more likely scenario, according to state police, was that O’Sullivan may have taken Connolly into his confidence out of professional courtesy—mindful that Connolly was in fact the FBI’s handler of Bulger and Flemmi—and that Connolly then betrayed that confidence. Indeed, the state police’s long-held suspicions of FBI duplicity hardened into dogma when one of the troopers doing surveillance spotted Bulger sitting with Connolly in a car in South Boston. Whatever the fine details, Morris and Connolly had warned Bulger and Flemmi, and the FBI leaks had undermined another police agency’s bid to target Boston’s Irish gang.
But amid the Morris and Connolly cover-up, there was one potential bright spot. O’Donovan had found an earnest audience in the one agent who counted—the new FBI boss in town, special agent in charge Lawrence Sarhatt, who did not buy Morris’s defensive explanations. They didn’t sound credible, and the more Sarhatt thought about it, the more he began asking a question far more threatening. Sarhatt wondered whether Bulger had become more trouble than he was worth. Had this South Boston gangster grown too close to his FBI handlers? Beyond the question of the leak, Sarhatt began asking Morris and Connolly about Bulger’s “suitability.” This whole new line of inquiry further jeopardized the core deal established by Connolly five years earlier.
The strife landed on Morris’s desk at a difficult time. At home his marriage was falling apart. His reckless party chatter and phone call to O’Donovan had almost blown everything. And work was all-consuming. He was coordinating the strategy to win federal court approval to bug Gennaro Angiulo’s office at 98 Prince Street. He was overseeing a punishing schedule for his expanding squad of agents. Now along came Sarhatt questioning the cornerstone of the Organized Crime Squad—Whitey’s and Stevie’s information highway. On top of all that, Morris knew he was losing control over the loose cannon on his squad, the crafty and connected Connolly.
Connolly had been livid at Morris for his foolhardy overture at the midsummer party. Morris had tried to make things better with Connolly. During the leak inquiry Morris had omitted in his reports that Connolly also knew about the bug well before Morris had shot his mouth off at the Friday night party. Morris’s report kept Connolly off the FBI’s internal suspect list of leakers. But Connolly was exerting his influence over Morris more than ever before, his bombastic personality overwhelming the introverted boss. “I should have said no to Connolly,” Morris said. “But I didn’t want to take him on.” After weathering a crisis of his own making, Morris began to fear Connolly’s political connections with a vindictive Billy Bulger and Connolly’s South Boston brotherhood with the dangerous Whitey.
Late in 1980, as the FBI internal inquiry evolved from a loo
k at a possible leak into a more dangerous review of Bulger, Morris began to follow Connolly’s lead in converting the challenge they faced into something resembling an old South Boston us-versus-them fight against outsiders. To rebut Sarhatt’s concerns, Connolly and Morris would have to prove that Bulger and Flemmi were invaluable assets that the state police were simply trying to destroy out of jealousy. Look at Bulger’s potential, they would argue right up the FBI chain of command, not at his life in crime. No matter what it took, this is what they had to make Sarhatt see.
As the new FBI man in town, Sarhatt learned quickly that boisterous Boston was not at all like his last posting in sleepy Knoxville, Tennessee. Never before during his twenty-year career had he encountered such a tangled tale of treachery. But he was determined to get to the bottom of it. Almost alone at the FBI, he viewed the state police’s O’Donovan as a straight shooter with a genuine problem. Prodded by O’Donovan, Sarhatt kept demanding more sensible answers from Morris and kept getting specious ones. After weeks of internal go-arounds and lame memos, Sarhatt began to turn up the volume about possibly closing Bulger down. If the state police knew about Bulger’s ties to the FBI, he worried, then everyone else at the roundtable at the Ramada knew. If all those state and police officials knew, that meant eventually the top-secret information might spill into the city’s underworld. Indeed, Sarhatt worried that the word was already out about Bulger and that it would get him killed, leaving blood on everyone’s hands. Besides, Sarhatt questioned whether Bulger’s information was all that good. He began to entertain the heretical thought: shut Bulger down.
