Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  “So unless it is Mr. Bulger’s contention that all of these agents got together to fabricate this file for some reason, his contention that he was not an FBI informant is simply absurd. And I don’t think the government should be required in the face of all this evidence to tailor its questions in a manner which preserves this contention.”

  The judge raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Brennan, I’ll hear you.”

  Brennan took a breath. For the defense, this was an issue that, they believed, defined their case. “Your Honor, the Department of Justice has historically engaged in inappropriate relationships with organized crime figures. There are documented histories of relationships with organized crime figures who are serial murderers, not limited to this case. There is an extraordinary history that when the Department of Justice employees can benefit their objectives, they’ll allow organized crime figures to engage in whatever conduct they want. . . . That is the historical backdrop to this case. It goes through Barboza, it goes through this case. . . .

  “Furthermore, there is a long-standing history of the Department of Justice, FBI Washington, Strike Force employees overlooking the relationship between Mr. Connolly and Mr. Bulger. There is a long-standing history of them choosing not to indict or charge Mr. Bulger with any crimes. The DOJ had an obligation on a quarterly or yearly basis to look into these files, to consider whether or not they were viable. They didn’t do that, or if they did, they didn’t do a very thorough job. There is missing information suggesting that there isn’t any authenticity to these files. There is no pink sheet, which is a piece of paper [with personal information] about the intake a person must go through in order to sign up to be an informant. That is absent here.

  “Certainly the DOJ needs to protect the fact that they let somebody they believe is a killer run loose, kill people throughout the Boston area, and never charge him. If they were now to come in and admit the truth, that there was a special relationship and nobody cared about it because they were pursuing the LCN, then they would have a problem.

  “So to come in now and say that somehow this person, Mr. Marra, who’s never had a conversation with Mr. Bulger, to give an opinion that he was an informant . . . There is absolutely no basis for it.”

  Wyshak seemed miffed by the sweeping, roundhouse nature of Brennan’s objection. “Your Honor, all of that information—whatever happened with Barboza and those relationships [from long ago] has nothing to do with the fact of whether or not Mr. Bulger was an informant. He was an informant who corrupted his handler, and, you know, the Justice Department, the FBI, shares some responsibility for continuing to operate Mr. Bulger as an informant over the years. The government doesn’t dispute that, but one does not follow the other. It doesn’t mean that Mr. Bulger was not an informant.”

  The discussion continued for the better part of an hour. Brennan was objecting on a number of different grounds to a number of different issues, though he kept trying to bring the argument back to his contention that the central fallacy of the government’s case was that Whitey Bulger was an informant.

  It was a circular argument, and the more Brennan spoke, with occasional injections of support from his co-counsel Carney, the farther the defense team drifted from shore.

  The leakiness of their position was obvious: From before the trial began, they had been arguing that Bulger’s position was that he had been given immunity from prosecution by Jeremiah O’Sullivan. Few specific details about that arrangement were put forth. There was no mention of a meeting in a hotel room around Christmas of 1978, with John Connolly present. The defense team preferred to leave it as vague as possible. All they would say is that a meeting or meetings had taken place. Consequently, Bulger promised something to O’Sullivan, and O’Sullivan, in return, offered immunity to one of the most notorious gangsters within his jurisdiction.

  Assuming that this exchange did take place, and that some sort of mutual arrangement was discussed, the most credible conclusion would be that Bulger was offering to help O’Sullivan take down the Mafia by serving as an informant, and in exchange the top crime prosecutor promised that he would cover Bulger’s back. But the defense wasn’t making that argument. Instead, they were asking the jury—and the public—to make a leap of faith and accept, for the sake of argument, that Bulger never was an informant.

  Which begged the question: if Bulger wasn’t an informant, why would O’Sullivan offer him immunity?

  Throughout pretrial hearings, and now well into the presentation of evidence, the defense lawyers had not answered this question, except to say that their client, Jim Bulger, would take the stand and tell all. Their frequent provocative claims that Bulger would testify on his own behalf had galvanized the media and brought great attention to their case, but in the absence of any further explanation of what Bulger’s arrangement with O’Sullivan had been, they were making an argument without adequate foundation. The entire discussion was a red herring. Bulger was not charged with being an informant; it wasn’t one of the counts in the indictment. By spending so much time and energy on this point, the defense lawyers were obscuring what should have been their primary argument: that Bulger’s relationship with Connolly, Morris, O’Sullivan, et al. was a historical continuation of the Barboza years. Jim Bulger was merely a player in a dirty and corrupt game that had been ongoing in Boston for close to half a century.

  Both Brennan and Carney had alluded to this position, and, beginning with Carney’s opening statement, had attempted to establish it as part of the defense narrative. But every time they sought to claim that Bulger had never been an informant, it muddied the waters and diluted their defense.

  In his cross-examination of Marra, Brennan did score some points. He made it clear that Bulger’s informant file had many peculiarities. When a special agent enlists an informant, he’s supposed to have him read and sign a “pink sheet,” which includes a set of guidelines. The agent is supposed to take fingerprints of the informant, and also to supply a current photo, ideally one taken by the agent himself.

  Bulger’s file did have a pink sheet, but it contained none of the above. There was no signature from Bulger acknowledging that he had entered into an informant relationship with the FBI. No fingerprints. And the only photo in his file was an ancient arrest photo from 1959, taken when Bulger was twenty-one years old.

  Brennan spent much of Marra’s time on the stand seeking to establish that Bulger’s informant file, in its totality, was a work of fiction. He projected onto a screen many of the same memoranda first entered into evidence by Wyshak: reports, signed by Connolly, purporting to be “insert files” of information provided to the agent by Bulger.

  “Mr. Marra,” asked the defense attorney about one insert file, “when you say you saw this in the file that Mr. Connolly had for Mr. Bulger, did you make any other determination about whether Bulger actually gave this information to Connolly or got it from somewhere else?”

  Marra was asked a version of this question nearly a dozen times in relation to a dozen different memos and insert files, and he rarely gave a straightforward answer. When finally pinned down, he was forced to say, “No. I did no independent investigation on that.” It was in the Bulger informant file, as created by Connolly, and therefore assumed by Marra and everyone else in the FBI to be what it was purported to be.

  Brennan asked Marra about “the rotor,” a circular, rotating file cabinet inside the FBI office that contained files pertaining to all criminal matters under the purview of the office, including, in some cases, open informant files. The rotor would become a running theme throughout the trial. Both the defense team and prosecution acknowledged that the rotor was likely plundered by John Connolly, who stole information from other files and put it in Bulger’s file, as if it originally came from BS-1544.

  Though Marra was curiously unwilling to concede the point, it was clear to any discerning observer that Connolly had engaged in a system of puffery; he had ginned up Bulger’s informant file with information stolen from other file
s, or garnered from other informants and attributed to Bulger. In some cases, the information in Bulger’s informant file was identical to information in Stephen Flemmi’s file, as the defense lawyers illustrated by projecting the file memos side by side in open court.

  Bulger’s rat file began to emerge as a talisman that, when split open and examined, became a portal into a world of bureaucratic deception, chicanery, and lies. Connolly needed to pad and puff up Bulger’s file because he needed him to be designated a Top Echelon Informant, which was the cream of the crop. In general, informants were seedy little vermin who hid in dark alleyways and traded information for a pat on the head by their law enforcement masters, but a TE was at the top of the pyramid, a high-ranking mobster who was privy to policy-making decisions by an underworld board of directors. Special agents who handled TEs were royalty within the bureau. They received commendations and monetary prizes and incentives. Among other agents, they were the cock of the walk.

  An agent would go to great lengths to protect their golden goose, and they were enabled in their efforts to do so from within the system. In this regard, the FBI was in a league by itself.

  The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) system is a central database of criminal information available to all U.S. law enforcement. Whenever any agency of law enforcement, federal or local, ran a search on someone who was designated as an FBI informant, like, say, James J. “Whitey” Bulger, the bureau was immediately notified. No other branch of law enforcement was accorded this privilege. As Marra put it from the stand, “The end result is Mr. Connolly would be aware of any law enforcement agency who conducted a criminal inquiry on Mr. Bulger. He would get a notice that this was the agency that ran the query and the purpose for that query, which usually is criminal or investigative, and he would be aware that someone’s looking or at least running criminal histories on his informant.”

  The witness had no problems with designating Connolly and the FBI as the primary culprits in the cultivation and protection of Bulger. In fact, that’s why Marra was on the stand. Whenever he was asked if he pursued other avenues of questionable contacts with Bulger above and beyond the FBI, Marra retreated to what would become a mantra: he had been assigned to investigate whether Agent Connolly had supplied information to Bulger that led to the murders of Castucci, Wheeler, Halloran, Donahue, and Callahan. Nothing more.

  Marra was a veteran employee of the DOJ. He had been assigned to monitor the Bulger prosecutions and, it could be argued, make sure that damage did not spread beyond the Boston office of the FBI. He was the Little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike, and as such, he undertook his duties with extreme prejudice.

  CORRUPTION IN LAW enforcement is nothing new. The emphasis on the ceremonial aspects of policing—the pride that comes from pledging allegiance to a military-style organization based on dedication and loyalty—seems to exist partly as a counterbalance to the reality that there will always be officers who choose personal aggrandizement over ethics. In the public domain, there is a yearning to present cops and agents as heroic figures, with a job that requires a level of stress and danger that no mere mortal could ever understand. Yet cops and agents are themselves drawn from the ranks of mere mortals, susceptible to the same temptations and lapses in judgment as the average schnook.

  The type of lawman most likely to become entangled in corruption is one on the front lines, a cop or agent who comes into direct contact with criminals or criminal activity. The most obvious lures are money and power. John Connolly took money from Bulger and Flemmi, cash payments totaling $250,000 over roughly a ten-year period. By most accounts, he reveled in the financial largesse—he wore expensive jewelry and suits that were beyond the means of the average FBI agent. Along with his home in Boston, he acquired a house on the Cape—the de rigueur status symbol for upwardly mobile New Englanders—and he purchased a boat to go with it.

  In retrospect, money was likely not the primary motivator for Connolly. What he seemed to value most in his relationship with Bulger and Flemmi was the status and stature it accorded him within the ranks of federal law enforcement. For an insecure person—or someone whose reputation for confidence is based primarily on external measures—the pursuit of this kind of stature represents its own kind of corruption. To be respected or revered or feared—to have that kind of power—is, in the pantheon of human motivators, as much a manifestation of corruption as taking an illegal cash payoff under the table.

  A far more nuanced form of corruption is that which is rooted in the system. This type of corruption is often predicated on the performance and policies of an institution. To enhance the institution’s reputation, or to safeguard a history of impropriety within the institution, individual officers or agents are encouraged to do what needs to be done on behalf of it. If they do it well, they are rewarded with commendations, promotions, and plum assignments; they will be accorded esteem within their universe of influence. In return it is understood that if they are exposed in any way, they will fall on their sword; they will take the hit on behalf of the organization.

  In this regard, Paul Rico and Dennis Condon had never been tested. Anything untoward they might have done, such as suppressing evidence and suborning perjury, or criminal, such as acting as an accessory to a murder, they had gotten away with it. By the mid-1970s it was time for a new generation to do the dirty work.

  When John Morris first came to the Boston office of the FBI, he was, as he himself has noted, a hayseed from Kansas City. Just two years out of the academy, Morris was assigned to the unit known as Squad-5, the organized crime (OC) unit that would later change its designation to C-3. The Boston division’s OC squad was famous within law enforcement for having convicted Raymond Patriarca, who was at that time the highest-ranking member of Cosa Nostra ever prosecuted in federal court.

  Morris was lucky. The star of the squad was Dennis Condon, who had played a vital role in the Patriarca case. Condon’s partner, Paul Rico, had moved on to the FBI’s Miami office and would soon retire, but Condon was still in Boston basking in the glow of earlier successes. Having been a crucial player during the Barboza years, Condon had an unparalleled reputation as a handler of informants, not so much through his personal connections with criminals out on the street, but rather from his ability to finesse those relationships within the bureaucracy and maintain credible informant files. By the time Morris arrived, Condon had even been given a special designation as “supervisor of informants.”

  To those within the system who had been a party to the framing of innocent men during the Teddy Deegan murder trial, Condon—along with Rico and prosecutor Ted Harrington—was something of a local legend. The Barboza years and the Deegan case had created a potential sinkhole that could have engulfed the entire Boston division of the FBI, and somehow Condon, Rico, and Harrington had not only emerged unscathed, they had safeguarded the Patriarca conviction and burnished the reputation of the criminal justice system in Boston.

  Morris and Condon lived in the same neighborhood of Lexington, the leafy Boston suburb that was at the center of much local Revolutionary War history. Not long after Morris arrived in Boston, he and Condon began carpooling to work every morning. On these drives, Morris learned about the years of the Boston gang wars, Joe Barboza, and the Patriarca convictions. He was schooled on how FBI business was handled in Boston.

  Morris and Condon were far apart in age, but they had some similarities. Neither was particularly street-savvy; they did not have the types of personalities that would make it easy for them to talk or circulate among gangsters, à la Paul Rico. Condon communicated to Morris that for an agent like him to rise in the organization, he needed to find his own Paul Rico, his own swaggering doppelganger who could function as yin to his yang.

  Within a year of Morris’s arrival in Boston, John Connolly would be transferred from the New York office, after his dramatic arrest of Most Wanted fugitive Frank Salemme on a street in Manhattan. All three men—Morris, Condon, and Connolly—were now part
of the same unit. The pieces were in place for a passing of the baton from the Barboza years to whatever was to come next.

  WHITEY BULGER HARDLY looked up from the notepad he was doodling on when John Morris entered the courtroom. Unlike with some of the witnesses so far, where Bulger’s disinterest seemed genuine, in this case the defendant’s body language spoke volumes. Bulger seemed to be pissed-off about something. His mood was also reflected in his attire. Today, his Hensley was a dark blue bordering on black.

  On the other hand, the witness, as he was sworn in and took the stand, was the picture of harmlessness. Since his years in the FBI, Morris had gone soft, his face jowly and complexion rosy from his retirement job as a “wine educator,” which, no doubt, included some sampling of the product. Morris wore a suit not unlike the type he might have worn back in his days as supervisor of the C-3 squad, a suit without distinction, moderately priced, designed to project conformity and functionality over style.

  These two men had not seen each other in decades. They had not spoken since late 1995, in a fateful phone conversation that almost ended Morris’s life.

  Back then, Morris was working at the FBI’s training center in Quantico, Virginia, serving out the latter months of a seemingly distinguished career as chief of training and administration. A year earlier, Whitey Bulger had disappeared on the run and become a Ten Most Wanted fugitive. The Bulger-Flemmi indictment was causing Morris great consternation. For more than a decade he and Connolly had engaged in a felonious relationship with Bulger and Flemmi, and now, with Bulger on the lam and Flemmi facing charges, it all had the potential to blow wide open.

  Chief Morris was in his office one afternoon when his secretary told him there was a Mr. White on the phone. Morris took the call and immediately recognized a voice he hadn’t heard in a long time: it was Bulger.

  Bulger threatened Morris, telling him that he better “use his Machiavellian ways” to get a hold of the Boston Globe and clear up allegations that he was an FBI informant—an allegation that had originated with a leak from Morris. Bulger reminded Morris that he, Morris, had taken money from him on numerous occasions. Bulger’s tone was aggressive and terrifying. Morris was getting a full blast of the Whitey Bulger from the streets—the mob boss—not the nice guy with whom he had shared pasta and wine in the years he had cosponsored Bulger as a prize informant for the bureau. Bulger told Morris, “If I go to prison, you’re going with me.”