Where the Bodies Were Buried

by T. J. English

  Asked Hank Brennan, “After you told Mr. Connolly about Mr. Halloran, you had another conversation with him, didn’t you?”

  Morris spoke quietly now, his voice barely a whisper. “Yes. He came back to me.”

  “And during that conversation, you inferred that he had told members of organized crime about your little secret.”

  “I inferred from what he told me that he had talked to them. Whether they had the information already or whether he told them, I don’t know, but he, obviously, had been in contact with them.”

  Four weeks later—on May 11, 1982—Morris came in to work at the federal building one day and learned that Brian Halloran had been gunned down on the Boston waterfront, along with Michael Donahue, an innocent victim who had been giving Halloran a ride home.

  Morris knew that he had provided information to Connolly that had likely led to the murders of Halloran and Donahue.

  From the stand, Morris wanted the jury and everyone else in the courtroom to know how bad he felt. It was part of his performance as a man racked by guilt. His decision to divulge confidential information to Connolly had led to the murder of two men. What a terrible burden for John Morris. His brow furrowed in contemplation; his eyes moistened.

  Hank Brennan wasn’t buying it: “After you learned that Halloran and Donahue were murdered following your tip [to Connolly], did you then do something to try to uncover the truth, Mr. Morris?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Did you tell any of your superiors about the information so they could do a proper investigation?”

  “No, I did not.”

  Not only did Morris keep his knowledge of Bulger’s possible connection to the murders under wraps; he also set out, along with Connolly, to create a false investigative narrative, as he and Connolly had done on other occasions.

  “Your Honor,” said Brennan, “with your permission I’d like to publish Exhibit 282 into evidence.”

  “You may,” said the judge.

  Brennan handed to the witness an FBI memorandum that was also projected onto a screen for the jury to see. The defense lawyer noted that the memo was a report, filed by John Connolly, in which Bulger placed the blame for the Halloran-Donahue murder on “a group from Charlestown.” Said Brennan, “Let’s look at the second paragraph, Mr. Morris. Would you read that, please?”

  Morris cleared his throat. “Source advised that the story being put out by the state police is that the FBI got Halloran killed, but source advised that the people from Charlestown say it was the state police who let the cat out of the bag and in fact the Charlestown crew had information that Halloran was talking to Colonel O’Donovan and Trooper Fralick.”

  After Morris finished, Brennan let the silence linger. The memo encapsulated the Morris-Connolly conspiracy: not only had they provided Whitey Bulger with information that led to the murder of two men, but they were now attempting to shift responsibility onto the Massachusetts State Police, and in particular, Colonel Jack O’Donovan, a man who had for years been trying to sound alarm bells within law enforcement about the FBI’s unseemly relationship with Bulger.

  “Two days after you received that memo from Special Agent Connolly,” said Brennan, “you endorsed it, didn’t you?”

  “I reviewed it and initialed it,” said Morris.

  “When Mr. Connolly gave that to you and you read that, you knew it was untrue, didn’t you?”

  Morris’s mood seemed to shift. Over a series of defensive equivocations, he ducked the substance of Brennan’s inquiries and would not give straight answers. His voice hardened. For a while on the stand, he had been wallowing in self-pity but, now, whatever shield of denial he had constructed for himself, whatever he needed to do so that he could sleep at night, led him to forcefully defend himself. He sat upright, with renewed energy. The need to assert his theology of self-deception had reinforced his spine like an injection of B12.

  All these years later, he was still seeking to protect his reputation. He was still pretending.

  BY THE TIME John Morris neared the end of his testimony, defense attorney Jay Carney appeared to be exhausted. Although Hank Brennan was the one handling the cross-examination of Morris, Carney had been handling many of the legal arguments related to Morris, and there were many. The defense team was frequently frustrated in their efforts to enter a piece of evidence or pursue a line of questioning, due to objections from the prosecution. In some cases, the jury was removed from the courtroom and the witness asked to step down. The two sides would stand before the judge and make their case. As lead counsel, Carney argued with vigor and passion, but given the defense strategy he was frequently left spinning his wheels.

  The insistence that Bulger was not an informant was the rock upon which Carney and Brennan often found themselves stranded far from the shore. In their cross-examination of both James Marra and Morris, they had contested nearly every FBI airtel (exclusive correspondence) and teletype that was placed into evidence. In support of this strategy, Carney explained to the judge, “What if Mr. Connolly fabricated the entire informant file? What if not a single item in that informant file was based on a statement by James Bulger? . . . And the evidence today that we’ve heard through Mr. Morris gave some insight into that, to what we’ve been saying since my opening statement, which is, Mr. Bulger was not providing information as an informant to Connolly, he was providing money to these FBI agents so that he could get tipped off about wiretaps, search warrants, indictments being issued.”

  “But isn’t there a view of the evidence,” countered Judge Casper, “that he was also getting tipped off about people cooperating? I guess what I’m saying is, why can’t both be true?”

  For a moment, Carney appeared stumped, his arms dangled at his side, and then he said, “It’s possible that both can be true—theoretically—but the defendant’s position is that only one is true.”

  It was telling that Carney said “the defendant’s position” and not “the position of the defense.” It was becoming apparent that the insistence on the canard of whether or not Bulger was an informant was a position devised by Whitey Bulger. During these arguments, Bulger listened attentively. To him, this is what the trial was all about: an attempt to salvage his reputation as an “honorable racketeer” who could never be a snitch. But for the defense lawyers, it was a road to nowhere.

  Carney’s exasperation was based partly on his inability to get any love from the judge on this issue, but it was also likely founded on the reality that the entire debate had sidetracked the defense from exploring the more prescient point, also laid out in Carney’s opening statement, that the Bulger era was one chapter in a long, dark history of law enforcement corruption in New England. Morris had been their best chance so far to probe the continuity of sleaze between the Barboza era and the Bulger era. That opportunity had come and gone without the defense making the necessary connections.

  A telling moment in this regard had taken place when Brennan asked Morris about “the Limone matter.”

  Peter Limone had been the lead defendant in the Teddy Deegan murder trial back in 1967. When it was finally exposed that Limone, along with Joe Salvati and two others, had been wrongfully convicted and spent thirty years in prison, the aggrieved parties filed a lawsuit. The government contested the lawsuit, leading, in 2006, to hearings in federal court before Judge Nancy Gertner. Many witnesses were called; the hearings became the most full and complete rendering of the manner in which the four men were framed, and how the lie had been maintained by the DOJ over the years.

  Among the witnesses before Judge Gertner was a man named Michael Albano, who in the early 1980s was a member of the Massachusetts State Parole Board. Albano spoke in court, and later with the media, about how, in 1983, he was approached by FBI special agents John Morris and John Connolly.

  At the time, Peter Limone was being considered for commutation of his sentence. He’d been in prison for eighteen years on the Deegan murder conviction. There had always been rumors that
the conviction of Limone, Salvati, and the others was tainted, but the criminal justice system always fought back against these rumors. On this day in 1983, the guardians of the system were Morris and Connolly.

  According to Albano, he was visited in his office and verbally bullied by the two agents, who told him if he voted for commutation of Limone’s sentence his career in public life would be over. Albano considered the attempt to influence his decision by the two agents to be a flagrant effort by the FBI to intimidate him. He voted for commutation anyway. Years later, after Limone’s sentence was commuted, Albano went on to become the mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1995, he was the subject of a suspicious FBI investigation into wrongdoing in his administration. Albano believed the investigation was an act of revenge by the FBI for his vote on the Limone matter. The FBI’s probe of Mayor Albano was eventually thrown out of court.

  Now, all these years later, during the cross-examination of John Morris, the issue resurfaced at the Bulger trial. The mere mention of “the Limone matter” brought an objection from Wyshak: “Your Honor, this is the second time that [the defense] has tried to insert the Limone case, which was a prosecution in the sixties and has absolutely nothing to do with Bulger in this case. Obviously, the reason they are trying to insert it into this case is because it’s, you know, I think they believe it’s a black eye for the government. What the relevance is of questioning this witness who had nothing to do with that case, it escapes me.”

  Since Brennan was the one cross-examining Morris, he responded. For the next ten minutes he detailed how Morris had testified in five previous legal proceedings on the subject, and when confronted about his and Connolly’s efforts to bully Albano, he always answered with some version of “I don’t remember the details of that meeting.” His partner, John Connolly, publicly denied ever having met with Albano. That position was discredited by Albano having produced records to show that he was paid a visit by the two agents, and by Morris, who admitted that the meeting took place but was unable or unwilling to shed light on the details.

  “Mr. Albano currently works for the Governor’s Council,” said Brennan to the judge. “We have him listed on our witness list, and I expect that we’ll call him. . . . And so I’m going to ask [Morris] about his earlier denials, and then I’m going to impeach him when I call Mr. Albano as a witness. Because I suspect that he’s going to continue to deny it, and then it will be an issue of credibility for the jury. Do they believe Mr. Morris and his pattern of misconduct or do they believe a gentleman from the Governor’s Council, Mr. Albano? There could be no more central role of credibility than this example. It goes to the heart of the defense.”

  Wyshak stood to respond. “You know, if, yes, [Morris] made efforts to oppose [the Limone commutation] and he’s denying it now, I think, you know, that’s a basis for impeachment. . . . But I think what [the defense] is trying to do is to hang this whole misconduct by the FBI on this witness, who had absolutely nothing to do with it, and make it appear as though the reason that Mr. Morris opposed the commutation was some effort to cover up the misconduct. I think, you know, as they do with many other topics, they go far afield.”

  Wyshak’s comment was a rebuttal to an argument that Brennan had not yet made. Wyshak’s need to counteract any link between the Bulger case and the dirty little secrets of the Barboza era was a knee-jerk reaction, and it roused Brennan to make the argument he should have made in the first place.

  “If I could just add, Your Honor. There’s one fact I left out that’s important. Not only the fact of the manner in which [Morris] bullied Mr. Albano, but also the fact that this was a case where the impropriety was on behalf of other FBI agents, including Mr. Condon and Mr. Rico, who handled [the Limone] case. It’s no coincidence that Mr. Condon is Mr. Morris’s friend. It’s no coincidence that Mr. Condon shows up at private social gatherings at Mr. Morris’s house years later with Mr. Bulger. There is a link between Condon, Rico, and Morris. . . . There is an inference based on the evidence that [Morris] is acting upon—the baton has been passed from Rico and Condon to Mr. Morris.”

  This argument should have been at the center of the defense case, instead of tacked on only after Wyshak inadvertently put it out on the table. But it was too late. Judge Casper had been given an option, one that allowed her to appear judicious and accommodating by offering a bone to both sides. “Counsel,” said Casper, the monotone of her voice designed to reflect the evenness of her judgment, “I’m going to allow you to ask to the extent that you’re trying to show that [Morris] has been untruthful in regards to these efforts, but to the fact that you’re attempting to go into the whole Limone matter, I’m not going to allow you to go that far.”

  It was a legal smackdown, couched in the niceties of modern jurisprudence.

  AT THE END of his final day on the stand, John Morris was dismissed; he stepped out of the witness box and walked from the courtroom.

  Bulger eyeballed his former accomplice on the way out.

  In the hallway, Morris shook hands with John Marra; they practically fell into each other’s arms. Both men had been called to testify at least partly as a bulwark against broader accountability, and against history. Marra, the company man still operating from deep within the machine, and Morris, the disgraced supervisory agent, whose only remaining move was to fall on his sword and thus, hopefully, contain the damage. It seemed to have worked. The two G-men left the courthouse with smiles on their faces. And the prosecutors—Wyshak and Kelly—strutted from the courtroom with a look of satisfaction.

  The prosecution of Whitey Bulger was on course.

  PART II

  LEGACY OF DECEIT

  8

  WHITEY AND COCAINE

  EACH DAY AT the completion of testimony in the Bulger trial, the media gathered behind a rope on the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the courthouse. With microphones and cameras at the ready, they shouted questions at anyone connected to the trial that happened to walk out the door. It was mostly an empty exercise. With a gag order in place, the legal representatives offered nothing of substance. Occasionally, the defense lawyers stopped at the microphones. Following the testimony of John Morris, Jay Carney, with co-counsel Hank Brennan at his side, stopped to say, “Today was one of the most dramatic and poignant days we’ve ever spent in a courtroom.” He would say no more than that.

  Tommy Donahue, whose father had been killed partly as a result of Morris’s criminal negligence, had a different interpretation of the day’s event. “The whole thing disgusts me,” he said.

  In the larger universe of media coverage, the trial had fallen into a predictable pattern. The prosecution solicited testimony on the horrible acts of Whitey Bulger, and the press reported on these acts with little cognizance or understanding of the historical context. On the stand, Morris had been slippery and hollow, and his testimony was interpreted by the media as the sad story of yet one more sleazy character who had been corrupted by Bulger. Even locally, where reporters had for decades been covering various aspects of the moral quagmire surrounding the case, there was little clamoring for a more complete picture. All roads led back to Bulger, and the local media seemed to be okay with that.

  In some ways, this myopia was a continuation and culmination of the ways the Bulger story had been shaped from the beginning.

  By the time of the trial, the Bulger saga had become a national phenomenon, but for a long time the local press in Boston had the story all to themselves. The details had been reported on and presented by a handful of influential journalists and commentators in town, some of whom made a career off the case. Occasionally, the reporting was extraordinary, even groundbreaking, but much of what appeared in the press about Whitey Bulger was the result of leaks from government sources—prosecutors and people in law enforcement. Later, the accounts of cooperating witnesses and Bulger’s enemies on the street were added to the mix. Consequently, a certain narrative, or point of view, of the Bulger story unfolded over the years that dovetaile
d nicely with the prosecution’s theory of the case, that is, Bulger was a master manipulator who had corrupted the system, Connolly and Morris were his enablers, and it didn’t extend much further than that.

  It had taken congressional hearings generated in Washington, D.C., and lawsuits in federal court to expose the larger horrors of the Bulger conspiracy. Among institutions of government in Boston, there had been no clamoring to dig deeper into the scandal. In many ways, the local media reflected this ambivalence. As state trooper Colonel Tom Foley once told me when I asked why there had never been a comprehensive investigation or demand locally to fully explore the Bulger fiasco, “Nobody around here has any stomach for that.”

  Back in the early and mid-1980s, the name of James J. Bulger was mostly a no-show in the Boston media. Even though Bulger had by then risen to become a top player in the city’s criminal underworld by eliminating rivals and associates in South Boston and among the Winter Hill Mob; even though he had forged a relationship with the FBI that had been used to secure warrants and federal authorization to install electronic surveillance devices; even though his brother, Senator William Bulger, was one of the most powerful political figures in the commonwealth, James Bulger’s name had never once appeared in a news article in the Boston Globe.

  One name that did appear often in the Globe and elsewhere in the Boston media was that of Jerry Angiulo. Especially in the early and mid-1980s, as the FBI and federal New England Organized Crime Strike Force under Jeremiah O’Sullivan were building a major case against Angiulo and his brothers, Michele (Mikey), Donato (Danny), and Vittori Nicoli (Nick), articles on the Mafia frequently appeared in the front of the Globe’s metro section. These articles were based almost exclusively on law enforcement sources—cops, FBI agents, and prosecutors—who leaked information to the press with the understanding that their names would not appear in print.