Читать книгу Black Mass - Dick Lehr - Страница 18
ОглавлениеCHAPTER SIX
Gang of Two?
Like a curtain rising, the garage doors at the Lancaster Foreign Car Service flew open in the spring of 1980 on a new era in Boston’s underworld order. Howie Winter had fallen, and a realignment was under way. It was an industry shakeout, and standing in the bays of the repair shop were Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi, arms folded, ready to take center stage and exploit any and all opportunities.
The old haunt, Marshall Motors in Somerville, had been abandoned in favor of this new downtown location. Though some of the former Winter Hill gangsters were on the run, others had come along. George Kaufman, who had operated Marshall Motors as a front for Howie Winter, now operated the Lancaster Street garage for Bulger and Flemmi. In the mornings the bays might be filled with the clanging and banging of mechanics’ tools, but by early afternoon the tone of the place would change markedly. Most days Bulger and Flemmi arrived around one-thirty to take over the show. Whitey pulled into an empty bay and climbed out of his shiny black 1979 Chevy Caprice. The hushed conversations, the stream of visitors—it all revolved around Bulger and Flemmi. And accompanying them was the big and beefy Nick Femia, an enforcer with a reputation as a killer hooked on shotguns and cocaine. Femia, Kaufman, and other wiseguys stood outside as lookouts as Bulger and Flemmi took up in an office inside.
The Lancaster Street site represented an upgrade, the mobster equivalent of a law firm or bank moving its base from the margins to the center of a city’s business district. It was a location that came with certain frills that just about any Bostonian would covet: a couple blocks west and across the street stood Boston Garden. The Celtics, led by a rookie named Larry Bird, had just fallen short in their surprising run at the Eastern Conference title against Philadelphia.
More important, the Lancaster Street garage was situated in close proximity to the city’s Mafia heartland in the North End. In a matter of minutes you could walk from the garage to the front door of 98 Prince Street, where Gennaro Angiulo and his four brothers oversaw the region’s LCN racketeering enterprise. Finally, there were Bulger’s neighbors a few blocks south: the Lancaster Street garage stood practically in the shadow of the FBI’s Boston field office in Government Center, where John Connolly and John Morris were stationed.
In many ways Bulger was on a roll. Even though their former Winter Hill gang had suffered a crippling blow from the government’s wildly successful prosecution in the race-fixing case, Bulger and Flemmi seemed to have adopted the optimistic view that in life there were no setbacks, only new opportunities. They’d heard that an unaffiliated East Boston wiseguy named Vito was running a loan-sharking and gambling business without the blessing of either Bulger or the Mafia. Soon the gun-toting Femia paid Vito a visit and put a pistol to his head. Then Bulger and Flemmi had their own session with Vito in the back room of a downtown smoke shop and explained the meaning of life. Vito decided to retire, and Bulger, Flemmi, and Femia took control of the East Boston franchise.
There was no question that when the need arose, Bulger and Flemmi were hands on. If a “client” was late on a loan payment, they would take the wayward one for a ride in the black Chevy. Flemmi would drive with the recalcitrant debtor seated by his side. From the backseat Bulger would whisper in a low but unmistakably firm tone about the need to “get it up” or “face the consequences.” If a second trip was necessary, Bulger and Flemmi would have someone like Femia trash the debtor’s apartment while the two crime bosses talked over the problem during the ride-along.
Usually there was no call for a third ride.
Inside the FBI Connolly and Morris were stuffing the bureau’s files with confidential reports about how down and out Bulger and Flemmi were in the wake of Howie Winter’s fall, but out on the street the two gangsters hardly appeared to be suffering. In addition to coordinating their affairs with the Mafia, the two were busy launching their new tactic of extorting tribute—or rent—from already established rackets. The bookmaker Chico Krantz was now stopping by to drop off his monthly payments, at one point plunking down an extra $5,000—an additional fee Bulger had demanded for settling a dispute Krantz had had with another bookie. Krantz was only one of many bookies now paying such tributes.
There was one hardship, a personal one: on New Year’s Day 1980 Bulger’s mother had died at Massachusetts General Hospital after a long illness. She was seventy-three. Whitey Bulger had stayed on in the family apartment on O’Callaghan Way in the South Boston housing project where he, his brother Billy, and John Connolly had all grown up. It was where Flemmi often picked him up in the late morning in the black Chevy to start their business day.
Bulger did have two other women in his life to comfort him. One was his longtime girlfriend, Teresa Stanley, who lived in South Boston. He’d met Stanley in the late 1960s, when she was twenty-five and aimless, already a single mother of four children. He taught her how to organize her life and to have dinner ready for him each night at the same time. She was always grateful for his presence in her life. He was strict with her children, and he wanted everyone to sit at the dinner table together. But these days, even if he played father to Teresa’s four kids, Bulger often ended his day in the arms of a much younger woman, a dental hygienist named Catherine Greig, who lived in North Quincy.
Despite the loss of their mother at the start of the year, 1980 was a time when both Bulgers were consolidating their power and fast approaching the top of their games. Elected as president of the State Senate in 1978, Billy Bulger had established himself as a charming orator and cunning powerbroker. Conservative on social issues—opposing abortion rights and supporting the death penalty—Bulger was an outspoken defender of the working class. He remained impatient with dissent, however, if not intolerant. In words that could have been ascribed to his gangster brother, politicians described having worked with “two Billy Bulgers.”
“If you are going to be just his friend, he’s very polite, very proper, a very nice person, a good host, all that,” George Keverian, the house speaker, said about dealings with his counterpart in the State Senate. But, he added, if you opposed Bulger, you faced a different and darker side: “He gets steely-eyed, he gets cold.”
In a number of highly publicized disputes Billy Bulger’s reputation as a vindictive autocrat was cemented. In one, Billy became enraged when a Boston housing court judge refused to fill a clerkship with his hand-picked choice. The judge lashed out against Bulger’s raw patronage move by calling Bulger a “corrupt midget.” Payback came through legislation that cut the judge’s pay, reduced the size of his staff, and ended the court’s independent status by having it folded into another branch of the judiciary. Both Bulgers were used to having the last word.
Indeed, the Bulger brothers—each in his own way—seemed determined to make a struggling city theirs. It was a period of economic unrest, of high inflation, with an aging ex-movie actor, Ronald Reagan, on his way to ousting the unpopular incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. It was the dawn of what would soon become known as the high-flying 1980s, the “Me Decade,” featuring yuppies, skinny ties, designer food, and leg warmers, an era of Wall Street greed and corporate takeovers led by mega-financiers like Carl Icahn and Michael Milken.
Strutting into the Lancaster Street garage each day were Bulger and Flemmi to take care of their own mergers and acquisitions. And Jane Fonda wasn’t the only one exercising hard. Both Whitey and Stevie worked out, lifted weights, and stayed fit. Bulger, even at fifty, took his appearance seriously, and he showed up at the garage to flex his underworld power wearing the body-fitting shirts that were in style. There wasn’t a mirror or a windshield he didn’t like. He’d pause, catch his reflection, secure in the feeling that no one—at least not the Boston FBI—was watching what he was really up to.
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But someone was watching.
Peering out from behind the shabby curtains of a second-story window in a flophouse directly across from the Lancaster Street garage was a group of hard-driving troopers from the Massachusetts State Police. Six days a week, beginning in late April and lasting into July, the troopers were hunkered down at the window in the roach-infested bedroom, chronicling the mob action across the street.
They saw the little things—Bulger and Flemmi preening on the sidewalk between appointments, sucking in their stomachs when a pretty woman walked by or making sure their shirt buttons lined up with their belt buckles. They watched Bulger’s body language downshift into business gear when he was displeased—charging hard at a visitor and jabbing a finger into the man’s chest, swearing at him all the while. When Bulger was done, Flemmi would take over and do the same. More significant, the troopers saw the big things—men arriving with briefcases and betting slips. They watched money change hands. They took notes—and pictures. In all, during the eleven weeks they watched they counted more than sixty noted underworld figures come and go; in fact, virtually every organized crime figure in New England, at one time or another, showed up at the Lancaster Street garage for a meeting with Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi.
Like a silent movie—no words and all action—the garage provided a panoramic shot of the whole of the Boston underworld. And the action filling the wide screen in living color contrasted sharply with the narrow snapshot of Bulger and Flemmi that the Boston FBI was planting in the bureau’s files and in the minds of anyone who asked about the two gangsters.
The state police surveillance had begun quite by accident. Trooper Rick Fraelick happened upon the garage one day while he was driving in the neighborhood on a tip about a stolen car ring. He drove down Lancaster Street and noticed George Kaufman and some of the other mobsters standing on the sidewalk. He pulled over and, out of their view, checked out what was going on.
It was a jaw-dropping moment. He recognized other mobsters coming and going. He saw Bulger and Flemmi. Fraelick returned to headquarters and told Sergeant Bob Long, the supervisor of the Major Crime Unit. Long accompanied Fraelick on a few drive-bys to view the activity for himself. They felt the adrenaline rush that comes with the prospect of a potentially big case. The question was where to set up. Directly across from the garage was a run-down brick building, 119 Merrimac Street. The first floor was a gay bar. Upstairs rooms could be rented. It was a dump, a cheap place where winos crashed. There was little privacy: the uninsulated walls were made of thin wood paneling that a fist could pass through easily. Posing as a gay man, Fraelick rented the room looking directly on to the Lancaster Street garage, and starting in late April, he and Long and trooper Jack O’Malley began documenting Bulger’s affairs.
Other troopers were involved along the way, but these three were the principal investigators who arrived early each day and took up at the window, usually in shifts of two. The men were all local. Long, in his midthirties, had grown up just outside Boston, in nearby Newton, the fourth in a family of ten kids. His father was a lawyer, and since he was a boy he’d dreamed of becoming a state trooper. Long was a jock in high school, even won a partial basketball scholarship to a local junior college, but once he blew out his knee, his sporting life was over. Less than nine months after earning a college degree in criminal justice from City College in San Francisco in 1967, he was back in Massachusetts standing at attention at the state police academy.
Now in charge of a special investigations squad, Long had handpicked Fraelick and O’Malley—both, like himself, athletic and solidly built, the brown-haired Fraelick originally from the North Shore and the reddish-blond O’Malley from Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood and a family of cops. (O’Malley’s dad, a Boston cop, still patrolled Roxbury.) The two troopers, both in their late twenties, were pulled off the road to work with Long. The hours were a killer, but O’Malley was single and Fraelick, though newly married, didn’t have any kids yet. Long had two sons, and the youngest, ten-year-old Brian, had just been selected as the poster boy for the Massachusetts Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The boy got to pose with Bobby Orr of the Bruins in the poster.
The room the troopers shared was small and stuffy, and as the weeks passed into June and July it got hotter. They’d come to work wearing shorts and T-shirts, carrying gym bags that concealed their cameras and logbooks. They practically had to whisper so the other occupants in the flophouse would not overhear them. Fights frequently broke out in the other rooms running down the hallway. But it was worth it, they thought.
The garage’s daily rhythm quickly revealed itself: Kaufman opened up in the morning, and then Bulger and Flemmi took over in the early afternoon. Besides Bulger, Flemmi, Kaufman, and Femia, there were a number of other regulars, including established mobsters like Phil Waggenheim and Mafia associate Nicky Giso.
Then there were the heavy hitters. Bulger met with Donato Angiulo, a capo de regime, or captain, in his brother’s crime family. Larry Zannino, Flemmi’s old acquaintance who ranked second only to underboss Gennaro Angiulo in the hierarchy of the Boston Mafia, made entrances that resembled a Hollywood set piece. Zannino would pull up in a new blue Lincoln Continental or a polished brown Cadillac driven by an underling. The men at the garage would scatter like ants as Zannino made his way from the car to a meeting inside the office with Bulger and Flemmi. Sometimes the flamboyant mafioso would embrace Bulger and kiss him on the cheek. Not every visit was so lovey-dovey, though. Once Zannino emerged from the office and was met by two men who’d been waiting outside. Zannino embraced one, but when the second man moved in for a hug, Zannino slapped him violently. The man dropped to his knees, and Zannino began yelling. Bulger and Flemmi hustled out of the office to catch the show. Zannino berated the fleeing man and then stopped, composed himself, and climbed back into his cool blue Continental.
To the troopers taking notes across the street, Bulger and Flemmi and the Mafia—it all seemed like one family. The troopers developed a feel for the garage. They could tell when an associate was “in the shits” with Bulger. Bulger would make these men wait, and the troopers watched the men nervously pacing outside the garage, checking their wristwatches for the time, looking up and down the street, their faces clenched. When Bulger finally appeared, he would begin the finger jabbing. The body language spoke volumes. Bulger was in charge, no doubt about it. The other men at the garage deferred to him, including Flemmi.
Over time the troopers could detect when Bulger was in a funk. He would turn dark, refuse to talk to anyone or to be bothered, and sulk over in one corner. In keeping with his fanaticism about fitness, he’d take a hamburger and throw out the bun, eating only the meat. Long, O’Malley, and Fraelick learned that Bulger was neat as a pin, a casual but careful dresser who wouldn’t let a hair fall out of place. He liked the things around him kept up and in place. One time Femia had gone down the street to the McDonald’s near Boston Garden. Upon his return the hungry henchman spread out the Big Mac and French fries on the hood of the black car. Bulger came out of the office, saw the greasy display of fast food, and turned white-hot. He marched over, grabbed the French fries, and began whipping them at Femia. He whipped French fries into Femia’s chest and face. The 240-pound Femia backpedaled and stumbled, a hulking hitman cowering before Bulger’s rage. It was as if, instead of hot French fries, Bulger were swinging a crowbar. The troopers would never forget the food fight and its clear message: you did not mess with Whitey Bulger.
At times Long, Fraelick, or O’Malley followed Bulger and Flemmi in order to pick up their routine. They learned that Flemmi often kept the Chevy overnight. They saw that Whitey was not the only one with a complicated love life; Flemmi was the true underworld Lothario. In fact, his juvenile rap sheet contained a portent of the man’s appetites: an early arrest at fifteen for a bizarre charge of “carnal abuse” without further explanation. Flemmi always had a slew of women. He might age, but he made sure the women on his arm were young.
Since the 1960s Flemmi had lived on and off with Marion Hussey in a house that once belonged to his parents just over the Boston city line in Milton. He kept Hussey as his common-law wife, as he’d never divorced Jeannette A. McLaughlin, the woman he’d married in the 1950s when he was a paratrooper. Then, in the mid-1970s Flemmi became smitten with a teenager working behind the counter at a Brookline jewelry store. Debra Davis was stunning. She had shiny blond hair, a big white smile, and long legs. Flemmi showered her with clothes, jewelry, even a car, and the two began to play house, first in a luxury apartment Flemmi kept in Brookline and later in a smaller apartment in Randolph, a suburb on the South Shore. By the late 1970s Flemmi had added another captivating blond teenager to his stable: he was fooling around with Debbie Hussey, Marion’s daughter. Stevie and Debbie could sometimes be seen tooling around in Flemmi’s Jaguar.
There were other women too, but these were the regulars. Although the troopers were never sure where the Chevy might land for the night—Brookline, Randolph, Milton, parts unknown—like clockwork Stevie would pick up Bulger at the housing project around midday. Flemmi would slide over, and Bulger would slip in behind the steering wheel. They realized that Bulger’s demeanor seemed to soften in South Boston, away from Lancaster Street. He greeted kids, waved to mothers, and stopped his car to allow elderly women to cross the street.
But even in Southie he had his moments. One day that summer O’Malley was following Bulger and Flemmi when Bulger turned down Silver Street. Bulger supposedly owned some property on the street, and his girlfriend, Teresa Stanley, lived there. Turning onto Silver, Bulger came upon a group of old men seated on the front stoop of one of the houses. The men were drinking. Bulger hit the car’s brakes and jumped out. The men scrambled off, but one was too slow to react. Bulger hit him across the face, back and forth. The man fell to the ground and curled up. Bulger kicked him. Then he grabbed the man’s hat and threw it down the street. Flemmi, meanwhile, looked up and down the street, keeping watch, but Bulger was done. He and Flemmi laughed hard, got back into the car, and sped away. O’Malley raced over to the bleeding man, but the man was no fool: he waved the trooper off, told him to get away. “I don’t know nothin’ and don’t bother me.” Even a drunk knew better.
While they were assembling their own intelligence about Bulger, the troopers also checked in with their criminal informants. One informant, code-named “It-1,” reported that starting that year “there was a large Money Bank at the garage on Lancaster Street, where the ‘Big Boys’ go to deliver money collected as a result of illegal gaming operations run by the North End. This garage is where the accounts are settled up.” Another informant, named “It-3,” told the troopers that “Bulger is a former lieutenant in the Howie Winter organization and is believed to be assuming control of the operation in Winter’s absence.” Another informant, “It-4,” told them that “Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi were presently overseeing the majority of the sports betting, numbers action, and loan-sharking for the Boston area and in particular the Somerville area.”
The troopers tapped other informants as well, all of whom hooked Bulger and Flemmi up with the Mafia in a flourishing joint venture. By the time July rolled around, Fraelick, Long, and O’Malley felt they had enough probable cause in hand. In open view from the window was a case with the potential to stand as the hallmark of any investigator’s career: nailing the entire lineup—the Mafia and the Bulger gang. The troopers had put up with the squalor of the flophouse, logged the long hours of surveillance, and even gotten a little wacky: on the walls of their room they’d mounted the largest of the cockroaches they killed during the surveillance, transforming the “room kill” into a trophy.
By early July the troopers had witnessed plenty of street action; now they wanted to know what the mobsters were actually saying. They sensed they’d stockpiled enough intelligence and were eager to take their case to the next level—installing a microphone inside the garage.
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Several times that spring Long, along with his commander, met with Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan, still the top federal prosecutor at the New England Organized Crime Strike Force. Long briefed O’Sullivan on what he and his troopers were witnessing at the Lancaster Street garage. They came up with a plan in which the feds would provide funding for the state police bugging operation. They brought in a local prosecutor, Tim Burke, an assistant district attorney in Suffolk County, to prepare the court papers to win a judge’s approval.
Despite the federal funding, it would be a stand-alone state police effort—no other agency. It wasn’t as if the troopers could not work with the FBI; after all, Long had served as state police commander in Operation Lobster, the joint FBI and state police investigation that had involved Nick Gianturco. But there were the new rumors, especially after the race-fixing indictments when Bulger had eluded prosecution. The rest of law enforcement had begun wondering about Bulger and the FBI. But O’Sullivan, despite what he knew, told Long nothing—it was their case.
On July 23, 1980, Superior Court Judge Robert A. Barton approved Burke’s application for a warrant to bug the Lancaster Street garage. Pumped up, Long, Fraelick, and O’Malley went to work. None of them had had much experience when it came to electronic surveillance, but they’d make up in energy what they clearly lacked in expertise. They’d actually made a trip to Radio Shack to buy the microphones they were going to use. Then, to case the garage’s interior and get a sense of the layout of the office, O’Malley posed as a tourist needing to relieve himself. He wandered into the garage one day, looking lost and looking all around. Bulger confronted him, saying there was no bathroom, and sharply ordered O’Malley out.
It was all trial and error.
The troopers came to call their first attempt “the Trojan Horse.” They obtained a fancy-looking, souped-up van, pulled up the floorboards, and created crawl space for O’Malley. Then they replaced the floorboards, covered them with a shag rug, and filled the van with furniture. With a state police secretary at his side, Fraelick drove up to the garage late one midsummer afternoon. He told George Kaufman that he and his bride were new to Boston and having some car trouble. He was worried about leaving the van with all their belongings overnight on the streets of Boston. What if he pulled the van inside the garage and then first thing in the morning a mechanic could take a look at it?
Kaufman gave his okay and waved the van in. The “newlyweds” thanked Kaufman, promised to return in the morning, and walked off. Kaufman eventually closed up and left too. The plan was for O’Malley to emerge from the van during the night and let a crew in to install the microphones. But none of the troopers had counted on one of the winos from the flophouse across the street setting up right by the garage. O’Malley, bathed in sweat and grime, had no idea what was going on. He was not in radio contact with the others, but he could hear the wino making noise outside. The troopers improvised. Long had one of his crew go out and buy a case of beer. The trooper plopped down next to the wino and began feeding him beers. Once the man passed out, the troopers could move in. But waiting ate up precious time, and just when the man was going down Kaufman unexpectedly reappeared. Kaufman started yelling at the two men drinking at his garage, and he chased them off. By this time it was too late to pull off a bug installation. Eventually O’Malley emerged from his suffocating hiding spot only to learn that Long had called off the effort.
Their next try met with more success.
Early one evening the troopers parked a U-Haul truck snugly next to the garage. The truck not only carried a crew but also created a wall so that no one from the flophouse could look down onto the garage. Most nights the winos and wackos were yelling and hanging out the open windows in the sweltering heat. The truck took care of the flophouse follies. Then, after Kaufman left, two troopers dropped down by the side of the truck and kicked out a bottom panel of the garage door. The troopers crawled in and, with the help of a technician they had hired for the job, installed three microphones—one in a couch, one inside a radio, and one in the ceiling of the office. They left, replacing the panel on the garage door.
Bob Long and his troopers were ecstatic. But the operation went quickly downhill from there. Testing the reception, they faced technical problems. Instead of mobster talk, they were picking up pager calls for doctors at nearby Massachusetts General Hospital. The microphone installed inside the radio didn’t function at all. The one in the couch worked but wasn’t of much use, producing little more than a rush of sound, like a hurricane, when one of the mobsters, especially the oversized ones like Nicky Femia, collapsed into it. But they were getting transmission from the microphone in the office, and that was the prime location; after straightening out the hospital interference, it was soon up and running.
Then the sky fell in.
Bulger, Flemmi, and Kaufman mysteriously started looking up at the windows in the flophouse. Abruptly they altered their routine. Instead of talking in the office or in the open bays, Bulger and Flemmi held meetings inside the black Chevy. The office was now off limits. The troopers were stunned. They kept monitoring their bugs, but shortly after the gangsters moved their talk to the backseat of the Chevy, they had to stop coming to the Lancaster Street garage altogether. Early in August the court order permitting them to bug the garage expired. The troopers had their notes, a pile of great photographs, but nothing more. Bulger was gone.
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In the days before Long, Fraelick, and O’Malley failed in their bugging attempt, trouble had been brewing for the FBI. It began with a chance encounter at a Friday night party. John Morris, cocktail in hand, sidled up to a hulking Boston detective. The diminutive Morris still managed to talk down to him—the federal agent lording over a local cop. “You have something going at Lancaster Street?” Morris asked with a conspiratorial smile that urged: C’mon, you can tell me.
Taken aback, the detective put on a poker face to mask his surprise. A direct question about another agency’s secret investigation wasn’t expected cocktail chatter at a midsummer party. The question hung in the air, unanswered.
Morris pushed on. “If you have microphones in there,” he said, “they know about it.”
After some more dead air, the police detective finally replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The detective moved away from Morris. But his heart was racing. The next morning he called Bob Long. The early morning phone call did not take Long completely by surprise. He had been sensing something was wrong. All that the bug inside the Lancaster Street garage’s corner office was picking up was a jaunty Whitey Bulger commending state troopers for the great job they did patrolling the Massachusetts Turnpike. Ballbusting or coincidence?
Long wasn’t entirely sure. But the more he thought it over, a pattern became clear. He and his troopers had watched for months from the flop-house across the street as Bulger harassed anxious gamblers who owed money and bantered with visiting Mafia dignitaries. Then, exactly one day after a bug was up and running inside the garage, Bulger had been praising highway patrols and, more important, changing his routine. Business conversations had moved from inside the office to the backseat of Bulger’s black Chevy parked inside the bay area.
Initially Long had figured that Bulger and Flemmi spotted the troopers across the way. But now word of Morris’s overture made Long realize that the problem was much worse than a blown surveillance. To Long, the gangsters’ new routine wasn’t just one of those things that happened—it was treachery. The call from the police detective confirmed the shocking truth that Long saw through a red haze of fury. And he became transfixed by two questions:
How did John Morris know about the state police bug?
And how did he know Bulger and Flemmi knew?
By Monday morning, August 4, 1980, it was war. The ranking state police officer, Lieutenant Colonel John O’Donovan, was on the phone complaining about the leak to the head of the FBI’s Boston office. The state police and FBI office were already accustomed to tangling over glory and credit for fighting crime in Massachusetts, but this kind of accusation marked the nadir of a strained relationship.
Faced with the angry finger pointing, law enforcement did what it always does—it held a meeting. The summit at a Ramada Inn in Boston convened four days after Morris’s party blunder. Attending was a who’s who of law and order: O’Donovan and Long from the state police, county prosecutors, Boston Police officials, an FBI official, and Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan.
O’Donovan presented the grievances of the state police. Looking around the room, he spiced his indignation with a small bluffing game. He claimed their bug had been “extremely productive” until it was tipped. And he said they knew Bulger and Flemmi were informants. Of course, the state police had no solid proof that Bulger and Flemmi were FBI snitches, but O’Donovan had a strong hunch about Bulger’s possible ties to the FBI, going back to an encounter he’d had with the gangster a couple of years earlier. O’Donovan recalled going to see Bulger at Marshall Motors. The issue was a threat against a state trooper from one of Bulger’s associates in the Winter Hill gang. Packing two guns, O’Donovan stopped by the garage to convince Bulger that any move against a trooper was a stupid idea. Bulger quickly assured the lieutenant colonel that nothing would come of the hotheaded rhetoric. Then the two chatted sociably about life along the law enforcement landscape, with one thing leading to another, and finally to the FBI. O’Donovan mentioned that he preferred the older agents in the Boston office to the younger ones, saying that newer agents like John Morris were too inexperienced in the ways of Boston. He made it clear that Morris and other young turks did not impress him.
About two weeks later O’Donovan took a call from a fuming John Morris, who wanted to know why he was badmouthing the FBI with Whitey Bulger. O’Donovan was brought up short and concluded that either the FBI had a bug planted inside Marshall Motors or Bulger was an FBI informant.
Morris’s indiscreet call only compounded O’Donovan’s mistrust for the FBI supervisor. O’Donovan saw the agent as a schemer who maneuvered behind a friendly demeanor. Another time he’d passed along a state police tip to Morris about a fugitive on the Ten Most Wanted List. The same day Morris and several agents raced to capture the terrorist bomber. There was no joint arrest, just an FBI press conference. O’Donovan and his troopers were forgotten on the sidelines.
But none of this was proof of skullduggery. It was just troubling background that an experienced policeman never forgot. And at the Ramada O’Donovan didn’t get into this kind of history. But neither did he and Sergeant Long disclose that the troopers, despite the setback at the Lancaster Street garage, were planning to take another run at Bulger and Flemmi later in August. Instead, O’Donovan focused on recapping the debacle at the garage, climaxed by his conviction that the FBI had compromised the bug. Between the lines the topic on the roundtable was nothing short of accusing FBI agents of a crime: obstruction of justice.
But the FBI men did not flinch—it was their kind of game. The bureau’s representative, an agent named Weldon L. Kennedy, one of the assistant supervisors in Boston, listened politely to O’Donovan of the state police. Once O’Donovan was done, Kennedy had little to say.
“We’ll get back to you,” he finally offered. But that was it.
After the meetings, however, the FBI in Boston went into spin cycle. Initially the bureau insisted that Morris had learned about the bug by putting two and two together: first, his own informants from the North End Mafia had detected “new faces” in the area, and second, Morris had heard that Boston Police were ordered to stay away from Lancaster Street. To a professional like Morris, there was only one conclusion to draw: something investigatory was under way. Morris even offered that his approach to the Boston cop was a well-meaning bid to use his insight as a warning to the troopers.
But O’Donovan and his troopers viewed Morris’s account as disingenuous at best and, during the weeks after the Ramada Inn summit, made it clear that they were not buying the FBI’s explanation. In turn, the FBI moved the tense, interagency dispute up a notch. The FBI said it had learned from its informants that any leak had come from within the state police; the collapse of the bugging operation was the state police’s own fault. The agent who had brought this new juicy intelligence to the table was John Connolly.
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