Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down (13 page)

O’Sullivan had allowed Bulger and Flemmi to escape prosecution in the Race Fix case involving sports bribery and game fixing, the first, I believe, in a long string of cover-ups the then U.S. attorney had a hand in. Years later, in 2002 while testifying before the Government Reform Committee, O’Sullivan pretty much admitted to this and more. The following exchange with Connecticut Representative Chris Shays, with regards to the Race Fix case in 1979, was typical.

“I said did anyone from the FBI ask you not to indict Bulger and Flemmi. I thought you said no and now you are saying yes?”

“In my opening statement,” O’Sullivan answered, “I said that when I made up my mind not to indict them, that Morris and Connolly came over after the fact and asked me not to indict them.”

“So when I asked you the question did anyone from the FBI ask you not to indict them, you said no to me. Really what you should have said is yes, but—”

“That’s correct, Congressman.”

“Did anyone from the Justice Department tell you not to indict them?”

“No, Congressman. Absolutely not.”

“Did anyone from the state police at anytime ask you—”

“Absolutely not,” O’Sullivan interrupted.

“So the only people, according to your testimony, that asked you not to indict, are the FBI.”

“Yes,” O’Sullivan admitted.

“Now,” Shays continued, “did you respond with some degree of … somewhat incredulously like, ‘What do you mean these are FBI informants? They are known murderers?’”

“No, I did not, Congressman.”

“Why not?”

“I assume that when you have informants at that level they are involved in crimes.”

“Let me understand something. If you are an informant and giving testimony against someone else, are you allowed to be killing people?”

O’Sullivan, of course, never really answered the question, and later, when confronted with a memorandum refuting his recollection of the events, all he could say was “You got me.” And he said it with a wry but fearful smirk, the same smirk I recalled when I warned him there was a leak in his office.

Later, the committee’s final report would state, among other scathing findings, that the FBI’s relationship with Bulger and company “must be considered one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement.”

14

BOSTON, SPRING 1981

Prior to reporting to Boston in late 1980, I had several assignments that proved prescient when it came to what I’d be facing in Boston. Most notable among these was one detailing gangsters who were frequenting the Miami Jai Alai fronton, gangsters directly connected to Whitey Bulger. Although I was vaguely aware that former agent Paul Rico had been hired as head of security down there, I didn’t think much of it at the time, and the whole incident might have passed from my memory if not for the murder of Roger Wheeler, the new owner of World Jai Alai, at a country club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1981.

As both
The Brothers Bulger
and
Black Mass
have expertly reported, John Callahan, a glorified Jai Alai accountant who washed money for Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang, informed Whitey that Wheeler had gotten wise to the fact that more than a million dollars a year was being skimmed off the top of his Miami fronton’s take. This represented clean profits for Bulger based on a strong-arm agreement he had with Wheeler’s predecessors, an agreement that Wheeler clearly had no intention of honoring. He’d already grudgingly agreed to a partner he didn’t need in the Bulger-backed jai alai rep Richard Donovan, and to a head of security he didn’t want in Paul Rico.

Wheeler’s response to the Winter Hill Gang’s pressure was to commission an internal audit almost sure to reveal the cagey Callahan’s complicity in the skim, perhaps incriminating Bulger and Flemmi as well and possibly revealing Rico to be a facilitator for the whole enterprise. Wheeler was a very good businessman, not easily intimidated and comfortable in a world where numbers could be as effective a weapon as bullets. But Wheeler also believed that living across the country in the middle of nowhere offered a degree of insulation from the murderous gangsters he was confronting back East.

He was wrong.

Accepting counsel from Callahan, Bulger and Flemmi decided to cut out the middleman; they’d take over World Jai Alai altogether by whacking Wheeler. And they had an ally firmly in place to help them in the form of Paul Rico, the agent who, along with Dennis Condon, had blazed a trail to glory in the Boston office and had been Whitey’s guy at the Miami fronton all along. Apparently sitting in the sun while collecting a pension and hefty salary to boot wasn’t enough for him. Rico saw an opportunity for advancement by helping the gangster muscle Wheeler out of the action once and for all by supplying whatever intelligence Whitey demanded. Of course, muscling Wheeler out could mean only one thing in Whitey’s world, and the question became would he risk his empire on the pretext of expanding it?

The answer was a resounding yes, especially since Bulger was convinced Connolly and the FBI could protect him as easily for a murder he was behind in Oklahoma as they’d been protecting him in Boston. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that Connolly had uncovered some shady business dealings in Wheeler’s past and passed them on to Bulger. It wasn’t much, but it may have been enough to point the finger at several other possible suspects who made more sense than trying to pin the rap on gangsters out of Boston, which seemed like a world away. I had come to know that a Connolly MO (modus operandi) was to blame everything on the other guys. Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter accusations.

John Callahan thought Brian Halloran, a Winter Hill Gang member, would be perfect to send to Tulsa to do the deed. But Whitey didn’t like or trust Halloran and had grown tired of his ever-growing cocaine habit. He suggested John Martorano for the job instead. Martorano was his most trusted button man, his “go-to guy,” implicated at that point in no less than eighteen murders on Whitey’s orders. But Martorano was no psychopath and was actually more a partner than simple button man or thuggish enforcer. To him, it was all about business. When someone needed to go, they needed to go. Still, Martorano’s reputation and prowess made for a great counterbalance against any of Bulger’s gangster foes, even considering doing him harm out of fear of what Martorano would do to them if they failed or, even, succeeded. For those familiar with
The Godfather,
book and movie, Martorano to a great extent was for Whitey what Luca Brasi was for Vito Corleone. The difference being in Martorano’s classy case his gun was concealed by Armani, Brioni, or Zegna. I heard somewhere that Martin Scorcese has snapped up his life story for a million dollars, and I can see why.

In May 1981, Wheeler was leaving the prestigious Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa when a man wearing a fake beard closed in from behind. He followed Wheeler to his car, and when the businessman took a seat behind the wheel, the stranger raised a paper bag and a single shot rang out. Witnesses at the club’s swimming pool, including a police officer, were startled to see the stranger calmly walk across the parking lot and slide into a car that drove him away.

John Martorano had once again come through for Whitey Bulger, the slaying taking place at a country club where he could just as easily have been confused as a member. All that was missing was a fish wrapped in newspaper to signify Wheeler’s ultimate fate.

True to Connolly’s assertion that nobody would look eastward for the killer and motive, Wheeler’s murder might have gone unsolved if not for a few Oklahoma informants who dimed “Boston gangsters” for the hit. Tulsa authorities, led by a dedicated, no-bullshit homicide detective named Michael Huff, contacted our Boston office and was referred to me. Remembering my earlier fleeting experiences with Boston gangsters seen frequenting Miami Jai Alai during ABSCAM, the pieces of the puzzle were suddenly all on the table. It would take months to put them all together, but I was convinced of Bulger’s complicity in Wheeler’s murder, giving me what I needed to close Whitey once and for all and put an end to the leaks.

SAC Sarhatt clearly hadn’t acted on my earlier recommendations, acting instead on Morris’s countermemo suggesting that Bulger be allowed to remain open “until such time that incontrovertible proof of his participation in a criminal act became clear.” To change things, I would need to prove that Whitey was indeed involved in the murder of Roger Wheeler. So I set my other squads to work on the Tulsa-based murder case.

But I had other problems to contend with as well. Even as I began assembling the facts of the Winter Hill Gang’s part in the Wheeler killing, the two men directly responsible for my assignment to Boston moved on. Assistant Director Roy McKinnon, who’d told me to “kick ass and take names,” retired due to health issues. And Tom Kelly, who championed me after supervising my work in ABSCAM, was promoted to SAC of the FBI office in Dallas. Kelly had pushed for me to clean up the mess in Boston after I’d done similar work in Miami.

While their HQ replacements were certainly briefed on the particulars of my assignment, they could in no way understand the depths to which the Boston office had fallen. Worse, they were Organized Crime guys who lived by the mantra of “get the mafia at all costs.” It was much simpler to tacitly accept the words of agents there over those of locals like Colonel John O’Donovan of the Massachusetts State Police, especially when Strike Force attorney Jeremiah O’Sullivan backed up everything those agents said. And Larry Sarhatt acquiesced, because to do otherwise would be to cast aspersions on his own office and leadership. He wasn’t about to throw himself under the bus, which meant leaving me squarely in front of it. Of course, Roger Wheeler never would’ve been murdered in the first place had my original memo recommending that Bulger be closed as an informant been acted upon.

I could read the writing on the wall, but I had been sent to Boston to do a job and I still had every intention of doing it. My meeting with Billy Bulger had made things squarely personal. Going it alone was nothing new for me. I’d gotten used to it in my youth at Mount Loretto as well as in my time as an FBI agent and supervisor, the feeling personified in this case by the fact that my family had not accompanied me to Boston and my marriage had crumbled, leaving me estranged from my two boys. My apartment was small and dark, inconsequential since I never expected to be there for as long as I was.

Being alone brought back more painful memories from my days at the Mount, the most painful of all. My mother visited me there several times, but never for long enough to renew the bond that had been severed. I eventually dealt with my fear and anxiety by turning off any feelings of attachment and longing. I became the classic “stone child” of literature and profile typing. I surrendered to detachment in what could be called passive-aggressive emotions, and I began the task of coping and persevering for myself and for my mother. I now recognize that her reluctance to visit me at the home was because of her own pain and shame, and the knowledge that she was dying. In fear of exposing any weakness, I internalized every painful emotion, but since no one heard me crying out it became my own personal grief. It was the same with all the other children at the Mount. We shared the same misery, the same deep and dark despair, but on the surface we shared only the same regimented routine.

The church was the heart and soul of Mount Loretto. The sprawling cathedral had Gothic architecture, flying buttresses, stained-glass windows exotically reflecting scenes of saints and sinners. There was a huge altar and in the rear a choir loft for singing Latin hymns and reciting ancient prayers. The elegantly carved hardwood pews were darkly stained to match the medieval church décor and blended with the community of Mount people: priests, nuns, brothers, and over seven hundred homeless boys. At Sunday mass or at a holy day feast celebration in this elegiac theater I would sing in the choir as well as serve as acolyte and altar boy.

One night I couldn’t sleep, haunted by a premonition of death—not mine, my mother’s. In the dream, I couldn’t do anything about it or call for help because I was alone in my dormitory bed. My mother appeared to me smiling sweetly, assuring me that no matter what happened, she’d always be at my side. She told me many things and we talked the better part of the seemingly sleepless night. When she rose from my bedside, I pleaded with her, “
Don’t leave me, never leave me!
” and she shushed me to sleep. Then, all of a sudden, she was gone despite my fearful pleas.

During mass on the next Sunday, restless and uneasy, I sat in the Gothic church and vaguely heard the priest’s words, “We now pray for the repose of the soul of Alice, wife of John,” who had died that Sunday morning. Blood rushed to my face and the familiar flutter of loneliness and abandonment returned to my stomach in an instant of panic and denial. It couldn’t be
my mother
Alice; hadn’t she promised she’d never leave me? Wasn’t my eventual return to her what had kept me going through the years?

It was with those numbing words, spoken by a priest during a Sunday-morning mass, that I learned of the death of my mother. I left the church, light-headed and on unsteady legs, with the unmistakable feeling of everyone’s eyes upon me. There were expressions of pity and sorrow, but there was no love, no reassurance, and now, no hope of a return to my mother.

The reality of my mother being gone forever overwhelmed me and deadened my senses. I resisted anyone touching me or getting close. Just a firmer reiteration of the “no-hug” policy. I wanted to escape, but to where? The nuns saw a hurt child, with all the agony and pain, and no doubt wanted to help. I wouldn’t let them. Soon, I began to embrace the heartbreak and the longing because feeling something was better than feeling nothing, even if it meant torturing myself. My recollection of the funeral and its immediate aftermath remains vague. My oldest brother Larry had already left the Mount for the Marine Corps. I was allowed to spend time with my other brother Gerard and sister Diane, but it did little to ease the numbing pain that consumed me.