28

BOSTON, 2000

A team of Massachusetts state policemen pulled the body of John McIntyre out of a shallow grave in a Dorchester, Massachusetts, gulley on a cold, dark, and dismal morning in January of 2000. The gray sky hung over the town’s brick housing projects nestled apart from the rows of tenement homes finished in peeling paint or cheap siding, while the skyline of nearby downtown Boston winked with the first light of day. Across the street, a worker replaced letters on the marquee of Florian Hall, a popular banquet facility, to greet the attendees of a Chamber of Commerce luncheon later that day.

The gulley had been dug out as part of the “Big Dig,” a major highway project undertaken to reroute the traffic, currently buzzing above along the Southeast Expressway, underground—it would ultimately become the most expensive highway project in U.S. history. I stood on the lip of the gulley gazing downward at the scene, flanked on either side by local television news teams eager to scoop one another. McIntyre’s remains, limited to bones and body parts, were forced from an unforgiving frozen ground by uniformed officers wearing surgical masks over their mouths as a precaution both against germs and the potential stench of decomposition.

No priest or cleric had presided over the funeral of John McIntyre. No dark-dressed cortege stood in solemn silence, weeping in grief for a lost friend and loved one. There had been no wake, no eulogy, no visiting hours.

As I stood on the lip of the dirt pile, looking down at the assemblages of bagged and tagged pieces of what had once been a man, the war I’d waged against organized crime and my own associates in the FBI for that entire period hit me hard and fast. I would later learn how McIntyre’s last rites had been given in the basement of a two-story tenement house in Irish-dominated South Boston, where he’d been lured on the pretext of a party. For sixteen years, McIntyre’s disappearance remained unexplained and his body undiscovered until another informant’s tip drew the Massachusetts State Police to this burial spot.

I’d been out of the Bureau for almost fifteen years by this point, but calls from both the media and some leftover contacts in law enforcement had brought me to the scene just past dawn, where I stood frozen in the frigid air. It was 1984 again, John McIntyre was still alive, and once more I thought I had what I needed to clean up a mess in the Boston office of the FBI many years in the making.

And here now, almost two decades to the day of my arrival in Boston, the bones being pulled from the ground told the same story I’d spent the last fifteen years of my life telling. While my personal efforts to seek vindication were being stymied at every turn, justice was about to be served. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed an assistant U.S. attorney from Connecticut, a bespectacled, ordinary-looking special prosecutor with an organized crime background named John Durham to finally do what I’d been prevented from doing: sort out the corrupt mess that defined the Boston office and clean it up. Sounds like a simple enough mandate, and for Durham it was. Like Fred Wyshak he didn’t have to contend with superiors impeding his investigation, some of whom were corrupt themselves. He did have a substantial handicap, though. Durham knew most of the agents involved in the Boston organized crime debacle, which could influence him partially because he had worked with them on some of the same OC investigations.

Or, he could embarrass the Bureau all he wanted.

Durham turned his sights, initially anyway, on John Connolly. Connolly had always cultivated a high profile and now that would come back to haunt him by making him the most convenient target, especially since he’d left the Bureau and wouldn’t have the insulation that comes with being an active agent. Connolly bombastically and combatively took shots at the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, denigrating them in the media. Arrogance, I was reminded, was his calling card.

Authorities arrested Connolly shortly after Durham obtained an indictment on obstruction of justice and racketeering charges in December of 1999, just before the statute of limitations ran out. They arrested him as the holiday season was in full swing, Connolly led out dressed in pajamas with his usual neat and polished appearance in disarray.

His brashness and ego had made him an easy target. Believing himself immune to prosecution, ingratiating himself with the media, he had turned the Wolf hearings into his own personal sideshow both in and out of court by speaking out against his former colleagues and superiors. He lambasted John Morris by labeling him a liar and a fraud, while flatly rejecting the claims of another, Morris’s successor as head of Boston’s Organized Crime squad, Jim Ring. Everyone, from Connolly’s perspective, was a liar except him. He alone stood above all the corruption either revealed or hinted at during the hearings, contesting that he was a pillar of integrity. Connolly had insulated himself in his blanket of delusion that he had single-handedly taken down the Boston mafia, thanks to his turning Whitey Bulger as an informant. Profiling Connolly, I called this delusion superego lacunae, or “holes in the conscience,” opinion over fact.

Connolly had the ability to use defense mechanisms to see things as rosy as he desired. He was a hero, a legend in his own mind, and thus untouchable, and everyone else be damned. He brushed aside my claims about him; dismissing them out of hand while seeming insulted I’d even dare pose them. There were guys calling him “Cannoli” because he went over to the other side. He simply stopped listening to reason, along with whatever was left of his own conscience. I had dealt with a lot of aberrational subjects in my time and Connolly had dissolved into little more than one of them, having lived the lie so long that he now routinely accepted it as the truth.

But there was another side to the whole Connolly fiasco that has never gotten the attention it deserves, that being the real possibility that at this very time none other than Billy Bulger was putting Connolly’s name forward to become police commissioner for the city of Boston. I’d heard the rumors but dismissed them out of hand until questioning of Bulger in 2002 before a U.S. House of Representatives committee revealed that was exactly the case. Billy tried to double-talk his way out of it, saying in part, “Maybe way back. Many years before, there was a neighbor of ours who was mayor, and I may have suggested John to Raymond Flynn.… I may have suggested him as a candidate, somebody that might be looked at.”

Well, I ran the Boston Marathon with Boston mayor Ray Flynn during that period, and in my mind there was no way he’d ever even consider Connolly for such a positon. The point is that Connolly had always insulated and compartmentalized Billy from his brother, while protecting Whitey from arrest and prosecution at the same time. His taking me to meet Billy early into my Boston tenure was all about showcasing his power and making “we always take care of our own” a barely veiled promise. That’s what Billy was doing now by pushing the then lobbyist Connolly for a “commish” job that would have put him in charge of fighting crime in Boston.

How ironic that around the very time Billy Bulger may have been pushing John Connolly for police commissioner, another gangster-turned-informant, one Kevin Weeks, led FBI and Massachusetts State Police officials to the site in Dorchester where he’d buried the body of John McIntyre and two more of Bulger’s victims. Weeks had already admitted his involvement in five murders with Whitey and Stephen Flemmi while denying he ever killed anyone himself.

“It wasn’t that I wouldn’t shoot,” he said, as reported in the Boston Globe; he didn’t have to, since Bulger and Flemmi “liked killing people.”

Kevin Weeks was in the basement the night of John McIntyre’s murder. I stood on the lip of the gulley that cold January day thinking about how these three victims (other bodies recovered included those of Bucky Barrett, another informant, and an ex-girlfriend of Flemmi’s named Debra Davis, allegedly strangled by Bulger himself), whose lives had been reduced to the contents of black body bags, didn’t have to die. They’d all been murdered after my claims about Whitey Bulger and repeated recommendations that he be closed as an informant.

John Durham, though, had only John Connolly in his crosshairs, and it should have been like shooting fish in a barrel. As it was, though, the lengthy trial resulted in more charges being dismissed than upheld, due in large part to the fact that much of the testimony presented against Connolly came from convicted hit man John Martorano, as well as Frank “Cadillac” Salemme himself. Both had already cut deals with the government and were even less credible than Connolly himself. In truth, Salemme would actually perjure himself to get Connolly. The former crime boss was an advocate of “what goes around comes around,” and it was his turn to get even. Stephen Flemmi, too, from a witness chair not far removed from the jail cell where he was serving an abbreviated sentence thanks to a plea bargain, wasted no time in cutting Connolly down to size.

In May 2002, Connolly was convicted of racketeering, obstruction of justice, and lying to an FBI agent. The jury, though, failed to find him guilty of bribery or of receiving a two-carat diamond ring from Bulger. This in spite of the fact that Connolly had many times shown the ring off and made no secret of its origin as stolen property. Even agents on the OC squad heard the rumors of the infamous ring and winced each time Connolly ran it up the pole.

Connolly was ultimately sentenced to ten years in federal prison, stoically stewing there while prosecutors began to build a case against him in the 1982 murder of John Callahan in Miami. As that Florida trial was about to begin in 2008, I was interviewed by David Boeri for an article he was writing for Boston Magazine. In “The Martyrdom of John Connolly” (September 2008), Boeri expertly handled much of what transpired subsequent to John Connolly’s 2002 conviction with a scathing, eye-opening aplomb that stressed Durham’s myopic vision of the problems he’d been brought in to deal with.

“Nobody in this country is above the law, an FBI agent or otherwise,” Durham insisted in the wake of Connolly’s conviction, seeming to indicate a plan, at least an intention, to pursue other guilty parties.

Nothing could be further from the truth. More than a decade later now, no additional arrests or prosecutions have taken place, in spite of the fact that I and a number of other law enforcement officials laid out all the evidence of corruption and leaking for Durham. We basically served up everything he needed on a silver platter, which he apparently ignored then and has continued to ignore since.

I indicated to Boeri for his article that the Department of Justice threw Connolly under the bus. Clearly no fan or close friend of the man either then or now, I continue to stand by that statement. Connolly was the fall guy, the most convenient to go after and nothing more. But his conviction on charges that only scratched the surface of what he was truly guilty of did little to address the scope and magnitude of the corruption I’d found in Boston. Durham never charged the top leadership, including James Greenleaf or Jeremiah O’Sullivan, with a single thing. Whitey, after all, was John Connolly’s guy. Connolly had long proclaimed that to be so and had ridden Bulger’s coattails to a decorated career and cushy retirement. But now he was finally paying the price for it. Of course, O’Sullivan had been a willing partner ever since the 1979 Race Fix case, in which he’d let Bulger and Flemmi skate even though he knew they were guilty. That should have made them beholden to him; instead the reverse turned out to be the case.

Durham’s laserlike focus on Connolly, in my mind, made him appear little better than O’Sullivan and the Department of Justice that oversaw his Strike Force. Durham gave everyone else involved in or enabling Boston’s culture of corruption a pass, just as O’Sullivan had given Bulger and Flemmi a pass.

“In short,” David Boeri wrote me in an e-mail months before publication of his article for Boston Magazine, “Durham protected the FBI, and the very team he relied upon—the State Police and DEA agents—who arrested, interrogated, and handled the major witnesses, rebelled against him and consider him a fraud. They believe he could have and should have prosecuted other FBI agents. But that he chose not to investigate further.”

In hearings held in 2002 and 2003, though, the House Committee on Government Reform picked up the ball Durham had dropped. On November 20, 2003, the committee approved and adopted a report entitled “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murderers as Informants.” “The 1979 Ciulla race-fixing prosecution memorandum provides extremely important information about how prosecutorial discretion was exercised to benefit FBI informants James ‘Whitey’ Bulger and Stephen Flemmi,” the report said in part. “It demonstrates that former U.S. Attorney Jeremiah O’Sullivan’s testimony before the Committee is subject to question. Perhaps more important, it shows that a 1997 FBI Office of Professional Responsibility conclusion that prosecutorial discretion had never been exercised by the federal government on behalf of James Bulger and Stephen Flemmi was not correct.”

Also included in the committee’s report was a scathing indictment of the work of Paul Rico and Dennis Condon. Rico and Condon were the ones who’d handled informant Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, going so far as to falsely imprison four innocent men in the 1965 murder of Teddy Deegan to keep Barboza from taking the heat.

“I must tell you this, that I was outraged—outraged—at the fact that if [the exculpatory documents] had ever been shown to me, we wouldn’t be sitting here,” testified the lead prosecutor in the Deegan case. “I certainly would never have allowed myself to prosecute this case having that knowledge. No way.… That information should have been in my hands. It should have been in the hands of the defense attorneys. It is outrageous, it’s terrible, and that trial shouldn’t have gone forward.”

In October of 2003, the very same week that testimony was given, police authorities from both Miami and Tulsa arrested Paul Rico at his Florida home on charges associated with his involvement in the murder of Roger Wheeler, owner of World Jai Alai, back in Oklahoma in 1981. The information they needed had come from none other than Stephen Flemmi, who was more than happy to give up anyone he could to get his own sentence reduced. To some hard-nosed investigators this kind of dealing by subjects in custody to get sentences reduced was called “getting on the bus.” Both strange and fitting, given that Rico had first tapped Flemmi as an informant, turning him over to John Connolly upon his retirement. Rico had managed to skirt the law for years, according to court records, and probably figured he’d gotten away with everything right up until that knock on his door, and he was arrested for involvement in the crimes he should’ve been fighting, according to federal court records.

The paradox in this irony was bitter and sweet at the same time, since so much of the culture that allowed the Boston office to spin out of control had been bred by Rico and his former partner Dennis Condon. Two of the four men they had wrongly jailed for the murder of Teddy Deegan, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco, died in prison. (Their death sentences, along with that of Peter Limone, were commuted to life in prison following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Furman v. Georgia, 1972.) Joseph Salvati and Limone, were finally freed not long before Rico’s arrest. Rico might not pay for the four lives he had needlessly destroyed, but he would now pay for a fifth whose murder he’d reportedly engineered.

Rico died at the age of seventy-eight in 2004 prior to his trial, his appearance so wan and weak in those final months that even his most fervent enemies and accusers expressed sympathy for his plight. Justice had hardly been served, neither in Rico’s case nor the Boston office itself, since only one of the perpetrators spawned by the era, John Connolly, had actually been jailed. The justice system had failed. Those at FBIHQ who’d continued to fight and belittle me and my efforts thought they could breathe easier.

They were wrong.

Because the floodgates had been opened and could not be shut. The failure of the criminal justice system sent those wronged by the actions of corrupt FBI personnel to civil court, backed up by the inescapable conclusions reached in the Wolf hearings, the Connolly trial, and the Rico arrest. The corruption I had fought for so long had at last found the proper forum; Joseph Salvati, for example, sued the Bureau for $680 million for wrongful conviction in 2003, and that was just the beginning.

In the ensuing years, more than a dozen civil cases were filed against the Bureau directly related to the actions I had been stymied from stopping or exposing. After fighting for years to make people listen, suddenly I had a willing and captive audience eager to depose me for what I knew that for so long nobody wanted to hear. Appearing on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2001, I had extemporaneously held the Bureau guilty in answering a question about responsibility. Every plaintiff’s attorney had a copy of that show. In one case, there were no less than thirteen lawyers in a conference room during my deposition, too many for all the chairs to accommodate.

In a separate venue with government lawyers alone, I got a taste of what shape their hostility would take later in open court.

“Don’t answer that,” my crusty lawyer, Bill Brown, instructed in response to a relatively simple question from a Department of Justice attorney.

“You can answer the question, Mr. Fitzpatrick,” she extolled.

“No, he can’t,” came Brownie’s retort.

The attorney kept her eyes squarely on me, avoiding Brownie altogether. “Answer the question, please. You have nothing to fear.”

At which point, Brownie leaned over the table toward her. “Are you Mr. Fitzpatrick’s lawyer?”

“No,” she replied feebly.

“That’s right. So stop giving my client legal advice. He won’t be answering the question.”

This episode made for a prime counterpoint to the way I’d been handled by the FBI following the shooting incident in Cape Cod. Back then, FBIHQ agents ordered me to attend a class at Quantico that I’d already taken. I was actually taken out of class one day and ordered to FBIHQ where I was grilled yet again without counsel or any legal recourse. I told my interrogators I wanted an attorney and was rebuffed repeatedly. It was like a scene from the classic novel Darkness at Noon in which Communist interrogators continue to question and berate Nicholas Rubashov until he falsely confesses his guilt just to make it stop. And if they did this to me, it made perfect sense that they’d follow the same track with agents used to concoct the case against me, one of whom later admitted he was so scared that, as in Darkness at Noon, he made up a lie they wanted to hear rather than sticking to the truth. Make no mistake about it, though, I remained Rubashov in this twisted tragedy.

I wish I’d had Brownie on my side back then, since his intervention with government lawyers had been a prime example of his working to protect me. Wolf, in his hearings, had inadvertently made a finding that now included me as a defendant in most of the civil cases brought against the government. One defense attorney told me he had to name me as a defendant to assure my testimony at trial to win the civil case.

The battle lines had been drawn, and this time I had Brownie watching my back. There were enough cases and depositions to make all the Q and A’s run together, with one exception that would provide me with an opportunity to achieve the justice I’d been seeking for twenty years. A case that was still etched into my memory from a cold, blustery January day in 2000 when I stood watching the remains of a long-buried body being lifted from the frozen ground.

The body of John McIntyre.