NOT LONG AFTER Kevin Weeks finished his two-day stint on the witness stand, I was invited to come on the Howie Carr radio show to talk about the trial. I knew Carr and had been a guest on his show in previous years to promote books I had published. Nearly every day during the proceedings, I saw Howie in the third-floor media room watching the monitors and taking notes on his laptop computer, just like everyone else.
Carr is a lightning rod in Boston: some love him, some hate him. He uses ridicule and sarcasm in a way that can, at times, be sophomoric, but he is an effective entertainer. Behind his jocular on-air persona, Howie possesses a comprehensive knowledge of Boston crime history. And, as a columnist for the Boston Herald back in the 1980s, he had gone after the Bulger brothers—in print—at a time when others in the media rarely touched the subject.
It was a Thursday afternoon, after the trial testimony was finished for the day. Carr was broadcasting his show live from the Barking Crab, a seafood restaurant located on a dock directly across from the Moakley Courthouse. The restaurant was a classic waterfront chowder house, a wooden structure with indoor picnic tables and a horseshoe bar in the middle of the room. The menu was a chalkboard on the wall, and, on this particular day, pitchers of beer were flowing at three o’clock in the afternoon.
The Carr show was set up in an area near the back wall, next to a window overlooking Fort Point Channel and the scenic Old North Avenue drawbridge, with seagulls honking and swooping just outside the open-air windows. The place was packed with customers, most of them brought in to provide background atmosphere for the ever-popular Howie Carr Show. In the crowd were many familiar faces from the trial—Steve Davis was there, as were the three sons of Michael Donahue—Tommy, Michael, and Brian—as well as their mother, Pat. The CNN film crew led by director Joe Berlinger was there with cameras and a boom microphone, filming the scene at the restaurant. The atmosphere was rambunctious and circuslike, with much loud conversation and laughing and drinking. It was a slightly incongruous scene, given that many of these folks had just come from the trial where, thirty yards away at the courthouse building, the morning had been filled with the usual tales of corruption and murder.
In the crowd, I spotted Stippo Rakes. I had met Rakes earlier in the trial. I was introduced by Steve Davis, who sometimes served as a kind of liaison between the various family members and the media. By that point, I was familiar with Stippo’s story. When we first met, he was friendly; he had read a book I wrote and was complimentary. But I noticed that he had the odd habit of not looking a person in the eyes when he spoke with them.
I went up and said hello to Stippo. I asked him what he’d thought of Kevin Weeks’s testimony. He said, “Oh, Kevin lied. That’s what he always does. It’s what the government has trained him to do. The truth will come out when I take the stand.”
Stippo’s words were almost an exact repeat of what I had heard him say earlier in a statement to the media outside the courthouse entrance. It reinforced a feeling I had that some of the family members had become stuck in a kind of self-promotional loop, delivering sound bites and predigested commentary for the press. Stippo was hyperfriendly, and he gave the appearance of being accessible, but I was not alone in thinking he was the kind of guy who, with his shifty eyes and nervous smile, did not inspire trust.
After meeting with Carr and his small crew, I was given a set of headphones and sat down to take part in his show “live from the Barking Crab.”
I wasn’t the only guest. Seated next to me was John “Red” Shea, a former South Boston drug dealer (no relation to Billy Shea, Kermit the Frog’s Irish uncle). Along with many of the mid- and street-level dealers in Bulger’s organization, Shea had been swept up and arrested in 1990 as part of a sting operation by the Drug Enforcement Administration. In all, fifty people were pinched, though, noticeably, Bulger, Flemmi, and Weeks—the top echelon of the organization—were not among them. Some of those dealers had accepted plea bargain arrangements with the government and become informants, two of whom—Paul Moore and Anthony Attardo—would take the stand at the current Bulger trial. Red Shea, on the other hand, served eleven years in prison and kept his mouth shut. That is, until he was released and turned his years with the Bulger organization into a memoir titled Rat Bastards: The South Boston Irish Mobster Who Took the Rap When Everyone Else Ran, published in 2007.
Like many people, Shea had turned his feelings about Bulger into a personal vendetta, partly to promote himself and his book. He was friendly and bright. Like many ex-criminals in Boston that I met—especially those who had done an extended stretch in the joint—Shea read books and told a good story.
Howie’s show that afternoon reflected the loose and jocular atmosphere of the waterfront saloon where it took place, with Carr, as he often did, obsessing about Whitey Bulger’s sexuality, quoting sources who said they had seen him in the 1970s cruising the infamous gay bars in Provincetown. Red Shea suggested that Whitey had an unnatural affection for young boys in Southie, including himself. The show was set up to take calls from listeners; the calls were off the wall and took the discussion even further from anything worthwhile than had the commentary of Howie and Red Shea.
After The Howie Carr Show wrapped for the day, I headed back toward my lodgings in the North End with the sinking feeling that the Bulger trial was doomed. Yes, there were many dramatic moments, and the parade of old-school bookies, loan sharks, hit men, and gangsters continued to be fascinating. But the trial—and the commentary surrounding it—had become a modern version of the Salem witch trials. Any hope that the proceedings would shed light on the universe of corruption that created Bulger seemed more distant with each passing day. If I hoped to achieve a deeper understanding of the motivations behind the Bulger era, I needed to get away from the Moakley Courthouse and away from Southie.
Staying in the city’s Italian North End while following the trial had been instructive. I was staying at the Bricco Suites, a set of studio apartments located behind Bricco Ristorante, a popular restaurant and bar on Hanover Street. Owned by Frank DePasquale, a prominent businessman in the North End, the Bricco was a popular spot with neighborhood old-timers. I was introduced to people with long memories, some of whom had done time in prison—or knew people who had done time—courtesy of Bulger, Flemmi, John Connolly, John Morris, or Jeremiah O’Sullivan.
In the North End, attitudes toward Whitey Bulger were scalding. People’s hatred for the Bulger brothers was surpassed only by their venom for Steve Flemmi, an Italian American who had betrayed his own blood.
Few people in Boston understood the reasons behind these sentiments better than Anthony “Tony” Cardinale. Though he was not a gangster nor born and raised in the North End, Cardinale had acquired a broad range of knowledge in both areas due to his role as a prominent criminal defense attorney for many Boston-based Mafiosi.
I had interviewed Cardinale before and knew that he also had a deep professional disdain for Bulger and Flemmi. Through their relationship with the FBI and the New England Organized Crime Strike Force, they had sowed the seeds of dissension among many of Cardinale’s clients in the 1980s, leading to unscrupulous convictions in court and gangland murders in the streets. Since Bulger’s apprehension in Santa Monica in June 2011, Cardinale had been a frequent commentator in the Boston media, where he rarely missed an opportunity to refer to Bulger as a “lowlife” and “a piece of garbage.”
I made arrangements to meet with Cardinale at Café Pompeii on Hanover Street.
One of the great pleasures of staying in the North End during the trial was that the neighborhood existed as a kind of living history of gangland Boston. Just down the street from my studio apartment was an early-twentieth-century building—formerly the C. K. Importing Company, now a bank—where Frankie Wallace was executed in December 1931. Wallace had been the leader of the Gustin gang, a group of bootleggers and racketeers from South Boson prominent during the Prohibition era. The gang was named after a street in Southie. In 1931, the Gustins hijacked some shipments of booze belonging to the Mafia. Wallace and an underling, Bernard “Dodo” Walsh, were lured to a “sit-down” on Hanover Street to discuss a truce. In the lobby of the building, they were ambushed and assassinated by two hit men.
More recent history, including key events from the Bulger trial, had taken place at locations within blocks from my living quarters. The intersection where Frank Capizzi—the witness who heard things half in Sicilian and half in English—had been shot up while riding shotgun in a car was at the end of Hanover Street. That drive-by shooting by Martorano, Bulger, and Flemmi, in which Al Plummer was killed, had been part of the hunt to find and murder Alfred “Indian Al” Notarangeli in the early 1970s.
Prince Street, where Jerry Angiulo had been born and where his headquarters was based, out of a social club at 98 Prince Street, intersected Hanover Street and was a block away from my place.
And Café Pompeii, where I was meeting Tony Cardinale, had been mentioned at the trial by John Martorano. It had been the location for a meeting between Indian Al, John Martorano, Howie Winter, and Jerry Angiulo. At that meeting, Notarangeli begged for his life and paid Angiulo fifty thousand dollars to not kill him and let him continue his business. Angiulo told him, “Okay, I will take your money. And you can live.” A couple of weeks later, on Angiulo’s instructions, Indian Al was murdered by Martorano—lured to Revere and shot in the head inside a car, with Bulger in a nearby boiler, or crash car, serving as an accomplice.
When I arrived at Café Pompeii, Tony Cardinale was already there, sipping espresso and grappa, chatting with the owner.
We got right to it. “Tell me about the Holy Grail,” I said to the lawyer.
Cardinale smiled. “I will,” he said. “But first let me come at it in a roundabout way.”
As with many people in the legal profession, especially trial lawyers, Tony liked to talk. But he was one of those people from whom you didn’t mind if you were going to get a roundabout answer, because within that answer would be anecdotes and layers of information that would reveal essential truths about the criminal mentality in general, and, more specifically, the inner workings of the Bulger fiasco, from the point of view of someone who also happened to be a terrific storyteller.
“Let me take you back to the roots of this case,” said Cardinale. “We need to go back to the Barboza era, the 1960s.”
Cardinale knew from whence he spoke: as a young attorney, having just recently passed the bar, he went to work for renowned criminal defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey. Among many notorious clients, Bailey had briefly represented Joe “Animal” Barboza. In 1970, Barboza had come to Bailey and signed an affidavit declaring that his testimony at various criminal trials was riddled with lies perpetrated in consort with devious officials of the criminal justice system. Then Barboza abruptly recanted the affidavit. Bailey ceased representing Barboza after arriving at the conclusion that the Animal was untrustworthy and quite possibly psychotic. Barboza responded by publicly vowing to kill Bailey—a threat that the attorney took seriously.
“He had to hire bodyguards,” noted Cardinale.
When Barboza was eventually hunted down and taken out in a mob hit in February 1976, Bailey was quoted saying, “With all due respect to my former client, I don’t think society has suffered a great loss.”
Barboza’s first big test as an informant witness was not the Patriarca trial, or the notorious Teddy Deegan murder trial; it had come before that in a trial involving the charge of murder against Jerry Angiulo and three others.
As an underboss in the Patriarca crime family and boss of the Mafia in the North End, Angiulo, then in his forties, had emerged as a tremendous moneymaker. Operating primarily as an organizer and financier of bookies and shylocks, Angiulo and his Boston crew became the central bank for all gambling and bookmaking operations throughout New England. The feds figured if they could take down Angiulo, they could cut off the Mafia’s cash flow.
The trial took place at the Pemberton Square courthouse in Boston in January 1968. As a witness, Barboza was green and easily rattled. Consequently, Jerry Angiulo and his codefendants were found not guilty of the murder charge. Afterward, the mafia boss told a flock of reporters, “I don’t want to say anything right now. I want to see my mother. She’s seventy-three, and this thing has been bothering her.”
Barboza went on to redeem himself as a professional witness in the trial of Raymond Patriarca and the Teddy Deegan murder trial, where he told lies that resulted in the conviction of four innocent men. Meanwhile, the feds never forgot about Jerry Angiulo, who continued to be a major player in the New England Mafia. From his perch on Prince Street, Angiulo and his brothers rubbed it in the nose of federal authorities by openly ruling the North End like Sicilian padroni from the old country.
When FBI agents John Connolly and John Morris took the baton from H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condon, they knew that a big part of that legacy involved nailing Jerry Angiulo.
Seated at a back table at Café Pompeii, away from the windows, away from the front door, Tony Cardinale chose his words carefully. “Getting Jerry Angiulo was the highest priority. It’s why the FBI recruited Stevie Flemmi, whose brother Jimmy had been a Top Echelon Informant, and later Stevie recruits Bulger.”
Along with Connolly and Morris, the other key inside player in the government’s quest to avenge their 1968 loss to Angiulo was Jeremiah O’Sullivan. As the leader of the federal New England Organized Crime Strike Force, O’Sullivan had been on the receiving end of a baton exchange of his own. He received his mandate to aggressively pursue high-profile Mafia indictments from Ted Harrington, his mentor, the former assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw the 1968 Angiulo prosecution and other Barboza-related trials. In 1970, Harrington took over as lead attorney for the Strike Force. As a young prosecutor, O’Sullivan was part of Harrington’s team; he was groomed to take over as Strike Force chief.
As with other participants inside the secretive, clubhouse world of criminal prosecutions in New England law enforcement, O’Sullivan assumed his duties as an inheritor of all that came before, with great zeal. To say that the ends justified the means was a quaint way of putting it: in a jurisdiction where FBI agents had been enabling murderers, suborning perjury, and burying exculpatory evidence for at least a generation, O’Sullivan seized his moment in history.
Noted Cardinale, “We know that, in 1979, O’Sullivan takes Bulger and Flemmi out of the race-fix case: that’s a fact. He did that because he was sold a bill of goods by Connolly and Morris that without those two he couldn’t get what he wanted more than anything in the world, which was to take down the Angiulo organization. He got bullshitted by two completely corrupt motherfuckers, who would have done anything to protect their informants, because they were taking money, making cases, and their star was rising in the FBI because they were doing all this great work.”
The recording device that the C-3 squad was able to plant inside 98 Prince Street, thanks to a schematic provided by Flemmi, would prove to be Jerry Angiulo’s undoing. It remained in place for 105 days and picked up, among other things, killings authorized by Jerry Angiulo, who was recorded telling an underling, “You think I need tough guys? I need intelligent tough guys. . . . What do you want me to say? Do you want me to say to you do it right or don’t do it? . . . Tell him to take a ride, okay? . . . Get out of the car and stomp him. Bing! You hit him in the fuckin’ head and leave him right in the fuckin’ spot. Do you understand? . . . Meet him tonight. . . . Just hit him in the fuckin’ head and stab him, okay? The jeopardy is just a little too much for me. You understand American?”
On tape, Angiulo’s diatribes sometimes came across as profane stream of consciousness, but always with a point. “Fucking, motherfucker, big-mouth cocksucker. Shut up,” he said to an underling whom he was attempting to school on the proper way to fix a dice game. “You motherfucker . . . Let me tell you something. I’ve been in the craps business when you weren’t born, you cocksucker that you are. Don’t you ever, ever have a pair of dice go more than one and a half or two hours without replacing it with a brand-new set, and that set goes in your fucking pocket and they’re thrown down the fucking sewer. Do you understand that? That’s a fucking order because you’re a fucking idiot. Now shut up.”
“Yeah, but let me tell you,” said the underling.
“You talk and I’ll hit you with a fucking bottle.”
The 98 Prince Street tapes were sometimes comical, but there was nothing funny about the charges. Cardinale, just thirty-three years old at the time, was Jerry Angiulo’s lawyer during the trial. “We tried like hell to get those tapes declared inadmissible,” remembered Cardinale. “But keep in mind: at the time we knew nothing about Bulger and Flemmi’s arrangement with the feds.”
I asked Cardinale, “Weren’t your guys suspicious? Didn’t they wonder who was working with the FBI from the inside?”
Cardinale was insistent: “My clients couldn’t believe the FBI would ever deal with somebody as heinous as Whitey Bulger. They viewed Bulger and Flemmi as glorified hit men who would kill people for nothing. Murderous bastards. They knew Bulger had Connolly in his pocket, that he was paying Connolly for information. They were jealous and wanted in on that. That was something they would pay for. But they never believed that the FBI had such a degree of institutional degeneracy as to be in bed with Bulger and Flemmi.”
In February 1986, after an eight-month trial, Jerry Angiulo and his three brothers were found guilty on multiple racketeering counts. Jerry Angiulo was sentenced to forty-five years in prison.
“So that was it, the Holy Grail,” I said to Cardinale.
“No. That was a big step on the way to the Holy Grail, but that’s not the Holy Grail.”
In the history of the federal government’s war on La Cosa Nostra, or LCN, there had never been a recording of a secret mafia initiation ceremony. In his testimony before Congress in 1963, Joe Valachi had described a mafia induction ceremony. From that point on, it had been a dream of the FBI and prosecutors to secretly record such a ceremony, and by so doing penetrate and discredit the mafia code of omertà.
Morris and Connolly decided, Why stop with Jerry Angiulo? Why not go for the Holy Grail?
The quest to bug a mafia induction ceremony began with the planting of yet another Title III wiretap inside Vanessa’s restaurant, located at the Prudential Center, in Boston’s Back Bay. Through Steve Flemmi, the FBI agents learned that the Mafia, in the wake of the devastating Angiulo convictions, had moved their meeting place outside the North End to a part of the city where, they figured, nobody would suspect a mafia confab would be taking place. Through the bug at Vanessa’s, the FBI was able to record and ultimately coerce into cooperating an old-school Mafioso named Sonny Mercurio. Said Cardinale, “Mercurio was a tough guy who had done time for murder. The last kind of person you would suspect could ever be an informant.” But it happened: Mercurio became the latest feather in the cap of John Connolly, who enlisted the mobster as a Top Echelon Informant.
Mercurio’s job was to lead them to the Holy Grail. That wasn’t going to be easy. At the time, there was a moratorium on inducting new soldati into the New England Mafia. So the agents and Mercurio, with an assist from Bulger and Flemmi, needed to create a scenario that would lead to the Mafia having to induct new members. Mercurio fomented a dispute between two factions of the Mafia. On the wiretap at Vanessa’s, the FBI’s C-3 squad heard it being decided that there was going to be a series of mob hits. What the agents did next might be considered shocking, except that it was a continuation of what had occurred during the Teddy Deegan murder twenty years earlier. The agents, though they had foreknowledge, did not warn the targets about the pending hits.
One of the targets was Frank Salemme, former partner of Steve Flemmi. Salemme had returned to Boston after a nine-year stint in prison and, in the wake of the Angiulo convictions, was looking to take over as boss. The FBI and its informants—Bulger, Flemmi, and Sonny Mercurio—were looking to use Salemme as a stepping-stone on their way to the Holy Grail.
On the morning of June 16, 1989, Salemme sat down at an outside table at the International House of Pancakes in Saugus, Massachusetts, to have breakfast and some coffee. Four gunmen opened fire. It was a sloppy attempt. Bullets flew high and off the mark, shattering glass and sending innocent bystanders ducking for cover. Salemme was hit multiple times but survived.
The second hit that had been planned—and overheard on the Vanessa wire—was successful. A New England Mafioso named William “Billy” Grasso was shot in the back of the head, his body left alongside the Connecticut River.
The FBI investigators and prosecutors had stood by and let the mayhem take place, knowing that it would lead them to their goal. Sure enough, the induction ceremony transpired, on October 29, 1989, at a private home of a mobster in Medford, Massachusetts. Present at the ceremony was Sonny Mercurio.
Numerous criminal trials rose out of the induction ceremony tapes, one of them involving a client of Tony Cardinale. The attorney still had no idea of Bulger and Flemmi’s role, and he was unaware that Sonny Mercurio was an informant—though co-counsel knew there had to be a rat for the feds to have known where the ceremony was going to take place. Cardinale and the other attorneys in the case discussed who it might be. “It was beyond anything that we could imagine that a guy like Sonny Mercurio could be an informant,” said Tony.
Then he listened to the tape of the induction. Just as the ceremony was about to begin, someone in the room had gone over and turned down the television. Said Cardinale to the other attorneys, “Find out who turned down that TV and we know who our informant is.” The person who turned down the TV was Sonny Mercurio.
The induction ceremony tapes were a tremendous coup. U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh and FBI director William Sessions flew in from the nation’s capital for a press conference announcing the arrest and indictment of twenty-one mobsters. Director Sessions later sent a personal letter to Connolly praising his talent for cultivating informants. Connolly was given a fifteen-hundred-dollar bonus and held up as the standard of an enterprising special agent.
“They got what they wanted,” said Cardinale. “The Holy Grail. Using Bulger and Flemmi they got Mercurio, and through him they fomented a dispute. Billy Grasso was killed. They knew he was going to get killed. And Frank Salemme was supposed to get killed. And luckily a bunch of little kids and mothers didn’t get killed that morning outside the pancake house in Saugus. The FBI knew it, planned it, pushed it. So this is what this Bulger trial is all about. This is why the FBI was willing to get into bed with such reprehensible lowlifes and give them the run of the town.”
Cardinale finished his grappa and shook his head in amazement. When he looked back over the last thirty years in Boston, like many people, he still found it unsettling. “A big part of what I do as a criminal defense lawyer,” he said, “is to try and stop cops, prosecutors, and judges from playing God. Because these guys couldn’t care less if they have a guy who is guilty or not guilty. They’ll manufacture evidence; they’ll do whatever it takes to secure a conviction. And the way they can shave in the morning without slitting their throats is by saying to themselves, ‘If he didn’t do this, he did something else. Fuck him.’ That’s playing God. And it shouldn’t be allowed to happen that way.”
At the Bulger trial, there was little mention of Sonny Mercurio, the attempted murder of Salemme, or the Medford induction ceremony, nor did it seem likely that these events would be touched upon in any depth. The prosecution had no desire to cast a bad light on what had been some of the most illustrious mafia prosecutions in the very jurisdiction and office for whom they worked, the very office that was now prosecuting Whitey Bulger. As for Bulger’s defense lawyers, they were claiming that their client had never been an informant, so a detailed explication of how these prosecutions came about was not in their interest.
THE BEGINNINGS OF an effort to burrow through layers of deceit in the criminal justice system in Boston occurred in May 2001. It had its origins not in the city itself, but in Washington, D.C. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched an investigation into the FBI’s use of criminal informants. Chaired by Representative Dan Burton, a conservative Republican from Indiana, the committee announced its intentions to hold public hearings, both in Boston and in the nation’s capital, at which many prominent players in law enforcement, both past and present, would be subpoenaed to testify.
The hearings are best remembered for bringing about the public demise of former state senator William Bulger, who since his retirement in 1996 had gone on to be appointed president of the University of Massachusetts. Bulger fought the subpoena, and when called before the committee he took the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify, on the grounds of self-incrimination. Later, the committee voted to give him full immunity from prosecution, and on June 19, 2003, Billy Bulger appeared before the committee in Washington, D.C., at the Rayburn House Office Building.
Bulger denied many things that day, including having ever heard of the Winter Hill Mob. The committee tried to get at Billy Bulger’s close friendship with John Connolly and other FBI agents affiliated with the C-3 squad.
It was common knowledge in South Boston that Connolly and the senator were close. Throughout his time with the organized crime squad, Connolly routinely brought fellow FBI agents over to Bulger’s office in the statehouse, where they were treated as though they were having a sitting with the pope. The understanding was that if they did right by the senator—which meant looking out for his brother, Whitey—then the senator would take care of them. When Connolly retired in 1990, Senator Bulger was a featured speaker at his retirement party and said of the agent, “John Connolly is the personification of loyalty, not only to his friends and not only to the job that he holds but also to the highest principles. He’s never forgotten them.” Senator Bulger helped Connolly land a cushy retirement job as head of security at Boston Edison, a public utility.
Nicholas Gianturco, John J. Kehoe Jr., Robert Sheehan, and other FBI agents also went to work at Boston Edison upon retirement. In his testimony at the congressional hearing, Bulger professed to have no recollection of having helped these people and even went so far as to produce a signed affidavit from the CEO at Boston Edison claiming that he had nothing to do with these hirings.
Then there was Dennis Condon, Whitey Bulger’s first FBI handler in the early 1970s and a regular at Billy’s St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts over the years. On a written recommendation from the senator, Condon landed a post-FBI job as commissioner of the Massachusetts State Police.
Even though he had been granted immunity, Bulger’s testimony was a study in obfuscation. One thing he couldn’t deny was that since his brother had gone on the lam, he had spoken with Whitey in a private phone call that was prearranged by Kevin Weeks, who testified about the call before a grand jury. By admitting that this call took place, Bulger was acknowledging that he lied to FBI agents who had asked him, years later, if he had any contact with his brother. Bulger’s immunity deal precluded his being charged with a crime, but it was an ethical impropriety that cost him his job as president of UMass.
Billy Bulger’s testimony garnered the headlines, but it was not the most revealing information to be unearthed at the hearing. Most noteworthy was the committee’s unprecedented exploration of the Teddy Deegan murder case. That line of inquiry immediately set off a high-stakes struggle between committee lawyers and the FBI over whether or not the bureau would be compelled to produce documents that the committee requested. The Boston SAC, Charles Prouty, made a request directly to President George W. Bush that they not be forced to turn over documents. Prouty said publicly, “We didn’t conceal information. We didn’t frame anyone.”
One day before the committee was scheduled to begin hearing testimony, President Bush invoked executive privilege, the first time he had done so in his presidency, and ordered the attorney general to not turn over documents. The lengths the FBI was willing to go to keep the Deegan case buried were extreme. Eventually, after five months of legal wrangling, a compromise was reached. The executive privilege order was lifted and some documents were released, but they were heavily redacted.
Even for those who were aware of malfeasance in the criminal justice system in New England, the findings of the committee were devastating. Nearly forty years after Teddy Deegan was gunned down in an alleyway in Chelsea, the public learned for the first time the full magnitude of the conspiracy. They learned there was an illegal wiretap conversation in which Barboza and Jimmy Flemmi asked for permission to murder Deegan from Raymond Patriarca. The committee learned that the FBI had been told after the murder that they were pursuing a wrongful prosecution, and they buried this information. A detailed file-by-file, memo-by-memo re-creation of the Deegan case showed either knowing or willfully ignorant collaboration at many levels of the criminal justice system.
One person who was not aware of the conspiracy was Jack Zalkind, lead prosecutor at the Deegan trial, who was deliberately left in the dark. After being shown documents relevant to his case, Zalkind told the committee, “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. . . . I certainly never would 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 the trial shouldn’t have gone forward.”
Over the course of the next fifteen months, in periodic public hearings in front of the committee. many key players were called to testify, including:
H. Paul Rico—Seared by his years in the Florida sun, surly and unrepentant, Rico came before the committee in May 2001. Having retired as a legendary and highly decorated agent, Rico testified as if he had nothing to fear. In the hallway outside the committee hearing room, he stuck his finger in the chest of committee counsel James Wilson and said, “What are you going to do to me, Mr. Wilson? I’m seventy-six years old. What the fuck are you going to do?”
In his testimony, Rico admitted that a memo, written by him, had first been sent to his supervisor in the organized crime squad noting that a hit on Deegan had been discussed and authorized. That memo was initialized and forwarded to the SAC of the Boston division, then sent to a regional supervisor in Washington, D.C. Eventually that memo landed on the desk of Director J. Edgar Hoover, who micromanaged every aspect of the informant program and was kept abreast of the Deegan case. The FBI, all the way to the top man, allowed the murder of Deegan to take place. They knew their star witness, Barboza, was involved. They knowingly allowed Barboza to take the stand and give a version of the killing that was markedly different from what they were hearing from other sources.
Many people within the criminal justice system had reason to believe the Deegan convictions were tainted, and they did nothing. Two of the four men wrongfully convicted were sentenced to the death penalty and incarcerated on death row. Two of them died in prison before the truth became known.
A congressman asked Rico, “Does it bother you that an innocent man spent thirty years in jail?”
Said the witness, “It would probably be a nice movie or something.”
“Do you have any remorse?”
“Remorse for what?”
“So you don’t really care much and you don’t have any remorse. Is that true?”
“What do you want, tears?” answered the agent.
Paul Rico would accept no blame and faced no consequences for the framing of innocent men. In October 2003 he was indicted for his role in another crime, the murder of Roger Wheeler, owner of World Jai Lai. He was arrested at his condominium in Miami Shores by Sergeant Mike Huff of the Tulsa Police Department, lead investigator in the Wheeler homicide case.
Three months later, at the age of seventy-eight, Rico died in a Tulsa hospital, where he had been moved from prison while awaiting trial.1
Dennis Condon—As Rico’s partner, Condon was another key player in the cultivation of Barboza and the fraudulent Deegan murder convictions. Condon did not appear before the committee, but he was deposed under oath by committee investigators, and his deposition was an integral aspect of the committee’s final report.
Condon was forced to admit that Barboza had made it clear to him and Paul Rico that he would never testify against his friend Jimmy the Bear Flemmi, who had been an accomplice in the Deegan murder. Barboza told the agents, in so many words, If you put me on the stand I will lie to protect my friend. This fact was memorialized in FBI 209 field reports and airtels that went from field agents to supervisors all the way to Hoover.
By this time, Barboza had been a witness at the Patriarca trial and helped deliver the biggest mafia prosecution in the history of the bureau. Part of protecting the sanctity of the Patriarca conviction involved preserving the credibility of Barboza. That’s why the FBI was willing to put him on the stand and have him commit perjury.
When Dennis Condon was first approached in 1997 and asked about James Bulger, he said he had no recollection of ever having met the man. It didn’t take long to jog his memory; there were voluminous FBI file reports of his having opened Bulger as an informant in 1971. At the Wolf hearings in 1998, Condon’s friend and fellow agent John Morris and Steve Flemmi both testified about Condon attending dinner gatherings at Morris’s home in Lexington, in the company of Bulger and Flemmi.
The FBI and the criminal justice system in New England had for so long been successful at keeping their dirty secrets buried, that for someone like Condon, who was a devout Catholic with a sterling public reputation, the revelations were a nightmare come true. Though he was never indicted for his actions or legally held accountable in any way, when Condon died of natural causes in 2009, he did so knowing that his name will forever be associated with the FBI’s legacy of corruption in Boston, from the Deegan murder case to the Bulger scandal.
Edward “Ted” Harrington—In the late 1960s, as an assistant U.S. attorney, Harrington seemed willing to do almost anything to protect Joe Barboza. Under questioning by the Burton committee, Harrington admitted that, previous to the Deegan murder trial, he reviewed a confidential FBI memo that revealed Barboza and Jimmy the Bear Flemmi were behind the Deegan murder and had, they believed, been given permission to kill Deegan by Patriarca. That memo included references to the gypsy wire planted at Patriarca’s office in Providence. Harrington was required by law to have released that evidence to lawyers representing the codefendants at the Deegan murder trial. He did not, which was possibly a crime or at least an act of criminal negligence. Confronted with these facts, Harrington told the committee that he simply forgot about the memo.
“For you to say you didn’t remember it stretches my imagination,” said Burton.
Harrington conceded nothing. When asked if he regretted having flown to California with agents Rico and Condon to testify as a character witness at Barboza’s murder trial, Harrington said no. To him, defending Barboza was a consequence of the need to preserve the government’s informant program, which had became the single most important tool in law enforcement’s war against the mafia.
For his actions, Harrington received kudos and rose in his career from an assistant U.S. attorney to chief of the New England Organized Crime Strike Force to U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, and, finally, the crown jewel, when in 1987 he was nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan. Judge Harrington presided over criminal cases in Boston for the next twenty-five years.
In 2008, during the trial of John Connolly on murder charges in Miami, Harrington put his reputation on the line and took the stand on behalf of the defense. Just as he had with Barboza forty years earlier, he was there to defend the accused on the grounds that he had been a valuable compatriot in the government’s war against organized crime.
Much had changed since 1969, when, at Barboza’s murder trial in California, Harrington portrayed the war against the Mob as a battle between clearly defined good and evil. By the time of Connolly’s trial, the story of how Bulger and Flemmi had been protected by multiple FBI agents, a top organized crime prosecutor, and higher-ups in the DOJ, and kept out on the street to commit murders and other crimes, had entered the public consciousness. Despite Judge Harrington’s testimony on behalf the disgraced agent, Connolly was found guilty of murder in the second degree.
In September 2013, Harrington retired from the federal bench as a highly lauded and esteemed veteran of the criminal justice system.
Jeremiah O’Sullivan—Members of the Burton committee were especially intrigued by the prospect of having former prosecutor O’Sullivan come before them as a witness.
Four years earlier, O’Sullivan had suffered a heart attack and missed having to testify at the Wolf hearings. At the time, defense lawyer Tony Cardinale noted that back in 1980, prosecutor O’Sullivan had fought vociferously when Mafioso Larry Zannino used a medical claim that he was too sick to come to court. O’Sullivan challenged the claim and had Zannino dragged into court, even though he was in a wheelchair and on an oxygen tank. Hearing that O’Sullivan was now utilizing a similar tactic, defense lawyers in Boston said he had “pulled a Zannino.”
Though O’Sullivan had emerged as a primary inheritor of the region’s systemic legacy of corruption, he had successfully stonewalled the press. He had been called to testify at the Burton committee hearings under a federal subpoena and began his testimony by reading a statement that read, in part: “I state categorically and unequivocally that, although I was made aware of the status of Bulger and Flemmi as FBI informants in the late 1970s, I never authorized them to commit any crimes and have no knowledge of such authorization.”
Most of the questions for O’Sullivan revolved around his decision to drop Bulger and Flemmi from the 1979 race-fix prosecution, which led to the conviction of Howie Winter, Jimmy Sims, and nineteen other confederates of the Winter Hill Mob. O’Sullivan claimed that he had made the decision before he was approached by Connolly and Morris based on the fact that neither Bulger nor Flemmi was central to race-fix conspiracy. But then a lawyer for the committee read a January 1979 memo, written by O’Sullivan, naming Bulger and Flemmi as integral players in the scheme.
“Is this memo correct?” asked the committee lawyer.
“It must have been at the time I wrote it . . . so you got me,” said O’Sullivan. He wasn’t too worried. The congressional committee hearings were not legally binding; no matter how mendacious he sounded, he would not be indicted for perjury.
O’Sullivan did his best to distance himself from Connolly and Morris, saying of the FBI, “If you go against them, they will try to get you. They will wage war on you. They will create major administrative problems for me as a prosecutor.”
Later, after acknowledging that Bulger and Flemmi were two of the most notorious murderers in the Boston underworld, he was asked by a congressman why, upon hearing that they were being used to make criminal cases in his jurisdiction, he didn’t try to close them as informants.
Answered the former most powerful organized crime prosecutor in New England, “Because that would have precipitated World War III if I tried to get inside the FBI to deal with informants. That was the holy of holies, the inner sanctuarium. They wouldn’t have allowed me to do anything about that.”
IT IS NOT uncommon for people in law enforcement to joke about criminals turning on one another. Cops refer to the underworld as “a self-cleaning oven.” Popular wisdom dictates that there is no honor among thieves. If a criminal is used to rat on another criminal, so be it, and if that criminal is telling lies to take down other criminals, it is, perhaps, in the minds of some, not the worst thing in the world. The reality that innocent people might become collateral damage in this provisional approach to justice is more than many in law enforcement are willing to acknowledge.
What do you want from me, tears?
Paul Rico became a player in the criminal underworld, some might say a gangster with a badge. He was rewarded for the role he played by those who sent him into battle.
Jeremiah O’Sullivan claimed that he did not trust the FBI, but he knew better than to rock the boat. When asked, specifically, if he concerned himself with troubling facts about the Teddy Deegan murder trial or other rumored injustices that he might have inherited as U.S. attorney, O’Sullivan answered, “I did not, Congressman.”
“Why not?”
“It just wasn’t on my turf. I didn’t think that I could right the wrongs of the whole world.”
Policies of law enforcement are frequently driven by public relations. For an entire generation of cops, agents, and prosecutors, the war on the LCN was the biggest game in town. Daring new techniques were created, such as the Top Echelon Informant Program and the witness protection program. Agents like Rico and Connolly who could rub shoulders with gangsters and cultivate informants became the new stars.
In this war that spanned nearly half a century, there were many victims.
At the Bulger trial, the most obvious manifestation of the price that had been paid was the daily gathering of family members of Bulger’s many murder victims. These were people who had lost loved ones, though, in most cases, the people Bulger was alleged to have murdered were fellow criminals, or others who, by choice, had tragically entered into the orbit of Bulger and Flemmi.
In the morass of duplicity that flowed from the generation of Barboza and his handlers to the generation of Flemmi and Bulger, there was another kind of victim—people who got caught in the maw of corruption, the detritus of dirty deals struck between informants and their handlers. Human waste. People for whom men like Paul Rico would shed no tears and Jerry O’Sullivan would lose no sleep. People like Joe Salvati.
At the beginning of the congressional hearings in 2001, Salvati’s longtime attorney, Victor J. Garo, spoke in front of the committee. Garo had fought the government for nearly thirty years in an attempt to have Salvati’s case reopened. The biggest stumbling block was the Justice Department, which consistently refused to release documents that might have exonerated Salvati. Said Garo to the committee, “The FBI determined that the life of Joe Salvati was expendable, that the life and future of his wonderful wife, Marie, was expendable, and that the four young lives of their children, at the time ages four, seven, nine, and eleven, were expendable.”
Garo talked about the legal struggles to get Salvati out of prison, but most emotional of all was when he described his regular meetings with Salvati’s family. He once joked with the youngest son, Anthony, that “when I get your father out of prison, you’re going to say I created a monster, because he’s going to follow you around, he’s going to want to know everything you have done.” The child got real quiet, said the lawyer, then he spoke. “‘No, Victor,’ he said. ‘I have never seen my father wake up in the morning. I have never had breakfast with my father in the morning. I’ve never taken a walk with my father, and I have never gone to a ball game with my father. I sure do want to do that in the future with my dad.’”
Joe and his wife, Marie, were at the hearings. After Garo spoke, Salvati read a statement in which he attempted to explain some of the ways his conviction had destroyed his life. “There were constant stories in the media that I was a very bad person and one not to be respected.” This, said Salvati, created a tremendous burden that had to be shouldered mostly by his family. “More than once my heart was broken because I was unable to be with my family at very important times.” With his wife seated at his side, Salvati looked at the collection of political representatives stretched out in front of him. “Finally, I would like to say a few things about my wife,” he said. “She is a woman with great strength and character. She has always been there for me in my darkest hours. She brought up our four children and gave them a caring and loving home. . . .” Salvati’s voice cracked, and his eyes welled with tears. “When God made my Marie, they threw the mold away. . . .” Then he began weeping uncontrollably.
Victor Garo, seated next to Salvati, leaned to the microphone and said, “Mr. Chairman, may I please finish those last two sentences for Mr. Salvati?”
“Sure,” said Congressman Burton.
Reading from Salvati’s statement, Garo continued, “When God made Marie, the mold was thrown away. I am one of the luckiest men in the world to have such a devoted and caring wife, my precious Marie.”
Then Salvati’s wife, Marie, read a statement about what it was like trying to raise a family while the man in their lives was in prison for a crime they knew he didn’t commit. “The government stole thirty years of my life,” she said.
By the time Marie Salvati finished reading her brief statement, most of the committee members were in tears or hushed in silence.
AT CAFÉ POMPEII, when I interviewed Joe Salvati, as with many events from his past, his memory of the congressional hearings was remarkably vivid. Something about the deadness of thirty years in prison had attuned his senses, energizing those moments that are outside the norm. While in prison, Salvati held on to the hope that he would one day be released, but he never dreamed that high-ranking representatives of the U.S. government, or anyone else, for that matter, would one day offer an apology.
What still rankles all these years later is that in the long fight to get released and clear his name—with Victor Garo as his Job-like point man—Salvati’s biggest stumbling block were the very institutions that had perpetrated the injustice—the FBI and DOJ. Even after favorable rulings determined that these institutions be required by law to turn over documents, they simply stalled or refused to comply with court orders. It seemed as though the bureaucracy was determined to crush Salvati through indifference and institutional malfeasance. And when Victor Garo, the lawyer, did achieve a provisional victory within the legal system, there was someone else—a law enforcement representative or politician who had a vested interest in Salvati’s conviction—who stepped forward and acted on behalf of the conspiracy.
Salvati remembered when he was paid a visit by Michael Albano, a member of the state parole board.
Albano’s name had come up at the Bulger trial. On the witness stand, John Morris was forced to admit that he and Connolly, in 1983, had paid a visit to Albano to discuss with him his intention to vote for commutation of Salvati’s sentence, along with the sentences of Louis Greco and Peter Limone.
“Albano came to me in prison,” Salvati told me at Café Pompeii. “He said those two agents came up there to threaten him.”
In so doing, Morris and Connolly were serving as inheritors and custodians of the conspiracy to keep buried the justice system’s dirty little secrets.
Albano told Salvati that even though he had been intimidated by the two FBI agents, he was still going to vote for the commutation of his and Limone’s sentence. Albano had learned enough about Barboza to comprehend that the Deegan murder convictions were rotten.
Salvati did not want to get his hopes up. His case had gone before the parole board numerous times over the years and always seemed to get mysteriously derailed. But this time, they had the votes. The state parole board voted in favor of release. Then it went to the Governor’s Council, which voted nine to zero for commutation. Salvati was close; he was even transferred to a “prerelease facility” in expectation of his commutation. All that remained was a final decision from Governor William Weld.
Weld was a former federal prosecutor, a product of the same system that had conspired to frame Salvati. He had long been a fellow traveler of the Bulger conspiracy. At the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Southie, Weld had shown fealty to Senator Bulger. As state attorney general, he had backed up the decision of Jeremiah O’Sullivan to not grant hoodlum Brian Halloran refuge in the federal witness protection program. Halloran and Michael Donahue were murdered by Whitey Bulger within days of Weld’s decision. Even so, the odds in favor of Salvati’s commutation were strong.
On May 17, 1993, Governor Weld announced that he declined to commute the sentence of Salvati, Greco, and Limone. In the case of Salvati, the governor cited “Mr. Salvati’s long criminal record.”
Salvati’s “long” criminal record consisted of a single conviction for stealing a tool from a construction site in 1955.
It had been a crushing defeat, but four years later, in 1997, the governor reversed his decision. I asked Salvati how that came about.
“We got to Weld through Moakley,” said Salvati.
I was startled. Congressman Joe Moakley? The beloved figure after whom the federal Moakley Courthouse was named?
“What happened was, my wife’s aunt was sick and dying in the hospital. And in the bed next to her was Joe Moakley’s wife. My wife used to go up there to the hospital every night. Moakley couldn’t go often because he was in Washington. So my wife used to sit with her, keep her company. And she told her my story. Moakley’s wife said, ‘Make sure your husband’s lawyer talks to my husband, the congressman.’
“Sure enough, one day Moakley comes in the hospital room and saw Marie sitting there. After being introduced, she told Moakley the story. He couldn’t get over it. He said, ‘You come by my office tomorrow.’
“Marie goes to the office. He has her sitting in the waiting area, but she can hear him say, ‘Get me Governor Weld on the phone.’ She hears him talking. He says to Weld, ‘I want this guy home by Christmas.’”
Salvati’s long nightmare was over, but there were still a few battles to wage. One of those battles was a lawsuit filed in 2003 by Salvati, Limone, and the families of the other two men who had been falsely incarcerated. The suit claimed that the FBI and the DOJ were guilty of “malicious prosecution, civil conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent selection, supervision and retention.” The family members also cited “loss of consortium” for having lost their loved ones to prison for three decades. The suit would occasionally be mentioned during the Bulger trial as “the Limone case” or “the Limone matter.”
The case was brought before Judge Nancy Gertner, who heard testimony at a bench trial that lasted, on and off, for years. Gertner was successful in doing what the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had been unsuccessful in doing; under a U.S. Supreme Court subpoena, she obtained unredacted FBI files relating to the fraudulent Deegan murder convictions and subsequent attempts to keep the truth buried. Gertner’s findings were staggering, some of which she summarized in a July 2007 final ruling on the case. Declared Judge Gertner:
Government agents suborned perjury, framed four innocent men and conspired to keep them in jail for three decades. . . . The FBI agents handling Barboza and their superiors—all the way up to the FBI Director—knew that Barboza would perjure himself. They knew this because Barboza, a killer many times over, had told them so—directly and indirectly. . . . They coddled him, nurtured him, debriefed him, protected him, and rewarded him—no matter how much he lied. . . . Indeed, they took steps to make certain that Barboza’s false story would withstand cross-examination, and even be corroborated by other witnesses. . . . The FBI agents were given raises and promotions precisely for their extraordinary role in procuring the Deegan convictions. . . . The pieties the FBI offered to justify their actions are the usual ones: The benefits outweigh the costs. . . . Now is the time to say and say without equivocation: This “cost”—to the liberty of four men, to our system of justice—is not remotely acceptable. No man’s liberty is dispensable. No human being may be traded for another. Our system cherishes each individual. We have fought wars over this principle. We are still fighting those wars.
Judge Gertner awarded the families of those affected a total of $101 million.
“It was a good chunk of money, sure,” said Joe Salvati. His family’s portion of the award was approximately $30 million. “We were able to take care of the kids, put some money away. But if somebody said, ‘I’ll give you thirty million, will you do thirty years?’ you’d have to be an imbecile to say yes.”
Mostly, Salvati has let go of the anger—“You can’t hold on to it forever; it eats you up”—but there are many things about the experience that still bother him.
With the Bulger trial ongoing, Joe noticed that many of the names involved in his case—Rico and Condon and Harrington—had emerged as a Greek chorus. It is this fact that rankles Salvati most of all, that the people who cultivated and used Barboza were able to pass their skills along to those who used Whitey Bulger, and that the efforts to hide the true nature of that arrangement became not only a source of corruption but an operating mandate within the system.
“It is a shame,” said Salvati. “But I’m not surprised by any of it.”
The interview was over. Salvati and I exited Café Pompeii and headed out into the early evening sunlight. We shook hands and said our goodbyes. As part of his usual routine, Joe would likely go next door to Stanza dei Sigari to smoke a cigar, or farther down the block to Caffé Vittoria for an aperitif, or maybe do both.
Salvati strolled along the sidewalk, his face to the sky.
That afternoon on Hanover Street, the ghosts of the past were alive and well.