The Oreto operation dealt the Italian mob another heavy blow by taking out a major source of money, and by wrecking any hopes that it could scuttle the Angiulo trial.
Lieutenant Dave Mattioli, the head of my OC unit, was happy to see how it turned out. Back at headquarters in Framingham, he took me aside. “So what do you want to work on next?” he asked me.
I was starting to see that after the Prince Street indictments, the Mafia wasn’t nearly as much of a threat anymore. And Howie Winter was just completing prison time and decided not to come back to Boston, relocating to Worcester.
That left only one mobster, the only one who was rising while the others were falling. Rising in power, in control, and in reputation. You didn’t even have to say the name, because everybody was already thinking it.
“I want to work on Whitey Bulger,” I told him. “Him and Flemmi.” I’d checked the records. Neither of them had ever even been arrested since 1965. That was about twenty years ago. “Come on,” I told Mattioli. “Does anybody really think he’s gone straight? Got an office job?” It was almost laughable, the notion of Whitey Bulger pulling down a regular paycheck.
Mattioli had to smile at that. “Let me check with Ring.”
I’d gotten to know another trooper, Jimmy White, back when we were on patrol and later on the Oreto investigation, and I loved the guy. He was about the hardest worker I’d ever seen. He could really grind it out. I couldn’t imagine trying to get Bulger without Jimmy. For something like that, you need people you can trust with your life, and that was Jimmy for me. He’d been a Gold Gloves boxer when he was younger. Threw some heavy punches, and he must have taken some, too, but there wasn’t a scar on him. He’d hold his ground and let fly. The man was as solid as they come.
When I ran the Bulger idea by him, he was ready to start that afternoon. “Perfect,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
A couple of days later, Mattioli invited Jimmy and me into his office at headquarters, and he shut the door. That wasn’t good.
“I’ve run it by Ring,” he told us. “And he says no. Can’t do Bulger. Can’t do Flemmi.”
Jimmy and I looked at each other. “Why the hell not?” Jimmy asked.
“Because they’re not LCN, and the FBI is only doing LCN.”
“Yeah, but Dave,” I told him. “Come on. LCN is way down. But Bulger, shit. He’s the biggest thing in Boston right now. Maybe ever. You know that. Everybody knows that. Just by himself, he’s probably bigger than the whole LCN right now. Add Flemmi—”
He didn’t want to hear it. He raised his hands to shut me up. “Guys, I know. But the FBI wants to go after the LCN, OK? So that’s it. LCN.”
So, LCN it was. And the FBI laid out the plan, just like before, with Oreto. This time, the idea was to wipe out the next rank of mafiosi before they could take over. It was like chopping off the head of a snake, the way the FBI explained it. Chop off the head, and you don’t have to worry about the rest of the snake. It made sense if you were worried about the LCN in Boston. That wasn’t Jimmy and me. As far as we could see, after the Angiulo takedown and the Oreto case, Whitey posed the greater threat. But we were both new to OC and the FBI had been working it a long time. The feds had spent years killing off the Italian mob, and they probably wanted to make sure it stayed dead, and I had to respect that.
This new one was called Operation Jungle Mist—an inside joke that I never got—but instead of going after a single loan shark, this one targeted five wiseguys who were comers in the mob. And these weren’t hotheads like Oreto, but serious, methodical, and dangerous killers who knew the feds were all over them, and so the feds were going to proceed very cautiously.
The operation focused on a sub shop called Vanessa’s on the ground floor of the Prudential Center by Boylston Street in the Back Bay. It was run by a dark, thickset man named Angelo “Sonny” Mercurio. At the time, he wasn’t much, but he was ambitious, and he later decided that if he couldn’t rise up in the mob, he’d bring it crashing down. He tipped off the FBI to a big Mafia induction ceremony that was to take place in Medford, in the presence of all the Mafia heavyweights, from Raymond Patriarca Jr.—that chubby son of the towering New England godfather Raymond Patriarca Sr.—on down. The ceremony was like something at the Vatican. On Mercurio’s say-so, the FBI sneaked in some recording devices and got the whole thing on blurry videotape: the teary speeches, the pricking of fingers, the blood oaths as four new recruits joined the Family. That tape sent a bunch of mafiosi away for a long time, but it did worse things for the morale of the mafiosi who remained. It was embarrassing to the mob to have its most sacred ceremony on the local evening news, and the butt of a thousand barroom jokes. Lucky for Mercurio, no one fingered him as the rat.
At the time of Operation Jungle Mist, though, we knew Mercurio as an LCN foot soldier with decent prospects. He owned Vanessa’s, where he’d have regular get-togethers with some other wiseguys to talk business in the storage room in the back. It was a perfect cover. At that point, I still didn’t know Boston all that well, but the Prudential Center—the Pru—was about the last place I’d have picked as a mob hangout. It was like finding the New York mob holed up by the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. But it had the perfect entrance. The wiseguys could park their fat cars on the fifth level belowground, ride up in the service elevator, sneak down a long dark corridor, and come in through a back door, never once showing themselves to the street.
Inside, beside an industrial refrigerator and some racks of bread, all the heavies would sit in a ring of metal chairs and talk business. From the beginning, it was clear that the FBI had come to the right place. When Angiulo went down, it was like a forest had burned, and this was the new growth pushing its way up. Besides Sonny Mercurio, there were Vinny Ferrara, Bobby Carrozza, Joe Russo, and Dennis Lepore. This was summer, and, in the glimpses we got of them, all of them wore the usual open shirts, creased pants, and a lot of jewelry. And guns, for all we knew. All of them were made men, so named because they’d murdered for the mob, and a couple of them—Ferrara and Russo—had strong reputations as capable hit men. If this was poker, they were four face cards, with Mercurio a nine, with ambitions.
To record what went on, working with a few members of the FBI tech team, some of us from state OC went over there late one night. A locksmith picked the lock, and we sneaked in. We put a few mikes in the storage room where the mafiosi met, each mike about the size of a match head. We dropped the wires down to the basement underneath, and outside to a line that could have sent it anywhere in the world, but this time sent it literally straight up—to the fiftieth floor of the Prudential tower that loomed overhead. Up there, two floors down from the very top, we’d set up a listening station in a vacant office with a nice view of the Charles.
For hours on end, we were up in that office, grinding through days, headsets cupped over our ears. It was Oreto all over again. All the wiseguys sounded alike—five gruff Italians barking at one another, lobbing f-bombs.
But that was only half my job. The rest of the time I spent undercover down at ground level. I grew a beard—much to Marguerite’s distress—but kept it neatly trimmed, since I was carrying myself as a proper businessman. I kept my hair brushed, shined my shoes, and wore a jacket and tie.
After the FBI’s campaign against Angiulo, and ours against Oreto, all the mobsters were on high alert. You could feel it. When it was my shift, I’d hang right by Vanessa’s, to see if I could spot anyone. One lunchtime, I was sitting at a table out front, reading the Globe over an Italian sub. I had a briefcase by my feet, rigged up with a tiny camera inside, ready to snap away through a pinhole. Suddenly, the door opened and it was Vinny Ferrara, out to have a look around. He’s a big, menacing guy, anger all over his face. He saw me sitting there with my newspaper, and I could see his eyes narrow. He walked right up to me, hovered there for a moment, then swung around to stand behind me. I could almost feel his breath on the back of my neck.
He was testing me. Was I going to allow this? How was I going to react? Was I going to go head-to-head with a Mafia hit man? Well, I didn’t know what was going to happen, but Ferrara was going to learn that I wasn’t going to let anyone breathe on me, whoever he was.
I wheeled around and stared at him—hard. Deep into his black eyes. He stared just as hard back at me. We were really locked in. Finally he gave a little half smile and a tiny nod and broke it off. He stepped around me, made his way to the door, and disappeared once more into the darkness of the sub shop. To this day, I don’t know if he decided I was a cop, or if he decided I wasn’t, but I am pretty sure he figured he’d sent me a message either way.
It wasn’t just Ferrara. They all radiated sweaty, anxious heat. Like Ferrara, the others would sometimes come outside, glance around, then disappear inside again. When they were inside, buried in that storeroom, they assumed they were invisible, which they were—from us. But not from the various informants who came through. And their words were captured in our headsets on the fiftieth floor.
After Oreto, an investigation like this was getting to be pretty straightforward—watch, listen, use informants, build case, indict. It was gutsy to go straight at these gangsters, but nothing unusual for OC work. What got to me came on before any of the gangsters even got on the scene. It was the initial affidavit from the FBI, the one the feds submitted to the court to get permission to do the electronic surveillance at Vanessa’s in the first place. As with the request on Oreto, an affidavit like that is intended to convince a judge that there is enough evidence of serious crimes to warrant a tap—and the breach of a subject’s First Amendment rights that this entails. Judges take those rights seriously, they look at an affidavit hard, and they count on investigators to tell the absolute truth in it.
This particular affidavit cited a name that caught my attention. James J. “Whitey” Bulger, as the writers always put it in such documents. The affidavit named Bulger as meeting at Vanessa’s with all the other wise guys. Interesting. Bulger was meeting at this place, too? Maybe we’d have a shot at him after all.
After I saw that affidavit, I asked Jimmy about it. “Did you see that?” I asked him. “It says Whitey Bulger has been meeting at Vanessa’s with these guys.”
“Yeah, I noticed that.”
“You ever see him around Vanessa’s?”
“Shit, no.”
“And you’d remember, right?”
Jimmy just looked at me.
“So, how do you figure it?”
He just shrugged. “Can’t.”
We checked around with a couple of other troopers working the case. Nobody had ever seen Whitey, or heard him, or heard anything about him on all the hours of talk we listened in on. And yet the FBI had claimed that Whitey had been there as a major player before we arrived. This was why the wiretap was so important. I didn’t get it. Whitey was cited by the FBI as someone on the inside, and yet there was no indication that he’d ever been one. Jimmy and I talked this one over a lot. Neither of us could come up with a good scenario. Could the FBI have faked all this, put Whitey’s name on an affidavit to sell it to the judge? Neither Jimmy or I had any idea—but there was no one to ask. We’d never get a straight answer, and if we tried to get one, nobody who’d know would ever talk to us again. No—far better to keep our mouths shut. We were still the new guys, and new guys don’t ask those kinds of questions.