Operation Jungle Mist did not end there. It only began there. When the electronic surveillance was nearly over, we got warrants to search Vanessa’s and a few other places for further evidence. One of them was Mercurio’s place north of Boston. We brought Mercurio with us when we went over there. Me, Jimmy White, and some FBI agents, one of them John Connolly. Like he had on Oreto, Connolly had been breezing into and out of the Vanessa’s surveillance, like someone between appointments. Ring was there, professorial as always, but off a little to the side, as usual. As we were going through his place, Connolly tapped Mercurio on the shoulder and nodded for him to step into another room with him, where it could be just them. Other FBI guys had let me know that Connolly handled the most valuable FBI informants, the “top-echelon” ones, meaning he recruited them and he was the agent they talked to, maybe the only one. He was famous for it. He was like one of the superagents who rep the star athletes. Connolly was cocky about it; he knew it was his claim to fame. The whole thing of being a handler, as it was called, was supposed to be cloaked in mystery, the deepest of FBI secrets, but it was pretty obvious. To begin with, it was why Connolly didn’t do any of the hard stuff, why we hardly ever saw him, and why he was always peacocking around.
When Jimmy saw Connolly move in on Mercurio there in his apartment, he could tell that Connolly was giving him the talk. By now I’d made plenty of pitches myself, and I knew how it went. How Mercurio had only two choices—go away for years and years and years, or talk to us from time to time. It seems so easy, when put like that. Jimmy could tell just by the way Connolly took Mercurio aside. For Mercurio, it wasn’t all bad news. To be an informer meant that he wouldn’t be doing time. But it wasn’t something the FBI wanted to advertise; that was why Connolly took him into another room and spoke quietly enough so Jimmy couldn’t hear a word.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. It was as an informant that Mercurio tipped off the FBI to the induction ceremony, but after that he started to get cocky himself, because he figured out that the FBI wasn’t likely to hold him back from pretty much whatever he tried to do. He knew that the feds didn’t want to lose him. Not only would they not go after him; they’d make sure that nobody else did either. Mercurio was golden, and all he had to do was shine.
Mercurio had it in for “Cadillac” Frank Salemme, who’d just gotten out of prison and was seeking to move up the ladder in the Mafia. It was a grudge that went back to the 1960s, when Raymond Patriarca Sr. asked Salemme to do him a favor. The hit man Joe “The Animal” Barboza had strayed from the mob’s interests, and Patriarca wanted Salemme to straighten him out. Barboza was in custody and unreachable, but his lawyer, John Fitzgerald, wasn’t. Salemme rigged up Fitzgerald’s car with explosives. When Fitzgerald hit the ignition, the car went sky high. Incredibly, Fitzgerald lost only a leg. Salemme fled to New York, but the FBI was tipped off to his whereabouts, and our friend John Connolly picked him up. Salemme did some serious time, and because Ray Sr. was dead by the time he got out, Salemme wanted to collect on the father’s obligation from the son, Ray Jr. He wanted a spot in the Boston leadership, and the chance to take over.
Mercurio feared that Salemme’s rise might mean his own fall, and he had the solution. Mercurio put together a crew, and one morning he asked Salemme to come to a meeting with everyone at the International House of Pancakes in Saugus. When Salemme strolled out to his car, Mercurio’s gang leaped out at him with machine guns and sprayed him with bullets. Salemme went down screaming. Amazingly, none of the bullets hit anything vital, and somehow he survived.
Salemme never identified his assailants.
There were plenty of rumors, but the FBI never said a word. But I could see the results for myself a few months later. Jimmy and I had been tailing Salemme in a couple of unmarked State Police cars, ready to grab him on a warrant for a scam in California. The idea was just to get into his pockets. Literally—empty his pockets to find any little notes he carried, which can be surprisingly helpful in figuring things out; you get names, phone numbers. I was out with Jimmy and a trooper we sometimes worked with, Ray Stevens. Jimmy and Ray pinched Salemme off from the front, and I pulled up behind so he couldn’t back up. We were all in plain clothes, and when we had Frank stopped, we got out of our cars and approached him with our guns out. We were yelling at him—“Get out of the car, Frank! Now! Out of the car!” Salemme opened the door and got out, his hands up, terrified, and braced like we were going to blast him. “No!” he shouted. “Please. Shit—no!” Just quivering with fear.
“We’re State Police, Frank,” I told him.
“State—?” He grabbed his heart, he was so overwhelmed, and his body went limp for a second. “Oh, shit, man, Jesus. State Police. Oh, thank God. You gave me a hell of a scare there.” He had to wait a second to catch his breath. “God. Fuck.”
We took him in to the barracks. “I thought you were coming for me,” he gasped when we had him inside. He didn’t want to be any more specific, but he was too worked up to say anything. During the booking process, Frank showed his wounds like they were medals. He reached down and yanked up his shirt, and I could see purplish scars all over his chest, maybe half a dozen of them. “Look at this! I nearly fucking died. See what those fuckers did to me? You see that? Those pieces of shit.” He dropped his shirt again.
From the way he was talking, we knew perfectly well it was a hit, and we knew who’d done it, and he knew we knew. We all knew why, too. The only thing none of us knew was how much the FBI knew about it. But we had a pretty good guess that, since Mercurio was FBI, the feds knew a good deal. By that time, I’d figured out that information like this went into the FBI, but it never came out. The FBI was a black hole, you might say.