Troy told me he’d been placing some bets with Berkowitz as part of his undercover work.
“Yeah?”
He nodded.
“Well, we want to hit him with a search warrant for his gaming stuff. Do you think you could help us out a little on that—maybe get us some information for the affidavit?”
“Sure, Tommy. No problem,” he told me.
“And we’ll keep it real quiet, don’t worry.”
We thought that maybe Berkowitz would tell us everything about Salemme. We had his cell tapped, and he was always on it. We figured the moment we hit Berkowitz with the search warrant, Berkowitz would call and give Salemme an earful, and we’d know how Salemme fitted into the Boston rackets, and maybe we’d get something on Flemmi, too.
Next day, I told Quinn we were going to do a search warrant on Berkowitz. I’d just as soon have skipped that step, but Henderson had made it clear that he expected me to coordinate all our efforts with the FBI.
“Thanks for the heads-up,” Quinn told me.
I didn’t say anything about Troy, didn’t even let Quinn know we had an undercover trooper in there.
The very next day, Troy called me up, hot as anything. “Shit, Tommy, you know what Berkowitz just told me? He told me to watch out. An FBI agent had told him that the State Police were on him. He said he couldn’t take any action for a while. It was too hot. He had to shut down. ‘Shut down,’ Tommy. That’s what he said. Because some trooper was on him.”
“Oh, Jesus.” I didn’t go into it with Troy, and I didn’t have to. He was plenty smart to know the score.
“Ed, listen.” Where to begin? “Christ almighty. Let me deal with this, OK?”
“Whatever you have to do.”
When I hung up, I wanted to grind the receiver into its cradle.
This time, there could be no evasions, no I-didn’t-knows. So I called Quinn up, and I ran through what had just happened with Troy. I wasn’t loud; loud doesn’t work. But I was forceful. There was nothing but silence on the other end of the phone.
“Eddie, Jesus,” I wound up. “What are you trying to do, get my guy killed?”
“Hey, come on. I didn’t know you had an undercover trooper in there.”
“How can you guys keep doing this? This is bullshit, Eddie!
“Hey, calm down.” He went quieter himself. “We need to talk about this, but not on the phone.”
He asked me to come in and take a ride with him. We’d talk in the car.
I waited for him in front of the McCormack Building downtown. I was in civilian clothes, with a parka for warmth. He came out in a long topcoat and leather gloves.
He climbed in without a word, shut the door, and pulled on his seat belt. I took us on a jagged loop around the financial district, by the waterfront, and about the North End.
“Eddie, I thought we had an understanding here,” I began. “We can’t go the way you’re going. You can’t mess with our people like this. I mean, Jesus Christ. Our guy goes undercover, and you out him? What are you thinking?” There’s a phrase for that, not that I told him: obstruction of justice.
“Take it easy, Tom.”
I was raising my voice this time. Not much, but I couldn’t help it. I was getting loud enough for him to play the calm and reasonable grown-up—and make me the kid who can’t control himself.
“Eddie, I’ll take it easy when it’s easy to take. This is serious, all right? So I’m going to take it seriously.”
“Listen, this was a mistake, OK? It happens. And no one was hurt.” To him, it was Guzzi’s all over again. “A rookie agent made a mistake, all right? That’s all it was. Said something he shouldn’t have. It happens. Nobody got hurt.”
“Not yet.”
Two boneheads at Guzzi’s, one here on Berkowitz. Different lies for different times. The agents at Guzzi’s existed, but they sure weren’t there by mistake. This idiot didn’t exist—no one is that stupid. Berkowitz was tipped off, all right, but not by any rookie agent.
Quinn slapped my thigh. “But I’ve had him transferred so it won’t happen again, believe me.” He paused a moment. “And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of it.”
I ran through it all in my head. Clemente’s, Guzzi’s, Busy Bee, Barnicle’s column, and now this. The pattern was clear, but still nobody at the FBI would listen to me, or do a damn thing about it. It was like none of it ever happened. We were just a bunch of children, and it didn’t much matter what happened to us.
I’d had it with Quinn, but this was no time to take him on. I just needed to keep pushing forward and hope to stay ahead of the dangers that seemed to be looming up all around us.
We were in the North End by now, not far from the Mafia headquarters on Prince Street where Eddie made his name. I saw his eyes turn to the building as we went past, but he said nothing. When I dropped him off, he just got out of the car and closed the door behind him. Gently, like he didn’t want to break anything.
“Bye, Tom,” he said.
Years later, the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility looked into the Troy matter. When Quinn was asked about it, he told investigators that he didn’t recall any such incident involving anyone named Ed Troy and Sam Berkowitz.
For an aspiring Mafia boss, Salemme was unusual in that he didn’t live in the North End like all the others; but way out in horse country, in Sharon, and he hung out as much with Irish mobsters like Flemmi as with Italians. Salemme’s ascent didn’t come easy either. Before too long his chief enforcer, a bank robber named Richie Devlin, got wiped out when he stepped out of a restaurant in East Boston, and then another loyalist named Cucinotta got wasted in Cranston, Rhode Island. But Salemme gave as good as he got. We got reports that a mid-level mobster, Bobby Donati, was found beaten and stabbed to death in Revere; and Barry Lazerini was bludgeoned to death in the living room of his Plymouth home. Frank Salemme Jr. was a suspect in the murders. He was known to be vicious, would do anything to please his father, and was said to be moving up in the mob, too. But for Frank Sr., there were definitely openings in the leadership. Raymond Patriarca Jr. was finally heading to prison after the taping of the induction ceremony, and Vinny Ferrara and the rest of the crew at Vanessa’s were going away, too. And it sure didn’t hurt that Salemme could call Flemmi and Bulger his good friends.
No question, Salemme was preparing to claim his prize as Mafia boss for all of New England, and other mobsters in other parts of the country knew it. We figured out that Natale “Big Chris” Richichi, a powerful, heavily bejeweled mafioso from Las Vegas, had taken note. Richichi represented the New York OC families in Las Vegas. As a favor to Rhode Island wiseguy wannabe, Ken Guarino, he agreed to fly in to see Salemme for a sit-down to try to hammer out a deal on some peep show machines that Richichi’s people wanted to bring into the Combat Zone, the red-light district that Salemme controlled. The FBI had learned about the meeting, but not where it would happen or when—so the feds needed to draw on our existing taps to figure that out. By then, we’d pretty much bugged every aspect of Salemme’s life, just as we’d done Fat Vinny’s, including his cell, and Salemme lived on his cell.
This was just days after I took Quinn for a drive. For a few months he’d been knocking me about our taps, saying that the mobsters don’t say anything on their phones anymore, so why bother with any of that stuff? Well, right now the feds needed it. They needed help getting information together for an application for a bug for the Richichi-Salemme meeting room. I was leery, of course. I was more than frustrated with the FBI, but I still had to work with them. That was my deal with Colonel Henderson, and I was going to stick to it. We got the wiretap information the FBI wanted from Salemme’s cell phone. The meeting would be at the Hilton at Logan Airport, and we got when. All the feds had to do was watch Richichi and Salemme and the others check in, drop a bug into their room, and then commandeer the next room as a listening post. It was perfect. The mobsters hadn’t a clue.
For the meeting, Salemme came with his new friend Bobby DeLuca, and Richichi showed up with Ken Guarino. For a high-level meeting like that, the two sides have to be even. It’s about respect, about power. When the two principals had settled down and gotten comfortable with each other, they dismissed their seconds and then carried on alone, one-on-one, well into the evening. Salemme was usually blunt and dismissive of other mobsters, now that he was moving up the ladder. But you could hear a new deference in Salemme’s voice with this king of the casinos. Richichi heaped on the sugar right back. After they worked out the issue of the Combat Zone peep shows, Richichi offered Salemme some advice about how to set up a mob family of his own. You need loyalty, he told Salemme. Loyal soldiers, Frank. You get what I’m saying to you? No jerks. Salemme assured Richichi that he was confident of the loyalty of the men he had around him, and that he had powerful people on his side, too.
And then he mentioned a name that got my attention. Bulger. We almost never heard it. None of the other low-level mobsters had dared mention him, for fear that it would show up on some transcript, and they’d get dead. Whitey inspired that kind of fear. He dictated silence. Big, loud, brash, Salemme demanded to be noticed (that was probably why we had him bugged six ways till Sunday), and he was loose (why Bulger steered clear of him).
It came up when Richichi, a capo in the Gambino family under John Gotti, offered Salemme some fraternal advice. Don’t forget about protection, he told Frank. You’ll need it, believe me. And don’t stint. You’re the boss; people will come for you.
You have protection? Richichi asked Salemme.
“I got that crew from South Boston, some kids from South Boston,” Salemme told him. “Bulger and Flemmi.” Obviously, it was just braggadocio. Calling Bulger and Flemmi “some kids from South Boston” was like calling the navy SEALs a bunch of dog paddlers. Salemme’s thought he’d look big by making Bulger and Flemmi look small. If he called them what they really were, Richichi would wonder why he was dealing with Frank and not with Whitey and Stevie directly.
Flemmi had been the one to bring in Whitey; Whitey would never had gone in otherwise. But Flemmi had that debt to Salemme, just as the Patriarcas did, and this was another way to pay it off. But he also paid in exposure. We learned a lot more about Flemmi from Salemme than we ever did any other way. And we got more on Whitey, too.
I kept my word with Henderson and kept Quinn in the loop as our investigation of Salemme went along. I told Quinn how Salemme was expanding his operation, making Bobby DeLuca his number two and relying on him to pick the wiseguys to fill out his team. DeLuca was pulling them from Providence, since Salemme didn’t trust anyone in Boston. But we were having trouble dealing with some of the code names—Shanks; The Saint. Who the hell were these people? I told Quinn we needed some help, and he said that he had an agent, Shay, who went way back with the mob down there, and who’d be good at working out all the names. Shay was in the hospital just then, but he’d be able to listen to the tapes while he was lying in his bed. “Might give him something to do,” Quinn said. A Providence agent, Suddes, would take Shay the tapes if I would bring them just across the Rhode Island border on Route 146.
I made copies of the tapes as Quinn asked, and on New Year’s Day 1992 I drove them down to Suddes to pass on to Shay. That was the plan anyway. The next day the cell phone of Salemme’s that had produced oceans of great stuff for weeks went dead.
Once again, I was bullshit, and had to struggle to keep from getting pretty loud on this one. Who were they trying to kid? It was the same thing all over again. FBI. No question. FBI. They were the only ones who knew. And this time, I could think why. We didn’t have just the mobsters on the tapes; we also had FBI informants. Everybody is protective of informants, but the FBI is more so than everybody else. The more people know, the bigger the danger. Makes sense. But the FBI didn’t ever want anyone to know a word about anyone. It was the sort of thing that had caused Gianturco to turn to stone back when we worked together. Ring had been the same way. They valued their informants over our investigation into Whitey.
A few days later, I told Quinn what happened.
“Really,” he said, like he couldn’t have been less interested.
I knew the FBI was behind it, but again, no proof. So I let it go. I had to.
We’d been going full out, and we crashed through the holidays and into the New Year, but it was getting hard on all of us. Early that January 1992, I went back to headquarters as usual and mounted the stairs to the wire room on the third floor. The whole unit was still up there—Patty and Gale, Tutungian, Hanko, Scanlan, and another guy who’d been helping out, John Cahill. It had been barely a year, but we had grown into a tight unit. We’d all been working brutal hours, but it sometimes seemed like we weren’t getting anywhere. Nerves were starting to fray. People were starting to snap at each other. And now, as soon as I came into the room, I saw everyone pull off the headphones and turn toward me.
This was the State Police, almost a military operation. No one was going to question my leadership, or my authority. But I could tell everyone was bummed. How many setbacks were we supposed to take? Were we ever going to get Whitey behind bars? We had plenty of wiretaps going, and we had lots of investigative angles to work, but it wasn’t going the way any of us wanted. We were up against something much bigger than ourselves. It was like sensing danger in the dark. We couldn’t see it, but we could feel it. “Guys, listen,” I told everyone that night. “We’ve just got to keep going. This is hard. There’s a lot of shit to get through. But the only way is to keep putting one foot in front of the other.” I looked around the room—at Patty and Gale, Big John, Sly, and the rest. Their faces were tipped down a little, but I could tell they were listening. “And we’re getting places. It may not look like it but we are.” I touched on our accomplishments, with the bookies, Chico, the results of the search warrants, the Busy Bee intercepts, and now with Salemme’s cell. “Things like this are never going to be easy. There are going to be bad days, bad weeks, maybe bad months. But we have to believe in what we’re doing, and to persevere. We’re building a case here. Brick by brick. That’s all we can do. One brick at a time.”
We had to keep on going because we had to. That’s what it came down to. I didn’t want to be in this situation anymore than they did. Unlike them, I had some say over it. But only in theory. In fact, I was just as stuck as they were. We were after Whitey, but it seemed like the FBI was after us just as hard. That was on everybody’s mind that night, not that anybody came out with it. And we had to hope that we could catch one before any of us got caught by the other.