If we did have a problem, it was the FBI. But it only started there. As our investigation advanced, it spread to another level in the hierarchy of the Department of Justice. The DOJ was the FBI’s home in the government, so the attorney general was the ultimate boss of the Bureau. In fact, ever since J. Edgar Hoover used to gather information on his potential enemies in the government in order to protect the Bureau’s independence, the FBI has operated at a safe remove from almost any governmental oversight. And its reputation as an agency that will use your secrets against you has served it well to give it power well beyond its station.
The United States Attorney’s Office, or USAO, is a little-known agency that operates as a federal prosecutor’s office. In Boston during most of our investigation, it was located in the large and ornate federal courthouse in Post Office Square downtown. It was a big deal. There were probably a hundred attorneys working out of there, overseen by the U.S. attorney, one of maybe fifty across the country, all of them appointed by the president. Their job is largely to prosecute the cases the FBI investigates. Supposedly, the USAO directs the action, picking the targets, and the FBI follows through. But, from what I could see of the USAO, the power went the other way. The FBI chose the targets, and the USAO went along.
One organization that was left out of the process was ours. Too much of the time, whatever we said, the FBI and the USAO closed ranks against us. Their message was: what could you possibly know that we don’t? And, beyond that: who are you to question our judgment? When we started bringing the case to the federal level in 1993, the U.S. attorney was a Clinton appointee, Donald Stern, but we rarely dealt directly with him. Much more often, an assistant U.S. attorney would handle it. There were dozens of them, and they didn’t all think alike. One of the few who saw the world our way was Fred Wyshak. Wyshak monitored the progress we were making prior to bringing our case to the feds. He’d investigated organized crime in New York, so he knew his way around. He was aggressive and liked the challenge. He would be my alter ego on the prosecutorial side, pushing for convictions as our unit pushed for arrests. Gentle and soft-spoken, Wyshak had a hangdog look, but it didn’t really fit him. Deep down, he had a fire that I was happy to have on our side.
“So what’s all this about?” he asked when I met with him to brief him on our case.
“Whitey,” I told him. “We’re going after him. You should know that.”
We were sitting in Fred’s office, with a view of the square. He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Well,” he said finally. “OK then.”
He put together indictments of Chico for money laundering and a few other things. Unlike all the other assistant attorneys, he asked nothing about our problems with the FBI, which he must have heard about. He didn’t care about our struggles with the USAO, which were just developing either. He was just one of those guys who go into law enforcement to bring out the truth. Fred Wyshak was the best. We could never have gotten anywhere without him.
By the time 1993 rolled around, we felt we’d turned the corner on the Whitey investigation and were starting to feel better about things. On some of the intercepts, we’d picked up word about Peter Fiumara, who owned a strip joint in Revere called the Sports Page. To boost his profits, Fiumara put any extra cash out for loan-sharking through Kaufman’s pal Joey Yerardi. Fiumara handled a lot of bookies for Whitey and Flemmi, and he did it in a big way, and in April 1993, we were all set to indict him. Wyshak drew up the indictment.
Just one problem. I knew how the FBI felt about its informants, and I had been told years earlier that Fiumara was an informant of Ed Quinn’s. I did not know if this was still the case. We might have let it go, but Fiumara was a heavy, and we were pretty sure he had a lot to tell us about Whitey’s operation.
I called Quinn and laid it out for him. “We’re going to indict Fiumara.” At this point, I’d given up asking. I wanted to give Ed the opportunity to talk to me about Fiumara if he needed to.
Quinn’s voice was chilly, but he didn’t say a word about Fiumara, and we went on with our plans.
The FBI can’t stop an indictment, since it has no prosecutorial authority. But the USAO can, and the FBI can get the USAO to want to. A few weeks after I spoke to Quinn I got a call from Fred Wyshak.
“Tommy,” he said. “A heads-up. We’re not going to indict Fiumara.”
“Shit—why not?”
“Farmer.” Jim Farmer was the head of the USAO’s organized crime strike force, and reported directly to the U.S. attorney, Donald Stern. I doubt that Farmer did or said anything important without running it by Stern. “He says there’s not enough there.”
I could hear the doubt in Wyshak’s voice. “Do you?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“The guy is a shylock who’s in with Whitey Bulger,” I reminded him. “About as cut-and-dried a RICO charge as you’re going to see.”
“I’m with you there, Tommy. I tried to tell him, but, well, you know.”
“You know why, don’t you?”
“I can guess.”
“You guessed right.”
Wyshak went right back to Farmer and confronted him, demanding to know if Fiumara was informing for the FBI.
“Absolutely not,” Farmer told him. “Who told you that?”
“Foley.”
“He’s full of it,” Farmer told him.
Wyshak can be pretty persistent, so he went right at it. He asked Farmer straight out which was more important, protecting an FBI informant or getting Whitey Bulger.
Farmer just walked away. “Sorry, Fred. It’s out of my hands. If Foley has a problem, he should take it up with Ed Quinn.”
Wyshak and I were getting seriously pissed off, and I thought I’d better try to smooth things over with Farmer. The USAO was going to be bringing our cases and we needed them on our side. Farmer told me what he told Wyshak: take it up with Quinn. The runaround. But Quinn didn’t have the authority to stop the indictment—only the USAO did. Why should I talk to Quinn?
Wyshak has a long fuse, but he can blow, and this impasse infuriated him. The FBI was blocking a legitimate case to save its informant? Where were the priorities? Is the Department of Justice getting out of the justice business? Fred wrote a scorching letter to his superiors at the Department of Justice in Washington, demanding reconsideration of the Fiumara indictment. It went on for several pages. I was impressed when I read it. But everyone at the DOJ who read it saw it the same way. Fred Wyshak was trouble.
That made two of us.
Fiumara was never indicted.
By that summer of 1993, we’d accomplished a lot, despite the efforts of the FBI and the USAO to stymie us, but we were starting to drag. It had been such a long hard slog that I could tell that the burnout factor was pretty high. There was grumbling in our little unit about the long hours, and complaints about some of my decisions, and worry about when the investigation would finally yield the indictments we’d been seeking. Tutungian and Scanlan were still the backbone of the group. Real power houses. If those guys had been marines, they would have taken hill after hill and then set their sights on a mountain. The big lug Pat Greaney had been a great addition to the team, and a loyal friend for me when I needed one.
It was still the original six, but they got a lift when I brought in Tom Duffy. For almost two decades, he’d been doing investigations with the DA’s office in Worcester, and he brought the group some fresh energy and enthusiasm. A little later, I picked up another investigator from the same Worcester DA’s office, Steve Johnson, who’d done a ton of undercover work and knew his way around in the dark. And finally, we lured in Dan Doherty, a real godsend. He was one tough guy—shrewd, street smart, resourceful, the kind of guy you’d always want on your team. He knew all about Bulger from the DEA, and he was in with all the players from the State Police, the USAO, and even the feds. As soon as he started, it was like he’d been in with us from the beginning. With these guys, I figured we had the manpower we’d need for the next push.
Even if the USAO didn’t move on Fiumara, we managed to grab enough of the other middlemen in the organization to more than make up for it. In December 1993, we targeted Mike Dezotell, a flunky for Yerardi, and bugged his car while he drank himself silly at the Marriott Hotel in Newton. The guy could not shut up. Who paid, who didn’t, who had to be eliminated for not paying. It was a pretty good index to the Boston underworld. We also grabbed a veteran bookie named Jimmy Katz, who knew a lot about Whitey’s bookmaking network. But Chico remained our ace in the hole, the one man whose testimony could bring down Whitey’s empire.
Confident that we had the makings of a major case, in the spring and summer of 1994 we started bringing a stream of bookies and loan sharks before a grand jury that was convened to consider Bulger and the other conspirators, like Flemmi and Salemme. Fred Wyshak made the presentations, and what a workhorse he was. He enlisted a sidekick, Brian Kelly, a brilliant lawyer who also brought some much-needed humor to the duo. People started calling them Batman and Robin.
In the federal system, a grand jury is only impaneled for eighteen months before it expires, and when it does expire, the prosecutors have to start all over again with another grand jury, if that is even possible. This one would close down on September 12, and it was now early summer. That didn’t leave us much time. Our case was cumbersome anyway, with all the witnesses and evidence we’d assembled, but it had gotten badly bogged down with some subpoenas we needed to get out on a number of bookies around town. The subpoenas had come from the USAO in May, and my instruction from the USAO was to let the FBI participate in serving the subpoenas. We had a big urgent meeting with Quinn, Farmer, his protégé Jamie Herbert, and Wyshak. We decided that the FBI would do half the list, and we’d do the other half. Remembering Fiumara, I let the feds pick the people they’d serve, in case there were any informants in there that they wanted to handle in their own way. I thought everything was all set.
We got ours done in a matter of days. If anything, the bookies we were serving were eager to go to court; they were tired of being shaken down by Bulger and Flemmi. Their information was from the bottom of the organization, but it would add important details to the picture drawn by Krantz, Roberto, Katz, and the rest about the top.
On the FBI side, though, there still was no action at all. This was toward the end of July, and Wyshak was getting frantic. He pleaded with the FBI to get cracking. When the feds continued to do nothing, Wyshak told us to go ahead and take over the FBI’s list. It was either that or screw up our case. But when word got back to the FBI that we’d gone out with the subpoenas and started pounding on doors, Quinn lost it. An agent in the office told me he started raging at me, wondering what the fuck I was trying to do.
Quinn never told anyone what his problem was. I assumed it was just that there were informants on his list, and he couldn’t deal with it. But an agent in his office passed on to me a better explanation. “We don’t do South Boston.” He said it in a tone like it was obvious. And it was.
South Boston, of course, wasn’t just any part of the city. It was Southie, Whitey Bulger’s base of operations. It was the feds’ way of saying, “Don’t do Bulger.” It was one thing to be careful with informants but another to be careful with Whitey himself. What were they afraid of, exactly? Was Whitey so powerful that he posed some threat to the FBI? Or was it something else, like they owed him special treatment? The informants could help the feds out, make their lives easier, save them some trouble. But Whitey? What could he do for them?
We felt resistance on many fronts. We were trying to pull everything together for the grand jury to get indictments on Bulger, Flemmi, and Salemme before time ran out. We still wanted to strengthen the financial case against Bulger and Flemmi. Knowing our needs, another assistant U.S. attorney thought we might be interested in the Tim Connolly incident. A former tavern owner in Southie, Tim Connolly wanted to make something of himself as a mortgage broker, until he ran into Bulger and Flemmi. This is another aspect of the FBI’s staying out of South Boston. The feds wouldn’t have to confront Bulger and Flemmi’s activities there, and the fact was, despite their reputations as Southie loyalists, Bulger and Flemmi would stick it to a Southie resident just like anyone else.
Tim Connolly was out walking his dog on a hot summer day when, with a screech of tires, a car pulled over. Bulger and Flemmi were inside, and they shouted at Connolly to get his ass over to Bulger’s Rotary Variety Store. Connolly had no choice but to leave the dog at home and go straight there. Ushered into a storeroom, he found Bulger and Flemmi. Bulger held a hunting knife, a long one with serrated edges. He sat Connolly down and explained that he was outraged that Connolly had been slow handling a refinance for someone who owed him money.
“You fucker!” he suddenly screamed and, spotting some empty cardboard boxes along the wall, lunged at them with his knife and plunged the blade in to the handle, again and again, with a sickening ripping sound. Then he extracted the blade and brought it close to Connolly’s face, then down his chin, and pressed it tight against his throat.
“I’m going to let you buy your life,” he told Connolly.
The price was fifty grand, payable immediately. Connolly didn’t have it, but he vowed to produce it, and Whitey and Stevie let him go. He ran out and got a bank loan for half, then for ten grand more. When Whitey demanded the balance, Connolly was tapped out. Desperate, he turned to Tom Reilly, the former assistant DA, who’d returned to private practice by then, and told him what had happened. Because racketeering is federal, Reilly told Connolly to speak to the FBI.
Tim Connolly had no reason not to. He called the Boston office of the FBI, and it sent out an agent, John Gamel, to have a talk with him. Gamel came from Worcester, where he had been a newscaster on a little-watched UHF station, and I’d never forgotten his heavy mustache and serious eyebrows; but most of all I remembered his immense height, somewhere north of six foot six. He was one of the few agents who had come to the FBI as a second career, but he retained the quality of a rookie through all the years I knew him. He never seemed to learn from experience.
Gamel interviewed Connolly at length, took down all the information, and then went back to the office. Nothing came of it. Happily, though, Whitey thought better of killing Tim Connolly for the balance, and he soon forgot about the whole thing.
That was way back in 1989. Now it was 1994. The Connolly incident sounded like a perfect example of Bulger-style extortion. Wyshak asked Farmer if we could use Tim Connolly in our case. Farmer stalled us, but finally provided the information we needed about Connolly. The problem was that he waited to deliver this piece of generosity until after the five-year statute of limitations on the Connolly matter had expired. It was over. It could not be a part of Whitey’s indictment.
By now, John Gamel started paying closer attention to us. Before, he’d just been there, but now he was taking an active interest, curious about why we cared so much about the Connolly case, and where were we in our investigation. Then again, that was not exactly a secret. Any number of people in the USAO knew how things stood.
The truth was that we were going like crazy to meet the shutdown date of September 12 for the grand jury, and we wouldn’t get indictments until then, if we got any indictments at all. Tutungian, Scanlan, Doherty, Johnson, and I were shuttling into and out of the courthouse every day, testifying, monitoring, and conferring with Wyshak and Kelly, who were even more crazed than we were trying to usher it all through. The others on the team were staying as close as possible to Bulger, Flemmi, and Salemme, the three we really wanted, if we could get the arrest warrants in time. Bulger they never got. The guy was impossible. You could make a guess where he was, but you’d never know. Along with several others, Patty and Gale were out following Salemme and Flemmi around. They weren’t nearly as much of a problem. Especially Salemme. Big guy in a big car—you couldn’t miss him.
And then, a few days before the end date, Flemmi and Salemme were gone. Vanished. Didn’t show up anywhere. And we had to figure that Bulger had split, too. Days away from the indictments, they all scrammed. We couldn’t believe it.
Despite our frantic efforts, we didn’t get done anyway. We missed the deadline, and the grand jury expired. Eighteen months and—nothing. With the main targets gone, we would have had trouble arresting them anyway. Still, it took a little of the wind out of all of us, no question. But we rallied.
Wyshak, as determined as ever, said he would convene an entirely new grand jury. All the evidence and testimony we previously brought to the prior grand jury would need to be read into the record to the new grand jury. A lot of it was a matter of reading the original testimony back into the record, page by page. The job fell to several of us in the unit—particularly Johnson, Tutungian, and Doherty—and we all got sick of it quickly, but we carried on.
Maybe two or three weeks later, Salemme and Flemmi slunk back into town. Patty and Gale spotted them. Somehow, they’d figured out the coast was clear.
We kept at it, though, week by week. The new grand jury was finishing up its work in late November when Wyshak ushered me into his office at the courthouse and shut the door behind us.
“We’ve got a problem, Tommy,” he said. “Stern’s not going to indict Bulger. He might not do Flemmi either.”
“What?” I exploded. “You’re kidding. What does the guy need?”
“He says the FBI’s told him they’ve got something going that would make a much stronger case against them, but they won’t have it together until spring.”
“Spring? You’re kidding me. This can’t hold until spring. By then they’ll be in Madrid or some goddamn place. They’ve already blown town once.”
“I hear you, and I agree. I’m just telling you what Stern says.”
“Doesn’t he get it? We don’t need the perfect case. We just need a case that will get those guys off the street.”
At Wyshak’s recommendation, I met Stern’s top guy, Jonathan Shiels, and laid it out for him. Besides Wyshak and Kelly, Shiels was one of the few I liked in OC over there. I trusted him, and that is saying a lot there. He reiterated Stern’s line that they were more likely to send Bulger and Flemmi away, and for longer, if we waited until spring. Apparently a concerted effort by the FBI to target the Rotary Variety Store was being planned.
Shiels was the messenger but I couldn’t believe in the message. He knew how far we’d come. He also knew—not that he said anything—that the FBI had a problem with Bulger. Once again the USAO was the FBI’s puppet.
“Jonathan, if we indict Bulger things will open up. You’ll see, people will start coming out of the woodwork on this guy. The more people cooperate, the stronger case we’ll have. I don’t buy this spring offensive. It’s just a delaying tactic.”
“It’s Don’s decision, Tommy. I’m just passing it along.”
“Well, Jonathan, listen to me. Tell them this. If Bulger and Flemmi are not indicted it will be the official public stand of the State Police that the United States Attorney’s Office had the opportunity to do so but refused. You clear about what I’m saying? The official public stand—you tell them that.”
He said he would definitely pass that along.
The FBI was feeling the heat, too. Aware over the years that we were working on Bulger, Dennis O’Callaghan, assistant agent in charge of FBI Boston, starting meeting with his equivalent in the State Police, Lieutenant Colonel Bud Riley, the head of the Division of Investigative Services.
A big, rumpled guy, O’Callaghan had always styled himself as one of the clean ones, and he always talked like the last thing he wanted was to damage the Bulger and Flemmi investigation. But he often complained to Riley about how I wasn’t working with the FBI. “You’ve gotta work with the FBI, Tommy,” Riley would tell me after meeting with O’Callaghan. “You’ve got to get along.” Riley knew that Greaney and I were close to Colonel Henderson and would often half-jokingly call us “the kitchen cabinet.”
O’Callaghan and Riley went back a long way together, and they had any number of friends in common. O’Callaghan knew the landscape well enough to know that if he wanted to gum up our investigation, Riley was the man to see. Buddy Riley was also looking to advance and knew it wasn’t in his best interests to go against the FBI.