Then in mid-December, Stern caved in. He decided to indict Bulger and Flemmi along with Salemme and the others as soon as the grand jury had finished its work; it was now slated to do that in mid-January. Since this was our case, we’d do the arrests, but Stern wanted the FBI in on them, too.
When word came down from Stern, I started in. Bulger, Flemmi, Salemme. There were others like Bobby DeLuca—who’d be targeted, but these three were the essential ones, the ones we’d been gunning for since 1990. I thought a lot about the smartest sequence of arrests. Bulger first, then Salemme and Flemmi, because of their relative power? Or work our way up, as we’d done in the case? Whitey and Flemmi ran the Irish mob and virtually were the Irish mob, far and away the most powerful and terrifying mobsters in the city. Salemme was solidifying his hold as Mafia boss, not just in Boston but in all of New England. Between the three of them, they controlled all there was of mob activity in Boston and some way beyond.
Flemmi was the bridge between them. Or more exactly he was two bridges, linking to Whitey on one side and to Salemme on the other. So he joined the two of them together. It was enough to make us wonder once again if the line between the Irish and the Italian mobs was really as bright and clear as we’d thought. By getting Flemmi, we were getting a major Whitey connection and a major Salemme connection, too. Reaching to each, he’d help us get all three.
So we claimed Flemmi for ourselves. We’d go in with the FBI on capturing Salemme, since we had good information on Salemme’s whereabouts. The FBI wanted Whitey. I had a talk with Quinn, and he assured me that his agents knew Whitey’s location—not that he would reveal it to me—and they were on him. That was the extent of it. I didn’t tell Quinn my plans for the arrests, or even say if I wanted the feds in. At that point, I didn’t trust Quinn as far as I could throw him. I figured that, with Whitey’s celebrity, once I told the feds their role, they would finally be under some pressure not to screw it up. The bottom line was that we had no choice. The U.S. attorney told us they had to be involved. Besides, I was going to set it up so that they wouldn’t move on either Salemme or Bulger until we had Flemmi in custody. After that, we’d join in on getting Whitey, too.
I kept all this dead quiet, not saying a word to anyone. I didn’t want any leaks. The less time the FBI had to interfere, the better.
Just after the New Year, we learned that the grand jury would finish earlier than expected—in another week, on January 10. I still wasn’t going to spill the plan. Finally, Dick Swenson, the agent in charge of the Boston office, called Colonel Henderson and summoned us from the State Police, starting with Colonel Henderson, to the FBI conference room, to break some important news.
“We’ve received information that Frank Salemme is preparing to flee,” he declared solemnly. “We’ll need to move on him right away.”
I was really starting to hate that voice. “What information is this?”
“That he’s preparing to flee,” Quinn replied.
“And the source?”
“Also confidential.”
“A good source, Ed?”
“Highly reliable.”
Confidential had come to mean nonexistent, but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere with that. Trying to keep the arrests as quiet as possible, I didn’t advise even my own people of the arrest teams and assignments. I wanted to wait to make sure that the indictments would be handed down. I believe, though, that the FBI felt we would leave them out of it. By claiming inside information, Quinn was sure to stay in on at least one of the arrests. Although the grand jury wasn’t quite finished, Quinn forced our hand. As usual, there was no saying no. Wyshak dutifully went to the court and, pleading emergency circumstances based on the information about Salemme, asked the court to issue arrest warrants in advance of the official indictments. Granted.
So much had gone into this—the layers of investigation since we started on Whitey in 1990. This would be the culmination of our hard work. Everybody on the team had sacrificed. We’d all given everything we had.
And now I was praying that we could pull this thing out. Things had gone wrong so many times that I’d gotten spooked. I didn’t have time to think about whether the cause was an accident or deliberate sabotage. But I couldn’t let myself be distracted. Now more than ever, I had to focus on what I needed to do, and let everything else go.
Just as I had back in September, I had the people in my unit out on the street keeping tabs on Flemmi and Salemme. As usual, nobody got a look at Whitey, but we’d have to take the feds’ word that they had him. Patty and Gale had been tailing Flemmi for several days now, and for weeks before that, and they had him down cold. I’d bring in Tutungian to help out there, too. Johnson had Salemme along with a couple of troopers: Darlene Decaire, who was great at surveillance; and Mark Caponette, who was more of a tech specialist. Even with my best people on them, both mobsters moved into and out of view. It was midwinter now, the season of heavy coats and warm hats, of staying inside, and it wasn’t so easy to stay with people.
At the end of December, just as we were gearing up to make our arrests, we had gotten some information that the notorious hit man John Martorano was living near Boca Raton, Florida. This was huge. A onetime member of the Winter Hill gang with Bulger and Flemmi, Martorano had fled race-fixing charges over fifteen years ago, and he’d been a fugitive ever since. He’d been as tight with Whitey then as Flemmi was now, and had as fearsome a reputation. Not only was Martorano a federal fugitive, but we had evidence that he was still involved with Bulger and Flemmi.
It killed me, but Martorano was too important to ignore. I had to take off two of my best, Sly Scanlan and Stevie Johnson, to fly down to Florida and take a shot at grabbing Martorano. At least we knew Flemmi and Salemme were around. The line from the FBI about Salemme’s splitting was just that. He and Flemmi were there for the taking, and Bulger, too, for all I knew.