The FBI always was shameless about PR. In announcing the arrest of Martorano, the feds somehow failed to mention that we were the ones actually to do it. And then they followed that up by announcing that the FBI was creating a high-level fugitive task force to capture the mobster it had let escape. This was in January, a few weeks after Bulger had fled. Wherever in the universe Whitey Bulger was, he would be hunted down—that was the message. The G-men would make this right. And who’d be running the show? Agent Charlie Gianturco, Mr. This Thing of Ours himself. And he would be assisted by John Gamel, who couldn’t even find Theresa Stanley’s house the night that Whitey disappeared.
It was a joke, but it didn’t matter to us if Stern had put General Patton in charge. We weren’t waiting around. We were going to do everything we could to get Whitey ourselves.
The FBI’s big idea was to get Whitey Bulger on America’s Most Wanted, and then wait for the phone to ring. The louder the feds yelled that they were in charge of the investigation, the more likely they would be to receive any tips.
Well, fine. But that didn’t mean we were going to just let Whitey go. Early on, we’d picked up intelligence that Bulger might have slipped across the border to lie low in Montreal or Toronto. To develop the lead, we needed some phone records from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But somehow Gianturco found out about our request, called the RCMP himself, and persuaded the Mounties to send the phone records directly to him.
Once he had the records in his hands, Gianturco called me. He spoke as though he were leaving an answering machine message, even though I was there on the other end of the phone. “Tommy? Just wanted you to know I’ve got those RCMP records you wanted.” Meaning he was in tighter with the Mounties than we would ever be, and that we would have to come to him if we expected to get any of the documents.
The fact was, of course, that even though we were a state police agency, we had full federal powers to subpoena evidence. It would have been nearly impossible to work on a fugitive case like Whitey’s otherwise. When I first started doing OC in 1984, I was deputized by the U.S. Marshals, gaining for myself the federal power to serve process and make arrests related to their cases. That was standard practice for investigators like me in the State Police, and it was pretty much essential for OC. When the investigation into Whitey and Flemmi heated up, all of my people were deputized by the Marshals as well.
Then Gianturco heard about this. He professed outrage that we had such powers. Not that he ever said why, but it was clear: he was afraid we’d use them to track Whitey—and never mind how Whitey became a fugitive in the first place. Gianturco didn’t care about reasons. He just wanted to keep us from showing up the FBI.
He took his complaint to Jim Farmer in the USAO, and Farmer called me. “Just wanted you to know that DOJ has worked out a new policy in Washington.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
“Starting now, the deputies will all have to be approved by the FBI. So you’ll be going through them on those.”
“This national, Jim? Or is this just us?”
“Not just you. Everyone. Whole country.”
“Could I see a copy of the order?”
“Of course. I’ll get it right out to you.”
I was curious to see the rationale behind the new requirements, and I had the feeling that none existed because, in fact, there was no such order at all. Sure enough, Farmer never sent anything. I asked several state police colleagues working on OC cases in other states if they had ever heard of such a policy, and none of them had. None of them were subject to any such FBI or DOJ review. It looked as though this new national policy was for us alone.
What Gianturco and Farmer didn’t think of was that our investigation was a joint project with the DEA—this was why we could have Danny Doherty with us—and DEA was a federal agency capable of providing deputizations. Doherty went to his boss, who shook his head over the FBI’s behavior and told Doherty he’d be happy to help us out. How many deputizations did we need?
Meanwhile, the feds were squeezing us on money. Back in 1991, Whitey did one of the more sensational things he had ever done: he announced that he held a portion of the winning $14.3 million state lottery ticket, which would kick out almost $90,000 a year. It was headline news across the country. Notorious mobster strikes it rich. Everyone wondered—was Whitey really that lucky? It didn’t seem possible. Suspicion immediately turned to Billy Bulger. With his power over state government, it seemed he could easily get a winning ticket into his brother’s hands. More likely, Whitey simply muscled in on the winning ticket after it had been pulled, claimed that he was in on it all along, and dared the true owner to say otherwise.
One problem for Whitey was that he had to go to the lottery office in person to collect, and show himself to the video cameras there. This provided one of the very few Whitey sightings on the case, and the only one that wasn’t still pictures but video. Shot from above in blurry black-and-white, it showed a middle-aged man in a baseball cap moving stiffly to the counter for a brief exchange with a clerk and then making a hasty exit, head tipped down.
For Whitey the ticket’s yield would provide cover for living expenses that were otherwise unaccounted for by someone who had no legitimate occupation. Now that Whitey had fled a federal arrest warrant, though, we could seize the lottery proceeds along with any other assets he had left behind. Normally, money like that goes to the lead agency investigating the case. That would be us, and we immediately put in a claim for it to the USAO, which decides these things. Of course, the FBI claimed it, too. Rather than adjudicate, the USAO ducked it, leaving the two of us to work it out between us. The FBI never engaged in any negotiations. It simply seized the money.
And the worse the FBI agents did, the more accolades they got. Within a year after letting Whitey slip through his fingers, and then being named to the task force that tried (without success) to find him, Gamel was named the Boston FBI office’s Agent of the Year. Two months after that, he took over from Quinn as commander of all the FBI’s OC efforts in New England, including the ones with us.
That was too much, and I called another assistant U.S. attorney, Jamie Herbert.
“Gamel’s the Agent of the Year? And now he’s overseeing Bulger?”
Herbert was usually an FBI apologist, and he didn’t let me down. “This has nothing to do with Bulger. It’s a career achievement award, honoring the guy for everything he’s done.”
More exactly, it was the annual award for the agent whose job it was to keep tabs on us that year. Later, when Gamel moved up, Stan Moody took over. His job was to watch what we were doing on Bulger, and to try to make it nothing. He was named Agent of the Year, too.
And there was Barry Mawn, who took over the FBI’s Boston office later. He called our efforts to find Bulger “FBI-bashing” and told us that if we couldn’t get along with the FBI, we should quit. New to the case, he declared that if we complained about anything the FBI did before he arrived, we were just whining about “ancient history.” Mawn eventually rose to become an assistant director of the entire FBI.
Meanwhile, the FBI continued to work the press, and the feds managed to turn black into white in some of the most prominent newspaper accounts of their work with Bulger. This is from a Boston Globe report in March 1995: “In 1991, federal prosecutors, working mostly with State Police leads, began corralling middle-aged bookies accustomed to paying small fines and hammered them with money-laundering charges carrying stiff sentences. The goal was to force the bookies to testify about extortion payments. It began to work, and the FBI jumped on board.”
This may sound right, or nearly right, but it is completely backward. If the Globe was talking about the USAO, it was not the entire USAO but just a couple of assistant U.S. attorneys who were willing to buck the system to do what was right. And the FBI did not “jump on board.” That’s crazy. The truth was just the opposite. As soon as the investigation started to work, the FBI tried to close us down. In the same article, the Globe hailed Ed Quinn, saying his “reputation for integrity” had “bridged the historical animosities and suspicions held by State Police” toward the FBI. Hardly. In fact, Quinn had fueled those animosities and suspicions, and he continued to do so. Toward the end of the story, the article landed on the truth of the matter: “Two years ago, a high level law enforcement official told the Globe that there would be as much trouble as glory for the FBI in building a case against Bulger. He saw a public relations debacle down the road if Bulger went to trial and used his role as a bureau informant as a defense—that he was only doing what the FBI told him to do.” Dead right. And that fact explained everything else. Such conflicting media accounts—within the same article, no less—revealed that, along with all the battles we were fighting, we were in a war with the FBI over public opinion.