The FBI didn’t do everything wrong. It had some successes, but the thing with the feds was that you never knew what to make of them. By this time, I simply did not believe them unless their claims were corroborated by an independent source, and even then I couldn’t be sure. Whenever I talked to people from the FBI, I had to listen on two tracks—the track of what they were saying, and the track of what I could believe.
In August 1995, the summer after Whitey fled, Colonel Henderson received a call at home from Dick Swensen of the Boston office saying that the FBI had just captured Frank Salemme Sr. in the Palm Beach home of one of his girlfriends. It was a rare success for the Bureau, and the feds were crowing. They didn’t alert us to the arrest ahead of time as I’d done with Martorano, but I knew not to expect them to share. They said they’d gotten a tip-off from a broadcast of America’s Most Wanted. I had to roll my eyes. That was like saying a little bird told them.
Still, Salemme was in custody, and we were good with that.
That left Whitey.
We continued to chase leads, and in mid-1996 we obtained information about a counterfeiter who had supposedly been creating false IDs for him. The counterfeiter specialized in driver’s licenses, and he’d helped any number of criminals in the past. That was big. If we had the alias under which Bulger was operating, we’d have a good shot at him. First, we’d need to get to the counterfeiter. Johnson, Tutungian, and Doherty went to have the conversation with the guy, and put him to use. Unfortunately, the FBI had found out about the counterfeiter, too, and insisted on pushing into any interview. Once again the USAO wanted the feds to participate.
We weren’t entirely convinced that the counterfeiter—whose name I still cannot divulge—was telling us the full truth, but we felt there was something there. Gamel, who was in charge by now, was sure our man was a compulsive liar who couldn’t be trusted. But could the FBI?
After the Mounties incident, we’d decided that the rule of thumb with the FBI was: the feds hold back any information that might help us find Whitey, but they broadcast anything that makes us look bad. Like when we learned later that the FBI had developed some information from another South Boston source that Bulger was using the name Thomas Baxter and driving a black Mercury Marquis. Both pieces of information proved true, and both would have been immensely helpful in any effort to dig out Bulger. The FBI never used the information and never let us know about it either.
The counterfeiter, however, was meeting Kevin Weeks on a fairly regular basis. Young and surly, Weeks was a close associate of Bulger’s and was often described as his surrogate son. Weeks was a bouncer at the Triple O’s, which was the successor to the old Killeen hangout, the Transit, and was owned by Whitey. I’d seen Weeks racing down the sidewalk, probably to alert Whitey to the arrest warrants, that big night in Southie when the town lit up. Weeks’s brother went to Harvard, and Weeks himself always made out that he could have gone Ivy League himself if he hadn’t decided to hang with Whitey. He was canny, no question, and I bet Whitey taught him a few things.
Like Whitey, he was just about impossible to tap, and I don’t think it was because he was getting tipped off. I think he was just smart that way. He was murder to tail. He knew all the tricks—running red lights; shooting across several lanes to make a sudden exit off a highway before we could react; or banging sudden illegal U-turns on one-way streets.
Concerned about his safety, the counterfeiter never came to us, and we never met anywhere we might be seen. Instead, we sat down with him well outside town.
Electronic surveillance of Weeks was difficult, but we did manage to get some information on his calls from the pay phones he used around the city, and, with a court order to the phone company, we were able to get a pen register on Weeks’s phone. That doesn’t record conversations—it records just the numbers dialed on a phone—so courts let us put one in fairly liberally. Our counterfeiter reported that Weeks didn’t just need a phony license or two for his client; he’d also need “clean” names—ones without any criminal history—to go with the licenses. Johnson dug those up for us. He pulled them off lists of the recently deceased. It was just a name—Bulger would have to fill in the ID, with address, profession, and all the rest. But if Bulger ever tried to use the name, we’d have him. Weeks also provided the counterfeiter with a photo to use for the phony ID. To me, it didn’t look like Whitey Bulger at all; it looked much more like his brother Jackie, and probably was. Obviously, Weeks was having trouble getting a good current picture of Whitey, just like we were. And Whitey couldn’t have been too pleased with what Weeks sent either. Whitey provided a fresh photo and told our guy to try again. We pocketed a copy of that one. Whitey was a little worn, but that cold stare of his burned right through.
Weeks had an unusual hobby, one we figured we could make use of. Paintballing. He loved running around shooting other guys with blobs of paint. That pen register we slapped on his phone suddenly started kicking out a lot of calls to a paintball club outside Chicago. Why Chicago, all of a sudden? That wasn’t exactly the paintball capital of the universe. It occurred to us that maybe he was going to meet Bulger to drop off some phony IDs. He’d make it appear like he was going on one of his paintball trips.
Still worried about the FBI, I told no one outside our unit about Weeks’s movements, or about the names we’d generated. Any disclosure could get the counterfeiter killed. I sent Johnson, Doherty, and Tutungian to Chicago to try to follow Weeks, but told them to keep their distance. It was essential that Weeks have no idea they were on him. If Weeks sensed he was being followed, he’d tell Bulger, and Bulger wouldn’t touch those IDs. Well, hard as it is to follow someone on unfamiliar city streets, it is doubly hard under those circumstances, and they lost him.
As we learned later, Weeks did indeed meet Whitey in Chicago on his paintball trip, and he talked over the IDs. He didn’t dare bring them with him, though. That task fell to another Southie hood, Peter Lee, who delivered them to Whitey in New York. Whitey was leery of IDs that two other people knew about, besides himself. He knew a bad ID could be the end of him, just as we did. He used the IDs, but only briefly. Then he tossed them.