In the mob, you never know where the bullet is going to come from, and usually it’s from the guy you least suspect. It’s the same in law enforcement. I knew I had enemies at the FBI, but that went with the territory. I didn’t think I had any serious enemies in the State Police.
They didn’t emerge until Henderson stepped down in the spring of 1996. He’d been a big supporter of ours, and I missed him when he was gone. To replace him Governor Weld appointed Reed Hillman—a surprising choice, since Hillman was much more a political figure than a trooper. He’d raised a lot of money for the Republican Party and was close to Weld’s lieutenant governor, Paul Cellucci. But he was only a captain, so he’d have to leap several ranks to become a colonel, the rank required for a superintendent. That was a first, and it meant there would be a lot of gaps in his experience. He came in knowing little about the full range of State Police operations, and almost nothing about investigations. As a trooper, he’d spent most of his time in central Massachusetts, well away from Boston, and most of that time he was a court officer. He had limited investigative and supervisory experience. That didn’t sound good for us.
Around this time, Riley left to become head of Harvard’s campus police. Major Nelson Ostiguy took over, and he kept the Division of Investigative Services on the course that Riley had set. He took the same line—Foley isn’t a team player, can’t work with the FBI, etc.—and he had a grudge against Colonel Henderson.
Pat and I were both considered Henderson’s people, kitchen cabinet or no, and that made us perfect targets for Ostiguy, if he was trying to make his mark. He’d create the new by tearing down the old. Frighteningly for all of us, Pat had a heart attack that summer. The stress of the investigation, and all the cross fire, had to have played a role. I knew what that was like: I found myself fighting for air sometimes. But Pat wasn’t able to return to the force, and this was sad for everybody. Great guy. And it also gave Ostiguy just the opportunity he was seeking.
Ostiguy went to Colonel Hillman and his second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Glenn Anderson, and declared that my SSS unit had a disproportionate number of sergeants, and some of them had to go—returned to patrol duties. It was absurd. Usually the commander of investigative services is fighting to keep his men, not lose them.
Hillman simply agreed. Sure, why not? Sounds good.
Once Ostiguy had Hillman’s approval, he summoned me to his office, shut the door, sat me down, and let me know that some of my sergeants would have to go.
At SSS, I had seventy people altogether, and within it I was running a delicate and complex OC investigation with just a few of them. I couldn’t manage without my sergeants. This he knew only too well.
“Sergeants Tutungian, Johnson, and Duffy will be transferred back to uniform duties,” Ostiguy declared, reading off a list he had prepared.
If he had stabbed me in the chest I don’t think I would have felt more betrayed than I did at that moment. These men weren’t just my key investigators on the most important case the State Police had going; they were my friends, my brothers. They had my back, and I had theirs. Everything we’d gone through together on the case—the strategizing, wiretaps, surveillance, informants, arrests—we had gone through together. On the job, I couldn’t imagine ever being as close to anyone else as I was to these three men. They were making this case, not me. If I lost them, I’d be lost, and the case would be as good as gone, too. And now Ostiguy was plucking them from the case, and sending them to Siberia.
“So that’s what we have decided,” he said, enjoying the moment. He would bring our investigation of Whitey Bulger to a halt. He didn’t care how much it mattered, or how much had gone into it.
“Is this a done deal?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then it doesn’t really matter what I think, now does it?”
I left his office a dead man. If those three officers were sent packing, everything that I had been trying for in the last ten years since I arrived in Boston to work on OC had amounted to nothing. It was stunning. We’d killed ourselves doing our job. We’d brought SSS back from the dark days of Naimovich. It had become the best place to work in the State Police, and we were making the most important cases in the Commonwealth. And this was what we got.
It was a classic case of pointless revenge. Ostiguy wasn’t really after me, much as it looked as though he was. He was carrying some water for Riley, who’d been convinced by O’Callaghan that I had it in for the FBI. Ostiguy bought into that, but he added a few cupfuls of hatred of his own. He wanted to get Henderson. He was upset because Henderson hadn’t promoted him earlier. And now that Henderson was gone, he’d stick it to him by sticking it to me, since I was a Henderson man. And if he could knock out the Bulger investigation that was causing the FBI so much grief, so much the better. And Hillman felt the same: any trouble with the FBI was trouble for him.
I had to sit with that one a long time. I’d never felt so frustrated, so powerless, and so angry. Obviously, it wasn’t about my sergeants. They were just a way of getting to me, just as I was a way of getting to Henderson. They were just a place to start. Without them, I’d be weakened. He could phony up some reason to take me out.
I can’t recall now just how long I sat with this, but I never said anything to my sergeants. However long it was, by the time I was done I knew what I had to do.
I’d worked before with Hillman’s second in command, Glenn Anderson, and I arranged to meet with him, just the two of us.
There was no need for preliminaries. He knew what it was about; it was the talk of the building.
“Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Ostiguy wants to take my sergeants,” I began.
“Yes, that’s right. We need them in the barracks. We have been studying the issue.” It was somewhat halting. Anderson must have known this was BS.
“Let me ask you something,” I replied. “How about lieutenants?” I asked. “Could you use a lieutenant?”
That surprised him. “You mean you?”
I nodded, once quickly. “If my sergeants can stay, I’ll go.”
“We do need lieutenants,” he said.
He studied me. “OK then.” He agreed to it so quickly it was clear to me this had been the ultimate objective all along. It was always about me.
“So where would you like to be assigned?”
I named a couple of areas in mid-state.
“How about station commander at Leominster?”
That was north-central Massachusetts, over fifty miles from Boston. Not exactly convenient.
“OK.”
“Done.”
He took me to see Hillman, to finalize the deal.
Standing on the other side of the desk, Hillman looked pale and almost bony. His eyes skipped around the room, landing everywhere but on me, and his hand was slippery when I shook it. Hillman didn’t know much about our investigation except that it was getting him grief from the FBI and the USAO.
A moment or two later, Ostiguy came into the room. He stood directly behind me in a way that reminded me of Vinny Ferrara years back, and he didn’t move until I turned around.
I told Hillman that I’d agreed to the transfer I’d just worked out with Anderson. “But it makes no sense at all,” I told him. I ticked off the accomplishments of SSS, and the progress we’d made on the Whitey case. “We’re at a key moment in the Bulger investigation, and I need these sergeants.”
From the look on his face, that seemed like news to him. “You can work on Bulger when you need to, Tommy. It’s fine with me.”
Hillman said this so casually I didn’t know how seriously he meant it, but I was going to take it and keep it. “Good,” I told him. “I would like that. Thank you, sir.” I had no idea how I could possibly keep the investigation going from Leominster. But I would find a way.
It wasn’t a long walk back across the compound to my office, but it seemed to take forever, like something in a nightmare. I couldn’t believe it. I was out. I’d taken myself out, removing myself from an active, daily role in an investigation that had been at the center of not just my career, but my life. I’d breathed this case. I ate it. I’d racked up so much time on it. Nights and weekends, yes, but also July Fourths and Christmases and birthdays.
I went upstairs to see my guys in the unit. They’d all heard the news. Tutungian, Johnson, Doherty, all my guys. They were all standing around with long faces, obviously stunned. “Tommy, are you really out?” Tutungian asked me.
“Out of here, anyway.”
“Shit,” Johnson said.
“Did you really offer to go?” they asked. “Was that your idea?”
“Guys, I didn’t have any choice. The case can’t be done without you guys.
“But listen,” I told them finally. “I’m going to stay on the case, just not from here.” I laid out for them how I’d stay involved from Leominster. That lifted spirits a little. We talked some about how it might work, but of course none of us knew yet how it would really work.
I wouldn’t leave for a couple of weeks, and the guys kept coming into my office to see me and tell me how bad they felt about everything.
“So that’s it?” Tutungian asked me one day toward the end. He had been there since 1990. He’d never given in to the hours, the pressure. He’d always been the beast of the group, just relentless, staying up all night to write an affidavit to get a wiretap, and then staying up all the next night to monitor it.
Now all we could do was look at each other.
“Yeah, it’s back to the barracks for me.”
“Leominster?” he asked, with some disgust.
“Hey, I’ll be back,” I told him. Then I smiled. “And I’m going to stay on your ass, don’t worry.”
I was home for a few days before I started in again at Leominster. All my guys in the unit called, even the ones I’d already spoken to, and told me how shocked they were, and all that.
One person from outside the force called, and that meant a lot to me. It was Tom Reilly, now the attorney general for the Commonwealth after a stint as our district attorney. He said he was calling to let me know how sorry he was about what had happened. “Senseless,” he told me. “Just senseless.”
I had to agree with that.
“I can call Hillman, you know. Put a stop to it.”
“Thanks,” I told him. “But it wouldn’t work. If they don’t get me out this way, they’ll do it some other way.”
“Well, the offer stands.”
“I’m just glad to have the support of the attorney general.”
Ostiguy had my replacement all teed up. I was hardly gone before he brought in Jack O’Malley. He was the head of something called the Criminal Information Section, which kept the State Police records. He’d spent some time in investigative services as a detective at Logan Airport. For him, though, it was a lucky bounce careerwise, to step into the leadership of a well-oiled investigative unit that was targeting Whitey Bulger. Still, I thought well enough of Jack to tell the guys in the section to get behind him. After all, he was in charge, and it wouldn’t do the investigation any good to undermine him.
But the word was getting out that I had been sent to Leominster because I couldn’t get along with the FBI, and O’Malley had to be brought in to replace me. I was the problem all along.
Even if I wanted to get off the case, I couldn’t. It had gotten so vast and involved, with so many subpoenas and search warrants and witnesses, to say nothing of the long history of the investigation and all the players. I’d have to stay in, whether anybody liked it or not. Nobody else knew it the way I did. O’Malley didn’t seem to like having me around, so he shifted over to other areas of SSS and left Bulger to me to work on as best I could with the people I had. It wasn’t much, but it was something. We’d been through hell together, but we hadn’t gotten to the other side.