Judge Wolf held court in the old Post Office Square courthouse on Milk Street, a big ornate place with room for maybe a hundred seats, all of which were filled when Flemmi rose to take the stand as the first witness. I was in Leominster now, but I worked my schedule so I could be there for his testimony. In his jacket and tie, Flemmi had the look of a mid-level bank manager, and he answered questions about the affidavit in a flat, uninflected voice, as if his words about his relationship to the FBI were of no particular importance. But when he was done, the polish was off the FBI.
Stunned by the revelation about the informant status of two preeminent mobsters, Judge Wolf ordered Fred Wyshak to dig into all the evidence of all the FBI informants on the Flemmi case, even peripheral ones like Sonny Mercurio. The FBI and the Department of Justice couldn’t duck it, either. They’d have to produce all the records they had or they would run the risk of being found in contempt of court, drawing still more unwanted publicity.
The news put the FBI in a vise. At least for the moment, Flemmi had shifted the focus of the inquiry from himself to the feds, and it rocked them. As an organization, the FBI was used to playing offense. It went after criminals, fought crime, attacked its enemies. On defense, it had to show that there was nothing to this idea of protection for Flemmi even as it acknowledged that it did use him as an informer despite his reputation, and that it never moved against him for any crimes.
Meanwhile, Salemme was in the Plymouth County House of Corrections awaiting trial on our indictment against him for racketeering and other crimes, many of which involved Whitey and Flemmi. He’d been held there for almost two years since he was arrested in Florida. Unlike Bulger and Flemmi, Salemme had never been an FBI informant. As those long years in prison for car-bombing Fitzgerald proved, he was a man who could keep a secret for as long as he had to. And he had to be seething about the other two, a pair of snitches—and wondering how much of his own troubles they’d brought on him. By now, Flemmi was in Plymouth, too. Together in the general lockup, Salemme and Flemmi had to have glowered at each other, these two Italians with such different ideas about omerta.
And where was Whitey? The feds did not want to compound their troubles by adding Whitey Bulger to the mix, backing up Flemmi’s allegations, adding some of his own, and drawing attention to the whole thing as only a celebrity could. They’d sworn to hunt Whitey down wherever he was—so how to account for the fact that the Bureau had gotten nowhere trying to find him, and had spent so much time trying to keep us off the case instead? To reassure everyone, the feds called a press conference and wheeled out the FBI’s new Boston office chief, Barry Mawn, to “clear up any perception,” as he put it, “that the FBI is not aggressively pursuing him.” And it kicked in a reward for information that led to Whitey’s capture. It was $250,000, which wasn’t all that much if the tip might get you killed. If the FBI got any leads for its money, it didn’t share them with us. And the money didn’t buy Whitey for the feds.
Rocked by the bad press, the Department of Justice decided that it had better do something to clean up the FBI’s image. Under the aegis of an entity called the Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, the DOJ gathered a team of investigators from the FBI and the USAO and sent them to Boston to investigate the dark relationship between two of the city’s most dangerous mobsters and their FBI handlers, Connolly and Morris. The team would be headed by a career agent, Charles Prouty.
It was the first time that the FBI had acknowledged that its agents might possibly have made a mistake or two here. That was something, and, despite the affiliations of the investigators, I held out some hope that Prouty might dig in to figure out just what. But it seemed more likely that Prouty’s real target was us. The feds had gone after us several times before—that was a big reason I was out in Leominster, after all, and not at SSS in Framingham. And, sure enough, as soon as Prouty arrived in Boston, he asked to interview me and my team to find out what we knew. With the FBI, I never knew what to believe, but I had almost never gone wrong believing less than all of it. Prouty’s would certainly not be your usual inquiry. Was it A: really to find out about what the FBI did wrong on the case? Or B: to find evidence of our corruption that would divert blame from the FBI? Or C: to discover our own lines of inquiry into the FBI, in order to stymie them? I’d say no to A, and probably to B and C. But who knew?
I needed to stay on top of the Bulger and Flemmi investigation with troopers based in Framingham, all while doing a new day job in Leominster that was proving heavier than I expected. I had to coordinate our State Police efforts with local police chiefs in the thirteen cities and towns of our area, and deal with a ton of management issues at the barracks, from scheduling maintenance to monitoring the contraband inventory in our storage hold. Wherever you have people, you have people problems, and I had thirty people under me at Leominster. Draw your own conclusions.
With Prouty, Fred Wyshak was on the interview list, too. He was as suspicious of the FBI as anyone, but he was getting heat from the Department of Justice to help the feds out. The official line was—the FBI is finally going to get to the bottom of this, clean house, make things right, start fresh. And Fred bought it. “You have to give them a chance, Tommy,” he kept telling me.
“Fred, how serious are they about this?” I’d tell him. “I just don’t think they’re for real.”
“We’ve got to let them know what we know,” he’d say. “Otherwise, they’ll never get anywhere.”
“Well, I want to see if they’re serious first.”
We never resolved that, but I did agree to attend the first sit-down with Prouty and some of his investigators. We sat around the big conference room table in the USAO as we had so many times before. Now it was Prouty. It was suits and ties all around.
Prouty sat at the head of the table, and, after some preliminary remarks about how we all needed to work together, he launched into it. “Now, Tom, maybe you can start by telling us why you believe that there has been FBI corruption.” Me? It was Judge Wolf who said there was FBI corruption, not me. And it was the FBI that agreed, which is why you’re here. But I said nothing, and all of us from the State Police side just looked at one another. I looked over at Wyshak, who looked away.
And Prouty wanted us to tell him everything we knew? Names, dates, times, background? Just hand it over? Why doesn’t he ask us for our ATM passwords while he’s at it?
Besides, we didn’t want this to be a State Police investigation. The FBI already knew most of what we knew. The feds could act on it that afternoon if they wanted to. And we didn’t want to give in to the same “State Police versus FBI” mentality that had caused us so much grief. Small-time us, big-deal them, with the pettiness and jealousy all on our side. Mawn had called that “FBI-bashing.” And, behind that, of course was the inside story of an embittered and unreliable State Police commander who was off on a vendetta against the FBI, and who had been banished to Leominster. If I was going to be hung out to dry, I didn’t want to provide the clothespins.
The meeting went nowhere, and afterward I told Prouty I’d answer particular questions, but I wasn’t going to be the basis of their investigation.
Around then, I happened to go to a retirement party for an FBI special agent, Arthur Ryall, a friend who was proof of something I tended to forget, that not all FBI agents are impossible. Ryall had nothing to do with Bulger and Flemmi. He did all his work around Worcester. The party was at the Wachusett Country Club just outside Worcester, and a lot of FBI agents were there. One was Jim Ring, the pipe-smoking former head of OC investigations in the Boston office. I’d scarcely laid eyes on him since he’d retired back in 1989 in the wake of the Naimovich scandal. This was 1997, but it might have been a century later, given how much he’d changed. Once so sure of himself, puffing away so confidently, now he seemed almost fragile when he called out to me. “Hey, Tommy! Tommy, jeez, good to see you.” He spoke as if we were old friends. But, of course, we weren’t friends, never had been, and never would be. Not after what he did to Naimovich.
Now the worm had turned, and some heavy charges might be coming his way. By this time, in his affidavit, Flemmi had said Ring was heavily involved in the effort to protect Flemmi and Bulger from our investigation. That was outside the scope of the Prouty investigation, but it was of considerable interest to Judge Wolf. Knowing what I knew about Ring, and about what he’d done to us, I found this to be all too likely. Ring would have to testify about all this in the Wolf hearings, and the prospect couldn’t have made him too comfortable.
And I knew that Wyshak was going to ask him about another nugget we’d picked up from Flemmi. Apparently, when Billy Bulger was senate president, he’d strolled into Flemmi’s mother’s house, which adjoined his own on East Third Street in Southie, and spent some time there with Ring, Connolly, Flemmi, and his brother Whitey—a rogues’ gallery if ever there was one. That testimony could do more than just shake up the case against Flemmi; it could rock the statehouse. A pair of gangsters weren’t exactly fit company for a couple of FBI agents, to say nothing of the state’s second most powerful pol. And then there were a growing number of reports that Flemmi and Whitey had given Ring several gifts, including a choice pipe. They nicknamed him “The Pipe.” To receive gifts, even fairly modest ones, from a criminal informant—when he’d gone after Naimovich for doing exactly that? (Ring later denied ever getting any gifts from them.)
Ring looked worried, almost panicky, but he tried hard not to let on. He congratulated me on the success of our investigation, overlooking the fact that he had done everything he could to squelch it. “You’ve done well with it,” he told me. “Very well. I’m impressed.”
I could have said any number of things back, but I let it go at “Thanks.”
That could have been the end of it, but he kept pushing the conversation on, obviously probing for what I knew. He tried for that marvelous breezy tone he used to use with me, back when he was in charge. Now his anxiety showed through every syllable. The fire in his eyes had gone out, replaced by a kind of weary dullness that was lit up only occasionally by flickers of dread.
Then, of all people, Dave Mattioli, my old boss at OC, came up to us.
“Well, hello,” he said to Ring as he approached. His greeting was understandably frosty, since Ring had been the big reason that Mattioli had retired from the State Police. Ring had screwed him over in the Naimovich affair even worse than he did me.
If it was awkward for Ring to be with Mattioli and me at the same time, he didn’t show it. He just kept trolling me for information as though his life depended on it, even though Mattioli was right there. Finally, Mattioli turned to me, grabbed my arm, and said: “Tommy, you better watch out here. I don’t know if you can see, but Jimmy’s fin is sticking right out of his back.” Ring looked like he had been slapped. His eyes narrowed as he looked at Mattioli.
“You’d know,” he said, trying to get back.
“I should’ve known,” Mattioli corrected him.
At that, Ring gave a little snort of derision and swung around, turning his back to Mattioli. I thought he’d head off to stalk somebody else, but he turned back to me, unable to let go of the conversation. “It’s all Connolly, you know,” he told me. “All the crap at the FBI with Bulger and Flemmi was his. Connolly is the guy you should be going after.”
This part I did get into, since I’d said it countless times in countless places already: “Jim, listen, if you and Connolly’s other bosses didn’t know, you should have known. You were responsible for everything that happened in your unit, right? I mean, cut the shit. You had no reason to suspect? Our Bulger and Flemmi wiretaps get compromised, they skip out on our warrants, their rivals disappear—and you don’t have a clue? Are you shitting me? Come on!”
“I’m telling you, I didn’t know, and I didn’t have any reason to know.”
“Whatever you say, Jim.”
Finally, Ring slunk off, a sad figure making his way across the floor in search of anything that could help him. Mattioli and I just shook our heads as we watched him go. “What an asshole,” we said, practically in unison.
While I tried to keep my distance from Prouty’s investigation, I did agree to direct the investigators to relevant bits of the court records, and to some FBI agents whose testimony might be helpful. And I answered specific questions when I was asked—like when a special agent named Walter Reynolds called me up and asked me about my conversation with Ring at the Wachusett Country Club. First off, I was a little irked that he didn’t come around to speak to me in person. On something like that, I like to see the guy I’m talking to. That’s how we handle interviews like that, or at least I do, but apparently not the FBI.
“Who told you about that?” I asked Reynolds, referring to the conversation. Of course, he wouldn’t say.
Still, I took him through the gist of the conversation, and I thought that was the end of it. No big deal.
In the course of the investigation, Prouty went through all the motions. He made a show of talking to everybody he could, and of reviewing all the relevant documents he could find. He and his team were at it for five weeks. And in the end he cleared the FBI of all wrongdoing. But I entered into his report, despite my determination to stay out, and in an unflattering context—my strained conversation with Ring. In fact, it showed me how guilty Ring was acting. But in the report, it got all twisted around to show that Ring wasn’t to blame for anything. Instead, any blame went to certain State Police malcontents who were determined to smear the FBI. One malcontent in particular.
The report cited some comments of mine about John Connolly, but it misquoted them, and in a revealing way. “Foley explained to Ring that even though they have had a number of allegations made against Connolly, they (MSP) are not about to target Connolly as a suspect. Foley then told Ring ‘you should.’”
That’s not the way it happened. I said that we would probably not target Connolly in our current investigation, but we would certainly hold out this possibility for later. More important, I was not the one who said “You should.” Ring said that. And the difference was significant. If Ring was on the record telling us to investigate, that would suggest he thought there was wrongdoing. Of course, he had thought that, and he told me so. But this document suggests just the opposite: it sounds as if he knows nothing of any irregularities. Further, by shifting that quote to me, and away from him, the document removes Ring from the list of people to pursue for further information—he knew nothing!—and puts me on it instead.
When we heard the details of Prouty’s report, he did not come out and say that Connolly and Morris had done nothing wrong. He said only that they had done nothing wrong “within the statute of limitations,” which is different. Since this was the summer of 1997, that would mean since the summer of 1992, five years before. John Connolly had retired two years before that, in 1990, ending his official connection with Bulger and Flemmi. And, to cover more recent crimes, Prouty added another out. He considered the actions only of “current FBI employees.” Morris had retired the year before, so he was off the hook, too.
No matter how artfully Prouty avoided charging either agent with a crime, a large problem remained for a report like his. Whitey. Where was he? He was gone because he had been tipped off to the coming arrests by John Connolly, and Connolly had done that to save his own skin. If Bulger and Flemmi were gone, they couldn’t testify to Connolly’s crimes in protecting them. By this point, Flemmi had filed affidavits with the courts naming Connolly as the one who told them to flee. And phone records subsequently revealed that John Connolly had made several dozen calls to O’Callaghan inquiring about the status of the grand jury and the timing of the indictments. He knew—and he told Bulger and Flemmi what he knew.
If Prouty was trying to say that, while he found no corruption within the confines of his report, there was corruption outside it—nobody got it. The message everybody took away was that the FBI was clean. And FBI higher-ups appreciated this, and they rewarded him by promoting him to run the Boston office. Ultimately, Charles Prouty became the third-ranking administrator in the FBI.