When Flemmi learned that the FBI was ducking any responsibility for his crimes, he was furious, and he responded by going into ever-greater detail about the nature of the FBI’s secret connection with him and Bulger, detail that made it ever harder for the FBI to deny this connection. Still, Judge Wolf proceeded with our case against Flemmi, which would begin in January 1998.
But in his obsession with getting back at the FBI, Flemmi had lost sight of something essential to his health. Just as our war against Bulger and Flemmi was proceeding on many fronts, his war to fend us off involved many, too. He had gotten the idea that he need worry only about the FBI. If he could somehow persuade the world that the FBI had permitted his crimes, he thought he’d be home free. But he overlooked the many mobsters who would be enraged to discover that as an FBI snitch, he had ruined their lives, and who would come for him, bent on revenge. He already had Salemme to contend with.
Now he had John Martorano. As a codefendant with Flemmi on the RICO conspiracy charge, he sat in Judge Wolf’s courtroom for the next few weeks, after it became all too clear that Flemmi had been an FBI informant. Martorano was up in the front row with Bobby DeLuca and Salemme, who’d also been brought together by our charges. A solid, menacing figure, Martorano sat there all day every day, stone-faced, with his arms crossed. On the stand, Flemmi did not say that he and Whitey had used the FBI’s protection to remove their mob rivals. But Martorano could add two and two. And it didn’t take long for him to figure out how it could have been that Bulger and Flemmi had themselves avoided arrest in the race-fixing investigation, had known enough to alert Martorano to his impending arrest, and had watched Howie Winter go off to prison, ceding to them the top spot at Winter Hill. Meanwhile, Martorano had been forced to abandon his family and friends to go on the run for fifteen years.
From that first day, through weeks of testimony, Flemmi’s eyes never once met Martorano’s, even though Flemmi had always insisted he and Bulger were Martorano’s best friends in the world. But Martorano sat dead still, his eyes going nowhere except to Steve Flemmi. If a look could kill, Flemmi would be lying in a pool of blood. Out of court, Martorano was housed at the Plymouth County House of Corrections. His cell was three doors down from Flemmi’s. At night, in their beds, each could hear the other breathing. All the cells opened at six in the morning, allowing all the inmates to mingle. Martorano thought often about strangling Flemmi or slipping a shiv into him, but he never did it. He had a better way to take revenge than murdering him.
Martorano had heard good things about how we’d handled sources like Chico Krantz and the bookies Jimmy Katz, Paul Moore, and others. For us, it was simple: we did what we said we would do. No surprises, no exceptions. Plus, Martorano had been impressed by the way Steve Johnson and Sly Scanlan handled his arrest in Florida. Criminals aren’t ever going to like cops, but they do appreciate professionalism, and Mike and Stevie did the whole thing by the book. It’s like what they say about your reputation. It takes a lifetime to build and a moment to blow.
The first we learned of Johnny Martorano’s interest in cooperating came when his younger brother Jimmy asked us to come out to his home in Quincy to talk. He didn’t have to send out any feelers; I knew what it was about. Now we had to decide if we wanted to go down this road. Martorano was a stone-cold killer. He could pop you and then have a nice dinner. If ever there was a deal with the devil, this was it. I went around and around on it. We were kicking the crap out of the FBI for coddling a pair of killers. Would people think we were doing the same thing?
This one wasn’t easy, and I talked it over with Wyshak, Doherty, Johnson, and others in the unit. Was this OK? Should we do it? How would it look? None of us liked it. Martorano was the devil, no question. We were all agreed on that. But what choice did we have? Besides, our dealing with Martorano was a whole different thing from the FBI’s dealing with Bulger. We certainly didn’t keep Martorano in business the way the FBI did Bulger. Just the opposite. We’d captured Martorano and thrown him into prison. The feds had protected Whitey from arrest, and now they seemed bent on letting him stay gone forever. Basically, they had let him kill as many people as he wanted, and maybe they were continuing to, as far as anyone knew. By taking Martorano off the street, we’d make the killing stop.
Martorano was exactly the man we needed for our plan to work. The idea had always been to start with the bookies, and keep going up until we get the full truth. The lesser charges would be enough to put Whitey in prison, and that’s when we’d lay the real charges on him. But this was back before DNA, when you usually needed a body or a reliable eyewitness to win a murder conviction, and both were hard to find with Whitey. We knew he was a killer. That was his reputation, and any number of people had disappeared after seeing him. But we hadn’t found the bodies that would allow us to develop murder charges, or anyone to tell us about the crimes. Whitey never left a body behind, at least none whose death could be traced to him. And no eyewitnesses ever came forward. They knew better.
That’s how the FBI could play Whitey as a lowly racketeer who, despite a lot of tough talk, never actually hurt anyone. Martorano would put an end to that. He’d know all about Bulger’s murders. And once a guy like Johnny Martorano started to talk, others would say some more. And then we’d start to make some inroads into the FBI cover-up, too. And whoever was behind that in the USAO, the DOJ, and anywhere else. We would follow this snake back to its hole.
And we had the families of the murder victims to consider. In a lot of Bulger’s murder cases, nobody knew what happened. As far as the families knew, their loved ones were just gone. Many of them had been gone so long that the families had long since started to fear the worst. But not knowing can be agonizing, and if we could get Martorano to tell us what he knew, that could end their suspense.
Johnson and Doherty stayed in touch with many of them. The families couldn’t be absolutely sure that it had been Bulger and Flemmi who had killed their relatives, but they had ample reason to suspect. Johnson and Doherty had broached the subject of our gaining solid information about what happened, since they could not legally be brought into any plea bargain, but the families made clear their views. They wanted to know the truth, however painful it might be to hear.
Born in 1940, Jimmy Martorano was just eleven months younger than his brother Johnny. We knew all about them. For Jimmy was in the files, too. The brothers were in the same grade growing up, and they’d gone pretty much in lockstep through life. The family had started out in Somerville, not far from Winter Hill, but then moved out to suburban Milton, where it was quieter and the boys had room to run. Their father, Andy Martorano, had started out as a cabbie, but he went in with a bookie, Abie Sarkas, to buy a sleazy nightclub called Luigi’s in the Combat Zone. Jimmy stayed in public school in Milton, but Johnny was more difficult. His parents tried to straighten him out at an all-boys Catholic prep school down in Rhode Island. One of his friends there was Ed Bradley, of 60 Minutes. But Johnny ran away one fall to rejoin his brother at Milton Junior High, and they went on from there to Milton High, where they were cocaptains of the football team. As a hard-running fullback, Johnny was called “the milkman” because he always delivered. Jimmy went on to Boston College, but Johnny went to Luigi’s.
Their dad was a gambler who liked to bet on stupid little things like whether the Red Sox star Ted Williams would hit a grounder or a fly ball. Johnny picked up some of that. He also took an interest in his father’s twenty-two rifle, and proved a good shot. And Luigi’s was heaven to him—all the lowlifes and wiseguys drinking and swapping tips and smoking and grabbing women and carrying on. It gave him ideas, and before long he got arrested for carrying an unregistered firearm. To escape the charges, Johnny fled, first to South Beach, then to Havana. From there, a payoff made the gun charges go away, and he returned to Luigi’s. He then jumped to Winter Hill, brought in by a friend of his from Luigi’s, Jimmy “The Bear” Flemmi, who was into everything. That was Stevie Flemmi’s big brother. By now, Johnny’s brother Jimmy Martorano had gone from Boston College to the mob, too, but the New York Mafia. The two brothers went along separate lines, but parallel ones.
We decided that we could at least see what Jimmy Martorano had to say. Johnson, Doherty, and I took a ride out to his place. Jimmy was a thinner version of his brother, with less power but more coiled energy. He sat us down in the dining room and, without any preliminaries, he got right down to it, and it was as we’d thought. Johnny wanted to talk. “He’s ready to tell you everything he knows about Stevie and Whitey,” Jimmy said. He brought his hand down hard on the table. “What those fuckers did to Johnny, he will do to them.”
But, he added, there were “certain concerns.”
“And what might those be?” I asked.
“My brother is concerned about his reputation.”
“Sure.”
“Johnny is no rat, you understand me? He’d never consider doing this if Stevie and Whitey hadn’t done what they did. But this is where we are. Here is what I’m saying. I’ll handle that. The people I need to reach will understand. You can’t rat a rat. Follow me? It’s as simple as that.”
Jimmy expressed other concerns; Johnny did not want to be segregated in prison. He’d be in with everybody, and he’d take care of himself. And no Witness Protection Program when he got out. He’d return to his life. He was done running.
“Oh, and one last thing,” Jimmy said. “No FBI. He doesn’t want to talk to the FBI. That clear?”
After the FBI’s role with Bulger and Flemmi, we didn’t have to ask why.
“I’m sure things can be worked out OK, Jimmy,” I told him. But I set down some conditions of our own: Johnny would have to tell us the truth, and nothing but. If we caught him in a lie, the deal would be off, and we’d prosecute him. End of story.
“I understand,” Jimmy said. “I’ll let him know, and I’m sure he’ll agree.”
Because such deals with witnesses are ruled on by the U.S. attorney, we had to take the idea back to Donald Stern. Stern had his misgivings, and they were mostly the same ones we had about doing a deal with a professional murderer. But in the end he went along. “OK,” he said wearily. “You got it, you and DEA. See what you can work out for a proffer.”
A proffer is kind of a proposal, a preliminary presentation of the things a subject is prepared to talk about. The government needs it to decide whether it will enter into an agreement. Nothing in a proffer can be used against the subject, so he is able to speak freely. But what would Martorano say? To find out, we had to take him someplace quiet and out of the way.
By now, the FBI had gotten word of Martorano’s cooperation, and the feds desperately wanted in. They were worried about what Martorano might tell us, and they figured that they’d better find out. But after what the FBI did with Bulger and Flemmi, Martorano didn’t want them anywhere near him. I asked Wyshak to tell the feds to forget it. Martorano was ours. We’d find a place that was completely secluded, from the mob and from the press.
A couple of days more, and we had just the place. So, on one hot July afternoon, when Martorano was finished with Judge Wolf, he was not returned to his cell at the Plymouth County House of Corrections. Instead, some U.S. Marshals packed him into a black SUV and took him to the State Police barracks by the Massachusetts Turnpike in Weston. There, he was transferred to a State Police van, and we took him to a forgotten little town called New Braintree in the middle of the state. A Seventh-Day Adventist school had been converted to a small prison and then been taken over by the State Police as a training facility. It was well off the road, out in the middle of nowhere, but there was still a small holding area inside. It was perfect.
We never told anyone in the DOJ where we’d taken Martorano, but when the people in the department figured out he was gone, and in our exclusive charge, they complained to Wyshak that we didn’t know how to handle prisoners like Martorano, and that we shouldn’t have him. In their frenzy, they cited a recent joint effort we’d undertaken with DEA to investigate a State Police sergeant who was dealing cocaine on Cape Cod. To them, this somehow proved that the State Police were unreliable and custody should be returned to DOJ. It didn’t matter that the State Police and DEA had combined to clean up the corruption, not to cause it. The DOJ was just mad that the FBI had been left out of the Martorano interviews, and was having a tantrum about it.
Wyshak and Kelly had to stay up several nights running to fight that one off, although it put them in an awkward position, since they were DOJ themselves.
With the DOJ held at bay, we began the debriefing process with Martorano. That first evening when we brought him to New Braintree, we went through the ground rules regarding the proffer and then told him we’d be back in the morning to start in.
The next morning, the tabloid Boston Herald came out with a big article trumpeting that the notorious hit man John Martorano had turned state’s evidence, and he was being held for interviews by the State Police and DEA. I’d scarcely gotten out of bed when the phones started ringing. All of the callers had the same question: Where’d this come from?
When the courthouse opened up, Judge Wolf did what the DOJ had long been demanding: he took Martorano away from us, handed him back to the U.S. Marshals, and restored him to the custody of the DOJ. Wyshak and Kelly took our side, but almost no one else did—in the USAO or anywhere outside the State Police, for that matter. Judge Wolf appeared to believe we were the leak.
Judge Wolf had lost all patience with these media leaks and didn’t really buy what I was selling. I can only guess that he saw law enforcement as a single entity. In his mind, the Boston police, the State Police, the FBI, the DEA—they were all basically one operation with several different departments. If one department screwed up, they were all to blame.
This also gave Judge Wolf a chance to make some headlines of his own, something he never minded, as he personally headed up his inquiry into the source of the leaks.
And the DOJ jumped on us now that we were down. It dispatched its Office of Professional Responsibility—Prouty’s old outfit—to grill us about the leaks. The OPR would file affidavits and ask probing questions to determine what contacts people in our unit had with which reporters, at what times, and on what subjects. If the topic was Martorano, the answers were none and none, but that didn’t satisfy the people from OPR. In their minds we were all guilty, and we should confess. Even though there were plenty of better candidates for leakers out there, DOJ zeroed in on us. We consoled ourselves by thinking this was a kind of praise. The DOJ focused on us because we were the only ones doing real police work. But that was small consolation.
In the course of his investigation, Judge Wolf summoned me into his chambers with some representatives of the USAO to interrogate me. Once again, I could not believe that I was on the receiving end of such grief. What was everybody thinking? Around the room were Herbert and Farmer and several other people who had done nothing but hinder our investigation, and they were delighted now to see me on the defensive.
When I told Judge Wolf it wasn’t us, he’d just shake his head or grimace. It seemed to me like he wanted to make us as uncomfortable as possible. Why, I don’t know, but someone was pointing him in our direction. How could he not understand? He didn’t get it.
So I asked him: “Why would we compromise our own investigation? What would we possibly gain? We went to such great lengths to keep the interviews secret; why would we want to tell anyone? That would just make everything harder for ourselves.”
To Wolf, it already had done that.
A few weeks later, the leak was found, and, needless to say, it wasn’t us. It was Jimmy Martorano, along with the lawyer he’d hired for Johnny. Both of them were trying to get ahead of the idea that Johnny was ratting anyone out. That was part of the strategy that Jimmy talked about with us in Quincy. Jimmy had gone to the Globe, Johnny’s lawyer to the Herald. Once the news was in those two papers, it might as well have been on every billboard in Greater Boston.
So it wasn’t us, just as we’d said. But that didn’t matter. The damage had been done. We’d been deemed untrustworthy, and we were still untrustworthy, regardless of the facts. Judge Wolf went ahead and gave Martorano to DOJ just as he said he would, and DOJ took him away from us to an undisclosed location that could have been anywhere in the whole country. We’d still be able to interview him at some point, but he was out of our control. So who knew? He was gone. I couldn’t imagine what Martorano thought, rushed off into the night.
My breathing problems got bad again. Climbing stairs, I felt I was running a marathon, and I wasn’t sleeping too well either. Whatever we did, we got slammed. Right thing, wrong thing, it didn’t matter. Flemmi’s testimony and the stuff Martorano was ready to give us—they were a couple of big guns aimed right at the feds. But now the feds, in conjunction with their bosses at DOJ, were shooting back with some heavy firepower of their own.
I was still in the Leominster barracks, working long hours to get everything done. This didn’t make it easy to get to Boston to attend Judge Wolf’s hearings or support the guys on the investigation. Wyshak was pretty beat. It was catching up to him, too. He was trying to fight off the FBI, the DOJ, and some of the attorneys in the USAO who were supposed to be his colleagues.
And by now, most of my original people had drifted away. After O’Malley replaced me as the head of SSS, he took the remaining four of them—Tutungian, Scanlan, Patty, and Gale. It made sense. He was their new boss. I could see it from their side. Our work was hard, the hours were long, and we were getting it from all sides, no matter how well we did.
We still had a strong team and stuff was getting done. We were focused and knew that we had some real good opportunities to bring the investigation to a higher level. Johnson, Doherty, and Duffy all hung in, sticking it out against long odds, and at some risk to their careers, to send Bulger and Flemmi away forever. We were in it together, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t get frustrated with me, and after Wolf’s ruling they were pissed when Martorano was snatched from us.
“Shouldn’t we be going after Connolly, Tommy?” Stevie Johnson asked me one day.
“Stevie, I know. And, Fred, I know you are frustrated with this too. But listen, if we can get going on the proffer, we’ll see some movement on Connolly. For now, we’ve got to stay focused. Get Whitey and Flemmi on the little things, then on the bigger things. The closer we get to nailing Whitey, the more we’ll get on the FBI.” And I had to like the guys’ spirit. They might get down, but never out. They were fighters, every one of them.