Although Weeks’s information was yielding major discoveries, we certainly had not forgotten about Martorano. We continued to work him and did him whatever small favors we could to keep his trust in us going. At one point, Martorano developed a terrible toothache. At the time, he was with the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Florida, and its people weren’t helping. He was back up for a debriefing when the Marshals called: the interview was going nowhere because he was in such pain. I got him in to see my own dentist, Dr. Jeff Maher, in Worcester. A security contingent of U.S. Marshals and troopers brought him to the dentist’s office, and then stood guard while Maher attended to Martorano in the dental chair.
The whole thing probably took an hour or two. Afterward, Maher wanted to know why all the security. “Who was that guy?” he asked.
There was no reason not to tell him. “A hit man named John Martorano. He’s up from prison in Florida.”
Maher whitened slightly.
“He’s probably killed thirty or forty people.” I kept it casual, but this was only getting Maher more distressed. “But I don’t think any dentists.” I waited a beat. “But you filled that cavity, right?”
It was toward the end of the debriefing that Martorano told us all about State Police Lieutenant Dick Schneiderhan. Even as I gathered an ever-greater understanding of what had really happened with Whitey, the FBI, the USAO, and all the other agencies involved, I had the sense of sinking into ever-deeper levels of depravity that I’d never wished to reach. The mangled corpses, the betrayals, the vicious murders.
I’d known Schneiderhan, but only as someone to say hello to, not much more. He was tall and pale, with hair that went white early. He had a stiff, formal manner that I associate with Germans, and he was proud of it. He wanted people to call him “The German,” as if that were his name, not Schneiderhan.
He was retired by now, in 2000, from any work, but he’d been a career State Police officer, leaving the job in the early 1980s. Martorano told us he’d gotten to know Schneiderhan in the late 1960s, when he was working on OC cases out of the attorney general’s office in downtown Boston. After work, Schneiderhan would often grab a bite at a restaurant downtown called Enrico’s. So did Martorano—not that Schneiderhan knew that.
Until one night, when some bikers came in, and someone said the wrong thing, and it was pandemonium. Fists, chairs, bodies—everything was flying around. Although they operated on opposite sides of the law, Martorano and Schneiderhan were united against the bikers, and they both did some damage. When the fight finally died down and the bikers shoved off, the criminal and the cop must have had some warm words for each other, for they hit it off. They were both tough guys who happened to work on opposite sides of the law.
They started to eat together, and to hang out. Eventually, Schneiderhan thought he might make something of the connection, and he asked if Martorano would be interested in being an informant. Martorano said no, he was no rat, but no offense taken. The two remained friends.
A decade passed, and Schneiderhan developed a heart condition that kept him out of work for about six months. Cooped up at home and worried about money, he was annoyed that nobody in the State Police came by. Had everyone forgotten about him? Martorano hadn’t. He visited, talked about old times, and, before he left, slipped his old friend a few thousand dollars to help him out. Schneiderhan shouldn’t have taken the money, obviously. But he did. It was one of those moments when your life takes a turn, and you can’t quite turn it back.
Martorano let Howie Winter know about things with Schneiderhan, and Winter saw the opportunity. Together, they decided to make a pitch of their own to Schneiderhan. Martorano arranged for Schneiderhan to get together with him and Howie Winter at the Holiday Inn outside Harvard Square. Schneiderhan must have known that just to show up was to say yes to whatever they asked. And he was right about that. The mobsters said that all they wanted was a little information from time to time. Things like which independent bookies might be brought into the Winter Hill fold, or if anyone wanted to kill them. And advance word on any investigation might be useful, too.
No problem, Schneiderhan said. This all seemed doable.
The mobsters slipped him $1,000.
After Bulger and Flemmi persuaded Martorano to flee the state, he fell out of touch with Schneiderhan. That was twenty years ago. It was interesting, but nothing we could use. But then we started talking to Weeks, and he told us about a source he had in the State Police now. Schneiderhan.
“Shit yeah,” Weeks told us. “Schneiderhan’s still in it. He’s still in touch with Stevie.” When Weeks used to see Flemmi at the Plymouth County House of Corrections after his arrest—but before Flemmi had revealed his FBI status, and long before Weeks started talking to us—Flemmi had told him to get in touch with “Eric.” That was code for Schneiderhan, although it took a while for Weeks to figure it out. Flemmi added another code word like “eagle” to use when Weeks was calling Schneiderhan for Flemmi.
Flemmi needed Schneiderhan to let him know which guys were informants. But he also told Schneiderhan when he heard Martorano had flipped. He said Schneiderhan should cut off all contact right away.
The last contact that Weeks had with Schneiderhan came in September, about two months before Weeks himself decided to cooperate with us. Weeks received a coded letter from Schneiderhan, telling him to warn Billy Bulger, now the president of the University of Massachusetts, and his brother Jackie that their phones were being tapped. Weeks did as he was told, getting the word to both brothers through Jackie.
Hearing all this, I finally got it. For some time, the FBI had been giving me veiled warnings that my department had “a problem” of its own. I had assumed that this was the feds’ usual bluster, but more pointed now that we were doing so well. I kept telling them, “Look, if we have a problem, tell me what it is, so I can address it.” No dice. They didn’t want me to fix a problem; they wanted me to have a problem.
Now it was clear: the problem was Schneiderhan. And he was a problem. It was Naimovich all over again, but worse.
And the feds were all over it. Once Weeks told us about Schneiderhan, the feds pounced. They had Connolly; we had Schneiderhan. Tie score. We were no better than they were. See?
Well, not exactly. With the FBI, the corruption was systemic, widespread, and unending. With us, it was confined, as far as we could tell, to one individual operating alone for a set period of time. The FBI did everything it could to stymie any investigation into its misbehavior; we were the first to undertake ours. Totally different—but not to the FBI.
The fact is that corruption is part of human nature. It’s inevitable, in law enforcement or anywhere else. For an organization, the important thing isn’t so much what happens, but what you do about it when it does happen. We would do our best to make it right. Could the FBI say the same?
And, despite everything else that was going on that fall, we swept into action. The feds wanted in on this, so they could be the clean ones for once. But we wanted to do it ourselves, and not just because Schneiderhan was one of our own. It was the same old thing with the FBI. We knew the territory, and the history. And I had the feeling that Schneiderhan would talk to me, cop to cop, in ways that he never would with the FBI. John Durham was working on FBI corruption by now, and to his credit, he agreed to let us take our shot at an interview. In exchange, we agreed that if Schneiderhan would talk to the feds, we’d help set it up.
I’d known Schneiderhan from my first days on OC, back in 1984, and, although I’d lost touch with him, he’d followed what I’d been doing since. He had a little ranch house up in a quiet neighborhood in Randolph. When I showed up at his door and asked to speak to him, I got the sense that he was relieved to find someone he knew, but also ashamed, for the same reason. I’d brought Duffy along. He invited us in, and we settled ourselves in his living room.
“So, what’s this about?” he asked. He rubbed his hands together nervously and looked around for a face with some warmth in it.
I kept it open. “There’s something that isn’t fitting together in a case we’re working. I wonder if you can help us.”
“Well, I’ll try.” He kept fidgeting on the couch, taking deep breaths.
He started to ramble about how he didn’t trust the feds, didn’t even like them. Then he added that he didn’t trust any institution very much, including the Massachusetts State Police. It sounded like he was dodging this way and that, trying to find a way out of the interview, even as he knew, as a police officer, that he’d look guilty if he ducked it.
“Listen, Dick, all we want is the truth here. You know what it’s like in these investigations. You talk to this person, talk to that person, and it takes a while to add it all up. Now we need a piece from you.”
He looked at me for a moment. “OK,” he said. “If that’s what you want.” He touched my forearm. “But no notes, OK?”
“You know we’ve been investigating Steve Flemmi,” I began.
“Yes,” he said. “The Rifleman.”
I nodded.
“You know him.”
“I did. Slightly.”
“Have you been in touch with him?”
“Recently?”
“Since he’s been in prison.”
He glanced at me. He had to be wondering: How much do I know? What’s going to catch me out?
“I wrote him once or twice. I had cancer. I wanted him to know.”
“Were you friends?”
“God, no. I’d just gotten to know him a little through the years.”
“And Weeks?”
He nodded. “Flemmi sent him to see how I was doing with the cancer, that was all.” As the evening went on, Schneiderhan kept looping back to Flemmi and Weeks, trying to limit the damage. And then to Martorano, too. But he just made it worse, going back and back. He wanted us to think he was just doing his job as a cop, checking up on criminals. But he must have known how hollow that sounded.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “I cut all that out. My wife . . .” His voice trailed off. “She didn’t want me into anything like that. If she’d found out, she’d have kicked me out of the house. Things haven’t been so great between us, I might as well tell you. I didn’t need the stress.”
“Dick, I have to ask. Did you ever take any money from Martorano, Howie Winter, or anyone from Winter Hill?”
“Shit no! Tommy, come on. You know me. No, never!”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Have you ever given them any inside information?”
“No.” He said it quietly.
“Not at Lancaster Street? When the State Police put in that bug in 1983, and Whitey stopped talking that same day? That wasn’t you?” We’d heard from Martorano it was.
He looked a little panicky. “God no!”
“We have also been told that you dropped off a letter to Kevin Weeks warning him about the electronic surveillance we were doing in South Boston.” I could have said it was on Billy and Jackie Bulger, but I wanted to leave it open.
With all the questions, Schneiderhan was starting to squirm in his chair. “Who’s saying these things? I didn’t do anything like that. I didn’t know about any of that.”
The conversation went around and around some more, with us asking and him denying, all the more desperately. He was in a leaky boat, and the water was rising. It was getting late, and he was obviously getting tired of ducking accusations and questions that seemed to be coming from all directions. At one point, he doubled back to the question of the electronic surveillance, as if to dismiss that one once and for all. “Listen, Tommy, guys, I didn’t know anything about Billy Bulger’s phones being tapped. You’ve got to believe that.”
The room went still for a second. Duffy and I looked at each other. “Dick, no one said Billy Bulger’s phones were tapped. We just said electronic surveillance in South Boston, and you said you knew nothing about that. Let me ask you now: How did you know Billy Bulger’s phone was tapped?”
At that, Schneiderhan remained silent except for the sound of his hands rubbing together.
It was a harrowing interview. There is nothing more agonizing than investigating one of your own, and then finding him guilty. You’re pleased to get answers, but you’re disgusted to discover what those answers are. I was all worked up when we finally left Schneiderhan’s place. Mad, sad, everything. It infuriated me to have the questions coming at us just when the questions were finally going away from us.
Duffy and I went back to Schneiderhan a couple of days later. This time, his wife was there when we talked to him. “Dick? What is it?” she asked him, obviously distressed. “What did you do? Please—just tell the truth.” And he did: he admitted to telling Weeks all about the taps on Billy and Jackie Bulger’s phones. He’d found out about them from a niece who worked at the phone company. And he corroborated the rest of what Martorano and Weeks had told us, too.
We’d kept John Durham, of the Justice Task Force, abreast of the developments, and when we were finishing up, he came in with a crew to search the house, and he came away with a number of documents.
The next morning, Schneiderhan left an urgent message asking to speak to me. When I called him back he sounded very agitated. “Tommy, those shitheads from the FBI took some letters from me. They’re personal, OK? Really personal. They’re mine, and they have nothing to do with the case. They were sealed up, and I want them to stay that way. Those fuckers had no business taking them, and I want them back. Do you hear me, Tommy? I want those letters back!”
I told him I would do what I could, and I passed on the request to the FBI. But no one was about to return any criminal evidence to a suspect, no matter how urgently he wanted it. Duffy and I opened them ourselves. They dated back to September 1994, around the time that the first round of indictments against Flemmi and Bulger was expected.
All three had a valedictory theme, as if it was all over for Schneiderhan. But the first one summed it all up. It was to his son, Eric. It was written as a final farewell, as if Schneiderhan were dying, even though he wasn’t; it also has the quality of a will, instructing Eric about how Schneiderhan wanted things to be when was gone. He wanted Steve Flemmi to take over, in effect, as Eric’s new father. If he hadn’t fled in anticipation of the indictment, Flemmi should be invited to sit with Eric “as family” during Schneiderhan’s wake. If Flemmi needed to flee, Eric should stay in touch with Flemmi by coded letters, as Schneiderhan had been doing. “TRUST HIM,” Schneiderhan added in capital letters, referring to Flemmi. “He is one of the few people in this world you can trust.” And then, again in capital letters, Schneiderhan made clear that he knew where he was headed, and deserved to be, just as Flemmi did, and he wanted Eric to pass the news along to his friend. “TELL HIM I SAID THAT I WILL SAVE HIM A COOL ROCK TO SIT ON WHEN HE GETS DOWN AMONG ALL THE FIRE AND BRIMSTONE. HE’LL HAVE AT LEAST ONE FRIEND DOWN HERE.”
A tormented soul, obviously, but the letter reminded me where mobsters take people who get too close to them. They don’t send them to hell. They make a hell for them on earth.
The indictment of Dick Schneiderhan came down in November 2000. Along with a few FBI agents who insisted on being involved, Duffy, Doherty, Johnson, and I made the arrest. The lead FBI agent, someone named Bald, had wanted us to do it the FBI way, and he asked us to review the FBI arrest policy and “operational plan” beforehand. “Washington requires it,” he told us. The four of us had seventy-five years of experience with arrests, and we told Bald we didn’t need his operational plan.
The arrest made a grim scene, as if we were escorting him to the gallows. His wife wasn’t there, so Schneiderhan was all alone when we showed up to cuff him, led him outside to the cruiser, and took him to the federal courthouse for booking.
Afterward, the FBI and USAO issued a press release that once again somehow failed to mention our involvement in the case.