John Connolly had always carried himself as if he had everything under control, what with the nice threads, the big smile, and the whole living-large attitude. He’d kept it up through his career in the FBI and well into his new job as a lobbyist at Boston Edison. He was confident enough that after he left the Bureau he briefly considered making a run at becoming police commissioner in Boston. Then came Judge Wolf’s hearings into FBI informants, the revelations about Steve Flemmi’s status, and the disclosures about John Connolly as the handler who let two murderers run amok, and life for him wasn’t quite so good anymore.
Judge Wolf could not have expected to veer off into such topics when he drew Flemmi’s case. He’d assumed it would be standard mobster fare—an array of racketeering-type charges to be matched against the evidence produced by eyewitnesses, documents, and electronic intercepts. But when Flemmi said he was innocent because the FBI—meaning Connolly and Morris—let him do it, that changed everything. Before Wolf could get into the charges we’d brought against Flemmi, he had to resolve the legal questions that Flemmi had raised.
I give Judge Wolf a lot of credit. There weren’t too many federal judges who’d let a matter like that take over the way Wolf did, but he was an unusual judge. In the end, his investigation took more than six years and included witnesses on every side of the issue: the FBI agents involved with handling Bulger and Flemmi, and the agencies handling them; those of us in the State Police who had to fight through the FBI to get at Bulger and Flemmi; USAO personnel, past and present, who’d tried to arbitrate between us and the FBI; the administrators who set policy for these different organizations; other law enforcement officials who’d faced similar cases in the past; and on and on. There were forty-six witnesses altogether, and seventeen thousand pages of transcripts. Judge Wolf didn’t care how long it took, or how many people he pissed off. He was going to skin this apple all the way down to the seed.
To him, it was a matter of determining the FBI informant status for Whitey and Flemmi, then of considering exactly how much license that gave them, then of determining whether agents could legally offer such immunity, and finally of determining where the corrupt agents stepped over the line.
Connolly was the man at the center of everything, largely because, with his personality and temperament, he’d made it so. Given his top-of-the-world air, it was all the more striking when he was finally called to the stand, and for once he had absolutely nothing to say. Special prosecutor John Durham handled the interrogation, and in response to almost every question he posed, Connolly took the Fifth. This did not endear him to Judge Wolf, nor did it fit the image of a man with nothing to hide.
Once he was off the stand, Connolly thought he was done with the Wolf hearings, and nothing would come of anything he said. So he immediately went on a media tour, including a sit-down with Dateline, in which he expounded on his role as a handler of informants, which he likened to being a lion tamer. (More likely, he was the one being tamed.) He lit into his former boss John Morris for betraying him, and he expressed nothing but gratitude to Whitey Bulger for providing the information that helped bring down the Boston Mafia—although his own records showed that Bulger had done very little of that.
Actually, there was still time for Wolf to put Connolly back into the witness chair. And he did. This time, under oath, when asked to address those same topics, Connolly again invoked the Fifth over and over and over again. Judge Wolf was plainly furious. All the unanswered questions hurt him. The peacock’s plume seemed to wilt a little after that.
In the end, Judge Wolf issued a 661-page report that one columnist called the “Rise and Fall of Bulger’s Empire” because it was so sweeping. Most of those pages described areas of questionable activity in the FBI’s handling of Bulger and Flemmi, but ultimately the report was termed a “nondecision.” It raised all the issues, identified potential culprits, outlined areas of possible malfeasance, but didn’t bring any specific charges. Perhaps Wolf was leaving that to Durham, who was running his separate USAO inquiry for that purpose.
More alarming to us, Wolf declared that, misguided as the idea was, the FBI had indeed offered immunity to Flemmi and Bulger, and the feds were obliged to keep their promise. Flemmi and Bulger could not be prosecuted for the crimes. That was terrifying, and, if it stood, would mean the end of the case for us. It must have brought a huge smile to Flemmi’s face—and some serious looks of annoyance to the faces of his many codefendants who hadn’t struck any such deals. Wyshak assured me that he’d beat it on appeal; he quickly took the case to the First Circuit of Appeals and managed to get a reversal on the grounds that FBI agents aren’t authorized to offer such immunity. That power remains with prosecutors. For all Wolf’s fear of getting second-guessed, that’s exactly what happened here, and thank God.
Judge Wolf fingered Connolly more than anyone else in the Boston office of the FBI. He discovered that Connolly had warned Bulger and Flemmi about the hazard posed by Brian Halloran, Wheeler’s would-be assassin, and by John Callahan—a warning that led to their executions, the first done by Bulger, and the second by Martorano. Connolly improperly sanitized his FBI files to get rid of incriminating documents. He took thousands of dollars in bribes and gifts from Bulger and Flemmi. He socialized with them inappropriately. And he tipped off Bulger and Flemmi to our pending indictments, causing Bulger to flee. Morris had committed many of these same crimes, of course, but since he had immunity, Connolly was left to face the music alone.
Connolly responded with typical bluster. “I did not tip Bulger, Flemmi, or anyone,” he insisted in a prepared statement. “Judge Wolf has engaged in irresponsible speculation on a matter involving my integrity.”
By then, relying on evidence we’d developed, Durham had executed a warrant to search Connolly’s office at Boston Edison. Among other things, Durham found stationery from organizations around town, including the Globe, that Connolly had used to punish enemies. One example was Sergeant Dewan, whose integrity Connolly had savaged in an anonymous letter to Dewan’s superiors. Frank Dewan was a lone wolf who’d taken it upon himself to investigate Bulger and Flemmi largely on his own, for years. He was not in a position to conduct a proper investigation, let alone to make an arrest. But he had been outraged that Bulger and Flemmi had been able to operate with impunity for so long, making a mockery of the Boston police, just as they had of the State Police and the FBI. At this point, Dewan knew nearly all there was to know about Whitey and Flemmi without being in their inner circle. But his pursuit of Bulger and Flemmi had irritated the FBI, as it challenged their idea that Bulger and Flemmi weren’t worth worrying about. All we knew originally was that someone wrote to the Boston police commissioner, William Bratton, a letter on Boston Globe stationery questioning Dewan’s emotional reliability and loyalty to the department. It closed by demanding that Dewan be fired immediately.
You’d think a letter like that would be ignored, but not at the Boston police department. It sparked an internal investigation, which ultimately revealed nothing. But the claim remained in Dewan’s file, a permanent mark against him.
The results weren’t much, but the search itself turned the tables on Connolly. The investigator was being investigated. I’d love to have seen the stunned look on his face when they came through his office door. That would have said everything about the rise and fall of John Connolly.
And then the hammer came down. Relying entirely on our investigation, Durham prepared a federal indictment against Connolly for tipping off Whitey and Flemmi to the coming 1995 indictment, and much more. Later, other jurisdictions would have to weigh in on other crimes, like the murder of Wheeler and the ensuing murders. One count summed up all the others—the combined racketeering charges against Whitey Bulger, Stevie Flemmi, and John Connolly. Connolly was a mobster, too.
When it came time to make the arrest, the FBI insisted on handling it alone, as if the investigation of Connolly was the feds’ idea, and their doing. Once again, we were in no position to say no, and we certainly wouldn’t miss the prospect of seeing another law enforcement official go down. So John Durham, the special prosecutor who was now leading the investigation into FBI misconduct, took charge of the group of agents who drove up to Connolly’s conspicuously lavish house in the northern suburb of Lynnfield to take him. It was a couple of days before Christmas in 1999. Worn out by all the stress, Connolly was home alone with the flu, and he went quietly.
He must have known the arrest was coming, but it took a lot of the starch out of him all the same. He was no longer the Dapper John; now he was just another defendant facing hard time. He was brought into court handcuffed, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, his hair uncombed, his eyes empty, and his face gray. After he pleaded not guilty, the judge released him on $200,000 bail.
You’d think we might have celebrated to see an adversary in handcuffs. But I didn’t take any joy in it. I don’t like seeing anyone in law enforcement take a fall. To me, it was like Naimovich or Schneiderhan all over again. When a cop of any stripe is accused of serious crimes like these, all of us in law enforcement take the hit. The situation blurs the line between the good guys and the bad guys, and it gets confusing to people. The next time they read about an FBI investigation, they may stop to wonder: Are they on the take? But it was encouraging to finally see justice done, and to see investigators working to make wrong right.
Shortly after we finally found the remains of Debbie Davis on the Neponset shore, we received an unexpected visitor at the command post. It was U.S. Attorney Don Stern, and he was bringing us a box of doughnuts. Cop cliché aside, it was a nice gesture, and, even though Stern had caused nothing but trouble for us, we welcomed him inside to join in the celebration of what we’d accomplished.
He clutched my arm. “Tommy, I’m here to tell you something I thought I’d never say.”
“And what’s that?”
“You were right all along.”
I just looked at him.
“Absolutely. You were right to keep going on this thing. But I am proud of you and all your guys for seeing it through. And I really mean that. You guys did a great job.”
That meant a lot to me, and to the guys on the team. It was big of him to say that—he was the only one at DOJ who did. And I was grateful, and I never thought I’d miss him when he left, as he did shortly afterward, but I did. People can change, and change for the better. It was rare on this case, but it definitely happened.
Of course, that didn’t keep the higher-ups at DOJ from going after us. Ashcroft was the attorney general then, under Bush. It was ridiculous. Those guys would not stop. We could have found the Unabomber, and they’d still have demanded to know if we were up-to-date on all our vaccinations. Once again, there were some media leaks, and once again DOJ was sure they’d come from us. No matter that we’d been through this exercise before and we’d come clean, and no matter that there were plenty of other more likely suspects, they came down on us, insisting on the equivalent of a strip search of me and my men. Extensive interviews and polygraphing all my troopers who might have been responsible. Colonel DiFava and I both called bullshit on this and we roared down to DOJ to get the people there to stop the nonsense, but they refused. I said: Well, at least have some other non-FBI agents in on the interview. No. Then a neutral witness. No. Then tape-record it. No.
Colonel DiFava said: Forget it. The DOJ returned with a threat to take us before a grand jury. DiFava said: Do, we’d feel far more comfortable there. The DOJ people fumed, then summoned us to a meeting in Washington to hash out the disagreement. DiFava held his ground, refusing to submit his troopers to the kind of treatment the DOJ was proposing. His position was unchanged: a grand jury or nothing. The Massachusetts attorney general, Tom Reilly, backed up DiFava but pushed to resolve the dispute. The DOJ told him to stay out of it. The back-and-forth went on through the summer and into the fall.
The stalemate didn’t ease until a new U.S. attorney was named to succeed Don Stern. It was Mike Sullivan, the former Plymouth County DA. I was pleased about that, since a lot of troopers down there thought well of him. He thought he would start his tenure off on the right foot if he could resolve things between us and the DOJ. To show Sullivan I could meet him at least halfway, I agreed to let my troopers be interviewed if he’d have his assistant sit in. To that, finally, the DOJ said OK. The interviews were conducted, and, needless to say, nothing was found. The source never was located. But it wasted a lot of valuable time.
In the late stages of all this, in early September, Colonel DiFava asked me to come into his office, shut the door behind me, and sit down. I was a little apprehensive when I asked him what was up.
“As I think you know, I am set to retire from the State Police later this fall.”
I knew that, of course. Everybody did.
“I thought you’d want to know I’ve settled on my recommendation for my successor. I’ll be forwarding the name to the governor.”
“Oh? And who’s that?” I really didn’t know.
“You, Tommy. I’d like you to succeed me.”
Few things in my life have surprised me more. I’d never set my sights on the top job; all I’d ever intended was to do the job I had as best I could. I didn’t know what to say.
“I’ve been watching you. I like the way you operate, Tommy. These are difficult times, but I think the State Police will be in very good hands. I am recommending your appointment to the governor.” Naturally it was an honor to be considered.
To say I was flabbergasted would be an understatement. After all the trouble I’d caused? I was the most hated man in law enforcement! And now I was being recommended to run the whole Massachusetts State Police. It took a little while to get used to the idea. I thanked him for his faith in me. But I still had trouble believing it.
A few days later, on September 11, Al Qaeda assaulted the nation. Domestic law enforcement departments all across the country were thrown into high-alert security mode, and the Massachusetts State Police was no different. Since the hijacking team had passed through Logan, we scrambled to close down the airport and flooded the place with troopers. When it could be opened again, we put in extra security details, all while we were guarding bridges; protecting the water supply; supervising high-rises like the Hancock Building and the Pru; supervising historic monuments, like the one at Bunker Hill, that might be terrorist targets; and doing a ton of other things. Obviously, the State Police would have to adapt to a new kind of threat.
A couple of months later, in December, there was a ceremony in the statehouse, at which Governor Jane Swift announced my appointment. Before she did, however, she had a request for me. “Try to get along with the FBI.” She knew, as I did, that all law enforcement agencies would have to cooperate if we were to fight terrorism effectively.
“I’ll try,” I told her.
Now I had a 2,300-person force to run across the Commonwealth, and I’d be going in twelve directions at once. I’d be pushing to get our fair share of the budget from the governor’s office and the legislature, fighting over policy issues, working out personnel questions, and deciding how best to address the different levels of security issues after 9/11.
Still, with everything that was going on, my heart remained with the Bulger investigation. Just as I had from the beginning, I worked on that case every day, thinking about strategy, worrying about our witnesses, helping Wyshak and Kelly, digging up money (this was a little easier now), and deciding how best to deploy my energies and those of my men. But now I was doing it as the colonel of the Massachusetts State Police, a title that I will admit sounded pretty good.