The Davis committee wanted to know whatever came of the FBI’s secret deal with Jimmy Flemmi and Barboza. Did Rico and Condon ever even consider revealing the truth to the defense attorneys of the four men who were convicted of murdering Deegan? Did the Bureau ever tell anyone about the illegal bug in Patriarca’s office that had picked up the critical exchange with Flemmi? Is there any solid evidence that the conspiracy really was limited to just Rico and Condon? Did anyone at the FBI ever acknowledge that Flemmi had helped kill Deegan—and that Barboza had vowed to keep him free from prosecution? Did the FBI ever tell local prosecutors that Barboza and Jimmy Flemmi were federal informants, and that Flemmi was in the top echelon?
It was pretty obvious that the answer to all these questions was no. And the FBI gave the same answer when the committee members asked it to share critical documents with them. No to the Patriarca transcripts, no to the name of another informant who had been an eyewitness to much of Barboza’s intrigue and who contradicted Barboza’s account, no to the original FBI memos on the Deegan murder, no to evidence of misconduct by FBI agents. The FBI did make Paul Rico available to the committee, but he took the Fifth in response to virtually every question the congressmen posed. One he answered was whether he felt any remorse.
“What do you want from me,” he scoffed. “Tears?”
It took a year of pounding before the DOJ even agreed to discuss the matter, and then it declared that it had no intention of handing over the materials being sought. The committee continued to press, and the DOJ to resist. The few documents that it did provide were so heavily redacted that many of the pages were unreadable. It promised to produce others but never did. The more the committee persisted, the higher the matter rose in the George W. Bush administration. It came to the attention of two assistant attorneys general, to that of the White House counsel, and then to that of Attorney General Ashcroft. Ultimately, it reached the desk of President Bush himself, who wrote a memo to his attorney general saying that to release these documents on the Deegan case would endanger “candor” within the DOJ, damage the “national interest,” and “politicize” the process. That was ridiculous, and the decision raised a furor, and not just within the committee. A sweeping declaration like that could justify holding back almost anything. The committee kept at it, and eventually the White House decided it didn’t need the grief; it finally authorized the release of some of the documents, although it continued to hold on to others.
A lot of what came was too little, too late. Still, the committee was able to determine the substance of what had happened in the Deegan murder and the subsequent cover-up. And from there, it was able to see a pattern of FBI deception that we knew all too well. With Rico and Condon, as with Connolly and Morris, FBI informants were protected, not just from the law and other individuals but also from reality. They could do whatever they wanted, just as Barboza said. And, of course, that first top-echelon informant, Jimmy Flemmi, became a model for all the others, starting with his brother. He saw this as his big chance to fulfill his ambition to become the “No. One ‘hit man’” in Boston, as one FBI report put it. Obviously, his brother Stevie and Whitey Bulger were bent on a similar course, to be “No. One” in their fields, too, and they saw the FBI as their ticket up.
It wasn’t just in Boston. This happened all across the country. The FBI would routinely intervene to keep its informants from being indicted; or, if indicted, from being arrested; or, if arrested, from being convicted; or, if convicted, from serving their time. The FBI will do almost anything to protect its top-echelon informants. As former U.S. attorney Jeremiah O’Sullivan testified, “If you go against the FBI, they will try to get you. They will wage war on you. It would have precipitated World War III if I tried to get inside the FBI to deal with informants. That was the holy of holies, the inner sanctum.”
According to the final report of the Davis Committee, Director Mueller was supposedly working to “reengineer” the FBI so there would be no more Bulgers. He was centralizing administration, identifying risk factors for bad informant outcomes, and developing a checkoff system that drew on wider input for decisions regarding informants, and on a more reliable overview on the part of supervisors. The Office of Professional Responsibility, Prouty’s old OPR, was to be upgraded to monitor the program, security was to be beefed up, and sharper guidelines for informants’ behavior were to be established.
All of this sounded reassuring, and, reading it, I was pleased to think that our efforts in the Bulger case might help to reform the FBI. But the “reengineering” scheme went nowhere. Olds ways die hard. In 2005, just two years after the implementation, the DOJ’s inspector general checked in and discovered that it was still the same old FBI. In virtually all of the cases—87 percent—reviewed by his staff, the agents failed to follow the new guidelines.
And it’s the same old same old today. A Boston Mafia case from 2011 involving capo Mark Rossetti showed that the FBI hadn’t changed a damn thing. Once again it gave a top guy, Rossetti, informant status, and it promised to protect him from prosecution for his crimes, and lo and behold he committed more crimes, allegedly including six murders and running a heroin and loan-sharking ring. Once again the state troopers found out about this only by accident, because they ran their own wiretap on Rossetti and picked it up. The feds didn’t breathe a word about him to them. This runs directly counter to the DOJ’s 2006 guidelines, the next iteration after Mueller’s, which forbid an agent to “authorize” serious crimes like those. Rossetti told his handler that he knew he’d be protected, whatever he did. It’s Bulger all over again, just as Bulger was Barboza all over again. When does it stop? Right now, the FBI decides for itself how it’s going to do things, and it will continue to do them that way regardless of how they turn out, and regardless of what anybody says.
The FBI-first culture has yielded other unfortunate results, outside the realm of OC. The FBI has learned to buttress its power with information, which can be deployed to intimidate anyone it views as a threat. I’m convinced that’s why it investigated us so many times on this one. If it had ever found anything amiss we would never have heard the end of it. The FBI sometimes reminds me of the runaway computer HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL is supposed to guide the ship, but instead it uses its data and intelligence to follow only its own interests, all the while talking in that syrupy voice. The classic example from the Bureau itself is Deep Throat, the informant Woodward and Bernstein relied on to break the Watergate investigation. Deep Throat was hailed as an American hero for bringing down the Nixon administration—until it turned out that he was actually Mark Felt, the FBI number two, who was furious that Nixon had passed him over as director in favor of an outsider, Patrick Gray. So Felt did what FBI guys do. He used his inside information to retaliate, in this case by bringing down Nixon and his administration—anonymously, of course. It had nothing to do with patriotism. It was spite.
It happens time and again. Two examples are the disastrous siege of the Weaver family compound at Ruby Ridge, Tennessee, and the massacre of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Messy and embarrassing screwups, yes, but the errors were compounded by the FBI’s refusal to acknowledge them, which only inflamed the passions of the victims, and their followers, all the more. They sparked the militia movement, and seem to have spurred Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City. There are plenty more: the FBI laboratory “bad science” scandal; the false arrest of the supposed Atlanta bomber Richard Jewell; the revelation of an FBI mole, Richard Hansen; and on and on. All of these follow the same pattern that we encountered in Boston with our pursuit of Whitey Bulger. The FBI’s we-know-best culture leads agents to make mistakes that occasionally cross the line into outright criminality; that behavior has to be hidden to preserve the Bureau’s image; those who seek to expose it are hit with embarrassing leaks of personal information and then slammed with an exhaustive FBI investigation into their own actions and personal life; in defense, the Bureau stonewalls, then produces a trickle of irrelevant information, then stages a phony internal investigation that ends up blaming underlings for tiny infractions and other organizations and individuals for large ones. Meanwhile it claims that any external inquiries pose a threat to ongoing internal investigations, and drags everything out until everyone loses interest. Then the FBI declares that it has been exonerated and the whole matter is “ancient history.” I know this all too well. That’s what it did with us.