And then there was Connolly. By the time he was up for trial in 2002, I wondered why it was just him. I knew the corruption went deep into the FBI, but he was the only one who’d face charges. Why not Morris, Ring, Quinn, Gianturco, and so many others? When the DOJ threw its weight against the Davis committee, bringing in the power of the presidency to knock down the investigation—well, that just showed the firepower it can bring. The feds brought plenty of that against us, and we were just a band of about half a dozen people with precious little power, and with a commander who was under pressure from within his own State Police, and from outside, too. We could not do this by ourselves. If we were going to get anywhere in prosecuting the guilty, we needed help from the FBI, from DOJ, and from the USAO; but except for Wyshak and Kelly, we got the opposite. The FBI had decided that it was going to stick with the “one rogue agent” strategy, making this seem like an isolated case, even if that meant just adding more lies to the lies it had already told. And the other two organizations had little choice but to go along. So no one but Connolly would be held accountable; that seemed to be the message. If he was going down, he was going down alone.
Chief Justice Joseph Tauro would preside over the case. A no-nonsense judge, he was like Wolf in that his biggest obligation was to the truth. Happily, he was a little easier to get along with. In keeping with our general strategy of starting with a small winnable case and then working up to the larger, more difficult one, Durham was going after Connolly this time largely on racketeering charges. For the trial, Connolly relied on theater along with the law. But then, there was always a lot of show in John. Rather than take a defendant’s usual place with his defense team, he sat instead with his second wife and their three young sons. The idea was that he was just an observer here, not a participant. Maybe he was even a victim. A family man, in any case. If you take him down, you take down his family, too.
But that didn’t hold up very long. One of the first witnesses was his first wife, who testified to receiving from Connolly the diamond ring that Whitey had pulled out of his jewel collection at Marshall Motors in Somerville; and Morris told the court how Connolly had passed on to him money from Whitey and Stevie for an airline ticket for his girlfriend even though Morris was still married to his wife. The cash value may not have been very much. But the point wasn’t how much money Connolly took; it was that he took any at all.
As the trial went along, a lot of the air started to go out of Connolly’s balloon. It took the jury just a few of hours to convict him of four of the five charges. At the sentencing four months later, Tauro sent Connolly to prison for ten years. It was serious time, and it staggered Connolly for a moment. His body dipped as he was standing there. But he rallied, blowing a kiss to his wife and children before leaving the courtroom to board the van to his new life behind bars.
And there was more, much of it stemming from what Martorano told us about the Roger Wheeler murder, and Bulger and Flemmi’s flailing attempts to cover it up. Even though Connolly was long retired from the FBI, he’d had to remain vigilant about his former informants. He would always be their handler, and he had to be. If they went down, they’d take him with them. After the Wheeler hit, he’d been the one to tell them to target Callahan and Halloran if they wanted to keep the truth about Wheeler a secret.
That trial would come in 2008, and by then I wasn’t in a position to help out nearly so much as before, and it frustrated me. I’d retired in 2004. It is customary to have only a brief term for a superintendent, but mine was a little shorter than it might have been, because of my health. Maybe it was the stress of running the whole show, but my breathing was causing me problems, and I was having some heart trouble, too. But even in retirement, I stayed closely involved in the Connolly prosecution, and was down for the trial and testified at length, all the time wishing I could do more. In many ways, it was back to what it had been at the very beginning. Just a small group of guys up against long odds.
The big question on Connolly was where to begin. With the murder of Callahan and Halloran? Or would it be some common conspiracy with Bulger and Flemmi that covered those two and Wheeler, too? The Dade County prosecutor, Mike Von Zampt, wanted to get Connolly for Callahan, since he thought that was a clear win. That made sense, but we weren’t so sure it would be easy. The Connolly-Callahan connection went back to South Boston, and jurors in Miami might not get a feel for it. Besides, what are they going to make of names like “Cadillac” Frank Salemme, “Whitey” Bulger, and Steve “The Rifleman” Flemmi? To them, the names might sound less like deadly mobsters and more like cartoon figures. And would they take the word of a killer like Johnny Martorano, or a creep like Stevie Flemmi, over that of a retired FBI agent like Connolly? Finally, as murder cases went, this one was hardly straightforward. We weren’t claiming that Connolly had killed anyone himself, but rather that he had designated someone to be killed. This was harder to prove, but in the eyes of the law, it’s almost as bad as pulling the trigger.
To tip the scales toward believing the hit man over the career agent, we needed to make full use of the backup material Fred Wyshak had accumulated over the twenty years he had been working on the case—all the FBI reports, police records, court documents, and wire transcripts, and a thousand other things. He planned to back up Martorano’s account with a solid wall of paper.
But it isn’t easy to drive a small legal library like his from Boston to Miami, and not just because of the logistics involved. Fred Wyshak housed everything on the Bulger case in what we called the War Room, an unused office down the hall from his own in the federal courthouse, now located on the South Boston waterfront. He had the only passkey. The FBI knew that the War Room existed, and the feds wanted in. Understandably, Wyshak wanted them to stay out.
This irritated the FBI to no end. The feds were relentless in demanding access, but Wyshak would not give in, knowing all too well what might happen to his precious documents if he did. Finally, after months of frustration, the feds came up with a winning stratagem. They persuaded another assistant U.S. attorney that she needed that space for herself, and they got the War Room shifted to an all-FBI building to which they had the only key. Legally, they couldn’t keep Wyshak, an assistant U.S. attorney, away from his own documents, but they could keep out Johnson and Doherty, and did. Wyshak raged as only he could, but it did no good.
Since the War Room had federal documents, Wyshak had taken the precaution of requesting formal permission from the FBI to move the documents that were absolutely essential for the Connolly case from the War Room down to Miami. For months and months, he got no response—until the afternoon before the move. No. They could not leave the FBI building. In this, the FBI invoked something called the Touhey Regulations, which required the FBI to review any federal documents that might be used by state prosecutors in a local court. The fact that Wyshak was not a state prosecutor but an assistant U.S. attorney didn’t seem to matter.
By then, Wyshak had already ordered a U-Haul to drive the documents down, along with Johnson and Doherty and an agent from the inspector general’s office, Jimmy Marra, who’d been immensely helpful to us in organizing everything we had. He had the four of them swiftly load all the Connolly documents into the U-Haul, and then went roaring out of there and onto Route 95 south before anyone from the FBI had any idea what had happened. As the thousands of documents were bombing down the highway for Miami, Wyshak got a call from the FBI. The feds had heard about what he’d done, and they insisted he drive the papers to the FBI building in Washington, D.C., and they’d sift through everything there. Wyshak knew this was crazy, and he told them he simply was sorry, but he couldn’t stop. That almost cost him his career, but he got the papers to the trial.
Even though I was supposed to be retired, I still kept my hand in. I was deposed at some length by Connolly’s lawyer, Manuel Casabielle, and I’d be a witness. But mostly I did my best to provide the historical context for the case. It was strange to be in a Dade County courtroom on a Boston case. With the air-conditioning going, it was actually cooler than any Boston courtroom ever was, and there was nothing ornate or historic or particularly grand like what you’d find up north.
The courtroom was low-ceilinged, with all the usual flags. The judge, Stanford Blake, was a firm, energetic character who kept tight control over the proceedings. He was especially solicitous of the jurors, knowing they were likely to feel overwhelmed by all the details of the interaction between the FBI and the Boston mob, and how these interactions had led to a murder of a shady Boston businessman in Miami.
The trial lasted two months, and it meant a lot of time away from home for Wyshak, Doherty, Johnson, and Marra, who were the real heroes on this one. By this point, Connolly had been in prison for almost six years, and it had drained him. The flamboyance was gone, and his hair had grayed. He seemed like just another guy. During this trial, unlike his trial in Boston, his family was rarely present.
This time, Connolly sat with the defense, toned down his wardrobe, and whispered frequently to his defense team, sometimes sharply in response to testimony. I was thinking that if he took the stand, he’d be our best witness. Even deflated by his years in prison, he still had enough of his smugness to kill him with a jury in Miami, as it did in Boston.
Wyshak and the state attorney, Von Zampt, were the lead prosecutors on the case. They started with Jimmy Marra from the office of the inspector general in Washington. I’d gotten so used to being disappointed by federal officials that I was blown away by Marra. The guy saved us. He’d supplemented our own investigation of Connolly, dug out a lot of fresh evidence, helped us secure key reports from the FBI that we’d killed ourselves trying to get, and arranged everything into a kind of fat encyclopedia on the case. All of this was key to putting Connolly away. I don’t know if it was luck or justice, but we were really glad to have Jimmy Marra on the team. Now it was through his testimony that we got the key pieces of written evidence into the record, since all that material has to be linked to witness testimony.
A lot of the case hinged on Martorano. He was the one to testify to the central fact that Connolly had told Bulger that Callahan was not to be trusted, and had recommended that Bulger get rid of him before Callahan could spread the story around about what Bulger’s people had done to Wheeler. And Martorano was in a position to know, too, since he’d been in on the discussion at the La Guardia Marriott, and he was the one to put the bullet in the back of Callahan’s head. Testifying, Martorano was a big rock up there, no emotion, hardly moving, his words a steady monotone. The big question was: would the jury trust a man like that to tell the truth?
After Martorano, Wyshak brought up the other two key witnesses we had developed on the Bulger case, and, together, they made quite a threesome. Martorano, Flemmi, and Weeks. There could hardly be three less appealing characters, but we were asking the jury only to believe these guys, not to go drinking with them. They were there to tell the jury how Connolly was in so tight with Bulger and Flemmi that he ended up being a mobster himself.
Connolly’s defense team tried to make him the victim here. He was not the mobbed-up, above-the-law FBI superagent at all. That was a fabrication of the press. No, he’d been the pawn of the DOJ, the USAO, and the FBI, just as we had. He’d done his job, nothing more. He was supposed to do everything he could to wipe out the Mafia. This had been the charge of the FBI since Hoover in the 1960s, and look, the Mafia in Boston had pretty much been wiped out. Ever since Angiulo went down, it had not been able to establish a steady leadership.
The defense tried to fight back by challenging the motivation of our key witnesses, starting with Martorano, whom they accused of lying to cut his sentence. It never addressed the key accusation, that Connolly had fed Callahan to Bulger. Instead, it brought out character witnesses who swore to Connolly’s sterling reputation, and found a judge who, remarkably, saw nothing wrong with FBI agents’ taking gifts from criminals.
As the defense wound up, all eyes were on John Connolly. What was he going to say about all this? The answer was nothing. For years, he had claimed that he was going to rip the prosecution to shreds, that our witnesses were all lying, and that whatever anybody said, he was a by-the-book agent. But, just as he had in Boston, he saved this talk for the media. He did not rise to his own defense, and once again this hurt him. If he offered no defense, how was the jury to believe there was one? The trial lasted for two months, but the jury deliberated only two days before convicting Connolly of second-degree murder. The jurors agreed with our central premise, that Callahan would never have been murdered if it hadn’t been for Connolly. When Judge Blake revealed the verdict, I’m told Connolly didn’t flinch. I’ll give him that.
I wasn’t there for the verdict. Danny Doherty called me right afterward.
“Guilty!” he shouted. “We got him, Tommy! Guilty!”
I spoke to all the guys, congratulating them and carrying on a little. And then I gave Wyshak a call. “You’re incredible,” I told him. “Congratulations.”
It was Wyshak. We would never have gotten a single conviction without him. We probably wouldn’t have gotten any warrants. No, he was the man, and there is no telling me otherwise.
There wasn’t much of a celebration beyond that. You’d think there’d be more, since this was the culmination of over a decade of effort. Flemmi was gone; Bulger would go away as soon as he was caught, as we had no doubt he would be; and now Connolly. But mostly, we were relieved that the jury saw the case as we did. The truth now was out. And we were all exhausted. But beyond that I’ll admit to an odd sort of sadness similar to what I felt with Schneiderhan and Naimovich. Maybe this has to happen, but I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to think about FBI agents who betrayed the public trust and arranged for people they feared to be shot in the back of the head by professional killers. I didn’t want to think either of the wreckage Connolly’s actions had left behind—not just the dead, but the families of the dead, and his own family, with three sons who would grow up without a father, and a wife who would not have a husband. The wound would take a long time to heal, and the scars would never go away.
When it came time for the sentencing, several months later, we were in for one last surprise. Connolly’s attorneys argued that the conviction for second-degree murder should be tossed out because of an error by the judge: Florida provides only a four-year statute of limitations for a case of this type, and that time had long since passed when Connolly was arrested. The prosecution countered that the four-year limit is waived if the accused was carrying a gun during the commission of the murder, and Connolly had his FBI-issued handgun in his possession. Connolly’s lawyers said maybe so, but Connolly was out on Cape Cod when Martorano shot Callahan in Miami, and no gun was going to do any damage from there. The judge said he would need awhile to think about that.
Finally, in January 2009, the judge offered his ruling. He began by acknowledging that the defense had made a strong point about the statute of limitations. But he said that another deadline mattered more: the appeal would need to have been filed much nearer in time to the close of the original trial than it had been. So, no. Blake declared that Connolly remained guilty of murder in the second degree, and now he asked Connolly to rise. This time, Connolly seemed to brace himself as Blake imposed the sentence: forty years in prison.
Under Florida law, Connolly would be eligible for parole after serving a third of that time, and he was credited with the three years he had already served. But if you add the full ten from Massachusetts, he would end up serving twenty-three years at least, a serious term. Connolly deserved to be punished for his actions on the Bulger case, no question. But so did others. The fault lay not in the individuals so much as in a system that encouraged FBI agents to wander down the wrong path, and then required yet more agents to cover for them, and finally created an atmosphere of deceit—which I knew all too well and which was the last thing you’d want at a place like the FBI. But Connolly was the fall guy, so fall he did.
And then there was Whitey, as there would always be Whitey. Over the weeks of the trial, we got to know a lot of the spectators in the gallery. Many of them were media, and many more of them crime buffs. But there was one woman nobody could place. White, a little heavy, fortyish. There every day of the two-month trial. No one got a name, but she said she was a freelance writer—not that she mentioned a publication. This mystery woman had attracted a good deal of curiosity from the media people by the time the trial was over. When Doherty, Johnson, and Wyshak flew back to Boston, they used the Fort Lauderdale airport, and they noticed her there, standing beside an FBI agent we all knew from the Boston office, Todd Richards.
Curious, Danny went up to her, engaged her in light conversation, and asked her who she was.
She gave her name, which I won’t mention here.
“From?”
She glanced over at Todd. “The FBI.”
“Not a freelance writer.”
“No.”
“What brought you down here?”
“I’m with the Bulger fugitive task force.”
“Tracking Whitey.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
The conversation didn’t go much beyond that. Back in Boston, we called around, and found out that she was from Maine and that she’d been assigned to the task force purely to attend the trial. And why? To offer Connolly a deal after his conviction. If he provided information on Bulger’s whereabouts, the FBI would see to it that the award, then up to $2 million, would go to his family. And she’d see to it that no one from the Bulger investigative team would find out.
Connolly’s lawyer turned her down. It probably wasn’t the best time to ask, given that Connolly had just been sentenced to forty years in a federal prison for the Bureau’s sake. But the feds must have found the refusal a surprising breach of loyalty all the same. Despite everything—all the rebukes from judges, the bad publicity, the $100 million in damages—the FBI was still bent on doing things the same old FBI way. Operating undercover, under false pretenses, and making inside offers, all to manipulate an outcome that it would only make worse by trying to manipulate. It was remarkable, really. Had it learned nothing? After all this time, and everything it had done, the FBI still went ahead and made this underhand offer to the most disgraced FBI agent in its history. And it showed that John Connolly, at least, had learned something. He knew enough to refuse it.