In all, twenty-one men were charged, led by forty-nine-year-old Howard T. Winter and including nearly all of his associates in the Winter Hill gang, along with three Las Vegas casino executives, three jockeys, and two racehorse owners. Police were unable to round up everyone. Bulger and Flemmi, knowing from Connolly that indictments were coming down, had taken a couple of preventive measures. They warned John Martorano in time so he could get out of town, and they notified Joe McDonald, who was already a fugitive, that he had new troubles. “Because Mr. Bulger and I had been told that the indictment was imminent, we were able to warn them,” said Flemmi. “Martorano fled, and McDonald remained a fugitive.”
The indictment itself skipped over Bulger and Flemmi. The more than fifty-page federal court filing mentioned them only in a two-page attachment in a list of sixty-four “unindicted co-conspirators”: James Bulger, South Boston, and Stephen Flemmi, unknown. “The winnings,” wrote O’Sullivan, “were divided by defendants Howard T. Winter, John Martorano, James Martorano, Joseph M. McDonald, James L. Sims, and others.”
Bulger and Flemmi had become a couple of friendly ghosts.
COME summertime, John Morris decided to host a party at his home. He lived outside Boston in the quiet, tree-lined suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts. It was a bedroom community with a bedrock place in U.S. history. His house was not far from where, in 1775, the opening shots in the American Revolution had been fired; the modest, colonial-style home was located near streets named after giants in American history, like Hancock and Adams.
Morris had a small guest list in mind. John Connolly was invited; it was he, in fact, who had urged Morris to hold the gathering. Nick Gianturco was going to come, all finished now with life undercover and back safe at home with his family. Then there were the special guests: Whitey and Stevie.
Morris’s home life was increasingly troubled—his marriage was stormy—but professionally he and the others had much to celebrate. The FBI agents were on cloud nine. They’d blocked the indictment of Bulger and Flemmi; the race-fixing trial was under way with Tony Ciulla, on the witness stand, pummeling Winter; and third, the truck hijacking case, Operation Lobster, had gone to indictments on March 15, also making front-page headlines. It was as if they’d hit a trifecta—win, place, and show.
Back at the office, Morris and Connolly had made certain to take care of some FBI paperwork. Morris sent a teletype to FBI headquarters on May 4 saying that Bulger was “being reopened inasmuch as source is now in a position to provide information of value.” The storm had passed. Seven days later Morris and Connolly added a second teletype that more fully explained the basis for the move. Bulger, wrote Morris, had not been closed in January
due to unproductivity, but due to the fact that he became a principal subject of a Bureau investigation.
In view of source’s status at that time, a decision was made to discontinue contacts with him until the investigative matter was resolved. Since then, the matter has been resolved resulting in numerous indictments.
Most important, the two Boston agents reported, Bulger had not been charged. “No prosecutable case developed against source in the opinion of Strike Force attorney handling matter. Accordingly, source was recontacted and continues to be willing to furnish information.” It didn’t matter to the agents that this information was false, and Morris made no mention to FBI headquarters of their backroom lobbying.
“Boston,” concluded Morris, “is of the opinion that this source is one of the most highly placed and valuable sources of this division.” Morris said later he’d puffed up Bulger at Connolly’s urging, recommending he be elevated back to his top echelon rank. Morris didn’t care what Bulger was called so long as he gave the FBI information it wanted. But Connolly cared. “Top echelon informant is a credit to him,” Morris noted. “In other words, that’s reflective of his work and the caliber of informants that he’s operating.” The label was mostly about an agent’s ego and had no bearing on how the office worked with Bulger. “It made no difference whatsoever,” said Morris about the ranking of FBI rats. But Bulger was indeed quickly restored to his top echelon status.
These were the sorts of developments the group could toast. Moreover, Bulger would soon turn fifty, on September 3. Morris turned his attention to deciding what food to serve, what wine would be on hand. He was a wine connoisseur, an interest Bulger and Flemmi had noticed. They would bring bottles for John to subsequent soirees, and they eventually nicknamed the FBI supervisor “Vino.”
Together, as a group, they could consider what a new good thing they had. Look at Nickie Gianturco. He might have been dead if not for the alliance Connolly had made with Bulger and Flemmi. In a sense, as a result of the race-fixing case, they had even enlarged the family to now include prosecutor O’Sullivan. Connolly said later that O’Sullivan’s intervention provided a new layer of protective veneer to the FBI’s deal. It was as if the prosecutor had sanctified the notion that Bulger and Flemmi were protected from prosecution. “The first few years I met with Flemmi and Bulger there was no understanding. The understanding didn’t come until the race-fix case, and the conversations that I had with Jerry O’Sullivan,” Connolly later said.
Even though no government document would ever be drafted that reflected any kind of immunity or no-prosecution clause to the deal the FBI had with the two informants, that didn’t trouble Connolly. To him it was all in the secret talk, the wink, the body language, and, most important to this agent from South Boston, his word. To make the alliance seem more palatable, the FBI began portraying Bulger and Flemmi as a couple of leftovers from the now devastated Winter Hill gang. As John Connolly always liked to say, they were merely a “gang of two.”
If only it were true. Bulger and Flemmi were hardly passive, sitting idly by. Instead, beyond the FBI’s radar, they’d spent the better part of 1979 taking care of business, masters of their own destinies. Bulger especially was proving to be the grand puppeteer, pulling the strings of both the FBI and La Cosa Nostra.
Early in the year they’d had a sit-down with Gennaro Angiulo in a room at the Holiday Inn in Somerville. The Mafia underboss wanted to discuss the more than $200,000 debt that Bulger and Flemmi had inherited from their fallen boss, Howie Winter. Angiulo wanted to talk interest rates and timetables for repayment. Bulger put him off, pleading hard times given the race-fixing probe, and he and Flemmi even managed to leave the meeting with $50,000 in cold cash that Angiulo gave them as a token of goodwill. Bulger and Flemmi might well have snickered afterward; they knew the FBI had begun poking around surreptitiously in the North End, looking for a way in. In fact, a few months later they overheard that Angiulo had erupted angrily after discovering two surveillance cameras aimed right at his 98 Prince Street office. Bulger knew the cameras belonged to the FBI, and he knew that if the FBI eventually made good on its promise to bring down Angiulo, he and Flemmi were never going to lose any sleep over the repayment of the $200,000 debt. Bulger eagerly told Connolly about Angiulo’s temper tantrum.