The strife landed on Morris’s desk at a difficult time. At home his marriage was falling apart. His reckless party chatter and phone call to O’Donovan had almost blown everything. And work was all-consuming. He was coordinating the strategy to win federal court approval to bug Gennaro Angiulo’s office at 98 Prince Street. He was overseeing a punishing schedule for his expanding squad of agents. Now along came Sarhatt questioning the cornerstone of the Organized Crime Squad—Whitey’s and Stevie’s information highway. On top of all that, Morris knew he was losing control over the loose cannon on his squad, the crafty and connected Connolly.
Connolly had been livid at Morris for his foolhardy overture at the midsummer party. Morris had tried to make things better with Connolly. During the leak inquiry Morris had omitted in his reports that Connolly also knew about the bug well before Morris had shot his mouth off at the Friday night party. Morris’s report kept Connolly off the FBI’s internal suspect list of leakers. But Connolly was exerting his influence over Morris more than ever before, his bombastic personality overwhelming the introverted boss. “I should have said no to Connolly,” Morris said. “But I didn’t want to take him on.” After weathering a crisis of his own making, Morris began to fear Connolly’s political connections with a vindictive Billy Bulger and Connolly’s South Boston brotherhood with the dangerous Whitey.
Late in 1980, as the FBI internal inquiry evolved from a look at a possible leak into a more dangerous review of Bulger, Morris began to follow Connolly’s lead in converting the challenge they faced into something resembling an old South Boston us-versus-them fight against outsiders. To rebut Sarhatt’s concerns, Connolly and Morris would have to prove that Bulger and Flemmi were invaluable assets that the state police were simply trying to destroy out of jealousy. Look at Bulger’s potential, they would argue right up the FBI chain of command, not at his life in crime. No matter what it took, this is what they had to make Sarhatt see.
As the new FBI man in town, Sarhatt learned quickly that boisterous Boston was not at all like his last posting in sleepy Knoxville, Tennessee. Never before during his twenty-year career had he encountered such a tangled tale of treachery. But he was determined to get to the bottom of it. Almost alone at the FBI, he viewed the state police’s O’Donovan as a straight shooter with a genuine problem. Prodded by O’Donovan, Sarhatt kept demanding more sensible answers from Morris and kept getting specious ones. After weeks of internal go-arounds and lame memos, Sarhatt began to turn up the volume about possibly closing Bulger down. If the state police knew about Bulger’s ties to the FBI, he worried, then everyone else at the roundtable at the Ramada knew. If all those state and police officials knew, that meant eventually the top-secret information might spill into the city’s underworld. Indeed, Sarhatt worried that the word was already out about Bulger and that it would get him killed, leaving blood on everyone’s hands. Besides, Sarhatt questioned whether Bulger’s information was all that good. He began to entertain the heretical thought: shut Bulger down.
But Morris and Connolly had an answer: cut Bulger and Flemmi into the biggest case ever in the history of the Boston FBI office—the bugging of Angiulo headquarters. It was a brilliant plan, and John Morris sat in an extraordinary catbird seat, a traffic cop directing the players on both sides of the line to suit his own needs without any disruption in the Organized Crime Squad.
Winning a court’s permission to plant a bug required jumping through a number of legal hoops, all of which had to do with providing the court with detailed information about the specific location the FBI was targeting for its proposed invasion of privacy. The FBI, working with prosecutors from Jeremiah O’Sullivan’s office, had to prove to the court that it had “probable cause” to infringe on the mafiosi’s otherwise constitutionally protected right to be left alone. In other words, the FBI had to show that the Angiulos used the office as their base and were likely to be committing crimes there.
To get the inside information that Gennaro Angiulo presided over his wide-ranging rackets at 98 Prince Street, Morris relied on a number of informants who often went there. These six or so informants—gamblers and bookmakers who regularly visited 98 Prince Street to do business with the Angiulos—brought the FBI squad intelligence that was ample and impressive. Many of them reported to Connolly, but one—the best informant in the lot—reported to Morris. This informant was a well-established bookmaker from the city of Chelsea, just north of Boston, and Angiulo depended on the bookie’s financial acumen.
For his part, Whitey had rarely, if ever, stepped inside 98 Prince Street. The Mafia was wary of the cheeky Bulger. He was Irish and hoarded South Boston profits for himself. But Flemmi had always been a Mafia favorite. He was Italian and had a long history of ruthlessly collecting loan-shark debts for the North End. But even Flemmi had been inside Angiulo’s office only four or five times.
By the fall of 1980 one of the federal prosecutors assigned to work with the FBI was already putting the finishing touches on the government’s application for electronic surveillance, known as a “T3 application.” In painstaking detail, the application incorporated Morris’s reports from agents and from agents’ informants. They contained no mention of Bulger and Flemmi.
Morris and Connolly had to find a way to turn Prince Street to their advantage, and the T3, though in its final draft, was not yet complete. There was still time, and during the frenetic days leading up to its filing in court, Morris and Connolly went to work. The plan was to give Bulger and Flemmi credit for 98 Prince Street.
It began with Morris cleaning up some paperwork. Ever since the race-fixing investigation, Flemmi had been closed as an informant. (Morris had reopened Bulger in 1979, but Flemmi had been overlooked.) Flemmi did not know he’d been closed and still met with Connolly as often as he ever did; he had to be officially reopened in order to be tucked into the Prince Street T3. Morris arranged the reopening in a teletype to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. Flemmi’s new code name was “Shogun,” the term for the ruling military governors in ancient Japan who paid lip service to titular emperors.
Next came a meeting between Morris and Sarhatt on October 10. The top FBI agent in Boston told Morris straight out that he was thinking of closing Bulger. Sarhatt’s alarming ruminations sent Morris and Connolly into overdrive. They called an emergency meeting for that very night, at Bulger’s Quincy condominium. They explained the crisis at hand to their informants. And then the scheming agents explained that they wanted to add Bulger and Flemmi to the pending T3 as additional confidential informants who had provided inside information about 98 Prince Street.