And finally getting to the point of the meeting, Bulger denied that the FBI had leaked word of the state police bug to him. He told Sarhatt that he learned about it from a state trooper. In a stunning breach of informant protocol, Bulger refused to identify the trooper, saying only that the tip had been given as a favor and not as a “corrupt act.” For the state police, Bulger’s refusal to identify a mole within law enforcement was a high-risk outrage. It should have been a simple matter of standard housekeeping for Sarhatt: you plug the leak or you close the source. Otherwise, Bulger would keep his purported snitch in the state police while rank-and-file troopers such as Bob Long, Jack O’Malley, and Rick Fraelick risked their lives chasing a crook who always knew they were coming.
But Sarhatt blinked and moved on.
SARHATT was clearly troubled by the airport hotel meeting, driving back to his downtown office with serious concerns about Bulger’s credibility. But he was a new man in town with no allies. His top organized crime agents clearly wanted to keep Bulger and make use of him in pending Mafia cases. Mulling what to do, Sarhatt reached out to O’Sullivan. What would be the impact of closing Bulger, he asked.
O’Sullivan jumped on him, saying it would amount to a calamity in chasing the Mafia. In his clipped, cocksure way, O’Sullivan told Sarhatt that Bulger was crucial to the mother of all Mafia cases, the imminent Prince Street bugging. “Crucial” became the watchword among all the sentinels guarding the FBI’s secret deal with Bulger. Somehow, in a matter of weeks, Bulger had gone from being a troubling liability causing seismic fractures within law enforcement to the key to the future. Connolly and Morris had done well.
Of course, the relentless O’Sullivan viewed the issue through his prosecutor’s tunnel vision. He was for just about anything that would get him closer to nailing the Angiulos, and he needed the Organized Crime Squad led by Morris and Connolly to get there. To the firebrand prosecutor, Bulger was such a means to an end that he told Sarhatt to retain him “regardless of his current activities,” a recommendation that covered a lot of dirty ground. This tipped the scales for Sarhatt, who could live with unhappy agents but would have trouble making his way if the chief prosecutor in his new jurisdiction was against him.
As part of a one-two punch, Connolly quickly sent Sarhatt a long memorandum justifying the continued use of Bulger, listing all his contributions over the prior five years. Although Whitey’s recent visit to Angiulo’s office had produced no new information, Connolly proclaimed Prince Street the centerpiece of accomplishments that made Bulger the “highest caliber” informant in recent FBI history.
Connolly’s memo was the ultimate spin document. It covered the waterfront, almost hailing Whitey Bulger as a crime fighter. Connolly gave him exaggerated and at times false credit for solving murders, saving two FBI agents’ lives, and breaking news with inside information on a headline-grabbing bank heist. Morris weighed in to second the motion, saying that losing Bulger would be a “serious blow” to the bureau’s Organized Crime Squad.
By the time Connolly’s memo of December 2, 1980, landed on Sarhatt’s desk, the boss had touched all the bases. It was decision time. He had talked to the man himself, wrangled with the key agents, and got braced by the best prosecutor in town. Any reservations Sarhatt had were reduced to a final, face-saving demand he scrawled at the bottom of Connolly’s glowing memo. Sarhatt ordered that a “tickler” be placed in Bulger’s file so the issue would be revisited in three months. But it was a paperwork matter now. Connolly would do the review under Morris’s supervision. Whitey was home free.
Connolly would even walk away from the state police challenge with a career “stat,” or commendation, in his file for Bulger’s covert Prince Street work. It was the kind of formal recognition that was a hot item within the bureau. It brought salary bonuses to agents with informants who provided material incorporated into T3s.
WHEN all was said and done, the Lancaster Street caper had a dispiriting ending out of The French Connection, the movie in which drug dealers walked and cops were reassigned.
The state police wound up with what one of them called “a bloody bag of nothing.” The valiant effort to target the collaborating organized crime leaders of the Winter Hill gang and the Mafia was sabotaged and in ashes.
Sergeant Bob Long was transferred to the narcotics squad.
And within months an effort was made at the State House to eliminate the state police leadership that oversaw organized crime investigations, including O’Donovan and four others.
During one of the late-night sessions that became a hallmark of Billy Bulger’s long reign as senate president, his chamber passed an anonymous amendment to the state budget that struck back at O’Donovan in an exquisitely simple and perversely personal way. A short provision with no fingerprints required officers fifty or older—O’Donovan, a major, and three captains—to make a choice: take a reduction in pay and rank or retire. The provision also covered the chief detective in District Attorney Delahunt’s office, Major John Regan.
After several anxious days and protests from public safety officials about a ploy by organized crime, the item was vetoed by the governor. But the point was made.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Prince Street Hitman
Around midnight, long after agents had followed Gennaro Angiulo home and reported back that the Mafia boardroom was a dark office on a still street in the North End, the FBI entry team began to move out from headquarters about a mile away in downtown Boston.
A dozen agents had whittled the night away in the big open squad room, sitting on desktops, drinking coffee, trading wisecracks. Some talked about the Celtics’ tight victory over Los Angeles that afternoon, a good win despite Larry Bird’s bad game. Others wondered why the boss, Larry Sarhatt, was going on the mission that night. Did it mean he lacked confidence in the game plan? Or was Sarhatt doing what most twenty-year FBI men would do—getting involved on a big night? No one was sure.
After everyone was in place in the North End, John Morris, as the Organized Crime Squad supervisor, called the shots over a two-way radio from a car on the other side of a small hill from Angiulo’s office. He was now spending 98 percent of his time on the case, and 2 percent worrying about Whitey Bulger’s standing within the bureau and his own relationship with the disdainful John Connolly.
Nervous as a cat and bundled against the frigid January night, Morris sat in the front passenger seat as he fielded reports from agents in cars around Prince Street. At two o’clock the word from the other side of the hill was “all’s quiet.” Morris turned to the backseat and dispatched agents Ed Quinn and Deborah Richards and an FBI locksmith, sending them down the hill to 98 Prince Street. They were to break into Angiulo’s small suite on this crisp clear night. Surveillance had revealed that early Monday morning was the quietest time of the week in a neighborhood of double parked cars outside restaurants, bakeries, pizza joints, and apartment buildings. Even the wiseguys stayed in on Sunday nights. Now the usually watchful neighborhood of narrow streets and five-story tenements had finally turned in.