Over time too, Connolly’s retelling of this Bulger moment grew more rarefied. “They saved one of my friends’ life,” he liked to say. Connolly could also count on Gianturco—to a point. Gianturco said Connolly had called and persuaded him not to meet with the hijackers. “He said they were going to kill me.” But pushed to say whether he indeed thought Bulger and Flemmi had saved his life, Gianturco was evasive. “I was glad that Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi were kind of watching out for me.” He wouldn’t flat-out credit Bulger with saving his life. And Flemmi himself undercut Connolly’s take, later calling the information Bulger passed along an “accidental tip” about a possible shakedown, not a planned murder.
Just as important, police supervisors of Operation Lobster said they did not recall any specific death threat to Gianturco. A plot to kill an FBI agent was not something any police official would ever forget, they said. And word of a planned hit would have set off internal alarms and been documented at the time, not just in a Connolly memo two years later. If anything like what Connolly claimed had actually happened, said trooper Bob Long, who had also supervised Operation Lobster, “it’s incredible that he would not have advised Gianturco’s immediate supervisors, who were responsible for his safety and security.
“If you had information that someone was planning to kill an FBI agent, wouldn’t you want to monitor the suspect’s movements? Because if he didn’t succeed that day, there would be another day, and he’d keep trying.” None of the truck hijackers were ever tracked by investigators as potential assassins.
The bundle of Connolly hype rescued Bulger from internal scrutiny, and the memos were part of a blizzard of paperwork assembled by Connolly and Morris that, like a high-gloss finish, sealed the FBI’s rosy view of Bulger and Flemmi. Lying and deceit were clearly on Morris’s mind. In his office he kept a copy of Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. He’d come across the book by Sissela Bok while taking a graduate course in ethics at Northeastern University. The book was heady and philosophical, not a how-to guide to lying, but it had captured his interest. He kept it near him and had marked up certain passages and underlined others. As he supervised Connolly and together they distorted the truth about Bulger and Flemmi to FBI superiors, Morris was flipping through a book with such chapters as “Lies in a Crisis,” “Lies Protecting Peers and Clients,” and “Justification.”
BUT the early 1980s was not just a period of pushing paper. Besides customizing the FBI’s books, the agents were putting out some home cooking. The group’s social life took off. The inaugural dinner held at Morris’s home in Lexington in 1979, in part to celebrate the close call in the race-fixing indictment, had only broken the ice. Since then, Morris had hosted more dinners. Gianturco did too, at his suburban home in Peabody, north of Boston. Flemmi did his share, leaning on his mother to prepare an Italian spread for Bulger, Morris, Connolly, Gianturco, and other agents. The first of the Flemmi affairs was held at his parents’ home in the Mattapan section of Boston, but by the early 1980s his parents had moved into South Boston right next door to none other than Billy Bulger. (The houses faced one another.) Flemmi began hosting gatherings within arm’s reach of the most powerful politician in Massachusetts. Flemmi and Bulger even turned Flemmi’s mother’s property into a weapons depot. In an outdoor shed where most homeowners would keep a lawnmower, the gangsters accumulated what amounted to a small military arsenal. They stockpiled handguns, rifles, automatic weapons, shotguns, ammunition of all kinds and calibers, and even explosive devices, all of which were kept in a hidden compartment behind an interior wall in the shed.
Over drinks and dinner it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between business and pleasure. John Connolly took care to act as a master of ceremonies, arranging the times, places, and guest lists. (“I never arranged for any of the meetings,” said Morris, even though he often hosted. “I never knew how to get in contact with them.”) Connolly seemed to fuss as well. Having persuaded Morris and Gianturco to open up their homes to the gangsters, he then wanted to make sure they behaved. Connolly, recalled Morris, did not want FBI agents treating Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi like run-of-the-mill snitches. They were to be shown the “special respect” they deserved.
Even though the FBI in no uncertain terms banned socializing with informants, Connolly had proposed—and Morris readily accepted—a rationale for why the rules did not apply to them. Bulger and Flemmi, said Morris, “were very, very, very well known in the crime community, and there were very few safe places that we could meet with them, and Connolly did not want to meet with them in the usual alternatives—hotel rooms and that sort of stuff. He wanted an atmosphere where it would be a little more relaxing, would be more sociable, more pleasurable, and that left very few alternatives, and I agreed to have them for dinner.”
There were indeed people stalking Bulger and Flemmi—like state troopers. Years later the irony was not lost on the investigators from other police agencies: the gangsters had shaken the troopers tailing them by finding a safe haven and a hot meal in the homes of FBI agents.
The FBI dinners were off the books—the agents never filed reports about them—and over fine food and fine wine the group was already waxing nostalgic about their times together. They chatted, said Flemmi, about “things that happened in the past, like the racetrack case.” The conversation was friendly and often featured, recalled Morris, “pretty strange things.” If Connolly was the emcee, Bulger was the chairman of the board, “talking about life in Alcatraz, talking about life—what it’s like being a fugitive, talking about family matters, talking in generalities about people.” He entertained the others with descriptions of taking LSD while he was in prison during the 1950s. Said Flemmi: “He was in Alcatraz when they closed it down. Then he went to Leavenworth, and he participated in a CIA program. The name of the program was Ultra. He was a volunteer in that program, the LSD program, for eighteen months. He was one of the people selected, because he was—he had such a high IQ.”
Flemmi might offer some of his own stories, about living in Canada when he was a fugitive, but Bulger clearly commanded center stage. “Jim Bulger was the talker. Anyone who knows him will attest to that,” said Flemmi.
Though Connolly frequently met privately with Bulger and Flemmi—on hundreds of occasions—the FBI dinner parties unfolded as a kind of biannual banquet. The agents and the gangsters took certain precautions for their evening affairs. To meet once to chat over beers at Bulger’s apartment in South Boston, Connolly and Morris parked their car several blocks away. “Connolly was familiar with the back alleys,” said Morris. The supervisor, meanwhile, was lost in South Boston. “I had no idea in the world where I was. And we took a series of back alleys and entered his apartment in a back alley.” Morris and Connolly both wore hats, a token stab at a disguise to conceal their faces. Bulger greeted them and served up St. Pauli Girl beer while Morris casually scanned issues of Soldier of Fortune magazine that Bulger had around.