But that was off the record. In a report he filed after the bust, Connolly did not write a word about the payments Murray was making to Bulger and Flemmi. Instead, Connolly stated that the “Murray crew” was worried about Bulger being “upset with them over their storing grass in his town.”
Kennedy, who worked briefly as the bureau’s liaison with the DEA for Operation Beans, did share some of his intelligence about Bulger’s drug activities with DEA agents Reilly and Boeri. (Kennedy had an informant who’d told him Bulger relied on a South Boston drug dealer named Hobart Willis to serve as his go-between with Joe Murray.) But Kennedy never told anything to FBI supervisor Ring. Nor did Kennedy tell Ring or the DEA agents about Connolly’s disclosure regarding Joe Murray and Bulger. That was Connolly’s responsibility, not his, Kennedy felt. Besides, Connolly had probably expected him “not to pass it on,” and he didn’t want to cross Connolly.
Eventually more FBI agents in Boston would have informants telling the bureau about Bulger and drugs. By the mid -I990s even some of Bulger’s own rank-and-file dealers—like Polecat Moore—had decided to testify against him. And other dealers too. David Lindholm told investigators that in 1983 he was summoned to East Boston, where Bulger and Flemmi held a gun to his head to persuade him to pay them their share of his illegal drug action. In 1998 federal judge Mark Wolf ruled that Flemmi lied to FBI supervisor Jim Ring in 1984 in denying his and Bulger’s drug involvement. “It’s my understanding that he [Flemmi] was at least involved . . . in extorting money from drug dealers,” Wolf said on September 2, 1998.
But Connolly never let up. He had played a key part in creating the myth, and he clung to it. “Well, you know, I’ve never seen any evidence that they ever did get into drugs,” he boasted in I998—six weeks after Judge Wolf’s comments in court. Never mind the evidence, the testimony, the federal judge’s findings. “I mean, to get involved with a drug dealer, to collect rent from them—they are the lowest form of animal life. A guy like Flemmi or Bulger is not ever going to put himself in a position to be dealing with these guys.”
Denial is not a river in Boston.
BERGERON soon developed another reason for wanting to take Bulger and Flemmi down. He believed he’d lost a promising informant to them. It began one Sunday night in early October 1984 when the detective got word he better hurry down to the station. He arrived and learned that some other cops on the Quincy force had brought in thirty-two-year-old John McIntyre, an army vet with a string of minor run-ins with the law, for questioning after he was found trying to break into his estranged wife’s home. Held in one of the claustrophobic, poorly lit cells, McIntyre’s talk soon went way over the heads of the patrol officers. The man was rambling on about marijuana, mother ships, gunrunning, and, most shocking, the Valhalla.
The fishing trawler Valhalla had left Gloucester, Massachusetts, on September 14 for a few weeks of swordfishing. At least that was the cover story. In fact the trawler was carrying seven tons of weapons valued at a cool million—163 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition—destined for the IRA in Northern Ireland. Two hundred miles off the coast of Ireland, the Valhalla met up with a fishing boat from Ireland, the Marita Ann. The cache of weapons was transferred, and the operation seemed a success. But the Irish Navy had been tipped off and intercepted the Marita Ann at sea. The seizure of an IRA-bound arsenal made front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic.
Bergeron summoned Boeri, and they sat with McIntyre in the office of the chief of detectives at the Quincy police station, a tape recorder running. Bergeron sat transfixed as the names of some of the men he’d been targeting came tumbling off McIntyre’s lips: Joe Murray, the major drug smuggler who worked out of Charlestown, and Patrick Nee of Southie, who worked as a liaison between Bulger and Murray. Identifying himself as a member of Murray’s “cell,” McIntyre described a number of marijuana smuggling operations. He talked about how in the past couple of years Murray’s group had merged with the “South Boston organization,” and that meant Nee was around more often because “they wanted to bring some of their own representative people over, so they could keep an eye on everything.”
With regard to the botched IRA gunrunning mission that was so recently in the news, McIntyre confessed that he’d actually helped load the weapons and then served as the boat’s engineer, and he said that six men went along on the voyage—himself, a captain, an IRA member named Sean, and three guys from the Southie crew. He didn’t know them except by nicknames, and he didn’t like them. “You can tell them right away. All of them wear scally caps. They got the Adidas jumpsuits, and they ain’t got a speck of dirt on them. They don’t know the first thing about a boat. Every day they got to take two, three showers. These fuckin’ guys, running around flossing their teeth, takin’ showers. There was a storm so bad out there that me and the captain were driving about two days, three days. They wouldn’t even come out of their cabins.”
Murray, Nee, and “the guys from the liquor store” were behind the arms shipment, and, McIntyre added, theirs was a gang no one should take lightly. “They would tie you right up with piano wire to a pile and leave you there. That’s their idea of a joke.”
The night the Valhalla left port, Kevin Weeks had stood watch on a nearby hill. Kevin was tough, said McIntyre, but then there was “one guy above him.” Cross him, said McIntyre, and “he’ll just put a bullet in your head.” Bergeron could see McIntyre was shaky, almost petrified. “I’d like to start living a normal life,” he’d said earlier. “It’s almost like living with a knife in you. The last few years you don’t know where you’re going to end up or what kind of demise you’re going to come to. I mean, I didn’t start out in life to end up like this.”
He never actually uttered the name of the “one guy” above Weeks who oversaw the drug smuggling and the Valhalla, but everyone else in the room knew exactly whom he meant: Bulger.
Bulger was considered to be a chest-beating IRA sympathizer. But eventually some investigators came to believe that Bulger, just as he’d betrayed his neighborhood with his phony anti-drug posturing, had also betrayed the IRA. He might have played a key role in rounding up the weapons to sell to the IRA, but after taking payment he dropped a dime. “Whitey waved good-bye to the Valhalla, then made a phone call,” said one official later. Even if true, Bulger was not the only leak. The former head of the IRA in Kerry later admitted that he’d compromised the gun exchange at sea. Sean O’Callaghan, an assassin-turned-informer, said he did so to get revenge against the IRA. He immediately became a marked man for admitting his perfidy.