By the time the FBI’s bug began on Halloween, Flemmi had, not surprisingly or coincidentally, stopped attending the meetings in the storeroom at Vanessa’s. Once again, the FBI would capture the Mafia while Flemmi and Bulger would remain invisible. “I wasn’t intercepted because I knew it [the bug] was going to be in there,” Flemmi said. Just before the bug began, “John Connolly did tell me it was in.” For months policy meetings at Vanessa’s had involved the two powerful organized crime outfits in Boston, the Mafia and the Bulger gang. But once the FBI tapes began rolling, it was as if Boston was strictly a Mafia town.
The Sagansky shakedown coincided with the arrival of a new special agent in charge for the Boston office. Jim Ahearn, himself a veteran of organized crime cases in California, arrived in November 1986 at the same time the Boston squad was piling up taped evidence against the Ferrara faction. He was immediately impressed by the Organized Crime Squad’s work, and especially by John Connolly, who made sure others knew that the informants behind the bug belonged to him.
To rely on Flemmi at this time, however, the FBI also had to ignore mounting intelligence from other informants about the FBI’s two crime bosses. “Stevie Flemmi, of the Winter Hill gang, has been looking around for numbers agents to take over during the period of [Mafia] confusion and weakness,” one informant told John Morris on April 20, 1986. Flemmi began steering Connolly to Vanessa’s at the same time he and Bulger were moving about the city, flexing their own muscle. “The Winter Hill people are presenting a challenge to the old Angiulo regime, and Flemmi has been all over the city,” the informant went on. “The old Angiulo regime is not in a position to stop Flemmi.”
In this regard, Flemmi’s tip about Vanessa’s proved self-serving, a way to keep a staggered Mafia back on its heels. The FBI could do the dirty work.
Then there was the third in the trilogy of FBI bugs that Connolly would invoke in the 1990s as proof that Whitey Bulger had all-world status. The bugging operation itself, which unfolded on a single night, October 29, 1989, indeed warrants a spot in the FBI’s hall of fame. For the first time ever, agents that night secretly recorded a Mafia induction ceremony. Present were Vinnie Ferrara, J. R. Russo, Bobby Carrozza, thirteen other Mafia figures, and, most important, the reigning Mafia boss in New England, Raymond J. Patriarca, son of the deceased Raymond L. S. Patriarca. In the dining room of an associate’s home in Medford, Massachusetts, the band of mafiosi went through their legendary ritual—the pricking of fingers, the sharing of blood oaths—that culminated in the “making” of four new soldiers. It was also a ceremony that was part of the mob’s ongoing effort, post-Angiulo, to ease tensions between competing factions and establish a better working order.
“We’re all here to bring some new members into our Family,” welcomed the presiding Patriarca, “and more than that, to start making a new beginning. ’Cause they come into our Family to start a new thing with us.” One by one, the four new soldiers were administered the oath of Mafia office. Each drew blood from his trigger finger for use in the ceremony. “I, Carmen, want to enter into this organization to protect my Family and to protect all my Friends. I swear not to divulge this secret and to obey, with love and omerta.” Each was then told he had become a “brother for life,” and each responded, “I want to enter alive into this organization and leave it dead.”
Carmen Tortora, along with the other three, was also run through a test of loyalties: “If I told you your brother was wrong, he’s a rat, he’s gonna do one of us harm, you’d have to kill him. Would you do that for me, Carmen?”
“Yes.”
“Any one of us here for that?”
“Yes.”
“So you know the severity of This Thing of Ours?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want it badly and desperately? Your mother’s dying in bed, and you have to leave her because we called you, it’s an emergency. You have to leave. Would you do that, Carmen?”
“Yes.”
In the 1990s the famous induction ceremony became an integral part of Connolly’s ode to Bulger. But once again, the facts got in Connolly’s way. FBI files revealed that of the four informants the FBI used for its affidavit to win court approval to record the ceremony, Bulger was not one of them. For probable cause, the FBI relied almost exclusively on another of Connolly’s informants, Sonny Mercurio. Sonny had all the hard information about the time and place of the Mafia induction—not Bulger. For his part, Flemmi was used as one of the four informants, but his contributions paled compared to Mercurio’s. In fact, Flemmi later conceded that during the early autumn of 1989 the few tidbits of information he picked up for Connolly came only after the agent told him about the planned event. Until then, Flemmi didn’t know anything about the scheduled Mafia ceremony. “He asked me to monitor all sources and to report to him any information that I obtained, which I did.” Then, once the FBI had captured the ceremony on tape, Flemmi added that he was told about the bureau’s success—a disclosure that may have seemed matter-of-fact to Flemmi but that violated FBI rules. Who told him? “John Connolly,” said Flemmi.
If anything, Connolly’s later stump speech reflected not only a habit for hype but also his knack for embellishing Bulger at the expense of Flemmi. Throughout the years Connolly sometimes filed duplicate reports for each —attributing the same information in the exact same words to both Bulger and Flemmi. The only difference between the two reports would be the typewriters used to write them. Other times the wording wasn’t exactly the same but the information was, and both would get credit. To explain the duplication, Connolly said he wasn’t especially careful about how he kept the books and that he considered them one source. “Oftentimes they blurred,” he said. “The information almost came as one.”
The technique benefited Bulger, for between the two, Flemmi was the one with long personal ties to the Mafia. Flemmi, not Bulger, had the juice; he was the frequent visitor inside Mafia dens. Flemmi, not Bulger, was then later able to describe to Connolly the layout and floor plans. Larry Zannino, Patriarca, and other Mafia leaders repeatedly tried to persuade Flemmi to join La Cosa Nostra. But by his “blurrings,” Connolly spread the credit to include Whitey, pumping up—and thus protecting—his old friend from the neighborhood.