It was the late spring of 1988, and the timing of all the troubles haunting Morris coincided with the work by a team of Globe reporters about Bulger and the FBI. Lehr, Gerard O’Neill (the authors of this book), Christine Chinlund, and Kevin Cullen were all working on their series about the brothers Bulger. Cullen had put into play the notion that Whitey was an FBI informant as the only explanation for his charmed life.
The reporters kept asking around. Police veterans like Dennis Condon, the high-ranking state police official and former FBI agent, shrugged off the inquiry during an interview that summer. Having provided a lot of material about the history of the Boston Mafia and the Winter Hill gang, Condon sat back and sighed. “Well, I left the FBI in 1977, and I never expected any help from Whitey Bulger or Stevie Flemmi,” he said unblinkingly.
Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan, still the chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force, proved impatient and combative. “I don’t buy it,” he shot back when asked about the theory that Bulger served as an FBI informant. He then went on the offensive against the troopers and cops who had been talking to reporters. “There are a lot of people wandering around with blue lights and guns, making a nice salary. Many of those people aren’t making cases, and they cause feuds, bitching and moaning.”
Lehr may have bumped into Connolly on the street early in the year, and Cullen was talking to Connolly about other matters, but the team of reporters knew they could not expect help from him on this line of inquiry. Connolly was the FBI agent other cops were complaining about.
Instead, in May 1988, O’Neill called FBI supervisor John Morris. The two had gotten to know one another during the Globe’s series about the bugging of 98 Prince Street.
Morris took O’Neill’s call, but he rebuffed the gingerly advanced notion that Bulger was an FBI informant. Morris did agree to meet for lunch. O’Neill had described the project about the Bulger brothers and said he wanted to get from Morris some background, what reporters like to call “color,” about Whitey’s life in Boston’s underworld.
O’Neill and Morris met in June at Venezia’s, a restaurant overlooking Dorchester Bay. Morris arrived, dressed nattily in a suit, and he seemed excited to see O’Neill. There was some small talk, and then O’Neill raised the need to ask again about Bulger and the bureau. “You have no idea how dangerous he can be,” Morris said. It was as if Morris had come to the lunch ready for this moment. Bulger was an informant, Morris suddenly declared, and it was a deal that had become a terrible burden, one that he feared had corrupted the bureau and was going to end badly. The words poured off his lips, gathering momentum. Connolly and Bulger were close, perhaps too close. There were these dinners, Morris explained, he and Connolly had enjoyed at the home of the mother of Bulger’s partner. At one, Billy Bulger had even walked in on the feast Mrs. Flemmi had prepared. (This was a separate dinner from the one later attended by Jim Ring.) “There we were, the two brothers on one side of the table and the two FBI agents on the other.”
O’Neill sat there stunned. If there were any other sounds inside the restaurant—the noise of other diners and the waiters—neither man heard them. O’Neill had hoped for confirmation and got a confession. The FBI supervisor looked weary, ashen, and deflated; something inside him had given way. They wrapped up lunch, mixing chitchat and non sequiturs with references back to Bulger. Morris worried openly about what the Globe would do with the information and cautioned about the consequences of revealing an informant’s identity—the danger that such a disclosure could pose to Bulger, to himself, to Globe reporters.
O’Neill said he wasn’t sure yet what would come of it. But they both knew something had happened, something pivotal. This was the rare kind of information that precipitates movement in the way things are, information that causes a correction in the history of a city as it is understood by its citizens, so that ultimately one version of history is replaced by a more complete and truer one.
UNKNOWN to the reporters, Morris was already well informed about the Globe’s project even before O’Neill telephoned. Connolly had told Morris that Billy Bulger, the senate president, was cooperating and doing interviews focused on growing up in Southie. But Connolly had fresh concerns about an apparent turn in the journalists’ reporting: word had gotten back that the Globe was asking around about Whitey and the FBI. Connolly suggested that because Morris knew O’Neill better than any of the other FBI agents, he should put in a call and spin O’Neill off of any trouble spots. Connolly, recalled Morris, “requested that I contact him to attempt to learn about the true direction of the articles and to set him straight.”
The supervisor’s decision to verify the Globe’s reporting was hardly high-minded. “My principal concern was my own skin,” he conceded. “I was trying to minimize damage in my career.” By his calculation, “outing” Bulger seemed to offer a new solution. Publicity might force the FBI’s hand and lead finally to closing down shop with the two informants. If that happened, his own wrongdoing—“that I had accepted money, gifts, and in turn had compromised an investigation”—might be buried forever. There was also a darker possibility—that the Mafia or someone else would assassinate an “outed” Bulger. This would truly end any risk to Morris that Bulger would ever disclose his own wrongdoing. But Morris insisted that bringing about this “potential harm” was not his intent. “I wanted them closed,” he said.
He also sensed, however, that he was just fooling himself to think that if only the FBI would close down Bulger then he would be safe. “My thinking there really wasn’t very clear,” he said. “I think that part of it, if Connolly were surfaced, that would mean that I would be surfaced; and I think at that point in time I in fact wanted my own involvement surfaced.” Full of fear and self-loathing, Morris lacked the courage to confess to the authorities.
Back at the Globe, O’Neill shared his findings with the other reporters. Everyone was dumbstruck, and there was discussion about whether the information could run in the newspaper, whether it might spur underworld bloodshed. But before any decision about publication could be made, the reporters knew more work was required. They had only a single source. There are times when an unnamed but well-placed source is enough to go with a story, but a single source for this kind of explosive disclosure did not cut it. Morris’s information needed to be tested.