In July, O’Neill and Cullen flew to Washington, D.C., to see William F. Weld. Weld had just resigned from his post as head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department in a much-publicized policy dispute with Ed Meese, the attorney general. Over lunch, and on background, Weld was careful and cautious. He said he’d heard the rumors from agencies like the state police. He even said he’d thought the rumors were true. But he had no proof, and he did not give the two reporters anything they could use in their story.
Then, during the last week of July, Lehr called Bob Fitzpatrick, a name he’d been given along the way. The New York native had joined the FBI in 1965. He’d worked in New Orleans, Memphis, Jackson, Mississippi, and Miami. He’d worked the Martin Luther King assassination. He’d worked several bombing cases involving the Ku Klux Klan. He’d taught at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The now former agent had served as the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of the Boston office from 1980 to 1987. During that time he’d been Morris’s boss and overseen the Organized Crime Squad. In 1988 he was working in Boston as a private investigator.
Lehr drove to Fitzpatrick’s home in Rhode Island, and Fitzpatrick took him for a walk to a nearby beach. The day was muggy and overcast. The beach was empty. Far away in Atlanta, Democrats were nominating Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis at their convention.
“What do you know?” Fitzpatrick asked abrasively.
“We know.”
Pacing in the sand, Fitzpatrick seemed edgy. Then he started, and for the next few hours he talked about Whitey Bulger and the FBI, about Connolly and Morris.
“He became a fuckin’ liability,” Fitzpatrick said about Bulger. He said that during his tenure at the Boston office he’d had increasing concerns about the quality of Bulger’s information and about Bulger’s rise to the top as the biggest wiseguy in the city. “You can never have the top guy as an informant,” he said at one point, his voice rising in anger. “You have the top guy, he’s making policy, and then he owns you. He owns you!”
It began to rain, and the interview moved into Lehr’s car and then back to Fitzpatrick’s house. The wide-ranging discourse became a primer of sorts about informant handling, the dangers and benefits of the bureau’s reliance on informants, a beachside course on informant dos and don’ts. He repeatedly voiced regret that what he saw as a major internal scandal had gone untreated. The few times Bulger was reviewed internally, the pro-Bulger forces prevailed.
“The FBI is being compromised. That’s what pisses the shit out of me. I mean the FBI is being used.” The root of the problem, he said, came down to the most basic seduction facing any FBI handler of a longtime informant. Connolly, he said, had long before “overidentified with the guy he was supposed to be running, and the guy took him.” The agent, said Fitzpatrick, had “gone native.”
TWO MONTHS later a four-part series about the Bulger brothers published in the Boston Globe included an installment devoted to what was described as the “special relationship” between Whitey Bulger and the FBI.
In the hectic weeks prior to publication, Cullen and Globe photographer John Tlumacki, acting on a tip from a local cop, succeeded in taking fresh photographs of Whitey Bulger late one sunny afternoon in a city park near Neponset Circle in Dorchester. Bulger was walking Catherine Greig’s poodle, wearing his trademark sunglasses and baseball cap.
By this time too the FBI was well aware of the Globe’s storyline and took a shot across the newspaper’s bow. Tom Daly, a veteran agent, called up Cullen one afternoon at the office. Daly acted miffed, wanting to know why Lehr had been trying to contact “Fat Tony” Ciulla, the former government witness he’d handled in the 1979 race-fixing case against Howie Winter. Then the conversation turned to Bulger. First off, Daly said that if he was ever asked, “this conversation never took place.” (True to form, a decade later Daly denied calling Cullen.) Daly also said he was calling as a “friend,” although Cullen barely knew him.
Daly wanted to know where the Globe was headed with the Bulger story. First he denied that Bulger was an FBI informant. Then he said that he wanted to make sure Cullen understood what he and his colleagues were up against. He said Ciulla, who was now in the federal witness protection program, had a warning for the Globe: “Whitey is a dangerous guy. You don’t want to piss him off.”
Daly said Ciulla had cautioned that Bulger would not tolerate anything written about him that either was untrue or caused his family any embarrassment. “The guy would never live with that,” said Daly about Bulger. “He wouldn’t think nothing of clipping you.”
The intimidation tactic left Cullen briefly rattled. But by the next day the reporters and their editors had all agreed that Whitey Bulger did not get where he was by killing reporters. The story was seen as something that simply had to be published.
The series ran in late September 1988, a few weeks after Bulger turned fifty-nine, and included unequivocal denials from FBI officials. In public remarks, Jim Ahearn, the top agent in Boston, exuded certitude. “That is absolutely untrue,” he declared. “We specifically deny that there has been special treatment of this individual.”
Backstage, however, a scramble was under way to assess the fallout. “I read the article,” said Flemmi, and “I discussed it with Jim Bulger.” In early October they met at Morris’s condo. “I went there with John Connolly and Jim Bulger,” Flemmi said. It was too soon to wonder how the Globe got the story; their first worry was damage control. “He was upset about it,” said Flemmi of Bulger. “But I don’t believe he at that point in time said anything about who leaked the information. I don’t think he knew.”
“It was brief,” continued Flemmi, the meeting marking the last time Bulger and Flemmi ever met with Morris face to face. The agents, recalled Flemmi, were “talking about distancing themselves from us.” But Flemmi also detected that Connolly wasn’t happy about this kind of talk and was under pressure. He was against a breakup. “John Connolly, he wanted us to hang in there, and we did,” said Flemmi.
In fact, Morris and Connolly had already gone over the story and figured maybe they would all be okay. Even though the in-depth stories “left little imagination” regarding Bulger’s status, the Globe, noted Morris, had never used the I-word: informant. The article called the deal a “special relationship.” Working in their favor, the story was followed by the FBI’s public denials. Maybe, they thought, they could ride it out. Maybe their best asset was Bulger himself, and the myth that he was the ultimate stand-up guy. “Connolly and I both thought the informant would be okay because no one in the underworld would believe it,” said Morris, playing along once again to cover his tracks.