In the weeks after the story their hunch proved correct. Flemmi and Bulger went to work calling the story a hoax. The FBI agents, meanwhile, took the underworld’s pulse. In late September, Sonny Mercurio passed along to Connolly that his associates were thinking the story was “bullshit.” Mercurio said Ferrara and J. R. Russo were talking about hidden agendas, deciding the newspaper story was actually a bid to embarrass Billy Bulger. The agents wondered if the Mafia’s quick dismissal was actually a reflection of the Mafia’s fear of Whitey. If the mafiosi believed Bulger was an FBI informant, then they would have to take action; they would probably have to get rid of Bulger. Maybe the Mafia didn’t want to believe.
In October yet another government source indicated that the disclosure was not provoking undue concern. The source, who was actually passing along word of Bulger’s continued drug profiteering, mentioned that Bulger and Flemmi, although still “very concerned about the newspaper article,” now believed they were “weathering the storm of present.” The two crime bosses, said the tipster, had taken to calling the story a lie planted by their enemies and other informants who were out to get them.
It was the talk of the town for a while. By the end of October, however, the storm had passed. In short order, Connolly turned his attention to another important matter. He’d met her at the office nearly a decade before, and on November 5, 1988, Connolly walked down the aisle to marry Elizabeth L. Moore. The crowd watching the happy couple included many of Connolly’s pals from the office, especially from the old Organized Crime Squad, among them Nick Gianturco, Jack Cloherty, and Ed Quinn. The affair was joyous, and John Connolly had begun to entertain thoughts of retiring. But even if he stuck around, despite the troubling publicity about the FBI’s Bulger deal, the coast now seemed awfully clear.
BY THIS time Connolly and the others—including an unraveling John Morris—had honed their skills at deflecting trouble. They’d been doing it for thirteen years, getting better all the time. Now, to his enemies list of state troopers, drug agents, and cops whom he claimed hated him, Connolly added reporters. He couldn’t understand any of it. What could there be not to like about an agent armed with colorful FBI stories about bringing the Mafia to its knees? To rebut the Bulger talk, he sought out a private meeting at one point with the top editor at the Globe. Connolly made his pitch. How could any of these stories be true, he explained to the editor, Jack Driscoll, when he’d never even talked to Whitey Bulger.
Connolly and the others had a strategy to weather the scrutiny of this new press coverage: just keep zealously working the street. They were confident that they could extinguish any brushfire that came their way, including another that was smoldering from within.
This one originated from Bill Weld. Before he left the Justice Department, he’d started getting telephone calls from a woman from Boston with intriguing insights about Bulger and the FBI. The first call came January 6, 1988, and the woman talked to one of Weld’s assistants. She was “obviously scared and calling from a pay phone,” and she promised to call again to give “information on who Stevie Flemmi and Whitey Bulger have on their payroll, i.e., Boston police and federal agents.” Weld distributed a memo to a few high-ranking officials at Justice, and he scribbled in the margin next to the reference to Bulger, “OK, this checks out—maybe not a nut.” Weld’s office not infrequently got calls from people complaining about the CIA monitoring the fillings in their teeth, but Weld felt this wasn’t one of those. The next call came on January 20, and the caller named “Agent John Connolly—FBI” and a Boston police official as the two who “sell wiretap information” to Bulger and Flemmi. Weld again scribbled in the margins: “I know all this! So this is on the up and up.” The calls kept coming, on January 27, February 3, February 10, and they included mouthwatering lines like, “I have information on the Brian Halloran killing. It was done by Whitey Bulger and Pat Nee.”
Despite his exclamatory jottings, Weld didn’t know for certain if the tips were true, but he did think they should be taken seriously and pursued. “I had a sense that there might be a weak link there between Mr. Bulger and Mr. Connolly.”
Weld resigned his post on March 29, but his former assistants continued to take the calls, on August 15 and October 27, during which the caller said that a second FBI agent, John Newton, also disclosed government secrets to Bulger. The tipster turned out to be a woman named Sue Murray, fronting for her husband, Joe Murray, the gangster who trafficked in drugs and stolen guns for the IRA and sometimes did business with Bulger. Murray, imprisoned since his arrest in 1983, was looking to trade information for leniency.
Prior to resigning, Weld shipped “all the stuff up to Boston for further investigation.” But the referral landed right in the laps of Connolly’s friends and the longtime gatekeepers of the Bulger deal, people like Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan and Connolly’s new best friend, Jim Ahearn. The Boston SAC oversaw an internal inquiry of Connolly that proceeded slowly throughout 1988 and into 1989. It was not to be handled by outsiders or impartial agents from another office, but by Connolly’s associates. It was as if Connolly had been asked to look into the allegations himself.
Ahearn made it clear that he thought the information was baseless. In a letter to FBI director William Sessions, he complained that this latest questioning about Connolly’s conduct was “but one of a lengthy series of allegations over the years.” Ahearn assured his boss he would not jump to any conclusions, but in the next breath he did just that. He wrote Sessions: “While I am not prejudging the current investigation, all others have proven groundless and [agent] Connolly is held in extremely high esteem by both the Criminal Investigation Division and myself for his accomplishments.” The writing was on the wall.
Joe Murray was brought to Boston in June from a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for an interview with two agents from the Boston office. Ed Clark and Ed Quinn sat across from Murray that day. Both agents were friendly with Connolly, especially Quinn, who for years worked closely with Connolly and just a few months earlier was raising a glass in a toast to John at his wedding.
Murray told the agents he’d heard Bulger and Connolly traveled to the Cape together and shared an apartment in the Brighton section of Boston. He said a number of Bulger’s associates, like Pat Nee, knew Bulger and Connolly were close and that Bulger had Connolly on a string. “Connolly was no problem,” Nee indicated. He said “Bulger and Flemmi are responsible for the death of Bucky Barrett in 1983” and summarized what he knew about the twenty-four hours leading up to Barrett’s disappearance.