It seemed to Connolly and the others that everything was going their way. Deriding any criticism was Jim Ahearn. Indeed, soon after he came to Boston, he ordered a deputy to review Bulger’s status to quell the nagging backbiting at the office. But the outcome—a hearty recommendation to keep Bulger—was hardly a surprise. The review consisted largely of a review of Connolly’s files and talking to Connolly himself. Ahearn wrote to the FBI director on February 10, 1989, boasting that Whitey Bulger was “regarded as the most important Organized Crime informant for many years.” (The memo did not even mention Flemmi by name, even though Stevie was the one with the best Mafia access.) Connolly, wrote Ahearn, has an “outstanding reputation as an informant developer and his accomplishments are well-known throughout Massachusetts law enforcement.”
The SAC’s memo to Sessions had a specific purpose: to protest the fact that the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Boston Police Department were conducting yet another drug probe of Bulger. Ahearn had only the day before learned of the joint investigation; worse still, the probe had been under way since 1987. Ahearn was beside himself—angry about being left out of the loop, and incensed that the second-class DEA would dare treat the Federal Bureau of Investigation that way.
But the decision to leave out the FBI had been carefully considered. “I was quite happy to have the FBI out of that investigation,” said Bill Weld, the chief of the Criminal Division in the Justice Department at the time. “I thought there might very well be a problem somewhere in the FBI. I thought it was at a low level, the John Connolly level. I thought it was historical, but that’s still a problem.”
But Jim Ahearn didn’t care. He told the FBI director that the DEA’s conduct was “reprehensible.” He was “deeply disappointed.” His words were “in your face”: the Boston office and John Connolly were above reproach, and Whitey Bulger was the best thing ever to happen to the FBI.
It was a high-water mark in Bulger hype and FBI bravado. And once again Whitey weathered the squall in his back yard. The DEA investigation lopped off top enforcers such as John “Red” Shea and Paul “Polecat” Moore and snared scores of dealers. But no Whitey. Now it was time to coast home. Nearing retirement, Connolly wrote a report saying that Bulger and Flemmi were also thinking of calling it a day, “packing it in and going into various legitimate businesses that they own.” Flemmi, for one, was spending more than $1 million—in cash—to buy up a slew of real estate in the affluent Back Bay neighborhood.
But what Connolly considered “legitimate business” a new team of federal prosecutors would soon regard as money laundering. Despite how it seemed at decade’s end, Connolly and the gang would never have it so good again.
PART THREE
Some things are necessary evils, some things are more evil than necessary.
JOHN LE CARRÉ, THE RUSSIA HOUSE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Fred Wyshak
The 1989 Mafia baptism captured by the FBI on tape seemed like a scene out of Saturday Night Live— as burly men took stilted oaths and burned holy cards. But it was a deadly serious event in the history of the New England mob, a last-gasp attempt by the beleaguered boss, Raymond Patriarca of Rhode Island, to bring warring Boston factions together. “Junior” was a pretender to the throne once held tightly by his deceased father, and he hoped that adding some new blood to the ranks would help calm Boston’s troubled waters. Notable Boston Mafia malcontents Vinnie Ferrara and J. R. Russo were there, nodding and smiling. Leaving the show of unity, Ferrara said, “Only the ghost knows what really took place over here today, by God.”
Not quite. Whitey Bulger was rubbing his hands on the sidelines, gleefully aware that another Mafia cadre was about to bite the dust by putting racketeering evidence on tape for the feds. Once again top mafiosi would soon face the music played in court and have little choice but to plead guilty to long terms. Patriarca, with the lightest criminal record, was sentenced to eight years; Russo got sixteen years; and Ferrara was dealt the stiffest sentence of all—twenty-two years. Once again Whitey and Stevie had helped target their enemies and then got out of the way.
The shattered mobster hierarchy also paved the way to the top for Stevie’s old partner from the 1960s, Cadillac Frank Salemme. Just out of jail, Salemme was planning a rapid ascension. He revived a loose alliance with Flemmi, a reunion of their two-man death squad of the late 1960s when they carried out hits for Larry Zannino. Salemme would soon manage to survive a clumsy assassination attempt against him outside a pancake house, for which he blamed Ferrara. But the gunfire did not slow his ambitious program to take over the Mafia and ally himself with Flemmi and Bulger.
The law enforcement terrain began to shift as well. For starters, John Connolly stepped down at the end of 1990. He was feted by his colleagues at a raucous party before making a soft landing as head of corporate security at Boston Edison, a company that had long curried favor with Senate President William Bulger. Around the same time, Connolly moved into a condo building in South Boston that had adjoining units belonging to Kevin Weeks and Whitey Bulger. Connolly quickly moved up the corporate ladder to the job of in-house lobbyist and an executive salary of about $120,000. From a Prudential Tower office above Boston’s Back Bay, Connolly worked with legislators at Bulger’s state house and did some Washington lobbying for the utility. But his interests stayed parochial. His office wall, decked out with photos of local politicians and sports figures, had a special place for Ted Williams, his boyhood icon.
Without Connolly in place, Bulger began to scale back and focused on South Boston holdings rather than looking for new business. He even forged a uniquely Whitey Bulger retirement plan: he “won” the state lottery. After a winning ticket was sold at his Rotary Variety Store, Bulger informed the $14.3 million jackpot winner that it would be in his best interests to acquire a new partner. Whitey and two allies left the customer half of the proceeds. Bulger claimed about $89,000 a year in after-tax income for himself—a stipend that could support his lifestyle against audits by the increasingly snoopy IRS. Investigators later found that Bulger paid the ticket holder $700,000 in dirty money to get an official cut worth $1.8 million over the next twenty years.
For his part, Flemmi launched his 401k plan with real estate trusts he controlled through relatives and in-laws. The 1990s marked his whole-hog immersion in Boston’s toniest neighborhood, the onetime Brahmin bastion of Back Bay. In 1992 he sunk $1.5 million in cash into a six-unit condominium building and two smaller units and some residential property in surrounding suburbs.