“Why don’t you just sit down, Mr. Wyshak?” Wolf said.
Wyshak would not, and he continued arguing against allowing a new batch of FBI files to be made public.
“Have a seat,” Wolf interrupted.
“What is the relevance?”
“Have a seat.”
Wyshak remained standing.
“Do you want to be held in contempt? Sit down!”
The hearings lasted most of 1998. The testimony of the 46 witnesses filled 17,000 pages of transcripts, and 276 exhibits—mostly lengthy internal FBI documents—were admitted into evidence. Taking the stand and swearing to tell the whole truth were a former Massachusetts governor and U.S. attorney (William Weld); a sitting Superior Court judge and former protégé of prosecutor Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan (Diane Kottmyer); the three FBI supervisors who ran the Boston office during the Bulger years (Lawrence Sarhatt, James Greenleaf, and James Ahearn); and a long line of federal drug agents, other FBI supervisors, and many of the FBI agents who’d worked alongside Connolly (Nick Gianturco, Ed Quinn, and John Newton). It was a who’s who of the federal law enforcement establishment, and there was a touch of the surreal as former FBI agents on the witness stand sometimes seemed to mimic tactics usually displayed in court by the gangsters they pursued.
The godfather of the FBI’s Organized Crime Squad, Dennis Condon, the retired supervisor who had first matched Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi together back in the mid-1970s, took the stand in early May and eluded tough scrutiny. The lawyers were hoping he would shed light on the early years of the FBI and Bulger, but Condon pleaded a blank memory. He set the standard for responding, “I don’t recall.” Even when an attorney showed him an FBI document he’d prepared, Condon would shrug, say he didn’t recall writing it, and was therefore unable to elaborate further. Cardinale and the other attorneys were left rolling their eyes, exasperated.
Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan eluded scrutiny altogether. In late February the fifty-six-year-old former prosecutor suffered a heart attack, was hospitalized, and had an adverse reaction to medication. Facing a lengthy rehabilitation, he was spared sharp questioning about removing Bulger and Flemmi from the horse race-fixing case in 1979. O’Sullivan would also have been grilled on claims he’d made publicly and to government investigators that his hands were clean because he’d never even known Bulger and Flemmi were FBI informants. The evidence to the contrary was substantial, and defense attorneys had been eager to put O’Sullivan on the hot seat.
The missing prosecutor quickly became a target of dark courthouse humor. Lawyers and commentators couldn’t resist suggesting that the heart attack enabled O’Sullivan to assert a claim many mafiosi had tried to pull off—too ill to testify. In fact a fiery O’Sullivan, back in the mid-1980s, had aggressively fought Mafia enforcer Larry Zannino’s medical claim that he was too sick to come to court. The prosecutor forced Zannino to appear, even though he was in full medical regalia, strapped into a wheelchair and breathing from an oxygen tank. Now people began to joke that O’Sullivan had “pulled a Zannino.” Though by the end of the hearings O’Sullivan would recover and resume his private law practice at one of the city’s prestigious, old-line firms, Choate Hall and Stewart, the man who for sixteen years had fought the Boston Mafia never once took the stand.
Theresa Stanley was granted immunity and compelled to testify about her life with Whitey Bulger—and his getaway when the 1995 indictment came down. In a soft voice, the blue-eyed fifty-seven-year-old, with snow-white hair and dressed in an orange floral top and black slacks, described how she and Whitey had been an item for nearly three decades. She’d cooked dinner for Bulger at her South Boston home nearly every night, and he’d spent most holidays with her family. Stanley spoke about mysterious trips to Europe. She didn’t ask Bulger why they were just moving about, because such questions always ended in an argument. She recalled their hasty drive around the country—to Long Island, to New Orleans, where they spent New Year’s Eve, to Graceland in Memphis, and to the Grand Canyon. Bulger made lots of calls from pay phones, but she didn’t ask who he was talking to or what the calls were about. Stanley also testified that Bulger ultimately abandoned her for the much younger Catherine Greig, who he’d been seeing secretly for twenty years.
“He was leading a double life with me,” a spurned Stanley concluded, “and a double life with the FBI.”
Unsealed in court were FBI reports revealing that Flemmi had ratted on Salemme for three decades. Flemmi was quoted in one FBI report as calling Frank Salemme “a jerk.” After hearing this, Frank Salemme moved, making sure DeLuca sat between himself and Flemmi. Cadillac Frank’s affection for Stevie evaporated; indeed, Salemme became “just sickened by the sight of him,” Cardinale concluded. The FBI files also clearly showed that Bulger and Flemmi had informed on Howie Winter and other Winter Hill gangsters, including Johnny Martorano, who, like Salemme, began pulling away from Flemmi in the courtroom.
Throughout, Flemmi tried to keep up his game face, coached that his only hope for freedom was to have all this surface to prove the FBI had promised not to prosecute him.
“To be in court every day with a smile on his face,” Cardinale remembered, “it’s crazy. I mean, one day I just got through telling the judge what a murderous piece of crap I thought he was, and he called me over. I thought he was going to say something to me, like, you know, ‘Don’t you ever say things like that about me again.’ He calls me over and he says, ‘Jesus, you’re doing a great job.’ It’s like, whoa! That’s all I can think: I-yiyi-yi-yi. I mean, it’s not even registering here. I had just literally gotten through saying he’d killed, you know, Halloran, that he’d done all kinds of horrendous, diabolical, murderous things, and I thought, Ohmygod, I went too far, he’s going to say something, and he says, ‘Look, you’re doing a good job.’”
THE unfolding debacle for the FBI hit rock bottom when John Morris walked into court and began testifying on April 21. In the months leading up to the hearings, Morris had negotiated immunity with the prosecutors for the crimes he’d committed. During the private debriefing with FBI agents and prosecutors that accompanied those negotiations, he wept. He’d thrown his career away by getting too close to Bulger, and he knew it. Now on the witness stand for eight grueling days, a wasted Morris sought to project the composed manner of an aging monsignor as he matter-of-factly described his descent from agent to liar and criminal, confessing to taking Bulger’s money and obstructing justice by warning Bulger about investigations.