To fend off Sarhatt’s concern about Bulger’s value, Morris and Connolly had come up with a master stroke—a cameo appearance inside 98 Prince Street. Flemmi could walk easily into 98 Prince Street. But now Bulger would tag along, and afterward the agents could convert the walk-on part into a starring role. It was a dream solution: save Bulger to sink Angiulo. And once in place, Sarhatt would not be able to oppose the two agents except by spurning the collaborators who helped the FBI find its Holy Grail: a surefire case against the Boston Mafia.
The last obstacle to the devious plan was some stage fright by Bulger and Flemmi. The savvy pair knew that a bug in Angiulo’s office would inevitably produce evidence of their own gambling and loan-sharking ventures with Angiulo, maybe even some old murders by Flemmi. Later Flemmi would say that he and Bulger pressed Morris and Connolly about whether they would be prosecuted for crimes revealed in bugged conversations at 98 Prince Street. Flemmi would claim the agents “assured us we wouldn’t have a problem and not to be concerned about it.” The FBI, they were repeatedly told, would look the other way on everything short of murder.
Reassured, Bulger also blew off the state police contention that word about him was out and he was in danger. He said the only gangsters up to the job of “taking him out” were the ones who would never believe he was an informant in the first place—the Boston Mafia. He said his one worry was that the perceived weakness of Winter Hill, with some of its leaders in jail and on the lam, might prompt Angiulo to make “a move” on him to reclaim territory and lost authority. Law enforcement was not even a concern worth mentioning.
INSIDE the FBI, Connolly and Bulger teamed up, collaborating on an extraordinary memorandum that reduced agent Connolly to a ghostwriter for the rampaging Bulger. Recasting the whole issue as a political attack, Connolly’s internal memo said that Bulger viewed the state police as part of a conspiracy to embarrass his brother Billy. It was a toned-down FBI version of a South Boston Tribune editorial that railed at intruders from across the Fort Point Channel. It was us-against-them.
Furthermore, the memo continued, Whitey wanted it known that the troopers were trying to make Connolly the fall guy for their own failures at the Lancaster Street garage. Look at the players, Bulger and Connolly exhorted—some of the same troopers who had worked for Norfolk County district attorney William Delahunt. They were all after revenge because of Connolly’s recent success in investigating their murderous informant, Myles Connor, the one who ratted out other people for his own crimes.
Bulger/Connolly even went so far as to put the conspiracy inside the State House. The memo said that Delahunt and a political ally, Attorney General Francis Bellotti, were plotting revenge against Billy because he bottled up legislation that would have allowed Bellotti personal use of $800,000 in campaign funds. Whitey even protested that the state police were spreading rumors that Connolly passed him information through Billy.
Connolly’s memo invoked the South Boston maxim: always retaliate when attacked by outsiders. But it misfired. Sarhatt suddenly had a highly spun polemic on his desk, a bizarre memo from an arrogant agent on behalf of an entitled informant, full of undocumented, even crazy inside baseball about political enemies seeking vengeance. For Sarhatt, it heightened rather than assuaged his original concerns.
HAVING vented his spleen, Bulger finally got down to the business of providing the FBI with some intelligence from Prince Street. It wasn’t much, but that wasn’t the point. It was something that could be dressed up and written about. Perception, not reality.
On a crisp late fall day at the end of November, the pair dropped by for a visit arranged by Flemmi. They talked with Danny Angiulo. Jerry wasn’t even there. Danny beefed about the poor football betting season, and they talked about how Vincent “The Animal” Ferrara, an up-and-comer in the Mafia, had agreed to track down a $65,000 blackjack debt that Billy Settipane owed Larry Zannino.
Later memoranda extolled the mission as vital to the Angiulo effort, but nothing of the sort showed up in Connolly’s initial report. He even credited Flemmi but not Bulger for information about Ferrara’s mission for Zannino. But a few months later, when Connolly folded the ballyhooed Prince Street visit into larger memos listing Bulger’s contributions, he claimed that Bulger provided detailed information on the momentous case, though he never explained what it was. Morris and others later testified that Bulger and Flemmi did a reconnaissance of Angiulo’s security system and that Flemmi drew an office layout for agents.
In truth, the prized informants only told the FBI what it already knew —where the doors and windows were and that no alarms were visible. Morris admitted later that the foray was helpful but not necessary to get court approval for the bug. But at the time it was enough: Bulger and Flemmi made it into the massive T3 document.
Still, even with Morris and Connolly pushing the 98 Prince Street angle, Sarhatt wanted more: a face-to-face meeting with the crime boss from South Boston to satisfy himself that retaining Bulger was the right thing to do. Connolly used one of his many connections around town to get a room at the Logan Airport Hotel on short notice.
While the meeting-on-demand had an edge to it, Whitey arrived alone and with all his brash confidence. Flanked on each side by his FBI handlers, he was the most relaxed man in the small room. Sitting across from Sarhatt in one of the cheap chairs, he clasped his hands behind his head and plunked his cowboy boots on a small table. He talked for four hours about his relationship with the bureau and his life in crime.
Bulger proclaimed himself an old-fashioned, true-blue FBI man. In fact, he said, his entire family were all admirers of the bureau, dating back to the kindness shown to them in 1956 by none other than agent Paul Rico, Flemmi’s onetime handler, who went to Bulger’s home in Southie to mollify his stricken parents after Whitey was arrested for bank robbery. It was such a transforming experience for him, Bulger told Sarhatt with a straight face, that he no longer harbored indiscriminate “hatred for all law enforcement.” He threw in kudos for his good friend from the neighborhood, saying his affinity for the FBI was cemented by his “close feelings” for Connolly.
Bulger also got in some licks at the state police, working the institutional bias against locals. He assured Sarhatt that even though the state police knew about his informant role, he was not concerned about his own safety. He recycled his standard answer that no wiseguy would ever believe he was a rat. “It would be too incredible,” he told the FBI boss, stressing his desire to remain an active informant. He also roundly denigrated O’Donovan, saying that their meeting in the late 1970s was marred by the detective’s derogatory comments about the FBI. Taking a page out of Connolly’s book, he took “great umbrage” at the criticism, standing tall for the FBI and praising Morris and Connolly for being “nothing but the most professional in every respect.”