But it had been way too close for comfort. The scrutiny was tiring, and not the good life the gangsters had in mind as part of their deal with the Boston FBI. So, in April 1985, just days after Flemmi’s repartee with the DEA agents at the Marconi Club, Bulger and Flemmi were looking for reassurance that things were okay and would stay that way. John Morris was back in town, and it was time to pay him a visit.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Black Mass
Tight-lipped and intense, the John Morris of 1985 was still enjoying the glow of having overseen the successful bugging of Mafia headquarters in early 1981. He was viewed as a seasoned veteran, thoughtful and determined. He was also leading the double life of a libertine, as were the other members of the cabal—John Connolly, Whitey Bulger, and Stevie Flemmi. Each had a public pose that contrasted sharply with a private reality. Morris and Connolly were FBI agents by day who at night caroused with the two gangsters they now zealously protected, even if it meant bending rules and breaking laws. Bulger and Flemmi feasted off reputations as the ultimate stand-up guys who cunningly outwitted the police at every turn, when in fact they had for years given the FBI tidbits about underworld friends and foes and enjoyed a protective shield from the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
Morris was essentially in Bulger’s back pocket—having solicited and taken $1,000 in 1982 to fly Debbie Noseworthy to Georgia. And during the early days of 1984, amid the start-up of the DEA’s Operation Beans, Morris had taken a second bite from the apple Bulger held out for him.
“Connolly called me and said, ‘I have something for you from these guys. Why don’t you come on over and pick it up?’ I went over; I picked it up. It was a case of wine. On the way out he said, ‘Be careful with it, there’s something in the bottom for you.’ So I took the case of wine, and then when I opened the case I found that there was an envelope on the bottom that contained $1,000 in it.” It was as if Morris needed more moments like this one to keep the high going. The concern was not whether he should march into the office of the special agent in charge of the Boston office and turn them all in; instead, his narrow eyes darted this way and that to make sure no one was watching. He picked up a corkscrew, opened a bottle, pocketed the Bulger money, and savored it all.
But if Bulger saw the case of wine as a second premium on his FBI insurance plan, he was suddenly disappointed. The FBI that considered Morris a model of integrity dispatched the supervisor off to Miami to oversee a special team of agents investigating—of all things—the corruption of an FBI agent in Florida. The timing was horrible, given the detectable increase in scrutiny Bulger and Flemmi were getting from the drug agents and the Quincy police. Throughout the remainder of the year and into early 1985, Bulger and Flemmi weathered Operation Beans with the help of Connolly and, to a lesser degree, Jim Ring. It had not been easy, however, and now that federal drug agents were stymied and John Morris was resurfacing, it seemed like the time for a reunion. Time to clarify their secret alliance over a good meal. Time to review some old business—Operation Beans—as well as discuss pressing new concerns, such as the long-delayed, upcoming racketeering trial of the Mafia’s Gennaro Angiulo, featuring the FBI’s extensive tape recordings of Mafia talk at 98 Prince Street. The trial—the biggest criminal trial in Boston in decades—was finally due to start any week, and Bulger and Flemmi had a list of worries about the tapes.
Going into the dinner, Connolly had already disclosed the fact that Mafia leaders Jerry Angiulo and Larry Zannino often got to talking on the tapes about Bulger and Flemmi, “conversations,” said Flemmi, about “different criminal acts.” Of particular concern to Flemmi was the Mafia talk about his role in the 1967 slayings of the three Bennett brothers. But there was plenty more. Connolly provided a full telling of the wiseguy dialogues. “The Bennetts were mentioned on the tapes,” Flemmi said, and John Connolly also “mentioned the gambling, if I can recall, some bookmakers on there that were—that we were involved with. I think Jerry [Angiulo] mentioned the fact that Whitey had all of South Boston, Stevie had all of the South End, and we were extracting X amount of dollars from bookmakers. He mentioned an amount—Whitey probably gets . . . $50,000 a week from extracting payments from bookmakers.”
Flemmi and Bulger were alarmed. Prior to the 1981 bugging of the Mafia, this was the exact situation Bulger and Flemmi had voiced concern about—that even if they avoided appearing at 98 Prince Street the Mafia bosses would nonetheless talk about their mutual business interests. They needed reassurance of a promise Morris and Connolly had made at the time, that in return for their help against Angiulo the tapes would not be used against them.
While Morris was off in Miami, the gangsters had talked all of this over with Connolly, asking the FBI handler about the precise danger the tapes posed to them. Connolly tried comforting them. “That’s when he said not to be concerned about it,” Flemmi recalled. But better to hear the same from Morris, to have the promise restated.
“The meeting was set up by John Connolly,” Flemmi recalled. Connolly got in touch with Bulger, and Bulger lined up Flemmi. “We just became available.” They picked a weekday night in early spring. The city was emerging from the darkness of winter, and the weather was mild, hinting at summer. Connolly picked up Bulger and Flemmi in a South Boston parking lot. He said another old friend would be joining them, Dennis Condon, the former FBI agent who’d been with them all at the start of their deal in 1975 and was now a high-ranking public safety official overseeing the state police. Condon was an elder statesman, a veteran of FBI tricks from the I960s. “They knew each other,” Morris recalled, “and Connolly and I felt that Condon would enjoy the opportunity of seeing them.” It went without saying that having Dennis Condon attend what was essentially a fifty-thousand-mile checkup in the FBI’s Bulger deal made sense. Condon was ex-FBI and now sitting atop the state police, and Bulger and Flemmi were constantly distracted by the attention they were drawing from other police agencies. Why not try to touch as many bases as possible?
Driving into the rush-hour traffic, Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi headed out of the city for dinner with John Morris.
MORRIS, meanwhile, was busy puttering around the kitchen of his Lexington home. He seasoned the steaks and got the meat ready for the oven. He set the table in the dining room for five. His wife Rebecca would not be joining them. “I refused to cook dinner for them,” she said later. John might be upbeat about his dinner party, but his wife was downcast. They circled one another in the kitchen, wary and mistrustful. Her head shaking, she voiced again her strong opposition to having two gangsters in their home—what about their son and daughter? John tried calmly to explain again the necessity of maintaining Bulger’s and Flemmi’s trust. Rebecca knew nothing about the Bulger money or any of the other peculiarities of her husband’s ties to the crime bosses. But she knew something wasn’t right. Rebecca had been an FBI wife long enough to sense that something was irregular about the long-running arrangement.