Black Mass

About two weeks later O’Donovan took a call from a fuming John Morris, who wanted to know why he was badmouthing the FBI with Whitey Bulger. O’Donovan was brought up short and concluded that either the FBI had a bug planted inside Marshall Motors or Bulger was an FBI informant.

Morris’s indiscreet call only compounded O’Donovan’s mistrust for the FBI supervisor. O’Donovan saw the agent as a schemer who maneuvered behind a friendly demeanor. Another time he’d passed along a state police tip to Morris about a fugitive on the Ten Most Wanted List. The same day Morris and several agents raced to capture the terrorist bomber. There was no joint arrest, just an FBI press conference. O’Donovan and his troopers were forgotten on the sidelines.

But none of this was proof of skullduggery. It was just troubling background that an experienced policeman never forgot. And at the Ramada, O’Donovan didn’t get into this kind of history. But neither did he and Sergeant Long disclose that the troopers, despite the setback at the Lancaster Street garage, were planning to take another run at Bulger and Flemmi later in August. Instead, O’Donovan focused on recapping the debacle at the garage, climaxed by his conviction that the FBI had compromised the bug. Between the lines the topic on the roundtable was nothing short of accusing FBI agents of a crime: obstruction of justice.

But the FBI men did not flinch. It was their kind of game. The bureau’s representative, an agent named Weldon L. Kennedy, one of the assistant supervisors in Boston, listened politely to O’Donovan of the state police. Once O’Donovan was done, Kennedy had little to say.

We’ll get back to you, he finally offered. But that was it.

After the meetings, however, the FBI in Boston went into spin cycle. Initially the bureau insisted that Morris had learned about the bug by putting two and two together: first, his own informants from the North End Mafia had detected “new faces” in the area, and second, Morris had heard that Boston police were ordered to stay away from Lancaster Street. To a professional like Morris, there was only one conclusion to draw: something investigatory was under way. Morris even offered that his approach to the Boston cop was a well-meaning bid to use his insight as a warning to the troopers.

But O’Donovan and his troopers viewed Morris’s account as disingenuous at best and, during the weeks after the Ramada Inn summit, made it clear they were not buying the FBI’s explanation. In turn, the FBI moved the tense, interagency dispute up a notch. The FBI said it had learned from its informants that any leak had come from within the state police; the collapse of the bugging operation was the state police’s own fault. The agent who had brought this new juicy intelligence to the table was John Connolly.

BACK at state police headquarters the troopers kept debating what went wrong, going over every move they’d made. They weren’t going to give up, not yet. They’d seen too much of Bulger and Flemmi.

They let a few weeks go by to give Bulger and Flemmi some room to move. Then they hit the street again, riding around to see if they could pick up the gangsters’ scent. It wasn’t easy, especially after the debacle at the garage. Bulger was crafty, a difficult mark. Behind the wheel of the Chevy he employed a number of evasive driving techniques. If he was approaching a traffic light and the light was turning yellow, he accelerated and raced through the intersection. Sometimes he simply ran the red light. He drove down a street and suddenly pulled a U-turn and came back at you. Sometimes he drove the wrong way down a one-way street, and Southie seemed cursed with one-way streets. He knew South Boston cold, and he often zigzagged his way through the old neighborhood rather than take a direct route to his destination.

But soon enough the troopers picked him up. Just before Labor Day, Long, Fraelick, and O’Malley established that Bulger and Flemmi had a new pattern, and it revolved around a bank of public pay phones outside a Howard Johnson’s restaurant right off of the Southeast Expressway.

The new routine went like this. Nicky Femia drove into the HoJo’s parking lot, circled around, and then parked. He’d saunter over to the pay phones, look around, stuff a few coins into the phone, and make a call. The black Chevy pulled in a few minutes later, carrying Bulger and Flemmi. Then they climbed out and looked around, and each went into a telephone booth to make some calls. They chatted away, their heads bobbing and turning, always looking out over the parking lot and studying any vehicle that might drive by. Once off the phone, they drove off. The troopers, if they could keep up, followed them to Southie or into the North End, where they met up with any one of the number of underworld figures they used to meet in the bay and office of the Lancaster Street garage.

So far the investigation had focused on loan-sharking and gambling, but the troopers now began to make out the hint of a drug connection. The troopers didn’t know at first who Frank Lepere was; in fact, a number of photographed wiseguys were written up in their logs as “unknown white male.” But showing one such photograph around, the troopers learned it was Lepere, a former Winter Hill associate who’d gone into the business of marijuana trafficking with Kevin Dailey of South Boston. Lepere had shown up at Lancaster Street carrying a briefcase; looking back, Long and his troopers realized “it wasn’t full of candy bars, that’s for sure.” After Labor Day the troopers had followed Bulger and Flemmi from the pay phones to South Boston, where the two gangsters met up with Kevin Dailey. This time Flemmi was the one carrying a briefcase. They met for an hour in the parking lot of a closed-down gas station across from the Gillette Company plant along the Fort Point Channel.

The next day at HoJo’s, on Friday, September 5, Femia caught the troopers’ attention when he tucked a small automatic handgun in his pocket before locking up his blue Malibu. Bulger and Flemmi pulled in, and then a short while later a gray Mercedes 450SL rolled into the lot. Driving the car was Mickey Caruana, who at forty-one was reputedly the biggest drug trafficker in New England. Caruana was the Mafia’s own drug kingpin, a brash high roller who answered to no one except Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the Providence-based godfather of New England. (In 1983 he would become a fugitive, fleeing a federal indictment for drug trafficking that charged him with netting $7.7 million between 1978 and 1981.) Bulger and Flemmi greeted Caruana. Femia stayed back while the three men went into the restaurant. The meeting lasted about ninety minutes. Outside, Bulger and Caruana shook hands heartily before splitting up.

It was all tantalizing stuff. There was another meeting with Kevin Dailey in Southie, and yet another encounter with the Mafia’s Larry Zannino, who arrived at HoJo’s in his blue Continental. Compared to the flophouse, the troopers’ command post was posh. They’d set up in a fourth-floor bedroom at HoJo’s overlooking the pay phones and were photographing and videotaping Bulger’s comings and goings.