Black Mass

The agents kept at it nonetheless, but as the nights passed they were never able to get enough words strung together to put together a criminal storyline. They saw Bulger sitting in the car with Patrick Nee, who worked as messenger between Bulger and Joe Murray, but they couldn’t quite capture what was said. They watched a Bulger subordinate climb into the car and deliver a pile of money to the crime boss, but once again, their talk was broken up. They listened to an angry Bulger curse another underling for daring to come for him at Theresa Stanley’s. Bulger read the miscreant the riot act, saying he would “clip” anyone who came there. Family had nothing to do with business, he said.

No investigation had ever caught Bulger on tape before, even in fractured form, but the investigators realized that if they wanted to make a case they could take into court they were going to have to improve the quality of their recordings. On the morning of March 7, at 2:40 A.M., Reilly and Bergeron made a final attempt to tinker with the position of the microphone. “We thought he was asleep because normally he would be asleep around two-thirty in the morning,” recalled Reilly. “We came around the building, and he came out of the condo. He saw us, and we saw him, and we took off and ran.” Bergeron said an agitated Bulger jumped into his car with his girlfriend Greig and began driving in circles around the parking lot. “He began driving around like a madman, screaming at Greig, real hyper and suspicious and screaming he knows all about the cops.”

Flemmi was out of town, in Mexico, and a jumpy Bulger hunkered down. Eluding the investigators, he met with John Connolly the very next day, on March 8. Then, three days later, DEA agents Reilly and Boeri followed Bulger as he drove his black Chevy into a garage beside the liquor mart in Southie.

The next words they heard from Bulger signaled the end.

“He’s right—they did put a bug in the car.”

The agents jumped out of their van and raced in to retrieve their electronic surveillance equipment. The last thing agents ever wanted was for targets to know exactly what kind of technology was being used against them. They found Bulger tearing open the door panel and Kevin Weeks standing nearby holding a radio frequency detector that located bugs just like the bug the DEA had used. Facing down Reilly, Boeri, and two other DEA agents inside the garage, Bulger resumed the take-charge bounce that usually characterized his interplay with cops. He said he was surprised they’d been able to install a bug. “I got a pretty good alarm system,” he said as Reilly stepped forward and fumbled around the door panel to pull out the microphone. Bulger mentioned he knew something was up after bumping into Bergeron and Reilly in the condo’s parking lot a few nights earlier. He did not, however, mention his FBI contacts.

Boeri noticed that Bulger wore a fancy belt buckle—inscribed with the words “ALCATRAZ: I934—I963.” Making small talk, the agent pointed out the handsome buckle, but Bulger didn’t dare mention how he’d come to possess it.

The crime boss and the agents kept up their banter, with Bulger nagging them for details about when the bug was installed and how long it had been running. He guessed “seven or nine days.” Weeks offered his guess the bug had been in place for about two months. They probably had a bug in his car too, Weeks added.

“You want to buy my car—cheap?” Weeks wisecracked.

Boeri asked Bulger where Flemmi was.

“He’s around,” Bulger lied.

The talk went around in circles. Hey, announced Bulger at one point to the DEA agents, “We’re all good guys.”

How so?

“You’re the good good guys. We’re the bad good guys.”

The agents took their equipment and went home. Two days later Boeri and Bergeron were driving past Theresa’s house when Bulger waved them down. He kept up his gangster panache, advising the investigators they shouldn’t believe all the things they heard about him. He showed them that the car panel had come loose and asked for their help securing it.

“Pretty ingenious installation,” Bulger told Boeri, returning again to the bug, fishing for information.

Flemmi returned from Mexico and ran into Boeri and Reilly in the parking lot of the Marconi Club in Roxbury, where he often hung out. They talked about the “excitement” earlier at the garage over the bug. Flemmi asked about the quality of the transmissions. “Doesn’t the cold weather affect the batteries?” he taunted. The agents said everything worked fine. They weren’t going to give an inch.

Flemmi urged that they all get along. Instead of chasing each other, they should be scratching each other’s backs. “Whaddya want?” he joked. “We don’t need Miranda. We can wrap a rope around anyone’s neck. Just tell us what you want.” Then he asked where all this was headed. He hoped the agents were not going to bother them much longer. “You’re not going to make Jimmy and me a lifetime investigation?”

“Well, we’re really just getting started,” said Boeri.

Bulger and Flemmi knew this was bluff. The two gangsters had already huddled again with Connolly. “John Connolly said that Jim Ring told him that the DEA investigation was collapsing, or it collapsed, words to that effect,” Flemmi said. “Connolly told me. We had frequent meetings at John Connolly’s house, independent of the meetings we had with supervisors.”

In the garage, the moment Bulger had uttered the line “He’s right—there is a bug in the car,” DEA agent Reilly was convinced that the FBI had tipped off Bulger. Reilly had his suspicions but couldn’t prove exactly who in the FBI Bulger was referring to. But the words were like the exclamation point to long-harbored concerns about Bulger’s ties to the FBI. From then on, Reilly, Boeri, and Bergeron all believed their effort was compromised.

Even so, no governmental inquiry was ever undertaken to examine this belief. No postmortem was conducted to try to find out exactly why Operation Beans failed. Everyone walked away, moved on. It was as if yet another investigatory dud gave rise to a numbness, with police agencies now unwittingly ready to accept the FBI’s protective shield of Bulger and Flemmi as a fact of life, the way things were in Boston, part of the city’s fabric.

Outwardly, the gangsters made the best of it. “I didn’t think they appeared to be concerned,” Ring recalled. Bulger and Flemmi acted like the car bug was a pretty funny joke. “It was more a matter of, I guess I’d have to call it ‘Gotcha.’”

The truth was that the close call was no laughing matter. The year-long chase had proved grueling. Bulger and Flemmi had felt harassed at every turn. Despite the FBI, the DEA had actually managed to accomplish a first—a bug on Bulger. Detective Bergeron and DEA agents Reilly and Boeri had revealed the man behind the myth, though not in a way that could result in a criminal indictment. But what Bergeron and the agents knew would remain locked in confidential law enforcement files. John Connolly, Bulger, and Flemmi resumed their anti-drug mantra. They had beaten the DEA’s Operation Beans.