Black Mass

TIPS like Vanessa’s were to be treasured, and unlike the other two FBI bugs cited by Connolly, Vanessa’s was truly the result of working with Flemmi and Bulger. Without their intelligence, there would have been no Back Bay bugging of the new Mafia, no extortion of Doc Sagansky.

But by the late 1980s, at what price?

The deal between the Boston FBI and Bulger was by now so out of whack that any good that came the FBI’s way was offset by a wave of concessions and corruption. Of course, such aspects of the deal never showed up in any of the official FBI paperwork—indeed, the annual reviews perfunctorily filed by Connolly and Morris always putatively put Bulger and Flemmi on notice that they fell under the bureau’s guidelines just like any other informant. No favors. No license to commit crimes. No looking the other way. For example: “Informant shall not participate in acts of violence or use unlawful techniques to obtain information for the FBI or initiate a plan to commit criminal acts.” Each year Connolly signed an internal FBI memo saying he’d given this and ten other “warnings” to Bulger and Flemmi, including: “Informant has been advised that informant’s relationship with the FBI will not protect informant from arrest or prosecution for any violation of Federal, State, or local law, except where the informant’s activity is justified by the Supervisor of SAC pursuant to appropriate Attorney General’s Guidelines.” And in all the FBI’s files on Bulger and Flemmi, covering hundreds of pages over two decades, no documents ever surfaced showing that the mobsters’ crime spree was authorized.

Instead, Connolly and Morris and the Boston FBI office had fashioned a side deal, a fine-print, invisible-ink addendum of sorts. It was simple and relatively straightforward. It called for agents to commit crimes to protect the two informants. Up had become down.

Sometimes the FBI protective zeal extended beyond Bulger himself to include sidekicks on Bulger’s rim. Bars on the lower end of West Broadway were letting out in the early morning hours of Mother’s Day 1986. A pop-pop of gunshots rang out, and in a car parked across from the entrance of Triple O’s, Tim Baldwin, twenty-three, of South Boston, an ex-con who’d just gotten out of jail, slumped forward, dead.

Within days Boston police homicide detectives had a suspect—twentysix-year-old Mark Estes, another ex-con who’d been drinking inside Triple O’s just prior to the killing. Police learned that two weeks earlier Estes had been beaten by Baldwin with a tire iron in a dispute over a girlfriend. Police had eyewitnesses to the shooting among the hundred or so people spilling out of the bars at closing time. The witnesses told police they saw Estes shoot Baldwin, saw Estes shoot at bystanders as he fled, and saw Baldwin commandeer a car driven by a woman in a futile attempt to escape.

But at a court hearing in late June the case against Estes hit a big-time snag. The witnesses recanted their identification. The murder charge was dismissed, and afterward police complained about the long-standing neighborhood “code of silence”: residents would balk at cooperating with the authorities. “I’m from South Boston,” shrugged one of the witnesses, trying to explain the turnabout to the judge. “We keep things to ourselves.”

Prosecutors vowed to continue a grand jury investigation, and by Labor Day a subpoena to appear at the grand jury was issued to Kevin O’Neil. The Bulger protégé had been running Triple O’s the night of the murder, and Sergeant Detective Brendan Bradley of the Boston police homicide squad said he had gotten information that O’Neil “knew all the details of the murder, including the name of the perpetrator.” Prosecutors wanted O’Neil to go before a grand jury and give them Estes.

But the Bulger gang and the FBI saw the subpoena differently—as a nuisance. Bradley came into work on September 5, 1986, and found a telephone message. FBI agent John Connolly had called. Bradley returned the call. “Connolly said that he wanted to talk.” They agreed to meet for coffee three days later in the lobby of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, where the FBI had its Boston bureau.

Bradley arrived first. “Connolly came out of an elevator carrying a cup of coffee for himself.” The agent was apologetic that his other hand was empty, saying, “The girls in the office love me and always buy me coffee.” What’s a popular guy to do? The two investigators went and got Bradley a cup and huddled off to the side. “What are you doing to my friend?” Connolly asked the cop.

The agent explained that he knew all about the subpoena served on O’Neil. O’Neil, said Connolly, was from a good South Boston family, and his brother was an injured Boston firefighter. He was “a good shit.”

Bradley explained that they were talking about a murder investigation, and O’Neil could apparently help the police. Connolly was unmoved. “But he’s a good guy.” Besides, he said, the dead man was “a piece of shit.”

The message was simple: a “good shit” beats a “piece of shit” any day.

Connolly did not “ask directly to withdraw the subpoena to O’Neil,” but Bradley left with the impression “that was the purpose of the conversation.” O’Neil eventually did appear before the grand jury, but he refused to testify. He cited his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Homicide detectives chased other leads; nothing broke and the investigation fizzled. Estes was a free man.

Immediately afterward, Bradley told a colleague and two homicide prosecutors about the disturbing lobbying on behalf of a Bulger protégé, apparently to “squash a grand jury subpoena.” Years later one of the prosecutors said that he did not recall Bradley complaining about Connolly. John Kiernan, a self-described friend of Connolly’s, said he did not “believe Connolly would ever do such a thing.” But the other prosecutor clearly recalled hearing from Bradley right after the detective had had coffee with the FBI agent.

James Hamrock said he had actually considered subpoenaing Connolly to the grand jury “to testify about his role and knowledge of the matter.” But to avoid worsening the already poor relations between the FBI and local prosecutors, Hamrock did not. Like others before him, he let the Connolly talk go.

IN TERMS of FBI housekeeping, John Connolly was not acting alone in keeping the Bulger house in order. John Morris was now the supervisor of a white-collar squad that mainly pursued public corruption, and in early 1985 he was running an investigation that had started as an organized crime case. The original targets were two veteran bookmakers operating in the Roxbury section of Boston, John Baharoian and Steve Puleo. Baharoian ran a gambling business out of his run-down Avenue Variety on Blue Hill Avenue. The shelves were stocked with dust and goods with expired sale dates.