Black Mass

Though Bulger was never known for sentimental attachments, it surprised Flemmi that he never heard another word from Bulger as his partner moved from one small city in middle America to another. Still, Bulger had done more for Flemmi than he did for most. He had warned him to stay out of Boston, and Flemmi had foolishly ignored him. It was a dumb mistake, and Whitey didn’t make those.

But Bulger had almost slipped up too. In January, shortly after trooper Tom Duffy put his gun to Flemmi’s temple, Bulger had been driving toward Boston himself. Theresa Stanley had grown tired of traveling on their extended “vacation.” Since the fall of 1994, while Bulger waited to see what would happen in Boston, they had traveled to Dublin, London, and Venice and then toured the southwestern United States. But Stanley was bored with sightseeing and tired of being alone with the aloof Bulger and his long silences. She missed her children and South Boston. In the last couple of weeks Stanley had hesitated to even ask simple questions like, where are we going now? It would only start an argument.

So in January 1995 they were making their way to the edge of Boston in stony silence, driving along route 95 in Connecticut, when Stanley heard a radio report about Flemmi’s arrest. Bulger took the next exit and headed back to New York City, where they checked into a Manhattan hotel. Bulger hung out at the hotel pay phones, getting whatever information he could. Theresa didn’t bother to ask him what was going on.

The next day they drove to a parking lot south of Boston where Stanley got out to wait for her daughter. Bulger said, “I’ll call you,” as he roared off forever. She never heard from him again.

Instead of heading off alone, he picked up his other girlfriend, Catherine Greig, and disappeared into rural America as a balding retired everyman with a younger wife.

On the road again with a different woman, Bulger lived for a while in the Louisiana bayou country and has reportedly been seen in the Midwest and Florida and even Mexico, Canada, and Ireland. Investigators traced phone calls he made from a New Orleans hotel and a restaurant in Mobile, Alabama. He stayed in touch with Kevin Weeks and some family members and even ventured back to the Boston area on a couple of occasions to rendezvous with Weeks. The meetings, which came early on, later in 1995 and in 1996, enabled Weeks to provide Bulger with some false identification and new intelligence about the ongoing investigation. Kevin O’Neil did his part too, funneling nearly $90,000 into Bulger’s bank account soon after Bulger was forced to flee. But no one outside his tight circle heard from him once he dropped off Theresa Stanley.

EXCEPT John Morris.

Morris’s last FBI station before retiring at the end of 1995 was training director at the FBI Academy in Virginia. One October afternoon his secretary told him that an insistent “Mister White” was calling. Ten months on the lam, the brazen Bulger was calling from a pay phone on the road.

He had a short message for Vino: If I’m going to jail, you’re going to jail.

“I’m taking you with me, you fuck,” Bulger said.

“I hear you,” said Morris. That night John Morris suffered a major heart attack. Bulger had nearly killed him with a phone call.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

In for a Penny, in for a Pound

Their cells were side by side on the mezzanine level of cellblock H-3 at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, number 419 belonging to Cadillac Frank Salemme and number 420 to Mafia soldier Bobby DeLuca. The seven-by-nine-foot cells had gray cement floors and walls painted a dull white. It was late summer 1996, and the racketeering case against the Mafia and Bulger and Flemmi, albeit with Bulger in absentia, was chugging along in low gear. The federal case was in discovery, a pretrial stage in every criminal case when the government discloses to the defense relevant evidence and potentially exculpatory material about the accused. The defense then studies the material, primarily to prepare for trial but even before that to see if it can gut the government’s case by finding legal fault with the way the evidence was developed. If defense lawyers can persuade the judge that all or part of the evidence was somehow obtained wrongly, the judge might throw it out. Depending on how much evidence goes, the case against the accused either shrinks or, better, evaporates.

Salemme and DeLuca huddled over a Sony tape recorder. They’d been given a homework assignment by their Boston attorney, Anthony M. Cardinale. Listen to the tapes, the lawyer had instructed—listen carefully. The lawyer had brought to the prison handfuls of tiny cassette tapes that were copies of recordings the FBI had made during covert electronic surveillances—from 98 Prince Street, Vanessa’s, Heller’s Café, a meeting of two mafiosi at a Hilton Hotel at Logan International Airport, the Mafia induction ceremony in 1989, and others.

Tony Cardinale was listening to the tapes himself, but he wanted Salemme and DeLuca listening too. Their ears were better trained for the Mafia talk. The voices belonged to their guys. All three were looking for a way to challenge the tapes’ admissibility, a way to knock them out of the ring so they could not be used in court. Listen, Cardinale instructed, for anything irregular.

Of particular interest to the lawyer were the tapes the FBI had made by using a “roving bug.” Unlike any other bug, this bug was not fixed in a ceiling or wall or beneath a lamp. Instead, this powerful and portable hand-held microphone could move, inside a dish that FBI agents aimed at people to pick up their conversation, even if they were inside a car or house. The FBI turned to a roving bug when it did not know in advance the location of a meeting, or when it otherwise lacked the time necessary to install a fixed bug or a telephone wiretap. By its mobility, the roving bug was a highly effective brand of electronic surveillance that sent chills down the spines of both guardians of privacy rights and criminal defense attorneys. Cardinale, for one, was no fan. “The roving bug is probably the most dangerous government intrusion,” he said. “In a sense, they’ve thrown out the Fourth Amendment protections. Because if you’re the target, then the government can go anywhere you go. To your house. To your mother’s house. To a church. Anywhere you are, the government has probable cause, a walking search warrant. It’s a vast expansion of electronic surveillance, and it’s a nasty little tool that should not be misused.”

Cardinale had a hunch about the Boston FBI’s use of roving bugs—namely, that the FBI was misusing them. He was convinced that the FBI, contrary to what agents swore under oath to judges, did know far enough in advance where certain meetings were going to take place. The agents knew this, he believed, because they had one or more of their confidential informants attending the meetings. If this were true—if federal judges had been misled—the defense might be able to get all or some of the tapes suppressed.