Black Mass

Eventually the Wolf hearings even changed locations, from the building in Post Office Square, which had housed the federal court for sixty-five years, to a new $220 million facility overlooking Boston Harbor, an area known as Fan Pier, right in South Boston.

The hearings were shut down for a recess in July, and by the time they resumed in early August a key participant was absent. Frank Salemme took his seat next to Bobby DeLuca, and next to DeLuca sat Stevie Flemmi. But Johnny Martorano was gone. He’d heard more than he could take. He’d sat grim-faced as agents, cops, and officials testified about Bulger’s deal. He’d listened to how the FBI protected Bulger and Flemmi from the 1979 horse race-fixing case while the rest of the gang, including Martorano, were indicted. He’d learned that after fleeing to avoid arrest and living on the lam in Florida for more than a decade, he’d been found by the FBI because Bulger and Flemmi told the agency where he was. Disgusted, Martorano agreed to cooperate with prosecutors against Bulger and Flemmi. Quietly, he was moved out of cellblock H-3 in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility on Thursday, July 20, 1998, where he’d been kept along with the others, and was ushered to a secret “safe house” for a debriefing. Martorano was busy telling investigators about the murders that he, Bulger, and Flemmi had committed that had long gone unsolved. The defection shook up Flemmi.

Nevertheless, even after months of the FBI testimony, the colorful Connolly sideshow, and the sharp reversal by Martorano, only when Stevie Flemmi took the witness stand did the lengthy hearings finally reach a climax. His back against the wall, he’d launched the “informant defense,” and he had to persuade Judge Wolf that the government had promised not to prosecute him. It was tricky business whenever a criminal defendant took the witness stand, and in these pretrial hearings Flemmi and Fishman wanted Flemmi to go into deep detail about his deal with the FBI while avoiding admissions to any crimes—except crimes he insisted were approved by the FBI.

FLEMMI usually wore a black-and-white nylon jogging suit to court. But on the day he took the stand, August 20, 1998, the bespectacled crime boss wore a crisp white shirt and maroon tie under a gray, herringbone sport jacket.

“Mr. Flemmi, it may be easier if you pick that microphone up a little,” the judge instructed a few minutes after Flemmi had begun his testimony.

Flemmi adjusted the mike. “How’s that, Judge?”

“And pull the seat a little closer.”

Ken Fishman, handling Flemmi carefully, opened right where it mattered most to the defense—at the dinner at John Morris’s house in the spring of 1985, during which, Flemmi said, Morris had promised that the gangsters could freely commit any crime “short of murder.” Fishman walked Flemmi through his history of the work he and then Bulger did with Paul Rico, John Connolly, John Morris, and Jim Ring. Throughout, Flemmi, at Fishman’s encouragement, emphasized the protection the FBI promised—a central tenet to the deal from day one.

“It was one of our themes: how much protection do we have? We’ve always stressed that, and they’ve always answered that in the affirmative, that we were protected, we wouldn’t be prosecuted,” Flemmi said just minutes into his first day on the witness stand. “We insisted on it. We wouldn’t be involved if we weren’t protected. It’s common sense. I wasn’t proud of it, and I wanted assurances. And with that I can speak for Mr. Bulger.”

There were times when Flemmi even waxed patriotic. “I believe I was performing a service for the United States government in my role as an informant,” he told Fred Wyshak once the prosecution’s turn came to ask the questions. Flemmi said he and Bulger had helped the FBI “to destroy the LCN, and I believed whatever I was doing I was doing in the interest of the United States government.”

The government’s chief prosecutor winced.

“Do you think it was in the interest of the United States government to control the flow of drugs into South Boston?” he asked. “Is that what you think, Mr. Flemmi?”

“I’ll assert the Fifth on that.”

Wyshak was no friend of Flemmi’s. The two sparred for hours over Flemmi’s “public service” as an informant.

“You had a good deal going,” chided Wyshak, pushing Flemmi to cut the phony high-minded spin. “You were committing crimes at will, putting money in your pockets, and, in your view, being protected from prosecution?”

FLEMMI: You’re forgetting one thing, Mr. Wyshak. The LCN was taken down. That was their [FBI’s] main goal. They were completely satisfied with that. We fulfilled our bargain.

WYSHAK: Did you think, Mr. Flemmi, that you and Mr. Bulger singlehandedly took the LCN down?

FLEMMI: I’ll tell you something, Mr. Wyshak, we did a hell of a job.

WYSHAK: That’s what you think?

FLEMMI: I think we did. The FBI thought we did.

WYSHAK: And when the FBI did that, you and Mr. Bulger were top dog in town, weren’t you?

FLEMMI: I’ll assert the Fifth on that.

WYSHAK: And that was really your goal throughout this entire period, was to gain control of criminal activities in Boston? Isn’t that true, Mr. Flemmi?

FLEMMI: We had formed a partnership, the FBI and I. How we benefited from it with their assistance or with their okay—yes, we did all right.

There were even times when Flemmi got mixed up—especially about whether he was supposed to view the leaks he’d gotten from FBI agents as either legal or illegal acts. The leaks, he argued, were proof of his claim of FBI protection. But would it matter to Judge Wolf if the leaking were illegal? Flemmi more than once wasn’t sure what position to stake out. At one point Wyshak was pushing Flemmi on the range of services Connolly provided Bulger and Flemmi—from warning the crime bosses about wiretaps to burying complaints against them, such as the extortion of Stephen and Julie Rakes—when the prosecutor suddenly asked: “You knew Mr. Connolly was breaking the law in his relationship with you, didn’t you?”

FLEMMI: Yes.

WYSHAK: In fact, do you know Stephen Rakes—Stippo?

FLEMMI: I’ll assert the Fifth on that.

WYSHAK: Well, you told us that—

FLEMMI: Excuse me, Mr. Wyshak. I just wanted to clarify one thing, when you asked me a question about did I know he was breaking the law. As far as I’m concerned, everything he was doing was legal—illegal—excuse me, legal.

WYSHAK: Now you’re saying you didn’t know he was breaking the law?