Black Mass

The alienation that came with being a career informant was bad enough, but Flemmi withdrew further into himself the day Johnny Martorano was whisked away to commence cooperating with the prosecutors. The prison guards surely weren’t going to miss the hitman. Martorano gave them the creeps—a surly, cold-blooded troublemaker who strutted around the cellblock as if to say: Get out of my way, I’m John Martorano, and I kill people. But Martorano’s departure was devastating to Stevie Flemmi. It meant that Martorano was implicating Flemmi and Bulger in murder—particularly the 1981 assassination of Roger Wheeler. It meant that even if Flemmi’s lawyer Ken Fishman succeeded in persuading Judge Wolf to throw out pending racketeering charges, the prosecutors were preparing to come back with a new indictment for murder.

In early September, as everyone was waiting on Judge Wolf, the news broke that Martorano and the government had completed negotiating the terms of a plea bargain for Martorano’s testimony. In exchange for a sentence of twelve and a half to fifteen years, Martorano had agreed to plead guilty to twenty murders spanning three decades and three states, including the murder of Roger Wheeler, a killing he claimed was committed on orders from Bulger and Flemmi. “The people he’s giving up are people who have enjoyed the protection of the FBI for many years while committing heinous crimes,” said David Wheeler, son of the slain Jai Alai executive, voicing support for the hitman’s deal.

Flemmi retreated to his prison cell. In cellblock H-3 the former crime boss was shunned, and he spent most of his time alone, seated on his bunk. “Just there,” said one guard. “He’s like the bag of golf clubs sitting in my closet.” Flemmi didn’t have a cellblock job to keep him busy. He didn’t have anyone to talk to. “He’s about as despondent as you can get without going insane,” one officer noted. Flemmi rarely, if ever, went out on the rec deck for the fresh air or the sun. It was the eve of one of the most eagerly awaited court rulings in the biggest organized crime case in Boston’s history, and Flemmi’s face had turned pallid, almost translucent. His skin had turned the color of the prison walls, one guard observed—a ghostly “popcorn white.”

TONY CARDINALE, the lawyer who had kicked open the Pandora’s box hiding the FBI’s affair with Bulger and Flemmi, began the day the ruling finally came out with a workout at the Boston Athletic Club. Then he picked up his associate John Mitchell, who’d flown in from New York City, at his hotel. They swung by the courthouse, where a clerk handed the lawyers a box containing seven copies of the ruling. Immediately Cardinale dispatched a messenger to take a copy down to the Plymouth prison for Frank Salemme. Then, huddled in shirtsleeves in Cardinale’s office, the Dunkin Donuts coffee and donuts spread out on the desk, the two lawyers opened up the thick ruling and began reading.

Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr would later wisecrack that Mark Wolf must have fashioned himself the Edward Gibbon of New England organized crime, penning The Rise and Fall of the Bulger Empire: it ran 661 pages. Cardinale and Mitchell both enjoyed the way Wolf opened his treatise, quoting from Lord Acton. “In 1861,” the judge began, “Lord Acton wrote that ‘every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice. ’” To that the judge added: “This case demonstrates that he was right.”

The donuts sat uneaten. The lawyers couldn’t put the ruling down. The legal part—the immediate impact on the status of the racketeering case—was inconclusive. For example, the judge refused to find that all of the protection the FBI had provided Bulger and Flemmi—much of it illegal—amounted to blanket immunity from prosecution. But he had decided that some of the wiretap evidence was tainted by past FBI promises to Bulger and Flemmi and that those tapes would never be used against them. The judge said he was going to suppress that evidence, and possibly more. With that, the racketeering case seemed to be hanging by a thread. But to reach a final decision on the disputed evidence the judge had decided he would need still more information, drawn from even more pretrial hearings. “In essence,” concluded Wolf, “the record for deciding Flemmi’s motions to dismiss and suppress is incomplete. Therefore, the court will hold the hearings necessary to determine whether this case must be dismissed and, if not, the scope of the evidence to be excluded at trial.” It meant that, for now, the case would go on.

But the legal part of the judge’s ruling was not the story of the day. The hard news was the judge’s “findings of facts” about the FBI and Bulger and Flemmi. More than half of the text—368 pages—was devoted to factual findings about all that had gone wrong in the FBI’s deal with Bulger, judicial findings resulting from sworn testimony and the mountains of FBI documents and files.

The judge acknowledged that Bulger and Flemmi were “very valuable and valued confidential informants” for the FBI, but then proceeded to describe in minute detail the corruption, rule-breaking, and misconduct that defined the deal, almost from its start three decades earlier. The leaks—from the Lancaster Street garage to the DEA’s car bug to the Baharoian wire—were all there, along with the long list of tips the crime bosses got about other wiseguys who posed a threat to them. “In an effort to protect Bulger and Flemmi, Morris and Connolly also identified for them at least a dozen other individuals who were either FBI informants or sources for other law enforcement agencies.” The judge cited the Brian Halloran leak and the fact that, a few weeks after he had talked to the FBI, “Halloran was killed.”

The judge concluded that, to protect Bulger and Flemmi, agents essentially fictionalized the FBI’s internal records on a regular basis, both to overstate their value and to minimize the extent of their criminal activities. The FBI’s files showed “recurring irregularities with regard to the preparation, maintenance, and production in this case of documents damaging to Bulger and Flemmi.” And despite Connolly’s claims to the contrary, Wolf ruled that the handler did indeed handle Morris’s bribe money. “Morris solicited and received through Connolly $1,000 from Bulger and Flemmi.”

The judge also cleared up some of the smaller details of the sordid saga. Despite Billy Bulger’s public comments to the contrary, the judge ruled that the powerful politician had in fact made a cameo appearance. “William, who was the President of the Massachusetts Senate and lived next door to the Flemmis, came to visit while Ring and Connolly were there.”