first of many.
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Given the fast pace and short memory of law enforcement, the Green case drifted unnoticed into limbo. Bulger backed off Green because of the heat, while Delahunt assumed that the FBI was pursuing the issue. It would be months before the district attorney realized that nothing had been done on an easily made case.
About a year after the initial contact Delahunt ran into the top federal prosecutor, Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan, at a social function. “Whatever happened with that Green thing?,” Delahunt asked him.
“We checked it out, but there was nothing there,” he told Delahunt.
Delahunt shrugged and thought, Okay, that happens. “And I meant it,” Delahunt said later. “Cases don’t work out.”
But this one gnawed at him because, every time he thought about it, things didn’t compute—a district attorney as a witness who could put notorious gangsters at the scene and an owner’s compelling testimony. Why hadn’t the FBI picked up the ball and run hard with it against the infamous Bulger and Flemmi?
Five years would go by before some answers began to crystallize for Delahunt. Over time his office’s relations with the Boston FBI would sour. Tensions between different police agencies and different prosecutors’ offices were not uncommon. It came with the turf, in Boston or in any jurisdiction. But this was different.
First came a sensational murder case that Delahunt’s office got involved with not long after the Green matter was turned over to the FBI in early 1977. To solve the murder case and locate the bodies of two eighteen-year-old women from Quincy, Delahunt and his state police investigators cut a deal with an informant by the name of Myles Connor. Connor was a vicious con man who had a high IQ and a long history of trouble. He was a rock musician and an accomplished art thief and drug dealer. His past included a 1966 shootout with a state trooper who was badly injured. Even in the venal world of informants, Connor was a mixed bag of trouble. But he knew where the bodies were buried.
Nonetheless, cutting a deal with Connor was controversial, both inside Delahunt’s office and beyond. The FBI was enraged because Delahunt, to win Connor’s help, had negotiated his early release from prison. Even though with Connor’s help Delahunt would find the bodies of the missing women and then convict the murderer at a trial in 1978, the FBI angrily challenged the district attorney’s unholy alliance. It was the FBI that had put Connor behind bars on a stolen art conviction. FBI agent John Connolly himself began urging the US attorney to investigate what role, if any, Connor had in the grisly murders. Eventually Connor was charged with planning the killings. He went to trial and was convicted, an outcome that was overturned on appeal. During the subsequent retrial Connor was acquitted.
Delahunt had known that cutting a deal with Connor would prove controversial. Key staff in his own office, whose judgment he relied on daily, had told him as much. But he’d had no idea the situation would explode into the open warfare that followed, with angry exchanges in courtrooms, in the newspapers, and on television as well as in more sinister ways that would have seemed unimaginable at the start.
Some of the warfare got personal. One day John Connolly contacted one of Delahunt’s top assistants, John Kivlan. The young prosecutor was known to have had reservations about using Connor as an informant. Connolly called Kivlan and set up a lunch date. Kivlan showed up thinking the FBI agent wanted to discuss another murder investigation. But quickly Connolly began asking a lot of questions about Delahunt and the deal he’d cut with Connor. The FBI agent was especially curious to know if Delahunt and the state police had believed that Connor was guilty of the murders but had given him a pass anyway to bask in the glory and publicity that came with recovering the bodies.
“It wasn’t long,” Kivlan said later, “before I realized the lunch was about getting some dirt on Bill.”
Kivlan was taken aback by Connolly’s overture. “I thought to myself, ‘He must think everyone is an informer,’” Kivlan recalled. “I guess he thought my concerns would amount to trading information with him. It was a short lunch.”
Looking back, and long after telling Delahunt about the bizarre encounter with Connolly, Kivlan would wonder if the rabid battle between Delahunt’s office and Connolly’s FBI was less about Connor and more about Bulger. In any case, when Connolly could have been busy fighting crime, he was spending much of his time in a down-and-dirty public relations battle. In fact, crime fighting was becoming less of a clear-cut priority for the young agent from South Boston.
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Delahunt had limped away from the bruising encounter with the FBI over using Myles Connor as an informant, chewed up in the FBI public relations maw. Federal officials publicly chided him for using an informant who was involved in the kinds of crimes he was giving information about. By and large the media sided with the FBI, mostly on the strength of John Connolly’s personal ties with reporters at the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald and with some television reporters. Indeed, Connolly was fast becoming a public relations maven and a talented improviser with the truth. Garrulous and engaging, he was breaking free of the grim, button-down G-man persona, a welcome change from the aloof, stone-faced demeanor of most federal agents. Connolly not only occasionally talked to reporters but also regularly courted them.
But this was early on, and there were only a few within law enforcement who suspected the FBI was tilting Bulger’s way. Delahunt was one of them, but he had learned there was a price to pay for confronting the Boston FBI. It was hardball. And being Boston, it was personal.
In 1980 a rumor took hold that Delahunt had had an affair with a waitress from Quincy that ended badly, with a door broken at her apartment and raised voices overheard by neighbors. The media heard about it, and one television reporter began calling the woman. The calls continued for the next two years, and each time the woman was urged to take Delahunt to court and go on air for an interview. But each time the woman said there was no case, that there was nothing to the rumor, “not a speck of truth.” If any of it were true, she said, “Delahunt would not be DA today, believe me.”
But the media weren’t the only parties interested in the rumors. Two FBI agents showed up at the restaurant in Quincy one day in late 1982 asking for the waitress. The chef told the agents she didn’t work there anymore. The agents took down some notes, thanked the chef, and left. They never called again.
Then there was the call the woman got in January 1983. It was from a man in her past. She later described the old friend to local police as “someone on the other side.”
The two met for a drink in a Quincy lounge. The friend, Stevie Flemmi, shocked the woman by knowing about the Delahunt rumor. Flemmi really just wanted to know one thing: was it true?
No, it wasn’t, the woman said one more time. Stevie never called again either.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bob ’n’ Weave
The Boston FBI was convinced it needed Bulger and Flemmi, and Paul Rico, Dennis Condon, and John Connolly were going to make the match work, even if that meant dispensing with the Frank Greens of the world, and even if it meant juggling three regulatory hot potatoes—the FBI manual of operations, the attorney general’s guidelines for handling criminal informants, and federal criminal statutes. Luckily for them, Rico had fashioned a “unique” style in his approach to the messy business of managing informants and had set the tone for other handlers in Boston: rules were made to be broken.
It was all worth it, they believed, to get at the Mafia. Throughout the United States the FBI’s field offices were under great pressure to develop informants of a certain kind—top-echelon informants—to wage war against the mob. Much of the pressure was fallout from how embarrassingly late the FBI had been in acknowledging the Mafia. The problem had been J. Edgar Hoover’s intransigence. He preferred piling up statistics on bank robberies and hunting down Communists to taking a hard look at evidence of the Mafia’s existence.
For instance,