Connolly and, before him, the silver-haired Paul Rico, Morris was like the team manager jealous of the jocks who started and starred in the big game. And not long after transferring to Boston in 1972 he’d even sought to show that he too had the right stuff.
He was toiling on a stubborn loan-sharking investigation and had made little headway trying to persuade a wiseguy named Eddie Miani to become a cooperating witness. Having failed one on one, Morris and two other agents one night went to Miani’s house and crawled around under his car. “It was a wire and a blasting cap,” Morris said later, “as if you were going to rig an explosive device on it.” Then they left and hurriedly placed an anonymous call to the local police reporting unknown persons monkeying with a car outside Miani’s house. The police went to the scene, roused Miani, and showed him the mangled bombing device. The very next day Morris was back in Miani’s face: See, I told you. Your “friends” are trying to kill you. Get smart. Come with us. The FBI is your only hope.
Miani told Morris to get lost, and the dirty car bomb trick remained the agents’ secret. But the bit of law breaking had given Morris a taste for the wild side, so that by the time he assumed command of the Organized Crime Squad he’d already developed the flexibility that made him a fitting match with Connolly. Next to faking bombs, fooling with the FBI’s paperwork was lightweight; starting with the race-fixing case, the lies they wrote seemed to come easy.
For example, Morris’s 1978 memo might have reported that Bulger was out of the informant business, but Bulger was never told about his putative change in status, and Connolly continued to see him as if nothing had changed. Moreover, Morris flat-out lied in a later document saying that during the race-fixing probe Connolly had “discontinued contacts”; it was just not true. Then, in the 1980s, there would be a three-year period when Flemmi was closed down as an informant. But no one ever told Flemmi, and during those three years Connolly would file forty-six FBI reports of contacts he and other agents had with Flemmi during the supposed shutdown. No FBI manager would ever ask Connolly to explain the large number of contacts he and other agents were having with a closed informant. As long as the paperwork appeared in order, all was well.
For his part, Morris at the time had other, more pressing concerns than someone else’s race-fixing case. The ambitious supervisor was determined to have his Organized Crime Squad devise a plan to do what no police agency had yet been able to accomplish—put a bug in Gennaro Angiulo’s North End office. More immediately, Morris was up to his eyeballs overseeing another investigation already under way.
This one involved the widespread hijacking of trucks in New England. The joint probe between the Boston FBI and the Massachusetts State Police was given the code name Operation Lobster. Dozens of agents and troopers had been assigned to the case, which was built around an undercover FBI agent, Nick Gianturco, who had become Nick Giarro. He’d been brought in for the job from the FBI office in New York to minimize the chances that the local hijackers would detect him. In fact, John Connolly was the one who’d nominated Gianturco. The two agents had worked on the same squad together when Connolly was stationed in the Big Apple, and they had remained friends ever since.
Gianturco was set up in a ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse in the Hyde Park section of Boston that was wired for sound and closed-circuit television. Just a few doors down the FBI and state police had rented another site, a “monitoring plant,” to work the video cameras and microphones. Just a few more blocks away investigators had rented an apartment to use as a command post.
Midway through 1977 Gianturco opened for business, posing as a fence to an expanding lineup of hijackers, many of whom operated out of Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood. The stolen merchandise Gianturco recovered ran the gamut—flour, liquor, shaving products, furniture, tool boxes, beer, ski jackets, sports coats and other clothing, heavy construction equipment, cigarettes, coffee, and microwave ovens. Fifteen months later, in the fall of 1978, Gianturco’s field supervisors were writing FBI headquarters that “Boston now has a date of 10/31/78 as a possible date of cessation of the operation phase.” By then more than $2.6 million in stolen goods had been recovered.
While Morris was busy with Operation Lobster, Connolly was meeting with Flemmi, and at one of the meetings the separate investigations suddenly came together. “It was an accidental statement made to me by a friend of mine,” Flemmi recalled. “He had said to me that there was a fence, that this guy was wide open, and he was buying trailer loads of stolen goods. They were eyeing him as a potential [robbery] target because of the money he was handling, but the reason they were reluctant to do anything was that they didn’t know if he was connected to anyone. So my friend asked me about it. He says: ‘Can you find out if he’s connected with anyone?’ Because people wanted to do something, and they didn’t want to take the chance of doing something and have repercussions.”
Flemmi later insisted he had no idea at the time that Connolly’s FBI pal was working undercover as the fence in question. But Connolly was immediately concerned for Gianturco’s safety. He picked up the telephone to give his friend a heads-up.
“I got a call from Mr. Connolly at home,” Gianturco said later, “and he asked me if I was going, if I had a meeting set up with the Charlestown people.”
Nick Gianturco told Connolly that, yeah, he actually did have a meeting scheduled for later that night at the warehouse.
“He told me not to go,” recalled Gianturco, “because, he said, they were going to kill me.” Gianturco, weary from the long months of living an undercover life, was shaken to the core. He was tired of looking over his shoulder all the time, commuting between Hyde Park and his role as Nick Giarro to his home and real life as a husband and father. Right after talking to Connolly, he bailed out of the meeting, and in the years to come he would say how grateful he was to Connolly for watching his back.
In the days following the incident Connolly did not document the episode in any FBI report. He did not notify the two FBI and state police field managers of Operation Lobster who were responsible for the safety of “Nick Giarro.” Connolly told Morris about it, and the Flemmi tip was transformed as it was passed along, just as in the child’s game of telephone, deepening in seriousness from a possible shakedown to a threat of murder. The more they talked about it, the more they dramatized the idea of a heart-pounding, midnight scramble that resulted in saving an agent’s life, the more they now had in hand a profound illustration of the importance of the deal they had with Bulger and Flemmi. The “accidental tip” that began with Flemmi seemed suddenly to capture the essence of why Connolly and Morris had to do what they could to keep Bulger and Flemmi for the FBI.
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As 1978 came to a close the FBI handler and the FBI supervisor had a big problem looming on the horizon: the gathering storm of the race-fixing case. Instead of fizzling, the case building around Fat Tony Ciulla had taken off. For Howie Winter, Ciulla was turning out to be the biggest insult to a string of injuries he and his gang had suffered. In a state prosecution Winter had been convicted of extortion and was sitting in a Massachusetts state prison as Ciulla was unloading before the federal grand jury in Boston. Hit by a run of huge losses in his New England sports-betting operations, Winter had actually gone to see the Mafia’s Gennaro Angiulo before his incarceration and borrowed more than $200,000.
The November 6, 1978, issue of Sports Illustrated featured a cover story about Ciulla and his life in crime as the “master race fixer.” The newly minted government witness was paid $10,000 by the magazine for the long piece, which mentioned the ongoing Boston probe. Down in Mt. Holly, New Jersey, Ciulla was busy walking through a dress rehearsal of sorts for the upcoming Boston case, testifying as the key witness at a local trial against nine jockeys and trainers.
It all worried John Connolly. He didn’t care about Howie Winter, but he cared about Bulger and Flemmi. In a sense, the New Jersey trial was not the immediate threat; that trial involved only the jockeys. But Ciulla’s role in the New Jersey trial was nonetheless making life in Boston miserable. Testifying against the jockeys, Ciulla was talking publicly for the first time about how the race-fixing scheme worked. During the same weeks when Connolly was scrambling with information he’d gotten from Bulger and Flemmi that might affect undercover agent Nick Gianturco’s safety, Fat Tony was