in Boston. Ciulla at first hesitated, like an actor setting up his best lines.
“Your honor, I have been in front of federal grand juries with these names. I don’t know if I am allowed to say these names here in open court.”
The local judge was unimpressed with Ciulla’s dilemma. “You are here now,” the judge replied from the bench. He ordered Ciulla to identify the key partners in Boston.
There was to be no holding back, and Ciulla didn’t.
“Fellows that were partners of mine,” he began.
“One’s name is Howie Winter.
“One name is John Martorano. M-a-r-t-o-r-a-n-o.
“Whitey Bulger.
“Stephen Flemmi.”
It was the end of 1978, and the much-anticipated Boston indictments in the federal race-fixing probe were being assembled. John Connolly and John Morris both decided they had to do something, even if Ciulla’s sworn testimony in another state had made any backstage maneuverings to guard Bulger and Flemmi all the more difficult to pull off.
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First off, Connolly and Morris huddled secretly with Bulger. The meeting was “off the books.” No report or memo was ever written up describing the January 1979 session. Connolly and Morris rendezvoused with Bulger at his apartment in South Boston, and the three talked through the case that had been constructed around Ciulla. “We thought we were going to get indicted,” Flemmi said about those tense days of early 1979.
To Bulger, his position was pretty simple. He told the two agents that he and Flemmi were not part of their gang’s race-fixing scheme. The government was in bed with a liar.
Bulger’s claim hardly came as a surprise to the FBI agents—a criminal target’s assertion of innocence was neither unique nor unusual. To cover his bases, Morris could have played hardball with Bulger. He could have insisted that Bulger and Flemmi execute a sworn affidavit attesting to their innocence. Doing so would have made the FBI look more responsible. If evidence ever surfaced showing Bulger to be the liar, the informants could have been prosecuted, at a minimum, for making a false statement to the FBI.
But Morris was not about to put Bulger and Flemmi through that kind of meat grinder. He “never gave that any thought,” Morris said. Bulger was a prime cut, not ground chuck. Instead, Morris and Connolly wholeheartedly adopted Bulger’s position—Bulger’s word against Ciulla’s—and promised to pursue the cause by seeking an audience with the chief prosecutor in the case, Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan.
Bulger was heartened when the agents said they would go to bat for him. He immediately told Flemmi they were off the hook. Bulger explained that “John Connolly had told him that we would be taken out of the case and we would not be indicted.” It was music to Flemmi’s ears.
Within days Morris and Connolly were crossing the few city blocks separating their FBI office in downtown Boston at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building and prosecutor O’Sullivan’s office on the upper floors of the John W. McCormack Courthouse in Post Office Square. O’Sullivan was not pleased to be taking up a matter like this so late in the game. The intense prosecutor, a bachelor in his midthirties, was all business nearly all the time. To many lawyers who went up against him he came off as a self-righteous zealot. But to his associates he was a relentless crime fighter, even if humorless and demanding. He’d grown up in a three-decker in nearby Cambridge, graduated from Boston College and Georgetown Law School, and was determined to work his way through the ranks of local organized mobs until he reached his ultimate ambition, nailing the Mafia.
By the time Morris and Connolly walked into his office, the finishing touches were being put on indictments in the race-fixing case, and at that point Bulger and Flemmi were indeed in the mix of the nearly two dozen figures facing arrest. This was hardly the right time—the final days of a two-year investigation—to come asking for favors.
Morris and Connolly had no way of knowing the extent to which Ciulla had implicated Bulger and Flemmi. But O’Sullivan knew. In debriefing sessions in Sacramento, California, with agent Tom Daly, before the grand jury and, later, at the federal trial itself, Ciulla had been consistent and convincing. He’d described exactly how Winter and his six key associates—John and James Martorano, James Bulger, Stephen Flemmi, Joseph McDonald, and James Sims—shared the proceeds: “Profits were divided from this illegal scheme as follows: 50 percent to Howard Winter and his six abovementioned associates; 25 percent for Ciulla and 25 percent for Ciulla’s partner, namely William Barnoski.” He’d described the various duties: “Mr. Winter said that him and his partners would finance the situation, would be responsible for placing bets outside with illegal bookmakers, also supplying runners to the racetracks and various parts of the country. He would be responsible for collecting money with bookmakers.”
Most troubling, he’d put Bulger and Flemmi right in the middle of the whole scheme. “I had them dead to rights,” Ciulla recalled. Bulger and Flemmi might have left before Ciulla and the gang began partying and snorting coke, but they were around when it mattered. “Did I hang out with him?” Ciulla said about Bulger. “Socialize after the day’s business? Go with him to Southie? No.
“But there was always money for him and Stevie.”
The visit to O’Sullivan was stealth: without permission from FBI headquarters, the agents had no business confiding in a prosecutor. In addition, the identity of an informant was considered a palace secret; disclosure—even to a prosecutor—violated FBI rules. But that didn’t stop Morris and Connolly from telling O’Sullivan about their arrangement with Bulger and Flemmi.
“We went to the prosecutor,” Morris recalled, “and we told him that they had represented to us that, first of all, they weren’t in it, that it was not their scheme.”
Just as important, the two agents brought up a matter they knew was dear to the intense prosecutor’s heart—Gennaro Angiulo. Morris said they told O’Sullivan, “These guys were in a position to help us in what was our number-one priority, the Mafia, and we asked O’Sullivan to consider these facts and consider not indicting them based on this.”
The prosecutor did not press the FBI agents for the basis of their trust, why they took the gangsters at their word, or whether they had undertaken any investigation to corroborate the claims of innocence. But Morris knew that for O’Sullivan to go along, the prosecutor was going to have to find a way around his star witness. The entire prosecution was being built around Ciulla. His credibility was paramount to winning at trial, and here were Bulger and Flemmi pitting their word against his.
Though still not happy that the agents had waited so long—it was virtually the eve of the indictments—O’Sullivan listened intently to their pitch. When they finished, he said he would get back to them. “He would consider it,” Morris recalled O’Sullivan saying. “He was favorably inclined toward it, but he wanted to discuss it with Tom Daly, who was the case agent.”
Morris and Connolly left the meeting feeling encouraged. It would not be the first time that informants had been held out of harm’s way in a criminal case—and properly so—in order to nurture them for bigger payoffs in the future. Indeed, at this time in the history of the FBI’s ties to Bulger and Flemmi, they believed they had a strong argument for cutting the informants some slack. There was, as they’d told O’Sullivan, their potential value in developing the mega-case against Gennaro Angiulo. Moreover, Bulger and Flemmi were not the primary targets in the race-fixing case; Howie Winter was the main man. Bulger and Flemmi were midlevel, not the top dogs, and as such ideally positioned to help the FBI. O’Sullivan, the FBI could argue, should go ahead and topple the Winter Hill gang, but amid the rubble, he should just let the two lieutenants stand.
Within days O’Sullivan sent word to Morris at his FBI office that Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi would be dropped from the indictment. There was some talk about how, with Bulger and Flemmi, he didn’t have the kind of corroborating evidence in place, like telephone records and hotel receipts, that would buttress Ciulla’s