district attorney in Suffolk County, to prepare the court papers to win a judge’s approval.
Despite the federal funding, it would be a stand-alone state police effort—no other agency. It wasn’t as if the troopers could not work with the FBI; after all, Long had served as state police commander in Operation Lobster, the joint FBI and state police investigation that had involved Nick Gianturco. But there were the new rumors, especially after the race-fixing indictments when Bulger had eluded prosecution. The rest of law enforcement had begun wondering about Bulger and the FBI. But O’Sullivan, despite what he knew, told Long nothing—it was their case.
On July 23, 1980, Superior Court Judge Robert A. Barton approved Burke’s application for a warrant to bug the Lancaster Street garage. Pumped up, Long, Fraelick, and O’Malley went to work. None of them had had much experience when it came to electronic surveillance, but they’d make up in energy what they clearly lacked in expertise. They’d actually made a trip to Radio Shack to buy the microphones they were going to use. Then, to case the garage’s interior and get a sense of the layout of the office, O’Malley posed as a tourist needing to relieve himself. He wandered into the garage one day, looking lost and looking all around. Bulger confronted him, saying there was no bathroom, and sharply ordered O’Malley out.
It was all trial and error.
The troopers came to call their first attempt “the Trojan Horse.” They obtained a fancy-looking, souped-up van, pulled up the floorboards, and created crawl space for O’Malley. Then they replaced the floorboards, covered them with a shag rug, and filled the van with furniture. With a state police secretary at his side, Fraelick drove up to the garage late one midsummer afternoon. He told George Kaufman that he and his bride were new to Boston and having some car trouble. He was worried about leaving the van with all their belongings overnight on the streets of Boston. What if he pulled the van inside the garage and then first thing in the morning a mechanic could take a look at it?
Kaufman gave his okay and waved the van in. The “newlyweds” thanked Kaufman, promised to return in the morning, and walked off. Kaufman eventually closed up and left too. The plan was for O’Malley to emerge from the van during the night and let a crew in to install the microphones. But none of the troopers had counted on one of the winos from the flophouse across the street setting up right by the garage. O’Malley, bathed in sweat and grime, had no idea what was going on. He was not in radio contact with the others, but he could hear the wino making noise outside. The troopers improvised. Long had one of his crew go out and buy a case of beer. The trooper plopped down next to the wino and began feeding him beers. Once the man passed out, the troopers could move in. But waiting ate up precious time, and just when the man was going down Kaufman unexpectedly reappeared. Kaufman started yelling at the two men drinking at his garage, and he chased them off. By this time it was too late to pull off a bug installation. Eventually O’Malley emerged from his suffocating hiding spot only to learn that Long had called off the effort.
Their next try met with more success.
Early one evening the troopers parked a U-Haul truck snugly next to the garage. The truck not only carried a crew but also created a wall so that no one from the flophouse could look down onto the garage. Most nights the winos and wackos were yelling and hanging out the open windows in the sweltering heat. The truck took care of the flophouse follies. Then, after Kaufman left, two troopers dropped down by the side of the truck and kicked out a bottom panel of the garage door. The troopers crawled in and, with the help of a technician they had hired for the job, installed three microphones—one in a couch, one inside a radio, and one in the ceiling of the office. They left, replacing the panel on the garage door.
Bob Long and his troopers were ecstatic. But the operation went quickly downhill from there. Testing the reception, they faced technical problems. Instead of mobster talk, they were picking up pager calls for doctors at nearby Massachusetts General Hospital. The microphone installed inside the radio didn’t function at all. The one in the couch worked but wasn’t of much use, producing little more than a rush of sound, like a hurricane, when one of the mobsters, especially the oversized ones like Nicky Femia, collapsed into it. But they were getting transmission from the microphone in the office, and that was the prime location; after straightening out the hospital interference, it was soon up and running.
Then the sky fell in.
Bulger, Flemmi, and Kaufman mysteriously started looking up at the windows in the flophouse. Abruptly they altered their routine. Instead of talking in the office or in the open bays, Bulger and Flemmi held meetings inside the black Chevy. The office was now off limits. The troopers were stunned. They kept monitoring their bugs, but shortly after the gangsters moved their talk to the backseat of the Chevy, they had to stop coming to the Lancaster Street garage altogether. Early in August the court order permitting them to bug the garage expired. The troopers had their notes, a pile of great photographs, but nothing more. Bulger was gone.
▪ ▪ ▪
In the days before Long, Fraelick, and O’Malley failed in their bugging attempt, trouble had been brewing for the FBI. It began with a chance encounter at a Friday night party. John Morris, cocktail in hand, sidled up to a hulking Boston detective. The diminutive Morris still managed to talk down to him—the federal agent lording over a local cop. “You have something going at Lancaster Street?” Morris asked with a conspiratorial smile that urged: C’mon, you can tell me.
Taken aback, the detective put on a poker face to mask his surprise. A direct question about another agency’s secret investigation wasn’t expected cocktail chatter at a midsummer party. The question hung in the air, unanswered.
Morris pushed on. “If you have microphones in there,” he said, “they know about it.”
After some more dead air, the police detective finally replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The detective moved away from Morris. But his heart was racing. The next morning he called Bob Long. The early morning phone call did not take Long completely by surprise. He had been sensing something was wrong. All that the bug inside the Lancaster Street garage’s corner office was picking up was a jaunty Whitey Bulger commending state troopers for the great job they did patrolling the Massachusetts Turnpike. Ballbusting or coincidence?
Long wasn’t entirely sure. But the more he thought it over, a pattern became clear. He and his troopers had watched for months from the flop-house across the street as Bulger harassed anxious gamblers who owed money and bantered with visiting Mafia dignitaries. Then, exactly one day after a bug was up and running inside the garage, Bulger had been praising highway patrols and, more important, changing his routine. Business conversations had moved from inside the office to the backseat of Bulger’s black Chevy parked inside the bay area.
Initially Long had figured that Bulger and Flemmi spotted the troopers across the way. But now word of Morris’s overture made Long realize that the problem was much worse than a blown surveillance. To Long, the gangsters’ new routine wasn’t just one of those things that happened—it was treachery. The call from the police detective confirmed the shocking truth that Long saw through a red haze of fury. And he became transfixed by two questions:
How did John Morris know about the state police bug?
And how did he know Bulger and Flemmi knew?
By Monday morning, August 4, 1980, it was war. The ranking state police officer, Lieutenant Colonel John O’Donovan, was on the phone complaining about the leak to the head of the FBI’s Boston office. The state police and FBI office were already accustomed to tangling over glory and credit for fighting crime in Massachusetts, but this kind of accusation marked the nadir of a strained relationship.
Faced with the angry finger pointing, law enforcement did what it always does—it held a meeting. The summit at a Ramada Inn in Boston convened four days after Morris’s party blunder. Attending was a who’s who of law and order: O’Donovan and Long from the state police, county prosecutors, Boston Police officials, an FBI official, and Jeremiah