folks are threatened and extorted, with no recourse? If a large-scale cocaine ring, time and again, eludes investigators? If elaborate government bugging operations, costing taxpayers millions, are leaked and ruined?
This could never happen, right? A deal between the FBI and a top echelon informant going this bad?
But it did.
Today we know that the deal between Bulger and the FBI was deeper, dirtier, and more personal than anyone had imagined, and it was a deal that was sealed one moonlit night in 1975 between two sons of Southie, Bulger and a young FBI agent named John Connolly.
DICK LEHR AND GERARD O’NEILL
Boston, April 2000
Introduction to the Paperback Edition
In 2000 we published the first edition of Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal. Much has happened since the initial publication. Many of the so-called mighty have fallen, ranging from corrupted FBI agents past and present to the upper echelon of the Bulger Gang. In the years since Black Mass a slew of other books have been published about Bulger and the FBI, creating, in effect, a Bulger genre all its own: books by other journalists, gangster tell-all books by former members of the Bulger gang, and, more recently, inside accounts by investigators who pursued Bulger only to confront a corrupted FBI blocking their path. The FBI agent at the center of the scandal, John J. Connolly Jr., was convicted on November 6, 2008 of second-degree murder for plotting with Bulger to kill a man who was set to cooperate with investigators against them. Connolly, now seventy-one, is imprisoned in a Florida jail. Most significantly, the central figure in the historic scandal, James J. “Whitey” Bulger Jr., after being a fugitive from justice since 1995 and on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, was captured on June 22, 2011 in Santa Monica, California, where he’d been hiding in plain sight while living as a retiree with his longtime companion, Catherine Greig. Black Mass is a narrative account of the FBI’s dark deal with Bulger, revealing its origins, Bulger’s reign of terror during the 1980s while protected by the FBI, and, finally, the public disclosure in the 1990s of the deep and toxic FBI corruption. With new developments has come new information, and we are grateful to have the chance to update the story of the FBI and Bulger that is Black Mass.
DICK LEHR AND GERARD O’NEILL
January 2012
PART ONE
The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ACT III, SCENE 4),
KING LEAR
CHAPTER ONE
1975
Under a harvest moon FBI agent John Connolly eased his beat-up Plymouth into a parking space along Wollaston Beach. Behind him the water stirred, and further off, the Boston skyline sparkled. The ship-building city of Quincy, bordering Boston to the south, was a perfect location for the kind of meeting the agent had in mind. The roadway along the beach, Quincy Shore Drive, ran right into the Southeast Expressway. Heading north, any of the expressway’s next few exits led smack into South Boston, the neighborhood where Connolly and his “contact” had both grown up. Using these roads, the drive to and from Southie took just a few minutes. But convenience alone was not the main reason the location made a lot of sense. Most of all, neither Connolly nor the man he was scheduled to meet wanted to be spotted together in the old neighborhood.
Backing the Plymouth into the space along the beach, Connolly settled in and began his wait. In the years to come Connolly and the man he was expecting would never stray too far from one another. They shared Southie, always living and working within a radius of a mile of each other in an underworld populated by investigators and gangsters.
But that came later. For now Connolly waited eagerly along Wollaston Beach, the thrum of the engine a drag to the buzz inside the car that was like an electric charge. Having won a transfer back to his hometown a year earlier, he was poised to make his mark in the Boston office of the nation’s elite law enforcement agency. He was only thirty-five years old, and this was going to be his chance. His big moment in the FBI had arrived.
The nervy agent was coming of age in an FBI struggling with a rare public relations setback. In Congress, inquiries into FBI abuses had confirmed that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had for years been stockpiling information on the private lives of politicians and public figures in secret files. The FBI’s main target, the Mafia, was also in the news. Swirling around were sensational disclosures involving a bizarre partnership between the CIA and the Mafia also unearthed during congressional investigations. There was talk of a CIA deal with mafiosi to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro as well as murder plots that involved poisoned pens and cigars.
Indeed, it suddenly seemed like the Mafia was everywhere and everyone wanted a piece of the mysterious and somehow glamorous organization, including Hollywood. Francis Ford Coppola’s movie masterpiece, The Godfather, Part II, had played to huge audiences when it opened the year before. A few months earlier the picture had won a slew of Oscars. Connolly’s FBI was now deeply into its own highly publicized assault on La Cosa Nostra (LCN). It was the FBI’s number-one national priority, a war to counter the bad press, and Connolly had a plan, a work-in-progress to advance the cause.
Connolly surveyed the beachfront, which at this late hour was empty. Occasionally a car drove past him along Quincy Shore Drive. The bureau wanted the Mafia, and to build cases against the Mafia, agents needed intelligence. To get intelligence, agents needed insiders. In the FBI the measure of a man was his ability to cultivate informants. Connolly, now seven years on the job, knew this much was true, and he was determined to become one of the bureau’s top agents—an agent with the right touch. His plan? Cut the deal that others in the Boston office had attempted, but without success. John Connolly was going to land Whitey Bulger, the elusive, cunning, and extremely smart gangster who was already a legend in Southie. The stylish FBI arriviste wasn’t the type to take the stairs. He was an elevator man, and Whitey Bulger was the top floor.
The bureau had had its eye on Bulger for some time. Previously, a veteran agent named Dennis Condon had taken a run at him. The two would meet and talk, but Whitey was wary. In May 1971 Condon managed to elicit extensive inside information from Whitey on an Irish gang war that was dominating the city’s underworld—who was allied with whom, who was targeting whom. It was a thorough, detailed account of the landscape with an accompanying lineup of key characters. Condon even opened an informant file for Whitey. But just as quickly, Whitey went cold. They met several times throughout the summer, but the talks didn’t go well. In August, reported Condon, Whitey was “still reluctant to furnish info.” By September Condon had thrown up his hands. “Contacts with captioned individual have been unproductive,” he wrote in his FBI files on September 10, 1971. “Accordingly, this matter is being closed.” Exactly why Whitey ran hot then cold was a mystery. Maybe the all-Irish nature of the intelligence he’d provided had proved discomforting. Maybe there was a question of trust: why should Whitey Bulger trust Dennis Condon of the FBI? In any event, the Whitey file was closed.
Now, in 1975, Condon was on the way out, his eye on his upcoming retirement. But he’d brought Connolly along, and the younger agent was hungry to reopen the Whitey file. After all, Connolly brought something to the table no one else could: he knew Whitey Bulger. He’d grown up in a brick tenement near the Bulgers’ in the Old Harbor housing project in South Boston. Whitey was eleven years older than Connolly, but Connolly was oozing with confidence. The old neighborhood ties gave him the juice others in the Boston office didn’t have.
Then, in an instant, the waiting was over. Without any warning, the passenger side door swung open, and into the Plymouth slipped Whitey Bulger. Connolly