The juiciest intelligence broke new ground. Crossing Morris’s desk for the first time was information about Bulger grabbing a piece of the action in cocaine, the big-money narcotic that was red-hot in the early 1980s. South Boston, it turned out, was no different from any other part of the city: drugs were rolling down Broadway in a tidal wave, despite Bulger’s glamorized reputation as the neighborhood’s protector. Bulger might continue to promote himself as the anti-drug crime boss, but the kids shooting up and snorting in the alleyways of the housing projects knew otherwise. They might never deal directly with him, and they rarely, if ever, actually saw him, but they all knew that without his blessing there would be no “product.” Bulger was riding the crest of the coke wave.
In February 1981 an informant told one of Morris’s agents that Brian Halloran, a local Boston hood, was “dealing in cocaine with Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi.” Halloran had been linked to Bulger and Flemmi for years, especially Flemmi. He used to ride with Flemmi and often served as an advance man who checked out a club or meeting place prior to Flemmi’s arrival, much as Nicky Femia did. The next month a different informant told one of Morris’s men that “Brian Halloran is handling cocaine distribution for Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi. Other individuals involved with Halloran are: Nick Femia, responsible for ripping off 30 drug dealers thus far. Word has been placed on the street that any drug dealer involved in cocaine has to give a ‘piece of the action to Bulger and Flemmi’ or they will be put out of business.”
In June 1982 another informant told the FBI that a South Boston gangster was overseeing loan-sharking and drug-dealing out of a particular neighborhood bar. “He is reportedly making $5,000 a week from drugs and is paying Whitey Bulger a large percentage for the right to operate.”
When these intelligence reports landed on Morris’s desk, he’d review them, initial them, and file them away. Ordinarily FBI reports containing charges were indexed by the target’s name, so that other agents could locate the intelligence in the investigative files. But Morris often sabotaged the process by not indexing the reports properly, making the negative material hard, if not impossible, to find. There was virtually no follow-up. The state police may have observed Bulger’s tie-in with major drug dealers. The FBI’s own informants may have begun reporting the same development. But Morris would have none of it. Not once did he initiate a probe or refer any of the tips for action.
Out of sight, out of mind.
While Morris directed traffic at the supervisory level, Connolly took care of padding the Bulger file. Following a drug bust at a South Boston warehouse in early 1983, Connolly filed a Bulger report saying the crime boss was “upset” with the drug dealers for “storing the grass in his town.” In other FBI files Connolly always described Bulger as staunchly anti-drug, abetting the mythic portrayal Whitey clung to.
Not surprisingly, Connolly had emerged as the expert about Bulger and Flemmi inside the FBI office. If an agent had a question about Whitey’s personal history, he was sent to John Connolly, and usually John Morris was the one making the referral. Whitey’s rank in the underworld scheme? See Connolly. Whitey and drugs? See Connolly.
MANY of the FBI documents about Bulger were simply invention—and at this Connolly became the master. He repeatedly took a dull nugget of Bulger information and tumbled it into glittering gold.
There was the mention, for example, that Connolly made in a report to Sarhatt about the help Bulger gave the FBI in connection with a bank robbery over the Memorial Day weekend in 1980 at the Depositors Trust in Medford, Massachusetts. Connolly credited Bulger with being the “first source” to provide the names of the robbers. But it just wasn’t so. The morning after the robbery callers to police and other informants were naming the suspects. “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t get it from Whitey Bulger,” said Medford police chief Jake Keating about early leads in the case. It took a few years to charge the robbers, but their identities, said Keating, were “common knowledge.”
Connolly also gave Bulger credit for breaking open a murder case. Until Bulger had offered his helping hand, went a Connolly memo, the FBI had had “no positive leads” in the slaying of Joseph Barboza Baron, an underworld hitman who had turned into a valuable government witness. Baron was gunned down in San Francisco. In his memo, Connolly wrote that three months after the slaying Bulger had told him who set up Baron to be killed—a wiseguy named Jimmy Chalmas. In fact, Chalmas’s role in the murder was old news by the time Bulger mentioned it to Connolly. Chalmas was a prime suspect from the start. Baron had been shot outside Chalmas’s apartment. City homicide detectives had interrogated Chalmas that night. Following Bulger’s chat with Connolly, the FBI may have finally gone out and confronted Chalmas, but from the moment Baron died Chalmas was a hot lead. None of this was part of Connolly’s writings to Sarhatt. Nor was Sarhatt, in conducting the internal review of Bulger’s viability, supposed to dig up the rest of the story. He was, in theory, supposed to be able to rely on the completeness and veracity of his own field agent in Boston. Instead, he got Connolly’s angle, skewed in Bulger’s favor.
Connolly knew how to hit the hot buttons as well. He told Sarhatt that Bulger had saved the lives of two FBI agents who’d worked undercover in two separate cases in the late 1970s. These may have been the most intriguing of all of Connolly’s claims, in part because he had no records to back him up. Throughout his years as a handler, Connolly filed hundreds of the reports, known as “209 inserts,” documenting fresh Bulger intelligence. They ranged from the sublime, such as information about important Mafia policymaking meetings, to the ridiculous, such as the scoop on Larry Zannino’s latest temper tantrum. But with agents’ lives supposedly hanging in the balance, oddly, perhaps even unbelievably, Connolly had not written up contemporaneous reports about Bulger’s aid. To explain the omission, Connolly insisted later that he’d had no reason to file reports, although Morris conceded that documenting help of this sort was standard FBI procedure.
One of the two supposed life-saving instances was the old truck-hijacking case, Operation Lobster. In a memo to Sarhatt, Connolly revived the exaggerated claim that back in 1978 a Bulger tip enabled the FBI to “take steps to insure the safety of Special Agent Nicholas D. Gianturco.” In a follow-up report, Connolly reminded Sarhatt about the tip and added that Bulger had provided the information to protect FBI lives “at great personal risk” to his own life.