It was a tortured kind of semantic somersault, but there was precedent: Bulger’s attitude about alcohol. Bulger drank only occasionally, and when he did, just a glass or two of wine. He hated to see other people drink. Even on St. Patrick’s Day he would complain about celebrants drinking at midday. He once said “he didn’t trust anyone who drank.” Drinkers, he said, “were weak” and might rat him out.
During their two decades together, the only time Bulger hit Theresa Stanley was after she stayed out late drinking wine at a friend’s house. If she sipped two drinks, he’d act as if she’d guzzled a dozen. “I almost got killed for drinking a couple glasses of wine,” Stanley recalled. Yet at the same time he was berating his girlfriend for wine-tasting Bulger was emerging as the neighborhood’s biggest liquor supplier. He happily emptied the register at the liquor store he’d taken over from Stephen and Julie Rakes and once bragged to a patrolling Boston cop, “We have the busiest liquor store around.” There were those who weren’t fooled by the hypocrisy. The increasing numbers of dopers and junkies joked about the poster hanging in one of the stores Bulger controlled: “Say Nope to Dope.” The liquor mart Bulger had taken over was nicknamed the “Irish Mafia store.”
Eventually Flemmi himself was caught red-handed trying to push the phony wordplay. He claimed under oath that he could not be prosecuted for the illegal gambling operation he and Bulger ran during the 1980s because the FBI knew about it and had even “authorized” it. As part of the claim, Flemmi described the gambling operation: he and Bulger mostly required bookmakers to pay them “rent” for protection. “So part of the gambling business was shaking down bookmakers?” Flemmi was asked by a prosecutor. Flemmi replied, “That’s correct.”
Then the prosecutor pounced: “If you were shaking down drug dealers, you’d be in the drug business, right?”
“I assert the Fifth on that,” Flemmi responded.
Flemmi was stuck. Faced suddenly with extending the same logic to drugs, Flemmi blinked. If he hadn’t, he would have undercut the comfortable fiction that had served him and Bulger for years—the claim they were not involved in drugs.
Under the FBI’s informant guidelines, Bulger’s drug activities should have led to an abrupt end to the deal he and Connolly and Morris had worked so hard to preserve. Instead, the developing underworld intelligence putting Bulger together with drugs had to be discounted and deflected, and what better way to accomplish that than by cultivating a definition of drug activity that separated the money from the merchandise? Then Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly could share a refrain: shaking down drug dealers did not make Bulger the person he in fact was—a drug lord.
RIGHT from the start, Bulger and Connolly had begun drawing a portrait of Bulger as the anti-drug gangster. During the crucial powwow on November 25, 1980, when Larry Sarhatt was conducting his suitability review of Bulger, the gangster proclaimed that he was “not in the drug business and personally hates anyone who [is]; therefore he and any of his associates do not deal in drugs.” Inside the bureau Bulger’s words went untested: if Bulger said so, it must be true. And in January 1981, as other police agencies were documenting Bulger’s alliance with the drug trafficker Frank Lepere, John Connolly was padding the FBI files with the opposite. Connolly reported that Bulger and Flemmi were actually distancing themselves from Lepere because of the latter’s drug predilection. Bulger, wrote Connolly, had formerly associated with Lepere but more recently had “broomed him due to his involvement in the marijuana business.”
It was a Teflon coating that came in handy in 1984.
The FBI was not a major participant as the DEA and the Quincy police put together Operation Beans. But as a matter of courtesy, the Boston FBI had been notified by the DEA of its intentions. The Boston office now faced a dilemma: what to do with Bulger and Flemmi? To decide, FBI managers in Boston naturally turned to the agents in the best position to gauge what Bulger and Flemmi were up to: John Connolly and Jim Ring, who’d taken over from John Morris as supervisor of the Organized Crime Squad. The fortyish Ring had been fighting the Mafia in New England for nearly a decade, but mostly from Worcester, a city in central Massachusetts viewed by agents as a minor league outpost. From the moment he took over the squad, Ring recalled, Connolly insisted that Bulger and Flemmi “weren’t involved in drugs, they didn’t do drugs, and they hated drug dealers, and that they would never allow drugs in South Boston.” When managers began raising questions, Connolly, fixed in place as the bureau’s authority on all things Bulger, came armed with his FBI files discounting any possible link between the gangster and drugs.
Having to notify FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., about the DEA’s plans, the Boston office fired off a two-page telex to headquarters on April 12, 1984, explaining that the DEA was targeting Bulger and Flemmi, “whom DEA alleges are individuals who control a narcotics trafficking group.” But the FBI in Boston urged calm. It labeled the DEA’s allegations “unsubstantiated, and DEA has furnished no specific information relative to their involvement.” Bulger, the telex concluded, should not be “closed due to the past, present and future valuable assistance.”
Ring authored a more detailed memo later in the year explaining the Boston office’s hands-off position toward Operation Beans, and once again the FBI in Boston displayed its backing for the anti-drug version of Bulger. “The predication” for the DEA’s investigation, wrote Ring in October, “although it may be correct, is not consistent with our intelligence regarding the activities of these individuals.” Guided mainly by Connolly but also by Ring, the FBI brass in Boston would simply not accept the drug talk building around Bulger.
But behind Ring’s back, even Connolly was apparently engaged in hushed FBI talk about Bulger and drugs. In early April 1983 fifteen tons of marijuana were seized from a warehouse at 345 D Street in South Boston. The marijuana belonged to a trafficker named Joe Murray, and after the raid Connolly and agent Rod Kennedy got to talking. Connolly described specifically for his colleague how Bulger profited from Murray’s drug business, Kennedy said later.
“The conversation was basically that Joe Murray was required to pay rent to Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi for having used South Boston as a storage warehouse for his drug activity,” Kennedy recalled. He said Connolly told him that Murray had paid Bulger and Flemmi between $60,000 and $90,000 for that particular load. “It was like rent money for having used, you know, having gone into South Boston and using that area for illegal drug activity,” said Kennedy, adding that this amount was on top of more regular tribute.