BUT the FBI did know, and the way Flemmi saw it, the FBI’s role in Operation Beans was “no more than a surreptitious effort to ensure that the investigation was ultimately unsuccessful.” Connolly, it turned out, had caught wind of Operation Beans right from the start—early on in 1984, even before the investigation had a name and before the DEA had assembled its plan of action. Immediately after the telex was sent from Boston notifying FBI headquarters about DEA’s planned investigation, a top FBI official in Washington, D.C., named Sean McWeeney picked up the telephone to call Jim Ring. McWeeney was chief of the Organized Crime Section at FBI headquarters.
Instead of Ring, John Connolly took the call.
“Aren’t these our guys?” McWeeney asked the handler.
And if Connolly knew, Bulger and Flemmi knew. They continued to meet regularly throughout the year, and, said Flemmi, the talk often turned to the intensifying interest the DEA and Quincy police showed in them. They had a kind of cross-fertilization going, each sharing with the other whatever information they’d picked up. Connolly got additional information from other agents, either directly or through Ring. It would have been helpful to have John Morris’s input as well, but not only was Morris no longer running the squad, he was out of town: the former supervisor had been dispatched to Florida on a special assignment and would not return until early 1985.
During one key session in September 1984, Bulger and Flemmi and Ring and Connolly huddled at Connolly’s apartment in South Boston. Connolly’s apartment had been chosen because of all the cops spotted skulking around Bulger’s condo all hours of the night. The foursome, recalled Flemmi, had an “animated discussion” about Operation Beans. Flemmi and Bulger made their self-serving denials to Ring about the drugs. Ring and Connolly told them not to worry, insisting that he and Bulger “hang in there and stay, you know, stay on the team.” In addition, Bulger and Flemmi were told that Operation Beans was working out of the Fargo Building in Boston. This enabled Bulger to stake out the building and pick up the makes, models, and plates of the undercover cars the investigators were driving.
By the time DEA investigators, on Christmas Eve, won a court order to place a wiretap on George Kaufman’s telephone, Flemmi and Bulger were one step ahead. John Connolly had provided a holiday treat: a warning about the telephone wiretap. Thus, instead of capturing criminal conversations, all DEA agents Reilly and Boeri overheard was Flemmi talking nonsense or in code to George Kaufman. The agents never picked up Bulger using the phone at all.
Given the heads-up, it was a wonder that Bergeron and the DEA’s Reilly and Boeri actually succeeded in planting microphones in Bulger’s car and condo. But they did do it, briefly, for a few weeks in 1985. The DEA agents and Bergeron had been left to their own devices after the FBI technical team called in for a consultation was unable to offer any surefire method to implant a microphone in Bulger’s car and condo. Both contained sophisticated alarm systems designed to detect any intrusion inside the condo or the car. The technical team, looking at the condo and the car from a distance, concluded that unless the local agents could come up with the codes to defeat the alarms, there was no way agents could sneak inside to install the bugs. The other option the FBI mentioned was replacing Bulger’s car with an exact duplicate wired for sound. Reilly considered that proposal ridiculous. After a day the FBI tech team returned to New York. Their anemic proposals simply fueled Reilly’s worries about the FBI, even if the tech team had been ordered not to tell local FBI agents about being in town. “I thought they didn’t put their best effort forward.”
So Reilly, Boeri, and Bergeron took matters into their own hands. They obtained a Chevy exactly like Bulger’s and began studying it, looking for a way to insert a bug without having to break into the car. They found a point of entry low on one of the door panels, and they practiced drilling into it until they could install a microphone that worked. They took the same approach with the condo—they practiced drilling into window sills to plant a bug from the outside.
In early 1985, under the cover of darkness, the agents got a bug inserted into the condo’s window. “The bug worked fine,” Bergeron said. The problem, he said, was that Bulger blasted the stereo and television once Flemmi arrived, and the two gangsters would go upstairs to talk business. The attempt was a bust.
Then, on February 2, 1985, while Bulger slept, the agents installed a bug in the door panel of the black Chevy. But the next day, after Bulger got into his car and drove into South Boston, all the agents got was an earful of road noise. The microphone was picking up the bump and grind of the car’s wheels turning along the highway. Even after repositioning the bug the next night, the agents were faced with a persistent “lack of clarity” in catching Bulger talk. Part of the problem was that the technology they’d been forced to use had severe limitations. They were using a tiny device that transmitted a signal to a surveillance vehicle, where the actual recordings of the conversations were made. This meant that their ability to tape anything depended on keeping the van close to Bulger’s car—no easy task. Moreover, the agents were always competing with the road noise and Bulger’s habit of playing the car radio as he and Flemmi chatted quietly, managing their affairs in a general state of wariness.
It was a constant struggle to decipher who exactly was talking in the car and what they were saying. The best night came on February 17, 1985, with the two DEA agents and Bergeron tailing Bulger and Flemmi to a meeting with George Kaufman at Triple O’s. It was after 10:00 P.M. when Bulger and Flemmi emerged from the bar and drove off. Fighting through the radio and road noise, the agents then heard Bulger and Flemmi talking about the revised underworld order. They heard the gangsters talking about Howie Winter, who was due soon to come out of prison. “Fuck Howie,” Bulger said.
The agents heard the talk veer briefly toward drugs.
“This fuckin’ coke deal,” said Flemmi.
“I’m running the business and everything over the phone,” replied Bulger.
It was tantalizing stuff, but never more than a tease. They got snatches of talk about money, about “drug outlets,” and about Bulger’s gambling operations. They even captured what they thought was a reference to one of the local FBI agents, but they didn’t know what it meant: “Connolly has been a little fuckin’ nervous,” Flemmi remarked at one point.