Connolly then reported back to Ring that he’d obeyed the order and halted the practice of meeting at his house. But word got to Ring that Connolly had simply pulled a fast one, relocating down the street. “Unprofessional, stupid, not the way business is done by FBI agents. I was just not happy,” Ring said. “Why go into a neighborhood where two people are known? You can go to New York City. You can go to Canada. Go someplace. This is being lazy.”
And Ring didn’t even know about the dinner parties—at Nick Gianturco’s house, at John Morris’s house. In addition, Ring noted that seeing two informants together—an accepted fact at this point in the history of the FBI’s deal with Bulger and Flemmi—was highly irregular. “If you could control the situation,” noted Ring, “you’d meet Bulger and Flemmi separately.” But of course the FBI was not in full control.
In response to Ring’s criticisms, Connolly unleashed his well-rehearsed defense of Bulger and Flemmi as indispensable to the FBI’s war on the Mafia. Included was Connolly’s patented story that pulled the heartstrings of every FBI agent—how Bulger and Flemmi had saved Nickie Gianturco’s life.
But Ring even had the gall to question this piece of Bulger hype. Rather than take Connolly at his word, he went and asked Gianturco about the tale. “I asked him, what was the story? And he went back and related that there was this undercover operation which he had been in, that there was some scheduled meeting he was supposed to attend, and that reportedly Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi had sent him information warning him not to attend.
“I was saying to him: ‘You didn’t answer my question. My question was, “Are you reporting to me that you believe that these two people saved your life?”’ And I recall his response being that the case was over.” Ring never got a straight answer.
For all of his concerns, Ring kept the matter between himself and Connolly. He did not document his criticisms or share his concerns at the time with any of the other FBI supervisors in the Boston office. He did not discipline Connolly. Ring didn’t think discipline was warranted “for doing something stupid. What I thought I needed to do was to manage the people that I have and start doing that.” Instead, Connolly’s personnel files continued to fill with glowing reports about his work.
No surprise, then, that in the spring of 1985 at Morris’s house Jim Ring was not standing in the kitchen alongside Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly. In fact, around the time of the dinner Ring and Connolly had even discussed the issue of “Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi not liking me,” recalled Ring, “and my position being I really didn’t care, because they were informants.” But Morris did care about being liked—by everyone.
“CONNOLLY, Flemmi, and Bulger had arrived together,” Morris recalled. Dennis Condon showed up thirty minutes later, around 7:30 P.M. He had driven directly from his executive office at the state Public Safety Department in Boston. Morris hustled from living room to kitchen, the dutiful host and cook.
The men headed into the dining room. It had been years since Bulger and Flemmi had seen Condon. The night in Lexington marked “the first meeting that I’ve had since 1974 with Dennis Condon,” Flemmi recalled. The year 1974 had certainly been a pivotal one for Flemmi. He’d returned to Boston after spending nearly five years on the lam, a forced departure triggered by his indictment in 1969 for a car bombing and the William Bennett murder. Flemmi believed that Condon had paved the way for his eventual return from Canada by seeing that the two major felony charges were dropped along with a third charge that had been added as soon as he fled the country to avoid prosecution. After Flemmi’s return there had been the get-together with Condon at the coffee shop as part of his handoff to the very useful Connolly. In Flemmi’s eyes, Condon had been the stage manager behind many of these moves, and he was grateful. “I hadn’t seen him for quite a while. I asked him how he was doing, how he felt. I thanked him for disposing of the federal flight warrant that I had. I asked him how Mr. Rico was, who was a partner of his, and I says, ‘If you ever have the opportunity to see him, say hello for me.’”
The men took their seats at the table. Morris served up the steak. The men poured more wine. For the first hour or so they chatted about old times.
“It was light banter,” Flemmi recalled. Bulger recounted stories from his time in federal prison during the late 1950s for robbing banks. “Most times he does most of the talking,” Flemmi said about Bulger. “Quite a variety of subjects. He’s very knowledgeable, very intelligent. He kind of captivates his audience.”
But if Bulger was a chatterbox, Condon was not. The graying veteran of Boston’s law enforcement circles sat there picking at his food and listening politely. He felt ambushed, he said, surprised to find Bulger and Flemmi in Morris’s home. He’d gotten his invitation during a telephone call late in the afternoon—c’mon and swing by on your way home. He said that all he’d been told was that Morris and Connolly were going to be there, “and a couple of people were coming by, and they’d like to say hello.”
Of course there was an outward collegiality to the occasion, the appearance of a simple gathering of old friends sharing wine and war stories. But beneath the easygoing veneer were pressing concerns that Bulger and Flemmi had about their protection. In a way each law enforcement official present at the dinner was a symbol of the history and the scope of the alliance. The past, the present, and, they hoped, the future were represented at the table in Condon, Morris, and Connolly. But Condon, who potentially covered two police agencies, the FBI and the state police, was hardly having a regular old time. Morris said about Condon, “I could tell from the way he looked when he came in . . . he didn’t look real comfortable.”
“I thought that it was extremely unusual that Mrs. Morris was there and I was there, and neither of us at the time were members of the FBI,” said Condon. “I also felt that in the position that I occupied I shouldn’t have been there.”
Dennis Condon did not protest to anyone at the time, did not pull Morris and Connolly aside and ask for an explanation. “I hung in there for, I would say, for politeness and diplomacy.” (He would also keep the dinner a secret, telling no other official about it for at least another decade.) But the others at the table that night got no hand-holding from him. Finishing his food, Condon made his exit less than sixty minutes after he’d arrived. Flemmi was taken aback. To him, Condon “didn’t seem to be uncomfortable,” and he was sorry to see him leave.