The party was now minus one.
Even so, Bulger and Flemmi still had Connolly and Morris at hand. They poured more wine and got down to business.
John Connolly, Flemmi said later, provided updated accounts on who the two crime bosses should avoid in their underworld activities. He disclosed the identities of several police informants. The talk then turned to the upcoming Mafia trial, the FBI’s tapes, Bulger’s possible vulnerability, and, most important of all, the keeping of promises the agents had made.
“I don’t know who raised it,” said Flemmi. “We were concerned because we believed our names would be, during conversation at Prince Street, would be mentioned regarding criminal matters.
“I knew at that particular time there was conversation on them wiretaps between Jerry [Angiulo] and Larry [Zannino], and they were discussing Jim Bulger and myself. I was concerned about them at some point in time being used against us. I asked John Morris and John Connolly about that. And they said to me that that would be of no concern because I was not going to be prosecuted for anything that would be on those tapes.
“Well, when we were discussing the tapes, the flow from that conversation led into a statement that John Morris made to me and Jim Bulger.”
It was better than any promise Morris and Connolly had ever made to them. Morris, his wine nearby but clearly sober, said: “You can do anything you want as long as you don’t clip anyone.”
Flemmi liked what he heard. “I said to John, I says, well, I says, ‘John, can we shake on that?’ And he says, ‘Yes.’
“And we shook hands, and Jim Bulger shook hands.”
They had finally reached a champagne moment.
THE DINNER lasted three hours but did not run late. Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly drove away around 10:30 P.M. Morris tidied up before heading off to bed.
Condon may have departed prematurely, unable to enjoy the highlight of the night, but Bulger and Flemmi nonetheless left feeling pretty good. The gangsters thought their FBI agents had sanctioned what they did best: committing crime.
“That’s the way I interpret it,” Flemmi said later of the wonderful life he’d been promised. “Short of murdering someone, I think that, yes, they could give that kind of assurance.”
In Flemmi’s mind, the two agents had reaffirmed a group protection policy featuring a full menu of services: snuffing out trouble before an investigation could even get going, as the agents had done in the past in matters involving the Melotone vending machine executives, Frank Green’s extortion, the many unsolved murders, and the takeover of the Rakes family liquor store; tipping them off to wiretaps against them, as they had done in the state police’s Lancaster Street garage case and, most recently, the DEA’s Operation Beans; pulling them out of any indictment that actually made it to the development phase, as they had done in prosecutor Jeremiah O’Sullivan’s horse race-fixing case; and finally, if all else failed and Bulger and Flemmi were actually facing indictment, giving them a head start.
It was as if at the tenth anniversary of their secret deal they all renewed their vows. Bulger and Flemmi could leave the table feeling recharged. Ring might be unpredictable and therefore unreliable, but they could count on Morris and Connolly. The timing for this revived good cheer turned out to be fortuitous too. Though no one realized it that night, another Bulger, brother Billy, was about to have his own need for a friendly FBI.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Shades of Whitey
By 1984 Billy Bulger was securely on top of the state senate, running it smoothly and firmly with vinegar and honey. Yet he had ignored his private law practice with a boyhood friend from Old Harbor and was having trouble financing his hectic household of nine children. He worried about the roof falling in on a house full of kids and about paying their tuitions. He fretted that his battered car would drop dead by the side of the road, stranding his wife Mary as she gamely transported youngsters hither and yon. Even though he earned between $75,000 and $I00,000 that year, he was swimming upstream, with more money going out than coming in. In his memoir, he lamented that while he was not bankrupt, he was “not far from it.”
Then, according to Billy, a miracle client walked into his downtown law office out of the blue. Two brothers wanted to buy back property from a customer, and Bulger got them a $2.8 million loan from a friendly South Boston bank to do it. In exchange for his help in negotiating the loan and the property buyback, Billy was offered a prodigious fee. The prospect flooded Bulger with happy visions of hearth and home. “A new car for Mary... a new roof.”
After paying sporadic attention to the buyback, Bulger settled it in 1985 and agreed on a deferred fee of $267,000, more than enough for Mary and Bill to stop worrying about the car and the tuitions. But the cash flow problem persisted because Bulger agreed to take the fee in 1986. He told his law associate from South Boston, Thomas Finnerty, that he would be among the “impoverished rich” until his money came through.
But Tom leaped to the rescue. He offered to give Bulger a $240,000 loan against the fee. Bulger was ecstatic, but his relief was short-lived. A few weeks after taking the loan, he learned that Finnerty had been working with Boston developer Harold Brown. Bulger flushed with alarm when he heard that Finnerty was dealing with the likes of Brown and warned him that the disreputable landlord was trouble. But Finnerty laughed it off and teased Bulger about being a compulsive worrier. Besides, he said, a $500,000 fee from the developer was already in a trust fund Finnerty had set up.
Recoiling at the mention of the fund, Bulger realized that his recent loan came from Brown money. “You didn’t tell me that,” Bulger objected. “I’m paying it back—and right now. I want no connection, however remote, with Brown.” Back went the Brown money, with repayments totaling $254,000 with interest by the end of 1985. Mary was told to put plans for easy street on hold.
The next year Bulger felt more than justified in his cautious reaction when Brown was convicted of bribery in federal court. Brown began wearing a wire for the FBI, seeking out conversations with politicians. Bulger and Finnerty joked about avoiding Brown in a rainstorm for fear of being electrocuted. They had a good laugh.
BUT Harold Brown told an entirely different story.
The Bill Bulger case started in 1983 when federal investigators caught a corrupt city inspector taking a bribe and converted him into an undercover agent. In 1985 he put on a hidden wire to record conversations and revisited regular customers, including Harold Brown. The hands-on landlord paid the inspector $1,000 to “lowball” the cost of a housing project so that Brown could save $24,000 in permit fees.