In their interviews with federal investigators, neither Bulger nor McDonough could produce paperwork to support the fees. McDonough knew next to nothing about the work done for clients that indirectly paid him $120,000.
Two months after O’Sullivan slammed the door on any further investigation, the senate president was the guest speaker at a retirement party for FBI agent John Cloherty. Cloherty had handled press relations when the bureau closed its review of 75 State Street. He was also a former member of the Organized Crime Squad under Morris and a friend of Connolly’s. It was a rollicking good time.
ABOUT a year after Bill Bulger and Tom Finnerty split up $500,000 from the state’s largest landlord, a small South Boston realtor received an offer he couldn’t refuse. Once again money allegedly was demanded under duress, but the terms were starkly different in Southie. Raymond Slinger’s alternative to paying $50,000 was to get blown away by a shotgun.
Slinger thought he might be on to something good when his dealings with Whitey Bulger began in the fall of 1986. Bulger stopped by his office unexpectedly for a short primer on how to cash in on the suddenly surging local real estate market. They chatted for about twenty minutes, and Slinger may have seen himself working with Bulger in some real estate deals.
But it was not to be. Six months later Slinger was summoned to the dreaded Triple O’s bar. He gingerly entered the dank, claustrophobic barroom, with its warped floorboards and low ceiling, its dark walls and sticky tabletops. It was a place where someone was always playing pool while nursing a drink and solitary patrons stared into their shot glasses and beer chasers. Slinger was ushered to the second-floor office, where Bulger was waiting for him, arms folded. He looked up and announced, “We got a problem.”
Bulger said he had been hired to kill Slinger, an assignment that would require him to arrive at Slinger’s Old Harbor Real Estate office “with shotguns and masks and so forth.”
Bulger would answer no questions, including who it was who wanted Slinger dead or why. He would only talk about what could be done about it—pay Bulger to cancel the contract. Slinger, who had some large debts and his share of enemies, gulped and asked if he could be out from under for $2,000. But Bulger laughed at him and said his boots cost more than that.
BULGER: “$50,000 would be more like it.”
SLINGER: “I don’t have that kind of money.”
BULGER: “Well, I think you better find it.”
Slinger went straight to the downstairs bar to fortify himself before returning to his East Broadway Street office. He made a desperate call for help to city councilor James Kelly. After Kelly talked to Bulger, he told Slinger everything should be okay.
But it wasn’t. Two days later Slinger heard from Kevin O’Neil, the Bulger associate who ran Triple O’s. O’Neil told him “the man” wanted to see him again. Sensing the worst, Slinger returned to Triple O’s with a racing heart and a gun borrowed from a friend. Once inside, two of Bulger’s henchmen seized him immediately, pushing and shoving him up the stairs to the second floor, where a ranting Bulger was waiting. Slinger recalled that they “grabbed me and pulled me upstairs, frisked me, opened my shirt, took my gun away, and started belting me, beat me up.” Out of the melee, Slinger had the clear memory of Bulger kicking him.
Bulger and his underlings sat Slinger down hard in a chair. They made sure he was not wearing a wire and then upbraided him for talking to Kelly. Bulger took Slinger’s gun and placed the barrel pointing down on the top of Slinger’s head, explaining that the bullet would go down the spinal column and not cause a bloody mess. Bulger then ordered an aide to get him a “body bag,” and Slinger nearly passed out from fright. “I thought I was done.”
The moment passed, and Slinger was given a second chance to come up with the money. With a ripped shirt and scarred psyche, Slinger stumbled to the downstairs bar again. When he got back to his office, he called his sister and wife and lined up loans for a $10,000 payment. He also agreed to a weekly payment schedule.
About two months after he was slapped around and terrorized by Bulger, Slinger began to stagger under the burden of making the weekly $2,000 payments, which he put in a paper bag and handed over to O’Neil in a car outside the realty office. Slinger had paid half the debt, but he was so desperate that he turned to law enforcement. In the spring of 1987 he reached out to the FBI.
Without making an appointment, two agents showed up at the Old Harbor Real Estate office one day. Slinger opened his door to John Newton and Roderick Kennedy.
Later Newton would say that Slinger was willing to testify about a “shakedown” by Kevin O’Neil. But he claimed that Slinger never mentioned Bulger’s name. For his part, Kennedy could not remember a single detail about the interview, including whether it happened at all. And in an extraordinary departure from standard procedure, neither agent wrote a report on the session with Slinger.
In a classic example of what not to do with such a case, Newton discussed Slinger’s account with his boss, who talked it over with the assistant agent in charge. The top-level managers promptly dropped it, ignoring internal guidelines that they either refer it to prosecutors or explain their decision not to use it to FBI headquarters.
Ironically, the unproductive FBI interview helped Slinger get off the hook in his unexpected business relationship with Whitey Bulger. After the agents left his office, a worried Slinger immediately called O’Neil to cover himself by explaining that the unexpected visit by the FBI was none of his doing. O’Neil called him back the next day and told him he could cancel his installment plan. The $25,000 would be payment in full, a rare half-price sale from Bulger Enterprises.
Some years later Newton admitted that the bureau passed on what would have been a great extortion case. He was asked in court if there was a connection between the case dying and Bulger being an informant.
When an informant is involved in a crime, he said, “either you’re going to go ahead with this investigation or you’re going to have to figure something out.”
The something figured out was agent John Connolly telling Whitey to back off on the balance due from Slinger. That was what being a loyal friend was all about.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Connolly Talk
Late Monday morning, February 8, I988, FBI agent John Connolly strode out of a hardware store near his FBI office and bumped into Dick Lehr, a reporter for the Boston Globe (and one of the authors of this book). Connolly had been at the store getting some duplicate keys made while Lehr was crossing town en route to an appointment with a source.