After his 1988 release from prison, Salemme soon began taking the easy money that Stevie pushed his way from independent bookies who had broken free from the Ferrara network. It left Salemme as vulnerable to bookie extortion charges as the Bulger gang. But Salemme fell into another deep hole on his own. About a year out of prison he began working on an ill-advised deal brought to him by his son. He allegedly began extorting a Hollywood production company that wanted to avoid paying expensive union workers as it made a movie in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. For a price, Salemme got the Teamsters to go along. The fatal catch: the head of the production company was an undercover FBI agent. The spider’s web had caught Cadillac Frank.
BY THE middle of 1994 prosecutors had assembled a sturdy, intricate mosaic to support racketeering charges. The plan had been to arrest Bulger, Flemmi, and Salemme in rapid succession to avoid escapes by any of them. But while, by mid-December, Salemme could still be found at his usual haunts, Stevie and Whitey had been in and out of town for several weeks. The FBI insisted that Salemme, as the Mafia man of the moment, be arrested first. But top officials at the U.S. Attorney’s Office overruled the agents, concluding that the case was about Bulger and Flemmi. Indeed, most of the evidence concerned Flemmi, since he was the man in the middle, standing at the junction of Bulger and La Cosa Nostra. Fittingly, the arrest warrant for Flemmi charged him with extorting money from Chico Krantz.
As 1995 got under way the latest law enforcement intelligence was that Flemmi had been seen at Quincy Market, a tourist shopping center in downtown Boston where Flemmi’s two stepsons were renovating a restaurant. It was staked out by state troopers Thomas Duffy and John Tutungian and DEA agent Daniel Doherty, who were all part of the ad hoc team that had first gathered in Fred Wyshak’s office. Their orders were to arrest Flemmi the minute he “went mobile” by getting in a car.
In winter’s enveloping nightfall, the arrest team moved into action when Flemmi and a young Asian woman left Schooner’s Restaurant and got into a white Honda at 7:00 P.M. The team boxed them in with two cars and then raced at the Honda with guns drawn. After instinctively trying to hide under the dashboard, Flemmi calmly got out of the car and asked for permission to call his lawyer. The detectives relieved him of a knife and some mace and unsuccessfully tried to persuade the woman to accompany them to FBI headquarters, if only to keep her from warning others. But she knew the drill and refused to go without a warrant.
ALTHOUGH the FBI had brought in its elite Special Operations Group to do surveillance on Salemme with a helicopter, he escaped that night. Cadillac Frank fled to West Palm Beach, Florida, a favored sanctuary for mafiosi on the run. He would eventually be arrested there eight months later, but his easy escape fueled the barely suppressed anger of investigators working the same case. One denounced the Special Operations Group as an over-the-hill gang. “They suck,” he said bitterly. “It’s part of the facade over there. Those guys are looking for retirement homes. And they’re nine-to-five. Once their shift ends, they’re out of there. They have no personal interest in the case.”
For his part, Stevie Flemmi was an unflappable presence inside FBI headquarters, a calmness rooted in his belief that thirty years of FBI service would save him. He was expecting a quick bail and a night flight to Montreal. It was only as the night wore on with no side door opening that he realized he was all alone in his adversity. He thought that John Connolly or Paul Rico would help, as they had in the past. But Flemmi was like the Hollywood celebrity arrested for drunken driving. Protests about his importance would only make things worse. No one could save him now. He belonged to trooper Tom Duffy.
Flemmi had expected more because Connolly had kept him posted on grand jury developments throughout the year, at times using his continuing contact with the bureau’s Organized Crime Squad. But both Connolly and Morris, who was also close to retirement and working in Los Angeles, had left the scene and taken their early warning system with them.
In fact there had been a wholesale changing of the guard within the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI that left Bulger’s barrier beach unprotected. But hardly abandoned.
Bulger had become a dirty little secret that evolved into a tacit policy administered by new players who may not have fully understood the history but held fast out of institutional loyalty. They viewed any attempt to change the system as a challenge by upstarts who had the bad taste to urinate inside the tent. The lingering commitment became grounded in the fear that Bulger had become a time bomb by attracting too much public attention, especially after the 1988 Boston Globe article. The fierce personal friendship of John Connolly was replaced by the knee-jerk protectionism of one special agent in charge after another. The credo became: Bulger may be a skunk, but he’s our skunk.
But Flemmi’s arrest by state police told the FBI that the gig was up. And when it realized what had happened, the bureau backed away as quickly as it could. The only contact Flemmi had with his old allies after his arrest was when he hailed agent Edward Quinn at a bail hearing. The awkward encounter made Flemmi realize that he was no longer a prized informant. He was just another unhappy wiseguy in a courtroom.
“What’s going on here?” Flemmi asked the startled Quinn as he walked by. “How about a break on bail?” Flemmi persisted in a plea that meant “Get me outta here.”
But all Quinn could do for him was get him a Coke.
Even then, as Quinn edged away and the government’s lawyer got in between them, Flemmi thought there might be a magic parachute. His mind drifted over the years of FBI intervention, back to how Paul Rico got attempted murder charges dropped in state court. Flemmi remembered being tipped off to state police bugs in the Lancaster Street garage, and the time he and Whitey were let out of the race-fixing case. And how the FBI in Boston helped cover up Winter Hill murders in Boston, Tulsa, and Miami. Surely his friends, Jim Bulger and John Connolly, would “get this all squared away.”
But the most Flemmi ever got were prison visits from Kevin Weeks, Bulger’s friend from South Boston, who conveyed the commiseration of John Connolly. The agent wanted Flemmi to know how badly he felt about the FBI letting them both down.
Flemmi never heard another word from Bulger.
BULGER quickly adapted to life on the lam. The wild teenager who sought attention by walking a pet ocelot around the Old Harbor housing project had developed the low to the ground discipline of an army ranger hiding in the jungle. When it was clear that indictments were on the way, he cut all ties with South Boston, except for an occasional call to prearranged pay phones.