By Scott Malone
BOSTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) – When she was assigned to the
federal task force charged with finding James “Whitey” Bulger in
2000, then-Drug Enforcement Agency agent Pamela Hay had a
problem: She wasn’t convinced her FBI counterparts wanted to
catch the fugitive mobster.
The former leader of Boston’s “Winter Hill” crime gang by
then was in his sixth year of hiding, after fleeing the city in
1994 on a tip from a corrupt FBI agent that arrest was imminent.
“I had to sort out what was going on, did the FBI really
want to find Bulger, if Bulger was found, what was it going to
uncover?” Hay recalled in an interview on Tuesday.
She soon determined, however, her FBI colleagues were very
serious about catching Bulger. “They worked hard, almost like
they wanted to regain their reputation,” she said.
Bulger, once the most feared criminal in Boston, on Monday
was found guilty of 31 of 32 counts in a sweeping racketeering
case that proved him a murderer, drug dealer and extortionist. A
jury convicted him a little more than two years after FBI agents
caught up with him, living in hiding under an alias in a Santa
Monica, California seaside apartment.
The verdict, which legal experts said is likely to leave the
83-year-old in prison for his remaining years, is a step towards
redemption for the Boston office of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
Bulger, who early in his criminal career had served time on
the Alcatraz prison island off San Francisco, maintained brutal
control on Boston’s underworld thanks to corrupt relationships
with FBI agents that shared his Irish ethnicity and turned a
blind eye to his crimes in exchange for information they could
use against the Italian Mafia.
“This trial is a start for the FBI to earn back the trust
of the public once again,” said Walter Prince, a former federal
prosecutor in Boston who is now a partner with the law firm
Prince Lobel. “It’s going to take a while for the FBI to put
those criminal activities behind them.”
Justice Department officials in Boston admitted that
Bulger’s case had long been a black mark on the bureau.
“This day of reckoning for Bulger has been a long time in
coming. Too long, in fact, due to his decades long of corruption
– and corrupting law enforcement officials in this city,” U.S.
Attorney Carmen Ortiz said on Monday after the jury rendered its
verdict.
“It was a corruption that not only allowed him to operate a
violent organization, but allowed him to slip away when honest
law enforcement was closing in,” she said.
CORRUPT TIES
During Bulger’s two-month trial, jurors heard about a long
relationship between the defendant and his FBI handlers, John
Connolly and John Morris.
Connolly and Bulger were first put in touch by the
gangster’s older brother, William, who became the powerful
president of the state Senate and wanted to help out a friend
who grew up in the same South Boston neighborhood.
Bulger agreed to meet with Connolly, reluctantly at first,
but eventually the two became close. Connolly regularly
entertained Bulger and his partner-in-crime Stephen “The
Rifleman” Flemmi, inviting them over for home-cooked meals,
according to testimony at the trial.
Connolly developed a 700-page informant file in more than
decade of regular meetings with Bulger, who claimed that he paid
the agent for tips but never provided any of his own.
Connolly is serving a 40-year prison sentence on
racketeering and murder convictions. His boss, Morris, is a free
man and testified that he accepted money and gifts from Bulger,
and offered tips that led to mob executions, including that of
Edward Halloran.
Halloran had approached the FBI to offer tips of his own – a
crime that Bulger regarded as punishable by death.
“Not a day in my life has gone by that I haven’t thought
about this,” Morris said about the murder of that gangster and
another man, uninvolved in gang business, who had the misfortune
to be driving Halloran home when the “Winter Hill” gang arrived.
Bulger adamantly denied being an informant and cursed at
Morris when he took the witness stand, calling him a liar.
Still, Bulger’s lawyers acknowledged a close relationship with
law enforcement.
They plan to appeal the verdict, saying that rulings by U.S.
District Judge Denise Casper and her predecessor on the case
prevented them from making their best defense – that Bulger had
been promised immunity by prosecutors.
Bulger’s lawyers never said why prosecutors would have
offered their client immunity if he was not an informant, an
argument that they wanted to make in the courtroom.
“I was somewhat taken by the defense of immunity I think it
was novel and perhaps in another day and another time it would
have prevailed,” said Barry Slotnick, a defense lawyer whose
clients have included the late reputed New York mob boss Joseph
Colombo.
“He controlled organized crime in Boston and the FBI was
desperate to get info from him, whether they got it or not and
so as a result of their need to ingratiate themselves with him,
it all went aside.”
(Additional reporting by Daniel Lovering; Editing by Andre
Grenon and Grant McCool)
