Immediately he missed his girlfriend and through Connolly asked Bulger to arrange for an airline ticket for her. In June of 1982, Morris attended a two-week training session in Georgia. As Flemmi later admitted, it was Connolly who tipped them off about the bug. What the police overheard was Bulger commending state troopers for the great job they did patrolling the Massachusetts Turnpike. The bug was hardly up and running when Bulger and Flemmi abruptly changed their routine and stopped holding discussions in their office. At the same time, the FBI agents ignored information that Bulger and Flemmi had begun to shake down gamblers, loan sharks and drug dealers who operated in their territory, and that the two, in fact, were allegedly overseeing the majority of sports betting, numbers action, and loan-sharking for the Boston area in a joint venture with Boston's Cosa Nostra.įollowing up on this intelligence was the Massachusetts State Police who with the support of a local prosecutor obtained permission to plant a bug in Bulger and Flemmi's new headquarters, a garage on Lancaster Street near Boston Garden. This successful intervention paved the way for an increasingly closer social relationship between underworld figures Bulger and Flemmi and FBI agents Connolly and Morris marked by frequent meetings, including dinner invitations to Morris' private home, and the exchange of presents. O'Sullivan who agreed to drop Bulger and Flemmi from the indictment. When the race-fixing case became an imminent danger, Morris and Connolly first met with Bulger, who denied any involvement, and then with chief prosecutor Jeremiah T.
Connolly continued his cooperation with Bulger under the protection of the new supervisor of the Organized Crime Squad, John Morris, who engaged in "creative record-keeping" to conceal the relationship. In practice, however, nothing changed and Bulger was not even told about his putative change in status.
46).īetween 19, Bulger was officially shut down as top echelon informant because he had become the target of another FBI office's investigation into horse race fixing. What the FBI got in return for the protection it provided was, according to Lehr and O'Neill, helpful information but "(m)ost of it amounted to underworld gossip, and it was often flat-out self-serving" (p. "In the future it would seem like the world was divided between the FBI and Bulger, on the one hand, and all the other police agencies on the other" (p. In the years to come, Lehr and O'Neill claim, a similar pattern would emerge. The restaurant owner turned to the authorities for help, but when the case was forwarded to the FBI, agent Connolly took care that it would never leave the Organized Crime squad and obtained permission, about a year later, to officially close the case, arguing that the victim was reluctant to testify. In 1976 Bulger and Flemmi threatened a restaurant owner who refused to repay an outstanding debt to a Boston finance company with links to the Winter Hill gang. Bulger agreed and brought his friend and partner Steve Flemmi into the deal because he had direct ties to leading Cosa Nostra members. Connolly made a simple proposal: inform on the Mafia and let the FBI do the rest. In a time when tensions between the two groups mounted over the placement of vending machines throughout the region, Bulger was approached by FBI agent John Connolly, who a few years after Bulger had grown up in the same public housing project in South Boston. In 1975 at age 46, James "Whitey" Bulger was a prominent figure in South Boston's underworld and a member of the Winter Hill gang, the constant rival of Boston's Cosa Nostra family. Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish MobĪ journalistic account of the scandal surrounding Boston underworld figure James "Whitey" Bulger and his corrupt ties to FBI agents.
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