Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down Read online

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  For my parents,

  who tried

  For Father Kenny, Sister Jean Marie, and Brother Elliot,

  who made me strong

  And, especially, for my wife, Jane, and my children, Brian, Robert, Alicia, and Erin,

  who keep me that way

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: Coming to Boston

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two: Blowback

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Three: Beyond Bulger

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Four: After Boston

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Five: Vindication

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Appendix Contents

  Appendix 1

  Appendix 2

  Appendix 3

  Appendix 4

  Appendix 5

  Appendix 6

  Notes

  Index

  Photographs

  Other Books by Jon Land

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  SOUTH BOSTON, 1984

  “You want a bullet in the head?”

  A few hours before he was murdered on a raw November night in 1984, John McIntyre thought he’d been invited to a party. At least that’s what drew him to a South Boston house owned by Pat Nee, a top associate of Boston’s Irish crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger.

  Two weeks earlier, McIntyre had been aboard a ship called the Ramsland when it sailed into Boston Harbor carrying thirty tons of marijuana that would have netted Whitey somewhere between one and three million dollars. But the cargo was seized, putting a sizable dent in Whitey’s pocketbook. And it was seized because McIntyre had told federal authorities about the shipment to keep himself out of jail. Believing his informant status still to be safe and secure, McIntyre agreed to go to the party, figuring he’d be able to strengthen his hand with law enforcement even further. Only when he arrived at the house, Bulger stepped out of the shadows and stuck a machine gun in his gut.

  McIntyre was thirty-two, of average height and weight, and bearded with dark blue eyes that belied the hardscrabble life of a man who made his living at sea. He had rough, callused hands from handling fishing nets with the texture of razor wire. But in addition to fish McIntyre was also known to carry marijuana, bringing most of his supplies into the Boston area by boat. Small time mostly and not on anyone’s radar, until he caught the attention of the murderous Bulger and his Irish Winter Hill Gang, who were determined to muscle in on Boston’s drug trade in the 1980s.

  Whitey was also involved in smuggling large shipments of weapons to the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, for which he commandeered McIntyre as an engineer on a boat called the Valhalla. A military veteran, McIntyre kept his wits about him and didn’t view the criminal lifestyle as anything more than a means to supplement his fishing and boat-building jobs. The money was just too easy and plentiful to turn away from, and McIntyre rationalized his actions by the need to support the young family he was struggling to hold together.

  In September of 1984, the Valhalla set sail into the Atlantic with its holds full of guns and ammunition instead of marijuana, or iced swordfish and halibut. The voyage was smooth and uneventful, ending when McIntyre supervised the transfer of arms at sea onto a trawler called the Merita Ann. A few days later, off the coast of Ireland, British authorities boarded the Merita Ann. The weapons were seized and the crew was arrested.

  The ramifications of the seizure reverberated all the way back across the Atlantic. Once the Valhalla docked back in Boston, Customs officials took McIntyre and another crewmember into custody on suspicion of gunrunning charges. After routinely questioning McIntyre, they released him. But a few weeks later the Quincy, Massachusetts, police arrested McIntyre on a domestic assault beef. Facing a potential prison stretch, he agreed to become a government informant and cough up the information on the infamous Irish gang leader’s criminal activities. The feds assured McIntyre he’d be safe, that his informant status would be revealed only to those officials associated with the case.

  Now, though, on an autumn night that felt more like winter, John McIntyre found himself staring at the machine gun barrel propped over his belt. Stephen Flemmi and Kevin Weeks, two more of Whitey Bulger’s most trusted lieutenants, grabbed him and threw him on the floor. Then McIntyre watched in horror as Bulger opened his duffel bag of death. He took out a rope, chains, and an assortment of weapons that gleamed slightly beneath the naked lightbulbs with strings dangling from their outlets like spaghetti. Flemmi handcuffed McIntyre to a chair and then chained him to it as well for good measure.

  “We’re gonna have a talk, you and me,” Whitey told him. “I think you’re a rat. Are you a rat, Johnny?”

  According to testimony given in court years later by both Nee and Flemmi, Bulger proceeded to break McIntyre’s fingers one at a time until he finally confessed to his role as informant. Between shrieks of pain, McIntyre apologized for being “weak,” claiming he’d panicked, had no choice. Give him another chance and he’d prove himself loyal. He’d tell Customs and the FBI he’d made it all up to keep himself out of jail on that domestic assault charge.

  But Bulger, having been told otherwise by at least one of those McIntyre thought was protecting him, wasn’t buying it.

  “I think you’re full of shit, Mac.”

  “No, no! I fucked up, but I’ll make things right, I swear!”

  “Swear to God?”

  McIntyre just looked at him.

  “’Cause God’s not here. I’m here. You believe in God, Johnny?”

  McIntyre nodded.

  “You go to church?”

  McIntyre didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah,” Bulger picked up. “What’s God done for you anyway, compared to all I’ve done? And this is how you pay me back. By fucking me”—Bulger backhanded McIntyre across the face—“in the ass.”

  He was grinning now, enjoying himself. Bulger knew that John McIntyre had already told him everything, but that didn’t stop him from continuing the mental and physical torture for another five or six hours. When he finally tired of the process, Bulger placed a boat
rope around McIntyre’s neck and tried to strangle him. But McIntyre refused to die. Bulger then slammed him repeatedly in the skull with a chair leg. McIntyre still refused to die.

  “You want a bullet in the head?” Whitey asked, leaning in close to his ear.

  McIntyre nodded, rasping out “Yes” through the blood and spittle frothing from his mouth.

  Whitey shot him as promised. The impact threw him over backwards, still strapped to the chair and, incredibly enough, still alive. Flemmi grabbed his hair and pulled his head up while Bulger shot him again, repeatedly.

  “He’s dead now,” Whitey said, and then went upstairs to take a nap.

  PART ONE

  COMING TO BOSTON

  “Kick ass and take names.”

  1

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 1980

  “Fitz,” Assistant Director Roy McKinnon said the day he summoned me to his office at headquarters in Washington in late 1980, “we need an Irishman to go to Boston to kick ass and take names.”

  I laughed but he didn’t.

  “Any suggestions?” he asked instead, staring me in the eye.

  McKinnon was the ultimate straight shooter. He had a square jaw and wore his salt-and-pepper hair cropped military close. I seem to remember he’d been a Marine; either way, there was a directness of purpose about him befitting a military mind-set, right down to the orderly nature of his office, in which nothing, not even a single scrap of paper, was ever out of place. He told me the assignment was important for a variety of reasons. He sounded grave about my new adventure and talked about difficult problems in Boston without specifically outlining what those problems were. Right out of the gate, loud and clear, he ordered me to put Boston on the “straight and narrow.” My initial reaction was it sounded like déjà vu, having had an assignment in Miami in the mid-to-late 1970s where, in fact, I did kick ass and take names in the ABSCAM investigation that nabbed numerous public officials, including a sitting U.S. senator. ABSCAM was a sting operation that targeted corrupt politicians and possible law enforcement personnel. I supervised the sting undercover, getting targets, including Senator Harrison Williams (D-NJ), to implicate themselves on tape. It was, in all respects, the FBI at its best.

  I was Miami’s Economic Crimes (EC) supervisor at the time and also worked undercover on our yacht, the Left Hand. I had procured the sixty-foot yacht from U.S. Customs, which had acquired the boat as part of their seizure in a major drug sting. We needed a “come-on” for our undercover gig and the Left Hand fit the bill beautifully. Before we docked the boat in Boca Raton, my squad cleaned it and installed surveillance equipment around the large foredeck, which was perfect for entertaining, and inside a trio of well-appointed cabins for private meetings. Soon, the Left Hand became an attraction and developed a notorious reputation in South Florida, fostered in large part by our undercover persona.

  ABSCAM became the biggest case ever on the EC squad, recovering millions of dollars in fraudulent securities and various white-collar crime scams. We decided to have a final party and invited all of the criminals we had evidence on to attend. We equipped the boat with additional surveillance equipment and captured our future arrestees on tape. The “Sheik,” an undercover agent, was posing as the wealthiest person in Miami, a connected Arab. While I sat up in the control room with the Strike Force chief, we encountered a problem. Senator Williams had appeared and demanded that he be allowed to attend our party. We declined and he demanded to see the Sheik anyway.

  Under orders from FBIHQ we were told in no way could the senator board the boat. The Strike Force chief insisted we finish the sting, but FBIHQ demanded we close the operation down. HQ’s concern was that allowing the senator to come aboard a boat laden with druggers, prostitutes, and criminals might be seen as a form of entrapment.

  Afer much deliberation with FBIHQ, the FBI special agent who was playing the sheik, told me, “Bob, I won’t allow alcohol, drugs, or anything that could harm the senator aboard my boat!”

  I laughed at him and said, “You’re crazy. What kind of party are we supposed to throw?”

  He looked at me and, in the dignified role and manner of a true sheik, said, “I am the sheik and I won’t let it happen!”

  The party went forward on the pretext its host, our undercover sheik, could not be in the presence of drugs or alcohol for Muslim religious reasons. The recorded conversation and surveillance tapes played at Harrison Williams’s trial dispelled any notion that we had entrapped the senator, and he was found guilty and convicted in federal court by his own voice. I took no pleasure in taking down a sitting U.S. senator; to me, he was a criminal who was extorting agents of the federal government sworn to uphold the law.

  In this unique experence, I became no stranger to corruption, learning how to dig it out and destroy it. And that’s why I supposed I was being transferred to Boston.

  Tom Kelly, my former boss in Miami and an FBIHQ deputy at the time, had filled McKinnon in on my experience in ABSCAM, making it plain that I had cleaned up Miami and could probably do the same in Boston. Contrary to what was apparently going wrong up there, a key factor in the decision to send me north was my ability to pursue investigations without anyone tipping off the press or the target. ABSCAM was successful because all FBI agents working for me diligently did their jobs of investigating high-ranking government officials in a major scam without a single leak. Not one.

  I was on a career fast track, groomed, I anticipated, for even bigger things to come. Not bad for a kid who’d grown up in a church-run institution, an orphanage on Staten Island called Mount Loretto. But that’s where my dream, this very FBI dream, was born.

  2

  ASTORIA, QUEENS, 1944

  “I have to pee,” I whined to the cop. Then I screamed, “I really have to pee!”

  The cop, whose name was O’Rourke, looked at me indifferently. I thought he could care less until he knelt, picked me up, and carried me to the kitchen sink. After I relieved myself, he carried me back into the living room of my New York City apartment demanding clean underwear and clothes from my warring parents. Officer O’Rourke, who came from the 114th Precinct, had five kids of his own, so I guess I should consider myself fortunate he was the one who responded to yet another fight between my parents that was loud enough to rouse the neighbors.

  “You guys better calm down in there,” he called to my mother and father. “Your son’s coming with me. Pack some clothes in a bag.”

  They’d been warned what the upshot of one more complaint would be, but that hadn’t stopped their constant onslaught in the least. This time O’Rourke had responded after some neighbors complained that “the people next door were going to kill each other.” O’Rourke knew if he couldn’t stop my parents from doing that, he could at least stop them from doing it to me.

  “If you guys don’t stop with the bullshit I’ll be taking you in!” he shouted when they still failed to heed his warning. “Right now I’m taking Robert over to the Fourteenth. You’ll be hearing from the social worker in the morning.”

  O’Rourke bent over to pick me up again, this time heading for the door. I started to cry so O’Rourke soothed me by explaining that we were going for a short car ride to the police station. The elevator was broken again and he carried me down all eight flights of stairs, without the bag of clothes my parents had failed to produce.

  “This is O’Rourke,” he said to the police dispatcher. “I’ve got a four-year-old ready for a remand to social services. Get some clothes and food and I’ll see you at the station in about fifteen minutes.”

  “What the hell are you doing, O’Rourke?” came the dispatcher’s response.

  “See you in fifteen” was all O’Rourke said in response.

  So there I was, a scared four-year-old basically abandoned by my mother and father. At least that’s the way the Family Court put it when the judge remanded me to the custody of the State. After shuffling through a series of child shelters, I wound up at Mount Loretto, better known as the
“Mount,” then the largest child-care home in the United States, with over a thousand charges living in “cottages” spread across 524 acres on Staten Island.

  My initial stop at the Mount was the Quarantine House. First thing the sisters did when I arrived was to assign me a bed, check me for bugs and lice, and give me a physical exam. Everything was antiseptic and smelled like alcohol. And everything was like a portrait painted in stark white. The sisters wore white habits, white shoes. Their head coverings were white and even their rosary beads were white. The quarantine floor was lined with beds draped in white sheets set atop a white marble floor. The floor was cold all the time.

  Once I was deemed “clean,” I was taken to the residential side, consisting of six cottages housing sixty-six boys each. In Cottage 1, we were all new orphans, each with a box with a lid in which to store our possessions. Most of us had none. The boxes were arranged in a rectangular fashion around the perimeter of the cottage. Other boxes were attached to the cottage wall—these held our school clothes, shoes, and field clothes sometimes. All of our clothes were hand-me-downs, not at all fashionable or comfortable but better than nothing. In the lavatory we had stations that held toothbrushes, soap, and a towel on a hook. There were eight commodes and six urinals for sixty-six children. Half the cottage took showers at a time.

  For sleeping, each of us had a cot on either the second or third floor. Bed wetters, all thirty of them, were crammed into the third floor, and the stench of urine wafted throughout the cottage, especially bad in the summer months when the heat putrefied the stench further and in the dead of winter when the windows were all closed. I would pass through all six cottages as I grew older, the stench evolving with the years too, though the routine and accommodations otherwise remained unchanged.