The FBI's green godfather

By ROGER FRANKLIN

"It is better to know the judge than the law." - Irish proverb

NEW YORK - Like just about everyone else in Boston these days, journalist and author Michael MacDonald has a theory about why a celebrated FBI agent sold his soul to a murderous Irish mob boss. As with most of the other explanations doing the rounds, it begins with some observations about the consequences of poor town planning.

South Boston, the 12 square blocks of misery where MacDonald grew up, makes for a classic study in urban ills. Hemmed in by water on one side and a web of motorways on the others, it has always been an insular and isolated pocket of poverty, "a petrie dish for pathologies," is the way MacDonald speaks of the streets that were his childhood playgrounds.

"It's just like any other ghetto in America, except that the people it traps and destroys are Irish and white, not black. Skin colour is the only difference - and it's not a big one."

But urban geography is just one of the lenses through which MacDonald prefers to view the upcoming trial of onetime neighbour John Connolly, a former FBI agent who is accused of being very, very bent indeed. Connolly's story, like the Irish mobsters and IRA killers who are his alleged partners in crime, cries out for a deeper explanation.

So, even though he was raised Catholic, MacDonald is only half joking when he suggests that the pious Wasp worthies who once ruled his city might have pegged it just about right.

"Predestination," he explained in that honking and peculiarly nasal Boston accent. "Southie people play the parts written for them at birth. You can get out of Southie, but it's much tougher to get Southie out of you."

After seeing four of his 10 siblings claimed by prison, guns, drugs and madness, MacDonald admits there is a comforting measure of self-interest in the notion that life's path is largely pre-ordained. It eases his survivor's guilt to believe there was nothing, genuinely nothing, he or anybody could have done to save his brothers and sisters from the Southie curse.

In MacDonald's eyes, Connolly's journey from FBI poster boy to renegade is more proof of the same: Here is a hero whose fatal flaw was the home address on his birth certificate.

"Connolly climbed the ladder out of Southie. He became the first agent to bug a Mafia initiation ceremony. He was a genuine star and he could have gone all the way to the top. But somehow, he's sucked back into the Southie thing. Now he's charged with betraying everything he's supposed to defend and protect, for taking orders from a pack of animals," MacDonald said.

"And the thing is he's still convinced that he didn't do a damn thing that was wrong. The decision he made to throw in with killers, well that's the way the world looks from a Southie's perspective: Us and Them."

Us or Them. In places like the Triple O Bar, where the FBI agent's alleged partner, James "Whitey" Bulger, presided over a criminal empire that stretched from New York to the Canadian border, those words once needed no definition. But since December, when Connolly was indicted for racketeering and corruption after a determined judge forced the FBI to disclose some of its most embarrassing secrets, nobody in Southie is too sure anymore.

Neighbours liked to think of Bulger as their very own Robin Hood, so much so that the president of Boston City Council once hailed him as "a noble gentleman" who would make a grand leader of the St Patrick's Day Parade. Now the Green Godfather has been revealed as the scourge and misery of his own people, a murderous fraud who filled the neighbourhood with drugs and killed without remorse. If the FBI believes it was betrayed by Connolly, Southie is even more appalled to learn that it was duped for decades by its favourite hoodlum.

Beyond Boston - in Washington, and in far off Ulster and London - the case is also making waves. When Britain's Foreign Office recently noted that it would be following Connolly's trial "with great interest," the announcement came as no surprise. Britain has been trying for well over a century to stem the money and guns that flow from Irish-Americans to their IRA cousins across the Atlantic. Yet according to those same FBI files, Connolly not only turned a blind eye to Bulger's murders, his drug running, gambling operations and extortion rackets, he also looked the other way when his friend dispatched shiploads of guns, explosives and ammunition to the hard men of Northen Ireland.

And all the while, Connolly appears to have believed that his deal with the devil was entirely pure and noble.

"I have never done anything wrong, or that I am ashamed of," Connolly said recently. "Everything I did, every decision I took, was cleared with my superiors all the way to the top."

There is something of an old Hollywood movie about Connolly's rise and fall, and it is easy to imagine the leading parts being played by a young James Cagney and Edmund O'Brien.

By one of the more popular accounts, it began one day in 1949, when a little Irish-American boy from the Boston slums was getting the crap knocked out of him by a gang of older bullies. Through the forest of pounding feet, the young Connolly saw a pair of adult shoes wading into the mob, heard the growl of grownup curses and yelps of pain as his tormentors were torn away. He was hauled to his feet by the unexpected saviour, a 20-year-old tough guy with a shock of white hair, a bone-handled stiletto and a look of stone-hearted rage. This is a good kid, the rescuer snarled, not a loser like his assailants; a boy who does his homework and will make something of himself. Pick on him again, and the stranger vowed to exact a terrible retribution. For the next 10 years, until the boy bagged a Harvard scholarship and joined the FBI, the man everyone called Whitey was a doting and paternal protector. If Connolly had a problem, if he needed a little cash or a car to take his girl on a date, Whitey always saw him right.

That was just the way it was with Whitey, the locals all said. He always had a dog biscuit for the neighbourhood mutts, and if a little old lady's cat fell ill, the local vet knew to put the bill on Whitey's tab. At Thanksgiving he handed out turkeys. The fact that the birds were hot property, stolen like the hijacked truck from which his men pitched them to the crowd, did not spoil anybody's appetite. In Southie, a powerful friend like Whitey, a guy who delivers, is reckoned one of the best things a man can have.

Now turn the clock to 1968. Connolly, now an aggressively ambitious G-man, has just been sent back to Boston, where the FBI is trying without success to smash the New England branch of the Italian Mafia. The Italians have been conducting business with an open, defiant arrogance that galls the feds to distraction. They have the local cops in their pockets and the politicians on their payroll; perhaps someone like Connolly, with his smarts and local contacts, can help bring the dons to heel.

Connolly, who knows just where to get the help he needs, is keen to make his bones. His first stop is the Triple O bar, where he renews his friendship with Whitey and proposes a deal: Help me bust the Italians and my guys will leave your Winter Hill Gang pretty much alone. At least that is what prosecutors will claim at Connolly's trial.

Whitey, who was then an underboss and saw the advantages of having the FBI as his protector, soon introduced Connolly to a young Italian mobster called Sonny Mercurio, who had just been busted and was facing a long stretch of hard time. Perhaps we can strike a deal, the FBI man suggests to his new contact?

At the Bureau, where his fellow agents joke that he was a flashier dresser than the wiseguys he arrested, Connolly exuded an intimidating self confidence. So perhaps it was the hand-tailored suit that won the mobster's trust. Whatever the reason, Mercurio agreed to help the FBI plant some bugs and pass on the inside scoop about the crime family known throughout Boston as The Outfit. In return, the charges were sealed and Mercurio went free.

A month or so later, one of the bugs picked up a Mafia recruit being sworn in as a "made man." When other bugs collect the evidence that nailed a whole swag of capos and chieftains, Connolly was showered with awards and promotions. Several years later, after a string of further coups against the Italians, he was invited to the White House, where Gerald Ford chewed the agent's ear about Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

What Ford could not have known - and this is why the FBI fought long and hard to keep its files under wraps - is the breadth of Connolly's pact with his pal. In return for setting up the Italian mob, the Southie crew was permitted to do pretty much as it pleased, up to and including murder. Quite a few murders, actually, perhaps as many as 200.

When Connolly's trial begins there is no chance his lawyers will argue that their client knew nothing of the man he adopted as the FBI's invaluable ally. By the time he returned to Boston, Connolly must have pored over Whitey's rap sheet. Born in 1929, Bulger was arrested before his 10th birthday and progressed from reform school to state prison and finally, in 1959, to Alcatraz with 50 years to serve for bank robbery. He might have done the full stretch except that the CIA wanted human subjects on which to test LSD, a drug with which it hoped to "programme" assassins.

Whitey volunteered as a test subject and, in return for tripping off his face on an almost daily basis for three full months, had his sentence commuted. He went straight back to Southie, joined the Winter Hill Gang and set about making something of himself. "I don't know if you can blame the LSD experiments," said Boston lawyer Harvey Silverglate. "The evidence is that he was a sociopath to begin with and this is something the FBI must have known. Yet they did business with him anyway."

What remains to be established is just how much Connolly's FBI superiors actually knew. The Bureau professes blissful ignorance of their star agent's methods; Connolly swears the agency backed him at every turn. Whatever the truth, one thing is sure: there were people in the FBI who might easily have stopped Whitey Bulger's crew of killers. The issue soon to go before a jury is whether that knowledge was confined to a tight little cluster of bad apples in the FBI's Boston office, or did it extend all the way to the entire upper reaches of the Department of Justice?

While Whitey helped Connolly, Connolly helped Whitey by busting his friend's gangland superiors. Acting on information Whitey provided about a nobbling ring at Boston's Suffolk Downs race course, Connolly sent away the Winter Hill Gang's half-a-dozen top members. Whitey, who was the architect of the long running scam, was not indicted and ascended unhindered to the throne. He was to occupy the gang's top slot until 1996 through 20 years of unchallenged prosperity. As the Italians retreated under immense FBI pressure, Whitey's guys took over their former operations.

In Southie, the whisper was that Whitey owed his immunity from prosecution to his brother, a rising star in the Massachusetts state legislature who had taken control of the venerable Irish political machine once led by John F. Kennedy's maternal grandfather. In reality, prosecutors allege the protection appears to have flowed solely from Connolly and his squad of obliging underlings.

When a Boston police reporter was working on a story about Whitey's control of the local drug trade, he received an unsolicited call from one of Connolly's offsiders. "Whitey will butcher you. You're not stupid, you must know you're going to die," the agent told him, adding that the reporter's wife and children would probably be killed first. "Why don't you ask yourself if you really want to write this story." The reporter dropped the story; what else could he do when a gangster's threat was delivered by a Government agent?

If Whitey needed to find a turncoat in his ranks, Connolly's people would tap their sources in the Boston Police Department and tell him who it was. If the gang had to execute someone, as deputy gang leader Steve "The Rifleman" Flemmi once did to his own stepdaughter when he suspected her of talking to the local drug squad, the FBI knew how to avoid finding any bodies. And when Whitey organised one of his many fund drives on behalf of the IRA, always skimming a generous percentage for himself, Connolly's team were only too happy not to take down license plate numbers outside the bashes.

Everyone in law enforcement, even the Boston cops, preferred it that way.

The IRA had far too many friends in Southie, including plenty of support in the local precincts. When one of Whitey's arms shipments was intercepted off the coast of Ireland, for example, a dozen bulletproof vests were found amongst the grenade launchers and cases of plastic explosives in the trawler's hold. Scotland Yard traced the serial numbers and found the vests had all gone missing from the weapons locker at Boston Police Headquarters.

Connolly retired in 1990 and might have spent his golden years at peace had it not been for a former Bulger associate, a Boston thug called John Matorano whom Whitey often used as a contract hit man because the Italian gunman had no obvious connection with the Irish gang.

When the Supreme Court ordered that white kids from Southie be bused to black schools on the other side of town in an effort to end the apartheid of Boston's ferocious segregation, Matorano is widely rumoured to have become Whitey's racial enforcer. Southie was up in arms and wanted blood. Whitey unleashed his killer and ordered him to give the mob what it wanted.

One night, he is said to have shot a black social worker foolish enough to enter Southie unarmed. On another occasion, when a car with three black teens was spotted on a white street, Matorano is reputed to have killed them all. While Connolly denies knowing anything of Matorano and the racial murders, the hit man seems to know quite a lot about him.

Busted three years ago by Massachusetts State cops for yet another murder, Matorano admitted to 20 other killings - although not the racially motivated ones - and cut a deal. The agreed sentence was to be a meagre eight years if Matorano agreed to testify about Connolly's relationship with Whitey.

Since then, despite the FBI's strenuous efforts in court to keep its files under wraps, the details have been tumbling out. Late last year, Connolly was indicted on the charges that could saddle him with a 40-year stretch.

According to Mattorano, the FBI man sanctioned rub-outs on Whitey's gangster rivals and informed his friend whenever the local Boston cops planted a bug in one of his favourite meeting places.

But most shocking of all to Southie's citizens is Mattorano's claim, since confirmed by the Drug Enforcement Agency, that Whitey was one of the largest wholesalers of heroin, cocaine and angel dust in the US. While he made a great public show of ridding his neighbourhood of drug dealers, the truth was that the pushers who turned up dead were upstarts who tried to muscle in on his turf. Meanwhile, his own dealers did a roaring business.

Author MacDonald, whose All Souls: A Family Story of Southie is a harrowing account of a family's torment, is praying Connolly spends the rest of his life in prison. One of his sisters was left permanently retarded after being thrown from the roof of a high-rise housing complex by one of Whitey's dealers.

"Whitey was a criminal and it was his business," MacDonald said. "But Connolly was a sworn law enforcement officer. You tell me which guy is worse: the one who did what you expect him to do, or the one who betrayed everything he was supposed to honour and defend?"

As for Whitey, nobody has seen him for four years - except at the local post office, where his name and photo sit atop the FBI's Most Wanted list. There is a persistent belief around Boston that Connolly's friends in the FBI told the Irish don to hit the road before the local cops could arrest him. If there is one fugitive the feds might prefer to see go free forever, it is undoubtedly the gangster who knows so much about the agency's darkest and dirtiest secrets.