FBI's links to Irish crime lord exposed

The head of a vicious underworld gang was given protection and tipped off about his arrest, reports Ed Helmore in Boston.

James 'Whitey' Bulger and John Connolly made a fine couple whenever they met in dark Irish-American bars or on the dreary wastelands of south Boston. They had, after all, been friends from boyhood and both had risen to the top of their respective professions.

The only problem, perhaps, was that Bulger was head of the notoriously vicious Boston-Irish crime syndicate known as The Winter Hill Gang that ran loansharking, gambling and drug operations, and Connolly was the decorated deputy head in the FBI's Boston field office responsible for running Bulger as a top informant.

Last week, Connolly, 61, was convicted of tipping off his friend in 1994 that he was about to be charged with racketeering, extortion and 18 murders. The lord of Boston's crime underworld fled and has remained a fugitive ever since.

During the trial a parade of gangsters and murderers were called to give evidence against Connolly in exchange for leniency. But to the surprise of trial observers - the Boston Herald judged that Connolly's best defence was his smart suit and good-looking wife - he was cleared of more serious charges, including leaking information to Bulger that resulted in the killing of three witnesses against him, and of taking bribes. He faces up to 45 years in prison.

The jury seemed to conclude that even if Connolly was a dirty agent, it was the FBI who handed him a dirty job. 'What happened in Boston is not just a John Connolly, rogue street agent problem,' said Massachusetts congressman Bill Delahunt. 'What we have revealed here is an institution in dire need of reform, with no accountability, no transparency and a total lack of controls.'

Boston law enforcement agencies had long wondered why their investigations into Bulger were always compromised. As a 'top-echelon informant' for the FBI, Bulger was protected in his businesses so long as his activities did not extend to murder.

But over nearly 25 years as an FBI informer, Bulger and his sidekick James 'Rifleman' Flemmi eliminated anyone that got in their way - business rivals, friends, even Flemmi's stepdaughter, who had threatened to expose their relationship to her mother, his wife - and buried them in graves on wasteland near Bulger's home that were only discovered last summer after Flemmi made a deal with prosecutors.

One of the victims dug up was IRA sympathiser John McIntyre, who told police shortly before he disappeared that he had become entangled in one of Bulger's IRA gun-running operations.

According to Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, authors of Black Mass: The Irish Mob, The FBI and a Devil's Deal, Bulger knew how to play the FBI. He hosted agents at lavish dinners and loaned their girlfriends money. Christmas, he liked to say, was 'for kids and cops'. In exchange, he received prior warning about drug raids and wiretap surveillance.

'Whitey only talked to me because he knew me from when I was a kid,' Connolly bragged in the book. 'He knew I'd never help him, but he knew I'd never hurt him.' But Connolly was helping all along. In an attempt to bolster Connolly's credibility at trial, his defence lawyers played an FBI training video in which he warned young agents against trying to 'out-gangster a gangster'.

'You can get friendly with them and you can like them, but you can never forget who you work for and that you're an FBI agent,' he said.

But Connolly did exactly that. He was 'a Winter Hill gang operative masquerading as an FBI agent', said prosecutors. In a series of lawsuits against the FBI, relatives of Bulger's victims now charge that the Boston office was complicit in the killings or helped cover them up. A congressional investigation is also looking into allegations that Connolly's seniors also helped Bulger to murder witnesses, and cooked up evidence to send innocent men to prison for life.

The investigation will also probe how much FBI headquarters in Washington knew about the activities of its Boston office. A recently unearthed memo shows that J. Edgar Hoover was informed in 1965 that four innocent men had been convicted of a murder the bureau knew was committed by Flemmi.

Like recent disclosures about the FBI's failure to investigate terrorist activities before 11 September, the Boston case reveals 'a culture of concealment, where the FBI got itself into a protective mentality and cared less about justice being done than about protecting itself when agents made mistakes,' a congressional investigator told the New York Times.

Protected by the bureau, Bulger rose to power after a stint in Alcatraz in the late Sixties for armed robbery, and formed the Winter Hill mob in 1972 by merging three other Irish gangs.

As the murky tale has unfolded, Bulger is nowhere to be found. Even with a $250,000 bounty on his head there has been no confirmed sighting of him in eight years. According to underworld tipsters, he's been living in Louisiana, Oklahoma and possibly California with his longtime girlfriend, dental hygienist Catherine Greig, and likes to pass himself off as an amiable grandfather who is kind to children and dogs.

Nor is it certain that Bulger does not maintain an absentee role in the Boston-Irish underground. What is certain is that the FBI has never made it a priority to catch him, despite his figuring on its '10 Most Wanted List' for nearly eight years. The task force assigned to catch him is comprised of just one federal agent, one Boston police officer, and one state parole officer.

The Connolly-Bulger case places the FBI in a conflicted position. When the scale of the corruption first came to light, the then Attorney General Janet Reno issued new rules to limit the relationship between agents and criminal informers. Many of those restrictions, including having FBI-informant relationships reviewed by government prosecutors, were lifted last week by Reno's successor, John Ashcroft.

Last week, FBI director Robert Mueller, head of the Boston FBI in the Nineties, sought to reassure critics that overturning Reno's reforms was not at odds with the lessons of the Connolly case. 'Even before Agent Connolly's conviction, we at the bureau understood its need to reform its handling of confidential informants to make sure that this doesn't happen again,' he said.

Others, however, point out that by restoring agents with the kind of powers that Connolly enjoyed, the bureau is in danger of giving the Mafia a free pass.