By MICHAEL COOPER and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
Published: June 30, 2011
During the 16 years James (Whitey) Bulger spent on the lam, several of his former partners in crime testified that he had made payoffs to two dozen Boston police officers and half a dozen F.B.I. agents over his long criminal career ? giving them thousands of dollars and rings, a Meerschaum pipe and Lalique glass.
Drug Enforcement Administration
Stephen Flemmi, left, and James Bulger, center, in Boston in 1989.
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Bulger Racketeering Case Dropped for Murder Case (July 1, 2011)
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Times Topic: James (Whitey) Bulger
Josh Reynolds for The Boston Globe
Stephen Flemmi testified that he and James Bulger killed John McIntyre, above, for being an informer.
But few lawmen ? with the notable exception of John Connolly, his longtime handler at the F.B.I. ? were ever convicted of corruption.
Now that he is back in custody after his capture last week in Santa Monica, Calif., the looming question is whether Mr. Bulger, a longtime informant ? who fed information about his rivals to the F.B.I. for years in return for their protection ? will squeal again.
?I think there are a whole bunch of people out there he could probably name? who are worried what he might say, said Robert Fitzpatrick, who was an assistant special agent in charge of the Boston office of the F.B.I. in the 1980s, and who has testified that he tried unsuccessfully to end Mr. Bulger?s run as an informant.
The Bulger saga has been explored in trials, Congressional hearings, reams of newsprint and a shelf of books. But a review in recent days of hundreds of pages of trial transcripts and court decisions, along with interviews with several former law enforcement officials and lawyers connected with the case, shows that, despite all the scrutiny, there has never been a full official reckoning of the public corruption that allowed Mr. Bulger to thrive. His partners have testified that former F.B.I. agents were on the take, and named names, but in many cases, the agents simply denied it and nothing happened. A report promised years ago by a special prosecutor was never issued. It is unclear even now whether the government wants to reopen old wounds.
?It?s not always just the guy pulling the trigger who is guilty,? said Tom Foley, a retired state police commander who pursued Mr. Bulger with Ahab-like intensity for years, only to see him elude capture thanks to help from his F.B.I. friends. ?It?s also the people who set that up and allowed it to happen, and especially the people who had a responsibility to put a stop to it.?
Even if Mr. Bulger, 81, decides to talk, it is not clear that he has much to bargain with: he stands accused of 19 murders, and some of his closest associates have implicated him. The statute of limitations has passed for most crimes he could talk about, and most former investigators are retired or dead. But former F.B.I. agents and lawyers connected to the case say that Mr. Bulger may decide that he wants to settle a few scores.
For much of the 1980s, he turned the world of Boston law enforcement upside down.
The F.B.I. considered him and his partner Stephen (the Rifleman) Flemmi ?top echelon? informants, but the pair seemed to get more from the bureau than they gave. Federal agents helped them by locking up rivals, protected them from other investigators and tipped them off when witnesses threatened to implicate them. Those would-be witnesses quickly wound up dead, sometimes with their teeth removed to make it harder to identify the bodies.
In those days it was not just the lawmen who referred to the gangsters with colorful nicknames like Whitey and the Rifleman. Mr. Bulger had his own nicknames for the F.B.I. agents he wined and dined and used, associates testified: Zip, Agent Orange, The Pipe, Doc and Vino.
John Connolly was the F.B.I. agent who handled both Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi, using their information to build high-profile cases against the Mafia. Mr. Bulger called him Zip because they came from the same South Boston housing project and had shared a ZIP code. But Mr. Connolly grew too close to his source. He was convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice in 2002, in part for tipping Mr. Bulger off in 1994 when he was finally about to be indicted. Then he was convicted of second-degree murder in 2008 for warning Mr. Bulger in 1982 that a man named John Callahan was likely to implicate him in several murders connected with an attempt to profit from World Jai Alai, a company with frontons in Connecticut and Florida. Mr. Callahan?s body was found in the trunk of a car at Miami International Airport, after an attendant noticed blood dripping from it.
Inside NYTimes.com
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/us/01informant.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss
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