Black Mass - Dick Lehr

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often flat-out self-serving. Often the reliability was questionable, but Connolly did not challenge it. Instead, just as Rico had before him, he filed reports that served to divert suspicion away from Bulger and his gang.

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      The older agents Paul Rico and Dennis Condon belonged to the city’s first generation of FBI Mafia fighters, and they, along with their counterparts in every major US city, had worked feverishly in the late 1960s to turn around the bureau’s ignorance about all things Mafia. These agents had been instructed to get information—and to get it fast. One of the best techniques had proved to be electronic surveillance—even if the use of “gypsy wires” had required agents to bend the rules of law or even break them.

      In cities around the country agents had burglarized the offices of local mobsters to install microphones, often crude devices planted behind a desk or a radiator with the wires, hidden as best they could, snaking out to a nearby location where agents secretly recorded the mobsters’ conversations. In Chicago the bug agents secretly installed in a tailor’s shop used by mobster Sam Giancana operated for five years, from 1959 to 1964. In Providence, Rhode Island, agents made secret recordings of the New England godfather Raymond Patriarca. In Boston agents Condon and Rico were part of a crew that secretly bugged the basement office of Jay’s Lounge, a Tremont Street nightclub where underboss Gennaro Angiulo often conducted Mafia business.

      The FBI was not above engaging in dirty tricks—some silly, some far worse—in those hectic days of catch-up. In New York City agents one night grew tired of following a mob figure who’d picked up two women and was seen heading for a motel. The agents, wanting to go home, let the air out of the subject’s tires, hoping that would keep him in place for a while. There were also stories about agents who rattled suspected mobsters by visiting and questioning their friends and family; the aggressive, full-court press may have been designed to gather information, but it was also used to harass the targets.

      Far more serious was an incident in Youngstown, Ohio: FBI agents monitoring their makeshift bug picked up Mafia talk about a plan to kill the one FBI agent the mobsters most disliked. In short order, and with Hoover’s approval, about twenty FBI agents, the toughest batch that could be assembled from nearby offices, were sent to Youngstown for a private audience with the Mafia boss. The agents crashed into the mafioso’s penthouse, trashed the place, and issued a warning that considering harm to an agent was truly unwise.

      These were some of the FBI tactics of the time—before the 1968 passage of federal legislation authorizing court-approved electronic surveillance. None of the information obtained during these warrantless break-ins and bug installations could be used against the mobsters in court, but the bugs provided a windfall of intelligence that put the FBI on a fast track to closing its information gap. Eventually the FBI drew up a list of twenty-six US cities that were identified from then on as “LCN cities.” Among those cities was Boston.

      The whole premise of the top-echelon informant program rested on the bureau’s understanding—even acceptance—that its informants were active in crime. It was what made them top-echelon informants: they were criminals with access to the LCN. Bulger’s gambling and loan sharking constituted the threshold crimes that the FBI was generally aware of going into the deal, eyes wide open. The challenge was, what about other crimes? Then what?

      In the late 1950s the FBI had developed a set of regulations for the development and handling of informants. Over the years the regulations were revised and refined, most notably in the late 1970s when US Attorney General Edward H. Levi crafted for the Justice Department a series of informant guidelines that the FBI incorporated into its manual of operations. By decade’s end the FBI was reporting that it had 2,847 active informants on board in its fifty-nine field offices, an unknown number of them serving in the hot-ticket top-echelon category.

      For handlers the guidelines were the bureau’s soup-to-nuts primer. For example, when developing an informant, an agent was required to conduct a suitability review to assess the informant’s reliability and motive. Motivation could vary: money or revenge or the competitive edge against other gangsters. If the FBI succeeded in taking down the underworld competition, an informant obviously stood to gain.

      There was also a section on the admonishments an FBI handler was required to convey regularly to his informants—warnings intended to prevent an informant’s deal from softening into a cozy, protective cover. The informant was not to consider himself an employee of the FBI or to expect the FBI to protect him from arrest or prosecution for crimes he committed on his own time. Furthermore, the informant was warned against committing any acts of violence and was not to plan or initiate a crime.

      The regulations also outlined controls intended to keep the agent from being compromised or, worse, corrupted. The safety checks were an acknowledgment of the danger and temptations inherent in having agents team up with criminals. Provisions emphasized the “special care” that had to be exercised “to carefully evaluate and closely supervise” the use of informants, in large measure to ensure that “the government itself does not become a violator of the law.” In an effort to keep the deal on track, an alternate FBI agent was to be assigned to work alongside the primary handler in managing the informant. To ensure that the FBI was keeping the upper hand, the handler’s squad supervisor was required to meet with the informant periodically to assess the bump and grind going on between the informant and his FBI handler. The informant’s reports were to be tested constantly for accuracy and quality. Meanwhile, agents were barred from socializing with their informants or having any business ties with them. The exchange of gifts between agents and informants was prohibited.

      Taken as a whole, the regulations on paper seemed fairly airtight, but they also provided plenty of wiggle room. Even though the regulations stipulated that FBI informants could not commit any crimes, another section allowed for the “authorization” of an informant to break the law when “the FBI determines that such participation is necessary to obtain information needed for purposes of federal prosecution.” Though the guidelines discouraged use of this escape clause, the discretion to permit criminal activity rested with FBI agents in the field, agents like John Connolly, Paul Rico, and Dennis Condon. There was little oversight from FBI headquarters in Washington and no requirement that the bureau consult with anyone outside the FBI—namely, Justice Department lawyers—to review the wisdom of authorizing a particular crime. It was the FBI’s private business, an in-house matter. Deferring to the FBI, Levi and other Justice Department officials had agreed there was no other way if the FBI was going to fulfill its “sacred promise” of protecting an informant’s confidentiality. To seek outside review was to risk exposing an informant’s identity, and informants, according to the guidelines, were told right from the start “that the FBI will take all possible steps to maintain the full confidentiality of the informant’s relationship with the FBI.”

      It was a pledge right down John Connolly’s alley, an institutional version of the loyalty oath taken on the streets of Southie: you never turn your back on a friend, and you always keep your word. But Southie was not the FBI. Even if field agents possessed the power to give informants room to move in the underworld, the guidelines nonetheless required that agents consult the Justice Department if they learned that their informants were committing unauthorized crimes that had nothing to do with their deal with the FBI—particularly crimes of violence. “Under no circumstance shall the FBI take any action to conceal a crime by one of its informants.” This commandment was regarded as one of the guidelines’ core principles. Getting word of a crime, the FBI had some choices. It could report the criminal activity to another police agency for possible investigation. Or it could consult with federal prosecutors and together consider whether the extracurricular criminal activity was worth tolerating given the informant’s high value. But something had to be done; some assessment of the informant’s status had to be made, a review that required outside ventilation of the FBI’s usually exclusive and secret domain.

      But the rules were only as good as the agents abiding by them, and in Boston Paul Rico had already shown how the rules could be exploited or even ignored. It was as if the Boston agents focused on another section tailored to their personal styles: “The success of the Top Echelon Criminal Program depends on a dynamic and imaginative approach.” If need be, the Boston agents concluded, the

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