What a deal

The FBI, the Devil, and Bill Weld

by Dan Kennedy

BLACK MASS: THE IRISH MOB, THE FBI, AND A DEVIL'S DEAL
By Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill. Public Affairs, 381 pages, $26.

The tale told in Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal will be familiar to anyone who's followed the sordid story of the FBI's secret pact with Boston mobsters James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi. Its chief merit lies in the way the authors -- Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, who have been covering the story since the 1980s -- have woven a quarter-century's worth of events into a seamless, sickening whole.

The hidden loser of Black Mass could be former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, bit player though he may have been. Weld built his reputation as a crime-busting US attorney and assistant attorney general, but he comes across here as ineffective and clueless. His refusal to overrule federal prosecutor Jeremiah O'Sullivan, who had declined to provide protection for a hood named Brian Halloran in a murder probe involving Bulger, may well have resulted in Halloran's death. Later, Weld urged subordinates to check out tips that Bulger's main FBI contact, John Connolly, was up to no good, but Weld's follow-through was so lackadaisical that Connolly and his friends were able to deflect Weld with ease. Near the end of the book Weld pops up once again, at then Massachusetts Senate president Bill Bulger's annual St. Patrick's Day breakfast -- this time singing a humorous ditty about Whitey Bulger's disappearance. If Weld is serious about running for governor of New York someday, he had better hope a video clip of that revolting moment doesn't fall into the hands of his opponents.

The corruption laid out by Lehr and O'Neill is pervasive and horrifying enough to make even the most inveterate cynic gag. The FBI -- principally in the persons of Connolly and his supervisor, John Morris -- cut an agreement under which Bulger and Flemmi would provide information about the Italian Mafia in return for protection. This arrangement was struck despite evidence that Bulger's Winter Hill gang was at least as dangerous as La Cosa Nostra, and it enabled the Bulger organization to go on what amounted to a government-approved crime spree -- a spree that included murder and threats of murder.

In the end, the swashbuckling Connolly and his seemingly buttoned-down boss, Morris, who was accepting bribes from Bulger even while investigating corrupt FBI agents in other cities, were exposed and undone. But though the truth eventually came out, there are damned few heroes in Black Mass. To be sure, federal judge Mark Wolf, whose rulings pushed the FBI's protection racket into the light, stands as a shining exception to the prevailing sleaze. But most of Lehr and O'Neill's findings constitute a depressing meditation on the human condition.

Black Mass is getting an impressive national rollout. Tina Brown's Talk magazine published an excerpt; the Sunday Globe will follow suit. The subject of pre-publication raves by Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal, it has already earned Lehr and O'Neill a reported $500,000 in hardcover, paperback, audio, film (Miramax), and serialization rights. There will even be a Japanese version of Black Mass. "The idea of having a copy of this book in Japanese is weird," said Lehr at a recent book-signing party at Doyle's, a Jamaica Plain hangout favored by politicians.

Neither is Black Mass destined to be the last word on the subject. Globe correspondent Ralph Ranalli, who covered the Bulger-FBI case when he was a staff reporter for the Boston Herald, has sold a book to Avon that will probably be on the shelves early next year. Unlike the Lehr-O'Neill book, which focuses almost exclusively on Boston, Ranalli says his "takes a national perspective, and it traces the history of the FBI informant program that Bulger and Flemmi were a part of, and why it went so horribly and murderously wrong." Also reported to be working on a book is former Bulger associate Edward McKenzie.

Long before his disappearance, Whitey Bulger was the center of a formidable mythology. Yes, he was a bad guy, according to the myth, but he was a good bad guy -- a description Bulger himself once used in a mocking conversation with a state trooper who was tailing him. He kept drugs out of South Boston; he provided information that helped solve a notorious bank heist in Medford; he even passed along a crucial tip that saved an FBI agent's life.

Lehr and O'Neill make it clear not only that these pieces of the Bulger legend are untrue but that each sprang entirely from the imagination of John Connolly, who grossly exaggerated Bulger's value in reports to his superiors. Indeed, Black Mass's real importance isn't what it says about Bulger. It's what it tells us about the law-enforcement officials we trust to protect us, and the elected officials who oversee them. What happened in Boston was an entirely foreseeable consequence of the FBI's reliance on informants who are no less reprehensible than those they are informing on. Connolly and Morris may have been unique in the thoroughness of their corruption. Still, it should give everyone pause to realize that the "Devil's deal" they made, far from being an aberration, was and continues to be standard operating procedure.