Black Mass

For instance, in November 1957 Mafia leaders convening in the upstate New York town of Apalachin became front-page news after a New York State Police sergeant stumbled upon the invitation-only event. Troopers set up a roadblock, and the Mafia delegates arriving from around the country were sent scurrying, some jumping from their cars and running into the woods. Others took refuge inside the hilltop mansion of their host, beer distributor Joseph Barbara. More than sixty mobsters were eventually rounded up and identified, many flush with wads of cash. The roster included figures from the Mafia’s hall of fame: Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, and Vito Genovese. The FBI did nothing.

Two years later, on December 8, 1959, a larger group gathered closer to Boston, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The estimated 150 Mafia figures sneaked into the city, assembled at a downtown hotel, held all-night meetings, and then slipped away at dawn before any significant detection could occur. The news media and many experts in crime called these assemblies proof of a national criminal enterprise, an “invisible government,” that was meeting to set policy and solve disputes. But Hoover dismissed it as hype and media sensationalism.

Only after Robert F. Kennedy became U.S. attorney general in 1960 did the FBI, slowly but steadily, move to take on the so-called enemy within. By the time of the historic public testimony of Mafia informant Joseph Valachi, during congressional hearings in 1963, the FBI was officially catching up. In cities around the country special FBI units were created to focus on La Cosa Nostra. In Boston, Dennis Condon and Paul Rico were among the handful of agents picked to staff the city’s first-ever Organized Crime Squad.

The agents hit the street trying to figure out the scope and the power of the New England Mafia underboss Gennaro J. Angiulo, while Kennedy’s Justice Department in Washington, D.C., worked to beef up the legal tools available in the new national war.

In 1961 Congress had passed legislation, at Kennedy’s behest, that elevated much of the Mafia’s criminal activity to federal status. Interstate travel in aid of racketeering, known as ITAR, now came under federal jurisdiction, meaning that the previously local crimes of extortion, bribery, gambling, and the interstate movement of gambling paraphernalia were within federal reach.

Later on, in 1968, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. The act’s Title III set up procedures to obtain court approval for the use of electronic surveillance against mobsters. The new legislation signaled a relaxation in privacy rights, but the government viewed it as necessary, as the kind of trade-off between personal liberty and state power that had to be allowed, it was argued, if police agencies were to have a fighting chance in their efforts to break open conspiracies like the Mafia’s. Eventually the so-called Title III bugs were put to stunningly good use by the FBI in a series of major cases that toppled Mafia leaders in many cities in the United States, including Boston.

In 1970 Congress passed a law that eventually became the government’s most powerful weapon against organized crime. The Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known simply as RICO, would be used in nearly every major prosecution against the Mafia during the 1980s. RICO made operating a criminal racket, for the first time, a major federal criminal offense carrying huge prison sentences. If the government could prove a pattern of racketeering—that is, show that the mobster was involved in several existing state and federal offenses—then the heavy RICO sanctions kicked in. The RICO penalties were not something mobsters took lightly. Instead of the softer sentencing that often accompanied a separate conviction for gambling or loan-sharking, the government began to win terms of twenty years and more.

Finally, the organized crime strike forces created during the 1970 quickly assumed command in the anti-Mafia crusade. The commonsense idea behind the regional strike forces was to pool the resources of the various law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, along with local police agencies. The representatives from the different agencies then joined with federal prosecutors as a team in an organized, multipronged attack against their specific target, the Mafia.

But for all the statutory enhancements, the anti-Mafia crusade was still going to be won or lost in the streets, and the best tool FBI agents possessed on that front was the criminal informant. “The way you solve crime, 99 percent of it is when people tell you what happened,” John Connolly once explained in a Boston radio interview. “I mean, every director of the FBI has said that informants are our most important resource.”

Indeed.

“Without informants, we’re nothing,” Clarence M. Kelley said after being named the new FBI director following J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972. The reason was simple: the police cannot be everywhere, and when investigators look to solve crimes they do not possess unchecked power to search and interrogate suspects and citizens. In a bid to fill in intelligence gaps, a police agency finds that informants are the essential tool—the eyes and ears of the police. Police agencies’ reliance on informants developed as a partial solution to limitations on police power in the United States.

Like every FBI agent back in the 1970s, John Connolly knew full well the enormous value the bureau placed on cultivating informants. The message was drummed into rookie agents training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia: develop informants and win prestige. Later on, agents at work in the field saw that informant handlers were regarded as rain-makers. The FBI’s own manual reinforced in no uncertain terms a handler’s high-class status: working informants was the ultimate—a “source of great satisfaction because of the accomplishments which are obtained as a result of their successful operation.” In fact, compared to the numbingly dry prose of the rest of the FBI’s lengthy Manual of Investigative Operations and Guidelines (MIOG), the dramatic language used to cheer on agents regarding informants borders on the breathless. Operating informants, the manual proclaimed, “demands more of an agent than almost any other investigative activity. An agent’s judgment, skill, resourcefulness, and patience are tested constantly.” The work required “dedication and ingenuity. The success each agent enjoys normally depends on the strength of the agent’s personality and resourcefulness.” Not every agent had the knack for it. But an agent who established a reputation as a handler could achieve several aims simultaneously: advance an FBI investigation, impress the bosses, and dramatically shift upward the trajectory of his own status. In training agents and in fieldwork, the FBI culture made it clear that the working of informants was center stage.