Black Mass (Page 55)

Bergeron at the time knew none of this. He was soaking up McIntyre’s words and feeling as if he’d won the lottery. “Seemed like an awful big gift at that particular point in time,” he was thinking. “This guy had a mountain of information.” Over the next several days he and Boeri notified the DEA, customs, and even the FBI. McIntyre was willing to cooperate, and plans were made to use him to gather more information about the gang’s drug trafficking. Then one day a few weeks after this seemingly huge break, McIntyre left his parents’ house in Quincy saying he was heading off to see Patrick Nee. McIntyre was never seen again. His truck and wallet were found abandoned in a parking lot. Bergeron was crushed. It was Halloran all over again. It was Bucky Barrett all over again. Disappearances that followed talk about Bulger and Flemmi. There was even one more disappearance that autumn that fell outside Bergeron’s jurisdiction. Stevie Flemmi and Deborah Hussey were having a bad time of it. The couple was fighting a lot, and Hussey was threatening to tell her mother about her affair with Flemmi. Of course, this would have made things difficult for Stevie. Suddenly Deborah Hussey disappeared. Like Debra Davis before her, she was twenty-six. Flemmi went home to Marion Hussey in Milton. He wasn’t about to tell Marion he’d just buried Deborah in a basement in South Boston, a location he and Bulger had already used to dispose of John McIntyre’s body a few weeks earlier, and before that, Bucky Barrett’s. Instead he just shrugged his shoulders and did his best to console the girl’s mother.

BERGERON believed Bulger and Flemmi had murdered McIntyre. He didn’t know exactly how they’d found out about his cooperation, but he suspected the FBI. Bergeron and, especially, DEA agents Reilly and Boeri already knew about the rumors circulating throughout law enforcement in the Boston area that Bulger and Flemmi were informants for the FBI. In planning for Operation Beans, they had consulted with trooper Rick Fraelick, who provided the new team of investigators with photographs of the targets, informant reports, and other intelligence that state troopers had assembled. He also gave them a full accounting of the failed bid at electronic surveillance at the Lancaster Street garage in Boston. Fraelick was convinced the FBI had “dimed them out.”

The new investigators were not naive. They harbored suspicions about Bulger’s possible ties to the FBI. But no one had hard proof. From their own informants, they also knew that Bulger was supremely confident, that he liked to boast about outfoxing anyone who might try to pursue him. Bulger would rank on the state troopers, calling the failed Lancaster Street garage effort “a joke.” It was similar to the wiseguy bluster the troopers had witnessed from their perch in the rooming house, spying Bulger posing outside the garage, sucking in his stomach.

In fact Bulger had taken the Lancaster Street garage challenge to heart. Post-Lancaster, the ever-wary Bulger and Flemmi had grown increasingly careful in their ways. Bulger installed a sophisticated alarm system in the condo he shared with Greig. He did the same with the 1984 Black Chevy Caprice he and Flemmi drove. (The car was registered to Kevin Weeks’s sister Patricia, who worked as a clerk for the Boston police.) In the condo Bulger now always had the TV and stereo turned up. In the car he always blared the radio and a police scanner crackling with noise to mask his low talk. Then at the end of his day Bulger parked the car right up against the condo’s door, where he could watch it.

Moreover, Bulger and Flemmi had further insulated themselves, especially Bulger. Instead of exposing himself to a steady stream of underworld figures—as he had each day at the Lancaster Street garage—Bulger pulled back. Bulger, one informant told investigators in 1984, “will converse with subordinates only when necessary. Subordinates cannot directly contact Bulger and Flemmi. Contact is directed to George Kaufman, and Kaufman will relay information.”

The extra Bulger caution was in addition to his already well-established countersurveillance habits, such as the driving techniques he employed to check to see if anyone was following him: suddenly pulling over; suddenly reversing direction, especially on a one-way street; suddenly veering from the high-speed lane on the highway to take an exit. Bergeron and DEA agents Reilly and Boeri took note that Bulger and Flemmi seemed to function on high alert at all times.

Bulger and Flemmi and the new investigators periodically bumped into one another. Bergeron and Boeri were tailing Bulger one summer night along Dorchester Avenue in Southie when Bulger spotted them. Bulger waved and smiled. But Whitey wasn’t always so jaunty. Bergeron and another detective one night set up surveillance at the condo in Quincy with a white Ford van the DEA had provided. It was 2:02 in the morning, and Bulger came out of unit 101, got into his car, and drove around the parking lot while staring suspiciously at the van. Then he parked, got out, and looked into the van’s rear window. He walked all around the van, checking out the front plate. Visibly agitated, he went back inside the condo. Investigators hustled over to drive the van away, and as they did, Bulger appeared in the rearview mirror in a car that pulled out of the shadows by the Dumpster.

The investigators realized from these cat-and-mouse encounters that Bulger and Flemmi were aware of their interest in them. But even while recognizing that Operation Beans was unfolding in a high-risk atmosphere, they never thought of not going for it. Bergeron, Boeri, and Reilly had frequently worked over the possibility that Bulger and Flemmi were FBI informants. But in the end, so what? The bottom line in 1984 was actually quite simple. Bulger and Flemmi, Reilly concluded, “were the strongest organized crime figures remaining in Boston, since the recent downfall of the Angiulo organization.” Even if they were informants, noted Reilly, “informants aren’t given any particular free pass.” They all recognized it would be a lot easier to build a case if they could line up witnesses to testify in court against Bulger and Flemmi, but that wasn’t realistic, not with Bulger’s insular lifestyle, not with the widespread fear of Bulger that persisted in the underworld, not when men like John McIntyre disappeared off the face of the earth. Thus, the central game plan for Operation Beans was to capture Bulger’s own words. For much of 1984 the investigators worked to assemble the probable cause they’d need to win a judge’s okay to install bugs.

Even though the FBI was notified as a matter of courtesy in April 1984, the goal in putting together Operation Beans was to limit the FBI’s knowledge and participation in the drug investigation. “I wanted to keep it away from the FBI and go on with it,” said Reilly. The case, he said, was, “DEA initiated, DEA sustained, DEA funded. We did everything.” The whole operation was specifically set up to try to keep certain Boston FBI agents from knowing about it. That autumn, when agents from the FBI’s crack “tech team” arrived from New York City to consult with the DEA on installing a bug in Bulger’s car and condo, the out-of-town FBI agents were ordered not to check in with the Boston FBI office. The two local FBI agents who were eventually loaned to the DEA to help monitor the bugs were newcomers to the city. The office for Operation Beans was even moved off-site to the Fargo Building in downtown Boston, away from the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, where DEA agents and FBI agents often passed each other, ate lunch together, and might gossip about cases.