Whitey Bulger’s Relationship With the FBI — Worse Than Black Mass Shows HT
May 11th, 1982. Early afternoon, the waterfront along Northern Avenue in Boston. Brian Howerin sits in the passenger seat of a Blue Dotson, waiting for a ride home. He’s nervous. He should be. 3 weeks earlier, he walked into the FBI’s Boston field office and told them something dangerous, that Whitey Bulier murdered a man named Roger Wheeler.
He gave them names, dates, details. He asked for protection. He asked to be placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Strike Force Chief Jeremiah O Sullivan denied the request. The FBI said they would handle it. They handled it all right. What Howerin didn’t know, what he couldn’t have known was that FBI supervisor John Morris had already passed his name to Agent John Connelly.
and Connelly had already passed it to Bulier. The very agency Howeran trusted with his life had signed his death warrant. Kevin Weekes, Bulger’s enforcer, served as lookout that afternoon on Northern Avenue. He radioed in a code, “The balloon is in the air.” Within minutes, a 1975 Chevy Malibu pulled alongside the Datson.
Bulier, allegedly wearing a wig and a floppy mustache, opened fire with automatic weapons. Howerin’s body bounced off the pavement and Michael Donahghue, a 32-year-old Teamster truck driver, father of three, whose son had just made his first communion that same week, died beside him. His only crime was offering a friend a ride home from a bar.
This wasn’t a rogue agent. This wasn’t one bad decision. This was a system, a machine built over two decades inside the most powerful law enforcement enforcement agency on Earth, a machine that protected a serial murderer, leaked the names of cooperating witnesses who were then executed, fabricated intelligence reports to justify the arrangement, and buried the evidence under layers of institutional silence.
At least 19 people were murdered, while the FBI looked the other way. Four innocent men spent a combined century behind bars for a crime the bureau knew they did not commit. And when the bill finally came due, it cost American taxpayers more than $113 million. This is how the FBI did not just fail to stop Whitey Bulier.
This is how they built his empire. It starts with a beach. Late 1975, Wallist Beach in Quincy, Massachusetts. Two men sit in an agency Plymouth sedan after dark. One is John Connelly, FBI agent, a South Boston native, a man who grew up idolizing the Bulier brothers in the old harbor housing project. He had joined the bureau in October 1968 with a recommendation letter from House Speaker John McCormack to Jay Edgar Hoover himself.
After stints in Baltimore, San Francisco, and New York, he transferred to the Boston field office in 1973 with one personal mission to recruit Whitey Bulier as a top echelon informant. The other man in the car is James Whitey Bulier, leader of the Winter Hill gang, a career criminal with a 9-year federal prison stint behind him, and a reputation for controlled, calculated violence. Conny’s pitch was simple.
The Italian mafia was already feeding the FBI information about Bulger’s crew. Why not fight fire with fire? Connelly said, “Use us to do what they are doing to you.” Bulier agreed with one condition. He would never be called an informant. He would be a strategist. The FBI opened him as confidential source.
BS1544 TE. BS standing for Boston. TE standing for top echelon, the bureau’s highest informant classification. But here’s the thing most people miss. Bulier wasn’t even the FBI’s first corrupt bargain in Boston. His partner, Steven Fleming, had been an informant since 1965, a full decade earlier, under agents H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condan.
When those agents moved on, Condan transferred Flemy’s file directly to John Connelly in the early 1970s. The corruption wasn’t born in 1975. It was inherited, passed down from one generation of agents to the next like a family business. And just like a family business, each generation expanded the operation.
Connelly didn’t work alone. His direct supervisor was John Morris, head of the FBI’s organized crime squad in Boston from December 1977 onward. Morris was supposed to provide oversight to ensure handlers followed protocol, kept professional distance, and verified the intelligence their sources provided. Instead, he became a full partner in the arrangement.
He cooked dinner for Bulier and Flemmy at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. He drank imported wine with them, so much that Bulier’s crew nicknamed him Veno. At one gathering at the Colinade Hotel in 1983, Morris and Connelly let gangsters listen to highly classified Title 3 wiretap recordings from the FBI bug inside mafia boss Jerry and Julo’s headquarters at 98 Prince Street in the North End.
Those recordings were supposed to be among the most sensitive intelligence the bureau possessed. Morris got so drunk that night a gangster drove him home. The formal rules required Connelly to meet informants individually in controlled settings with detailed 209 reports filed after every contact. The actual arrangement violated every single one of those rules.
Joint meetings with both Bulier and Flemmy were a direct protocol breach. Social dinners, gifts, and a verbal understanding that Morris later admitted under oath. At a dinner at his Lexington home, Morris told Bulier and Flemmy directly that they could do anything they wanted as long as they did not clip anyone.
Flemmy testified they shook hands on it. What the gangsters wanted in return was simple. A head start, advance warning if indictments were ever coming so they could run. They clipped plenty and they got their head start when it mattered most. Above Morris, a succession of special agents in charge either knew what was happening or chose not to look.
Lawrence Sarot privately warned a colleague that Connelly and Morris might have leaked information, then did nothing about it. James Greenleaf buried a recommendation to close Bulier as an informant and refused the DEA’s offer to jointly investigate Bulger’s drug operations. James Ahern conducted a review of Bulger’s informant status by reading Conny’s own files and talking to Connelly himself.
Then when the Boston Globe reported Bulier was an informant in 1988, Ahern publicly called it absolutely untrue. In 1989, Aernn sent a secret memo to the FBI director heaping praise on Connelly, what prosecutors later described as the high water mark in the FBI’s peculiar view of Bulier. And when agents in the field raised real concerns, when ASAC Robert Fitzpatrick recommended in 1981 that Bulier be shut down as an informant, the FBI organized crime chief Shawn McQueeny in Washington overruled him personally. In May 1982, after the
Wheeler and Howerin killings, agents from Boston, Miami, Oklahoma City, and FBI headquarters met in Washington, acknowledged that Bulier and Flemmy were murder suspects and decided to keep them open as informants because they were extremely valuable assets. When the DEA launched Operation Beans in 1983 targeting Bulgers drug trafficking, a high-ranking FBI official in Washington contacted Boston to ask why their informants were being targeted.
A direct act of institutional protection. The bureau didn’t just tolerate the corruption, they defended it from the top. And prosecutor Jeremiah O Sullivan made it worse. In 1979, he excluded Bulier and Flemmy from a major race fixing indictment. A decision that sent Winter Hill gang boss Howe Winter to prison and handed Bulier control of the entire organization.
Oullivan would later admit to Congress, “You got me.” He also testified that confronting the FBI about its informants was impossible. That was the Holy of Holies, inner sanctum, and they would not have allowed me to do anything about that. Here’s how the machine actually worked.
Step by step, dollar by dollar, body by body. The intelligence laundering came first. Bulier and Flemy fed Connelly scraps of information about their Italian mafia rivals, the Andulo brothers and the Patriarcha family, just enough to justify their existence on paper. Connelly inflated those scraps in his reports, making his informants appear invaluable.
The FBI credited Bulier with providing a sketch of Angelo’s headquarters at 98 Prince Street, the sketch that helped agents plant the bugs, which led to the 1986 prosecution. But the sketch was actually drawn by Flemmy. Morris admitted this on the stand, and under oath, he said he knew the information was false.
Kevin Weekes later testified that 90% of the intelligence Connelly credited to Bulier actually came from Flemmy. Connelly took information from other sources and attributed it to Bulier. He allowed Bulier to place disinformation in FBI files about crimes his own gang committed. Before retiring in 1990, Connelly filed a final report suggesting his two informants were packing it in and going into various legitimate businesses, which federal prosecutors later characterized as moneyaundering.
Fleming put the whole arrangement in perspective. He said that he and Whitey gave them [ __ ] and they gave them gold. FBI brass in Washington rewarded Connelly because his reports produced mafia convictions. Connelly protected Bulier because Bulier made his career. Morris approved it all because he was in too deep to stop.
The cycle fed itself and nobody asked whether the intelligence was real because asking that question would collapse the entire structure. But the intelligence laundering was only half the machine. The other half was the leak system. And this is where people died. Every time someone cooperated against Bulier, Connelly, or Morris found out.
And every time they found out, Bulier found out. The pattern was consistent, methodical, and lethal. Nowhere was it more devastating than in the World Jai Ally murder chain, a sequence of three connected killings that shows exactly how FBI corruption amplified violence. It starts with a skim.
Retired FBI agent H. Paul Rico, one of the original handlers from the Flemmy era, had become security chief at World Ji Alli in Connecticut. He set up a scheme diverting an estimated $10,000 per week from the company to Bulier, Flemy, John Callahan, and himself. When owner Roger Wheeler discovered the irregularities and launched an audit, Callahan asked Bulier for a hit.
On May 27th, 1981, John Marterano flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma, walked up to Wheeler at the Southern Hills Country Club, and shot him once between the eyes with a 38 caliber snub-nosed revolver. Wheeler was still sitting in his car in the parking lot. When the Tulsa FBI office asked Boston for help investigating, the Boston office sent a tur reply ruling out any Boston connection, effectively obstructing a murder investigation to protect their informants. That created a problem.
Brian Howerin knew about the Wheeler hit and tried to cooperate. Morris leaked his name. On May 11th, 1982, Howerin and Michael Donahghue were gunned down on Northern Avenue. That created another problem. John Callahan, the man who had requested the Wheeler hit, was now the only living link between the murders and Bulger’s crew.
Connelly warned Bulier that Callahan was a weak link who would fold under pressure. Marterano was dispatched to Florida. He later testified that he objected, that Callahan was a friend of his, and that eventually they convinced him it was two against one. On July 31st, 1982, Callahan was shot in the back of the head at Fort Lauderdale Airport.
His body was stuffed in the trunk of his Cadillac and left at Miami International Airport with a dime placed on the chest. The mob symbol meaning do not drop a dime. Connecticut investigators who had flown to Florida to question Callahan arrived at the airport just as his body was discovered.
Three murders, all connected, all enabled by FBI protection. Wheeler died because the skin was discovered. Howerin died because he tried to tell the truth about Wheeler. Callahan died because he knew too much about both. And they weren’t the only ones. Richard Kuchi, a rever nightclub owner and FBI informant since 1970, gave the bureau information about the whereabouts of two Winter Hill gang fugitives hiding in New York.
Connelly revealed Kasuchi’s status to Bulier. On December 29th, 1976, Marterano shot Kusti in the temple at a Somerville garage. His body was stuffed in a sleeping bag in the trunk of his own car. John McIntyre was a 32-year-old Quincy fisherman who cooperated with authorities on an IRA gun running case involving the trwler Valhalla.
Connelly leaked it. McIntyre was lured to 799 East 3rd Street in South Boston, chained to a chair and interrogated for hours by Bulier. Bulier wrapped a rope around his neck and tried to strangle him. The rope was too thick. He asked, “Do you want one in the head?” McIntyre answered, “Yes, please.” Bulier shot him.
His body was buried in the dirt floor basement of that house alongside Arthur Bucky Barrett, a safe cracker who refused to give Bulier a cut from a $1.5 million bank job and was forced to reveal $47,000 hidden at his home before being shot with a Mac 10. And Deborah Hussie, Flemy’s 26-year-old stepdaughter, whom Flemmy had sexually abused since her teens.
After each killing, Flemmy pulled the victim’s teeth to hinder identification. Bulier took a nap while Weeks and Flemmy buried Barrett’s body. On Halloween 1985, all three bodies were exumed and reeried near Florian Hall in Dorchester. They were not found until January 2000 after weeks cooperated. For this protection, Connelly received more than $235,000 in documented cash payments, a 2 karat diamond ring, and cases of imported wine.
He acquired a house in South Boston, a house on Cape Cod and a boat. As US Attorney Michael Sullivan would later say, John Connelly became a Winter Hill gang operative, masquerading as an FBI agent. Morris received $7,000 in cash, wine, a silverplated wine bucket, and paid airfare for his mistress. One week after Howerin was murdered, after Morris had leaked his name, Morris called Connelly and asked him to have Bulier send $1,000 to fly his girlfriend to Georgia. Bulier obliged.
But the corruption in Boston did not start with Connelly and Morris. It started a decade earlier with the Degan case. And this is the part that should keep you up at night. On March 12th, 1965, Edward Teddy Degan was shot dead in an alley in Chelsea, Massachusetts. The FBI knew it was coming. They had a memo from October 1964 documenting that informant Jimmy Flemmy wanted Degan dead and another memo dated March 10th, 1965, just 2 days before the murder, sent to FBI Director Hoover himself, disclosing that Flemy and Joseph Barbosa planned to
carry out the killing. No agent warned Degan. No agent intervened. They were recruiting Jimmy Flemmy as a top echelon source, and protecting him was more important than preventing a murder. The actual killers included Barbosza and Jimmy Flemmy, both FBY informants. But when Barbosa agreed to testify, he refused to implicate his friend.
Instead, he named four innocent men, Peter Lemon, reportedly because Leone refused to fire a waitress Barbosa was involved with, Joseph Salvat Salvat owed him a $400 lone shark debt. Henry Tamo and Lewis Greco. Agents Rico and Condan met with Barbosza more than 30 times before his grand jury testimony and 26 times before trial, knowing every word was fabricated.
The FBI possessed at least 20 reports identifying the real killers. They shared none of them with prosecutors or defense attorneys. After the convictions, the bureau sent letters of commendation to Rico and Condan. All four men were sentenced to death in July 1968. Their sentences were commuted to life after Ferman versus Georgia in 1972, but the damage was done.
Henry Tamileo died in prison in 1985. His wife also died while he was incarcerated. Lewis Greco died in prison in 1995. His son later committed suicide. Salvati was finally parrolled in 1997 after more than 29 years. Lemon was released in January 2001 after 33 years, 2 months, and 5 days. Barbosza had actually recanted his testimony as early as July 1970, but the FBI induced him to withdraw his recantation by promising to arrange his release from prison.
The exonerating evidence was finally discovered in December 2000 by special prosecutor John Durham during the broader Bulger Flemmy investigation. On July 26, 2007, Judge Nancy Girtner ordered the government to pay $11 million750,000, the largest wrongful conviction award in American history. She wrote that the FBI’s misconduct was clearly the sole cause of this conviction and that FBI officials allowed their employees up the line to ruin lives.
The First Circuit upheld the award in August 2009, calling the FBI’s conduct intentional, outrageous, and beyond all bounds of decency. The direct line from the Degan case to Bulier is institutional. When Rico and Condan retired, Condan turned over Steven Flemy’s informant file to John Connelly. Same program, same methods, same willingness to let people die.
At its peak, Bulier’s criminal enterprise generated an estimated 25 to30 million annually from extortion, drug trafficking, and lone sharking. Revenue that the FBI’s protection made possible. Civil judgments against the US government exceeded $113 million. The Lemon and Salvati families received $11.7 million.
The McIntyre family $3.1 million. The Castuchi family $6.25 million. And the Davis, Husi, and Live families a combined $2.85 million. All paid by American taxpayers, not by the agents who caused the damage. And in South Boston, an entire community was devastated by a drug trade the FBI knowingly allowed to flourish.
A community that had trusted Bulier, trusted the government, and been betrayed by both. Every system has a weakness. For this one, it was not the FBI. It was a federal judge who refused to look the other way. In 1995, when Steven Flemmy was arrested on racketeering charges, his defense attorney filed a motion claiming the FBI had authorized his criminal activity.
Most judges would have dismissed it. Judge Mark Wolf did not. He demanded the FBI confirm or deny Flemy’s informant status, the first time anyone in authority had forced the bureau’s hand. Then Wolf opened 9 months of evidentiary hearings from January to October 1998. Agents took the stand.
Documents surfaced that the bureau had fought for years to keep buried. Wol’s 661page ruling in September 1999 confirmed everything. The leaks, the fabricated reports, the murders, the institutional cover up. But Bulier was already gone. On December 23rd, 1994, Connelly had warned him that sealed indictments were coming.
Bulier fled with Katherine Grig and vanished. He had prepared. Safe deposit boxes stuffed with cash and passports were stashed in Clearwater, Oklahoma, Montreal, Dublin, London, Birmingham, and Venice. Congress took over next. The House Committee on Government Reform, chaired by Representative Dan Burton, held hearings from 2001 to 2003 that produced some of the most explosive testimony in modern congressional history.
Retired agent H. Paul Rico, by then in his 70s, was wheeled into the hearing room and confronted about Salvad’s 30 years of wrongful imprisonment. His response was six words that captured the bureau’s entire attitude toward the people it destroyed. What do you want? Tears. Former prosecutor O Sullivan admitted under oath that he had exercised prosecal discretion on behalf of Bulier and Flemmy.
When confronted with his own contradictory memo, he said simply, “You got me.” The committee subpoenaed Billy Bulier, then president of the University of Massachusetts. He testified for nearly 4 hours on June 19th, 2003, claiming under immunity that he did not know where his brother was. Chairman Burton accused him of selective memory loss.
He was forced to resign from the University of Massachusetts. The final report titled Everything Secret Degenerates ran 1,82 pages across two volumes and concluded that federal law enforcement had actively worked to prevent homicide cases from being resolved in seven states. It documented well in excess of 20 murders committed by government informants.
The DOJ Inspector General’s 2005 report confirmed the systemic rot. 87% of all FBI nar confidential informant files examined had guideline violations. Field agents still were not familiar with the reformed guidelines 2 years after implementation. The system was not broken by one rogue agent. It was designed to fail.
Connelly was convicted twice. He received 10 years in federal prison in May 2002 for racketeering, obstruction, and lying to the FBI. Then he was sentenced to 40 years in Florida in November 2008 for the seconddegree murder of John Callahan, the first time a federal agent was ever convicted of murder for protecting an informant.
The judge told him he had crossed over to the dark side. Morris received full immunity in exchange for testimony against Connelly. He was never charged, never disciplined, and he retired from the FBI with his pension and his freedom. Who do you think was more corrupt, Connelly, who ran the operation, or Morris, who looked the other way and let people die? Let me know in the comments.
But the fall of the FBI’s corrupt alliance, did not end the story. The consequences played out for decades in courtrooms, in prisons, and on a quiet street in Santa Monica, California. For 16 years, Bulier and Grig lived as Charlie and Carol Gasco in a rent controlled apartment at 1,23rd Street in Santa Monica, three blocks from the Pacific Ocean.
They paid $837 a month in cash. Grig told neighbors Bulier had early signs of Alzheimer’s to explain why he rarely left the apartment. Behind the drywall, investigators found $822,198 in cash and more than 30 firearms. Bulier sat on the FBI 10 most wanted list alongside Osama bin Laden. The reward reached $2 million, the largest ever offered for a domestic fugitive.
He was featured on America’s Most Wanted 16 times. Sightings were reported in 19 countries. and the whole time he was three blocks from the beach. In June 2011, the FBI shifted tactics, running a public service announcement that targeted Grig, not Bulier, focusing on her love of plastic surgery and salon visits.
Anna Bjorn’s daughter, a former Miss Iceland, who had been a neighbor and had bonded with Grig over caring for a stray cat, saw the CNN report from her home in Reikuic and called the FBI. On June 22nd, 2011, agents lured Bulier to his parking garage by telling him someone had broken into his storage locker. He did not resist. He told agents they knew who he was and that he was Whitey Bulier.
His trial lasted 2 months with 72 witnesses. Marterano described 13 killings in two days on the stand. Weeks testified that over the radio during the Howlerin hit, he said the balloon is in the air. Flemmy described watching Bulier strangle Deborah Davis and Deborah Hussie. Bulier refused to testify and maintained to the end that he was never an informant.
The jury convicted him on 31 of 32 counts, including 11 murders. He received two consecutive life sentences plus 5 years. On October 30th, 2018, Bulier was transferred to USP Hazelton in West Virginia after an unexplained medical downgrade enabled his removal from a Florida facility where he had been receiving cardiac care.
Well over 100 Bureau of Prisons officials knew about the transfer in advance. Inmates at Hazelton discussed it for days before he arrived. Some placed bets on how long he would survive. Bulier arrived at approximately 8:30 p.m. on October 29. By 6:00 a.m. the next morning, he was dead. Fotios, Freddy Guash, and Paul Dalero entered his cell while a third man stood lookout.
They spent about 7 minutes inside. The 89year-old wheelchairbound bulier was bludgeoned with a lock attached to a belt. His eyes were nearly gouged out. His tongue was nearly cut off. The traditional mob punishment for a rat. The DOJ Inspector General’s December 2022 report found serious job performance and management failures at multiple levels, but remarkably no evidence of malicious intent by BOP employees.
In September 2024, Gaes pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and received 25 years, a largely symbolic sentence on top of his existing life term. Where are the others now? Connelly was released on compassionate release in February 2021 with a terminal cancer diagnosis. He is in his mid80s, living at home in Massachusetts and still collecting his FBI pension.
The Florida Parole Board ruled in April 2023 that he can remain free indefinitely. Morris never spent a single day behind bars. Full immunity, full pension, full freedom. Flemmy is 90 years old. He is in federal prison. He cooperated against Bulier. His parole date is set for the year 2218. Weeks cooperated, served 5 years, and lives quietly in Massachusetts.
Grig completed her sentence in July 2020 and she lives with her twin sister in South Boston. Marterano confessed to 20 murders. He served 12 years and he is a free man in Massachusetts. Despite everything, the investigations, the reforms, the $113 million in judgments, the FBI’s informant program still operates with more than 15,000 active sources.
The same fundamental structure remains with only cosmetic changes. In 2010, the Mark Rosetti case proved the lessons had not taken hold. Another Boston area FBI informant was caught committing violent crimes on the bureau’s payroll. The Bulier family’s $200 million wrongful death lawsuit was dismissed in January 2022, and that dismissal was upheld on appeal.
Most victims families have exhausted their legal options. The institutional accountability that Congress demanded never fully arrived. Connelly collects a government pension. Morris was never charged. The $113 million came from taxpayers, not from the men who leaked names, fabricated reports, and enabled murders.
And Flemy paints replicas of old masters in a federal cell, waiting for a parole date that falls in the 23rd century. Here is the thing about the FBI’s deal with Whitey Bulier. It was not a failure of the system. It was the system working exactly as designed. The top echelon informant program rewarded agents who cultivated high-V value sources.
The more valuable a source looked on paper, the faster an agent’s career advanced. Nobody asked whether the intelligence was real. Nobody asked what crimes were being committed to sustain the relationship. Nobody asked who was dying. Asking those questions meant losing the asset, and losing the asset meant losing the career.
That program still exists. That structure is still in place. And while the FBI was protecting Whitey Bulier in Boston, letting him kill, letting him traffic, letting him destroy an entire neighborhood, another FBI agent was doing the exact opposite. Going undercover inside the mafia itself. No badge, no backup plan, living as someone else for 6 years, knowing that one wrong word meant a bullet in the back of the head.
His name was Joe Pistone. The world knows him as Donnie Brasco. And that story is one you need to hear next.