The Real Whitey Bulger Story Is Much Darker Than Black Mass – HT

 

 

 

May 11th, 1982, 5:30 in the afternoon, Northern Avenue, Boston Waterfront. Brian Howerin sat in the passenger seat of a Blue Datson outside the topside lounge, finishing a beer with a man named Michael Donaghhue. The sun was still up. Families were walking past. A blue Chevy pulled alongside. The window came down.

 A man in a dark wig and a phony mustache leveled an MAC 10 card across the doorframe and opened up. The first burst tore through the windshield. Howerin tried to run. He made it three steps onto the pavement before another burst caught him in the chest and dropped him on the asphalt. Donahghue, who had only stopped for a ride home, took a round through the head and died slumped over the steering wheel.

 The shooter walked back to his car. He drove away. The whole thing took less than 30 seconds. This was not a clean mob hit. This was an ambush in front of a busy seafood restaurant in broad daylight with witnesses everywhere. The man pulling the trigger was James Whitey Bulier, the most protected criminal in the history of Boston.

 The man who tipped him off was a decorated FBI agent named John Connelly. And the innocent victim, Michael Donahghue, 32 years old, a father of three boys, a teamster on his way home from a side job, was a man who had never broken a law in his life. He died because he offered a stranger a ride. This is the story of how the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency sworn to protect American citizens, became the accessory to one of the most cold-blooded double homicides in Boston history.

 This is the murder that the Hollywood version of Black Mass glossed over in a single scene. This is the murder that the FBI spent 20 years trying to bury. And this is the case that finally, after two decades of silence, forced a federal court to admit what every Boston cop already knew. The government killed Michael Donaghhue.

They just used Whitey Bulier to pull the trigger. Here is what the movies will never show you. Brian Howerin was not a tough guy. He was a hanger on, a South Boston kid with a cocaine problem, a bad temper, and a long rap sheet. By 1982, he was 41 years old, broke, paranoid, and facing a murder charge for shooting a man named George Papus inside a Chinatown restaurant.

 He needed a way out. So in January of that year, he walked into the Boston field office of the FBI on the ninth floor of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building and offered to trade. What he had to trade was gold. Howerin told two FBI agents, Leo Brunick and Gerald Montinari, that Whitey Bulier and his partner, Steven Fleming, had personally murdered a wealthy Oklahoma businessman named Roger Wheeler.

 Wheeler owned World Jai Alai, a betting empire that the Winter Hill gang had been skimming for years. On May 27th, 1981, Wheeler had walked off a golf course at the Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, climbed into his Cadillac, and taken a bullet between the eyes from a hitman named John Marterano. Howerin said he had been in the room when Bulger ordered it.

 He said he could put Whitey in a federal courtroom. He wanted witness protection. He wanted his murder charge to disappear. He wanted a new life. The agents listened. They wrote it down. They walked the report up the chain. And that is where the story turns black. You have to understand who John Connelly was.

 Connelly grew up in the old harbor housing projects in South Boston, three doors down from the Bulier family. As a kid, Whitey Bulier had bought him an ice cream cone. That cone, Connelly later joked, was the most expensive piece of dairy in American history. Connelly joined the FBI in 1968. By 1975, he had recruited Whitey as a top echelon informant against the Italian mafia, the Patriarcha family that ran New England out of Federal Hill in Providence. The deal was simple.

Whitey gave the FBI scraps about the Italians. The FBI gave Whitey a license to kill. When the Howerin report landed on Conny’s desk, he did exactly what he had done a dozen times before. He drove to a meeting. He told Whitey everything. He named the informant. He told him what had said about the Wheeler hit.

 He told him Howerin was talking about the Tulsa murder, about Flemy, about the whole operation. And Connelly knew, because he knew Whitey better than anyone, that Howerin was a dead man the moment the words left his mouth. Whitey Bulier was 52 years old in the spring of 1982, 5’9, blue eyes, blonde hair going gray.

 He lifted weights every morning at the Boston Athletic Club. He read military history. He did not drink. He did not smoke. He kept a rotation of girlfriends and a steady relationship with a woman named Katherine Greg. 22 years his junior. He spoke softly. He never raised his voice.

 And he had personally killed at least 19 people, though the real number, according to his own partner, was closer to 40. Steven Fleming was his shadow. 47, dark-featured, soft-spoken, the son of Italian immigrants from Roxbury. Fleming had been a paratrooper in Korea. He had two bronze stars. He had also been a top echelon FBI informant since 1965, 10 years longer than Whitey.

 Together, the two men ran the Winter Hill gang out of a liquor store at 295 Old Colony Avenue in South Boston. They controlled the cocaine trade. They controlled the bookmaking. They controlled the lone sharking. And they did all of it under the protection of the Boston FBI office. an arrangement that would eventually be exposed as the most corrupt informant relationship in American law enforcement history.

 Now, here is the part that the Hollywood version got wrong. Black Mass, the 2015 film with Johnny Depp, treated the Howerin Murder as one beat in a long catalog of crimes. A wig, a gun, a quick scene, on to the next chapter. The film barely mentioned Michael Donahghue at all. It did not show his wife. It did not show his three sons.

 It did not show what it meant for a family to lose a husband and a father because the federal government decided one informant’s life was worth less than the comfort of another. The truth is uglier than the movie. The truth is that for 20 years the FBI fought the Donahghue family in court, denied responsibility, withheld documents, and tried to make the murder go away.

 Let me walk you through how the hit actually happened. By April of 1982, Howerin knew he was in trouble. The FBI had not granted him formal witness protection. He was bouncing between safe houses in Quincy and Squantum, drinking too much, telling friends he thought he was going to be killed. He was right. Connelly had already lit the fuse.

 On May 11th, Howerin spent the afternoon at the Topside Lounge on Northern Avenue, a workingclass waterfront bar in the shadow of the old Anony’s Pier 4 restaurant. He had been drinking beer for hours. Around 5:15, Michael Donahghue walked in. Donahghue was not a criminal. He was a long shoreman, a teamster, a husband to a woman named Patricia, a father to Michael Jr.

, Shawn, and Tommy, ages 8, seven, and four. He worked construction on the side to pay the bills. He stopped at the topside that afternoon to grab a quick drink with friends. Howeran asked him for a ride to a relative’s house in East. Donahghue said, “Sure.” They walked out to the curb. Donghue’s blue 1980 Dudson was parked in front.

 They got in. Howerin road shotgun. Donghue turned the key. Across the street, Whitey Bulier was waiting in a stolen Chevrolet Malibu. The windows tinted, the engine running. Beside him sat a man the federal government would later identify as Kevin Weekes, a young South Boston enforcer who acted as the lookout.

 A second car driven by Patrick Knee sat further down the block as a backup. White, he was wearing a long dark wig and a thick fake mustache. He was holding an MAC 10 machine pistol modified to fire fully automatic. Some accounts place a second shooter in the car. The accounts vary on this. What’s documented is that the burst of fire that killed Howerin and Donahghue came from the passenger side of the Chevrolet and that Whitey Bulier personally took credit for the shooting in conversations with Kevin Weekes years later. The first burst, six rounds, hit

the windshield of the Dutson. Donahue slumped forward, hit in the head and chest. Howerin threw open the passenger door and tried to run. He made it a few steps before the second burst caught him. He went down face first on Northern Avenue. The Chevrolet pulled forward. The shooter rolled down the window again.

 He fired a final burst into Helerin’s body to make sure. Then the car turned right and disappeared toward the Northern Avenue Bridge. A patrolman was on scene within 4 minutes. Howerin was still breathing. Paramedics rushed him to Boston City Hospital. He died at 6:07 that evening. Before he lost consciousness, he gave a name to the responding officers.

 He named a man called Jimmy Flynn, a Charles Town hijacker, as his shooter. He did not name Whitey Bulier. Some say he was protecting his own people. Some say he was so disoriented from the wounds that he picked the first name that came to mind. Some say he knew Bulier had FBI protection and that naming him was pointless. The accounts vary on this.

What is certain is that the false identification gave the Boston FBI office exactly what it needed, a suspect who was not Whitey Bulier. Michael Donahghue died at the scene. He was 32 years old. Now, I want you to understand what happened next inside that FBI office because this is where the cover up began.

 Within hours, John Connelly walked into the field office and began telling colleagues that Howerin had been killed by the Charles Town crew by Jimmy Flynn. Settling an old score. He pushed the false narrative. He buried the Wheeler murder lead. He filed a 302 report, the standard FBI interview document, claiming his informant had heard the same Charles Town rumor.

 The investigation into the actual killers stalled. Witnesses on Northern Avenue who had seen the Chevrolet were never seriously interviewed. The 40 plus shell casings recovered from the scene were logged and shelved. For the next 16 years, the official position of the Boston FBI was that the Howerin Donahghue murders were a mob dispute that had nothing to do with their office.

 Patricia Donaghhue was 29 years old when her husband was killed. She had three small boys. She had no idea why a complete stranger named Brian Howerin had gotten into her husband’s car that afternoon, or why someone wanted that man dead enough to spray a public street with automatic gunfire. For years, she got nothing from the FBI.

 No answers, no condolences, no explanation of why her husband, who had nothing to do with the underworld, had been shot in the head on his way home from a beer. Whitey Bulier went on living his life. He kept running South Boston. He kept collecting his FBI paycheck. He kept killing. Two months after the Howerin ambush on July 26th, 1982, he flew to Florida and murdered John Callahan, a Boston accountant who had helped set up the Wheeler hit.

Callahan was a loose end. Bulier and Flemmy paid John Marterano $25,000 in cash to put two bullets in the back of Callahan’s head and stuff his body in the trunk of a Cadillac at Miami International Airport. By the end of 1982, every man who could put Whitey in court for the Tulsa killing was either dead or running. The cleanup had worked.

The protection had held. Here is what the Boston FBI did not see coming. In 1994, a different federal agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, working with the Massachusetts State Police, was building a racketeering case against Whitey Bulier that did not run through the FBI.

 Connelly, who had retired from the bureau in 1990, found out he tipped his old friend one last time. On December 23rd, 1994, Whitey Bulier walked out of his Quincy condominium, climbed into a black Mercury marquee with Katherine Greg, and disappeared. He would not be seen again for 16 years. The case against the Boston FBI cracked open slowly, the way concrete cracks under pressure.

 In 1997, a federal judge named Mark Wolf began holding hearings into the Bulger Flemmy informant relationship. Steven Flemmy, who had been arrested in 1995, panicked on the stand and admitted everything. The top echelon files, the leaked grand jury information, the murders the FBI had let happen. He named Connelly. He named other agents.

 He named John Morris, Conny’s supervisor, who admitted in court that he had taken $7,000 in cash and a case of expensive wine from Bulier over the years. Kevin Weeks flipped in 1999. John Marterano, the hitman, flipped that same year, accepting a 12-year sentence in exchange for testimony against 20 murders, including the Howerin Donahghue ambush.

 For the first time, the Donahghue family heard under oath what had really happened on Northern Avenue. They heard about the wig, the phony mustache, the MT10. They heard John Conny’s name. They heard that the man who killed their father had been driven to the murder by a tip from the Boston FBI office. John Connelly was indicted in 1999. He went to trial in 2002.

 A federal jury convicted him of rakateeering, obstruction of justice, and lying to the FBI. He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. In 2008, a Florida jury convicted him of seconddegree murder for his role in tipping Bulier to the Callahan hit. He got 40 more years. He sits today in a federal facility.

 A former decorated agent who became the first FBI agent in modern history to be convicted of a mob related murder. Patricia Donahghue did not stop. She and her three sons sued the federal government. The case dragged through the courts for years. The Justice Department fought every motion. They invoked statutes of limitation.

They argued that the FBI’s handling of Bulier was a discretionary function. They tried to make the family go away. In 2006, a federal judge named Reginald Lindseay ruled that the United States government was liable for the murder of Michael Donahue. He awarded the family $8.3 million. The first circuit court of appeals reversed the ruling on a technicality, citing the statute of limitations.

 The Donahghue’s lost on procedure, not on facts. The court did not deny that the FBI had killed Michael Donahghue. It just said the family had filed too late. That ruling stands as one of the crulest moments in the history of American juristprudence. A federal court accepted that the federal government was responsible for an innocent man’s murder.

 And then the same court system told the widow and her sons that they were entitled to nothing. Whitey Bulier was finally captured on June 22nd, 2011 in a rent control apartment at 14283rd Street, Santa Monica, California. He was 81 years old. The FBI found $822,000 in cash hidden in the walls and 30 firearms stashed throughout the apartment. He was extradited to Boston.

In 2013, he stood trial on a 32-count racketeering indictment that included 19 murders. The jury found him guilty of 11 of them. Brian Howerin was on the list. Michael Donahghue was on the list. The judge, Denise Casper, sentenced him to two consecutive life terms plus 5 years. On October 30th, 2018, Whitey Bulier was beaten to death with a padlock stuffed in a sock inside Hazelton Federal Penitentiary in West Virginia.

 He was 89 years old. He had been in the facility for less than 12 hours. When you watch Black Mass, you see a stylish movie about a charismatic killer. When you study the actual file, you see something different. You see a federal agency that decided one career was worth more than the lives of innocent people.

 You see a chain of command that knew, that signed off, that looked the other way. You see John Connelly walking out of a meeting in January of 1982 carrying the name of an informant in his head. And you see Michael Donaghhue 4 months later on Northern Avenue dying in his own car because that name reached the wrong ears.

 Patricia Donaghhue passed away in 2020. Her sons are still alive. They still talk about their father. They still remember the day a Boston police officer came to the door and told their mother her husband was gone. They have spent four decades demanding the same thing. Not money, not revenge, just an admission.

 The admission that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation sworn to protect them, helped kill their father instead. The film didn’t show you that. The film couldn’t. The truth is too heavy to fit in a montage. The truth is that on a sunny afternoon in May of 1982, a 32-year-old teamster named Michael Donahghue offered a stranger a ride home.

 And the federal government of the United States of America made sure he never made it. That’s the story Blackbass skipped. That’s the murder Whitey Bulier took to his grave. And that’s the price the Donaghhue family paid so that an FBI informant could keep killing for another 12 years. Some men die for what they did. Michael Donahghue died for what he didn’t know.

 And the agency that was supposed to protect him is still to this day the reason his sons grew up without a father. If this story moved you, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. What corrupt FBI case should we cover