The Departed Left Out the Worst Part of This True Story – HT

 

 

 

The kid was 9 years old, bare knees, scraped elbows, getting his face pushed into the cracked pavement of the old harbor housing projects in South Boston. It was 1949, summer, the kind of humid afternoon where the laundry hung limp on the lines between buildings, and the smell of boiled cabbage drifted out of every kitchen window.

 Three older boys had him cornered behind the brick wall of building 18. They were going to take his ice cream. They were going to take more than that. And then a shadow fell across the pavement. A teenager. Blonde hair sllicked back. Cold blue eyes. He didn’t yell. He didn’t threaten. He just looked at the older boys and they scattered like roaches in a kitchen light.

 He bent down, picked up the ice cream cone, wiped it off on his shirt, handed it back to the kid. He said four words. “You all right there, kid?” The kid nodded. The teenager walked away. That kid’s name was John Connelly. The teenager who saved him was James Joseph Bulier. The world would come to know him as Whitey.

 And that 22nd encounter in the Old Harbor projects became the most catastrophic friendship in the history of American law enforcement. This wasn’t just another corrupt cop story. John Connelly Jr. wasn’t a beat patrolman taking envelopes from bookies. He was a decorated FBI special agent, the bureau’s golden boy, the man who recruited the most dangerous gangster in New England as a top echelon informant.

The man whose name appears on classified bureau files as the architect of the organized crime squad’s greatest victory over Lacosa Nostra. And he was also the man who tipped off Whitey Bulier to kill at least three people. The man who took diamonds and cash like a maidman. the man who became in every way that mattered family to the very monster he was supposed to be hunting.

 This is the story of how a 9-year-old boy’s gratitude became a 40-year corruption pact. This is how the FBI’s most prized informant program in Boston was actually run by the criminals it claimed to control. This is the rise and fall of John Zip Connelly Jr., the first FBI agent ever convicted of murder. But here’s what the official record buries in footnotes.

 Connelly didn’t get corrupted on the job. He didn’t slowly slide into Whity’s pocket over the years. He went into the FBI already belonging to him. The plan was set before he ever pinned on the badge. To understand how that happened, you have to understand Souy. South Boston in the late 1940s was not a neighborhood. It was a fortress.

 Irish, Catholic, workingass, insular in a way that’s hard to even describe now. Outsiders weren’t welcome. Cops weren’t trusted. And the unwritten rule that governed every kid who grew up there was simple. You don’t rat ever on anyone for any reason. The kids who played stickball in the alleys behind East 8th Street grew up knowing that loyalty to the neighborhood came before loyalty to the law.

 before loyalty to God. Before loyalty to your own mother, if it came to it, John Connelly was born in Boston in 1940. His father worked at the Boston Edison Electric Company. His mother kept the apartment in the projects spotless. They lived at number 41 Oellahan Way down the hall from the Bulier family.

 James was 11 years older, already a legend on the block, already running with a crew called the Shamrocks, already feared by adults who should have known better than to be afraid of a teenager. But Whitey Bulier was different even then. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. He read books in his bedroom while other kids his age were getting drunk on stolen beer.

 He lifted weights. He studied people. and he understood before anyone else in that neighborhood understood that information was more valuable than money. So when Whitey saved 9-year-old Johnny Connelly from those bullies, he wasn’t being kind. He was making an investment. He was the type of person who never did anything without calculating the return.

Connelly idolized him from that day on. There are old-timers in Souy who will tell you off the record that little Johnny used to follow Whitey around like a puppy, carrying his gym bag, running errands, bringing him sandwiches from the corner deli. And Whitey led him because Whitey understood something about that kid that nobody else saw.

Johnny Connelly was smart. Really smart. The kind of smart that could get him out of the projects. The kind of smart that could put him places no Bulier could ever go. By the time Connelly hit high school, he was already a different kind of souy kid. He read voraciously. He kept his grades up.

 He had ambition that stretched past the corner liquor store and the Long Shoreman’s union. He went to Boston College High School. Then he went to Boston College itself. Graduated in 1961. He got a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Think about that for a second. A kid from the Old Harbor Projects sitting in a classroom at Harvard.

 That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens because someone wants something. In 1968, John Connelly joined the FBI. He went through the academy at Quadico. He came out a fully credentialed special agent. And here’s the part that should have raised red flags from the moment he was hired. He specifically requested an assignment to Boston.

 Most rookie agents get sent to small field offices in cities they’ve never heard of. Birmingham, Tampa, Buffalo. The bureau likes to break agents away from their hometowns, removes the temptations, removes the conflicts of interest. Connelly skipped that. He demanded Boston and somehow he got it. His first posting was actually New York, then Baltimore.

 But by 1973, he was back in Boston, exactly where he wanted to be, where Whitey wanted him to be. He joined the organized crime squad, the unit dedicated to dismantling Lacosa Nostra. And his very first major project, the assignment that would define his career, was the recruitment of highlevel informants. Now, here’s where you have to understand how the FBI’s top echelon informant program actually worked.

 It wasn’t a snitch program. It wasn’t street level. The top echelon was a classified initiative started in the late 1950s by Jay Edgar Hoover himself. The idea was to recruit made guys, bosses, capos, men so deep inside the mob that they could deliver entire crime families on a silver platter. In exchange, the FBI would protect them, look the other way on certain crimes, bury investigations that got too close.

 The protection wasn’t supposed to extend to murder, or to active racketeering that hurt civilians. But the rules were vague, and the agents who handled these informants had enormous discretion, almost no oversight. Connelly knew exactly who he wanted. He’d known since he was 9 years old. In 1975, in a parked car at Wallist Beach in Quincy, Massachusetts, Special Agent John Connelly sat down with James Whitey Bulier, and made his pitch.

 By this point, Whitey was running the Winter Hill gang out of Somerville. He’d done nine years in federal prison, including three years at Alcatraz on bank robbery charges. He’d come home in 1965 and quietly built himself into the most feared man in South Boston. His brother, William Bulier, had become president of the Massachusetts State Senate. The Bulgers were power.

 Real power. The kind that ran from the projects to the state house. Conny’s pitch was simple. The Italians are coming for you. The Patriarcha family out of Providence wants Boston back. They’re going to wipe out the Irish. Help me destroy them first. I’ll protect you. You’ll be untouchable. Whitey listened. He took his time.

 He told Connelly he’d think about it. But the truth is the deal was already done. It had been done since 1949. This was just paperwork. On September 18th, 1975, James Joseph Bulgar was officially opened as top echelon informant BS1544. BS for Boston. 1544 was his number. From that day forward, on paper, Whitey Bulier was working for the FBI.

 In reality, the FBI was working for Whitey Bulier. Here’s what nobody in the bureau understood at the time. Connelly wasn’t running Bulier. Bulier was running Connelly. The information that flowed from Whitey to the FBI was carefully curated. He gave up his Italian rivals. He gave up the lower level guys.

 He gave up anyone who threatened his territory. And in exchange, he got a federal shield that allowed him to expand his empire without a single agent looking his way. Drug trafficking, extortion, lone sharking, murder, all of it protected by a man with a badge and a Harvard degree. The gifts started small.

 A bottle of expensive wine for Conny’s birthday. A case of Hennessy at Christmas. Then they got bigger. Cash stuffed envelopes passed in restaurant booths. 5,000 here, 10,000 there. Connelly later claimed these were just gifts between friends. Friends who happened to be informants and handlers, friends who happen to be murderers and federal agents.

 In 1976, Whitey bought Conny’s wife, Maryanne, a diamond ring. The accounts vary on the exact value, but it was substantial. Thousands of dollars at minimum. Connelly took it. He let his wife wear it. He never reported it to his supervisors. That diamond ring would become exhibit A in a federal courtroom 27 years later.

 And then the murders started. You have to understand what was happening in Boston in the late 1970s and early 80s. Whitey Bulier and his partner Steven the rifleman Fleming were systematically eliminating anyone who threatened them, anyone who knew too much, anyone who might cooperate with law enforcement.

 And every single time someone got close to flipping, every single time an investigation got dangerous, that person ended up dead. The pattern was too obvious to be coincidence, but the FBI office in Boston refused to see it. May 27th, 1982. Edward Brian Howerin, 41 years old, low-level associate of the Winter Hill gang.

 Howerin had walked into the FBI’s Boston office months earlier. He told agents he had information about a murder, specifically the killing of a Tulsa, Oklahoma businessman named Roger Wheeler. Wheeler had owned World Jai Alai. The Winter Hill gang had been skimming millions from his Florida operations. When Wheeler started auditing the books, he had to die.

Howerin told the FBI that Bulier and Flemmy were behind it. The bureau debated whether to put him in witness protection. They never made a decision because Connelly went to Whitey. Connelly told him exactly what Howerin was saying. Within weeks, Howerin was walking out of the Pier restaurant in South Boston when a car pulled up alongside him.

 Whitey was in the back seat with a ski mask and a machine gun. He fired 30 rounds. Howerin died on the pavement at the corner of Northern Avenue. A young man named Michael Donahghue, who was just giving Howerin a ride home, was also killed. Donahghue had three kids. He was 32 years old. He had nothing to do with anything. Then there was Roger Wheeler himself, the Tulsa businessman, shot in the head at his country club in Oklahoma on May 27th, 1981, right between the eyes as he sat in his car.

 The trigger was pulled by John Marano, a Winter Hill hitman. But the order had come from Bulier, and the warning that Wheeler was about to expose the J ally scheme. Some of that information had filtered up through FBI channels. First, Conny’s channels. The most haunting case was John McIntyre, November 1984. McIntyre was a fisherman.

He had been part of a crew that tried to smuggle 7 tons of weapons aboard the troller Valhalla to the Irish Republican Army. The shipment failed. McIntyre got picked up by customs. He started talking. He told federal agents that Whitey Bulier had financed the operation. He told them about drug shipments. He told them about murders.

And someone inside the FBI told Whitey. McIntyre was lured to a house on East Third Street in South Boston. Whitey tried to strangle him with a rope. The rope broke. McIntyre, choking, begged for his life. He asked if he could just be shot. Whitey obliged. They pulled his teeth out so he couldn’t be identified.

They buried him in the basement. Three murders directly tied to information that flowed from FBI files to Whitey Bulger’s ears. There were more. Some prosecutors believe as many as a dozen people died because of intelligence Connelly leaked to his top echelon informant, but three is the documented number.

 Three families destroyed, three men erased, and John Connelly kept getting promoted. He kept getting commendations. He kept being celebrated as the agent who delivered the Italian mafia of New England. Because that part was true, too. The intelligence white he provided actually did help dismantle the patriarch crime family. In 1983, Connelly and his team planted a bug in the Vanessa’s Italian restaurant at 34 Guild Street in Medford.

 They recorded a mob induction ceremony, the first one ever caught on tape in FBI history. It led to convictions across multiple states. Connelly was hailed as a hero. He retired from the FBI in 1990 with full honors. He took a high-paying job as head of corporate security for Boston Edison, the same company where his father had spent his life climbing poles.

 He had a house on Cape Cod, a second wife, three sons. He looked from the outside, like the perfect end to the perfect career, but the foundation was rotten, and it was about to crack. In 1994, federal prosecutors who didn’t trust the Boston FBI office began building a racketeering case against Whitey Bulier. Connelly had been retired for years, but he still had sources inside the bureau, and one of those sources tipped him off that an indictment was coming.

 Connelly drove out to a meeting spot. He told Whitey, “Run.” On December 23rd, 1994, Whitey Bulier vanished. He went on the run for 16 years. He became one of the most wanted fugitives in the world. Number two on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list, right behind Osama bin Laden. The investigators who finally cracked open the corruption story were not from Boston. They had to be.

 Nobody local was going to do it. A federal task force based out of Washington began pulling files, interviewing witnesses, reading the old reports. And the picture that emerged was so devastating that career FBI officials reportedly wept when they saw it. Their flagship informant program in Boston had been a fraud.

 Their golden boy had been a gangster with a badge. John Connelly was indicted in 1999. The federal trial began in May 2002. The evidence was overwhelming. Witnesses testified about the cash, the diamonds, the leaked grand jury information. Whitey’s partner, Steven Flemmy, who had been arrested in 1995, took the stand and confirmed everything.

 The jury convicted Connelly of rakateeering, obstruction of justice, lying to a federal grand jury. He got 10 years in federal prison. But that wasn’t the end. Because Roger Wheeler had been murdered in Oklahoma, and his family had never stopped pushing. And in 2005, the state of Florida indicted John Connelly for the 1982 murder of John Callahan, a Boston accountant who had been the bagman for the Gilei skim.

 Callahan had been found in the trunk of a Cadillac at Miami International Airport with two bullets in his head. The prosecution’s theory was that Connelly had tipped Bulier that Callahan was going to crack under FBI pressure. So Bulier had Marterano drive to Florida and kill him. Connelly hadn’t pulled the trigger. He hadn’t been in Florida, but under Florida law, providing information that leads to a murder makes you guilty of that murder.

 The trial began in October 2008. Connelly was 68 years old, gay-haired, stooped. He sat at the defense table in a brown suit, watching former mobsters testify against him in exchange for reduced sentences. On November 6th, 2008, the jury delivered its verdict. Guilty of seconddegree murder. The judge sentenced him to 40 years in Florida State Prison.

 With his federal sentence stacked on top, Connelly would be over a 100red years old before he ever saw daylight again. He became the first FBI agent in American history to be convicted of murder, the first ever to die in the system he had served. He’s still incarcerated as of the most recent records, fighting his conviction from a cell.

 The ripple effects rewrote the bureau. The FBI dismantled major parts of its informant program after the Connelly scandal. New regulations, new oversight, mandatory rotation of agents away from their hometowns, required reporting of all gifts and contacts. None of it would have happened without Conniey’s catastrophic failure. None of it can bring back John McIntyre or Brian Howerin or Roger Wheeler or Michael Donahghue or any of the other people who died because of a friendship that began in a souy housing project in 1949.

Whitey Bulier was finally captured in Santa Monica, California on June 22nd, 2011. He was 81 years old. He was tried in Boston in 2013, convicted of 11 murders. Sentenced to two consecutive life terms, he was beaten to death by fellow inmates in a federal prison in West Virginia in 2018. Steven Fleming is serving life.

 John Marterano cut a deal, served 12 years, walked out. And in a quiet Cape Cod neighborhood, a woman named Maryanne still has a diamond ring in a drawer somewhere. Or maybe she sold it. The official record doesn’t say. The Departed came out in 2006. Matt Damon played Colin Sullivan, the corrupt cop. Martin Scorsesei won the Oscar for best director.

 Audiences thought it was just a clever crime thriller. They didn’t realize they were watching a sanitized version of real events, real corpses, real betrayals. The character of Colin Sullivan, the polished Irish American climber who serves two masters and dies alone in his apartment, was based directly on John Connelly. Except Connelly didn’t die.

Connelly is still alive, still serving his sentence, still maintaining to anyone who will listen that he was a great FBI agent who did everything by the book. That’s the truth at the heart of this story. The mafia didn’t beat the FBI in Boston. They didn’t outsmart it. They didn’t bribe a few low-level agents.

 They walked right into the heart of the bureau and they planted their man there. They raised him from 9 years old. They sent him to Harvard. They watched him pin on the badge and they ran the show for 40 years while the federal government celebrated him. Connelly thought he was using Whitey to make his career. Whitey was using Connelly to build an empire.

 In the end, neither of them won. Both of them died in prison or in Conny’s case will die in prison. The body count between them conservatively runs to 19 murders. That’s the real lesson of John Zip Connelly. It’s not about a bad apple. It’s not about one corrupt agent. It’s about the seduction of loyalty.

 The way a debt you don’t even remember owing can grow into a chain that drags you to the bottom of the ocean. Connelly never stopped seeing himself as that 9-year-old kid. The one whose ice cream got saved, the one who owed his life to the older boy from down the hall. And Whitey Bulier spent every single day of the next 60 years collecting on that debt.