Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the Boston FBI, and a Devil's Deal Read Online Free PDF Page B

Flemmi’s rich access to mafiosi and the kind of information Connolly so badly wanted. Flemmi, meanwhile, had to recognize the value of teaming up with Bulger, not just for his cunning mind but also for his marquee status, particularly with Connolly. He could see something special pass between them right from the beginning. “They had a relationship.”
    For Connolly, Flemmi was a hand-me-down, but Bulger was his own, a coup for the FBI in Boston. It was a beast of a deal, a high-five achievement, with Connolly in charge of two midlevel gangsters positioned to assist the FBI in its stated campaign to cripple the Mafia enterprise. But the new deal hardly meant Whitey would curb his style. In fact, just five weeks after the Whitey Bulger informant file was opened officially on September 30, 1975, Whitey chalked up his first murder while on FBI time. He and Flemmi took out a longshoreman from Southie named Tommy King. The hit was part power grab, part revenge, and mostly Bulger hubris. Bulger and King, never friends, had gotten into an argument one night in a Southie bar. Fists began flying. King had Bulger down and was pounding away on him when others finally pulled him off. Payback for Bulger came November 5, 1975. No doubt buoyed by the secret knowledge the FBI would always be looking to curry favor with him, Bulger, Flemmi, and an associate jumped King. The longshoreman vanished from Southie and the world. Not surprisingly, Bulger mentioned none of this in his meetings with Connolly; instead, one of Bulger’s first reports was that the Irish gang unrest and bloodshed supposedly pending between Winter Hill and the Mafia had fizzled—much ado about nothing. The streets were calm, reported Bulger.
    So it began.

CHAPTER TWO
     

    South Boston
    In order to wait for Whitey at Wollaston Beach, John Connolly had to first get himself home from New York. Flemmi’s boyhood pal “Cadillac Frank” Salemme would be his ticket.
    Salemme’s arrest happened on a cold bright New York afternoon in December 1972 when the good guys and the bad guys floated past each other on Third Avenue. A face in the crowd suddenly clicked with Connolly, who told his FBI companions to unbutton their winter coats and draw their guns. A slow, almost comical footrace on snow ended with jewelry salesman Jules Sellick of Philadelphia protesting that he was not Frank Salemme of Boston, wanted for the attempted murder of a mobster’s lawyer. But indeed he was.
    The young agent had no handcuffs with him and had to stuff Salemme into a taxi at gunpoint and bark at the bewildered cabbie to drive to the nearby FBI headquarters at East Sixty-ninth and Third. His boss chided him good-naturedly about the handcuffs, but there were envious smiles and back slaps all around for bagging one of Boston’s most wanted mobsters. Some were amazed that Connolly had been able to recognize Salemme, but in fact it wasn’t quite as lucky as it first appeared. An old pro in the Boston FBI office had taken a shine to Connolly and earlier had sent him photographs and likely locations for spotting Salemme, gleaned from informant reports. It was a perfect example of how valuable informants could be. Connolly’s apprehension of Cadillac Frank resulted in a transfer back home, an unusually quick return for an agent with only four years of duty under his belt.
    By 1974 Salemme was off to fifteen years in prison and Connolly was back to the streets of his boyhood. By this time Bulger was the preeminent Irish gangster in the flagrantly Irish neighborhood of South Boston. When Connolly returned, Bulger had just solidified his hold on Southie’s gambling and loan-sharking network, the culmination of a slow steady climb that began in 1965 with his release from the country’s toughest prisons.
    The two men spoke the same language and shared deep roots in the same tribal place. They came together as book ends on the narrow spectrum of careers available to Irish Catholics who lived in