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Narrated by Christopher Evan Welch
Dick LehrUnabridged — 13 hours, 13 minutes
Narrated by Christopher Evan Welch
Dick LehrUnabridged — 13 hours, 13 minutes
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[Shows] how fragile FBI integrity can be when the good guys lose sight of truth, the rules, and the law.
...[A] jaw-dropping, true-life tale of how two thugs corrupted the FBI.
Black Mass should prompt a re-evaluation of the uses and misuses of informers by law enforcement officials throughout the country. —The New York Times Book Review
...A heartbreaking...story of corruption and crime...a work of rare lucidity, high drama, journalistic integrity, and plain courage.
A triumph of investigative reporting, this full-bodied true-crime saga by two Boston Globe reporters is a cautionary tale about FBI corruption and the abuse of power. Gangster James "Whitey" Bulger ruled Boston's Irish mob, and his wary collaboration with the Italian Mafia, which he detested, was the cornerstone of the city's balkanized criminal underworld. (His younger brother, Billy Bulger, was the iron-fisted president of the state senate and later president of the University of Massachusetts.) Few suspected that Whitey Bulger and his partner, crime boss Stevie Flemmi, were both FBI informants; their squealing helped the FBI to put a score of mobsters in jail and wipe out the Angiulo crime family. Here O'Neill and Lehr (Pulitzer winner and Pulitzer finalist, respectively, and coauthors of The Underboss: The Rise and Fall of a Mafia Family) maintain that overzealous FBI Agent John Connolly, who was Whitey's handler, and Agent John Morris, Flemmi's handler, "coddled, conspired and protected the mobsters in a way that for all practical purposes had given them a license to kill." FBI agents looked the other way while Bulger and Flemmi went on a 1980s crime spree that, according to witnesses, included extortion, bank robberies, drug trafficking and a string of unsolved murders. This complex, dramatic tale climaxes with a 1998 federal hearing that found that Connolly and Morris had essentially fictionalized FBI internal records to downplay the stoolies' crimes while overstating their value to the Bureau. In 1999, a grand jury probe launched by Attorney General Janet Reno led to Connolly's arrest on charges of racketeering and obstruction of justice (he's now out on bail). Also named in the indictment were Flemmi, already arrested by state police in 1995, and Bulger, now a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. This in-depth look at the FBI's war against the Mafia includes the first-ever secret recording of a Mafia induction ceremony, complete with pricking of fingers and blood oaths. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
In the 1980s and beyond, corrupt agents in Boston's FBI protected Irish mob bosses, they said, in exchange for tips on the rival Italian mob. Reporters Lehr and O'Neill finally exposed the scandal in newspaper articles and in their best seller, Black Mass. The central participants stand out, but a host of vague minor characters can be confusing. A few episodes bring in trivia, e.g., at "family" dinners we learn who was in the kitchen or what tie someone wore but less of what was transacted. Hasty abridgment? Shockingly documented are the south side mob's loan sharking, gambling, "protection" graft, money laundering, and even horse race fixing. In a grim move, the Irish boss forces an honest family out of their liquor store with a tragic aftermath. At least 21 gangland murders went unsolved until, belatedly, prosecutors had to cut deals with hit men. John Rubinstein narrates adeptly, except in his unconvincing "guttural for bad-guy" quotes. Minor limitations aside, this should have appeal on popular true crime shelves. Gordon Blackwell, Eastchester, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
John Connolly and James "Whitey" Bulger grew up together on the tough streets of South Boston. Decades later, they met again when Connolly was a major figure in the FBI's Boston office and Bulger was godfather of the Irish Mob. This is the true story of what happened between them as a dark deal spiraled out of control, leading to drug dealing, racketeering, and murder. Includes b&w photos. The authors write for the . O'Neill has won the Pulitzer Prize, and both authors have won the Hancock and Loeb awards. They have covered the Bulger-Connolly story for over a decade. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
When John Connelly and James "Whitey" Bulger met in the early 1970s, they had pursued very different careers since their childhood days in South Boston. Connelly, an agent for the FBI, and Bulger, godfather of the Irish mob, seemed to have very little in the way of mutual interest. However, the Balkanized crime world of Boston--made up of ethnic and racial groups usually in constantly shifting alliances with one another--provided an opportunistic young agent such as Connelly with numerous possibilities to use against the FBI's number one target, the Cosa Nostra. Connelly's ill-conceived plan was to recruit Bulger as an informant against the Italian Mafia, and in return the bureau would provide Bulger with "protection" against any type of criminal prosecution. Bulger, a sophisticated and notoriously violent crime boss, saw other opportunities. Soon Bulger was using his new status to consolidate power. Connelly and a circle of unwitting agents found themselves not only acting as paid informants for the Bulger operation but permitting a program of extortion, bank robberies and arms trafficking, and a string of gangland murders. Boston Globe reporters Lehr and O'Neill, who have covered Bulger and the FBI since 1987, have reconstructed this relationship through thousands of pages of court transcripts, wiretap logs, personal interviews and the bureau's records. More than just another tale of the good guys gone bad, this book ultimately uncovers a rogue operation sanctioned at the highest levels that would evolve into perhaps the worst scandal in FBI history.
[A] parable of what happens when law enforcement officers get too close to their informers . . . [It] should prompt a re-evaluation of the uses and misuses of informers by law enforcement officials throughout the country.
—The New York Times Book Review
An eye-opening true-crimer that recounts a cooperative arrangement in which two Boston mobsters, in exchange for acting as informants for an FBI agent and his supervisor, were permitted to take over most of Boston's organized crime. Boston Globe reporters Lehr and O'Neill can be forgiven some of their caustic bitterness in their second book about Boston's organized crime. Their first, The Underboss (1989, not reviewed), portrayed FBI Agent John J. Connolly Jr. as a sharp-dressing South Boston scrapper whose audacious bugging of a Mafia headquarters ended the Italian mob's control of Boston street crime. Unknown to the reporters, Connolly and his boss, Dick Morris, were relying on information about the Italians from James "Whitey" Bulger, an Irish "Southie" street punk with a penchant for rape and robbery who was also the older brother of rising political star William Bulger (who would go on to become president of the Massachusetts Senate, is currently president of Massachusetts State University, and has maintained that he has no involvement with his brother's criminal life). In 1975 Connolly recruited Whitey and fellow hood Steve Flammi. Connolly and Morris then shielded their informants from a federal racetrack-fixing indictment; in return, Whitey fingered competing crooks and possibly saved the life of an undercover FBI agent who had infiltrated a truck-hijacking ring. For the next two decades the FBI made many publicized arrests while Whitey Bulger reigned as Boston's organized crime boss until 1995, when he escaped arrest and has been missing ever since. In a sensational 1999 corruption investigation, the disgraced Morris admitted totakingbribes from Whitey and, with Connolly's alleged assistance, aided and abetted criminal activities involving narcotics, extortion, and murder. Connolly, now a lobbyist currently awaiting trial on this matter, has maintained his innocence. With enough unanswered questions for two sequels, the authors offer a pile of evidence that (in South Boston at least) politics is all too local. (photos and illustrations, not seen)
"Black Mass should prompt a reevaluation of the uses and misuses of informers by law enforcement officials throughout the country."—New York Times Book Review
"[Shows] how fragile FBI integrity can be when the good guys lose sight of [the] truth, the rules, and the law."
—Washington Post Book World
"[A] jaw-dropping, true-life tale of how two thugs corrupted the FBI."
—Baltimore Sun
"Bone-chilling . . . one of the best nonfiction reads of the year . . . a powerhouse of a book. Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill . . . write like veteran novelists, weaving scene after jaw-dropping scene into a tapestry of sickening American corruption."
—New York Post
| BN ID: | 2940171282295 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 12/07/2012 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Under a harvest moon, FBI agent John Connolly eased his beat-up Plymouth into a parking space along Wollaston Beach. Behind him the water stirred and, further off, the Boston skyline sparkled. The ship-building city of Quincy, bordering Boston to the south, was a perfect location for the kind of meeting the agent had in mind. The roadway along the beach, Quincy Shore Drive, ran right into the Southeast Expressway. Heading north, any of the expressway's next few exits led smack into South Boston, the neighborhood where Connolly and his -contact" had both grown up. Using these roads, the drive to and from Southie took just a few minutes. But convenience alone was not the main reason the location made a lot of sense. Most of all, neither Connolly nor the man he was scheduled to meet wanted to be spotted together in the old neighborhood.
Backing the Plymouth into the space along the beach, Connolly settled in and began his wait. In the years to come Connolly and the man he was expecting would never stray too far from one another. They shared Southie, always living and working within a radius of a mile of each other in an underworld populated by investigators and gangsters.
But that came later. For now Connolly waited eagerly along Wollaston Beach, the thrum of the engine a drag to the buzz inside the car that was like an electric charge. Having won a transfer back to his hometown a year earlier, he was poised to make his mark in the Boston office of the nation's elite law enforcement agency He was only thirty-five years old, and this was going to be his chance. His big moment in the FBI had arrived.
Thenervy agent was coming of age in an FBI struggling with a rare public relations setback. In Congress inquiries into FBI abuses had confirmed that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had for years been stockpiling information on the private lives of politicians and public figures in secret files. The FBI's main target, the Mafia, was also in the news. Swirling around were sensational disclosures involving a bizarre partnership between the CIA and the Mafia, also unearthed during congressional investigations. There was talk of a CIA deal with mafiosi to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro, and of murder plots that involved poisoned pens and poisoned cigars.
Indeed, it suddenly seemed like the Mafia was everywhere and everyone wanted a piece of the mysterious and somehow glamorous organization, including Hollywood. Francis Ford Coppola's movie masterpiece, The Godfather, Part II, had played to huge audiences when it opened the year before. A few months earlier the picture had won a slew of Oscars. Connolly's FBI was now deeply into its own highly publicized assault on La Cosa Nostra (LCN). It was the FBI's number-one national priority, a war to counter the bad press, and Connolly had a plan, a work-in-progress to advance the cause.
Connolly surveyed die beachfront, which at this late hour was empty. Occasionally a car drove past him along Quincy Shore Drive. The bureau wanted the Mafia, and to build cases against the Mafia, agents needed intelligence. To get intelligence, agents needed insiders. In the FBI the measure of a man was his ability to cultivate informants. Connolly, now seven years on the job, knew this much was true, and he was determined to become one of the bureau's top agents-an agent with the right touch. His plan? Cut the deal that others in the Boston office had attempted, but without success. John Connolly was going to land Whitey Bulger, the elusive, cunning, and extremely smart gangster already a legend in Southie. The stylish FBI arriviste wasn't the type to take the stairs. He was an elevator man, and Whitey Bulger was the top floor.
The bureau had had its eye on Bulger for some time. Previously, a veteran agent named Dennis Condon had taken a run at him. The two would meet and talk, but Whitey was wary. In May 1971 Condon managed to elicit extensive inside information from Whitey on an Irish gang war that was dominating the city's underworld-who was allied with whom, who was targeting whom. It was a thorough, detailed account of the landscape with an accompanying lineup of key characters. Condon even opened an informant file for Whitey. But just as quickly, Whitey went cold. They met several times through the summer, but the talks-didn't go well. In August, reported Condon, Whitey was "still reluctant to furnish info." By September Condon had thrown up his hands, "Contacts with captioned individual have been unproductive," he wrote in his FBI files on September 10, 1971. 'Accordingly, this matter is being closed." Exactly why Whitey ran hot then cold was a mystery Maybe the all-Irish nature of the intelligence he'd provided had proved discomforting. Maybe there was a question of trust: why should Whitey Bulger trust Dennis Condon of the FBI? In any event, the Whitey file was closed.
Now, in 1975, Condon was on the way out, his eye on his upcoming retirement. But he'd brought Connolly along, and the younger agent was hungry to reopen the Whitey file. After all, Connolly brought something to the table no one else could. He knew Whitey Bulger. He'd grown up in a brick tenement near the Bulgers' in the Old Harbor housing project in South Boston. Whitey was eleven years older than Connolly, but Connolly was oozing with confidence. The old neighborhood ties gave him the juice others in the Boston office didn't have.
Then, in an instant, the waiting was over. Without any warning, the passenger side door swung open, and into the Plymouth slipped Whitey Bulger. Connolly jumped, surprised by the suddenness of the entry, surprised he was caught unaware. He, a trained federal agent, had left his car doors unlocked...
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