Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [115]
THIRTEEN
FBI AND THE LAW
For years, I had assumed that FBI agents John Connolly and his boss, John Morris, the supervisor of the Bureau’s organized crime squad in Boston, were on the take. Jimmy and Stevie were always giving them money and gifts in exchange for information about what the law was doing. Jimmy even had three nicknames for Connolly: Elvis, because of the way he combed his hair; Neighbor, since he and Jimmy had once lived in the same building at Bay Shore Drive in Quincy; and Zip, because Jimmy and Connolly shared the same zip code.
Although I had little to do with Connolly until after Jimmy was on the run, I knew a bit about him. Eleven years younger than Jimmy, he was also a son of Irish immigrants, and had grown up in the Mary Ellen McCormack Housing Project, a few doors down from the Bulger family. I’d even heard stories about how Jimmy had once bought an eight-year-old John Connolly a vanilla ice cream cone, after convincing the little boy he wasn’t a stranger, and a few months later, had broken up a fight where Connolly was being pummeled by an older kid. Connolly, however, had apparently been more impressed with Billy Bulger and later told me that it was Billy who had convinced him to continue his education at Boston College. He’d started working for the FBI in the Organized Crime Unit in New York and came to the Boston office in 1973.
From what I saw, Connolly was a likable guy, always laughing and amiable with a nice personality. He liked nice things and owned a house up at Thomas Park in Southie, where he lived in the top two floors of the house and rented out the downstairs apartment. But there were times when I’d seen Jimmy get angry when he thought Connolly was spending too much money. Like when the FBI agent bought a boat, a 40-footer or something, with a nine-and-a-half-foot beam and twin engines. Jimmy was bullshit because he felt that Connolly was being too ostentatious, that he was flashing too much cash. How could he explain it? Connolly would say that he was single and could spend the money on himself, but Jimmy didn’t buy that answer and was always telling him to tone it down.
All I knew about FBI agent John Morris was his nickname, Vino, given to him because he liked wine. The only time he got to drink expensive wine was when Jimmy and Stevie gave it to him. Jimmy told me that one night while he and Stevie were at Morris’s house in Lexington, Morris had asked them for $5,000 to help with a problem he was having with his daughter. Jimmy and Stevie took the money out of their pockets and handed it to him. Even before Jimmy told me that story, I had known Morris was on the take.
Jimmy also told me about a brainstorm Morris had in 1975. He’d planted explosives in the car of a Revere loan shark, Eddie Miani, as part of his clever plan to scare Miani and develop him into an FBI informant. The bomb wasn’t actually hooked up to go off, but it was a real one and the Revere police considered it an attempted murder case. But Morris’s plan didn’t work out and the attempt to recruit Miani was unsuccessful.
I certainly got to know Connolly a lot better than Morris, but that didn’t happen till some years passed. The first time I met him was in 1978 at the L Street Bathhouse in Southie, a building on the beach where people used to work out, with a private area for members to sunbathe and swim in the ocean. That day, I had just finished working out with Johnny Pretzie and was walking out of the building when Connolly was heading in. I’d seen Connolly around but had never spoken to him. He stopped the two of us, Pretzie introduced us, and we shook hands and said, “Hi, how are you?”
That was pretty much all that ever passed between the two of us until six years later, in 1984, when Connolly came into the liquor store, walked over to me, and asked, “What’s going on?”
I didn’t really answer him, but when Jimmy got back to