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Jimmy snapped back at me, “That guy is a friend of ours. Don’t ever talk about him like that. You want him to think that’s what we say about him?” I figured he was corrupt and we were paying him for information from the FBI, and Jimmy must have just wanted me to be careful not to disturb that relationship. Of course, at that time I had no idea whatsoever of the real bond between these two men.

After Connolly had retired from the FBI in 1990, Jimmy told me about a trip the two of them had taken years earlier, to Mexico, most probably to get out of town during the Blizzard of ’78. Apparently Jimmy had been driving and they had had an accident. He didn’t get hurt, but Connolly ended up with a black eye. Wonder if that might have made anyone look twice. Here was an FBI agent and Boston’s most notorious criminal vacationing together.

While Jimmy and Connolly always appeared to have an amicable relationship, Jimmy had reason to be mad enough to take care of Morris. In 1988, four Globe reporters, Gerry O’Neill, Dick Lehr, Christine Chin-lund, and Kevin Cullen, published a four-part series on the Bulger brothers, with one installment devoted to the “special relationship” between Whitey and the FBI. It got back to Jimmy later that during an interview with Gerry O’Neill at Venezia’s restaurant in Dorchester Bay, Morris had told the Globe reporter that Jimmy was an informant and said how dangerous he was, adding that Connolly and Bulger were close, perhaps too close. Morris had also described a dinner at Stevie’s mother’s house with Billy Bulger, Jimmy, Morris, and Connolly.

Although the word “informant” wasn’t used in the actual Globe series, it was implied by the mention of “special relationship” in the sentence: “And the Federal Bureau of Investigation has for years had a special relationship with Bulger that has divided law enforcement bitterly and poisoned relations among many investigators…” When Jimmy read the published article in the Globe in September 1988, he was bullshit. But no one believed the story, and we figured it was probably just another way of getting back at Billy Bulger through his brother; smearing Billy’s reputation by proximity after a recent probe of a downtown office development deal at 75 State Street. I certainly did not believe it because I knew the FBI was giving us information and telling us everything that was going on. The idea that Jimmy or Stevie would be giving them information was unthinkable. After all, we were the ones paying them.

Years later, it wasn’t hard to figure out why Morris would leak such information. He had been corrupted by Jimmy and Stevie and compromised as an FBI agent and handler. He was also so terrified of Jimmy’s violence that he feared for his own life. Afraid that he was in over his head, Morris was worried that someone in organized crime was planning to kill him. Jimmy felt that Morris had put out the information that Jimmy was an informant in the hopes that someone would now try and kill Jimmy and Morris’s problems would be over. Eventually, Morris admitted to the agency that he had leaked the information and was given a two-week suspension after the article appeared in the Globe.

Jimmy had always known that Morris was afraid of him. He also knew that Morris was jealous of Connolly. Years earlier, Connolly had gotten some sort of a grant to attend a special program at Harvard, and Morris had felt slighted that he had been passed over for the privilege. But Jimmy’s wrath at learning that Morris had told stories about him to the Globe was huge.

But it was typical of Jimmy not to act on his anger right away. Rather than show his hand to a weak weasel like Morris, he filed the information away for future use. Never forgetting that Morris was the leak, seven years later, Jimmy put it on him. In October 1995, while he was on the lam, Jimmy called from out of the state to tell me exactly what he had done. He had spent a little time calling around and had finally located Morris at the