Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [121]
Stevie alleged that there had been no need to set up the roving bug, which is the most intrusive form of surveillance available. The need for a roving bug had been based on the fact that the FBI didn’t know where the induction ceremony would take place. However, the truth was they had known seven to ten days beforehand exactly where the ceremony would be. But the FBI was so paranoid of leaks in the office getting back to the Mafia that they lied to U.S. Attorney Diane Kottmeyer, the strike force chief who was overseeing the case, and said they didn’t know where the ceremony would take place. They also didn’t inform the judge that they had informants who were going to be at the ceremony who could have been wired up. It was just another case of the ends justifying the means. Stevie wanted to show that the FBI had broken the law and, therefore, everything obtained on the roving bug should be thrown out.
Stevie wanted me to find out exactly when the FBI had gone to the Department of Corrections to make sure Vinnie Federico, who was one of the four men scheduled to be inducted, was granted a furlough from MCI-Shirley so he could attend the ceremony at a relative’s house on Guild Street. Stevie also wanted the names and file numbers of the Top Echelon informants, the high-ranking members of organized crime, that the FBI had used to get that authorization for the roving bug. When I asked Connolly for the names of these informants, he told me four of them were his, including Jimmy, Stevie, Sonny Mercurio, and a made guy from Boston who later died of cancer. The fifth one, a made member of the Rhode Island Mafia, Anthony “The Saint” St. Laurant, belonged to Bill Shea, the FBI agent from Rhode Island. When I got the identities of all five informants, along with the rest of the information, from Connolly, I told it to Stevie when I visited him at Plymouth.
Personally, back in 1989, I had never known anything about the induction ceremony. Jimmy and Stevie had been involved, but I never heard about it till it was over. About a week after the ceremony took place, Jimmy and Stevie had been talking about it, saying how the feds got the whole ceremony on tape. They had heard how someone who was leaving had said, “Only the ghosts know what happened here tonight.”
“Oh, yeah,” Stevie had said to Jimmy, “only the ghosts and the feds.”
When I had heard them talking about it like that, I figured they had learned what had happened from the feds and were not personally involved. Since at that point I didn’t know the true relationship between Jimmy and Stevie and the FBI, as far as I knew, it was a one-way street and the feds were giving us information. Now I understood that Stevie and Jimmy’s involvement in the ceremony must have boosted their importance as FBI informants. As it turned out, the evidence intercepted at Guild Street was presented to the grand juries that indicted Stevie.
At one of our meetings at the Top of the Hub, Connolly showed me a letter he had drafted on a legal pad to U.S. District Court Judge Mark Wolf. Wolf’s hearings in the racketeering case against Jimmy and Stevie were still going on, but Stevie’s lawyers were not making any headway in their attempts to set up a pretrial hearing in front of the judge. They were getting nowhere in their attempts to get the charges dropped against Jimmy and Stevie and to get their cases thrown out. In Connolly’s letter, the source—three unnamed Boston police officers—falsely accused retired Detective Sergeant Frank Dewan of fabricating evidence against Bulger and Flemmi. Dewan had been a zealot, obsessed with getting Stevie and Jimmy. Everything that happened in the town, Dewan blamed on us.