Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [122]
Connolly’s letter included examples of how the government had corrupted its case by planting evidence to get us. He included the story of John Morris planting a bomb under Eddie Miani’s car in 1975. John gave me the letter to read over to see if I had any ideas or anything else to put into it, and I added a few things to it. I added the story of David Lindholm, a known drug dealer we had shaken down whose nickname on the street was Little Lies because he was known not to tell the truth.
Connolly typed the phony letter on his computer on the Boston Police Department stationery that I got for him from a source I had there. The three-and-a-half-page letter succeeded in convincing Judge Wolf that the government was using illegal evidence to get us. At the time of the letter, there were only two or three days left before the judge had to make his ruling, and the letter prompted him to grant Stevie a pretrial hearing right away.
Eventually, Connolly was convicted of obstruction of justice in writing the letter to the judge, but at the time it did succeed in convincing the judge to allow the hearing. The whole scene makes me wonder how things work when the situation is reversed and law enforcement uses the media to leak stories so they can create talk on the street. That way they can gather evidence even though the initial evidence they put out is blatantly false. When the law does that type of planting, it is not considered illegal, but, rather, a tactic, a tool of the investigation. When someone like Connolly does it, it is merely illegal.
Jimmy had told me stories about FBI agents, but in all these stories, they were the ones giving us information. In one such story, FBI agent Dennis Condon had set up Edward “Punchy” McLaughlin, one of the three Charlestown McLaughlin brothers, during the Winter Hill-McLaughlin gang war. In October 1965, Condon approached McLaughlin and told him, “Tell your brother to calm down.”
McLaughlin turned around and said, “Worry about your own brother, the fucking drunk.”
A night or two later, Condon called up Stevie and told him exactly where McLaughlin got the bus every morning. The next day, Stevie showed up at that bus stop, holding a paper bag from which he pulled out a gun, walked across the street, and shot and killed him. That night, Condon called up Stevie and said, “Nice shooting.” Frank Salemme later testified that FBI agent Paul Rico, who was Condon’s partner, had also given him and Stevie information about McLaughlin’s whereabouts.
Rico helped Stevie many more times, but he had been especially helpful in 1968 when Stevie had been on the lam for the Fitzgerald car bombing, letting Stevie know when it was safe for him to return to Boston in 1974.
Years later, in the early 1990s, federal prosecutor Jeremiah O’Sullivan was leading an investigation against Jimmy and Stevie and Winter Hill. Jimmy told me how John Connolly ran into O’Sullivan one day in Post Office Square. O’Sullivan said to Connolly, “There is an investigation going on with your boys.”
John turned around and said, “They already know that.”
“How could Jimmy know that?” O’Sullivan asked. “It was funded by my office.” Obviously, O’Sullivan didn’t know about Connolly’s two-way relationship with Jimmy. But the truth was that O’Sullivan was tipping off Connolly about the investigation. During the Wolf hearings, when O’Sullivan was scheduled to testify about his role in the investigation, the federal prosecutor suffered a heart attack, which couldn’t have come at a better time for him. After the hearings were over, he made a speedy recovery.
During these hearings, Stevie testified that John Morris had given him a tape recording in the 1980s. He felt that the fact that Morris gave him this tape would help support his