Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [135]
I was on the stand one day for a couple of hours. During that time, I independently corroborated Stevie’s testimony. I also told the court that Connolly had warned Jimmy that one of the two people who were stopped coming off the Valhalla was cooperating. I testified that a day or two after the crew had returned safely to Boston on the Valhalla, McIntyre and the ship’s captain went to inspect the damage the boat had received when encountering a storm crossing the Atlantic. Since these two men were stopped and questioned by U.S. Customs agents when leaving the boat, it wasn’t hard for Jimmy to realize who the informant was. He was 90 percent sure it was McIntyre.
While I was on the stand, the McIntyre family’s lawyer, Steven Gordon from New Hampshire, kept challenging my testimony that I was involved in only “some” crimes with Jimmy and Stevie. At one point, he said, “You caught up pretty quickly,” and I answered, “No. You could never catch up to them. I don’t think many people could. Besides, they were committing crimes long before I teamed up with them.”
Although neither McIntyre’s mother nor brother ever came to the courtroom when Stevie or I were testifying, Emily McIntyre was a convincing witness herself, showing photos of her son. He had apparently joined the Army but hadn’t gone to Vietnam and received a medical discharge. She also talked about how he used to make her hand-carved wooden gifts, saying, “I treasure them so much,” and discussing the science awards he won in high school and how he liked to sail.
When the Justice Department lawyer, a woman named Bridget Bailey Lipscomb, asked how much time Emily spent with her son, whether he liked to read books about Adolf Hitler, and whether schizophrenia ran in her family, she screamed back, “You should have questioned how my son was tortured.” When the lawyer said she was only doing her job, Emily said, “Your job is justice. Your type of justice destroyed my life.” When she was instructed to look at a document, she screamed, “You have to forgive me, but all I see is a cut-out tongue.” I can say for certain that McIntyre was never physically tortured.
Lipscomb tried to show that informants like Jimmy and Stevie had to be allowed to terrorize or they wouldn’t have been any use to the FBI in those roles. But Judge Lindsay asked her, “When I leave this courthouse this afternoon, do I need to worry that some informant is going to shoot me because the FBI is not watching them?”
Three months later, in September 2006, Judge Lindsay found that the FBI’s mishandling of Jimmy and Stevie as informants had caused McIntyre’s murder and ordered the government to pay more than $3 million to McIntyre’s mother and brother. Of course, this ruling raised the hopes of the families with similar suits pending and was hailed as a “spectacular victory” by some of them. Obviously, the judge hadn’t bought the government’s defense that John Connolly wasn’t acting in his official role as an FBI agent when he leaked the info that led to McIntyre being fingered as an informant or, as Stevie testified, when Connolly accepted approximately $200,000 in payoffs from Jimmy and Stevie over the course of twenty years.
One of the things that Lindsay wrote in his ruling was that “the truth is, however, that the FBI was not pounding the pavement looking for evidence that could ‘stick.’” In his 110-page decision, the judge found that, for decades, the FBI failed to properly supervise Connolly or to investigate numerous allegations that Bulger and Flemmi were involved in drug trafficking, murder, and other crimes. “The FBI stuck its head in the sand when it came to the criminal activities of Bulger and Flemmi,” he wrote.