Summary and Analysis of Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal: Based on the Book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill
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Summary and Analysis of Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal: Based on the Book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill
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Overview
Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
This short summary and analysis of Black Mass by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter summaries
- Detailed timeline of important events
- Important quotes
- Fascinating trivia
- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
About Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill’s Black Mass:
The New York Times–bestselling Black Mass is a groundbreaking true crime story about the Mafia, the FBI, and the Irish Mob in between them. Journalists Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill expose a decades-long partnership between FBI agent John Connolly and notorious Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger.
Connolly taps childhood friend-turned–Irish mobster Bulger to be an informant. But soon enough, Bulger is the one pulling the strings, convincing Connolly to cover up his dirty deeds. This corrupt deal results in a web of crimes including racketeering, drugs, and murder, all leading to an FBI rocked by scandal when the truth comes out.
Shocking and enlightening, Black Mass is an Edgar Award–winning book that magnifies the fine line between law and lawlessness.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504043755 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Summary and Analysis of Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal
Based on the Book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4375-5
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Prologue
When a young, skinny kid named John Connolly visits a South Boston drugstore with his friends in the summer of 1948, he finds local teenage legend Jimmy Bulger — who has already been nicknamed "Whitey" by the cops because of his striking blond hair — manning the counter. Bulger, known for his daring — and illegal — activities, offers Connolly and his friends free ice cream cones, but Connolly has been warned by his mother not to take food from strangers. Bulger protests that they're not strangers because they're both from Irish families. Connolly, starstruck, accepts a vanilla cone.
Introduction
In an introduction dated April 2000, the authors of Black Massdescribe the origin and development of the book. What started as a Boston Globe series about brothers James and William "Billy" Bulger — the former a notorious career criminal, the latter a rising politician in the Massachusetts Senate — took a detour caused by a major question that kept resurfacing: Was James "Whitey" Bulger actually an informant for the FBI? And was that the reason behind Whitey's seemingly charmed survival and success?
At first, none of the journalists involved in the series could believe it. Whitey had a reputation as a stand-up guy in his South Boston neighborhood. But that didn't mean he was a good guy, only that he was a loyal one. More than that, he was known for expecting complete loyalty in return. In the Irish underworld of Boston, to be a snitch was an unforgiveable crime. Surely the biggest Irish mob boss of all wouldn't commit such a heinous offense. And yet, the journalists found it hard to ignore the hints and whispers from local law enforcement, who insisted that no mobster, not even Whitey Bulger, could be so careful as to avoid arrest for more than twenty years. No case that they tried to build against him ever stuck. So the idea that he was protected by someone higher up just wouldn't go away.
Globe reporters took the whispers as incentive to keep digging. And what they eventually turned up was consistent evidence of a "devil's deal" between Whitey Bulger and FBI agent John Connolly beginning in 1975 and continuing until 1998: more than twenty years of criminal corruption at the heart of the FBI. For while Bulger may have started out as an informant, the mobster slowly managed to turn the tables until he was the one calling the shots, and the federal agent was the one breaking the law.
Introduction to the Paperback Edition
In this brief note, added to a new edition of Black Mass and dated January 2012, Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill update readers on new developments in the case — notably, the murder conviction of John Connolly and the capture and arrest of James "Whitey" Bulger.
In 2008, Connolly was convicted of second-degree murder for his involvement in the killing of a potential witness. He is serving his sentence in a Florida prison.
In 2011, after more than fifteen years as a fugitive, Whitey Bulger was discovered living with his girlfriend in California. He was captured and arrested, bringing some closure to the story told in Black Mass.
Part One
Chapter One: 1975
In 1975, thirty-five-year-old FBI agent John Connolly had just been transferred back to his hometown of Boston, and he was determined to make a name for himself. The way to do that, he decided, was to lure in the informant that nobody else has managed to land: James "Whitey" Bulger, a racketeer who had already earned an impressive reputation within the Irish mob — and the FBI's files. While the FBI had tried to recruit Bulger before with no success, Connolly had a "hook" that previous agents lacked: He and Whitey had grown up in the same neighborhood, South Boston, commonly known as "Southie." They were kin, of a sort, both children of Irish immigrants. Connolly thought Bulger would trust him. He was right.
Connolly used their shared history, and Bulger's desire to get rid of his rivals in La Cosa Nostra (LCN), the Italian Mafia, to convince Whitey to become an informant for the FBI. Bulger had been uncertain when the FBI first came sniffing around, discussing it with a trusted confidant, a mobster called Stevie "The Rifleman" Flemmi. What Bulger didn't know was that Flemmi had been an informant for more than a decade and saw Bulger's "ratting" as a way to improve his own status.
Connolly didn't ask Bulger to inform on his own people, but rather on the Mafia, who were already making things difficult for Bulger's Winter Hill gang. He promised that if Bulger helped them go after LCN, he would be safe from the FBI. Within two weeks of their first meeting, Bulger agreed to the deal. Connolly had landed the elusive Whitey Bulger.
Chapter Two: South Boston
Understanding Connolly and Bulger as adults requires understanding their background as children growing up in the tight-knit Irish neighborhood of South Boston. Whitey was the charming criminal, while his brother Billy was known to be more thoughtful, already showing the personality that would eventually make him a popular and long-term state senator.
Connolly, several years younger, idolized them both.
Chapter Three: Hard Ball
In 1976, a chance encounter between hit man Johnny Martorano and District Attorney William Delahunt in a restaurant just outside of Boston led to Flemmi and Bulger being named in a potential investigation. For the first time, Bulger's FBI handlers were forced to intervene to keep him safe from prosecution, bending the rules meant to keep informants — and agents — on the straight and narrow.
Chapter Four: Bob 'n' Weave
Taking down the Italian Mafia was the FBI's top priority on a national level as they played catch-up from the days of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had been reluctant to acknowledge the mob, and during his tenure as head of the FBI, little was done to stop the growth of the Mafia. Now, times had changed, and agents throughout the country were expected to get information on LCN — fast. The best way to do this was to cultivate top-level informants. So Paul Rico and John Condon, the older, more established agents who should have been keeping Connolly under control, encouraged him toward that goal, despite the fact that they were stepping on the FBI guidelines for how informants were supposed to be handled.
Chapter Five: Win, Place, and Show
The Winter Hill gang, of which Bulger was a member, had been fixing horse races throughout the East Coast since 1974 with the help of a man named Anthony "Fat Tony" Ciulla. But when Ciulla was busted, he decided to name names in return for being placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program. One of those names was Whitey Bulger. This race-fixing case would ultimately take down the Winter Hill gang. However, Connolly and his new FBI supervisor, John Morris, edited the files to keep Bulger out of active investigations — with the full knowledge that they were not just bending the rules, they were shattering them.
Part Two
Chapter Six: Gang of Two?
With the Winter Hill gang broken up, Whitey Bulger set off on his own — and the Massachusetts State Police took notice. The fact that Bulger always seemed one step ahead of them stirred suspicions among both the police and portions of the FBI's Boston office. But nothing could ever be proven.Connolly, with Morris's help, always stayed one step ahead of anything likely to hurt Whitey and Flemmi.
Chapter Seven: Betrayal
New Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Lawrence Sarhatt questioned Bulger's top-echelon informant status, forcing Connolly and Morris to fabricate roles to bolster his importance. Hoping to make him seem like a vital asset, they inserted Whitey into the FBI's operation against the head of the Boston Mafia, Jerry Angiulo. Angiulo was the big prize the FBI and local law enforcement had been going for all along, so the prosecutor, Jeremiah O'Sullivan, worked with them to convince Sarhatt not to jeopardize the operation. Sarhatt, who did not have the allies that Connolly did, backed down.
Chapter Eight: Prince Street Hitman
Angiulo's offices were successfully bugged, which turned up useful information but also caught Flemmi and Bulger's names on tape — with specifics about murders they had committed in the past and the fact that they were willing to commit murder in the future. Morris and Connolly had to take drastic measures to discredit those tapes.
The fact that they succeeded both in securing evidence against Angiulo and in protecting their informants was a mixed blessing for Morris, who was now well aware — and worried, unlike Connolly — that mobsters held his leash, rather than the other way around.
Chapter Nine: Fine Food, Fine Wine, Dirty Money
Connolly and Morris found themselves in a tight spot. Having "enhanced" Bulger's role thus far, the agents had to keep doing it or risk being found out. They also had to continue covering up any evidence of new crimes — crimes that Bulger sometimes committed using information Connolly or Morris had given him. As the FBI's "expert" on Whitey Bulger, Connolly diverted any questions that came in, assuring everyone, often with outright lies, that Bulger was under control and within guidelines.
This was far from the truth. By the early 1980s, the foursome of Bulger, Flemmi, Connolly, and Morris were a tight team, and the mobsters often commented on how "stand-up" their handlers were and how they would cover for them, no matter what.
Chapter Ten: Murder, Inc.
When Oklahoma businessman Roger Wheeler purchased a Boston jai alai business, it didn't take him long to notice that a lot of money was being skimmed off the profits. In fact, this was a money laundering scheme for Bulger and Flemmi. Mob accountant John Callahan suggested that it might be a good idea to make Wheeler — and the problem —"disappear." They approached an enforcer named Brian Halloran, but later dropped him from the plan, opting to have their favorite hit man, Johnny Martorano, take care of Wheeler. After the hit, however, they implicated Halloran for the murder. For his part, Halloran went to the FBI and offered evidence in return for protection. The protection never came. Connolly tipped off Bulger, and Bulger had Halloran killed.
An out-of-state hit on a legitimate businessman was a bigger transgression than usual for Bulger. Oklahoma and Massachusetts cops leaned on Callahan, hoping he would lead them to Wheeler's killers. Martorano was quickly called in to take care of that loose end, too, and the mob accountant ended up dead in the trunk of a rented car. Three dead bodies, no witnesses. But those murders would come back to haunt Connolly.
Chapter Eleven: Bulgertown, USA
Bulger wanted a new base for his operations — and a liquor store in Southie owned by a young couple seemed the perfect cover. But when he forced the issue, threatening the couple and their children in order to make them sell the store, the couple went to the Boston police, who handed the case over to the FBI. Connolly got involved, no investigation happened, and Bulger went after the young family again. He ultimately terrified them into selling their store at a loss, and, later, to testifying under oath that none of this had ever happened. In spite of being a victim of extortion, the husband was eventually convicted of perjury. The very government that he had turned to for safety had instead protected Whitey Bulger and prosecuted his innocent victim. This situation had nothing at all to do with the Italian Mafia. There had been no benefit to the FBI. It was purely a case of Connolly working for Bulger, rather than the other way around.
Chapter Twelve: The Bulger Myth
In 1983, Detective Dick Bergeron, from the police department in nearby Quincy, Massachusetts, opened a drug-trafficking file on Bulger and Flemmi. The FBI was not involved in the operation the QPD put together with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), but as a matter of courtesy, the Boston office of the FBI was informed of actions being taken in their town. Naturally, word got back to Connolly, and the operation was stymied at every turn.
Chapter Thirteen: Black Mass
John Morris had been sent to Miami, ironically, to oversee a corruption investigation. His successor, John Ring, was less useful to Connolly and Bulger than Morris had been, and with Angiulo's racketeering trial coming up, Bulger and Flemmi needed all their friends on board. A dinner party with Bulger, Flemmi, Connolly, and Morris was set up. Also on the guest list was Dennis Condon, the agent who had first tried to bring Bulger into the FBI's fold, and who now had a government job overseeing the state police.
Condon did not get on the reunion train, but Morris — feeling reassured as to his personal safety at the FBI after a successful assignment in Miami — did, reportedly assuring the mobsters, "You can do anything you want as long as you don't clip anyone."
Chapter Fourteen: Shades of Whitey
For the most part, Whitey's younger brother, Massachusetts State Senator Billy Bulger, kept his nose clean, manipulating the Senate with the charm that seemed to run in the Bulger family. But in 1983, Billy got involved in a deal with real estate developer Harold Brown that went sour when Brown was indicted for bribery. Billy quickly extricated himself from the deal — on paper, at least — but he was still at risk if the facts came out: Financial wrongdoings would not play well with his constituents. Connolly, who liked to brag about his friendship with the popular politician, was happy to step in and help. He and Morris brought in the previously helpful prosecutor Jeremiah O'Sullivan, and they conspired to pull the teeth out of any investigation.
Chapter Fifteen: Connolly Talk
In February 1988, Connolly ran into journalist Dick Lehr — one of the authors of Black Mass — in a hardware store and stopped to chat. Through the years, Connolly had been friendly with the press, seeming to relish the spotlight in his role as a spokesman for the FBI. Lehr was amazed to hear Connolly casually mention an operation, the bugging of a Mafia hangout, that should not have been revealed to a reporter. The FBI agent was becoming careless.
Meanwhile, the protection of Bulger and Flemmi was being extended to those around them in the forms of subpoenas, wiretaps, and witnesses being dismissed to keep Bulger's criminal empire untouched. Ten years since the beginning of their deal, and the original FBI directive — allow no informant to commit a crime — had been completely flipped. The FBI agents were committing crimes in order to benefit their informants.
Chapter Sixteen: Secrets Exposed
In the late 1980s, Morris declined to recommend Connolly for a promotion. He knew the agent — who was unreliable at work in addition to being compromised in ways Morris could not admit to his superiors — should not be a supervisor. Connolly used his other contacts to get the promotion anyway, and Morris knew his days were likely numbered.
At this point, the authors of Black Mass were working with their colleagues at the Boston Globe on a series of articles about the Bulger brothers. Gerard O'Neill asked Morris to meet for lunch to be interviewed. Morris's pent-up worries finally gave way to a confession: He admitted, nearly unprompted, that Whitey Bulger was an informant.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department was getting calls from an anonymous tipster about Bulger and Flemmi having federal agents on the take. The investigation was once again stonewalled when it reached the FBI, and the good life continued for Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly. But in 1989, Connolly's new boss, Jim Ahearn, discovered that the DEA had never closed their investigation into Bulger's drug trafficking — and that they had purposely kept that information from the FBI for several years.
Part Three
Chapter Seventeen: Fred Wyshak
In 1989, many of the top Italian Mafia players were caught in an FBI sting and shipped off to prison. Rising to the top in the aftermath was "Cadillac Frank" Salemme, who had been Stevie Flemmi's partner back in the 1960s. Flemmi began investing in real estate, and Whitey Bulger extorted half of the winnings from a lottery ticket sold in his store, thereby having a legitimate income to show the IRS.
While the mob underwent leadership changes, things in the FBI were shifting, too. John Connolly retired from the agency, taking a cushy job in corporate security. John Morris left Boston, eventually landing in the FBI's Los Angeles office. It seemed that the 1990s would be a period of successful retirement for the group of Bulger, Flemmi, and Connolly.
Instead, Fred Wyshak of the US Attorney's Office came on the scene, gunning for Whitey. Boston law enforcement told him Bulger was too careful to ever be caught — after so many years of protection, he seemed untouchable to those who didn't know of his deal with the FBI. Wyshak was advised to go after Salemme instead. But Wyshak had been successful going after the Mafia in New Jersey, and he knew the difference between a real mob boss and a small-timer. Whitey Bulger was the real boss, not Salemme, and Wyshak planned to bring him down. Rather than going after Bulger directly, though, Wyshak had his team pick up on earlier work done by the local police: He looked into the bookies Bulger had been shaking down for years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Summary,
Timeline,
Cast of Characters,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
Critical Response,
About Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,