The FBI office that cultivated Bulger as an informant against his rival, the New England Mafia, was toxic to the core. Agents cared more about collecting and polishing their informants than they did about solving crimes. Bulger’s personal handler, former agent John Connolly, was constantly padding Bulger’s worth as an informant in the 1970s and ’80s, according to a Globe Spotlight report in 1998. By elevating Bulger’s importance, Connolly elevated his own. And in its quest to seek credit for getting to the leadership of the Italian mob, the Boston FBI office glossed over a threat as great or greater posed by Bulger’s crew.
Soon it became impossible to distinguish between the criminal and the crimefighter, especially after Connolly was accused of leaking information to Bulger and fellow mobster Stephen Flemmi that led to the murders of at least one potential witness against them. In 2002, Connolly was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for protecting the mobsters, including tipping Bulger off about the federal racketeering indictment that prompted his escape.
New leadership in Boston’s FBI office has taken great pains to distant itself from the rogue agents of past decades, claiming it was always a problem of misdeeds by just a few employees. But the attitude that the government can do no wrong when dealing in mob matters lives on. In 1968, FBI agents in Boston framed four men for a mob-related murder they didn’t commit. Yet as recently as 2007, the government was still claiming that the FBI had no duty to tell state prosecutors that a key witnesses in that case, Joseph “The Animal’’ Barboza, had falsely implicated the men while protecting Flemmi — an FBI informant and Bulger associate who was one of the true killers. US District Judge Nancy Gertner openly scoffed at the claim and ordered the government to pay more than $100 million to the wrongfully imprisoned men and their families.
