I was sitting in a courtroom the other day, looking at the back of Whitey Bulger’s head, thinking of Pat Greaney and Jack O’Donovan.
Greaney and O’Donovan were state cops, good ones, and both did much to make sure that Whitey will spend his final days in an orange jumpsuit.
But neither could bask in any of this.
Greaney died seven weeks ago. He was only 63 and believe me when I tell you, Pat Greaney was a great cop and a better person.
Jack O’Donovan sits in the VA hospital in Bedford, a prisoner of old age and Alzheimer’s. As a Massachusetts State Police commander, O’Donovan railed against the FBI’s coddling of Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi, seeing them for the vicious sociopaths they were. He empowered State Police detectives to pursue Bulger, withstanding the predictable FBI backlash with a backbone thicker than any lie the Justice Department could throw at him.
Whitey was able to kill with impunity and rake in the millions that fueled his 16 years on the run because he was protected by a deeply corrupted FBI. His reign was assisted by other corrupt cops - some Boston police, at least one State Police officer, and who knows how many other bent law enforcement agents.
But that he even faced criminal charges, and will now die in custody of old age or just plain meanness, is because of a long line of honest cops, a fraternity that included Pat Greaney and Jack O’Donovan.
Bob Fitzpatrick, a good FBI agent who tried to save his agency from the rot that was Whitey Bulger, remembers teaching a class at the FBI Academy in Quantico in the late 1970s. O’D got up and shocked the class by claiming that FBI agent John Connolly and Connolly’s supervisor John Morris were in cahoots with the Irish mob in Boston.
It was shocking all right. And it was classic O’D. If you didn’t like the truth, too bad.
Fitzpatrick gradually came to believe O’Donovan. When he was made assistant special agent in charge in Boston, Fitzpatrick tried to close out Whitey as an informant, but he got the runaround from his own people.
There was a group of state cops - among them Bob Long, Jack O’Malley, Rick Fraelick, Arthur Bourque, Billy Powers - who knew O’D had their back when they went after Bulger and Flemmi in the 1980s.
There were US Drug Enforcement Administration agents like Steve Boeri and Al Reilly, backed by DEA bosses like Paul Brown and John Coleman, who were especially galled that Bulger’s defenders bogusly claimed he kept drugs out of South Boston. The DEA men knew the only drug dealers Whitey killed were the ones who didn’t pay him tribute. They were joined by three Boston cops - Frank Dewan, Ken Beers, Jimmy Carr - who were disgusted by Bulger’s protected status.