Where the Bodies Were Buried (29 page)

“You saw to it that these men inevitably lost their jobs for what they did,” said Brennan to Morris on the stand. Brennan was commenting on the damage that Morris had wrought, destroying people's careers for doing the same things that he was doing.

“Yeah, it made me sick,” said Morris

“It made you sick, but you didn't stop, did you?”

“Objection,” said Fred Wyshak. “Badgering the witness, Your Honor.”

“Overruled,” said the judge. Brennan was allowed the question.

Morris answered with a long, tortured explanation about when exactly he started to feel bad about what he was doing. “I changed my image of myself a long time ago,” he said.

By early 1982, Morris's moral gauge hit empty: he was not only corrupt but also desperate to conceal his corruption. Sometime in April, he was approached by two agents from the labor racketeering squad, Gerald Montanari and Leo Brunnick. They explained to Morris that they had begun to cultivate Brian Halloran, the Southie hoodlum, as a potential informant. The two agents had come to Morris to ask him what he thought of Halloran's suitability as a CI (confidential informant). In the course of this debriefing, Montanari and Brunnick also revealed to Morris that Halloran was claiming that he had been offered the contract to murder Roger Wheeler, owner of World Jai Lai, by Bulger and Flemmi, and that he had turned it down.

Mention of the Wheeler murder jangled Morris's nerves. Wheeler had been gunned down in Tulsa, and local and state police in Oklahoma had already traced a link to Boston. The investigator in charge—an aggressive Oklahoma state policeman named Mike Huff—had contacted Boston FBI with questions about Bulger, Flemmi, et al. As the FBI's liaison with the Oklahoma investigation, Morris had assigned John Connolly. It was Connolly's job to protect the FBI's prize informants.

In his conversation with the two agents, Morris was further alarmed to hear that it was their intention to wire up Brian Halloran and have him meet with John Callahan, the former president of World Jai Lai. Morris was aware that Callahan had quite possibly initiated the murder of Roger Wheeler. Any conversation between Halloran and Callahan, memorialized on a secret recording device, would be devastating to Bulger and Flemmi.

Not long after his conversation with Montanari and Brunnick, Morris was in his office when John Connolly entered. Connolly had been away from the office taking a master's course in public administration at Harvard University. Although Morris's conversation with Montanari and Brunnick had been confidential, Morris blurted out “spontaneously” to Connolly that
Halloran was being cultivated as a CI. Morris noted that Halloran was spilling the beans about the Wheeler murder and would imminently be used to gather potentially devastating evidence against Bulger and Flemmi via a wired-up conversation with Callahan.

Special Agent Connolly didn't need to be told more than once; he got the message. Within a matter of days, Connolly went directly to Bulger and told him that he had a potential problem he needed to take care of: Brian Halloran.

On the witness stand, Morris looked stricken. The deviousness of his former self was an unpleasant memory, like looking in the mirror and seeing something ugly, not the person you perceive yourself to be. Morris squirmed in his seat. He had testified in court about these facts many times over the last sixteen years, but that didn't make it any easier. Of all his many crimes, this may have been one that Morris, a Catholic, knew could result in the eternal damnation of his soul.

Asked Hank Brennan, “After you told Mr. Connolly about Mr. Halloran, you had another conversation with him, didn't you?”

Morris spoke quietly now, his voice barely a whisper. “Yes. He came back to me.”

“And during that conversation, you inferred that he had told members of organized crime about your little secret.”

“I inferred from what he told me that he had talked to them. Whether they had the information already or whether he told them, I don't know, but he, obviously, had been in contact with them.”

Four weeks later—on May 11, 1982—Morris came in to work at the federal building one day and learned that Brian Halloran had been gunned down on the Boston waterfront, along with Michael Donahue, an innocent victim who had been giving Halloran a ride home.

Morris knew that he had provided information to Connolly that had likely led to the murders of Halloran and Donahue.

From the stand, Morris wanted the jury and everyone else in the courtroom to know how bad he felt. It was part of his performance as a man racked by guilt. His decision to divulge confidential information to Connolly had led to the murder of two men. What a terrible burden for John Morris. His brow furrowed in contemplation; his eyes moistened.

Hank Brennan wasn't buying it: “After you learned that Halloran and Donahue were murdered following your tip [to Connolly], did you then do something to try to uncover the truth, Mr. Morris?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you tell any of your superiors about the information so they could do a proper investigation?”

“No, I did not.”

Not only did Morris keep his knowledge of Bulger's possible connection to the murders under wraps; he also set out, along with Connolly, to create a false investigative narrative, as he and Connolly had done on other occasions.

“Your Honor,” said Brennan, “with your permission I'd like to publish Exhibit 282 into evidence.”

“You may,” said the judge.

Brennan handed to the witness an FBI memorandum that was also projected onto a screen for the jury to see. The defense lawyer noted that the memo was a report, filed by John Connolly, in which Bulger placed the blame for the Halloran-Donahue murder on “a group from Charlestown.” Said Brennan, “Let's look at the second paragraph, Mr. Morris. Would you read that, please?”

Morris cleared his throat. “Source advised that the story being put out by the state police is that the FBI got Halloran killed, but source advised that the people from Charlestown say it was the state police who let the cat out of the bag and in fact the Charlestown crew had information that Halloran was talking to Colonel O'Donovan and Trooper Fralick.”

After Morris finished, Brennan let the silence linger. The memo encapsulated the Morris-Connolly conspiracy: not only had they provided Whitey Bulger with information that led to the murder of two men, but they were now attempting to shift responsibility onto the Massachusetts State Police, and in particular, Colonel Jack O'Donovan, a man who had for years been trying to sound alarm bells within law enforcement about the FBI's unseemly relationship with Bulger.

“Two days after you received that memo from Special Agent Connolly,” said Brennan, “you endorsed it, didn't you?”

“I reviewed it and initialed it,” said Morris.

“When Mr. Connolly gave that to you and you read that, you knew it was untrue, didn't you?”

Morris's mood seemed to shift. Over a series of defensive equivocations, he ducked the substance of Brennan's inquiries and would not give straight answers. His voice hardened. For a while on the stand, he had been wallowing in self-pity but, now, whatever shield of denial he had constructed for himself, whatever he needed to do so that he could sleep at night, led him to forcefully defend himself. He sat upright, with renewed energy. The need to assert his theology of self-deception had reinforced his spine like an injection of B
₁₂
.

All these years later, he was still seeking to protect his reputation. He was still pretending.

BY THE TIME
John Morris neared the end of his testimony, defense attorney Jay Carney appeared to be exhausted. Although Hank Brennan was the one handling the cross-examination of Morris, Carney had been handling many of the legal arguments related to Morris, and there were many. The defense team was frequently frustrated in their efforts to enter a piece of evidence or pursue a line of questioning, due to objections from the prosecution. In some cases, the jury was removed from the courtroom and the witness asked to step down. The two sides would stand before the judge and make their case. As lead counsel, Carney argued with vigor and passion, but given the defense strategy he was frequently left spinning his wheels.

The insistence that Bulger was not an informant was the rock upon which Carney and Brennan often found themselves stranded far from the shore. In their cross-examination of both James Marra and Morris, they had contested nearly every FBI airtel (exclusive correspondence) and teletype that was placed into evidence. In support of this strategy, Carney explained to the judge, “What if Mr. Connolly fabricated the entire informant file? What if not a single item in that informant file was based on a statement by James Bulger? . . . And the evidence today that we've heard through Mr. Morris gave some insight into that, to what we've been saying since my opening statement, which is, Mr. Bulger was not providing information as an informant to Connolly, he was providing money to these FBI agents so
that he could get tipped off about wiretaps, search warrants, indictments being issued.”

“But isn't there a view of the evidence,” countered Judge Casper, “that he was also getting tipped off about people cooperating? I guess what I'm saying is, why can't both be true?”

For a moment, Carney appeared stumped, his arms dangled at his side, and then he said, “It's possible that both can be true—theoretically—but the defendant's position is that only one is true.”

It was telling that Carney said “the defendant's position” and not “the position of the defense.” It was becoming apparent that the insistence on the canard of whether or not Bulger was an informant was a position devised by Whitey Bulger. During these arguments, Bulger listened attentively. To him, this is what the trial was all about: an attempt to salvage his reputation as an “honorable racketeer” who could never be a snitch. But for the defense lawyers, it was a road to nowhere.

Carney's exasperation was based partly on his inability to get any love from the judge on this issue, but it was also likely founded on the reality that the entire debate had sidetracked the defense from exploring the more prescient point, also laid out in Carney's opening statement, that the Bulger era was one chapter in a long, dark history of law enforcement corruption in New England. Morris had been their best chance so far to probe the continuity of sleaze between the Barboza era and the Bulger era. That opportunity had come and gone without the defense making the necessary connections.

A telling moment in this regard had taken place when Brennan asked Morris about “the Limone matter.”

Peter Limone had been the lead defendant in the Teddy Deegan murder trial back in 1967. When it was finally exposed that Limone, along with Joe Salvati and two others, had been wrongfully convicted and spent thirty years in prison, the aggrieved parties filed a lawsuit. The government contested the lawsuit, leading, in 2006, to hearings in federal court before Judge Nancy Gertner. Many witnesses were called; the hearings became the most full and complete rendering of the manner in which the four men were framed, and how the lie had been maintained by the DOJ over the years.

Among the witnesses before Judge Gertner was a man named Michael Albano, who in the early 1980s was a member of the Massachusetts State Parole Board. Albano spoke in court, and later with the media, about how, in 1983, he was approached by FBI special agents John Morris and John Connolly.

At the time, Peter Limone was being considered for commutation of his sentence. He'd been in prison for eighteen years on the Deegan murder conviction. There had always been rumors that the conviction of Limone, Salvati, and the others was tainted, but the criminal justice system always fought back against these rumors. On this day in 1983, the guardians of the system were Morris and Connolly.

According to Albano, he was visited in his office and verbally bullied by the two agents, who told him if he voted for commutation of Limone's sentence his career in public life would be over. Albano considered the attempt to influence his decision by the two agents to be a flagrant effort by the FBI to intimidate him. He voted for commutation anyway. Years later, after Limone's sentence was commuted, Albano went on to become the mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1995, he was the subject of a suspicious FBI investigation into wrongdoing in his administration. Albano believed the investigation was an act of revenge by the FBI for his vote on the Limone matter. The FBI's probe of Mayor Albano was eventually thrown out of court.

Now, all these years later, during the cross-examination of John Morris, the issue resurfaced at the Bulger trial. The mere mention of “the Limone matter” brought an objection from Wyshak: “Your Honor, this is the second time that [the defense] has tried to insert the Limone case, which was a prosecution in the sixties and has absolutely nothing to do with Bulger in this case. Obviously, the reason they are trying to insert it into this case is because it's, you know, I think they believe it's a black eye for the government. What the relevance is of questioning this witness who had nothing to do with that case, it escapes me.”

Since Brennan was the one cross-examining Morris, he responded. For the next ten minutes he detailed how Morris had testified in five previous legal proceedings on the subject, and when confronted about his and Connolly's efforts to bully Albano, he always answered with some version of “I
don't remember the details of that meeting.” His partner, John Connolly, publicly denied ever having met with Albano. That position was discredited by Albano having produced records to show that he was paid a visit by the two agents, and by Morris, who admitted that the meeting took place but was unable or unwilling to shed light on the details.

“Mr. Albano currently works for the Governor's Council,” said Brennan to the judge. “We have him listed on our witness list, and I expect that we'll call him. . . . And so I'm going to ask [Morris] about his earlier denials, and then I'm going to impeach him when I call Mr. Albano as a witness. Because I suspect that he's going to continue to deny it, and then it will be an issue of credibility for the jury. Do they believe Mr. Morris and his pattern of misconduct or do they believe a gentleman from the Governor's Council, Mr. Albano? There could be no more central role of credibility than this example. It goes to the heart of the defense.”