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Switching sides (cont.) Agent ignored Such inaction is just as common for those who spot misconduct from the inside. FBI Special Agent Jerome R. Sullivan pleaded guilty last year to being a spy for associates of New York’s Gambino crime family. Sullivan had been party to some spectacular successes for the FBI. He said he was driven to criminal actions by stress, alcohol and gambling addictions caused by almost 20 years of undercover work. How Sullivan’s actions could have escaped the notice of supervisors and colleagues for so long has never been made clear. Sullivan skimmed almost $200,000 that was supposed to fund an undercover money-laundering investigation directed at members of Colombia’s Cali cartel. He wrote bogus memoranda and fake expense reports to cover the criminal activity; kept $100,000 from another money-laundering scheme; stole $100,000 from a raid at a check-cashing business; and pocketed money from the sale of un-stamped cigarettes he seized from a member of organized crime. He said he even scammed a judge to win the release from prison of organized crime figure Daniel "Fat Danny" Laratro. Sullivan told the judge Laratro had provided "substantial assistance" to the government in cases against several key figures in New York’s Lucchese crime family, which was trying to gain access to the garbage business in Florida. U.S. District Judge Stanley Marcus reduced Laratro’s five-year sentence to three years — time he’d already served. Of course, Laratro had given the government no help. But he helped Sullivan in a big way — arranging for his $100,000 gambling debt with Lucchese-connected bookmakers to be forgiven. Laratro also promised to provide Sullivan with more than $200,000 to start up a business after he retired from his government job. Sullivan pleaded guilty to a 10-count indictment and will soon be sentenced. His lawyers have argued that because of job-related stress and full cooperation, he deserves no more than a few years in prison. Well-placed friends It’s not always just a rogue agent who trades sides.
Several agents in Boston’s FBI office seemed beholden to lifelong gangster James "Whitey" Bulger. Bulger was known as an untouchable in Massachusetts — the crime boss who always managed to avoid federal wiretaps, warrants and racketeering charges that landed many of his associates in prison. Massachusetts residents figured Bulger’s brother, William, former president of the Massachusetts Senate and current president of the University of Massachusetts, was privy to inside information that helped safeguard his brother. But it was Whitey Bulger’s work as an FBI informant between 1971 and 1990 that helped keep him out of prison. Unbeknownst to his criminal colleagues, Bulger provided critical information to FBI agents that led to the indictments of many leading members of La Cosa Nostra in Boston. In return, the FBI protected Bulger from arrest while he operated his illegal loan-sharking and drug distribution businesses in South Boston, where he protected his enterprise through brutal assaults and murders. Someone finally pierced Bulger’s immunity. In January 1995, Bulger and five others were indicted on racketeering charges by a federal grand jury. The indictment suggested Bulger was responsible for the deaths of at least four people, dating to the 1960s. Curiously, five days before Bulger’s indictment, he disappeared. FBI agents have denied any connection, but lawyers and judges have publicly questioned the strange circumstances surrounding the Bulger investigation and his timely disappearance. Bulger has never been found. FBI Agent John Morris, who headed the FBI’s organized crime unit in the city, admitted he allowed Bulger and his associate, Stephen Flemmi, to commit crimes over a period of 20 years. In exchange, they provided the agency with information that helped set up the arrests of several gangsters. Morris also admitted on the witness stand that he had accepted gifts from Bulger and Flemmi, including French wine and almost $6,000, including $1,000 he used to take his girlfriend with him to a 1992 Drug Enforcement Administration convention in Georgia. In return, Morris said, he shielded Bulger and Flemmi from prosecution because they were his most important secret informers — he characterized them as the most prized informants in New England history. It was part of an FBI policy in Boston — albeit an unwritten one — that protected such high-ranking gangsters in exchange for the information they could provide on lesser known thugs that agents could then arrest. Morris denies he tolerated murders by Bulger. Yet he admitted he and other agents did little when an informant told them Flemmi and Bulger had offered him money to murder an Oklahoma businessman who had crossed the pair in a South Florida Jai Alai venture. The businessman was later murdered. The case has never been solved. The biggest fallout in the Bulger case may be yet to come. The FBI kept secret the fact Bulger was the source of information agents used to get wiretaps from federal judges for the telephones of dozens of gangsters — many of whom were then convicted of crimes based on that evidence. In one instance, the FBI learned through Bulger that a mafia swearing-in ceremony was being held outside of Boston, so secret cameras were installed to record it. Those tapes caused a sensation across the country. Since federal judges weren’t told Bulger was the source of information for many of the wiretap requests, the evidence obtained from those taps could be thrown out through appeals. And since federal agents did not disclose their close relationship with Bulger when they testified in these trials, that also could be the basis of successful appeals. Last summer, the FBI announced a $250,000 reward for Bulger’s arrest. Court records show that at about the same time agents had spotted Bulger’s car in a suburb of New York City. Bulger never returned to the car.
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