Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down
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Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down
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Overview
In Betrayal, renowned FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick partners with USA Today bestselling author Jon Land to present the true story of the lawman’s pursuit of James “Whitey” Bulger, Jr., the notorious crimelord of Boston, Massachusetts’s Winter Hill Gang.
The Jack Nicholson film The Departed didn’t tell half of their story. A poor kid from the slums, Robert Fitzpatrick grew up to become a stellar FBI agent and challenge the country’s deadliest gangsters. Relentless in his desire to catch, prosecute, and convict Whitey Bulger, Fitzpatrick fought the nation’s most determined cop-gangster battle since Melvin Purvis hunted, confronted, and killed John Dillinger.
In his crusade to bring Bulger to justice, Fitzpatrick faced not only Whitey but also corrupt FBI agents, along with political cronies and enablers from Boston to Washington who, in one way or another, blocked his efforts at every step. Even when Fitzpatrick discovered the very organization to which he had sworn allegiance was his biggest obstacle, the agent continued to pursue Whitey and his gang . . . knowing that they were prepared to murder anyone who got in their way.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429963664 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/03/2012 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
ROBERT FITZPATRICK spent twenty-plus years as an FBI agent and chief in a career highlighted by his involvement in the Martin Luther King, Jr. killing and the ABSCAM investigation in Miami that resulted in the indictments of numerous public officials. He played a key role in the famed "Mississippi Burning" investigation and recovered the rifle that was used in the MLK assassination and that ultimately led to the arrest of James Earl Ray.
JON LAND is the critically acclaimed author of thirty novels, including the bestselling series featuring female Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong: Strong Enough to Die, Strong Justice, and Strong at the Break. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Jon Land is the USA Today bestselling author of more than fifty books, over ten of which feature Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong. The critically acclaimed series has won more than a dozen awards, including the 2019 International Book Award for Best Thriller for Strong as Steel. He is also the author of Chasing the Dragon, a detailed account of the War on Drugs written with one of the most celebrated DEA agents of all time. A graduate of Brown University, Land lives in Providence, Rhode Island and received the 2019 Rhode Island Authors Legacy Award for his lifetime of literary achievements.
Read an Excerpt
Betrayal
By Robert Fitzpatrick, Jon Land
Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2011 Robert Fitzpatrick and Jon LandAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6366-4
CHAPTER 1
WASHINGTON, D.C., 1980
"Fitz," Assistant Director Roy McKinnon said the day he summoned me to his office at headquarters in Washington in late 1980, "we need an Irishman to go to Boston to kick ass and take names."
I laughed but he didn't.
"Any suggestions?" he asked instead, staring me in the eye.
McKinnon was the ultimate straight shooter. He had a square jaw and wore his salt-and-pepper hair cropped military close. I seem to remember he'd been a Marine; either way, there was a directness of purpose about him befitting a military mind-set, right down to the orderly nature of his office, in which nothing, not even a single scrap of paper, was ever out of place. He told me the assignment was important for a variety of reasons. He sounded grave about my new adventure and talked about difficult problems in Boston without specifically outlining what those problems were. Right out of the gate, loud and clear, he ordered me to put Boston on the "straight and narrow." My initial reaction was it sounded like déjà vu, having had an assignment in Miami in the mid-to-late 1970s where, in fact, I did kick ass and take names in the ABSCAM investigation that nabbed numerous public officials, including a sitting U.S. senator. ABSCAM was a sting operation that targeted corrupt politicians and possible law enforcement personnel. I supervised the sting undercover, getting targets, including Senator Harrison Williams (D-NJ), to implicate themselves on tape. It was, in all respects, the FBI at its best.
I was Miami's Economic Crimes (EC) supervisor at the time and also worked undercover on our yacht, the Left Hand. I had procured the sixty-foot yacht from U.S. Customs, which had acquired the boat as part of their seizure in a major drug sting. We needed a "come-on" for our undercover gig and the Left Hand fit the bill beautifully. Before we docked the boat in Boca Raton, my squad cleaned it and installed surveillance equipment around the large foredeck, which was perfect for entertaining, and inside a trio of well-appointed cabins for private meetings. Soon, the Left Hand became an attraction and developed a notorious reputation in South Florida, fostered in large part by our undercover persona.
ABSCAM became the biggest case ever on the EC squad, recovering millions of dollars in fraudulent securities and various white-collar crime scams. We decided to have a final party and invited all of the criminals we had evidence on to attend. We equipped the boat with additional surveillance equipment and captured our future arrestees on tape. The "Sheik," an undercover agent, was posing as the wealthiest person in Miami, a connected Arab. While I sat up in the control room with the Strike Force chief, we encountered a problem. Senator Williams had appeared and demanded that he be allowed to attend our party. We declined and he demanded to see the Sheik anyway.
Under orders from FBIHQ we were told in no way could the senator board the boat. The Strike Force chief insisted we finish the sting, but FBIHQ demanded we close the operation down. HQ's concern was that allowing the senator to come aboard a boat laden with druggers, prostitutes, and criminals might be seen as a form of entrapment.
Afer much deliberation with FBIHQ, the FBI special agent who was playing the sheik, told me, "Bob, I won't allow alcohol, drugs, or anything that could harm the senator aboard my boat!"
I laughed at him and said, "You're crazy. What kind of party are we supposed to throw?"
He looked at me and, in the dignified role and manner of a true sheik, said, "I am the sheik and I won't let it happen!"
The party went forward on the pretext its host, our undercover sheik, could not be in the presence of drugs or alcohol for Muslim religious reasons. The recorded conversation and surveillance tapes played at Harrison Williams's trial dispelled any notion that we had entrapped the senator, and he was found guilty and convicted in federal court by his own voice. I took no pleasure in taking down a sitting U.S. senator; to me, he was a criminal who was extorting agents of the federal government sworn to uphold the law.
In this unique experence, I became no stranger to corruption, learning how to dig it out and destroy it. And that's why I supposed I was being transferred to Boston.
Tom Kelly, my former boss in Miami and an FBIHQ deputy at the time, had filled McKinnon in on my experience in ABSCAM, making it plain that I had cleaned up Miami and could probably do the same in Boston. Contrary to what was apparently going wrong up there, a key factor in the decision to send me north was my ability to pursue investigations without anyone tipping off the press or the target. ABSCAM was successful because all FBI agents working for me diligently did their jobs of investigating high-ranking government officials in a major scam without a single leak. Not one.
I was on a career fast track, groomed, I anticipated, for even bigger things to come. Not bad for a kid who'd grown up in a church-run institution, an orphanage on Staten Island called Mount Loretto. But that's where my dream, this very FBI dream, was born.
CHAPTER 2ASTORIA, QUEENS, 1944
"I have to pee," I whined to the cop. Then I screamed, "I really have to pee!"
The cop, whose name was O'Rourke, looked at me indifferently. I thought he could care less until he knelt, picked me up, and carried me to the kitchen sink. After I relieved myself, he carried me back into the living room of my New York City apartment demanding clean underwear and clothes from my warring parents. Officer O'Rourke, who came from the 114th Precinct, had five kids of his own, so I guess I should consider myself fortunate he was the one who responded to yet another fight between my parents that was loud enough to rouse the neighbors.
"You guys better calm down in there," he called to my mother and father. "Your son's coming with me. Pack some clothes in a bag."
They'd been warned what the upshot of one more complaint would be, but that hadn't stopped their constant onslaught in the least. This time O'Rourke had responded after some neighbors complained that "the people next door were going to kill each other." O'Rourke knew if he couldn't stop my parents from doing that, he could at least stop them from doing it to me.
"If you guys don't stop with the bullshit I'll be taking you in!" he shouted when they still failed to heed his warning. "Right now I'm taking Robert over to the Fourteenth. You'll be hearing from the social worker in the morning."
O'Rourke bent over to pick me up again, this time heading for the door. I started to cry so O'Rourke soothed me by explaining that we were going for a short car ride to the police station. The elevator was broken again and he carried me down all eight flights of stairs, without the bag of clothes my parents had failed to produce.
"This is O'Rourke," he said to the police dispatcher. "I've got a four-year-old ready for a remand to social services. Get some clothes and food and I'll see you at the station in about fifteen minutes."
"What the hell are you doing, O'Rourke?" came the dispatcher's response.
"See you in fifteen" was all O'Rourke said in response.
So there I was, a scared four-year-old basically abandoned by my mother and father. At least that's the way the Family Court put it when the judge remanded me to the custody of the State. After shuffling through a series of child shelters, I wound up at Mount Loretto, better known as the "Mount," then the largest child-care home in the United States, with over a thousand charges living in "cottages" spread across 524 acres on Staten Island.
My initial stop at the Mount was the Quarantine House. First thing the sisters did when I arrived was to assign me a bed, check me for bugs and lice, and give me a physical exam. Everything was antiseptic and smelled like alcohol. And everything was like a portrait painted in stark white. The sisters wore white habits, white shoes. Their head coverings were white and even their rosary beads were white. The quarantine floor was lined with beds draped in white sheets set atop a white marble floor. The floor was cold all the time.
Once I was deemed "clean," I was taken to the residential side, consisting of six cottages housing sixty-six boys each. In Cottage 1, we were all new orphans, each with a box with a lid in which to store our possessions. Most of us had none. The boxes were arranged in a rectangular fashion around the perimeter of the cottage. Other boxes were attached to the cottage wall — these held our school clothes, shoes, and field clothes sometimes. All of our clothes were hand-me-downs, not at all fashionable or comfortable but better than nothing. In the lavatory we had stations that held toothbrushes, soap, and a towel on a hook. There were eight commodes and six urinals for sixty-six children. Half the cottage took showers at a time.
For sleeping, each of us had a cot on either the second or third floor. Bed wetters, all thirty of them, were crammed into the third floor, and the stench of urine wafted throughout the cottage, especially bad in the summer months when the heat putrefied the stench further and in the dead of winter when the windows were all closed. I would pass through all six cottages as I grew older, the stench evolving with the years too, though the routine and accommodations otherwise remained unchanged.
My two older brothers, Larry and Gerard, and older sister, Diane, had been moved to the Mount as well. But I hardly ever saw them. The older children almost never mixed with the younger under any circumstances, siblings or not. I'd often stare out the windows or across the fields, hoping I'd spot one of them. In my mind I saw myself lighting out toward Larry, Gerard, or Diane. But even if I'd glimpsed them, I'd never have done it. I was much too scared to dare challenge authority or break the rules. We were sometimes able to sit together in church on Sundays, but that was it. Regimentation and regulation were everything. Corporal punishment was the rule, not the exception.
There was brutality in this world where power was the only currency. I remember walking across the bridge that ran near a drainage ditch between the dormitory and dining hall. The bridge's structure was worn and it shook a bit when packed with young boys rushing to lunch to beat the February cold.
One wind-blown dreary day, as our counselors led us across the bridge, one of the ten-year-olds from my cottage yelled out, "Fuck you!"
"Who yelled that?" the counselor named Scarvelli demanded, stopping everyone in their tracks.
All of us remained silent.
"I'm gonna ask youse guys again: who yelled that?"
"Last chance," another especially sadistic counselor, Farber, chimed in. "Or you all pay."
But there were no rats in this group, so the counselors marched us straight back to our cottage where we were told to stand fast near our "boxes" directly beneath the hissing steam pipes that heated the buildings — or at least were supposed to.
"All right, you little assholes, grab the pipes," counselor Farber ordered. "Everybody holds on until somebody talks. Let go and we'll beat the shit out of you."
The pipes clanked and hissed as the hot steamed water coursed through them. I held tight, feeling my hands beginning to blister, and watched my first cottage mate drop to the floor to be beaten and interrogated, then the second, followed by a third and a fourth. When the bulk of us finally dropped, it was too much for the counselors to handle. They had us stand at our boxes and demanded each boy come into the wash-up area where one by one we were systematically berated and beaten again. Since I was the last to fall, they beat me only once but twice as hard. They had the power.
No supervisor interceded. Either they didn't know what was going on or they didn't care. Scarvelli and Farber beat some of the boys worse than others, including me since I was one of the youngest and smallest. But I didn't tell them what they wanted to know. No one did.
And neither did anyone rat out Scarvelli and Farber. We all knew that if we ratted out the counselors, we'd be beaten much worse and end up longing for the blisters the steam pipes left on our small hands. The message was clear and all of us got it: They were bullies and we were helpless against them.
My escape from times like these came in the form of the old-time radio programs playing over Sister Mary Assumpta's radio. She was kind enough to leave her door open after lights out so the sound filtered out into the dormitory. It was often garbled and not very loud, but I was entranced, whisked away to a world dominated by heroes where the good guys always won and the bad guys, the bullies, lost.
I'd lie in my second-floor dormitory bed listening to The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and especially, This Is Your FBI. I say especially because I was already "old" and jaded enough by experience to know the difference between what was real and what wasn't. Neither the Lone Ranger nor the Shadow could swoop in and save me, because they weren't real, but the FBI was. I would lie there and imagine myself becoming a swashbuckling, crime-fighting hero someday, in large part because my life up to that point had been so bereft of them. In all of the "cops and robbers" games, I was always the FBI agent who got his man. I thought of O'Rourke and the others at the 114th and how kind they were.
It might sound corny, but in the Mount's big, Gothic church there was a huge stained-glass window. It showed Jesus with children around him and the inscription read, "Suffer the little children come unto me for their's is the Kingdom of Heaven." Jesus became my rescuer, to be replaced later, in my "cops and robbers" game, by the FBI.
In those minutes, as I lay with my eyes closed listening to the garbled tales of This Is Your FBI, I was spirited far away from the Mount to places where I was happy and secure, reliant on no one and fearing not a single soul. And maybe someday I was going to become for the world, and the country, what no one had ever been for me.
I'd found my dream, and through the years and pain that followed, I never let go of it.
CHAPTER 3BOSTON, 1981
The FBI had lacked an authoritative face since the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover's reign as chief. His fall from grace had exposed plenty of what was thought wrong with the Bureau and unfairly dwarfed much of what was right. Certainly no one individual could restore the lost luster and repair a tarnished image. But appointing successful, high-profile agents in top-level positions seemed the next best thing. My wife and two young boys, unfortunately were less thrilled about the prospects of moving yet again. It seemed as if, in my fifteen years with the Bureau since my marriage, every time we'd just about get settled, I was transferred. Coming to a top-ten office like Boston to take over as ASAC (Assistant Special Agent in Charge) represented the pinnacle of my career, and I could see myself staying in the city for some time.
But my wife wasn't buying that, and my marriage dissolved. My wife was tired of sharing me with a dream that knew no end. I tried to convince her that Boston could be just that, the final stop. But she feared I'd end up returning first to Washington en route to yet another promotion and posting. She believed I loved the Bureau more than her.
She was both wrong and right, something I considered often on long, lonely nights in my small apartment, where it always seemed dark outside.
My entry into Boston had been through the proverbial back door. On the face of it I appeared to have a routine FBI transfer with no ulterior motive; there was no paperwork about my "official" mandate. Just an Irish guy going to an Irish city on another assignment.
I came to Boston straight from my post as head of the investigative nerve center of the FBI in Washington, D.C., the Special Agent Transfer Unit. SATU, an unusual sounding acronym, was the FBI unit from which agents were transferred from particular offices throughout the U.S. and abroad to other assignments, and from where investigative resources and funding were allocated to the FBI field offices worldwide. Not a single major case unfolded without my knowledge and involvement. As a bureau chief I had the responsibility to make recommendations after reviewing requests for manpower, investigative resource allocation assistance, and "specials." Major cases and specials were defined as the most important investigations, demanding supplemental manpower and sometimes extraordinary technical assistance in the form of surveillance equipment as advanced as any in the world at the time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Betrayal by Robert Fitzpatrick, Jon Land. Copyright © 2011 Robert Fitzpatrick and Jon Land. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Prologue,
Part One: Coming to Boston,
Part Two: Blowback,
Part Three: Beyond Bulger,
Part Four: After Boston,
Part Five: Vindication,
Epilogue,
Appendix Contents,
Notes,
Index,
Photographs,
Other Books by Jon Land,
About the Authors,
Copyright,