What Am I Reading : Black Mass

The third and last book I picked up at the Harvard Co-op in early October, Black Mass was published in 2000 by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neil, two reporters from The Boston Globe.  It bills itself as ‘The true story of an unholy alliance between the FBI and the Irish Mob.’  ‘Unholy alliance’ does not come close to begin to describe the situation this non-fiction book addresses.

Black Mass sets out to document the relationship between James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, the head of the Winter Hill Gang (i.e., the Irish Mob) in Boston from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1990’s, as well as his top lieutenant, Stevie Flemmi, and the Boston office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, principally, but not limited to, Special Agent John Connolly.  Upon his assignment to the FBI Boston office in the early 1970’s, Connolly, a son of South Boston, an insular Irish working class Boston neighbourhood, had reached out to Whitey Bulger, already a legend in South Boston, whose influence was rising in the Boston Irish mob.  The deal was simple:  become an informant for the FBI and help us bring down the Boston Mafia, and we will look at you in a favourable light.

The book details the20-year history of gory interactions between Connolly, his superiors and Whitey Bulger.  As the FBI was attempting to draw information out of Bulger and Flemmi, Bulger was essentially manipulating Connolly into providing him a means to bring down his enemies in the Boston underworld, de facto immunity from FBI investigations and insider information about the operations of other state and federal law enforcement agencies.

Oh yeah, throughout most of this time, Whitey’s brother Billy was President of the Massachusetts State Senate.

Did I mention that this was a non-fiction work?

While the story it tells is captivating, the book is a bit of a difficult read, as it has definitely been written by two journalists.  While it includes extensive end-notes (38 pages), documenting in detail all references and quotes, the book could have been better edited.  I found myself getting lost in some of the descriptions both of police stake-outs and of mob activities, where the authors regularly jumped from one event to another and back.  Simply adding dates and more time references would have made the narrative easier to follow.  Another example of the book’s uneven editing:  Stevie Flemmi’s son ends up playing a significant role in Flemmi’s eventual arrest; there was no previous mention of the son.

Other than these editorial weaknesses, the events are fascinating on so many levels:

• How FBI agents allowed and deluded themselves to be manipulated by, essentially, a master criminal for his own purposes.
• How low the price was to lead one of the senior FBI officials in the Boston office (John Morris) down the path of corruption: e.g., a few fine dinners, a couple of bottles of wine, a plane ticket for his girlfriend).
• The utter frustration that must have been felt by rival law enforcement officers (and, for that matter, rival criminal organizations) as they were stymied in their activities as a result of the Bulger-FBI dynamic.
• The organizational dynamic that led the FBI to systematically ignore for 15 years the undue influence exercised by Bulger on their Boston office, either through wilful blindness, lack of checks of balances, misplaced organizational priorities, personal agendas taking priority over the public good, etc.  As the authors put it:

Bulger had become a dirty little secret that evolved into a tacit policy administered by new players who many not have fully understood the history but held fast out of institutional loyalty.  They viewed any attempt to change the system as a challenge by upstarts who had the bad taste to urinate inside the tent. … The fierce personal friendship of John Connolly was replaced by the knee-jerk protectionism of one special agent in charge after another.  The credo became:  Bulger may be a skunk, but he’s our skunk. (page 272)

This was a timely book to read, as Whitey Bulger was arrested early last summer, after being on the run for 15 years.  He faced charges stemming from his activities with the Winter Hill gang from the 60s to the mid-90s, which had placed him on the FBI’s ten-most wanted list.  No doubt that there are a number of treatments floating around Hollywood right now; Bulger’s story (which frankly just tells itself) is bound to come to the silver screen in the near future.  Hopefully, they will do it justice.