The Sword AND The Stone (Part Six)

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Whitey Bulger
“In the immediate aftermath of the April 15, 2013, bombings, Boston police commissioner Ed Davis. said, “you can’t let the latest technology pull you away from the easiest thing. Sometimes old-fashioned shoe leather works best.”

This is something organized crime figure James "Whitey Bulger" understood as well.  After the Gardner Heist, Bulger dispatched two of his most senior and trusted confederates, Kevin Weeks and Stephen Flemmi to find out who took the paintings.

Anne Hawley understood: "Hawley was so desperate she reached out to the Vatican to ask Pope John Paul II to issue a papal appeal. She also approached William Bulger, president of the state Senate, asking that he to his brother Whitey to see what he knew. The notorious gangster was fruitlessly chasing leads himself. The heist had happened in his territory and he figured he was owed tribute." the New York Daily News reported in 2015. 

 Ulrich Boser thought everyone understood this: "There's no doubt in my mind that when Bulger did read of the theft the next morning, he made a few calls to try to figure out who did it.  I just think that's very, very likely.  It's something that he would want to do as almost everyone else in the city wanted to do." 

But while Boser assumes that is what everyone in the city wanted to do, there is no that the FBI actually did do that that. In fact the evidence points in the opposite direction.  According to the Boston Globe, "FBI agent John Connolly, who handled Bulger as an FBI informant, has written in letters to a reporter that after leaving the agency’s Boston office in 1990, his former bosses asked him to approach Bulger about the Gardner crime. Connolly said that Bulger told him that he did not know who had engineered the theft or where the artwork had been taken. 

Though Connolly did not retire until more than eight months after the Gardner Heist.  So at least eight months after his retirement the FBI finally wanted to know what Whitey Bulger knew about the Gardner Heist.  Maybe they were just responding to pressure from Anne Hawley's initiative with Whitey Bulger's brother William.  You would think that just out of curiosity, that FBI agents assigned to the case would be quickly in touch with all of their informants with the hope of finding out what happened. 

 Both Kevin Weeks and Stephen Flemmi said that Bulger asked them to find out who was involved in the Gardner robbery but neither have ever said they themselves were questioned by the FBI about the whereabouts of the paintings or who might have done it, Flemmi was himself an FBI informant at the time of the robbery. 

US attorney Michael Sullivan asked Stephen Flemmi, Bulger’s closest associate, who testified against him at his 2013 trial," [twenty three years later],  if Bulger had any connection to the theft," Kurkjian reports in Master Thieves. And then writes: 

"Disgraced FBI agent John Connolly, who had handled Bulger as an informant, said that even though he was retired from the Bureau when the theft took place, he was asked by his old colleagues to see what he could find out from Bulger," though it is well documented that Connolly was an agent for at least eight months after the Heist.  

 "Connolly retired from the FBI in 1990 after 22 years the Boston Globe reported.  Connolly was appointed to the FBI in October of 1968, so for him to retire after 22 years would mean he was an agent until at least October of 1990. 

 A June 29, 1990 Boston Globe article refers to John Connolly as  Supervisory Special Agent John Connolly," in a Boston Globe article dated June 29th 1990, eulogizing FBI Special Agent Paul F. Cavanagh, the first FBI agent to be quoted in the press three and a half months earlier, who had died in a plane crash.   A November 11, 1990 Boston Globe article refers to Connolly "as the FBI agent from South Boston whose relationship with Bulger was detailed in a Globe Spotlight Team report two years ago,"  
At Connolly's retirement party, the crowd erupted with knowing laughter when a woman presented John Connolly with a bottle of wine and said: "John, they wanted me to say that that bottle came from South Boston Liquors but I wouldn't." A report that the FBI had bought booze for an FBI Christmas Party the previous year at discounted prices from a Whitely Bulger linked establishment, South Boston Liquor Mart," was not made public until November of 1990.  In a raid of the established investigators also seized a piece of notebook paper with the following written on it: [FBI Agent] 'Dick Baker (friend of John Connolly).'" 

Maybe Connolly did not say he was retired already and Kurkjian mistakenly assumed Connolly was retired at the time of the robbery since, as Ulrich Boser surmised,  talking to people who might know who committed the Gardner Heist immediately afterward was  something "almost everyone else" in the city wanted to do, so why not Connolly? 

The FBI frequently talks about all of the leads that were coming in that kept them busy but that would be a very one track strategy. There was help available even if the FBI was understaffed as the Gardner Museum's security director suggested.

From Master Thieves "Ray Flynn, then Boston’s mayor, says he remains baffled as to why the FBI never sought the assistance of Boston police. “The Gardner art theft in Boston was devastating,” Flynn recalled recently. 'Boston police were pretty much taken off the scene of the investigation by the feds, and we never could quite understand why that was the policy. Our robbery squad knew every wise guy in the city and had some reliable informants. They grew up and lived in Boston. Why wouldn’t they hear things during an investigation?'” But after the three months the FBI left the case in the hands of one agent from California 26 year old Dan Falzon. 

 And there is questions about the FBI's handling of the leads that did come their way as well.  “'The F.B.I. gives a very standard line that they investigate all viable leads,' Mr. Boser said in an interview. 'But occasionally you’ll see evidence where they’re not.'” the New York Times reported in the same 2009 article. 

It was a different story in the case of another notorious crime which began only a couple of hundred yards away from the Gardner Museum six months, earlier, the Charles Stuart murder of his wife Carol Dimaiti, was noteworthy for many things but a lack of aggressiveness by investigators was not one of them.  

The story made national news on three occasions. The first when Carol Dimaiti was killed and her husband said her murder was committed by an African American carjacker. The second when it was learned that Stuart himself was actually the one responsible and that he had killed himself jumping 145 feet off the Tobin Bridge into the Mystic River. And then a third time over the public outcry in Boston's minority neighborhoods, by residents who felt there were racial overtones in the aggressive nature of the investigation.  

On Nov 10, 1989 the Boston Globe reported that: "In the days following the Stuart shootings, nearly 100 Boston police officers combed Mission Hill looking for a suspect" based on a on a phony "partial description of the assailant as a black man in his late 20s or early 30s, about 5 feet 10 inches, wearing a black jogging suit trimmed with several red stripes."  An October 27, 1990 Globe article reported: "Residents of Mission Hill,  said police officers had interviewed people in the area throughout Wednesday night (Two nights after the murder).

There is no record of any visit to the Boston neighborhoods associated with the local tough demographic linked by law enforcement  and the media with the crime, such as Dorchester, South Boston, East Boston, or the North End.  Or to the campus communities ringing the museum, or in the Back Fens, just down the street, a long established gathering place at all hours year round, never mind speaking to known hardened criminals like Stephen Rossetti, robbed an armored car in Revere in 1982, and  Carmello Merlino, a career criminal who robbed a Brinks truck in 1968, but did not become suspects until two years after the Heist. 

Not only did investigator refrain from  knocking on doors seem to have done little to make people with hard information feel as though their efforts were welcome, appreciated, and potentially valuable" 

 "It's unreal to imagine I was there and saw them up close and that that information was not considered valuable or helpful to the FBI," an eyewitnesses told WBUR. There are four known eye witnesses and none of their names were published in the media until just one, Rick Abath's, was published in 2013. Ulrich Boser used aliases in his book, the Gardner Heist in 2009.  Kurkjian uses the names of two of the other witnesses in his book, Master Thieves.

 "The FBI asked Boston detectives Francis J. McCarthy and Carl Washington, who conducted the initial investigation, to file their reports and then never consulted the two again." -- Master Thieves

 Steve Keller,  a security consultant for the Gardner Museum at the time of the robbery wrote in March 2009 described his experience as follows:   

 "I was called in to talk to the FBI briefly (in spite of the fact that they were not at all interested in talking to me)"  Adding later in the same comment:  "I feel that if the FBI interviewed everyone as poorly as they interviewed me, it's no wonder this remains unsolved. As a former police Detective in a major city and someone who knew infinitely more than they did about art crimes, I felt that they were not interested in what I might be able to tell them because they knew it all already."
by Kerry Joyce

 copyright 2017 

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