Betrayal: Whitey Bulger and the FBI Agent Who Fought to Bring Him Down

Robert Fitzpatrick had his dream job. All through his difficult childhood, he dreamed of becoming an FBI agent and working with the best of the best. He had great successes and moved up in the organization quickly, showing his mettle in the Miami office running the ABSCAM investigation. Soon after, he moved to the Boston office as Assistant Special Agent in Charge with orders from the top to clean up that office. He was told by his supervisor to “kick ass and take names.” With the focus on bringing down the Italian mafia, some agents had made an unholy alliance with members of the Irish mafia, particularly two low-lifes named “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen Flemmi. Fitzgerald had no idea how high up the corruption went or the long, painful process he would undergo discovering the truth.

Two agents in the Boston office, John Connolly and John Morris, were the handlers of Bulger and Flemmi. Connolly and Morris protected their “informants” to a degree that was entirely outside the bounds of FBI rules. Bulger and Flemmi were fed information no informant ever should have had, in spite of the fact they gave no information that was particularly useful or valuable. They operated with impunity, committing crimes from gunrunning to drug distribution to murder, all while being protected by their FBI handlers. When Fitzgerald tried to close the operation, he was stone-walled, all the way to the top of the FBI, and he ended up with his career in shreds.

This account of the unbelievable corruption during the 1980s in the Boston office of the FBI is raw and compelling. The only nit to pick is the level of detail sometimes slows the story a bit (a la Anne Rule), but, for the most part, it reads like the true-crime thriller it is.