Court says US may owe legal fees in FBI case

The federal government was ordered to pay $3.1 million to the family of a murdered Quincy man last year after a judge found that the FBI's mishandling of longtime informants James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi caused the 1984 slaying.

Yesterday, lawyers who won the case on behalf of John L. McIntyre's family were in court arguing that the government should be forced to pay their legal fees, estimated at nearly $643,000, because Justice Department lawyers acted in bad faith during the trial in the wrongful death suit.

US Magistrate Judge Joyce London Alexander said she believes that the McIntyres' lawyers may be entitled to collect their legal fees from the government, but she will decide the issue later this week.

William Christie, a New Hampshire lawyer who represents the McIntyres, argued yesterday that the government's Washington lawyers "consistently and systematically lied" by repeatedly saying there was no evidence that then-FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. leaked McIntyre's identity as a cooperating witness, prompting Bulger and Flemmi to kill him.

Then, on the eve of trial, Christie said, government lawyers turned over a report that indicated Flemmi had told investigators in 2003 that Connolly had warned him and Bulger that either McIntyre or a shipmate had implicated them in an unsuccessful effort to ship guns to the Irish Republican Army. Flemmi said that the tip helped them pinpoint McIntyre as the informant and that they killed him.

Though Flemmi offered a similar account when he took the stand at the trial, Christie said the government's prior denials had forced the McIntyres' lawyers and the trial judge to waste an enormous amount of time responding to false filings in the case.

Bridget Bailey Lipscomb, a Justice Department trial lawyer who had defended the government against the McIntyres' suit, said she never misled the court. "We did not commit bad faith at all here," she told the magistrate.

Lipscomb said the government's civil attorneys do not believe they had any obligation to turn over the document, which detailed Flemmi's interviews with investigators after he struck a deal with the government that spared him the death penalty. He is serving a life sentence for 10 murders. Bulger is a fugitive.

Christie said the document was disclosed after Assistant US Attorney Fred Wyshak insisted that the McIntyres' lawyers were entitled to it.