Connolly case tough to digest, juror says
Even 'more dramatic' than TV's 'Sopranos'
It took a Florida jury 13 hours to convict disgraced FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. of setting up the 1982 slaying of a gambling executive, but one juror said yesterday that she and others quickly agreed on one thing: Never had they heard such a disheartening, real-life tale of corrupt law enforcement and thoughtless violence.
"A lot of us were of the feeling that what we were listening to was much more dramatic than anything we saw on 'The Sopranos,' " said Jane G. Bleakley, a 65-year-old marketing employee for a healthcare company in the Miami area. "Listening to people talk about how they murdered other people was very difficult."
The Miami-Dade jury spent parts of three days deliberating Connolly's fate before it convicted him late Thursday of second-degree murder for helping informants James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi kill a potential witness against them in Florida. Earlier that day, Bleakley said, jurors were still debating whether he was guilty of first-degree murder.
But the jury ultimately concluded that it lacked sufficient evidence that Connolly had outright plotted with Bulger and Flemmi to kill Boston business consultant John B. Callahan, a 45-year-old accountant and former president of World Jai Alai who had fraternized with gangsters, Bleakley said. The jury did feel, however, that prosecutors had proven that Connolly had signed Callahan's death warrant by warning Bulger and Flemmi that he might implicate them in several slayings, she said.
"All of us agreed that he knew by giving instructions to these people, it might cause the death of Callahan," she said. "But we couldn't prove he had directly ordered it."
The jury foreman, who spoke on the condition he not be named, said Connolly "didn't pull the trig ger, but he did have something to do with all of it. If it wasn't for him saying all the things he said, the guy would not have got killed."
Hitman-turned-government witness John Martorano testified that Flemmi and Bulger persuaded him to kill Callahan, whose body was found in the trunk of his Cadillac at Miami International Airport on Aug. 2, 1982.
The jury foreman said some jurors would not convict Connolly of first-degree murder, knowing that the triggerman, Martorano, is a free man after serving 12 years for killing 20 people.
"It bothered a lot of people that he's still on the street," he said.
Bleakley said that Connolly, who did not testify, emerged in testimony as someone who may have had good intentions early in his career, but was corrupted by his relationship with Bulger and Flemmi, whom he used as informants to pursue the New England Mafia.
"I think he was a man who started out with some very high ideals, in terms of being an FBI agent, but he gradually got drawn into the very world that he was supposed to be defending us against," she said.
The verdict closed a chapter in Boston history that has cast a pall over the FBI for more than a decade. It also completed the fall from grace of Connolly, a once-decorated agent already serving a 10-year prison term for his 2002 federal racketeering conviction for helping Bulger, one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted, to evade capture and for protecting him and Flemmi from prosecution.
Connolly is scheduled to be sentenced in Miami-Dade Criminal Court Dec. 4. He faces 30 years to life in prison.
The verdict was also a victory for a small band of federal and state investigators from Boston who have been working the Bulger case for years and who arrived in Florida nine weeks ago in a truck loaded with documents and other evidence and have not been home since.
They worked with the Miami-Dade state attorney's office to prosecute Connolly.
Two members of that group, Massachusetts State Police Detective Lieutenant Stephen Johnson and Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Daniel Doherty, arrested Flemmi in 1995, persuaded killers to become witnesses, unearthed secret graves of victims of Bulger and Flemmi, and exposed corruption.
They were solemn when the jury pronounced Connolly guilty. "Nobody took enjoyment seeing that happen, but it had to be done," said Johnson, adding that thoughts of the victims and their families flashed through his head.
"My first thought was, this is why we do this, for all those people," he said. ". . . We owed it to them to pursue it."
While the case exposed a Florida jury to decades of FBI corruption in Boston, Johnson said jurors also heard from several retired agents - including Michael Hannigan, Patrick Patterson, and Gerald Montanari - who were "good FBI agents who were trying to do the right thing" in the 1980s when Bulger and Flemmi were suspected of murders.
Gangster-turned-author Kevin Weeks, who testified during the trial that Connolly was a corrupt agent who leaked information to Bulger and took payoffs, said yesterday that Connolly was guilty, but that it did not seem right that he was the only agent to go to jail for corruption involving Bulger and Flemmi.
"The guilt should be shared around," Weeks said. "He wasn't the only one involved, and he's taking everyone's share of the guilt in that FBI office at the time."
Assistant US Attorney Brian T. Kelly called Connolly's conviction "a victory for honest government."
"It's public corruption at its worst, a corrupt FBI agent helping mobsters run their enterprise," Kelly said.
Among those in Boston who had watched the case closely were several families who filed wrongful death claims against the federal government. The suits allege that the FBI was responsible for Connolly causing Bulger, Flemmi and other members of the Winter Hill Gang to kill their relatives.
Robert A. George, a member of a legal team that is representing the family of the late Michael Donahue, said the Florida verdict only confirms their belief that the FBI was liable for Donahue's execution-style death in 1982. Donahue and Edward Brian Halloran were shot to death on Northern Avenue by gangsters after Connolly tipped off Bulger that Halloran was a government informant.
"I was not surprised by the verdict," said George, a Boston lawyer. "You're talking about a slick, East Coast, Boston FBI agent hanging around New York and Boston mobsters. I felt a Florida jury wasn't going to tolerate that kind of behavior, not that anyone up here would."
Last November, US District Court Judge Reginald C. Lindsay ruled that the FBI was responsible for the executions of Donahue and Halloran and urged prosecutors to settle for damages with the families. But the government has refused to settle, George said.
Bleakley, the Miami juror, said the most chilling testimony came from Flemmi and Martorano.
When prosecutor Michael Von Zamft pointed at a poster-size photograph of the victim and asked, "Did you kill John Callahan?" Martorano casually said yes, showing no emotion.
"To sit there," Bleakley said, "and listen to them recite the list of people they killed and the fact that they did it so matter-of-factly - I don't think the average person is used to hearing that kind of testimony." 