No joy in this justice

A few hours after the jury came back, Dan Doherty and Steve Johnson were sitting at a sidewalk table outside a pub called Finnegan's Way on Ocean Drive in Miami's South Beach.

Along with prosecutor Fred Wyshak and FBI agent Jim Marra, Doherty and Johnson spent almost three months living a spartan existence in a modest hotel in quiet North Beach, which afforded a partial view of the Atlantic but little else.

But it was over. John Connolly, the corrupt FBI agent they had pursued like big game, was now a convicted murderer. So Johnson, a Massachusetts state cop, and Doherty, a DEA agent, and the rest of the prosecution team traveled 25 blocks south, to the bright lights.

They were entitled to crow. But they didn't. There was satisfaction, of course, toasts to a job well done and all that. But there was no great joy in all this. There were just too many bodies in the rearview mirror.

In a trunk in Miami, a father of two who got too close to the flame that was Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi. In shallow graves along the Neponset River, women who were Flemmi's disposable lovers. Under a basement floor in South Boston, some mother's son. On the Southie waterfront, a father of three boys whose only mistake was to offer a ride to somebody who John Connolly and Whitey Bulger decided must die.

So many bodies.

"You think about the families ruined," Steve Johnson was saying. "So many families ruined."

Dan Doherty was also thinking of the honest cops and federal agents who tried to do the right thing, while Connolly and other FBI agents and supervisors were protecting a clique of sociopaths. Doherty, Johnson, and others won't believe they're done until all those who helped Connolly, anybody who wore a badge and took money from or a pass on Bulger and Flemmi, are in the dock.

One of those honest cops, Frank Dewan, a retired Boston police detective, was getting ready to go to the gym and had one sneaker on when he got the news. He never got the second sneaker on.

"My hands are shaking," he said, minutes after he learned that Connolly, who tried to ruin him, was going away forever. "I guess this is what vindication feels like."

Bob Long, a retired detective lieutenant with the Massachusetts State Police who led an effort to snare Bulger that was compromised by the FBI in 1980, was sitting in his office in Braintree on Thursday when he got a text message from Detective Lieutenant Steve Johnson: Guilty.

"A jury in Miami didn't buy the snake oil that was sold here for a generation," Long said.

Long and Dewan share a unique distinction. Connolly felt so threatened by their attempts to take out Bulger that he surreptitiously obtained stationery with Boston police and State Police letterheads and sent anonymous letters to their commanders, accusing them of being corrupt.

If Johnson represented every statie who tried to end Bulger's murderous reign, then Doherty was the link to DEA agents who debunked the myth that Whitey kept the drugs out of Southie.

Connolly's lawyers plan to fly people down from Boston next month to plead for leniency. Unlike the trial, which was sparsely attended, it could get crowded in Courtroom 4-1 of the Miami-Dade Circuit Court when Connolly is sentenced Dec. 4.

Dewan will be there. So will Tom Foley, the great state cop who did as much as anyone with a badge to make this happen, with his colleague, Tom Duffy. Long's going, and he's calling his crew - Rick Fraelick, Jack O'Malley, Arthur Bourque, and former prosecutor Tim Burke.

They're all going, those who took a swing and missed because Whitey owned so many. They are going, not to gloat. Not to sneer at John Connolly. But to be there. To bear witness. To see what justice looks like, after all these years.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com

Correction: Because of a reporting error, Jim Marra was mistakenly identified as an FBI agent in a Nov. 10 column by Kevin Cullen. While Marra began his law enforcement career with the FBI, he has for the last six years worked as an agent for the Department of Justice's inspector general's office, and it was in that capacity that he helped prosecute John Connolly, the retired FBI agent who was convicted of the 1982 murder of John Callahan. No FBI agents were part of the prosecution team that won Connolly's conviction.