Trial Diary: The Curtain Rises

By Dick Lehr, Globe Correspondent

MIAMI -- The clear night sky, full moon and all, is giving way to a day forecasters have promised will be hot and sun-filled, and in a matter of hours the broken star of the Boston FBI goes on trial for murder in a downtown county courthouse.

John J. Connolly Jr. -- how the mighty have fallen.

We already know Connolly's a gangster. That's been proven time and again, in court hearings, civil actions, and at his own racketeering trial in 2002. Connolly, a homegrown Boston FBI agent, turned corrupt protector of all things Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi.

But murderer?

Did Connolly, back in 1982, tip off Whitey and Stevie that Boston businessman John B. Callahan was ratting them out, a juicy bit of inside FBI information that led to Callahan's execution?

That's what government prosecutors believe, and today Connolly will be escorted from his solitary confinement into the Dade County Courthouse to listen to opening arguments at his murder trial.

We may be in Miami -- because this is where Callahan was executed by the Bulger gang -- but this murder case is largely a Boston matter. The victim's a Boston guy, Connolly's a Southie guy. The witness line-up features a host of Boston names and faces -- Bulger gang members, former Boston FBI agents, and more. The prosecutor, Michael Von Zamft, may be local, but seated by his side is Fred Wyshak, the Boston federal prosecutor who's been digging into the Bulger scandal since the early 1990s.

Reporters from Boston media have been trickling into town throughout the weekend. It has all the feel of an away game.

Twenty years ago this very month the Globe first reported Connolly and Whitey had a "special relationship,'' a story that became the first cut at the great undoing of Connolly and the Whitey myth. It's gotten harder and harder to go back and fully re-capture life before the secret was exposed -- back to an era when Whitey was underworld legend, a Robin Hood figure, the ultimate stand-up guy, while Connolly was the swashbuckling agent and big man around town.

The unraveling has taken years, a scandal involving drugs, murder, corruption, mayhem. Now we have a murder case against the disgraced FBI agent.

Let the games begin.

Dick Lehr is the co-author of the national bestseller “Black Mass: The True Story of the Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob.’’ He wrote for the Boston Globe from 1986 to 2003.

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