Ex-agent says FBI was warned on Bulger

Questions raised about reliability

A retired FBI official testified yesterday that he urged his superiors to drop gangster James ``Whitey" Bulger as an informant in the early 1980s, amid allegations that Bulger may have been involved in drug dealing and murder.

After being dispatched to assess Bulger's credibility in a brief meeting at the gangster's Quincy apartment in 1981, the official, Robert Fitzpatrick, testified yesterday that he left believing that Bulger was an egotistical ``big bag of wind."

But Fitzpatrick said that while he was unsuccessfully lobbying to cut Bulger loose, Bulger's handler, FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. , was inviting top agents in the FBI's Boston office to the State House to meet Bulger's younger brother, William, then president of the Massachusetts Senate.

Recounting how Connolly escorted him to a meeting with William Bulger at his Senate office in 1982, Fitzpatrick said, ``He was a little like his brother, to be honest with you. He did most of the talking. I just listened."

Fitzpatrick was not asked on the stand whether they discussed James Bulger with his politician brother during the meeting.

However, Fitzpatrick told the Globe after the proceedings yesterday that they did not.

Fitzpatrick, who served as an assistant special agent in charge of the Boston office between 1981 and 1986, said it wasn't unusual for top agents in an FBI field office to meet with prominent local officials.

However, he said he was concerned about Connolly's relationship with a powerful politician who was also his informant's brother, and asked him: ``What are you doing with this guy?"

He said Connolly responded that William Bulger ``is the guy who's going to get you the job when you leave [the FBI]. He's going to take care of you."

Yesterday was Fitzpatrick's third day on the stand in US District Court in Boston, where he was testifying in a $50 million wrongful death suit brought against the government by the family of John McIntyre , a Quincy fisherman. The family says that the government had negligently caused McIntyre's death by mishandling longtime FBI informants Bulger and Stephen ``The Rifleman" Flemmi .

Flemmi, who is serving a life sentence for killing McIntyre and nine other people, testified last week that he and Bulger killed McIntyre on Nov. 30, 1984 because Connolly warned them McIntyre was cooperating against them.

McIntyre was involved in an unsuccessful effort to ship weapons to the Irish Republican Army aboard the Valhalla, a Gloucester trawler, and had told government agents that Bulger and Flemmi were involved in the plot.

Bulger, who is listed as one of the FBI's 10 most wanted, is charged with 19 murders and has been a fugitive since he fled Boston just before his 1995 federal racketeering indictment.

Connolly was convicted in 2002 of warning him to flee, and is serving a 10-year prison sentence.

William Bulger resigned as president of the University of Massachusetts three years ago after he was grilled by a congressional committee that was investigating the FBI's handling of his brother.

William Bulger testified before the committee that Connolly was a friend who grew up in the same South Boston housing development, and had worked for him on political campaigns. But he said he had never asked Connolly to protect his brother and had not known his brother was an informant until it was publicly disclosed.

Yesterday, Fitzpatrick testified that he was sent to meet James Bulger in 1981 in an effort to evaluate his ``suitability" as an informant.

Bulger wore dark sunglasses that made it impossible to see his eyes. ``He talked about how tough he was," Fitzpatrick said.

Fitzpatrick recounted how Bulger went into a monologue, showing off his Alcatraz belt buckle and talking about the time he spent at the prison while serving a nine-year sentence for bank robbery in the 1950s and '60s.

Fitzpatrick said he recommended that Bulger be dropped as an informant because he was a gang leader, he allegedly was involved in crimes, and he seemed to be withholding information.

But Fitzpatrick said he was advised by superiors, including Sean McWeeney, chief of the FBI's organized crime section in Washington, ``how valuable" Bulger was in investigations.

Tensions flared in the FBI's Boston office in 1982, according to Fitzpatrick, when other agents began working with another informant, Brian Halloran, who implicated Bulger and Flemmi in the 1981 murder of Tulsa businessman Roger Wheeler.

Connolly was accused of rifling through FBI files on the Wheeler investigation, which led them to be moved to a safe, according to Fitzpatrick. Halloran was killed in May 1982 and another potential witness in the Wheeler case, John Callahan, was murdered two months later in Florida.

While the investigation into all three murders was underway, the FBI dropped Flemmi as an informant from 1982 to 1986, but continued to use Bulger.