Voice from old days says his friend will never roll
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MIAMI - Franny Joyce and Johnny Connolly grew up together, in the projects, in South Boston, and their families go back even longer and farther, back to the old country, in the west of Ireland. The Connollys and the Joyces hailed from the same part of Galway.
And so, with Johnny Connolly facing the very real prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, Franny Joyce had his old friend's back, literally, sitting behind him inside Courtroom 4-1 at the Miami-Dade Circuit Court.
This was more than a loyal show of support.
"I believe John is innocent," Franny Joyce was saying.
Francis X. Joyce does not believe that his childhood friend is on trial on charges of helping the gangster Whitey Bulger kill an accountant named John Callahan in Florida 26 years ago, which is what it says in the indictment charging Connolly with murder in the first degree.
"This is about trying to get John to roll," he said.
Specifically, he says, it's about getting John Connolly to roll on somebody who was a mentor to both Connolly and Joyce: Bill Bulger, the gangster's politician brother.
Bill Bulger encouraged both Connolly and Joyce to go to college, a place where kids from the projects seldom went. Connolly went to Boston College and joined the FBI. Joyce went to law school and became an aide to and political operative for Bill Bulger, who as the Massachusetts Senate president later orchestrated Joyce's appointment as the highly paid director of the patronage pit known as the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.
Yesterday, Joyce sat next to Connolly's brother, Jimmy, a retired DEA agent, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. It's not out of the question that Joyce could be called as a witness. A couple of years back, Kevin Weeks, Whitey's gravedigger, wrote one of those kill-and-tell tomes and claimed that after Connolly tipped Whitey off about his impending arrest and Whitey went on the lam in 1995, Whitey arranged to call John Connolly at Joyce's office at the convention center authority.
"Never happened," Franny Joyce told me, responding to the charge for the first time.
He said Connolly would come to his office, and they'd go out to dinner together, because their offices were close to each other after Connolly retired from the FBI and went to work for
Joyce knows prosecutors eye him warily.
"I'm in that vortex between John and Bill Bulger," he said.
Joyce says that vortex is part of a fantasy world in which prosecutors believe that Bill Bulger played some role in his brother's criminal exploits and that if only they can make life miserable enough for John Connolly, he'll become a government witness and give them Bill Bulger on a silver tray.
"There's nothing to give," Franny Joyce said. "This idea that John is sitting in prison, refusing to give up Bill Bulger, is ludicrous."
Joyce retired five years ago and has a place in Pompano Beach. He visits Connolly at the jail here where Connolly has been held in solitary confinement for three years.
"John's very disciplined," Joyce said. "He's used the time and the solitude to prepare for this."
Connolly wants to do more than beat this rap. He wants to retry the case that led to his conviction in Boston on racketeering charges six years ago. He wants to get on the stand and make his case, maybe even make a scene, because he thinks he's a scapegoat, a sacrificial lamb, the fall guy.
Franny Joyce says he knows his old friend is innocent, so he's not interested in retrying old cases. He wants Johnny to get back to his wife and kids.
He understands why prosecutors are still trying to get to Connolly, even if he thinks it's futile.
"They've seen all these tough guys roll," Franny Joyce said. "They're not going to see John Connolly roll."
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
