Florida jurors boiled tangled story down to civics lesson of right and wrong

MIAMI - You knew it was a guilty when the jurors walked into the courtroom and not one of them looked John Connolly in the eye.

Not one of them.

Everybody just took their seat. Down here, unlike Boston, it isn't part of the protocol to have the defendant stand to hear the verdict. The jury foreman doesn't get up, and he doesn't read the verdict. The judge reads it, and he doesn't stand up. Nobody gets up. It's so Miami. Why stand up when you can sit down?

"Guilty of murder in the second degree," Judge Stanford Blake said.

John Connolly didn't move. He didn't blink. He stared straight ahead, even though he knew that what was just said meant he was most likely going to die in prison.

Steve Johnson, a lieutenant with the Massachusetts State Police, and Dan Doherty, a DEA agent, sat in the front row, in back of prosecutors Fred Wyshak and Mike Von Zamft, and they didn't blink, either. They spent half of their careers waiting for this day. But they didn't move a muscle.

As the magnitude of what just happened began to sink in, the judge came down off his bench and walked right past Connolly and stood before the jurors and thanked them. He then launched into a soliloquy about the importance of public service, that they had served the Constitution. With great ceremony, he handed them, one by one, speaking their names, certificates of appreciation.

It was an extraordinary thing. John Connolly, the recipient of many FBI awards, sat there, just moments after learning he would probably spend the rest of his life in prison, and there was this guy in black robes, standing 10 feet away, giving a civics lesson.

But what was this trial, this last 20 years of journalistic expose and reluctant governmental inquiry, but one long, sordid civics lesson?

This was always about right and wrong, about whether the Constitution mattered or whether you could just fling it aside because J. Edgar Hoover said you could. That the FBI could decide who should live or die because it served some purpose decided on the streets of Southie or the hallways of the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C.

John Connolly said it was his job to get close to murderous sociopaths like Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi. But a jury of six men and six women, who wouldn't know South Boston from the South End, said yesterday that whatever deals you make with the devil, it can't include murder.

This was always going to be a tough sell for the prosecution. The murder of John Callahan took place 26 years ago. The victim was a wannabe wiseguy who a year before his own demise had orchestrated the murder of an Oklahoma businessman named Roger Wheeler who threatened a scam that Callahan had arranged with the Bulger crew. The hitman in both murders, John "I'm Not A Rat" Martorano, testified here that he killed his friend Callahan. But he said he did so only because Bulger told him Connolly said Callahan was weak and wouldn't stand up on the Wheeler hit. And the only important people who testified against Connolly were either corrupt or murderers.

So as Connolly sat there, contemplating what just happened, even he had to get his head around the fact that a jury of his peers believed that the truth was not buried somewhere in his defense but in the shallow graves that Whitey Bulger's minions dug in Neponset, that John Martorano was more believable than he was.

Before they took him away, Connolly stood with his brother, Jim, his sister, Sally, and his friend, Fran Joyce, who grew up with him in the projects.

"I'm gonna fight on," he told them. "What can I do?"

He hugged them, and then he disappeared into the back rooms.

The courtroom was empty, and the janitors had brought out the mops, when the court officers led John Connolly down a desolate hallway in chains and a red jumpsuit. He looked over at me and smiled wanly, shuffling, because that's what the chains make you do.

"See ya later," he said.

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