# Top Echelon *Whitey Bulger and the Price of a Federal Informant* — Legendary Biographies No. 268 - **Subject:** James Joseph Bulger Jr. - **Written by:** Ruth Kellerman - **Shelf:** Crime / Crime - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 234 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-548-0) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · 7h 26m · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-657-9) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/268-top-echelon.html ## About this book A parked car, with two men in it. One is an FBI agent named John Connolly. The other is James Joseph Bulger Jr., raised in Old Harbor Village in South Boston, nine years in federal prison behind him, lately the man South Boston reported to after he ended the Killeen-Mullen war by negotiating in a bar rather than shooting his way to the top. Seven years earlier, four men had been convicted of murdering Edward Deegan in Chelsea, Massachusetts on the testimony of a Bureau informant, while the Bureau held documents in its own files showing that testimony was false. Two of them died in prison. The convictions were vacated in 2001 and the government paid $101.7 million. The Deegan case comes at chapter five, ahead of the subject, because the argument is that the FBI did not fail to catch Bulger. It bought him, under the Top Echelon Criminal Informant Program, and then paid what that program costs. The premise is not irrational: you cannot get inside a criminal organization without paying a criminal, and the further in you go the worse the criminal has to be. The written guidelines said an informant may not be authorized to commit a crime of violence. They were unenforceable by design, because nobody in the arrangement has an interest in enforcing them. The handler's career depends on the source producing. The person who is going to be killed is not in the room. The murders are told from the victims' side, because the trial told them from the killers'. Brian Halloran was shot on the Boston waterfront months after asking the FBI for witness protection he never received; what he got was a supervisor telling Connolly and Connolly telling Bulger. Michael Donahue, a truck driver with three young sons, had stopped to give him a lift home. That chapter is written from the passenger seat. In October 2018 the Bureau of Prisons moved an eighty-nine-year-old man in a wheelchair into general population at USP Hazelton. He was beaten to death within about twelve hours. ## Contents 1. Old Harbor 2. Shamrocks 3. Atlanta 4. The Rock 5. Teddy Deegan 6. Killeen and Mullen 7. Winter Hill 8. Connolly. 1975 9. Race Fixing 10. Tulsa 11. Northern Avenue 12. Callahan 13. The Basement. 799 East Third Street, South Boston 14. Debra Davis 15. The Store 16. Lancaster Street 17. What the Bureau Got 18. December Twenty-Third 19. Wolf 20. Princess Eugenia 21. Courtroom Eleven 22. Hazelton ## Questions **Who is Top Echelon about?** James Joseph Bulger Jr.. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Top Echelon — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,378 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 72,000 words, 22 chapters, 234 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 7h 26m, measured from the finished masters. ## The writer Ruth Kellerman is a former particle physicist who left the field for science journalism and has written for Nature, The New Yorker, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Her first book, on the Berkeley Rad Lab generation, was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.