Top Echelon

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.