By Scott Malone
BOSTON (Reuters) - When gangster Brian Halloran was murdered in 1982, FBI officials summoned Boston special agent Gerald Montanari to Washington to discuss a troubling fact: their two top informants, James "Whitey" Bulger and Steven "The Rifleman" Flemmi, were suspects in the killing.
Montanari, now retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, took the stand on Tuesday to testify in Bulger's trial. The 83-year-old former mob boss, captured in June 2011 after 16 years on the run, is on trial for charges related to 19 murders that prosecutors say he committed or ordered while running Boston's Winter Hill gang in the 1970s and 1980s.
The emergence of Bulger as a suspect in the brazen daytime murder of former mob enforcer Halloran and another man with no criminal ties worried the FBI top brass, Montanari said.
"The fact that the two targets were top echelon informants of the Boston office involved in a major investigation, that was a concern," Montanari said.
Bulger's story has become a black mark on the FBI's history. The gangster met regularly with a corrupt agent who shared Bulger's Irish ancestry and South Boston upbringing, and turned a blind eye to crimes in exchange for information the FBI could use against the Italian Mafia, prosecutors charge.
Halloran had approached the bureau early in 1982 hoping to trade information on Bulger's gang in exchange for lenient treatment on a local murder charge and because he was afraid Bulger meant to kill him.
Halloran told investigators that a former FBI official with ties to Winter Hill was serving as a "pipeline" of information about the bureau's investigation. That information prompted Montanari to ask his supervisor to keep all files on Halloran under lock and key in a safe, rather in the Boston office's general informant file.
Montanari said he knew at the time that FBI colleague John Connolly, who is now serving a 40-year sentence on murder and racketeering charges, met weekly with Bulger and Flemmi, but did not regard him as a threat to his investigation.
"I had no reason to distrust John Connolly. I had heard stories about John Connolly. I knew that the state police didn't trust him," Montanari said. "It was at that stage, in 1982, beyond comprehension for me that an FBI agent would compromise his own."
Connolly built up a 700-page informant file on Bulger. The mobster denies ever serving as an informant, saying that he paid the agent for information but offered none of his own.
Bulger faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges but through his attorney has admitted to being a drug dealer, loan shark and extortionist.
His story inspired the 2006 Academy Award-winning film "The Departed," in which Jack Nicholson played a character loosely based on Bulger.
The trial, originally forecast to last up to four months, is now in its sixth week and prosecutors have said they expect to wrap up their case later this week or early next. Defense attorneys on Tuesday cut back sharply the number of witnesses they plan to call, listing 37 potential subjects rather the 86 names earlier submitted.
The list includes family members of victims and a handful of law enforcement officials that the jury has not yet heard from but drops prominent names including FBI Director Robert Mueller, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld and several prominent Boston journalists who Bulger had tried to have excluded from covering the trial.
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Dina Kyriakidou and David Gregorio)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/whitey-bulger-1982-boston-mob-hit-worried-fbi-170714222.html
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