(I began this story two Sundays ago here and last Sunday here. I’ll continue posting this on Sundays until I finish it.)

Last week we saw that Jeremiah O’Sullivan learned the Massachusetts state police under Sgt Bobby Long had a six month jump on him and the FBI in the pursuit of the Mafia and they were putting an electronic bug into the Lancaster Street garage.

People still argue today about  how it happened that Whitey and Stevie knew about that bug. Some point to the crass Richard Schneiderhan who was a state trooper in the Attorney General’s office who was leaking information to his life-long friend Stevie Flemmi but if it were him the FBI wouldn’t have known; others blame an Israeli private investigator skilled at installing electronics (who I worked with for years and had no problems) because he later did some work for the Patriarca family but with him also the FBI would not have known; but I have no doubt it was O’Sullivan because too much was at stake for him to let the state police succeed.

I can’t say it was a good week for the prosecutors. Those are the exact same words I used to start off last week’s review. That’s not to say the prosecutors are bad or anything like that. It is the opposite. They’re very good. It’s just maybe it’s me and I don’t understand their strategy.

I’ve been writing that the matter of Whitey being an informant has no bearing on his guilt or innocence reasoning he can be convicted of the charges whether the jury concludes he was or wasn’t. I’m slowly, or perhaps maybe not so slowly, walking back from that position. Between M & M, Marra and Morris, who appeared to be two pieces of coated chocolate candy that defense counsel Hank Brennan feasted on, suddenly the informant issue sticks its head up through the middle of the courtroom floor like a smiling, drooling gargoyle.

It has become the issue in the case. It was put into the case by the prosecutors. They were intent on fighting back against Whitey’s assertion that he was never an informant.

We’ve been wondering the genesis of the Boston Globe’s antagonism, to use an easy word, against Billy Bulger.  I was reading an article and came upon the term Curley Effect. Here’s what it said:

“There is a concept in political science called the Curley Effect, named for James Michael Curley, who was the intermittent Irish-American mayor of Boston over an astonishingly long period of time, first elected in 1913 and last elected in 1946. Curley had a special disgust for Boston’s Brahmin Establishment—“a strange and stupid race,” he once called the Wasps—and when in office, he did what he could to compel them to leave. He lavished funds on Irish neighborhoods and systematically neglected Anglo-American ones; he arranged his tax policies to redistribute wealth from the Wasp community to his own; and he kept up a rhetorical war on the Brahmins: “The Anglo-Saxon is a joke.” By his last term, the Yankee flight to the suburbs was complete.”

Perhaps since the Boston Globe was owned by a Brahmin family it saw in Billy Bulger the reincarnation of James Michael Curley. It felt an irresistible urge to destroy this monster before he drove them off to the wilds of Maine.

A  lot of you who have struggled along with me in this blog know at some point early on as we developed a better insight into matters when I tried to throw of the fetters that bound me to a certain way of thinking and approach the story of Whitey’s life anew, going back to the earliest days.

Doing that I found much that we had been told by certain authors that was plainly untrue. These authors, and their minions in the press and Department of Justice, had bought into a story about Whitey that simply did not stand up to close scrutiny. I pointed this out as I proceeded to tell the life of Whitey based upon my background in some of these matters and from independent sources that I could find.

Writing it I came upon two truths I was pretty certain about: Flemmi was an informant of the FBI since the early 1960s up through the early 1990s; and the FBI’s records as to who are informants do not truly reflect a person’s status.

“And it’s Brennan on the moor, Brennan on the moor, Bold, brave and undaunted was young Brennan on the moor.”

If Whitey isn’t humming that tune to himself by this time there’s not a drop of Irish blood in him. If that were ever shown, then his whole defense that proud Irishmen do not inform therefore he couldn’t be an informant would go down the drain.  Maybe Wyshak should bring in a genealogist to trace his background — I’ve read somewhere that he had British blood in him.

I checked to see if the name Bulger was Irish.  I found this. “The name Bulger originally appeared in Gaelic as O Boguidir, which according to this site, meant yellow belly (from bolg dohar).”  I hope Wyshak doesn’t know that because it would fit into his theory Whitey was a rat if we consider the modern-day understanding of the term as a person being a coward.

However, it has a very interesting historical meaning.  So it’s not clear cut. It is an Irish word and being called a “yellow belly” at one time in Ireland was a something to be proud of. Here is one example: “A Wexford Man. called because of there jerseys. A real man, who saved the Irish in the Civil War, the 1798 rising. Also called yella belly.” It’s best not to mix cultures.

Last night after the jury left the judge and counsel remained behind discussing evidentiary issues for about a half hour or so.  The issue is whether Defense Attorney Carney can get some reports he received from the prosecutors into evidence so that he can show – which is a critical component of his case – that many of the reports filed by John Connolly were copied from earlier reports filed by others or were from information gained through ELSUR (that’s FBI for electronic surveillance.)  Carney’s push is to show, as we’ve heard for months, that what Prosecutor Wyshak calls the myth Whitey was not an informant is a not a myth. Carney believes putting in 30 or 40 of these reports showing the information preexisted Connolly’s reports will give the jury a basis for concluding everything filed by Connolly in his 209s (FBI for informant reports) was fabricated.

Wyshak is objecting to having them entered into evidence because a foundation for them has not been established. He’s not suggesting that they are not authentic documents, but that the mere fact such a document exists means nothing unless Carney can show Connolly had an opportunity to gain access to it. For example, if Connolly wrote the Whitey told him Tiger Jones is driving a blue car and there is a report from another FBI agent two days earlier that his informant told him the same thing, Wyshak argues that Carney has to show Connolly could have had access to that report.

Break for lunch. Morris was the highlight today. By now whatever happened with Marra is long gone into the recesses of the memory. Maybe it’ll come back some day.

I found several things that were interesting in Morris’s testimony. One was the information surrounding the Halloran murder.  I never knew before that Agent John Connolly was not around the office much during the time that Halloran had begun cooperating with the FBI.  This is according to Morris who said that because he was attending graduate school at Harvard he was not there often.

Morris had opposed Connolly going to that school. The reason is unclear because if Connolly was his best friend as he asserts, why would he not have supported it?

Halloran decides to cooperate and the FBI wants to get him into the witness protection program. We heard about efforts made in that direction and one involved Morris doing a threat assessment which was an attempt to determine what threats existed to Halloran from the criminal element. We’ve seen reports from which we are supposed to infer that Whitey is laying the ground work for doing a hit on Halloran. Connolly is filing information wherein Whitey is telling him about the many people who have grudges against Halloran like the Mafia and people from Charlestown.

The weird thing that happens is that Morris tells Agent Quinn who works under him to rewrite his affidavit. The purpose is to commit a fraud. Morris wants to include Whitey and Stevie in the affidavit, as informants. They are put in and disguised by a designation such as “Informant A-4”. They are not necessary to getting the order but are included so that they can be advised of the wiretap and cut their ties with Angiulo and his group during the electronic bugging operation.  Right off the bat the true picture of the Angiulo operation will be distorted and the agents will not be getting the full information that they should be getting.

During the interception, Morris and Connolly meet with Stevie and Whitey. They have their usual few glasses of wine, or at least Morris does, earning him the nickname Vino.  Stevie and Whitey are very abstemious when it comes to imbibing in alcohol. They play some of the tapes from the wiretap for the gangsters to listen to.  These are outrageous violations of Title III and they had the high potential of undermining all the guys in Morris’ unit who are working hard on the bug.