Bob Fitzpatrick was appointed ASAC (Assistant Special Agent in Charge) of the Boston office of the FBI in late 1980 with a clear mandate:  “Kick ass and take names,” according to his superior Roy McKinnon in Washington.  And the ass he really needed to kick was that of an Irish gangster named Whitey Bulger.  But what Fitzpatrick, one of the most celebrated agents of his time, didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that the adversary he was about to confront was fast becoming the most notorious gangster in all the annuls of American crime history.  Bigger than Al Capone, bigger than any of the infamous heads of the Five Families in New York, bigger than John Gotti and every other name of criminal legend.  Why?

Because only Bulger had the FBI and the Justice Department acting as willing accomplices in his murderous rise to the pinnacle of the criminal underworld.

Sound crazy?  Maybe so, but it happened, the how and the why detailed in BETRAYAL (Forge, January 3), the book I co-authored with Bob Fitzpatrick chronicling his time in Boston and the frustration he faced in trying to end the madness once and for all.  The Irish Whitey Bulger, you see, was then on the books as a Top Echelon (TE) informant, vital in the Bureau’s mind to supplying crucial evidence against the Italian mafia until Fitzpatrick ascertained that Bulger was providing no evidence of the kind whatsoever, never mind anything of note. Yet instead of taking Fitzpatrick’s advice and targeting Bulger, the FBI did nothing.  The Justice Department through Jeremiah O’Sullivan, head of the Organized Crime Strike Force for New England, did nothing.  No less than William Weld, then the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts and future governor of the State, did nothing.  Fitzpatrick warned officials at the very highest levels of the FBI in Washington about what was happening.  They, too, did nothing. Even when no less than three informants capable of proving everything he said was true were murdered thanks directly to sources inside the Boston FBI office who leaked the names of those informants to Bulger, assuring their deaths thanks to a vicious culture of corruption.

Meanwhile, Bulger consolidated the power the FBI had enabled him to seize in the first place.  His equally notorious contemporaries and predecessors never had the government’s help, never had the FBI and Justice Department riding shotgun over their murderous exploits.  Elliot Ness put Al Capone away on tax invasion.  Melvin Purvis gunned down John Dillinger.  John Gotti, the so-called “Teflon Don,” died in prison.  Whitey Bulger, on the other hand, went on to allegedly murder more than a dozen people under the watchful eye of the FBI after Bob Fitzpatrick recommended he be arrested once and for all after their single fateful interview in March of 1981.  No other gangster, no other underworld figure, can make that claim.  No other gangster or underworld figure had their brutal efforts aided and abetted by the very officials charged with protecting the rest of us from their actions.

Whitey Bulger

Sound crazy?  As a fiction writer, of thrillers specifically, no one would believe this were possible or credible had I made it up.  Bob Fitzpatrick wasn’t just any agent either.  Before coming to Boston, his major case experience included playing a key role in the takedown of Sam Bowers in the famed Mississippi Burning case, leading the investigation into the Martin Luther King assassination, and running ABSCAM in Miami.  The Bureau had the right man for the job all right; they just wouldn’t let him finish it.

Click here to read an excerpt from the book!