Excerpt from Black Mass by Dick Lehr, Gerard O'Neill, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The next day at HoJo's, on Friday, September 5, Femia caught the troopers' attention when he tucked a small automatic handgun in his pocket before locking up his blue Malibu. Bulger and Flemmi pulled in, and then a short while later a grey Mercedes 450SL rolled into the lot. Driving the car was Mickey Caruana, who at 41 years old was reputedly the biggest drug trafficker in New England. Caruana was the Mafia's own drug kingpin, a brash highroller who answered to no one except Raymond L.S. Patriarca, the Providence-based Godfather of New England. (In 1983 he became a fugitive, fleeing a federal indictment for drug trafficking charging him with netting $7.7 million in drug proceeds between 1978 and 1981.) Bulger and Flemmi greeted Caruana. Femia stayed back while the three men went into the restaurant. The meeting lasted about 90 minutes. Outside, Bulger and Caruana shook hands heartily before splitting up.

It was all tantalizing stuff. There was another meeting with Kevin Dailey in Southie, and yet another encounter with the Mafia's Larry Zannino, who arrived at HoJo's in his blue Continental. Compared to the flophouse, the troopers' command post was posh. They'd set up in a fourth-floor bedroom at HoJo's overlooking the pay phones and were photographing and videotaping Bulger's comings and goings.

Pulling all their intelligence together, the troopers went back to court. On September 15, 1980, Judge Barton approved their second bid to capture Bulger and Flemmi's incriminating words. The troopers had all five pay phones tapped. The wiring was done two nights later, on a Wednesday night.

But once again the troopers came up empty. Eager and optimistic, they took up their position in their hotel room the next afternoon, awaiting their targets' regular arrival. But 1 o'clock came and went. 2 o'clock. 3 o'clock. The hours passed. Bulger and Flemmi were no-shows. They didn't show up the next day either, or the day after, or the day after that. Once again, Bulger was gone.

Inside their hotel room, the sullen troopers had a lot of empty time on their hands. The court order they had lasted until October 11, and Bulger never re-appeared. They could have screamed and yelled, cursed the high heavens, but they didn't. They didn't trash their room. But they did talk obsessively about their plight, talk that went in dizzying circles: what the hell was going on?





Maybe they were crazy, or at least too stubborn for their own good, but Long and his unit reviewed the intelligence they had amassed against Bulger and Flemmi and, despite their setbacks, they decided to launch a third and final try. They all felt some pressure to produce something tangible -- a prosecutable case -- after investing more than six months of manpower and resources into the investigation. They also weren't naive -- with each failure, the chances for success narrowed. Bulger and Flemmi were on high alert. But Long and the troopers were still fired up, and together they decided to take a final shot at the highriding crime bosses. "We didn't think our chances were good," Long was thinking, "but we figured what the hell -- go for it. If it doesn't work out, we close the books on it and move on."

Their target would be the black Chevy -- installing a bug in the car would be their Hail Mary pass. The troopers had chased Bulger from the Lancaster Street Garage, from the pay phones outside HoJo's, and, from their surveillance, they now saw that Bulger was using the car as a mobile office. For a few weeks in the fall, the troopers once again eased off to give Bulger and Flemmi some breathing room, but resuming their surveillance in late 1980 they saw that Bulger and Flemmi continued to conduct most of their business in the Chevy.

Bulger's new routine was to drive into the North End in the early afternoon and park outside of Giro's. The restaurant was located on one of the neighborhood's busier streets, Commercial Street, and was only a few blocks from Angiulo's headquarters at 98 Prince Street. Giro's, like the garage before it, was a hub of underworld activity: wiseguys were moving in and out of the restaurant throughout the early afternoon. Sometimes Bulger or Flemmi went inside and sat at a table for a meeting with various underworld figures, but most of the time they sat in their car and hosted a stream of wiseguys who climbed into the Chevy, talked a bit a business, and then got out.

Copyright 2000, Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.