During the third week of the James “Whitey” Bulger trial, lawyers debated the former mob boss’s alleged status as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Department of Justice Special Agent James Marra, whose department oversaw the investigation into possible problems with the FBI’s handling of Bulger, and John Morris, an ex-FBI agent who has admitted to taking bribes from Bulger decades ago, testified conflicting information as to how accurate the FBI’s files on the 83-year-old defendant as an informant are.
“I didn’t verify [the material in the files,]” Marra said Tuesday at the trial in the John Joseph Moakley Courthouse in South Boston.
Following the presentation of Bulger’s informant identification card on June 21, the jury was shown three binders last Monday containing about 700 pages that the prosecution claimed catalogs all information Bulger gave the FBI in his role as an informant.
Marra testified encounters with Bulger or his associate Stephen Flemmi based on the FBI’s files on June 25. One of the only interruptions came when Judge Denise Casper had to disallow Marra from confirming or denying if Bulger was a spy following an objection from defense attorney Hank Brennan, who denies Bulger had ties with the FBI.
The afternoon on June 25 and most of Wednesday, June 26 was reserved for the defense’s cross-examination of Marra, in which Brennan attempted to prove the files were corrupt and his client, who faces 19 charges of murder along with others including racketeering, never helped the FBI.
On Thursday and Friday, Morris was on the stand. He admitted to receiving $7,000 and two cases of wine from Bulger as bribes.
He said he was scared when Bulger called him a fugitive in 1995.
“He said if he was going to jail, I was going with him,” Morris said on Thursday.
Morris, who was the supervisor of John Connolly — the FBI agent who was Bulger’s handler when he allegedly worked as an informant — testified that he helped protect Bulger and Flemmi from prosecution in a 1978 race-fixing indictment because of their information on the Italian Mafia.
He told the jury that he asked Connolly to tell him when Bulger and Flemmi were about to be arrested so they could get away. Bulger fled Boston in 1994 and, after a prolonged manhunt, he was finally captured in Santa Monica, Calif. in 2011.
During Morris’s testimony on Thursday, Casper had to give Bulger a warning for calling the man on the stand a “[expletive] liar.” That was the second time that week that Bulger was reported for swearing in trial, as he said something similar three days prior.
The outbursts marked a shift in the demeanor of the mob boss. During the previous week when his former best friend John Martorano testified against Bulger, he did not move much and never engaged in eye contact with the witnesses for an extended period of time.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kelly said Bulger’s behavior was unacceptable and he requested Casper to admonish the defendant.
“I know he spent his whole life trying to intimidate people … but he should not be doing that here,” he said Thursday.
The trial continued Monday with prosecutors calling witnesses of Bulger’s crimes to the stand. The trial is expected to continue into September.
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