How a failed IRA shipment and a shady FBI agent led Whitey to murder my son
When a boat filled with weapons was captured on its way to Ireland in 1984, corrupt US officials set in motion a range of events that led the notorious gangster to beat John McIntyre to death
EMILY McIntyre’s son appears to her in her dreams. He’s always crying for help. ‘Sometimes he has no hands and he cries: “Ma, where are my hands?” Sometimes he has no feet and cries: “Ma, where are my feet?’ ‘He had a gorgeous set of teeth but they were ripped from him to stop the police from identifying his body. Sometimes I see him without his teeth. He cries to me and asks me where they are.’ Emily is one of the many, many fallout victims of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, the Irish-American gangster who was brutally beaten to death in a West Virginia prison last week. Her son John was just 31 when he was murdered by the mob boss’s notorious Winter Hill Gang after they discovered he had passed on information about the Valhalla IRA gun-running ship.
The fishing boat left Boston harbour in 1984 bound for Ireland, carrying more than $1 million in guns and ammunition. It was intercepted by the Irish Navy after the Valhalla crew transferred the weapons to an Irish-registered trawler, the Marita Ann, off the Kerry coast
Four IRA members were arrested, including commander Martin Ferris, now a sitting Sinn Féin TD. He was jailed for ten years.
The death of her son was hard enough for Emily to take, especially as it took more than 15 years to find his body. But even more difficult to get over was the fact that a corrupt FBI agent — and, by association, the federal government — was responsible for leaking the information that led to his killing.
‘When I came to this country, I thought that America was this great country of democracy and freedom, but I have seen another side,’ she says bitterly.
Emily met her husband, an IrishAmerican who worked in US military intelligence, in Germany after the Second World War. During the war, she had worked in a Munich bakery and had delivered bread to Jewish slaves forced to work in Nazi munitions factories — a memory, she says, that has haunted her.
‘I would look at these women’s faces and think to myself that they could be my mother,’ she says. ‘It was a horrible experience.
‘It made me determined to always oppose war and to teach my family those values.’
Nevertheless, her son followed his father into the military and was involved in bombing guidance during the Vietnam War from a control centre in Europe.
‘I don’t think that he ever recovered from that experience, of knowing of his involvement. How could any young man recover from that?’ she says.
John became a Massachusetts fisherman after the war and got caught up in soft drugs and Irish republicanism, which his family strongly disavowed.
‘That changed everything for him,’ says Emily. ‘He was in with a different crowd and that is how he became involved with the Valhalla. It all happened so quickly.’
John passed on information about the shipment to the FBI after it was intercepted but what he didn’t know was that the FBI was shielding Whitey Bulger in a conspiracy that, in the words of a US prosecutor, had left ‘a scar’ over Boston law enforcement.
Emily says she had no knowledge of John’s involvement in the shipment.
‘We didn’t know anything. It was only when he disappeared that I learnt about the IRA and the situation in Ireland. It was a dumb decision to have anything to do with that boat,’ she says.
After the seizure of the weapons, the crew of the Valhalla were questioned by federal agents but later released. A few months later, John was arrested on a separate matter. While in custody, he gave information about the shipment and agreed to wear a wire while meeting with Bulger.
However, senior FBI commander John Connolly had at this stage struck a deal with Bulger that saw his crimes covered up in return for information on other mafia operations in Boston. Connolly told Bulger that John McIntyre had spilled the beans and his death was immediately ordered.
On November 30, 1984, Bulger lured McIntyre to one of his safe houses, where he tried to strangle him with a
She felt ‘crazed’, unable to trust the government
‘I feel relieved that people are finally listening’
rope. However, he wasn’t strong enough to kill him so he asked McIntyre if he wanted to be shot instead. McIntyre pleaded for the torture to end and both Bulger and his second-in-command, Steve ‘The Rifleman’ Flemmi, put bullets in his head.
Gang member Kevin Weeks told a court in 2006 that he’d helped dump the body in a wasteland.
After her son’s disappearance, Emily begged the police and the FBI for help.
‘I went to the FBI and spoke to one agent who was extremely unhelpful. They just wanted to get rid of me and told me to go to the regular cops. I didn’t know where to go because these criminals were still out there.’
After John disappeared, she recalls, she felt like a ‘crazed woman’, unable to trust her own government, knowing that few would believe the FBI was involved with psychopathic killers who had tortured and murdered more than 20 people. She felt powerless, she says, against government denials and against Whitey Bulger, who was often seen in her neighbourhood and who was known for his police and political connections.
He managed to flee before he could be indicted on racketeering charges in 1995 and incredibly stayed on the run until 2011 — he and his long-term partner Teresa Stanley are rumoured to have spent some of the intervening years in Ireland.
Under intense pressure from FBI headquarters in Washington, the Boston FBI made strident efforts to clean up the corruption in the late 1990s. Connolly was jailed, while another former FBI agent was put on trial for conspiracy to commit murder on behalf of the Winter Hill Gang and died in his prison cell.
Eventually, under police pressure, Kevin Weeks — the Winter Hill Gang member who buried McIntyre — uncovered the body in an unmarked grave in Dorchester, a Boston neighbourhood, along with two other victims of Bulger and Flemmi.
There was outrage among victims’ families when Weeks was given a six-year sentence in 2004 for racketeering and extortion after cutting a deal with prosecutors. He was back on the streets of Emily’s neighbourhood by Christmas, having served several years in prison while awaiting sentencing.
Emily found some relief when Flemmi was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering her son. He was also jailed for nine other gruesome murders, including those of his ex-girlfriend and a teenager who told police he had tried to molest her. Flemmi, like Bulger, had been an FBI informant who enjoyed immunity as long as he kept information supplied on Boston’s Italian mafia.
Though she has a deep-rooted hatred towards Bulger, Emily — who has struggled with depression since losing her son — reserves her strongest anger for John Connolly.
‘I cannot forgive Connolly for what he has done because of the brutality of what happened to my son,’ she says of the man currently serving a 40-year prison sentence. ‘It is with me every day.’
She refers to Bulger and his gang as ‘the Winter Hill thing’, and holds disdain for the hero myth that surrounded Bulger for decades until his death last week.
‘I have not been to south Boston in more than 15 years because of the belligerent attitudes of people there,’ she says. ‘This hero-worship of these parasites makes me ill.’
Martin Ferris, who served ten years for his role in the Marita Ann affair, was released from prison in 1994 and elected to the Dáil in 2002. He said that he didn’t know that the weapons on the ship came from Whitey Bulger, despite meetings between Bulger and IRA leaders, including Joe Cahill and others who came over from Ireland to supervise the deal. Ferris said he knew that the weapons were ‘not coming from the Legion of Mary’ but he didn’t know who exactly was supplying them.
The McIntyre family won a $3.1million wrongful death suit from the federal government and, having settled her case, Emily felt a huge increase in support for her cause. The Boston Globe had firmly backed her family’s civil case, as has her local Congressman, William Delahunt, and other Irish-American politicians.
‘The superior court was marvellous,’ says Emily, her voice noticeably more upbeat than before the case began. ‘One of the three judges looked right at me when she made a point about a mother’s rights. I feel a great sense of relief, that people are finally listening.’
Bulger’s eventual capture occurred in 2011 in bizarre circumstances. A neighbour in the Santa Monica area where he was living, Anna Bjornsdottir, a former Miss Iceland, recognised him when she was watching a programme about him while on a visit to Ireland.
In 2013, he was convicted of 11 murders as well as racketeering charges, and sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus five years — he would never be eligible for parole.
His sentence came to a grisly end last week when he was beaten to death in Hazelton Prison.
‘He lived violently and apparently died violently,’ said Dick Lehr, author of Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss. ‘It marks the full circle of a terrible life.’