"Whitey" Bulger sought ex-agent's advice while in hiding

Geriatric gangster James "Whitey" Bulger was thinking about surrendering to authorities in the mid '90s to face loansharking charges but apparently went underground forever once his life as an FBI informant was later exposed.

That's the word from the Miami jail cell of Bulger's handler, ex-FBI agent John Connolly. Connolly faces sentencing tomorrow for leaking information leading to the Bulger gang's murder of an associate -- business man John Callahan in 1982.

Connolly claims Bulger called him from a pay phone back then, even though his former handler was long retired and working for Boston Edison.

"He seemed to be serious about it," Connolly told the Boston Globe today, claiming Bulger was primed to come in from the cold with guarantee of an FBI cover for his activities. He wanted Connolly, then retired from the bureau, to assure him the feds would help him win bail and try to broom the case, as they had more than a decade earlier when Jeremiah O'Sullivan was U.S. Attorney. (Sullivan admitted this before a Congressional committee in 2003, explaining he had to or the bureau "would have buried me.")

Bulger thought he and crime partner Stephen Flemmi deserved help dodging the bullet again. "He felt because they were both FBI informants and had produced for the FBI, they could be given that concession and get bail while fighting the case,'' Connolly tells the Globe.

The leader of Boston's Irish mob believed he had FBI permission to run his rackets in exhange for information about the Italian mob.

Connolly says he assured Bulger he had nothing to do with the 1995 indictment that sent Bulger into hiding. That case was made by three state troopers and a DEA agent, whose work forever changed four decades of Hub history.

In the interview, the former agent, now 68 and the father of twin teen-aged boys, once again claims he never crossed the thin blue line to become one of Bulger's minions. He's likely to get 30-to-life tomorrow in Miami.