A widow's pain: A murdered husband's deal with the devil 'Whitey' Bulger

Mary Callahan has a frightening theory about why her husband was murdered in Miami.

He was heading to the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., to report that the Boston office was corrupt to the core.

“He knew the FBI was so bad here. He always let me know where he was, and he told me he was going to go to D.C.” after first jetting to Florida on business, the 86-year-old widow said.

John Callahan was shot in the back of the head and left to die in the trunk of his Cadillac at Miami International Airport, where he was found in July of 1982. As the Boston Herald first reported this week, ailing ex-FBI agent John “Zip” Connolly is waging a final battle to clear his name for being part of that slaying.

Connolly, his lawyer says, is on house arrest on a compassionate release from a Florida prison. He’s 83 and living in Lynnfield.

Mary Callahan is now in a nursing home after falling and breaking her back, but that has not stopped her from trying to set the record straight about her late husband and his fear of mobster James “Whitey” Bulger and his Winter Hill Gang.

The regrets are many, she told the Herald by telephone after the big news broke of Bulger’s never-published book and FBI interviews of him this week. Those documents are exhibits in Zip Connolly’s motion to throw out his conviction.

Bulger was caught in Santa Monica, California, in 2011 after 16 years on the run and was murdered in prison in 2018.

Mary Callahan said all that killing worried her husband sick, but he was an ambitious businessman and took one too many risks.

“I’m an American. I pay my taxes … they didn’t take care of me. They ruined me,” she said of the FBI, admitting her husband “mixed with the wrong people.” But did it have to end in murder?

Movies are made, and books are written, but the loved ones of victims still suffer as the years pass and a seat at the table remains empty. It leaves a hole, Mary said, adding her grown son and daughter have also struggled with their dad’s absence.

“A lot of us lost a lot,” she said of the 11 murders Bulger was convicted of in Boston in 2013.

As for Bulger’s manuscript and the interview notes right after his capture, Mary Callahan said it’s just more spin from the corrupt FBI and their one-time star informant.

“You going to believe Whitey? I don’t think so,” she said.

Some of what Bulger said was that LSD flashbacks he took in prison as part of a CIA experiment tormented him and that he kept cash hidden in the U.S. and Europe, and returned to Boston on “several occasions” armed “to the teeth” while on the lam.

“Come on? Drugs? He took a chance, but I think he was an angry man always,” said Mary Callahan.

As for the ex-FBI agent Connolly, she shed her bitterness a long time ago, but she added it’s too late to seek full retribution.

“I don’t think he can clear his name; it’s too late.”

Mary has always been a polite and wise widow forced to live on her own while living with her “workaholic” husband who attempted to beat the odds and make a buck. “Earning $300,000 one year,” she said, “wasn’t enough.”

She lamented the trips to Florida and elsewhere that were never to be repeated. She spoke about the Boston FBI who never tracked down her husband’s gold Rolex watch. And she remembered a Whitey Bulger so mean-spirited her husband left a restaurant when the mobster once walked inside.

“Whitey was nuts. He liked hurting people.”

In almost a whisper, Mary said she sees the day coming when she may seek more answers.

“When I’m dead and go over the river and see John again, I will tell him, ‘Wait. I have a few questions,’ and then I see him run. But then I see an angel who gives me a big Hershey bar and a pack of cigarettes,” explaining that any reformed smoker would understand.

More shocking tales of Whitey Bulger’s devious life and Zip Connolly’s possible final appeal for vindication left this broken widow out of the story.

But as in years past, the Herald tracked down the loved one of a slaying to listen to what they have to say.

Whitey wrote his once-loyal hitmen Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi and John “The Executioner” Martorano — who both testified in court that they had 43 murders between them while running with the Winter Hill Gang out of Somerville and Boston — betrayed him for a deal to land a light sentence.

He also drove through various areas of the United States while on the run and he liked to go to “museums, antique shops, and historical areas” with his girlfriend Teresa Stanley and later Catherine Greig. He stashed money in safe deposit boxes in New York City and Clearwater, Florida, and he bought land in Louisiana where he enjoyed life on Grand Isle — “a remote oasis nearly hidden within Louisiana’s expansive shoreline.”

That’s what the tourist website says. If they caught any of his musings, they now know a killer was among them.

Mary didn’t want to think too much of the life in the sun Whitey lived while she was back in Massachusetts trying to raise a family alone and dealing with the Boston FBI office that never made her life easy.

Her husband never made it to Washington.

“It’s all now just a big maybe.”