Ex-FBI agent convicted of aiding mob hit asks for release due to coronavirus

A former FBI agent convicted of helping notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger avoid justice and plan a 1982 murder has requested release from a Miami prison, citing the coronavirus pandemic.

John Connolly, 79, “suffers from multiple severe medical conditions, poses no threat to the public safety, and seeks release to protect him from contracting the novel coronavirus,” his attorneys said this week in a letter to a Miami-Dade circuit judge this week, according to the Miami Herald.

Lawyers James McDonald and Craig Trocino wrote that if Connolly is released he will be picked up by his brother and live with him at his Florida home.

Connolly, while working in the FBI’s Boston field office, recruited Bulger as an informant in the 1970s, accepting information on Bulger’s rivals in the Italian mafia and in return tipping him off about police informants and planned law enforcement actions. The former agent was the loose basis for Matt Damon’s character in Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-winning film “The Departed.”  

He served 10 years in federal prison before beginning a 40-year sentence in state prison for telling Bulger that a Miami jai alai executive planned to cooperate in an investigation that could tie back to Bulger, prompting the gangster to order him killed. Connolly was convicted of second-degree murder in 2008.

“He deserves to remain behind bars,” State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle told the Herald in an interview. “He was an FBI agent who used his badge to give information that led to the death of an informant. It’s reprehensible.”

At least one prison employee has tested positive for the virus at South Bay Correctional Facility, where Connolly is serving his sentence. At least 98 employees of the state Department of Corrections and 123 inmates have tested positive for the virus.

Numerous high-profile figures have been released due to the threat of the virus, including former attorneys Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti, while others, including Bill Cosby and Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman Richard Gates, have similarly asked to be released. A court denied Cosby’s request earlier this week.