TESTIMONY DETAILS AGENCIES' RIFT OVER MOB PROBE

In 1984, relations between the Boston offices of the US Drug Enforcement
Administration and the FBI had soured, largely because DEA agents blamed
their FBI counterparts for derailing an investigation targeting James
''Whitey'' Bulger and Stephen Flemmi earlier that year. The mistrust was
so deep that the head of the DEA's Boston office got permission from
Washington to keep his FBI colleagues out of another major probe five years
later, according to testimony in federal court yesterday.

Although the FBI was eventually brought on board late in the second DEA
investigation, Bulger and Flemmi - two of the FBI's top informants - were
not among the 51 people indicted in the summer of 1990. Their absence was
notable: For years, FBI reports indicated the pair was shaking down drug
dealers for thousands of dollars a month, the price of doing business on
Bulger's South Boston turf.

US District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf is presiding over hearings to
determine the legality of extortion and racketeering charges eventually
brought against Bulger and Flemmi in January 1995, four years after they
were closed as FBI informants. At issue is Flemmi's claim that he and
Bulger were given immunity from prosecution by the FBI in exchange for
information they provided as informants.

In testimony yesterday, FBI agent James F. Ahearn, who headed the Boston
office from late 1986 to late 1989, acknowledged he wrote a letter to FBI
headquarters in Washington in February 1989 to complain that his agents
were being frozen out of the DEA drug investigation. In the five-page
letter, which was offered as evidence yesterday, Ahearn called the move
''reprehensible.'' He blamed the suspicions surrounding the aborted
investigations of Bulger and Flemmi in 1984 and 1985 on ''jealousies,
rumors and distrust.'' In the letter, Ahearn wrote that allegations the FBI
had ''tipped off'' Bulger to the 1984-85 DEA investigation - which
collapsed after Bulger found a listening device in his car - had been
''investigated exhaustively ... and found to be groundless.'' Shifting the
blame, Ahern wrote that a Massachusetts state trooper had been indicted in
an unrelated matter for advising organized crime figures of FBI wiretaps.

Questioned by defense attorney Martin G. Weinberg, who represents Flemmi's
co-defendant, John Martorano, Ahearn acknowledged that the FBI's belated
entry into the DEA's 1989 investigation was the first time the FBI had
targeted Bulger and Flemmi for prosecution.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski