John Connolly, ex-FBI agent doing time for Miami murder, wants out over coronavirus fears

John Connolly, the former FBI agent convicted of helping notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger engineer the killing of a gambling executive in Miami in 1982, wants out of a Florida prison because of the pandemic.

The 79-year-old “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 defense lawyers wrote in a request to a Miami-Dade circuit judge this week.

Connolly is serving a 40-year sentence for second-degree murder at South Bay Correctional Facility, where at least one prison employee has tested positive for the highly contagious respiratory virus.

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, which worked with Boston federal prosecutors to convict Connolly during a high-profile trial in 2008, will oppose the move.

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

The former agent is asking that he be allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence on home confinement.

Connolly was a star FBI agent in the 1970s, and one of his informants was Bulger, the leader of a violent group known as the Winter Hill Gang. Their twisted relationship became crime lore in Boston, and served as the loose basis for the 2006 movie “The Departed.” Johnny Depp played Bulger in “Black Mass,” a 2015 film about the gangster.

Bulger spent 17 years as a fugitive before he was captured outside Los Angeles in 2011. Seven years later, Bulger was beaten to death in prison while serving a life sentence.

As for Connolly, he has already completed a 10-year federal prison sentence after a Massachusetts jury convicted him of protecting Bulger’s gang from prosecution and tipping them about informants in their ranks.

In the South Florida case, jurors convicted Connolly of murder for telling Bulger and his cohort that an executive with a jai-alai operation in Miami might cooperate in the probe of an earlier mob murder. The mobsters dispatched a hit man to fatally shoot the executive, John Callahan.

Callahan’s corpse was discovered in a Cadillac trunk at Miami International Airport. During a riveting trial in Miami in 2008, a host of underworld figures testified against Connolly. Miami jurors convicted Connolly of second-degree murder with a firearm.

A divided panel of three Miami appeals court judges tossed his conviction over a legal technicality, but it was later restored. The Florida Supreme Court declined to review his case, leaving his sentence intact.

Connolly is one of scores of convicted prison inmates across Florida who have asked state and federal courts for their release because of the dangers of catching the coronavirus while behind bars.

Florida prisons have become hot spots for the viral outbreak. The Florida Department of Corrections reports that at least 98 staff members have been infected, and 123 inmates, along with four deaths.

Even though Connolly was convicted in state court, defense lawyers are asking that he be released under a 2018 federal law allowing for “compassionate release” under “extraordinary” circumstances, such as age, health and other critical factors. Under the law, inmates must first as a prison warden for their release.

“Immediate judicial review is necessary here,” according to his motion. “Mr. Connolly submitted a request to the warden at South Bay Correctional Facility on April 16, 2020. Mr. Connolly has not received a response from the warden.”

According to his lawyers, Connolly’s brother, James Connolly, will pick him up from the prison while wearing proper masks and gloves, and the former agent will live with his sibling at his Florida home.

“Even though the end of Mr. Connolly’s sentence is years away, the risk and dangers associated with contracting COVID-19 are here today,” wrote lawyers James McDonald and Craig Trocino, of the University of Miami law school’s Innocence Clinic.

No hearing date has been set.

This story was originally published April 22, 2020 at 8:45 AM.