and in the '60s, there was a gangster named joe barboza, who cooperated with the government.ook the stand in a capital murder case and fingered four innocent people for a crime they didn't commit. and the government knew it. it was known all the way up to j. edgar hoover. this became the dirty secret of that jurisdiction for many generations after that. we wouldn't know about that until the '90s when bulger went on the run and a lot of this dirty history came out. so this tradition of using gangsters in the way that bulger was used was established in the era before bulger and it reached deep into the system, beyond the fbi, into the prosecutor's office, all the way to the department of justice in washington, d.c. >> how did he figure out he could make this work or bend, as you say this precedent toward the criminal enterprise he wanted to run, while basically the feds were protecting him? >> many of the same fbi agents who handled joe barboza in the '60s and early '70s passed the torch on to new fbi agents who recruited bulger, through steve fleming, who had been an informant