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Posted on 01/14/2003 4:02:50 AM PST by ninonitti
The Boston FBI and its Justice Department bosses allowed mob informants to lie and commit multiple murders for four decades during ``one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement,'' House investigators concluded in a final report for Congress.
Federal law enforcement did ``incalculable damage to the public's respect for the rule of law'' through actions in Boston from 1965 until now, House Government Reform Committee lawyers said in a report titled, ``Everything Secret Degenerates: The Justice Department's Use of Murderers as Informants.''
The evidence unraveled was so threatening to the government that the FBI offered a man $15,000 a few days before the committee's investigators interviewed him, according to an executive summary of the report, which was obtained by the Herald.
The witness, Robert Daddeico, a former mob associate given witness protection 30 years ago, ``provided information to the Committee that false testimony was suborned by prosecutors,'' according to the report.
Daddeico was a witness in the 1973 car bombing case against New England mob boss Francis P. ``Cadillac Frank'' Salemme. Salemme spent 15 years in prison for ordering the Jan. 30, 1968, bombing that maimed Hub attorney John Fitzgerald, who represented turncoat mob hit man Joseph ``The Animal'' Barboza.
FBI informant Stephen ``The Rifleman'' Flemmi also was part of the bomb plot but was tipped off by his handler, FBI agent H. Paul Rico, in September 1969 to run from a pending indictment.
Flemmi returned to Boston but was never prosecuted in the case.
The investigators' 110-page report has not yet been approved by the full committee, which is scheduled to vote on the report in the coming weeks.
U.S. Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) spearheaded the probe into the Boston FBI after learning about the wrongful conviction of Joseph Salvati of Boston, who spent 30 years in prison for a 1965 mob murder based on Barboza's perjured testimony.
Burton retired as committee chairman last week and was replaced by Tom Davis (R-Va.), who beat out Shays.
The committee's chief counsel, James Wilson, declined to comment on the report yesterday.
Other conclusions reached by investigators:
FBI agents and prosecutors ``appear to have tolerated, and perhaps encouraged, false testimony'' in the 1965 state death penalty prosecution for the murder of Edward ``Teddy'' Deegan. Based on Barboza's statements, four men were sentenced to die and two others were given life in prison. Four were not guilty, including Salvati, Peter Limone, Louis Greco and Henry Tameleo. ``Federal officials appear to have taken affirmative steps to ensure that the individuals convicted would not obtain post-conviction relief and that they would die in prison,'' the report says.
FBI bugs caught 1960s New England mob boss Raymond Patriarca giving Barboza and FBI informant Vincent ``Jimmy The Bear'' Flemmi the approval to kill Deegan, but Patriarca was never charged in the case. ``If Barboza's testimony had been consistent with the facts known to the Justice Department, Raymond Patriarca would have faced the death penalty,'' the report says.
Legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover or other senior law enforcement officials had enough information to conclude that Barboza was lying in the Deegan murder to cover for his pal, Vincent Flemmi. Hoover also was told that Flemmi was a psychopath whose goal was to become the ``No. 1 hit man in New England,'' but chose to cultivate him as a protected informant against La Cosa Nostra.
The FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility reached an ``extremely troubling'' conclusion in 1997 when it announced that no evidence existed showing informants James ``Whitey'' Bulger and Stephen Flemmi had been protected from prosecution. Former U.S. Attorney Jeremiah O'Sullivan testified to the committee in December that he had agreed in 1979 not to prosecute both men in a race-fixing case at Suffolk Downs despite having substantial evidence against them. O'Sullivan at first denied he protected the pair. But confronted with his own prosecution memo, which committee investigators obtained last year after battling with the Justice Department, O'Sullivan replied, ``You got me.''
Article dates the start of this FBI corruption to 1965 and blames J. Edgar Hoover. I had calculated, based on earlier articles, that it started in 1964, RFK's last year as Attorney General. Since RFK ordered Hoover to do things like wiretap Martin Luther King, and since this policy here involved giving favorable treatment to Irish gangsters in Boston, and since Kennedy-tied prosecutors were involved in the policy, I strongly suspect RFK gave the orders here.
Just another reminder how Bush/Ashcroft have demonstrated no interest, none at all, in confronting government corruption.
Too bad.
That's probably as close to a confession as we'll ever see.
I think the likely number is zero.
They'll all be promoted.
.
Not to mention the previous failures of Janet Reno and Bush I's attorney general to surrender documents relating to the defrauding of the Farmer's Home Administration [FmHA] in the midwest and the records that St Louis US Attorneys over those administrations have denied release of under Freedom of Information act requests from journalists. Funds in excess of 50 million dollars appear to have been stolen from the taxpayers, much of which, it seems, was plowed back into campaign contributions in 1988 and 1992 political races- including those of US congressmen and presidential candidates of BOTH parties.
Of course, that's the area where Attorney General Ashcroft and former FBI Director/Judge/resigned SEC chairman William Webster are from, so then again, maybe it's not at all odd that the feds are stonewalling it.
-archy-/-
Why do these people 'trust' the FBI to investigate the FBI?
While they run down equally inept and aging "family" members, The Russian Mob, The Colombians, al-Quaida. the KGB, and Cuba's DGI ran rings around them time after time. Remember, this is the same FBI that turned down the Walker Spy Ring's evidence 3 times in 6 years. This is the same FBI upon whom the KGB planted innumerable phony "defectors." The best you can say right now about the FBI is that they are more respectable in appearance than the BATF.
They have to get out of the more fanciful aspects of international and undercover work, at which they have displayed incredible incompetence in major cases, and concentrate on being super cops, at which they weren't too bad.
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