When a flurry of gunshots ended Edward "Teddy" Deegan's misspent life more than 40 years ago, there should have been no mystery about who pulled the trigger.FBI agents had been listening to the murder plot unfold for five months through a microphone hidden in a mob office and through reports from informants. They knew that Vincent "Jimmy" Flemmi and Joseph "The Animal" Barboza, two hoodlums the bureau was recruiting as informants, were behind the conspiracy.
But what should have been an open-and-shut case turned into a legal nightmare. Thousands of recently disclosed U.S. Justice Department records show that the FBI, in order to cultivate Flemmi and Barboza as informants, allowed them to frame four innocent men for the Deegan murder.
In his opening, Hartford attorney Austin J. McGuigan, representing Salvati, cited a score of FBI memos and reports showing that numerous FBI agents - including Hoover - not only knew the identities of Deegan's real killers, but had the information before he was killed.***According to the lawsuit, in their zeal to recruit the two men as informants Rico and others in the FBI agreed to help Barboza rope the four innocent men in as his accomplices. The suit contends that the FBI essentially handed the Deegan case to Massachusetts state prosecutors after arranging with Barboza what his testimony would be.
When the trial ended, Limone, Tameleo and Greco were sentenced to death by electrocution. During her opening statement last week, Limone lawyer Juliane Balliro, of Boston, flashed a picture of the Massachusetts electric chair on an oversize courtroom television screen. The death sentences were later commuted to life in prison, the same punishment Salvati got.
Tameleo and Greco, a decorated World War II hero, died in prison in 1985 and 1995, respectively.
In the late 1990s, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Durham to a special Justice Task Force assigned to investigate longstanding rumors of corrupt relationships between lawmen and gangsters in Boston.
How corrupt can a lawman be? Here's what happened to one of the FBI agents:
The documents also marked the beginning of the end for former agent Rico. In 2001, he was questioned by members of a congressional committee about FBI abuses. Pressed about the consequences of convicting an innocent man such as Salvati, Rico snapped: ""What do you want? Tears?" Salvati and his wife sat just 20 feet away, listening with expressions of horror.Two and a half years later Rico was under arrest for murder. He was accused of conspiring with another Top Echelon informant from Boston, Flemmi's brother Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, in the murder of Roger Wheeler, president of the World Jai Alai corporation. Rico and Stephen Flemmi were part of an underworld attempt to take over a substantial portion of the East Coast parimutuel wagering on jai alai.
Rico died in January 2004 while awaiting trial in a Tulsa, Okla., jail.
All tyrannies have an efficient police and prosecutorial system. The thing that makes a free society is an aggressive system of checks upon such powers. In our system it's the reason for a strong criminal defense bar and adversarial trial system. When you take away the capacity of the accused to defend themselves, to confront the evidence and witnesses against them, to question the tactics and conclusions of the investigators and prosecution, then you remove the safeguards that keep flagrant injustices from occurring. My favorite scene in "A Man for All Seasons" is Thomas More's conversation with his son-in-law, who tells him that if he were chasing the devil he would do anything to catch him, even if it came to obliterating the law. Thomas More asks him how, once he has eliminated all law, and caught the devile, is he going to defend himself agains the devil, now that the laws are gone.