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Title: The Exonerated. Set up by the FBI
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URL Source: http://www.rd.com/your-america-insp ... l-conviction/article54253.html
Published: Feb 5, 2009
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Post Date: 2009-02-05 12:32:07 by PSUSA
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Views: 82
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Joseph Salvati served 30 years for a murder he didn't commit. The most shocking revelation: who put him behind bars. By Jan Goodwin "It was all a lie," says Salvati, standing outside the Boston club where he was arrested in 1967. A Different Kind of Death Sentence You could hear the ticking of the clock hanging in the back of the courtroom and the cries of the seagulls that circled above Boston as the jurors—averting their eyes for the first time in the 50-day trial—filed past the six men in the dock. The day before, the six had been convicted in the slaying of a local hood named Edward "Teddy" Deegan. The jury was now being asked to choose between a sentence of life behind bars or death. His voice flinty, 73-year-old Justice Felix Forte addressed the first four defendants in turn. "You are sentenced to die in the electric chair." Undulating his hands to illustrate the chair's 2,000-volt current, he added, "On the designated date, the electricity will run through your body until death." Joseph Salvati, a 35-year-old father of four young children, was next. Convicted of being an accessory to the murder, he rose uneasily to his feet. Forte asked if he had anything to say. Although Salvati had maintained his innocence from the beginning, he mumbled, "No." "You are sentenced to Walpole Prison for the rest of your natural life, without possibility of parole," the judge said on that day, July 31, 1968. It was a death sentence of a different kind. And it was especially harsh because Salvati—and three of the other five defendants—were innocent. Worse still, the FBI knew it all along. In the mid-1960s, New England was teeming with organized crime. J. Edgar Hoover, the controversial FBI director, had launched his campaign to eradicate the Mob, and field agents were under pressure to cultivate Mafia informants. Operatives in the bureau's Boston office soon infiltrated deeply into the organized-crime underworld, forming alliances with a network of gangsters including Joseph "The Animal" Barboza, a brutal loan shark and hit man with some 30 murders to his name. Although there will always be questions surrounding the 1965 alleyway shooting of Deegan—several reports suggest that the FBI was forewarned and did nothing to stop the murder—it's clear today that Joseph Salvati didn't have anything to do with it. Barboza admitted to participating in the slaying to his FBI handler, Special Agent H. Paul Rico. But with Rico's collusion, the hit man concocted a scenario that protected his partner, Jimmy "The Bear" Flemmi, while implicating the defendants, only two of whom were actually involved. Barboza, for whom the Witness Protection Program was created, was ultimately murdered by the Mafia in 1976. Meanwhile, Salvati spent decades filing appeals from behind bars. He went into prison a vibrant man who loved his wife and kids, pasta and a bottle of wine shared with friends; he came out 29 years and seven months later a silver-haired great-grandfather. Salvati was exonerated in January 2001, a month after a special task force investigating the Boston FBI office's handling of Mob informants uncovered long-hidden documents establishing that innocent men had been framed for Deegan's murder. Last July, in a civil case filed by the families of the four wrongly convicted, federal Judge Nancy Gertner ordered the government to pay them $101.7 million. "The minute Barboza's mouth identified the plaintiffs, [the agents] had to have known he was lying," the judge wrote in her scathing 223-page decision. "FBI officials up the line allowed their employees to break laws, violate rules and ruin lives." "I was robbed of three generations of family, who grew up without me, and a lifetime with my wife," Salvati says today, sitting in the modest North End apartment that his wife, Marie, moved to 20 years ago, when money was especially tight. "I was behind bars so long, when I came out, my father had died and my mother had Alzheimer's. She didn't recognize me." He raises a beefy hand and wipes away tears as they course down his face. "Do you know what it's like to never be there for birthdays, Communions, graduations, weddings? The skinned knees, broken bones, taking your kid to play ball? The government stole more than 30 years of my life." A high school graduate with no trade skills, Joseph Salvati put in ten-hour days, six days a week, working three jobs to support his family. "It was casual labor," he says. "You got what you could. I'd run down to the pier and help unload the fish. Lumpin', it was called. It was dog's work. But you could make $60 a week. I unloaded trucks in the meat market. I worked as a doorman. The hours were late, but $40 in tips was $40." "We lived from week to week," says Marie. "It wasn't easy, but Joe provided for us the best he could. We'd take the kids out once a week for a pizza, sometimes a movie. It was good, but there was no money to spare." Their budget could barely stretch for unexpected expenses, like medical care for their daughter Lisa Marie, who was born with Down syndrome in 1959 and died two months later from a heart condition. "You had good times and bad," says Salvati, who, like his neighbors in the predominantly Italian American North End, occasionally borrowed from the local moneylender, a man who trusted them to pay him back when they could. One day, the lender told Salvati that his accounts had been taken over by a Mob-connected loan shark: Joseph Barboza. He needed Salvati's debt of $400 paid immediately, but Salvati didn't have the money. When Barboza sent two enforcers to collect, one armed with a baseball bat, Salvati grabbed the bat midswing and sent the two goons running. This, evidently, was the source of Barboza's grudge against Salvati, whose next visitor was a Mob attorney. "I have a message from Joe Barboza," the lawyer told Salvati. "He says to tell you he will take good care of you. Very good care." Mob wars had been raging in nearby Charlestown and Somerville's Winter Hill section for years; Deegan had fallen victim in one of the frequent bloodbaths. In October 1967, two years after Deegan's murder, Salvati was helping a friend move furniture into a bar in the working-class neighborhood where he lived, when Frank Walsh, a police sergeant he'd known since the man was a newly minted beat cop, approached him. "Joe, I have a warrant here for your arrest," Walsh said, then began reading: "Murder one, Teddy Deegan." "Who the hell is Teddy Deegan?" a stunned Salvati asked. Before anyone answered, he was taken into custody. Marie was walking with her youngest, five-year-old Anthony, when the case made news. "People on the street stopped me and said, "Marie, there's been a big crime raid, and Joe got arrested,' " she remembers. "No one knew the details, just that it was an organized-crime case." Terrified but sure her husband would call and tell her it was all a mistake, she collected the other children from school and hurried home. "Joe sent me word through a friend," she says. "He said not to worry, he'd soon clear this up and be out." But, remanded without bail for ten months before the trial, he didn't come home. "It was a nightmare that went on for 30 years," Marie says. A friend organized a raffle and raised $1,100 for Salvati's defense. What that bought was a fresh-out-of-law-school attorney whose name Salvati can't remember. "He kept asking for my alibi, and I kept telling him I didn't have one," he says. "Innocent people don't need alibis." Salvati's story—that Barboza had made good his threat by falsely implicating him in Deegan's murder—fell on deaf ears in court. "Barboza had his own gang," says Victor Garo, who took Salvati's case on appeal in 1977 and grew old with his client, fighting for his exoneration without charging a penny. "He was a loan shark, a receiver of stolen goods, a leg breaker. He'd shoot you in the head, puncture your eardrum with an ice pick, disembowel you with a knife. But the FBI wanted everyone to believe he would never, in a court of law, lie to save himself. And it worked." The first visitor to Salvati's cell at Walpole was Albert DeSalvo, accused of being the Boston Strangler. "He brought me two sandwiches, which I didn't eat," Salvati says. "They could have been poisoned." He learned survival tactics from the men who carried out the Great Brinks Robbery, then the largest heist in U.S. history. "They said that if you mind your business, the other prisoners won't bother you. But they also said you can find trouble if you want it." Poster Comment: More at link
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#1. To: PSUSA (#0)
And nothing's changed in forty-two years...
Nope. Still lying, still murdering, still ruining lives.
Click for Privacy and Preparedness files The $101.7 million awarded to Salvati and his codefendants is believed to be the highest ever for wrongful conviction and imprisonment. (Henry Tameleo, a codefendant in the murder trial, died in prison in 1985, as did Louis Greco, a decorated World War II veteran, in 1995; their awards go to their estates.) The Department of Justice is expected to appeal the case, despite an apology to the Salvati family by Congressman Dan Burton, who spearheaded a three-year investigation as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. No such apology was forthcoming from FBI Agent H. Paul Rico, who, when asked during the hearings if he felt remorse, answered, "What do you want, tears or something?" The agent, who died in 2004 awaiting trial on unrelated murder charges, was never disciplined for his role in the Deegan case. Once. Just once, you wish that these vicious swine would get the groin kick they so richly deserve.
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#2. To: lodwick (#1)
#3. To: PSUSA (#0)
It would be another four years before all charges against Salvati were dropped, and six more before a judge would determine what 30 years of his life was worth in dollars.
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