Four Were Framed With The FBI's Help

Four Were Framed With The FBI's Help

$100 Million In Damages Sought

By EDMUND H. MAHONY
Courant Staff Writer

November 19 2006


BOSTON -- 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.

Armed with those newly obtained records, the framed men - or their estates - are now seeking more than $100 million in damages from the federal government, arguing that they spent decades in prison because of a morally bankrupt conspiracy between FBI agents and gangsters.

Older, grayer, heavier and frailer, the two surviving defendants, Joseph Salvati and Peter Limone, were in U.S. District Court late last week to watch their battery of lawyers open the trial phase of the long-anticipated suit.

Salvati's wife, Marie, stung by bitter memories dredged up in the courtroom, wiped a tear from her eye during a recess. Said Limone: "It's all rhetoric so far. We just have to wait for the end result. I hope it's good."

What makes the suit's contentions as convincing as they are sensational is that most of the thousands of FBI records on which it is based were uncovered during an investigation of law enforcement corruption in New England by a special task force of the U.S. Department of Justice. State prosecutors in Florida are using parts of the same trove of records to prosecute a corrupt FBI agent from Boston on a Miami murder charge.

The suit claims that the harrowing legal odyssey of the four men - Salvati, Limone, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco - began in the early 1960s when U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover decided to crack down on the Mafia. One of the government's principal weapons was to be the Top Echelon informant program, a program created to recruit informants from among gangsters who knew the mob's inner workings at first hand.

"This was supposedly the creme de la creme regarding organized crime informants," Michael Avery, one of Limone's Boston attorneys, argued in his opening statement. "Soon after the Top Echelon program began, the FBI and the Department of Justice launched programs that were illegal, unconstitutional and immoral. It became the philosophy of the FBI and the Department of Justice that the end justifies the means."

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.

"There was extensive advance warning to the FBI that this crime would occur," McGuigan, Connecticut's former top state organized-crime prosecutor, told U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner.

Flemmi and Barboza even asked the late mob boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca to sanction the murder eight days before it took place. The FBI was aware of the meeting, McGuigan said, because an agent listened to the conversation through the microphone hidden in Patriarca's Providence office, took notes, reduced the notes to a memo and distributed it through the FBI chain of command to Hoover's desk in Washington.

Patriarca, a notoriously violent man, seemed to have doubts about the wisdom of the Flemmi-Barboza plan, at least initially. An FBI document in the case reflects that the mob boss told a trusted lieutenant that Flemmi, then boasting about becoming Boston's No. 1 hit man, "did not use sufficient common sense when it came to killing people."

But after a second Providence meeting a week later, McGuigan said, Patriarca's misgivings apparently evaporated. The records show that an informant told a slab-faced former FBI agent named H. Paul Rico that there had been "a dry run" and the Deegan hit was on. Flemmi was telling friends to find alibis for the next few evenings.

Deegan died, full of bullets, in a dark alley in Chelsea on March 12, 1965. Almost before the body had been removed, McGuigan said, FBI records show that yet another informant was describing Deegan's death to Rico in lurid detail. By this account, Flemmi, Barboza and three confederates lured Deegan into the alley on the pretext of burgling a finance company. One blasted Deegan in the back of the head and two more opened fire as his corpse crumpled. Flemmi, aspiring ace hit man, complained that the shooters made "an awful sloppy job" of it.

Still, police were having a hard time solving the case until Barboza wound up in jail facing trial on unrelated state charges - charges that could have landed him an 84-year sentence as an habitual offender. Barboza cut an extraordinary deal with Rico, which the FBI then sold to state prosecutors: He would confess his role in the Deegan killing in exchange for a drastically reduced charge that resulted in his release from prison for time served.

But Barboza refused to implicate Flemmi. 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.

The lawyers arguing the suit contended that Barboza framed four innocent men to obtain a measure of retribution in trivial personal disputes. But other sources familiar with the FBI documents say prosecutors got at least three mob convictions as a result of Barboza's testimony in the Deegan case.

The sources said Tameleo, Greco and Limone, although blameless in Deegan's murder, were Mafia members. The sources agree with Salvati's lawyers about why Barboza fingered him: Salvati owed Barboza $400. When Barboza sent men to collect, Salvati gave them a beating.

What the FBI didn't get from its deal with Barboza was one of the biggest prosecutorial coups imaginable. Had Barboza testified truthfully, McGuigan and other lawyers believe, prosecutors could have made a murder conspiracy case against Patriarca, who was near the top of Kennedy's list of national Mafia targets. But had prosecutors targeted Patriarca, the lawyers say, it could have led to disclosure in court of the hidden - and illegal - FBI microphone.

The informers Barboza and Flemmi would not have been inconsiderable defendants themselves. Barboza was believed responsible for 21 murders before he was gunned down in the 1970s in San Francisco, where he had been relocated as the country's first beneficiary of the federal witness protection program.

McGuigan said in court that, when writing an FBI report in March 1965 on Flemmi's purported suitability for the Top Echelon program, Rico attributed four murders to him. About a month later, when revising the report after Deegan's murder, Rico reported that Flemmi's body count had jumped to seven.

The U.S. Justice Department's civil division has challenged the suit on technical legal grounds. During pretrial arguments, the Justice lawyers argued that the United States is immune from such suits. Judge Gernter disagreed and was upheld by the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.

Last week, Justice Department lawyer Bridgette Bailey-Lipscomb, in an opening statement that lasted less than 10 minutes, disputed the lawsuit's contention that Rico and other FBI agents coached Barboza to perjure himself in the Deegan trial. She also argued that the federal government should not be responsible for convictions in state court.

Bailey-Lipscomb said that the FBI had no obligation to provide information about its relationship with Flemmi and Barboza to state authorities. Nonetheless, she said, the FBI did provide some information, but she did not say what it was.

Curiously, Bailey-Lipscomb is defending the government from a case that was essentially developed by her colleagues in the department's criminal division, in particular John H. Durham, the deputy U.S. attorney in New Haven. 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.

In December 2000, Durham delivered to Salvati and Limone the previously secret FBI records that form the heart of the lawsuit. In his opening statement, McGuigan said the suit would not have been possible without Durham's work. The documents also resulted in Limone's release from prison in January 2001 and caused state prosecutors to dismiss the convictions of Limone and Salvati, whose sentence had been commuted in 1997 by former Gov. William Weld.

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.

Contact Edmund H. Mahony at emahony@courant.com.
Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant

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