Panel broadens probe into use of FBI informants
By Ralph Ranalli, Globe Staff, 6/6/2001
A congressional probe into why a local man was wrongfully imprisoned is quickly mushrooming into a full-blown investigation of the FBI's use and abuse of organized crime informants, particularly in Boston, over the last 40 years, officials said yesterday.
In a clear sign that House Government Reform Committee chairman Dan Burton intends to conduct an extensive probe of the agency's long-secret organized crime informant programs, the Indiana Republican yesterday issued a sweeping document request to the US Justice Department demanding FBI records on agents, informants, and policies dating to the late 1950s.
''When we initiated this investigation, we had no idea how broad the scope of this scandal was,'' committee spokesman Mark Corallo said. ''The more we have uncovered, the more we have realized that we have an obligation to get to the bottom of this.
''This is a huge black mark on federal law enforcement. It is something that should never have happened in the United States of America,'' Corallo said. ''It flies in the face of every principle on which this country was founded, and we intend to go the distance.''
An FBI spokesman in Washington, Paul Bresson, referred all questions to the Justice Department press office, which did not return telephone calls yesterday.
Last month, Burton's committee held hearings into the case of Joseph Salvati, who, according to recently uncovered FBI documents, was framed for a 1965 gangland murder in Chelsea.
Salvati spent 30 years in prison for the murder of Edward ''Teddy'' Deegan while FBI reports attesting to his innocence sat at FBI headquarters in Washington. Those documents, which surfaced in a Justice Department criminal probe of FBI misconduct, were cited earlier this year by a Massachusetts Superior Court judge who overturned the convictions of Salvati and Peter Limone, a reputed Mafia soldier who was also convicted in the case.
Burton's committee has been investigating whether the FBI purposely covered up the fact that Salvati, Limone, and two other defendants who died in prison were framed by underworld hit man Joseph ''The Animal'' Barboza, the bureau's prized witness against the New England Mafia in the 1960s.
Barboza's FBI handler, former agent H. Paul Rico of Miami, was questioned by the committee last month and agreed that Salvati was innocent, but showed little remorse or regret about his involvement in the matter.
''What do you want from me? Tears?'' he asked committee members at one point.
Yesterday's document request, while expanding the probe to Rico and Barboza, also asked for records on other agents and other informants, such as South Boston gang boss James ''Whitey'' Bulger and his longtime partner Stephen Flemmi, and for policy documents dating back to the beginnings of the FBI's high-profile war on the Italian-American Mafia.
In particular, the three-page letter from Burton to Attorney General John Ashcroft demands ''all internal memoranda, policy statements, and US Department of Justice and FBI guidelines relating to the Top Hoodlum Program and the Top Echelon Program and other past and present programs regarding the use of confidential informants.''
According to FBI historians, the Top Hoodlum Program of the 1950s was Director J. Edgar Hoover's first attempt to investigate the Mafia and other underworld groups and marked the first formation of organized crime squads in FBI offices across the country.
The agency's controversial Top Echelon Informant Program was created in the early 1960s. According to FBI documents that surfaced during FBI misconduct hearings in federal court in Boston three years ago, the program encouraged agents to recruit high-ranking members of organized crime groups as secret informants against the Mafia.
Those hearings in US District Judge Mark L. Wolf's courtroom exposed Bulger's and Flemmi's work as informants. Bulger, who is a fugitive, has since been charged with involvement in at least 18 murders. Flemmi, who is in jail awaiting trial, has been charged in 10 killings.
Burton's letter also demands numerous other documents, including:
Personnel and other records for Rico, his former partner Dennis Condon, and Bulger's and Flemmi's handlers, John Connolly and John Morris, including records of the FBI's contact with the agents after they retired.
Records pertaining to efforts to help FBI witness Barboza fight a murder charge in California and to any contacts between Barboza, police, and prosecutors, including former New England Organized Crime Strike Force chief Edward F. Harrington, who is now a federal judge.
Records from illegal FBI wiretaps of New England Mafia leaders Raymond L.S. Patriarca and Gennaro Angiulo dating to the 1960s.
Documents from several FBI investigations that critics later said were coverups, including a 1982 investigation of the murder of Tulsa, Okla., businessman Roger Wheeler and a 1998 internal probe of corruption in the Boston FBI office by the bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility.
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 6/6/2001.
