The article below, "SNITCH", is used with permission and was originally a feature story in Boston Magazine, written by John Strahinich.
DAVID NAGLE
BEING A PAID INFORMANT WAS LIKE HAVING
A GET-OUT-OF-JAIL-FREE-CARD,
SAYS CAREER CRIMINAL DAVID NAGLE.
BARGAINS WITH SNITCHES LIKE NAGLE
ARE CORRUPTING THE SYSTEM, SAY CRITICS.
November 1981 was the cruelest month in Jack Rodwell's life. The first week he spent looking for work: he had just lost his engineering job with Avco Corporation to the recession. The second week he buried his mother: he lost her to cancer. The third week he spent in a Middlesex County courtroom, where his 25 year old son, Jimmy, was on trial for first degree murder. Jack Rodwell spent the first half of the fourth week awaiting the jury's decision. The last blow came on the day before Thanksgiving, when the jury handed up its verdict: he was losing his eldest son to a life sentence with no chance for parole.
At the time this article was written, the following statement appears with a picture of David Nagle, - "David Nagle in Northamptons Hampshire House of Corrections, where he is serving 20-25 years for armed robbery. Before being jailed there, he was sentenced on a variety of charges that taken together, could have kept him in jail for up to 165 YEARS. But, until his current incarceration, he spent fewer than 8 years behind bars."
JACK RODWELL'S LIFE WAS FALLING APART.
HE LOST HIS JOB. HIS MOTHER DIED.
AND THEN HIS SON WAS FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER
- BECAUSE OF DAVID NAGLE.
As the forewoman read the verdict, Jack Rodwell's wife, Carolyn, screamed and slumped against his arm. His son's estranged wife, Lillian, became hysterical and had to be removed from the courtroom. His son slowly bowed his head. The elder Rodwell greeted the verdict with silence. Tall, burly, and 51, he absorbed the bad news with a soft-spoken calm that belied what was going on inside. His family was breaking apart, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Rodwell had been heartened by the two days the jurors had spent poring over the evidence against his son. The case against the younger Rodwell rested on the testimony of two men: one, an immunized informant; the other, a jailhouse informant.
The first, Francis "Frankie" Holmes, Jr., had told the court that he and Rodwell had rendezvoused with another man at Rodwell's apartment on Sunday night, December 3, 1978, with the intention of stealing drugs from Louis Rose, Jr., a Woburn dealer and the son of a Burlington police captain. In return for immunity from prosecution, Holmes testified that, later that night, he watched Rodwell climb into Roses's car on a deserted street in Somerville and shoot the dealer seven times in the head.
Holmes's testimony, damning as it was, was not enough to put Rodwell away. By state law, a defendant cannot be convicted solely on the uncorroborated testimony of an immunized witness. The prosecution had no gun, no fingerprints, no other eyewitnesses-no other evidence whatsoever-linking Rodwell to what by then was a three year old murder. Instead, it had David Nagle.
A career criminal and longtime narcotics addict, Nagle had been in the Middlesex County House of Correction in Billerica the summer of 1981, awaiting trial on five charges of armed robbery and one count of kidnapping, amoung other things, when Rodwell was arrested and jailed there for the Rose murder. That July, Nagle contacted the investigators and told them Rodwell had boasted to him that he had murdered Louis Rose. That November he so testified - in return for what amounted to a lighter sentence on his own charges.
Jack Rodwell had also testified in the case. At the time of the murder, he was separated from his wife an living with Jimmy in a one bedroom apartment in Woburn. The elder Rodwell was working full time at the Raytheon Corporation in Lowell and taking courses toward an MBA at Suffolk University. He told the court that he had been home alone all evening on the night of the murder, studying for final exams, and that neither his son, Holmes, nor the third man had ever dropped by the apartment that night, as Holmes had claimed.
Indeed, the story Holmes told on the stand, including the account of the rendezvous at Rodwell's apartment, conflicted with earlier versions he had related to the investigators and the grand jury. In fact, both Holmes's and Nagles's testimonies were riddled with discrepancies, inconsistencies, and errors. That, and the length of the jury's deliberations, had lifted Jack Rodwell's hopes. The verdict brought the curtain down on the bleakest month of his life.
For all that, nothing Rodwell had heard during the eight day trial changed his own conviction that his son was innocent. And neither did the verdict.
Blond and blue eyed, his son Jimmy was blessed with the muscular body and oversize fists of a middleweight. The elder Rodwell, who had grown up in the North End, had taught his son how to use his fists to defend himself. If anything, though, his fists had gotten him into more trouble than they had gotten him out of. In the early seventies, he had been arrested twice for assault and battery. In 1977 he had done six months in the Middlesex County House of Correction in Billerica for passing phony $20 bills. Since then his record had remained virtually clean until he was arrested, in May 1981, for the Rose murder.
"I had heard what Holmes said," Jack Rodwell recalled years later. "He said that they had got the guns from my apartment. I knew that was a lie. Knowing that and knowing my son - if you had said the guy had died in a fistfight, I might have believed it. My son was a good street fighter. But he wasn't a shooter."
While visiting his son at the state's maximum security prison in Walpole two weeks after the sentencing, Rodwell ran into another inmate, a childhood friend from the North End, and asked the man to keep an eye on his son. Things could get hairy in Walpole, even for a street fighter like Jimmy Rodwell.
As bad as things got for him, however, nothing got under his skin as much as the taunts other inmates were directing at him, taunts that usually ended with the same refrain: "Another one that Nagle got."
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BEING A PAID INFORMANT WAS LIKE HAVING
A GET-OUT-OF-JAIL-FREE-CARD,
SAYS CAREER CRIMINAL DAVID NAGLE.
BARGAINS WITH SNITCHES LIKE NAGLE
ARE CORRUPTING THE SYSTEM, SAY CRITICS.
At the time this article was written, the following statement appears with a picture of David Nagle, - "David Nagle in Northamptons Hampshire House of Corrections, where he is serving 20-25 years for armed robbery. Before being jailed there, he was sentenced on a variety of charges that taken together, could have kept him in jail for up to 165 YEARS. But, until his current incarceration, he spent fewer than 8 years behind bars."
HE LOST HIS JOB. HIS MOTHER DIED.
AND THEN HIS SON WAS FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER
- BECAUSE OF DAVID NAGLE.
Rodwell had been heartened by the two days the jurors had spent poring over the evidence against his son. The case against the younger Rodwell rested on the testimony of two men: one, an immunized informant; the other, a jailhouse informant.
The first, Francis "Frankie" Holmes, Jr., had told the court that he and Rodwell had rendezvoused with another man at Rodwell's apartment on Sunday night, December 3, 1978, with the intention of stealing drugs from Louis Rose, Jr., a Woburn dealer and the son of a Burlington police captain. In return for immunity from prosecution, Holmes testified that, later that night, he watched Rodwell climb into Roses's car on a deserted street in Somerville and shoot the dealer seven times in the head.
Holmes's testimony, damning as it was, was not enough to put Rodwell away. By state law, a defendant cannot be convicted solely on the uncorroborated testimony of an immunized witness. The prosecution had no gun, no fingerprints, no other eyewitnesses-no other evidence whatsoever-linking Rodwell to what by then was a three year old murder. Instead, it had David Nagle.
A career criminal and longtime narcotics addict, Nagle had been in the Middlesex County House of Correction in Billerica the summer of 1981, awaiting trial on five charges of armed robbery and one count of kidnapping, amoung other things, when Rodwell was arrested and jailed there for the Rose murder. That July, Nagle contacted the investigators and told them Rodwell had boasted to him that he had murdered Louis Rose. That November he so testified - in return for what amounted to a lighter sentence on his own charges.
Jack Rodwell had also testified in the case. At the time of the murder, he was separated from his wife an living with Jimmy in a one bedroom apartment in Woburn. The elder Rodwell was working full time at the Raytheon Corporation in Lowell and taking courses toward an MBA at Suffolk University. He told the court that he had been home alone all evening on the night of the murder, studying for final exams, and that neither his son, Holmes, nor the third man had ever dropped by the apartment that night, as Holmes had claimed.
Indeed, the story Holmes told on the stand, including the account of the rendezvous at Rodwell's apartment, conflicted with earlier versions he had related to the investigators and the grand jury. In fact, both Holmes's and Nagles's testimonies were riddled with discrepancies, inconsistencies, and errors. That, and the length of the jury's deliberations, had lifted Jack Rodwell's hopes. The verdict brought the curtain down on the bleakest month of his life.
For all that, nothing Rodwell had heard during the eight day trial changed his own conviction that his son was innocent. And neither did the verdict.
Blond and blue eyed, his son Jimmy was blessed with the muscular body and oversize fists of a middleweight. The elder Rodwell, who had grown up in the North End, had taught his son how to use his fists to defend himself. If anything, though, his fists had gotten him into more trouble than they had gotten him out of. In the early seventies, he had been arrested twice for assault and battery. In 1977 he had done six months in the Middlesex County House of Correction in Billerica for passing phony $20 bills. Since then his record had remained virtually clean until he was arrested, in May 1981, for the Rose murder.
"I had heard what Holmes said," Jack Rodwell recalled years later. "He said that they had got the guns from my apartment. I knew that was a lie. Knowing that and knowing my son - if you had said the guy had died in a fistfight, I might have believed it. My son was a good street fighter. But he wasn't a shooter."
While visiting his son at the state's maximum security prison in Walpole two weeks after the sentencing, Rodwell ran into another inmate, a childhood friend from the North End, and asked the man to keep an eye on his son. Things could get hairy in Walpole, even for a street fighter like Jimmy Rodwell.
As bad as things got for him, however, nothing got under his skin as much as the taunts other inmates were directing at him, taunts that usually ended with the same refrain: "Another one that Nagle got."
Next Page