In some cases Nagle was paid money for his information. The sums ranged from the typical $25 and $50 he regularly received from a Boston police detective in the seventies to the $2,000 he once got from a DEA agent in the early eighties. In all, Nagle estimates that he received more than $20,000 from the DEA alone. Others believe the sum was much higher.
In other cases Nagle received considerably lighter sentences - and numerous suspended sentences - for his own crimes. A career felon, Nagle estimates that from 1970 until his incarceration in the Hampshire County House of Correction in Northampton in 1985, he pulled more than 100 armed heists. Law enforcement officials and inmates who know him put the number at more than 200. The targets ranged from pharmacies to supermarkets to convenience stores to airline ticket offices to banks. A printout of his court record is almost as tall as Larry Bird.
Even so, Nagle has never spent a day in the state's maximum security prison at Walpole, the usual repository for repeat offenders who are convicted of serious crimes. Instead, with one exception, he has served his sentences in lower security county jails and houses of correction. The lone exception was his first imprisonment, in 1972-73, when he served 16 months of a 6 year sentence for assault and larceny in the states medium security prison in Concord.
IN 13 YEARS HE WAS IN COURT FOR 116 SERIOUS FELONIES.
As of Nagle's current incarceration, (at the time of this article) in fact, he has been brought to court more than 20 times over a 13-year period on a total of 116 serious felony charges, including 56 counts of armed robbery, 21 counts of various types of larceny, 8 counts of receiving stolen goods, 4 counts of assault with a dangerous weapon, 4 counts of auto theft, 4 firearms violations, and 3 counts of kidnapping. Despite the numerous charges that were reduced or dismissed as a result of the deals he struck, the sentences he received - many of which were suspended or ran concurrently with one another - add up to an aggregate term of 125 to 165 years. Even so, prior to his current imprisonment, he had served fewer than 8 years behind bars and had never done more than 3 consecutive years before earning a parole or an early release to an alternative correction center.
From the evidence of the many cases in which Nagle served as an informant-and from the interviews with the law-inforcement agents and inmates-most of the murderers, bank robbers, stickup artists, hijackers, and drug dealers he fingered appear to have been guilty as charged. In at least one instance, however, there is documented proof that he lied.
Following his arrest for a liquor store stickup in Brighton in 1976, Nagle fingered a boyhood friend as his accomplice, but the detective investigating the case quickly discovered that he was the wrong man. The friend, Edward Madden, a former convict who now operates a construction company in Allston, says Nagle was getting even with him for sleeping with Nagle's girlfriend. The investigating officer Thomas Moran, a Boston detective now deceased, characterized Nagle as a liar and said that he never used Nagle's word as the basis for an arrest or a search warrant unless the information could be corroborated be someone else.
In fact, law enforcement agents who know Nagle well including his half brother, a former Watertown detective who is now a federal agent describe him variously as a "habitual", a "pathological", and a "calculating" liar.
"He's very calculating about his lies", says Nagle's half brother, who requested anonymity for obvious reasons. "He'll tell you what you want to hear if he thinks it'll do him any good".
John Ridlon, a retired Boston police detective who used Nagle as an informant in Charleston in the seventies and early eighties, regards him as "a con man from the word go". "You could see right through him", says Ridlon. "Whatever he told me, I would believe it was a lie until I checked it out. You wouldn't just take him at his word. It's fair to say that 97 percent of the cops I knew who knew him wouldn't believe him unless the guy he was giving up was laying there at his feet with the gun in his hand."
That didn't stop Ridlon and other law enforcement agents from using Nagle as an informant and prosecutors from calling him as a witness when they belived his information was good. According to defense attorneys and several inmates, including his cousin Paul Courtney, when Nagle had no information to give up, that didn't stop him from faking or fabricating some in hopes of making a deal.
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