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Fbi mob coverup dealings Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/014/nation/Panel_finds_shielding_of_FBI_wrongs+.shtmlhttp://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/014/nation/Panel_finds_shielding_of_FBI_wrongs+.shtml
Panel finds shielding of FBI wrongs
Justice Dept. allegedly kept key witness under wraps
By Shelley Murphy and Robert Schlesinger, Globe Staff, 1/14/2003
As a congressional committee was exposing the FBI's recruitment and protection of murderous informants in Boston, the Justice Department was frustrating the committee's efforts by trying to keep a lid on a key witness, according to a draft copy of the committee's report obtained by the Globe.
Last April, Justice Department officials insisted they needed more information before they could identify a witness, Robert Daddieco, being sought for questioning by the Committee on Government Reform. At the same time, a Justice Department official warned Daddieco - who had been relocated under the federal witness protection program 30 years ago - that the committee wanted to talk to him, according to the draft.
A few days before Daddieco was interviewed by the committee, which was investigating the FBI's handling of informants in Boston, the FBI offered him $15,000, according to the report. The report references the timing of the payment just before committee staff interviewed Daddieco about alleged misconduct by FBI agents, but does not indicate why the money was offered or whether it was accepted.
Also, Daddieco said he was paid $500 by a local prosecutor who allegedly attempted to coach him to lie in a 1968 attempted murder trial.
''Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Justice Department began a course of conduct in New England that must be considered one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement,'' says the draft report, accusing the FBI and federal prosecutors of making a decision to use murderers as informants beginning in the 1960s.
The probe, spearheaded by former committee chairman Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, focused primarily on allegations that the FBI and federal prosecutors withheld evidence, allowing a mob hit-man-turned-government-witness to send four men to prison for a 1965 gangland murder they didn't commit.
Although the committee wanted to delve further into FBI handling of two other controversial informants, fugitive gangster James ''Whitey'' Bulger and Stephen Flemmi, it agreed to delay its investigation because of an ongoing federal corruption probe by a special Justice Department task force.
A spokesman for the Justice Department in Washington and a spokeswoman for the FBI in Boston declined to comment on the report, which is currently being revised and has yet to be officially released, although it has been distributed among members of the Committee on Government Reform.
The minority Democrats on the House committee do not have a substantive problem with the report, a congressional aide said.
Representative William D. Delahunt, a former Norfolk district attorney and a Democrat from Quincy, was invited by Burton to participate in the hearings. Although not a member of the committee, Delahunt said of the report: ''There's substantial evidence, overwhelming evidence, not just from the efforts of this particular committee, that the FBI is in need of radical reform.''
Citing a ''culture of concealment'' that allowed FBI informants to kill with impunity and innocent men to go to jail for crimes they didn't commit, Delahunt said: ''The irony is, it hasn't changed in 40 years. From the decades of the '60s ... to most recently, when there was resistance to providing the documents to the House Committee on Government Reform.''
And the culture remains so ingrained, Delahunt said, ''that most likely it's going to require legislation to make the necessary changes, to effect the kind of fundamental reform people are demanding.''
In December 2001, President Bush invoked executive privilege to withhold from the committee 10 memos about the 1965 gangland murder of Edward ''Teddy'' Deegan, the case in which four men went to prison for a murder they did not commit.
Two of the men died in prison and two were later freed.
In a signed order to US Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bush wrote that making public ''confidential recommendations to Department of Justice officials'' would chill the candid exchange of ideas ''necessary to the effectiveness of the deliberative process by which the department makes prosecutorial decisions.''
That decision prompted an ongoing battle between the committee and the Justice Department, outlined in bitter words in the Committee on Government Reform's draft report.
''The Justice Department failed to take its responsibilities to assist Congress as seriously as it should have,'' the report said, citing three instances in which ''critical documents had been withheld from Congress.''
In one instance, the Justice Department held onto a damning memo about the Deegan murder until after the committee could no longer use it to ask questions at its hearings.
''The fact that this document was not provided to the Committee earlier leads to the concern that there are other significant documents that have been withheld,'' the report said.
The report cited overwhelming evidence that hit man Joseph ''The Animal'' Barboza lied about who participated in the 1965 slaying of Deegan in Chelsea, after striking a deal with the FBI to testify against local Mafia leaders.
A state judge overturned the convictions of Joseph Salvati and Peter Limone in 2000 after FBI reports that were never turned over to defense lawyers revealed that Barboza may have framed the pair, along with two other men who died in prison.
Salvati and Limone, who both spent more than 30 years in prison, have filed lawsuits against the FBI.
The long-secret FBI reports revealed that Barboza had told agents that he'd never testify against his close friend Vincent Flemmi, a man who was recruited by the FBI as an informant on the very same day that Deegan was killed - even though Flemmi was a suspect in the murder, according to the report.
Flemmi, who died in 1979 of a drug overdose, was the brother of Stephen Flemmi, another longtime FBI informant.
Regarding Daddieco, the draft report says the Justice Department claimed it needed more information from the committee before it could locate Daddieco, even though in the last few years Daddieco had been in personal contact with the FBI's former number two official.
The Justice Department's ''failure to produce this information in a timely fashion is inexcusable,'' and ''particularly curious,'' the report said.
Daddieco also provided the committee with a copy of a check from a local prosecutor for $500, which was allegedly given to him when the FBI was seeking his assistance in an ongoing investigation, according to a footnote in the report. Daddieco claimed the prosecutor ''once attempted to coach him'' to give false testimony in the trial for the 1968 car bombing of Everett attorney John Fitzgerald, the report says.
While the report doesn't offer any other details about the state trial, former New England Mafia boss Francis ''Cadillac Frank'' Salemme was convicted of trying to kill Fitzgerald, who represented Barboza, and spent 15 years in jail, while Stephen Flemmi, his alleged accomplice, was never tried after Daddieco recanted earlier claims about Flemmi's involvement.
In another case, federal prosecutors withheld handwritten FBI surveillance logs for more than 18 months after the committee requested them. The records were of surveillance in the 1960s of then-New England Mafia boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca, who was recorded by the FBI ordering the Deegan murder.
US Representative Martin Meehan, a Lowell Democrat who also participated in the Burton committee hearings, said they revealed ''a history of serious mistakes in the use of criminal informants by members of the Boston FBI office,'' and the need for reform.
''In addition, this validates that the inquiries into the FBI's practices should continue until the families of the victims, who have been wronged by the bureau in these cases, believe that justice is not being subverted,'' Meehan said. ''Congress needs to continue to find the truth for these families.''
Susan Milligan and Thanassis Cambanis of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 1/14/2003.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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