Thursday, May 17, 2018

Beware the Noble Prosecutor

I have an old case for your consideration, one that maintains a certain currency. It involves the wrongful conviction of four men for murder, two of whom survived long enough to be exonerated, and who were awarded one hundred and one million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in their lawsuit against the FBI.

The story is best told by the judge who awarded the money. That would be United States District Court Judge Somebody Somebody Gertner in the case of Limone v. United States of America. At more than 250 pages, the decision is too long to include in its entirety. I therefore limit my excerpt to his introduction.  Yes, his ruling is so large that it has an introduction. It even has a table of contents.

Buckle up. Here we go. The emphasis is mine.
Peter Limone ("Limone"), Enrico "Henry" Tameleo ("Tameleo"), Louis Greco ("Greco"), and Joseph Salvati ("Salvati"), made extraordinary and troubling accusations in this case. They claimed that thirty-nine years ago, virtually to the date of this decision, on July 31, 1968, they were convicted of a crime which they did not commit — the murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan ("Deegan"). Limone, Tameleo, and Greco were sentenced to die in the electric chair, a sentence reduced to life imprisonment whey the death penalty was vacated. They accused the United States, specifically, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") of framing them for Deegan's murder, and then, by covering up FBI misconduct, ensuring their imprisonment over the next three decades. 
This trial, however, was not about securing the plaintiffs' release. Salvati was freed in 1997; Limone in 2001. Tameleo and Greco died tragically as prisoners — Tameleo in 1985, Greco in 1995. 
Rather, the plaintiffs sought a different form of redress, which the law allows — damages for their loss of liberty, for their pain, and the pain of their loved ones. They brought this lawsuit ... on a number of grounds, including malicious prosecution. 
The bench trial was lengthy. It took twenty-two days and involved hundreds of exhibits, thousands of pages. There were comparatively few live witnesses; this story had to be painstakingly pieced together through documents, many of them heavily redacted, particularly at the outset of the proceedings. 
Despite the complexity of the record, this decision is far, far, longer than I would have wished. It has taken much more time to complete than I had predicted. But there was no other alternative. The conclusions that the plaintiffs have asked me to draw — that government agents suborned perjury, framed four innocent men, conspired to keep them in jail for three decades — are so shocking that I felt obliged to analyze this complex record with special care in order that the public, and especially the parties, could be fully confident of my conclusions. 
I have concluded that the plaintiffs' accusations that the United States government violated the law are proved. In the pages that follow, I will describe why in detail. This introduction summarizes some of those findings. 
The plaintiffs were convicted of Deegan's murder based on the perjured testimony of Joseph "The Animal" Barboza ("Barboza"). The FBI agents "handling" Barboza, Dennis Condon ("Condon") and H. Paul Rico ("Rico"), and their superiors — all the way up to the FBI Director — knew that Barboza would perjure himself. They knew this because Barboza, a killer many times over, had told them so — directly and indirectly. Barboza's testimony about the plaintiffs contradicted every shred of evidence in the FBI's possession at the time — and the FBI had extraordinary information. Barboza's testimony contradicted evidence from an illegal wiretap that had intercepted stunning plans for the Deegan murder before it had taken place, plans that never included the plaintiffs. It contradicted multiple reports from informants, including the very killers who were the FBI's "Top Echelon" informants. 
And even though the FBI knew Barboza's story was false, they encouraged him to testify in the Deegan murder trial. They never bothered to tell the truth to the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. Worse yet, they assured the District Attorney that Barboza's story "checked out." 
The FBI knew Barboza's testimony was perjured because they suborned that perjury. They met with Barboza long before the state authorities ever did. They coddled him, nurtured him, debriefed him, protected him, and rewarded him — no matter how much he lied. When Barboza told them he would not accuse the man they knew to be one of Deegan's killers, his friend and FBI informant, Jimmy Flemmi, they urged Barboza to testify nonetheless. And when he announced that he would accuse four men who had never been linked to this murder, they were undaunted. They continued to press for his testimony. Indeed, they took steps to make certain that Barboza's false story would withstand cross-examination, and even be corroborated by other witnesses. 
In word and in deed, the FBI condoned Barboza's lies. FBI agent Dennis Condon even told the Deegan jury that he was "always concerned with the purity of testimony on the part of his witnesses, referring to Barboza, the perjurer. When Tameleo, Greco, and Limone were sentenced to death, Salvati to life imprisonment, the FBI did not stand silently; they congratulated the agents for a job well done. 
Nor did the FBI's misconduct stop after the plaintiffs were convicted. The plaintiffs appealed, filed motions for a new trial, one even took and passed a polygraph test on public television — over and over again protesting their innocence. They sought commutations, appeared before parole boards, seeking clemency from the governor, even appealing to the press. On each occasion, when asked about the plaintiffs, on each occasion when the FBI could have disclosed the truth — the perfidy of Barboza and their complicity in it — they did not. This was so even as more and more evidence surfaced casting more and more doubt on these convictions. In the 1970s, for example, Barboza tried to recant his testimony, not in all cases in which he had participated, but only as to the plaintiffs in this case — the very men the FBI knew to be innocent. In the 1980s, Agent Rico was found by a court to have suborned the perjury of another witness under similar circumstances. Yet, there was still no FBI investigation, no searching inquiry to see if an injustice had been done in this case.
I interrupt here to suggest that you remember what happened beginning in the 1980s. There will be a pop quiz later. Now back to the introduction.
Rather, while Salvati and Limone languished in jail for thirty-odd years, and Greco and Tameleo died in prison, Barboza and his FBI handlers flourished. The FBI agents were given raises and promotions precisely for their extraordinary role in procuring the Deegan convictions. Even when Barboza, the "poster boy" for the new federal witness protection program, committed yet another murder, three federal officials testified — now for the second time on his behalf. FBI officials up the line allowed their employees to break laws, violate rules and ruin lives, interrupted only with the occasional burst of applause. 
The FBI knew Barboza's testimony was false, that the plaintiffs' convictions had been procured by perjury, that critical exculpatory information had been withheld — but they did not flinch. After all, the killers they protected — Jimmy Flemmi, along with Barboza, and Jimmy's brother, Stephen — were providing valued information in the "war" against the Italian Mafia, La Cosa Nostra ("LCN"). The pieties the FBI offered to justify their actions are the usual ones: The benefits outweighed the costs. Put otherwise, in terms that are more recently familiar, these four men were "collateral damage" in the LCN war. To the FBI, the plaintiffs' lives, and those of their families, just did not matter. As Agent Rico put it in his testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee or. Government Reform, when asked if he had any remorse that four innocent men went to prison, he replied: "Would you like tears or something?" 
Now is the time to say and say without equivocation: This "cost" — to the liberty of four men, to our system of justice — is not remotely acceptable. No man's liberty is dispensable. No human being may be traded for another. Our system cherishes each individual. We have fought wars over this principle. We are still fighting those wars. 
Sadly, when law enforcement perverts its mission, the criminal justice system does not easily self-correct. We understand that our system makes mistakes; we have appeals to address them. But this case goes beyond mistakes, beyond the unavoidable errors of a fallible system. This case is about intentional misconduct, subornation of perjury, conspiracy, the framing of innocent men. While judges are scrutinized — our decisions made in public and appealed — law enforcement decisions like these rarely see the light of day. The public necessarily relies on the integrity and professionalism of its officials. 
It took nearly thirty years to uncover this injustice. It took the extraordinary efforts of a judge, a lawyer, even a reporter, to finally bring out the facts. Proof of innocence in this democracy should not depend upon efforts as gargantuan as these. 
The claims of the plaintiffs or their estates fit into four categories: malicious prosecution, civil conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent selection, supervision, and retention. Their spouses and children have each brought loss of consortium and bystander intentional infliction of emotional distress claims as well. 
The federal government has fought hard. The legal doctrines on which it has relied are important ones. They are doctrines designed to give law enforcement room to make critical policy decisions. They are intended to insulate those who bring information in good faith to the authorities, even if the information is later disproved. All the FBI did, the government argued, was exercise their discretion about whom to offer deals, and how to conduct an investigation. All they did was to present their cooperating witness to the state authorities who independently prosecuted the crime. In effect, what they are saying is that it was the state's fault — not theirs — for not doing a better job. If the FBI erred at all, it was in not turning over information exculpatory to the defense — nothing more — and that violation is not actionable ... 
The government's position is, in a word, absurd. The law they cite does not apply to the extraordinary facts of this case. The issue here is not discretion but abuse, not independent charging decisions but the framing of four innocent men, not the failure to produce exculpatory evidence but procuring convictions by misrepresentation, not letting perjured testimony proceed uncorrected but facilitating it. 
The FBI, and not the state, developed Barboza as a witness, knowing that his false testimony would be used to prosecute the plaintiffs for a crime they did not commit. They, and not the state, kept their conduct from being discovered by failing to disclose exculpatory evidence, before, during, and after the trial. They, and not the state, vouched for Barboza to law enforcement and to the very jury hearing the murder case, even when all the information they had flatly contradicted his account.  ...
In the end I conclude that the defendant is liable to these men and their families. As to damages, plaintiffs' loss of liberty, and, in effect, a lifetime of experiences, is obviously not compensable. To the extent that damages can approach this task, my total award is One Hundred One Million, Seven Hundred Fifty Thousand, And 00/100 ($101,750,000.00) Dollars.
Now for the quiz. Who was the U.S. Attorney who, throughout the 1980s, wrote letters to the parole and pardons board opposing clemency for the four men the Feds had wrongfully convicted?

I'll give you a hint. This U.S. Attorney was also the acting U.S. Attorney in Boston while, in another disturbingly similar case, Whitey Bulger was helping the FBI cart off his criminal competitors even as he buried bodies in shallow graves.

It's a tough one, I know, so I will give you four lines to contemplate your answer before I reveal it.

One line.

Two lines.

Three lines.

Four lines.


In 2007, when asked about about the FBI corruption in Boston, Robert Muller offered this pearl of wisdom: "I think the public should remember what happened, happened years ago."

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The more I read about Mueller, the more disgusted I am.

VioletStreak said...

I'm really digging your blog. I hope you hop on here's and do some more entries.
I am disgusted by our court system. Especially the many, many cases of the institutions we put in place to protect us, throwing innocent people to the wolves in order to fulfill quotas, inflate egos, promote narcissism, make money, or become famous. I, personally, have been railroaded by law enforcement before. Nothing exciting. But I, and many other people in my community have been thrown under the bus to make quotas and police for profit.
I rarely use this account but now that I'm going back through your posts perhaps I'll understand this format a little better. I'm very interested in your observations of obvious innocence within court proceedings, but more importantly the things that don't make it to court. We have some very serious flaws in how we decide guilt or innocence.

Post a Comment