Character Assassins Ii

Copyright © 2014 by William M. Connolly, MPH, JD.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014920366

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-1643-4

                Softcover        978-1-5035-1644-1

                eBook            978-1-5035-1645-8

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Rev. date: 11/14/2014

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CONTENTS

THANKS

FOREWORD: We’d All Go Down Together!

CHAPTER I: The Big Picture

CHAPTER II: Recent Events

CHAPTER III: What If All The Gurus Are Wrong?

A Historical Survey

CHAPTER IV: Mudd Likely Was Innocent

A New Perspective And New Questions

CHAPTER V: Lifelong Character Assassins

Published Falsehoods And Toxic Talk

CHAPTER VI: A Tapestry Of Travesties

Serial Killers Lie To Save Themselves

Legal Extortion

Courts Violate Constitutional Rights

CHAPTER VII: John Connolly Is Innocent

Constitutional Fair Trial, Due Process, And Equal-Protection Rights Trashed

CHAPTER VIII: Closing Statements

What Crimes Are These?

CHAPTER IX: Believing Perjurers

ADDENDUM I: Letter To Justice Souter: How Appeals Court Handled A Letter From A Nonparty

ADDENDUM II: Letter To Us Department Of Justice

ADDENDUM III: Posts On Matt Connolly’s Blog: The Trial Of Whitey Bulger.

ADDENDUM IV: Letter To Prospective Readers Of Character Assassins I (First Edition)

ADDENDUM V: Disparate Treatment Of Ann Gianelli, Rn

ADDENDUM VI: Blaming One Cop

ADDENDUM VII: Is The Moakley Federal Courthouse A Racketeering-Influenced Corrupt Organization?

ADDENDUM VIII: Is The Boston Globe A Racketeering-Influenced, Corrupt, Criminal Enterprise?

APPENDIX: Letters To The Editor, Critical Of Opinions Of Carr, Egan, And Thomassen

This book is dedicated to (1) Martin William Richard, whose large extended family, including the O’Brien and Glavin families, are personal friends and former neighbors of my family, the Connolly family, formerly from the corner of Belfort Street and Sagamore Street in Savin Hill, two blocks down from Saint William’s Church on Dorchester Avenue; (2) my first cousin Billy Rogers, my godfather Billy’s second son; (3) my friend and neighbor Eddie Connors; and (4) my family’s friend and neighbor Tony Veranis, whose younger brother Ralph is a personal friend of mine too. The four, Richard, Rogers, Connors, and Veranis, were victims of violent killers. I also respectfully remember the O’Toole, O’Sullivan, Halloran, Noonan, Blackadore, Ryan families, and other neighborhood families from Savin Hill, Dorchester, at large, South Boston, and other sections of our city and proximate suburbs, who suffered at the hands of violent felons, career criminals, and serial killers (many of whom were drug-fueled; some of whom were federal informants) who plagued our city streets from 1960 to 1990, and who still do, as hard drug trafficking continues unabated with little or no relief from the federal government (the feds).

For decades, the feds have failed in their primary responsibilities (1) to interdict international trafficking in narcotics and other hard drugs before they reach America’s shores, (2) to prevent the diversion of prescription pharmaceuticals, from legal manufacturers/distributors/drugstores to the streets, and (3) to prevent acts of terror on the streets of Boston (April 15, 2013) and arising from Boston’s Logan International Airport (September 11, 2001). Illicit drug trafficking finances and fuels terrorism, organized crime, and street-level criminality and is a contributing factor to many citizen-on-citizen acts of violence. Hundreds of deaths annually from overdoses and drug-related violence in the Boston area alone can be attributed directly to the feds’ failure to interdict foreign-grown and manufactured narcotics (opium-derived) and other hard drugs (cocaine derivatives), and the feds’ failure to prevent the diversion of narcotics (oxys) and other addictive substances from the pharmaceutical industry/hospitals/clinics/patients.

Lies, ruin, disease

Into wounds like these

Let the truth sting.

—David Gray, musician, White Ladder

In Memoriam: Martin William Richard. We always will remember him and his family in our thoughts and prayers. We’ll always remember the sign he fashioned at Newfound Lake, New Hampshire, while on a camping/educational trip wherein some Buddhist philosophy was introduced to the children by wonderful teachers: that sign created by Martin said Stop Hurting People! The Martins were summertime neighbors of the author’s brother, Jim Connolly, at Newfound Lake. When the author was growing up in Savin Hill, his family, the Connollys, lived at 47 Belfort Street, across the street from the family of Martin’s grandfather, the O’Briens, at 41 Belfort Street. Martin’s grandfather, granduncles, and grandaunts were friends of our family. One of Martin’s granduncles, Walter Glavin, also lost a niece, Susan MacKay, on September 11, 2001. She was aboard one of the planes that took off from Logan Airport and crashed into the Twin Towers. On April 15, 2013, the author witnessed the twin bombs explode during the Boston Marathon. He was standing on Boylston Street, at Gucci’s store, next to the entrance of the Prudential Center, two hundred feet from the second explosion, which took Martin’s life. That day, three died; sixteen lost limbs (including Martin’s younger sister, Jane); two were double amputees; nearly three hundred were wounded by shrapnel, heat, and fire; and the concussive force caused hearing loss. Over 260 were treated at area hospitals that day (not all went to hospitals), and thousands who were present, spectators and runners, were traumatized, suffering various degrees of mental and emotional distress. Thereafter, many suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress. One year later, on April 15, 2014, the Boston Globe reported among the 275 wounded in the twin explosions on Marathon Day 2013, many still battle hearing loss, ringing ears, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress. Never forget!

In Memoriam: Billy Rogers, our first cousin and the son of the author’s godfather, was a peaceful, handsome, vibrant young man, loved by all who knew him. His bust stands outside L Street, the James M. Curley Community Center.

In Memoriam: Tony Veranis was a great boxer, brother and friend from Savin Hill. As a teenager, according to Brighton’s Jim Carr, in a spontaneously arranged amateur bout, Tony outboxed the very tough Walter Byars, future Boxing Commissioner of Massachusetts. Tony’s brother is a lifelong friend of the author and the author’s brothers. Tony had fifty amateur fights and a 26-2-2 professional record and retired at twenty years old. He inspired us to join boxing clubs in high school, to strive to overcome obstacles, to do better, to turn things around in life, and when troubles struck, to rise above them. His life story reads like the young Mark Wahlberg’s.

In Memoriam: Eddie Connors and his brothers were friends of the author and his brother, Sam, since the early nineteen sixties when Eddie and his brothers started managing two bars in Savin Hill: Connors Tavern and the Bulldog’s Lounge. Former heavyweight world-champion contender and gentleman, Tom McNeelly, was a doorman at Bulldog’s. Bands from all over the world performed there from Thursday night through Sunday. Eddie, the father of seven, helped thousands of people in his life, generously sponsored sports teams and supported charities in the neighborhoods. He also was a great boxer, as was his younger brother Jimmy. Both inspired us to hone our boxing skills. On April 4, 1959, Eddie fought the former world welterweight champion from Boston, Tony DeMarco, to a draw, in our opinion, but the judges gave a close unanimous decision to Tony. On April 2, 1955, DeMarco, who was born Leonardo Leo Liotta, beat by TKO in the fourteenth round the masterful, tough Johnny Saxton (a name we remember because Saxton Street in Savin Hill intersects with the street the author lived on, and speaking of sports, our friend Danny Sullivan, the all-pro lineman with the Baltimore Colts, was from Saxton Street). DeMarco fought Carmen Basilio twice in 1955; their second fight, in November 1955, was Ring Magazine’s Fight of the Year. Eddie Connors cooked breakfasts for the author and his wife, Carol, when they were staying for free at Eddie’s cottage in Falmouth in the summer of 1971.

Nota bene: Boston talk show host Howie Carr’s accounts of these men’s lives are highly slanted and generally false. He is a Johnny-come-lately to Boston. He has let himself be misled by the hyperbolic sordid tales told to him by unrepentant bloviating gangsters and others with axes to grind and scores to settle. We grew up with these men and knew them like brothers.

THANKS

The author thanks his family and friends for their ideas and suggestions, which contributed immensely to this book. Especially, he thanks his older brothers, Matt and Jim, Marine Corps officers during the Vietnam War era who taught him how to do push-ups. He thanks his younger brother, Neal, who kept things competitive and beat him in most sports. He thanks his older sister, Kathleen, and his younger sister, Alice, who simply are the best, smarter and wiser than the four brothers. He thanks his cousins, the Ambrose, Concannon, Connolly, and Rogers families, and his many friends from South Boston, Savin Hill, Dorchester, Brighton-Allston, and beyond who’ve helped to keep it real good, fun, exciting, and down-to-earth. He thanks his coaches (football, basketball, boxing, and handball) and teachers from the John Lothrop Motley, New England Conservatory (piano), Boston Latin, Boston College High School, Boston College, Berklee (music), Boston University (theater arts and open lectures), the docents at museums (art, science, natural history), Georgetown, Harvard, Massachusetts School of Art (photography), MIT (seminars) and Suffolk University. What joy it is to sit in a classroom or hall, to listen and learn while the mind mind wanders, the fingers tap, and the hand scribbles, jotting down a lot of thoughts. He thanks the edifying street persons and road scholars he’s met along the way who freely shared their time, stories, and insights. Lastly, he thanks some steadfast, stout hearted, lifelong friends, Paul Hutchinson, Dan Ryan, Bill Jenkins, Bill McMahan, Bob Mancini, and the girl of his dreams, his muse.

FOREWORD

We’d all go down together!

—Goodnight Saigon, Billy Joel

The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.

—Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

Any power you have, comes to you from far beyond.

—Jesus Christ Superstar,

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice

This book discusses defamation and abuses of power, personal and political, mostly by government actors and the press. Power can be abused by individuals, cliques, clubs, clans, corporations, agencies, and empires. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s taught us to question authorities. This book questions authorities in the federal government, its Department of Justice, its judges, its prosecutors, its clerks, and its administrators in the FBI and DEA. It questions the actions and words of some in state and local law enforcement. It also questions the integrity, accuracy, and fairness of Boston’s media, press, journalists, columnists, and authors. It raises new questions about current events and historical events. It challenges generally accepted theories and so-called settled facts.

The centerpiece of this book is the relationship of the federal government to organized crime in the Boston area from about 1970 to the present day, 2014, and the media’s often-warped coverage of related trials and key figures in those trials, including FBI agents, gangsters, and victims of gunmen. We try to paint a broader picture and put things in a larger historical context. Many books have been written about James Whitey Bulger’s and Steve Flemmi’s roles as top-echelon informants for the FBI. These books contain much factual material and honest opinion. But their overall focus, premises, and conclusions are often false. In the end, they paint a distorted picture. This book diverges from most in several ways. (1) While pointing out many abuses in the FBI hierarchy, it defends frontline FBI agents in general and John Connolly in particular. In May 2014, Connolly’s conviction on one count in Miami was overturned; he’d previously, in 2008, been acquitted in Miami of first-degree murder charges and conspiracy charges. It took six years for the Miami appellate court to decide to set aside his conviction on a phony second-degree murder count, murder by gun. In this book, we call such judicial abuses corrupt, and we use the term corrupt throughout to refer to systemic corruption, intellectual dishonesty, flagrant misinterpretations of statutory or constitutional law, or egregious abuses of prosecutorial discretion. John Connolly we defend not as a saint: he had rough edges, as many city kids have, and he had his personal flaws and failings like everyone else. We defend him as an exemplary, courageous, honest agent, made of the right stuff, who helped put a big dent in organized crime in the Boston area and was unfairly set up and scapegoated by the Department of Justice. John Connolly simply did the job the DOJ and FBI asked him to do: cultivate TEIs, including Whitey Bulger and Steve Flemmi. Federal prosecutors maligned John Connolly and used serial killers like the feds’ proven perjurers Steve Flemmi, Frank Salemme, John Morris, and John Martorano to further malign him. Steve Flemmi previously maligned another honest agent, H. Paul Rico. (2) This book unqualifiedly defends the exemplary career and accomplishments of senate president and University of Massachusetts president William Bulger and indicts the press and courts for their shabby attempts at impugning his character. (3) This book indicts the press, federal judges, and federal prosecutors for character assassination, for egregious unfairness, false fact-finding, deliberate distorting of facts, law, and opinion, and deliberate omissions of salient, exculpating facts. (4) This book unequivocally denounces those involved in organized crime, killing and drugs, including Whitey Bulger, Steve Flemmi, and their associates, gunmen, and henchmen. Whitey Bulger was a local hoodlum responsible for eleven murders over a twenty-year period. In 2013, a federal jury convicted him of those murders and other crimes. Whitey’s role in drug trafficking in South Boston was marginal (he merely extorted money from drug dealers—millions of dollars). The simple fact is that drug trafficking in South Boston would have continued and did continue unabated with and without Whitey, as it did in every other neighborhood in Greater Boston and throughout the country from the late 1960s to the present day. In the mid-1970s, the author, as a commissioned officer in the United States Public Health Services Officers Corps, was assigned to the National Institutes on Drug Abuse in the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, and when it comes to drugs, he knows of what he speaks and writes. His work experiences and life’s experience were supplemented by formal education and training, which included a ten-week fellowship in community psychiatry via Georgetown Medical School at the DC General Hospital in Washington, DC, in the summer of 1969. Lessons learned and courses taken early on in life during the formative years as careers begin can carry us through the thick and thin of turbulent times. Many personal friends, Vietnam veterans and younger men from his neighborhoods, suffered the consequences of narcotic addiction and drug abuse. Many died, and many also recovered. Whitey was not a major player in drug trafficking, nor was he some sort of mafioso kingpin. He was a local crime lord of a small sliver of land that included South Boston and parts of South Dorchester, lands the author was born and raised in and hung out in and worked in much of his life: first as a bag packer and cashier at local grocery chains, then as a summertime custodian in public housing, then as a summertime laborer in construction, then variously over the years part-time between jobs as a truck driver, taxi driver, or maintenance man, then as a white-collar worker in public health fields, then, from the 1980s through 2000s, as a lawyer with William Coyne’s offices on East Broadway and Beacon Street downtown. The author also spent much of his recreational time there, especially as a member of the L Street Noontime Nuts Running Club at the James Michael Curley Recreation Center, the heart of South Boston, for almost thirty years from the 1980s to today. As an infant, in summertime, the author, along with his siblings and cousins, was delightfully dunked in the cool salty waters of the beaches: Carson Beach, L Street, M Street, and Marine Park. He relaxed, played and swam in Southie’s and Savin Hill’s beaches much of his life, and vacationed on the Cape. The place’s salty waters are in his bloodstream, as are the people of the neighborhoods.

Whitey did not keep drugs out of South Boston. He kept the heroin dealers out. Addicts personally known to the author went to the South End, East Boston, North Dorchester, or Charlestown to get their narcotics. Moreover, many owners of barrooms and small businesses correctly saw heroin addicts as a plague, bad for business. Junkies didn’t drink, didn’t pay and often stole from customers, rifled customers’ cars, and broke into and entered local properties. Junkies were a bane and economic drain on neighborhoods.

Whitey did not terrorize Boston as radio host and journalist Howard Carr claims in his books and columns. Whitey’s turf, his fiefdom, was local, and 99 percent of the people, even in his neighborhoods, were not impacted by Whitey’s criminal cabal and went about their daily business unbothered by and oblivious to Whitey’s and his henchmen’s existence. The crime wave associated with heroin and other narcotic use and addiction, which struck nationwide, had nothing to do with Whitey, who did not deal in narcotics and did not use drugs (Flemmi, Martorano, and others admit using and abusing cocaine). In fact, although heroin addicts lived in Southie in numbers comparable to or exceeding other urban and suburban neighborhoods throughout the country (Newton, voted the best city to live in America in 2014, once had such an intractable problem with narcotics and other drugs that the city was considering setting up a separate high school for users and addicts), Whitey would not allow known narcotics dealers to operate in Southie, according to numerous addicts and health professionals the author has talked with from the late 1960s through the 1990s. Whitey profited from a flourishing drug trade in grass, hashish, cocaine, amphetamines and other pills, uppers and downers, by extorting protection money from the local dealers. Before Whitey came on the scene and long after he fled in 1995, that drug trade flourished throughout Boston and the country.

Historians, reporters, and authors disagree. This book is an honest effort to put events in a broader historical context, to be blunt, to pull no punches. History teaches that empires rise, fall, and fade away; kingdoms come and go; cultures clash then meld and fuse; countries fight to coexist; individuals struggle, pursue happiness, and some achieve fame and notoriety. Historians and biographers dispute facts, primary and secondary materials, and debate causes and effects, the how, why, what, and wherefore of everything. Prevailing views, zeitgeists, the wisdoms of the wisest often dissipate like dew at morn, upon a new day’s dawn. A few new facts may alter everything. Christ was born in Bethlehem. The world changed. Newton’s formula, F = MA, was superseded by Einstein’s E = MC², which may or may not obtain in a multiverse, string universe. Cause and effect may be debated, as minutiae and irrelevancies may be dismissed. We try to get to the heart of the matter. Things must be sorted out and put in context; the wheat separated from the chaff. This book attempts to put historical and current events in context and shed new light on old professions as currently practiced by judges, prosecutors, and journalists today. Oftentimes, we argue, the law and media are beset by malpractice, malfeasance, or misfeasance.

Even the best err. There are good fallible workers in most fields of endeavor. The best are found in abundance in charities, in churches, classrooms, hospitals, clinics, and other health-service facilities. The best are found in abundance in the military and among first responders. Some stellar public employees deserve praise, especially those who recognize that it is a privilege to serve in government and their paramount duty is to be a public servant. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino was an honest public servant who did his best to run an honest administration for twenty years. The best seem to be diminishingly few and far between in our politicized courtrooms, our politicized pressrooms, and our paralyzed cloakrooms where ideologues and egotists—power-drunk, avaricious, and indifferent to the public good—seem to prevail.

In boardrooms, there are titans of industry who are philanthropic giants and exceptional innovators, and the business world has its fair share of creative, industrious, enterprising individuals of good moral character, but it too is beset by too many manipulative, power-mad, money-grubbing, maximize profits–chanting, overly acquisitive, golden calf–worshipping folks. An exemplary model for businesses in the new world is Market Basket, a major grocery chain in New England, which values people over profits—its adopted slogan. Market Basket’s revolutionary approach to business is reminiscent of the 1775 patriots of New England who dished out a lesson to Imperial Britain about the power of independent thought, concerted democratic action, and adherence to principles, personal self-sacrifice, and communal self-sacrifice. As the patriots taught the established political world a few lessons, Market Basket employees in the summer of 2014 defied its board of directors, triggered a revolt of vendors and customers, and taught corporate America and the business world a revolutionary way to do business: being fair, just, and loyal to all stakeholders; sharing profits with associates (employees get steady work; good wages; a good chance at advancement; excellent benefit packages; and a good, clean, safe, and humane workplace environment) and with customers (customers get low prices and a pleasant shopping experience in clean, well-managed facilities). The Market Basket mantra (People over profits) and its spirit of sharing, treating everyone fairly and as equals, may catch on in the business world and alter the way business schools teach, as did the original patriots’ declaration that all men were created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. All workers too from executives to cashiers are best treated respectfully and as equals, although each has a different role and position. Market Basket excels too in the number of cashiers and shelf stockers who’ve worked their way up to top management positions. In contrast, some boardrooms, pressrooms, cloakrooms, and courtrooms act as if they are the anointed elite and others are disposable goods, trash.

There are heroes too in many fields. Among journalists, Bill Buckley, Pat Buchanan, Thomas Sowell, and Matt Taibbi stand out as distinguished columnists and authors of integrity whose honest writing, wit, perseverance, courage, and commitment to convictions are admirable qualities more should emulate. Some journalists and media types are far below subpar and simply can’t cut the mustard, as we’ll soon see. Read on!

*     *     *

What would you think about a person who mocked the dead? What if he mocked murder victims? What if he befriended the unrepentant, boastful, hubristic serial killer of your friends and neighbors? What if he made money off the killers who’d murdered your friends and neighbors by writing sordid stories about them? What if he honored the killers and invited them to appear on television with him and on his radio show? What if this same person joined forces with another and tried for twenty years to smear the reputation of an exemplary public servant, with an unblemished public record, who had received twenty honorary degrees from distinguished colleges and universities? What if you lived in a town where the press, for forty years, tried to trash your families, friends, neighbors, and traditions, and just to sell more newspapers, the press deliberately tried to