Joe Salvati: FBI Has License To Kill

Joe Salvati

http://bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view/20220810take_it_from_framed_man_fbi_has_a_license_to_kill/

Take it from framed man: ‘FBI has a license to kill
Boston Herald
By Peter Gelzinis
Friday, August 10, 2012

Tax Cheat Treasury Secretary Defies US Court Order

The intelligentsia is comfortable with the frame-up of four white men by dirt-bag FBI agents who know taxpayer funds will pay for their criminal acts. Obama's admitted tax cheat Treasury Secretary withholds payment. Is he helping the racially biased US AG try to force Limone and Salvati to commit crimes? Obama's thugocracy indicates they have little concern for due process rights. If citizens are accused of a crime why not frame them for murder? If the frame-up is exposed other people's money will pay. Don't worry. Be happy. Hope and Change are here.

http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1265753

Feds ordered to write $19M check to mobster

By Laurel J. Sweet
Boston Herald
Monday, July 5, 2010

FBI $101M Abuse Award Stands

God Bless Victor Garo. Why are the good citizens of Massachusetts not outraged by this egregious abuse of power by the FBI? Why are elected officials in this state silent about this criminal abuse of police power by FBI criminals? Why has the US Attorney and the MA AG's office failed to act to clean up the police agencies in this state? How many other civilians had their lives ruined by criminal police and FBI agents? Do MA voters share the relaxed rectitude of the elected criminal class? Is the Pope German?

Photo by Patrick Whittemore

‘VICTORY’: Victor Garo’s 33-year fight to overturn Joe Salvati’s murder conviction finally came to a close last week when the deadline for an appeal passed.

http://bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1252446

After three decades, the defense rests its case

By Peter Gelzinis
Boston Herald
Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Has the Boston FBI Changed at All?


Three people died after this man tried to turn himself in to the Boston FBI. James Bulger killed 19 working for John Connolly. Colleagues of Paul Rico framed four other men, Joe Salvati, Peter Limone and two others. The agent who "disconnected" the call was reprimanded. Does he have some cuplability? Knowing little about how the FBI treats persons with disabilities the disconnected call maybe was intentional. Perhaps the agent thought that Samson was mentally ill and ignored what he said. Would the Boston FBI ever do anything like that? Is the Pope German?

http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1170374&srvc=news&position=2

or

http://tinyurl.com/dk6nyw

Killer makes last-ditch bid
By Laurel J. Sweet
Boston Herald
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 -

Clueless Cambridge Journalist


Is this why the Editors 'forgot' to publish Griffin's column? Other references to security cameras disappeared from their blog. Obama's local newspaper keeps the voters informed. Ahem! Why do Homeland Security cameras offend when others do not? Harvard and many private individuals have security cameras operating watching public spaces. They abuse their video tapes power worse than the government. Nothing like clueless voters to support or oppose something for irrational reasons. Amazing how many Cambridge elitists believe that cameras prevent crime. More amazing is that this long term citizen-columnist of the Conformist Party City does not know how the city works. It is a question for him whether the City Manager did this by himself? The unelected one man ruler boasts that he has the statutory power to make contracts in the name of the City. He tells the City Council they should be grateful that he informs them after the fact. Griffin, have you ever seen a City Council meeting? Do you know what form of government the city has? There is no civil or constitutional liberty to be free of cameras in a public space. It is well established law. There's no right to privacy in a public place. Do you really reject the fact that Bush prevented any further attacks on this country? The current mayor of the city of conformists wants a policeman on every corner but opposes the USA PATRIOT Act. How is that rational? For many years the Ashburton state office building required screening before entering. Did Bush control security at the State House? Mexican drug cartels are invading the country and you call them 'alleged terrorists?' Regarding the FBI, were you outraged when they allowed Bulger to murder 19 civilians? Were you comfortable while Joe Salvati, Peter Limone and two who died in prison were framed for murder and jailed for 30 years? Have you noticed that the FBI has not changed? Do you think the City police and the state police have any cameras in the City?

http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/news/x1676795291/Griffin-Smile-your-picture-might-not-be-taken


Griffin: Smile, your picture might not be taken
By Richard Griffin/Growing Older
Cambridge Chronicle
Mon Mar 09, 2009, 11:48 AM EDT

DNA Not a Panacea

DNA Not a Panacea

DNA is celebrated as "one of the Commonwealth's most important
crime-fighting tools." (Brian R. Ballou, "Huge gains reported at crime
lab's DNA unit," Boston Globe, May 23, 2008) Is it more important than
the integrity of the humans who use it? The same people who gathered
and controlled fingerprint evidence for many years will now use DNA
evidence. Wrongfully convicted
persons know how flawed the former system is. The same justice system
will now have DNA evidence to use against defendants. Will it be
easier or more difficult to overturn a wrongful conviction based on
DNA evidence?
Also celebrated is the "computer network that serves as a national
registry for DNA samples collected from convicted criminals and
arrested individuals." How easy is it to correct a computer error on
credit files? Or the errors about people declared dead by Social
Security computers? One study showed a 40 percent error rate on FBI
computer warrants.
Technology creates benefits and risks. This technology is only
praised for its benefits with no fears of any abuses. What are the
protections from criminal use of this evidence? If Joe Salvati and
Peter Limone were convicted using DNA evidence they would still be in
prison.
Michael O'Keefe, "said the crime lab and the office of the chief
medical examiner have been vastly improved." How improved are the
people who run those offices?

Roy Bercaw - Editor ENOUGH ROOM

See full article at

http://tinyurl.com/68kvup

Huge gains reported at crime lab's DNA unit
Machine speeds process, cuts backlog
By Brian R. Ballou,
Boston Globe Staff
May 23, 2008

Misguided Focus

Misguided Focus

Seeing the world through the prism of white racism as the cause of all things
bad is misguided and itself racist. Shea says, "the growing black prison
population is eroding African-Americans' confidence in the rule of law." What
about the four white men and their families who spent 30 years in Jail (two died
in prison) after an FBI frameup? (Christopher Shea, "Life sentence," Boston
Globe, September 23, 2007)
Peter Limone, and Joe Salvati (Tamelo and Greco died in prison) lived to
see their freedom. They were initially sentenced to death for a murder they did
not commit. Why is this only a black issue? It is a matter for all Americans.
Making the issue a race issue shuts out all non African Americans who were
harmed by the same courts, police, judges and lawyers.
Spineless politicians get elected by the same interest groups who have an
economic interest in keeping the system as it is or making it worse.
Police, corrections officers, lawyers, construction corporations, social
workers, drug companies and psychiatrists (to keep the list manageable) enjoy
the way it is.
Just because "Black Americans interpret [the trends] as evidence of stark
racism," does make it so. Many prominent black people see racism as the cause of
all unpleasant events in their lives. They are obsessed with racism as the
explanation for all evil.
At the same time liberal politicians promoted and implemented policies
which encouraged the causes of increased crime and incarceration. As recently as
1995 Princeton Professor John Iulio noted that there were 4 million young men
who would be teenagers in the beginning of the 21st century. He said they are
fatherless, godless and jobless. 12 years after that observation (See Fox
Butterfield, NYTimes Nov 19 1995) and the country is reaping what it sowed
over the past 40 years.

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

CRITICAL FACULTIES
Life sentence
It's a government program whose impact rivals the New Deal. It pushes whole
communities out of society's mainstream. It costs tens of billions of dollars a
year. Scholars are just beginning to understand how prison is reshaping the
country.
Boston Globe
By Christopher Shea
September 23, 2007

WHAT if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed? And what if, instead
of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multibillion-dollar project
steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American
mainstream?

That's how America should think about its growing prison system, some leading
social scientists are saying, in research that suggests prisons have a far
deeper impact on the nation than simply punishing criminals.

Fueled by the war on drugs, "three-strike" laws, and mandatory minimum
sentences, America's prisons and jails now house some 2.2 million inmates -
roughly seven times the figure of the early 1970s. And Americans are investing
vast resources to keep the system running: The cost to maintain American
correctional institutions is some $60 billion a year.

For years sociologists saw prisons - with their disproportionately poor, black,
and uneducated populations - partly as mirrors of the social and economic
disparities that cleave American life. Now, however, a new crop of books and
articles are looking at the penal system not just as a reflection of society,
but a force that shapes it.

In this view, the system takes men with limited education and job skills and
stigmatizes them in a way that makes it hard for them to find jobs, slashes
their wages when they do find them, and brands them as bad future spouses. The
effects of imprisonment ripple out from prisoners, breaking up families and
further impoverishing neighborhoods, creating the conditions for more crime down
the road. Prisons have grown into potent "engines of inequality," in the words
of sociologist Bruce Western; the penal system, he and other scholars suggest,
actively widens the gap between the poor - especially poor black men - and
everyone else.

"This is a historic transformation of the character of American society," says
Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist who has begun to write on this topic,
most recently in the Boston Review. "We are managing the losers by confinement."

The shift isn't just academic. In national politics, concern about the people
who actually go to prison has been drowned out by tough-on-crime rhetoric, but
today the issue is getting a hearing from some politicians, and not just
hard-left liberals. On Oct. 4, Congress's Joint Economic Committee will hear
testimony from Western, Loury, and others on the economic and social costs of
the prison boom. The session will be chaired by Jim Webb, the gruff, moderate
Democratic Senator from Virginia. Cities including Boston and San Francisco are
changing their hiring practices to destigmatize prisoners, and there is
detectable momentum in Congress toward reducing the extraordinarily harsh
minimum sentences for possession of crack cocaine, which disproportionately
affect poor black Americans.

The issue has arrived on the public agenda in part because of the work done by a
handful of leading sociologists. Western's 2006 book "Punishment and Inequality
in America" is a key work in this new scholarly movement. Devah Pager, a
Princeton sociologist, has been making headlines since her dissertation,
completed in 2002 at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated how a criminal
record - even for nonviolent drug offenses - made it nearly impossible for black
ex-convicts in Milwaukee to land a job. This month, a book based on that work,
"Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration," appears
in bookstores. And the sociologist Lawrence Bobo, who left Harvard for Stanford
two years ago but is returning in January, has been investigating how the
growing black prison population is eroding African-Americans' confidence in the
rule of law.

For years, the penal system was a marginal topic among sociologists, catching
the interest chiefly of professors with an interest in hard-core criminology.
But in the past decade, discussion of incarceration has moved to the center of
the field, in the work of respected scholars at top institutions who are
interested in a broad understanding of American inequality.

"My sense of it is just that the sheer mass, the weight of the reality of what's
happening, has sunk in," says Loury.

With black men in their early 30s more likely to have been in prison than to
have graduated from college, and with 700,000 ex-prisoners reentering society
each year, the trends cannot be ignored. The current US rate of some 750
prisoners per 100,000 citizens is several times higher than rates in Europe -
higher, even, than the rates in formerly repressive states like Russia or South
Africa.

In "Punishment and Inequality in America," Western documented the degree to
which poor black communities across America live in a penitentiary shadow. Of
black males born in the late 1960s who did not attend college, 30 percent have
served time in prison, he pointed out. For high-school dropouts, the figure is a
startling 59 percent. "I don't think the really deep penetration of the criminal
justice system into poor and minority communities has been fully understood by
people outside these communities," says Western.

Mass incarceration, Western argues, also renders invisible a substantial portion
of American poverty. At the height of the tech boom in 2000, he points out, 65
percent of black male high school dropouts weren't working. Government
statistics, however, said the unemployment level of this group was 33 percent,
because government surveys exclude prisoners.

At the root of prison's broader social impact lies its lingering effect on
individual lives. In an ideal penal system, prisoners might exit the system
having paid their debt to society and be more or less restored to their previous
status as free men and women. But Pager's book demonstrates just how detached
from reality that view is. She had four college students, two black and two
white, pose as applicants for low-level jobs in Milwaukee (excluding jobs where
a criminal record would have disqualified them).

They used résumés that were nearly identical - high school degrees, steady
progress from entry-level work to a supervisory position - except that in some
cases the applicant had a drug conviction in his past (possession with intent to
distribute) for which he served an 18-month sentence and then behaved perfectly
on parole.

In surveys conducted by Pager, 62 percent of Milwaukee employers said they'd
consider hiring an applicant with a nonviolent drug offense in his past. But in
her field study, Pager found that her black applicants with criminal records got
called for an interview - or to interview on the spot, as they applied in person
- a mere 5 percent of the time. That compared with 14 percent for the black
applicants without a criminal record. Meanwhile, the white applicants with a
record were called back 17 percent of the time, compared with 34 percent for the
white men lacking the blotch on their résumé. "Two strikes" - blackness and a
record - "and you're out" is how Pager summarizes her findings. (Pager has
replicated this study in New York City, with similar results.)

Job prospects for black ex-prisoners in Milwaukee may be even worse in the
future, Pager argues in "Marked," because while the vast majority of job growth
is in the suburbs, the gap between employers' receptiveness to black and white
ex-convicts is even wider there.

Western explores the same set of post-prison issues on a broader statistical
canvas. He found that whites, Hispanics, and blacks all face a hit in their
wages of about a third, relative to their peers, when they emerge from prison,
and also work fewer weeks per year. Their peers will see significant raises from
ages 25 to 35, but the ex-prisoners won't, widening the gap. Former prisoners,
too, are far less likely ever to marry, but no less likely to have kids, meaning
that prisons contribute to the epidemic of female-headed, single-parent
households. (Some 9 percent of all black children now have a father in jail.)

Sociologists and a few politicians are not the only ones aware of these trends,
argues Lawrence Bobo. Black Americans interpret them as evidence of stark
racism, according to surveys he's done. Seventy-nine percent of white Americans,
for example, think drug laws are enforced fairly, compared with 34 percent of
black Americans.

Black Americans' concerns about the justice system burst to the fore in Jena,
La., last week when thousands protested prosecutors' tough treatment of six
black teenagers after an assault on a white student. When Bobo looks broadly at
black attitudes about the justice system, he doesn't find them irrational.

"We as a society," Bobo wrote last year, "have normalized and, for the time
being, depoliticized a remarkable set of social conditions."

Policy makers are slowly beginning to reckon with some aspects of these
developments. In 2004, President Bush, in his State of the Union address,
acknowledged some of the challenges caused by mass incarceration, Pager points
out, describing the hundreds of thousands exiting prisons annually as a "group
of Americans in need of help." And this year liberals like Senator Joseph Biden
(D-Del.) and conservatives like Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) have cosponsored
the so-called Second Chance Act. It would provide $192 million for drug
counseling, family counseling, housing, and mentorship for ex-offenders to
assist their reentry into their communities.

A handful of cities, including Boston, no longer ask applicants for city jobs
whether they have a criminal record, although their backgrounds can still be
checked later. A growing "Ban the Box" movement - referring to the check-off box
on an application, signaling a conviction - is designed to reduce the kind of
upfront discrimination Pager identifies. San Francisco and St. Paul have also
signed off on the idea, while Los Angeles is pondering it.

To these ideas, Pager would add a policy modeled on how we treat debtors: After
a certain amount of time, records of most convictions, especially for nonviolent
offenses, would be expunged. Stigma would have a deadline.

Such proposals would do nothing to roll back prison populations, but bills
introduced by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Biden
to raise the amount of crack cocaine that triggers automatic five- and ten-year
sentences might do so. (The possession of crack - typically a drug of the poor,
and specifically the black poor - is penalized far more harshly than the
powdered cocaine preferred by middle- and upper-class drug users.) Bruce Western
advocates ending mandatory minimum sentences for drug conviction, and adds some
further thoughts about reducing prison populations: "We could be spending money
and social services to reduce the risks that make people likely to go to prison
in the first place - on drug addiction, on mental-health services, on housing."

In a campaign year, the prison issue is a tough one - such arguments don't have
the easy pull on voters that "tough on crime" policies do. Yet with Congress
calling prison experts to testify about their research, and coverage in the
mainstream media of the protests in Jena, "I do sense there is a public
conversation beginning," Western says.

Christopher Shea's column appears regularly in Ideas. E-mail
criticalfaculties@verizon.net.

$101 million in Taxpayer Money

$101 million in Taxpayer Money

[This letter was published in the Boston Herald on July 31, 2007]

The experts and Prof. Bloom miss the essential point of the $101 million
dollar award. (Dave Wedge and Mike Underwood, "Staggering judgment clear warning
to law enforcement," Boston Herald, July 27, 2007)
The $101 million award is taxpayer money. The criminal agents, police
and other officials who were negligent did not pay for attorneys fees either.
This judgment will not prevent further misadventures and permits police
and the FBI to cover up more abuses. There is no incentive to stop such
malfeasance
because there is no individual liability.
There was no penalty to Paul Rico or any supervising agents over 30 years.
This is not "a warning that no one is above the law." The "loud and clear
message" is that it costs nothing to abuse police powers. The taxpayer will pay
for your abuses.

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

Staggering judgment clear warning to law enforcement
Boston Herald
By Dave Wedge and Mike Underwood/ Analysis
Friday, July 27, 2007 - Updated: 07:10 AM EST

Stinging criticism of the FBI and the staggering sum awarded to four men wrongly
jailed for murder should flash a warning that no one is above the law, experts
believe.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner yesterday awarded $101.7 million after the
men were jailed for a 1965 murder they did not commit, spending three decades
behind bars because the FBI withheld crucial evidence of their innocence.
“I have concluded that the plaintiffs’ accusations that the United States
government violated the law are proved,” Gertner seethed as she fired a
broadside at the feds.
Peter Limone, 73, and Joseph Salvati, 75, and the families of the two other
men who died in prison had sued the federal government for malicious
prosecution.
They argued that Boston FBI agents H. Paul Rico and Dennis Condon knew mob
hit man Joseph “The Animal” Barboza lied when he named the men as killers in the
1965 death of Edward “Teddy” Deegan.
They said Barboza was protecting a fellow FBI informant, Vincent ‘Jimmy‘
Flemmi, who was involved.
The government’s argument that federal authorities could not be held
responsible for a state prosecution was branded “absurd” by Gertner.
“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 judge
blasted.
Experts say the settlement and Gertner’s fierce criticism should have a
ripple effect on the way law enforcement conducts business in future.
“The judgment has definitely sent a message and the message is law
enforcement needs to play the game fairly and if they don’t play it fairly
there’s going to be ramifications,” said Boston College law Professor Robert
Bloom.
“The fact that it’s $100 million, will be a loud and clear message.”
[...]