So what was the connection of the man that AG Barr just appointed to the WB case?
https://www3.bostonglobe.com/metro/1970/01/19/one-lingering-question-for-fbi-director-robert-mueller/613uW0MR7czurRn7M4BG2J/story.html?arc404=trueOne lingering question for FBI director Robert Mueller
Back in 1976, as we were celebrating the 200th birthday of this republic, Congress passed a law limiting the tenure of the FBI director to 10 years.
This was done because, after the scandalous findings of the Church Commission, Congress realized that letting J. Edgar Hoover serve as director of the bureau from its founding in 1935 until his death in 1972 had only confirmed Lord Acton’s maxim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Hoover was a power unto himself, and the FBI that was created very much in his image sometimes acted more like the secret police of the totalitarian regimes Hoover regularly denounced: running rogue wiretaps, harassing political dissidents, using illegal means to collect evidence. Hoover’s FBI wasn’t accountable; it was untouchable.
So now, just weeks after the FBI’s worst nightmare, a gangster and FBI informant by the name of Whitey Bulger came strolling back into town, Congress is about to ignore its own wisdom and let Bob Mueller, the FBI director and former US Attorney in Boston, stay on an extra two years.
President Obama says he needs Mueller to stay because there’s been so much turnover in the national security teams at the CIA and Pentagon, and that’s all well and good.
Mueller has wide, bipartisan support in Congress. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I know Bob Mueller and he’s no J. Edgar Hoover, though the folks at the ACLU might take exception to that.
The recent FBI targeting of antiwar and labor activists in the Midwest has a disturbing echo of the days when the bureau considered Martin Luther King Jr. a sinister threat to national security.
But Mueller’s a Marine veteran and tough enough to take a question or two before Congress gives the president what he wants, and Mike Albano is just the guy to ask it: What did you know about Whitey Bulger, and when did you know it?
Back in the 1980s, when he was serving on the Massachusetts parole board, Albano expressed some sympathy for a group of men who had always maintained they had been framed for the 1965 gangland murder of a hoodlum named Teddy Deegan in Chelsea. The FBI had been instrumental in seeing that the men - Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo, Joe Salvati, and Louis Greco - were convicted. The FBI contended that Tameleo was the consigliere of the Mafia in Boston, and that Limone was a Mafia leader. There is no question that both men were bad actors, and Mafia players, but the evidence showed that neither had anything to do Deegan’s murder.
So in 1983, after Albano indicated he might vote to release Limone, he got a visit from a pair of FBI agents named John Connolly and John Morris. They told Albano that the men convicted of Deegan’s murder were bad guys, made guys.
“They told me that if I wanted to stay in public life, I shouldn’t vote to release a guy like Limone,’’ Albano said. “They intimidated me.’’
Turns out that Connolly was Whitey Bulger’s corrupt handler and Morris was Connolly’s corrupt supervisor. When they weren’t pocketing bribes from Bulger, they were helping him murder potential witnesses who were poised to expose the FBI’s sordid, Faustian deal with the rat named Whitey Bulger.Albano was messing with the FBI’s national policy of going after the Mafia and the Mafia alone. That was the justification the FBI gave for making deals with devils like Whitey Bulger and his partner in crime, Stevie Flemmi. They were supposedly giving up their pals in the Mafia. The problem with the FBI’s national policy is that it didn’t take into account that the most vicious, murderous gangsters in Boston were Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi.
After Albano was elected mayor of Springfield in 1995, he soon found the FBI hot on his tail, investigating his administration for corruption. The FBI took down several people in his administration, and Albano is convinced that the FBI wasn’t interested in public integrity as much as in publicly humiliating him because he dared to defy them.
The recent FBI targeting of antiwar and labor activists in the Midwest has a disturbing echo of the days when the bureau considered Martin Luther King Jr. a sinister threat to national security.
Kevin Cullen, Globe Columnist
In 2001, the four men convicted of Teddy Deegan’s murder were exonerated. Turned out the FBI let them take the rap to protect one of their informants, a killer named Vincent “Jimmy’’ Flemmi, who just happened to be the brother of their other rat, Stevie Flemmi. Thanks to the FBI’s corruption, taxpayers got stuck with the $100 million bill for compensating the framed men, two of whom, Greco and Tameleo, died in prison.Albano was appalled that,
later that same year, Mueller was appointed FBI director, because it was Mueller, first as an assistant US attorney then as the acting US attorney in Boston, who wrote letters to the parole and pardons board throughout the 1980s opposing clemency for the four men framed by FBI lies.Of course, Mueller was also in that position while Whitey Bulger was helping the FBI cart off his criminal competitors even as he buried bodies in shallow graves along the Neponset.
“Before he gets that extension,’’ Mike Albano said, “somebody in the Senate or House needs to ask him why the US Attorney’s office he led let the FBI protect Whitey Bulger.’’
I called FBI headquarters in Washington and tried to do just that. The nice lady who answered suggested I talk to one of the FBI’s “public affairs specialists.’’ But my call was not returned.
Four years ago, when questioned about the FBI’s corruption in Boston, Mueller told the Globe, “I think the public should recognize that what happened, happened years ago.’’That’s true. And we still don’t know what really happened.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
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John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees...Durham, who was nominated by Mr. Trump in 2017 and has been a Justice Department lawyer since 1982, has conducted special investigations under administrations of both parties.
Attorney General Janet Reno asked Mr. Durham in 1999 to investigate the F.B.I.’s handling of a notorious informant: the organized crime leader James (Whitey) Bulger. In 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey assigned Mr. Durham to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes in 2005 showing the torture of terrorism suspects. A year later, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. expanded Mr. Durham’s mandate to also examine whether the agency broke any laws in its abuses of detainees in its custody.
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https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/01/30/howie-carr-muellers-hands-dirty-in-old-fbi-frame-up/Howie Carr: Mueller’s hands dirty in old FBI frame-up
RUMOURED RESULTS: Findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election are rumored to be announced after the Nov. 6 midterm elections. Associated Press file photo.
By HOWIE CARR | howard.carr@medianewsgroup.com | Boston Herald
PUBLISHED: January 30, 2019 at 12:08 am | UPDATED: January 30, 2019 at 6:35 am
Roger Stone keeps talking about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s reprehensible behavior with the FBI in Boston way back when.
But I don’t think he or most people understand how bad Mueller’s actions were – “chilling,” is how a Clinton federal judge in 2006 described the former FBI director’s attempts to cover up a massive frame-up by Boston G-men decades earlier.
For the record, Mueller did not railroad four innocent men into prison – two onto death row – for a Chelsea murder they did not commit back in 1965.
That frame job was handled by the Boston office of the FBI, where at one point at least six G-men were taking payoffs from organized crime. That information came from serial killer Stevie Flemmi, who last summer admitted in federal court to taking part in 50 murders.
Everyone knew the four men were innocent, but the FBI wanted them to rot in prison, so the scandal would not be revealed. In the 1980s, two U.S. attorneys in Boston wrote letters to the state demanding that the innocent men not be released, but Mueller, an interim U.S. attorney in 1986-87, did not write one. (At least I couldn’t find one.)
Making sure the innocent men remained in prison was mostly handled by two of the G-men on the mobsters’ payroll, Zip Connolly and John “Vino” Morris, who made sure they left no paper trails. They were hit men with badges — Morris set up a double murder for Whitey Bulger in 1982 in Southie, after which Vino was promoted to director of the FBI training academy in Quantico.
Meanwhile, Zip is doing 40 years in a Florida prison for another gangland hit, in Miami, set up by the same crooked fed who set up the 1965 frame-up.
This is the world of “law enforcement” that Robert Mueller operated in. Not everyone was crooked – just everyone who mattered.
Fast forward to 2006. Mueller is now the FBI director.
After 35 years in the can, two of the four innocent men are dead, the other two have finally been freed. The four men or their estates are suing the feds for wrongful imprisonment. It is not a frivolous lawsuit – they will eventually win a judgment of $102 million.
The plaintiffs – the victims – are trying to get the necessary information from the crooked FBI now run by Mueller about how they were framed. But Mueller absolutely stonewalls the release of the information.
Here’s a show-cause order I discovered last year from U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who presided over the civil case. The FBI was refusing to turn over the exonerating evidence to either the plaintiffs or the Justice Department, which was defending the FBI after its frame up.
Mueller’s stonewalling, Gertner wrote, was a “serious problem.”
“This is a case about, inter alia, informant abuse, about the failure to disclose exculpatory evidence bearing on the innocence of the four plaintiffs, about FBI agents allegedly ‘hiding the ball,’ not disclosing critical information that would have exonerated the plaintiffs, and not doing so, for 40 years.”
Think about that again – for 40 years, ever since the night of the murder, the FBI had known that these four guys were innocent, and yet they never stepped up to identify the real killers, because they were FBI rats. And Mueller’s FBI was prolonging the cover-up, the judge wrote.
“Given those accusations,” she wrote, “the position the FBI is taking is chilling … This Court is not remotely satisfied.”
Six days after Mueller was threatened with contempt, the feds filed this: “This matter has been brought to the personal attention of the Director of the FBI… (the innocent men and the DOJ) have been provided with unredacted copies of the FBI documents.”And all it took to bring Mueller around to doing the right thing was the threat of a contempt citation by an ultra-liberal federal judge who went to Yale Law School with the Clintons.
Of course, that wasn’t the first time Mueller’s FBI tried to broom the scandal of the four framed men. In 2002, Mueller directed the G-men to oppose state pardons for the four men because the FBI’s own evidence that exonerated them was merely “fodder for cross-examination.”
Despite the FBI’s knowledge that the men, including Peter Limone, were innocent, Mueller’s FBI claimed to a state board that the incontrovertible exculpatory evidence “does not necessarily mean, however, that Limone or any of the other defendants is innocent – it merely means that they are entitled to a new trial.”By the way, one of the innocent men, Louie Greco, was in Florida the night of the murder he was falsely convicted of. One of the crooked Boston FBI agents (who died in prison in Oklahoma while facing murder charges in another gangland hit) later bragged to a local gangster about their brilliant railroad:
“How does Louie Greco like going from Miami to death row? He wasn’t even there.”
This is your FBI, the organization that Bob Mueller was – and still is – trying to protect from being exposed as irredeemably corrupt.
Good luck, Roger Stone. You’re going to need it, despite your not guilty plea Tuesday.
Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon Vol. 2,” is now available for immediate shipment at howiecarrshow.com.
