The FBI wants us to believe it is the federal government’s premiere law enforcement agency combating organized crime. The reality is otherwise. Largely unknown to the American people is the FBI’s record of assisting some organized crime organizations, supposedly to target other crime families. In the process, the FBI has committed innumerable crimes and then lied to the American people and the courts to cover up its crimes.
We now know that for years the FBI propped up the violent “Winter Hill Gang” — the Boston crime family led by the notorious James J. “Whitey” Bulger. On June 23, 2011, the FBI announced that it had “captured Bulger – one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.” What the FBI press release did not acknowledge was that “from 1975 to 1990, in its quest to bring down the Italian mob, the FBI’s Boston office became partner in crime to Bulger’s ‘Winter Hill Gang.’” At one point, “at least six G-men were taking payoffs from organized crime,” according to Bulger’s partner-in-crime Stevie Flemmi, who eventually admitted in court to taking part in 50 murders.
While one can understand that undercover work can put law enforcement into compromising situations, consider the pain the FBI has inflicted on the American people and the rule of law.
In 1982, informant Brian Halloran offered to implicate Bulger in the murder of an Oklahoma businessman. The FBI rejected his offer because Bulger was informing the FBI about the activities of rival gangs. Worse, Bulger’s FBI contact, agent John “Zip” Connolly, tipped Bulger off to Halloran’s offer. As Halloran was riding in the car of his friend Michael Donahue, Bulger’s gang, including Bulger himself, riddled the car with bullets, murdering both the would-be informant Halloran and the innocent Donahue, who left behind a wife and three young boys. The Donahues sued the government, and in 2007, Judge Reginald Lindsay finally ordered the Justice Department to stop denying the FBI’s involvement in the murder and to settle with the family.
That same FBI agent Connolly was convicted of being an accessory in the Bulger gang murder of businessman John Callahan after Connolly tipped off Bulger that Callahan could implicate him in the murder of another businessman. Agent Connolly was convicted in 2008, and released from prison in 2021 on medical grounds, supposedly being terminally ill. It was reported as recently as February 2022 that Agent Connolly continues to collect his FBI pension.
FBI Suborns Perjury to Keep Innocent Men in Prison
After the Bulger gang murdered another hoodlum, Teddy Deegan, the FBI pressured mob hitman Joseph Barboza to testify falsely that four innocent men participated in Deegan’s murder, and the jury believed the story, sending those men to jail. The FBI’s role was covered up for years, including by then-FBI Director Robert Mueller. In 2002, Mueller directed the Bureau to fight the granting of pardons to the men, in order to continue the FBI’s cover-up. Two of the innocent men died in prison, and two finally were released after 35 years behind bars. The press gave Mueller a pass for his cruelty and duplicity, and he later became famous as being the “squeaky-clean” Special Counsel investigating the myth of Russian collusion with President Trump in 2016.
The two survivors and the estates of the two deceased men sued, and in a scathing opinion, federal district judge Nancy Gertner excoriated the FBI. Gertner found that the FBI not only knew that Barboza’s testimony was perjured, but actually suborned his perjured testimony. “They coddled him, nurtured him, debriefed him, protected him, and rewarded him — no matter how much he lied…. In word and in deed, the FBI condoned Barboza’s lies.” Calling the FBI’s actions “absurd,” “shocking,” and “chilling,” the judge stated, “This case is about intentional misconduct, subornation of perjury, conspiracy, the framing of innocent men,” and awarded $102 million to the plaintiffs. Your tax dollars at work, paying for the crimes of the FBI. One Boston gangster testified to Congress that after the 1967 trial of one of the men, Louie Greco, one FBI agent bragged about framing Greco.
Judge Gertner noted that the FBI “continued to suppress exculpatory facts over the next thirty years.” “[T]he 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.” “In 2001, the Bush administration invoked executive privilege for five months to shield FBI documents about the Bulger affair, in what then-Rep. Dan Burton called, “‘an utterly unprecedented’ attempt to drape DOJ in a ‘veil of secrecy.’”
On February 3, 2004, the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform issued a report entitled: “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murders as Informants.” The Committee called the FBI’s complicity in Bulger’s gang activities “one of the greatest failures in federal law enforcement history.” The Committee concluded: “Incalculable damage to the public’s respect for the rule of law” was caused by the FBI and Department of Justice.
As Lord Acton explained: “Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.” It is time to end the secrecy covering the crimes of the FBI, and then end the FBI.
