The federal prosecutors and investigators after losing in Boston changed their hats, as I noted, so that they now looked like state prosecutors. The case went forward in Florida even though Connolly had already been cleared of any involvement in the Callahan murder. The issue of double jeopardy was never raised. It should have been. The Florida case was no more than the federal prosecutors retrying Connolly for same crime. A good lawyer should have been able to pierce the veil that this was a separate sovereign trying him.

Connolly by now is destitute. He is only going to get the lawyer the state assigns to him. In Boston he was well represented as shown by the results achieved by his skillful lawyer Tracey Miner. This was despite being limited in what she could do with respect to Connolly’s defense. I have no idea of her communications with Connolly nor should I because of the lawyer-client privilege. But throughout the trial I felt her hands were tied by Connolly who, as I mentioned, was of the belief that the FBI had done nothing wrong which prevented her from a full-out attack on it. He held to that belief in his Florida trial unable to see how the FBI abandoned him.

The story above is a somewhat truncated version of the story told to a Boston federal jury  but also a limited picture because it is difficult to show the true happenings of how gangsters operate “on the street” in a courtroom. I had one prosecutor in a case tell me that the witness in response to a question asked how he knew something answered that was the word “on the street.” The prosecutor, not really being from the neighborhoods, asked the witness: “what street was that?”

That’s the problem with any trial. It is difficult to establish the ambiance of the happening. There is so much that goes into our everyday dealings and decisions that a sterile courtroom can never capture. Frank Salemme testified about a killing: “We always wanted to know who was capable of doing that, because you had to know who was out on the street who would do that.”  Kevin Weeks would say of Whitey: “he was acutely aware of what was going on around us. . . . we’d just keep our eyes on what was happening around us and our ears tuned into what people were saying and who was doing what.”

The injustice is great in one sense because when Connolly was first prosecuted he was charged with obstructing justice by leaking information about John Callahan. The jury found that not proved.

Here are the facts: . Callahan was a wannabe gangster. A bright guy, a CPA, he had a good legitimate job during the day but notorious friends at night. He got fired from one job as president of World Jai Alai (WJA) because some good work by Connecticut detectives showed he hung around with the low lives including John Martorano’s brother Jimmy, a Mafia guy.

Callahan recognized that WJA was a cash money pit. He wanted to get back into that business. He tried to buy WJA from Roger Wheeler a legit guy and smart businessman out of Oklahoma. They could not agree on terms.

Callahan went to Miami, where WJA is headquartered to meet with John Martorano then a fugitive from justice. Martorano was known as a cold stone sneak murderer of at least 20 people. He bragged how he murdered unarmed people who he felt might be government witnesses against his friends. Imagine what he would do if he knew one was to be a witness against him.

“Heil” some shouted. Many others gave the Nazi straight arm salute. ‘Hark, Hark, the dogs do bark. The haters are coming to town.”

Like Senator Orrin Hatch I had a relative, uncle and Godfather, killed in uniform during the war: James Rogers. Other uncles served in uniform to fight the Nazis with their message of hate. I’m told one of my uncles wrote , “onward to Moscow.”  Did anyone in Trump’s family ever serve? Perhaps that explains his fondness for the Nazis and Putin.

You know that Trump knows how to fire out tweets within minutes at people he doesn’t like. A CEO tweets a resignation from one of his boards and within an hour he’s tweeting back saying the CEO’s pharmacy company is ripping off  people. I’m sure all will agree he’s quick on the tweeter.

Except when it came to the Nazis. I use the generic term Nazis to cover all those like the KKK, white supremacist group, and other so-called alt-right who gathered in Charlottesville Friday August 11, 2017, and the Saturday next, for the ostensible purpose of protesting the removal of the statue of General Robert E. Lee.

What is so strange about John Connolly spending 37 years in prison aside from the fact what he was alleged to have done was what the FBI wanted him to do is that the crime for which he is doing time is one which a jury found he had no involvement in.

What is even stranger is that neither John Connolly nor his FBI supporters will accept that it was the FBI that turned on Connolly. Connolly and the others seemed to believe it was the Justice Department in the form of some people in Washington D.C. and others in the Boston U.S. attorney’s office.

Why didn’t they look at the prosecuting table in the courtroom and see that the FBI had its representative sitting there in the person of Special Agent Gary Bald? Were they unaware of the parade of FBI witnesses who testified against Connolly during the trial who were specially assigned to Boston? Do they excuse them because they were “just doing their jobs.” But that’s exactly what Connolly was doing when the FBI turned on him.

NC wrote in and pointed out that there were two FBI agents who did the most in the Boston area to bring down the Mafia. They were John Connolly and Paul Rico. This I knew.

Guess what happened to them. Both were charged with criminal acts based on testimony of those they went after. Rico would be charged with murder, be arrested, and be treated like vermin. He was shipped off to Oklahoma where he died.

Connolly as you know has been in prison since 2002. He can possibly be release when he hits 99-years-old. That’s if he’s lucky. Both men were charged based on people with the morals of a devil who were closely connected with the Mafia.  What is strange about the evidence against them is if it were true the Mafia guys would never have been convicted since they would have blackmailed these agents into silence and backing off at the time. (more on that later)

The one good thing about Trump is that he does remind me of the days in Old Harbor Village. I moved from there when I was ten years-old so I know what I remember are happenings in my very early years.

You know what happened. Trump said “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” He then expanded the line to “fire, fury and frankly, power the likes of which this world has never seen before” 

Obviously North Korea backed off making threats. Well, that’s not true. It then a couple of hours after Trump’s warning replied:  

“it was “carefully examining” a plan to attack Guam,  . . . Kim Jong-un is weighing up firing intermediate range ballistic missiles at the Micronesian island, situated in the Western Pacific, less than 3000 kilometres north of the Australian coast, according to state-run media. The plan involves creating an “enveloping fire around Guam.”

Trump was in a box. North Korea did exactly what he told it not to so the consequences should have been “fire and fury.” Only it wasn’t. Trump had lost face, again. How would he save it. He resorted to doing the way we did it as kids. We bragged about something else when someone stood up to us.

The result of Flemmi’s testimony that he had been authorized to commit crimes by the FBI agent had the potential to do two compelling things: it would undermine the prosecutor’s case alleging a conspiracy among the gangsters because you cannot conspire with a government agent which Flemmi was alleging that he was; it also brought tremendous embarrassment to the FBI.  As I’ve shown over the years the worst thing an FBI agent can do, even worse than being a spy for an enemy, is to embarrass the FBI. (See book: “Don’t Embarrass the Family.”) 

The prosecutor believed he had to come up with testimony to counter Flemmi’s allegation. He had two choices: retired agent John Connolly or his supervisor retired agent John Morris. Both men had contact with Whitey and Flemmi.

During 1988 Morris had been the source for the Boston Globe. He was wrongfully providing information in an investigation dubbed the 75 State Street case. Having been taking money and other bennies from Whitey over the years he feared exposure. Perhaps Whity was recording the bribery.  He came up with a plan. He would violate his FBI obligation to keep the identity of an informant secret and disclose to the Globe that Whitey was an informant. He hoped that by publicly disclosing Whitey was an informant Whitey would get whacked (murdered) by the Mafia. Then his  taking money from Whitey would not be discovered. (He’d also admit taking money from another TEI.)