The FBI and I: A Long Trek Over The Past (3 of 7)

Morris testified as to taking money and wine from Bulger and Flemmi. He testified that when he did it he did not think it was wrong. Everyone gasped at the thought. I didn’t. I understood how Morris thought that. He convinced himself that they were giving him something not because they wanted him to do something but out of friendship. They liked him. There were no strings attached to the gifts. They would not affect in any way him doing his job.

That’s how he thought at the time. He knew the law that for there to be a bribe he would have to do something in exchange for any money or other gift that he would not have done otherwise. To have bribery there must be a “purpose of influencing the action of an official in discharge of his/ her public or legal duties.” Morris truly believed he was not being influenced. His job was to protect these top-level criminals.

Other FBI agents who may have received gifts believing they would not influence their actions would later the deny receiving them. Who needed the aggravation? How many agents took Red Sox, Celtic or Bruins tickets back in those days? Do they still take them today? What about a free meal at the local Chinese restaurant or someone picking up the lunch tab? Tickets to a play? No ticket for a traffic offense? FBI agents and other law enforcement officers routinely get something because of their positions. These aren’t bribes because most of them are not going to let the gift influence their actions.

Morris never admitted that the gifts influenced his actions, that he did something he otherwise would not have done. He also took gifts and money (a loan he said) from a big bookie in Chelsea. There too, he felt these were not bribes because the bookie was his top echelon informant. He was going to protect him anyway as part of the FBI’s program.

Connolly sat through his trial listening to lies (the star witness John Martorano’s evidence was rejected out of hand by the jury) and tales of his relationship with Bulger and Flemmi. He understood that was part of the job; the jury didn’t because it was not explained to them sufficiently. He did not testify. He was convicted of several of the minor charges.

I noted I concluded that the prosecution of John Connolly was done to protect the FBI. If there had not been a media stink about Flemmi and Bulger there would probably have been no trial. Even the desire by some in the U.S. attorney’s office and the Boston Globe and Boston Herald to do in Whitey’s brother would not have been enough for a prosecution had the FBI not been embarrassed.

My book had the effect of throwing a hand full of grass during a hurricane. The FBI since its creation under the strong hand of J. Edgar Hoover had been able to stomp out any criticism. Even as late as 2004 after investigating what it believed gross misconduct in the FBI’s Boston office in the case involving the Teddie Deegan murder, the use of Joe “The Animal” Barboza as a witness, and the long-term incarceration of some men, the House Committee on Government Reform wrote about the FBI’s involvement in that case that: “perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Boston debacle is the doubt cast on the integrity of the men and women who work for the Justice Department and, particularly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The United State Department of Justice is, without a doubt, the finest federal law enforcement organization in the world.  The men and women of the Justice Department are dedicated, professional public servants. The integrity of the vast majority of these men and women is beyond reproach.”

True to form no matter what happened in the FBI the first part of any report was to tell us that it and its agents are too wonderful for words except for a couple of bad apples. That may be so but it overlooks the fact that something was wrong that allowed these bad apples to taint the barrel. It also overlooks that perhaps other bad things happened but they were kept quiet about and never became public. In other words, it was obvious that the FBI was not, despite all the vast majority of its agents being beyond reproach, which I concur with, able to properly police itself because of its fear of embarrassment. It is plainly difficult in any police force for one person to criticize another for the enemy, the public, lurks at the gates.

6 Comments

  1. The book Matt refuses to read

    https://tinyurl.com/DeepStateintheHeartofTexas

    SAY SOMETHING REAL PRESS LLC

    Date: July 6, 2018
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    New Book Explores the Texas Connections to the JFK Assassination

    Noted researcher and political cartoonist Richard Bartholomew’s new book, THE DEEP STATE IN THE HEART OF TEXAS, takes a fresh – and often-stunning – new look into the forces behind the most important murder in 20thcentury American history. Available in paperback and Kindle beginning July 4, 2018, this book delivers truth in a detailed yet engaging style. From the alleged murder weapon, to the Zapruder film, to a vehicle possibly used in the assassination being found in Austin, as well as essays covering political strategies for the present and future, THE DEEP STATE IN THE HEART OF TEXAS provides real history in all its gory detail, without a need for theorizing.

    “While I have always insisted that the assassination resulted from a collaboration including the most powerful people in the country, I also believed full well that a Texas axis was instrumental in carrying out the plot and cover-up.,” writes researcher Ed Tatro, of THE MEN WHO KILLED KENNEDY, in his forward. “Richard Bartholomew’s research is an excellent place to continue searching for the truth.”

    While the 45th American President continues to abuse the term “deep state,” it retains its original meaning as coined by Peter Dale Scott, in reference to the private corporate and public interests that intertwine with one another in the road to power. Bartholomew’s book goes beyond simple media biases into the actual machinations of how deep state events are planned and produced.

    A co-founder and director of the Center for Deep Political Research, Richard Bartholomew’s research has appeared in many publications, including The Fourth Decade. He has also presented at various conferences over the years, including the the 2018 JFK Historical Group Conference in Sterling, VA, and his critique of Joan Mellen at the 2016 JFK Assassination Conference in Dallas, TX.

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  2. This buds for you, Ms Freeh:

    Donald Trump dishonors our troops
    The Defense Department is harming national security by discharging immigrants and rebuffing transgender volunteers

    7528
    LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
    JULY 7, 2018 12:00PM (UTC)
    Back in the 1960s, with the war in Vietnam raging and young Americans getting killed every day, it cost about $1,000 to dodge the draft. You got an automatic deferment for college, but once you graduated, or if you dropped out, you went back to 1-A status, which meant you were eligible for military service and could be drafted.

    The holy grail during the Vietnam war was to become 4-F, the draft status our president, Donald Trump, achieved with a letter from a doctor confirming that he had “bone spurs” on his heels which made him ineligible for military service. That’s where the $1,000 came in. If you had enough money, you could go to a dentist, or a doctor, enough times that you could establish a medical record for a disability that made it appear like you were not medically fit to serve.

    The ability of a significant number of young American men to essentially buy their way out of the draft left service in the military to those who couldn’t fake stuff like spurious “bone spurs” to dodge the draft. When I served in the Army at that time, draftees were nearly uniformly from the inner cities or the poorer areas in rural America, like the deep South, Appalachia and thinly populated states like Idaho, Montana, Nevada and the Dakotas.

    The draft began to apply to a smaller and smaller section of the country, but the war in Vietnam was chewing up recruits as fast as they could ship them over there. A total of 58,220 would be killed in Vietnam. Another 304,000 soldiers were wounded, out of a total of 2.7 million who served in Vietnam.

    As it got harder and harder for the Selective Service to fill the ranks, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came up with an experiment the Pentagon called “Project 100,000.” This was a program that lowered standards for military eligibility, dropping the lowest allowable scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test down to Category IV, scores in the 10 to 30 percentile range. In addition to lowering the standards for “mental aptitude,” Project 100,000 also allowed men to be drafted who could not speak English and had “minor” physical impairments, along with those who had previously been deemed too overweight or underweight to serve.

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    Over 300,000 are estimated to have been drafted under Project 100,000. In those days in the Army, the Project 100,000 draftees were called the “Moron Corps” and “cannon fodder.”

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    That’s what this country did to fill the ranks of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines at a time when we were at war. Today, we’re at war again, more or less officially in three countries: Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. We have troops serving overseas in at least 140 countries, including 800 on the continent of Africa in hotspots like Somalia, Niger and Congo, where ISIS terrorists are recruiting and attempting to expand their influence.

    What is the Trump administration doing? Why, it was attempting to discharge transgender troops already serving until that policy was stopped by an injunction in a Federal District Court. The Jeff Sessions Department of Justice has filed an appeal seeking to overturn that injunction as well as an injunction against allowing transgender people to volunteer for the service.

    So far, they have been unsuccessful with those appeals, but that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from discriminating against transgender recruits. According to The New York Times, “scores” of transgender people have tried to volunteer for the service, “but almost none are being accepted.”

    “The applicants are being stalled or turned away at a time when some branches of the military face a shortage of recruits, and when recruiters have been ordered to work Saturdays to try to make up the shortfall,” according to the Times.

    One potential transgender recruit, Nicholas Blade, has been waiting six months for his application to serve in the Air Force to be accepted. “I’m now on round five of rejections,” said Blade. “Each time, they say they need even more medical information.” Another transgender recruit submitted medical records for five months before being rejected because of a knee surgery, an operation that took place 25 years ago when the recruit was an infant, according to the Times.

    The Chiefs of Staff of the Navy, Marines, Air Force, Army and Coast Guard testified before Congress last spring that transgender troops present no negative issues in their service. According to the Times, General Robert Neller, Commandant of the Marine Corps, told the Congress, “As long as they can meet the standard of what their particular application was, I think we’ll move forward.”

    Trump isn’t satisfied with demonizing transgender troops, however. According to the Associated Press, the Army has begun discharging immigrant soldiers and recruits who enlisted through a special program that would put them on a path to citizenship.

    The AP was unable to find out how many immigrants have been discharged, but immigration attorneys said more than 40 have either been discharged or left with an uncertain enlistment status. “Some of the service members say they were not told why they were being discharged,” the AP reported. “Others who pressed for answers said the Army informed them they’d been labeled as security risks because they have relatives abroad or because the Defense Department had not completed background checks on them.”

    Department of Defense spokespeople told the AP they could not respond to questions about the discharges or comment on whether or not there has been a change in policy regarding immigrants, because of pending lawsuits.

    So while Trump’s Department of Defense has recruiters working overtime to try to fill the ranks with the troops they need to fight three wars and serve overseas in deployments to 140 countries, they are demonizing transgender Americans and immigrants who are volunteering to serve, and either discharging them or refusing them as military recruits.

    Trump has no knowledge of or respect for the service immigrants and the children of immigrants have given this country in our military. The 442nd Infantry Regiment, which was comprised almost entirely of second generation Japanese Americans who volunteered to serve while being confined in internment camps, was the most highly decorated Army unit in World War II. Out of the 14,000 Japanese Americans who served in the 442nd, 9,486 earned Purple Hearts. They were awarded eight Presidential Unit Citations, with five of them coming in a single month, and 21 members of the 442nd earned Medals of Honor. I have a photograph of my grandfather, General Lucian K. Truscott Jr., pinning a Medal of Honor on the chest of one guy in the 442nd. The Japanese American regiment served under him in Eastern France during the war.

    Trump and his administration are a disgrace and a stain on the honor of the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of immigrants and other minorities who have served this country in our military over the last two-plus centuries. The man who dodged the draft five times cares more about the rank prejudice of his “base” than he does about the national security of this country.

  3. One active barometer of the success or failure
    of the FBI is “ does it create more disorder than
    the order it gives “

    Oh my!

    https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/07/03/prosecutors-who-break-the-law-face-no-punishment/

    JULY 3, 2018 | PETER B. COLLINS
    PROSECUTORS WHO BREAK THE LAW FACE NO PUNISHMENT
    NY Legislature Creates Commission for Prosecutorial Misconduct

  4. I agree, the vast majority of public officials, FBI agents, are good and decent public servants, ordinary Janes and Joes, and I agree the FBI and Federal Prosecutors are not able to police themselves . . .they are, in fact, too often blind to the bad apples among them and bad acts officially taken on their behalf . . .bad programs, negligently instituted, negligently supervised, and wrongful prosecutions, obviously politically-tinged, politically-exacerbated and sometimes, too often, politically motivated.
    I agree, the FBI and Federal Prosecutors are not beyond reproach and criticism, and in fact merit more criticism and scrutiny.

    You know when Wyshak’s office brought that phony “hiring not the most qualified person” charge against O’Brien’s probation department and O’Brien’s employees and associates (like DeLeo, the House Speaker) one of my first thoughts was to find someone to publicly arrest and prosecute whoever hired Wyshak, because he has demonstrably and clearly proven beyond cavil, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is certainly not “the most qualified”, in fact, as his grotesque violation of Constitutional safeguards, including sacrosanct Double Jeopardy Protections, demonstrate he arguably has scant comprehension of the laws which govern him, including the US Constitution, never mind legal concepts of proportionality, equal justice, fairness, moderation, and equipose . . .in fact he’s proven to be fanatical, a Javier going to any lengths to get his innocent man . . .Wyshak’s office has demonstrated over and over again what is wrong with Federal Prosecutors and the FBI today . . .some in charge there think they’re above the law . . .or that the Constitution’s and statutes’ words are infinitely malleable . . .made in their own cocksure image and likeness and manifestly manipulable to sate their own conceits…they think they know best what the Constitution and Statues meant to say or should have said . . . they know little restraints on the exercise of their own powers . . . they’re hubristic . .

    It’s too bad . . .but it’s true . . .and we’ve seen it to excess in Boston these last several decades and it continues till today in the Boston Regional Office and in Washington D.C.

    “Some public servants think they rule” as I recently wrote in a widely distributed missive.

    Happy Summer Vacation Days to the good guys. . .See you at the Cape and in the Mountains . . .

    • I received a request from a reader who inquired about a book you said you wrote. Would you post the name of it and where it can be purchased.

      • The book is “Three Billboards outside Boston, Massachusetts: Prosecute the Persecutors Who Abuse Federal Prosecutorial Power.” ISBN (Softcover) 978-1-54393-493-9

        It is a booklet of 87 pages. It’s my ninth book.

        It begins with an essay by Harvard Law Professor Larry Lessig and contains two other essays, the three essays corresponding to three “billboards”, depicted, one at Harvard Yard, one at Heartbreak Hill, and one at the John Kelly twin-statute near Newton City Hall. Of course, the billboards are an eye-catching fictional pictorial device. The text is fully factual, hard-hitting and eye-opening.

        Professor Lessig’s essay is titled, “Prosecutor as Bully”; it accuses the FEDs of prosecutorial abuse that led to Aaron Swartz’s suicide. The other essays detail grotesque abuses in the prosecution of John Connolly. A chapter details prosecutorial abuse in six other cases and alludes to dozens more. Letters to Federal Officials, a Book Review, a brief author’s bio, a chapter titled “J’Accuse”, and poetry, etc., are included in this booklet which is “constructed less legalistically, more literarily, artistically’ to appeal to a wide audience.

        The book can be pre-ordered now on Amazon: It will be available for shipment from Amazon on July 28th. As said, it is my ninth book.