One person who had commented with me over time has repeatedly called my attention to the case against Attorney Robert George which was prosecuted by the Boston U.S. Attorneys office. I know very little about it. He suggested that I visit a site that tells something about what happened in the case.
I knew Bobby George just when he started out his career as an attorney. He worked for a bit in the Norfolk DA’s office. He was well liked and very helpful. The First Assistant DA at that time, Bob Banks, took Bobby under his wing and those two worked together most of the time Bob was in the office. Because Bobby worked directly for him and I was running my own units, I didn’t have that much contact with him. Banks went on to become a distinguished Superior Court judge.
Bobby went off and had a nice career as a defense lawyer. He took on the toughest cases and often came up on the wrong end of verdict. That’s no adverse reflection on his legal abilities because the never shied away from cases that looked like losers and made the government work hard to get a verdict against his client.
I read through some of the material that was referred to especially the post by Bobby George himself which included the opening statements of his attorneys as well as a statement he gave to the court at the time of his sentencing. He is scheduled to start his sentence of 3 1/2 years around the middle of next January. He says he has not asked for a stay of it pending appeal because he wants to get on with his life after he does his time.
Bobby is in his late fifties and has been an attorney for 32 years. He’s had no problems over that period of time. According to him he was originally targeted in 2004 by DEA and then again later on in the case that resulted in the charge that led up to his sentencing. This is one of these cases where the federal government is using a dirt ball informant Ronnie Dardinski to go around and try to get other people involved in his activities. Apparently he is well paid for his activities and is cooperating so that he stays out of jail where he belongs.
I’ve always said informants are lazy cops tools. The FBI had the good idea you could recruit people like Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi and protect them. We saw how that turned out not only for them but for their handler, John Connolly.
You know the routine for informants. Arrest someone and jam him in, tell him he won’t get the sentence he deserves if he give you someone else, he gives the other person up, who may or may not be worse than himself, and the other person goes to jail or he too becomes an informant on other people. The original bad guy who you targeted in the first place remains on the street.
This has been done so long and so often that you’d think the drug problem would be over by now but it has just kept getting worse, which probably indicates the approach is faulty. Isn’t there some old saying to the effect that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and thinking you’ll get a different result?
I’ve not paid much attention to Bobby’s case since he had a plethora of support in the criminal defense bar so I figured he’d do all right and I had enough to do with Whitey’s case. I heard he had more than one attorney representing him at trial, one of whom just came in for the final argument. That sounded pretty bad. He got convicted. The jury was out 4 hours so it had no doubt. Dardinski the witness may have been a total scum bucket but according to the jurors the tape recordings of his conversation with Bobby were devastating.
I just thought that the statement in the above reference given by Bobby to the court was very interesting. So is the judge’s statement at the time he sentenced him that he was “appalled by the brazenness and flagrant stupidity” of Bobby.
I don’t know if Bobby took the stand. If he didn’t that was a big mistake in a case like this. It has a ring of the case of FBI agent John Connolly who did all his protestation of innocence outside the courtroom but in the courtroom remained silent when he should have talked. You got to explain the tapes in the context they were made. If you are innocent don’t rely on the presumption to carry you through in the face of strong government evidence showing the other side.
I don’t know enough about the facts to comment on the justness of the outcome. It’s just close enough to some of the things in Whitey’s case I thought you might be interested in it.