This is one of my biggest gripes to come out of the episodes involving James Whitey Bulger and others: giving money to people whose involvement in criminal activities caused their own deaths. We learned as kids that if you play with fire you might be burned. As adults we should know that if you play with murderers you may be murdered.
One of the most disgraceful episodes of the Whitey Mania was the obsequious behavior of the investigators and prosecutors in the case. John Martorano was a government witness against John Connolly a retired FBI agent. He never met Connolly. He started off his testimony by telling of the twenty lives he had taken in cold blood – shooting unarmed people in the back of the head. Some of the people were government witnesses.
It would turn out that nothing he testified to was believed by the Boston jury of average citizens. They were as revolted as I was at the idea of this many being put on the stand by the federal government. The only people who seemed to savor his testimony were those in the State Police and Drug Enforcement Agency who worked with him to prepare his testimony. During the trial Marorano being the criminal wise guy he is had a couple of wise guy comments in answers to questions. While most of those in the courtroom recoiled in horror at hearing this man attempt to crack jokes about his murders these investigators broke out into loud laughter finding this murderer quite the comedian. Their laughter encouraged him to do it a couple of other times each time receiving back from the investigators their loud guffaws while the jurors looked like they could hardly keep from vomiting.
While men are being executed in some states for one or two murders, while the Attorney General Barr being the pro-life man has announced bringing back the death penalty, Martorano did less than twelve years for his murders. To show its appreciation for his murders the U.S. government gave his $1,000 dollars for each murder as a start up fund when he got out of prison.
It was not only Martorano – Kevin Weeks got a handshake by the government doing a year for each of his five years and getting to keep his lottery winnings after they had been forfeited; then Steve Flemmi who admitted he may have murdered 40 or more people who was sentenced to life in federal prison never spent a day in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons according to their records. He was also allowed to keep millions of dollars worth of property that he acquired while murdering people.
As bad as all that is, the worst case is the one involving John Callahan. His wife Mary is often featured as a victim. Most recently she was complaining that she only got forty-eight thousand dollars from Whitey Bulger’s estate. You can be sure when something occurs relative to compensation she will be interviewed.
I don’t get it, as I’ve said before, how she is considered a victim. Her deceased husband while living planned to murder a guy so that he could take over the guy’s business. He went to John Martorano and laid out a story that he would give Martorano fifty thousand dollars if he would murder Roger Wheeler a legitimate business man who owned World Jai Alai in Florida. It seems Mr. Wheeler would not sell his business to Callahan and had dismissed Callahan from the business.
Callahan planned to approach Mr. Wheeler’s widow after the murder and attempt to buy the business from her. Martorano and another Boston hoodlum Joseph McDonald known for his benders flew to Tulsa and murdered him. Play with murderers, you’ll get yourself murdered.
When the heat came down in Boston as the investigators from Tulsa focused in on the Boston mob as being behind Wheeler’s murder, Martorano knew there was one guy who could implicate him. So he murdered John Callahan.
How is Callahan a victim? He was a co-conspirator in a murder. How is Whitey required to compensate Callahan’s widow? Callahan could not implicate him in anything so he had no reason to murder him. Some say justice is blind; others say prosecutors on missions are blind to true facts.
The Horror of what happened to the mentally ill at Bridgewater State in the 1960s is parallel to the Horror of what happened to innocent men like John Connolly in the late 1990s through 2000s both in Boston Federal Court and in Miami by Federal Prosecutor Fred Wyshak and his collaborators from the FEDs and Florida State Government. And the true horror of what happened to John Connolly has been sealed off from public view by a corrupt judicial system, both in Boston and Miami, and by a corruptly complicit Media and Press in the Boston area, and by a Congress which turns a blind to it.
Titicut Follies, the1967 movie, (see MSFREEH post, below) showed Bridgewater State in its true colors. Systemic abuse of psychiatric patients was real, then, jus how widespread we’ll never know. The psychiatric wards I have worked on treated patients humanely. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence from a person who worked at Boston’s Mattapan Hospital of one staff acting callously towards a psychiatric patient. From a legal view point, a great constitutional affront to FREE SPEECH occurred when Massachusetts Jurists prohibited the showing of the film, Titicut Follies, except for “educational purposes” so the abuse remained sealed off from public views and public outrage for decades.
Frederick Wiseman, the film maker, is now about 89 and just two years ago produced a BALLET version of the Film which debuted on Broadway. He was still seeking to raise the American peoples’ consciousness.
MSFREEH partially redeems herself by offering the Youtube version of Mr. David Mallet’ fabulous song “Celebration” a song for today’s “times they are achangin’” as Dylan sang. David is capably accompanied by his two sons and a lovely daughter or daughter-in-law.
There will be a RIGHTEOUS CELEBRATION only when JOHN CONNOLLY IS SET FREE, and the whole sordid tale is told publicly and widely of his persecution by Fred the Fed Wyshak, the Jihadi Javert, and those corrupt FED and STATE Officials who acted in collusion with him.
Rented a 400 pound rototiller
last weekend to till a 10×20 plot
of land in the front yard.
Thought of the song Dave Mallet wrote
in the 70’s called The Garden Song covered
By Pater Paul and Mary, John Denver and others
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tlsgzz7BfI
Discovered a neighbor with a different
skill set. Heading over to his farm soon.
https://downeast.com/land-wildlife/rare-heirloom-seeds/
The Maine Farmer Saving the World’s Rarest Heirloom Seeds
Will Bonsall has spent a lifetime scattering seeds across the country. But will his efforts fall among the thorns?
SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER: SING TRUTH TO POWER: WRITE TRUTH TO CORRUPT POWER BROKERS:
And don’t blame John Durham whom the big wigs Muellar and Comey dragged into Boston solely to try John Connolly . . .Durham had earned an excellent reputation as a fed prosecutor/trial attorney in Conncecticut, and I believe he was hoodwinked, like Judge Wolfe by the willfully wiley conscienceless Wyshak et alia . . . .to go along with the nefarious work of Wyshak, his cohorts in the Fed Prosce office. Other offices and courtroom of the John J. Moakley Federal Courthouse in Boston, and the originators, inventors of the Rogue Agent theory, Comey and Muellar, their minions in D.C. and “rogue agent” perpetuators, like Louis Freeh, Wyshak and their cohorts and henchmen in D.C. who gaslighted John Connolly, scapegoated him, and gave the green light for Wyshak’s double jeopardy defying, nefarious, staged, sham prosecution/persecution displayed over a prolonged six months, a trial based solely on the double hearsay, twenty-years, stale recollections of two serial killer Mafiosa hit men, Flemmi and Martorano, the former who changed twice sworn testimony, the latter of whom the Boston Federal jury did not believe a single word: two patently perjurious serial killers, Mafia hitmen, the unscrupulous Fred Wyshak brought to Miami to testify against an innocent man, John Connolly.
Correction: the Miami sham staged trial was six weeks, not six months. The persecution by the FEDs, especially Fred Wyshak, of John Connolly has occurred continuously for over 20 years, now. TWENTY YEARS without redress of this heinous wrong.
It is all based on your definition of criminal.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/titicut-follies-1968
Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies” was filmed in 1966 at the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Mass. It was shown at the 1967 New York Film Festival, had two limited runs in New York and — aside from a few screenings before film societies — has had no other distribution. This is its first commercial booking outside New York.
It is not hard to understand why this is the case. “Titicut Follies” is one of the most despairing documentaries I have ever seen; more immediate than fiction because these people are real; more savage than satire because it seems to be neutral.
We are literally taken into a madhouse. Inmates of varying degrees of mental illness are treated with the same casual inhumanity. There is an old man named Jim who is constantly taunted by the guards, whose uniforms are disturbingly similar to a policeman’s. While he is being shaved with fast, painful strokes by the barber, the guards needle him: “Why’s your room so filthy, Jim? What’s that you said, Jim?” They are bullies who have their victim pinned and helpless.
When Jim is returned to his room, it is an absolutely empty cell. And Jim is naked. It appears that the inmates are deprived of clothing much of the time because that is cheaper and makes security easier. It is not explained how naked confinement in a barren cell cures mental illness and indeed this hospital seems to come from the Middle Ages.
Massachusetts legislators have tried for two years to suppress Wiseman’s film. They say it invades the privacy
Sometimes a song sez more than a huff and a puff from
Wilhelm of Erin Go Bragh ….
Dave Mallet lives a couple of mouthfuls up the road from me
and we went into the studio a couple of Pickering Ales ago to
do some music for the Robert Shetterly doc I am working on.
Here is his new song recorded at his Maine farm with his sons
singing backup….
I my old buddy Gordon Bok still alive?
Is my old buddy…. It should read.
Something is rotten at the Moakley Courthouse. It has been for 25 years. Your post hits the nail on the head. Murder is a big laugh to the media, DEA and State Cops. To understand what goes on at that locale one has to read Kafka’s ” The Trial”. Gross injustice. Total lawlessness and wholesale violations of rights. Industrial strength corruption. 2. The law enforcement and media cabal is a threat to every law abiding citizen. Connolly was honest. He was framed to give cover to Mueller and Comey so they could deny their TEI program had misfired. The institution couldn’t malfunction only a rogue individual. What nonsense.
Excellent.
Excellent post, Matt. The coddling of killers by Wyshak and his cohorts in the Federal Prosecutors’ Office is appalling. Considering all the other persons, the Probation Officers, the young Schwarz man, City Councilman Turner, the Caswell Motel Owners, Senator Brian Joyce, the bookie’s wife, the nurse with the clean record, Boston Police Officer Kenny Conley, and many more they wrongfully singled out for persecution, it is not far fetched to conceptualize Wyshak and his power abusing prosecutorial cohorts as a criminal cabal in cahoots with Mafiosa hit men, who meant vengeance against the one FBI agent most responsible for taking down the New England Mafia, John Connolly. Says who? Says former FBI agent Joe Pistone, of “Donny Brasco” fame.
What was Wyshak’s and his cohorts’ motive: POWER and PRESTIGE: they thought their stars would rise (Wyshak was promoted to head some sort of white-collar ethics office, what a joke); to puff themselves up,, Wyshak and his cohorts attempted to take y, not just John Connolly, but another innocent man whose boots they couldn’t lick, the honorable William Bulger, the longest serving Senate President in Massachusetts. Remember, too, that Wyshak and his cohorts got their Green Light, their Carte Blanche, from Comey, Muellar and Louis Freeh, who all originated and propagated the Rogue Agent Theory in an attempt to save their own faces and to save the FBI Agency’s Face and the Doj’s Face from criticism of the Top Echelon Informant Program, which that TROIKA spawned, mandated and oversaw.
No rational person can deny that Wyshak, the Jihadi Javert, and his cohorts in the Moakley Federal Courthouse, were not after John Connolly, but after John Connolly’s neighbor from South Boston, Bill Bulger. In fact Colonel Foley, Wyshak’s deputized flack, admitted that in Somerville (saying “we had two targets; one was Whitey; the other was at the State House,” words exactly like that spoken by retired State Cop, deputized Federal Cop, Foley. Who told him there were two targets? Could it be anyone else but the man who hired him, Wyshak, and who dragged him and four other deputized State Cops/Feds to the Miami courtroom for six weeks to intimidate judge and jury there. Fred Wyshak staged those five deputized Feds behind him in a courtroom for six weeks. For what purpose? It’s obvious. It’s corrupt.
I’ve read that deals were offered Connolly if he only lied . . .I’ve written how Wyshack had Flemmi change his years of sworn testimony that John Connolly was an honest, by the book cop, who never did or said anything intending anyone be harmed. David Boeri reported this. HOW DID THE JIHADI JAVERT FRED WYSHAK GET FLEMMI TO ALTER HIS TESTIMONY AFTER SEVEN OR EIGHT YEARS IN FEDERAL CONFINEMENT IN BOSTON? What inducements did Wyshak offer Flemmi for his newly recovered recollections?
Well, enough for me for now: I urge everyone to read MattofBoston’s 2018 blog and the comments thereto: See, “The Strange Happenings That Occurred to FBI Agent John Connolly for Not Lying.” February 13. 2018.
https://mattofboston.com/the-strange-happenings-that-occurred-to-fbi-agent-john-connolly-for-not-lying-58999/
I also urge all, including all students interested in social justice, constitutional law, and in the abuse of power by Federal and State Governments to read these five books: (1) From Trial Court to the United States Supreme Court, Anatomy of a Free Speech Case; subtitle added by the publisher, The Theft of the St. Patrick’s Parade (Brandon (of Brookline) (2002), by Paul Walkowski (principle writer) and William Connolly; (2) The Fix: the Corruption of Massachusetts Courts and Agencies (Xlibris 2006) Connolly; (3) Character Assassins: Carr, Dershowitz, Mudd: Who Will Live in Infamy? (Xlibris 2012) Connolly; (4) Character Assassins II (Xlibris 2014); and (5)Three Billboards Outside Boston Massachusetts: Prosecute the Persecutors who Abuse Federal Prosecutorial Power.(Bookbaby, 2018 ).
And please always remember the apt epithet attached to the corrupt Federal Prosecutor Fred Wyshak: “the Jihadi Javert” which appellation encapsulates and precisely conveys his overzealous modus operandi in abusing power. The Jihadi Javert Fred Wyshak, it says it all about him, his cohorts and their ilk, in a nutshell..
Folks concerned about JUSTICE, on all sides of the political spectrum, should condemn what Fred Wyshak and his cohorts did in Boston and Miami from about 1995 through the indictment and trial of John Connolly in Boston (December 1999-2002) through the indictment, trial and appeals in Miami (2004-2009) through today, as Wyshak still bends over backwards to persecute John Connolly and as Wyshak still refuses to honestly admit his wrongdoing throughout. . . .
Greatest country in the World!