Don’t ever get on the bad side of a certain type federal prosecutor. If you do and the prosecutor has unlimited powers like Kim Jong-un you will spend the rest of your life in prison. Even your family may be dragged in after you, or, if not imprisoned, impoverished.
Fortunately most federal prosecutors don’t have the power to pursue people endlessly to satisfy what borders on an irrational compulsion to destroy. Usually there are restraints upon them. Sometimes it is the media that will point out how it was never intended that for crimes not punishable by death that people do life in prison on the installment plan. Other times with the change-over in local U.S. Attorneys the newly installed leader will calm the waters and turn the prosecutor’s attention to other subjects.
As unusual as it seems, there may be an occasion like we see now where a prosecutor is in his sixties, he has done nothing but prosecute all his life and knows no other pursuit, has friends in the Department of Justice some who have been there almost 50 years who support him, who has been a source and friendly with the local media keeping them on his side providing them with inside information, his media friends end up with secret grand jury minutes, and his boss seems to either lack control or be oblivious to his crusade.
In other words at times there arises a prosecutor who has no restraints on him. He can pursue his quest no matter where it takes him or no matter how many lives it shatters. He does this with the full power of the federal government behind him. The judges, cowed, concur in his actions.
There is no way the Founding Fathers could ever have anticipated such a person could exist in America. It was for that reason that we had a Revolution because King George III had such powers. This prosecutor is able to trample down the Bill of Rights with clever tricks. He twists the law so that almost any normal act by any person can be turned into a major crime. He seeks not justice but to exert harm.
He creates crimes. A noted Massachusetts attorney said that after his most recent trial which he called an “ill-considered, reckless prosecution” the judge was prompted “to deliver to the jury an unusually prolix and complex set of jury instructions – his attempt to clarify legal concepts that, in reality, could not be made clear.” How can something be a crime when no one can understand why it is one?
This prosecutor having finished that case is now back to his original pursuit, that of what he said is the force of all evil and which destroyed an FBI agent, “the Bulgers and Southie.” And as expected, the reporter who received the leaked grand jury minutes is telling us his plans. She tells us with undisguised glee that he’s going to bring Catherine Greig back before a grand jury.
I’ve written before about Ms Greig. She ran off and stayed with Whitey Bulger when he was hiding out from answering to an indictment. She refused to provide any information to this prosecutor after being apprehended with Whitey. She had never committed a crime in her life except for being Whitey’s girlfriend.
Yet, when she was sentenced to prison, the judge overlooked the probation recommendation which is usually followed of around two years in prison and sentence her to eight. This was more than Mafia leaders were being sentenced to at the time. It was more than a murderer of five people received. Her crime was being with Whitey Bulger.
The sentence was truly outrageous. Beyond that, she was forced to listening to victims of Whitey’s crimes to which he had yet to be convicted castigating her in court. These were crimes that she had no possible connection with. It showed how the federal prosecutors and judges drink out of the same bowl.
Catherine will be put before grand jurors while this prosecutor acts like the Grand Inquisitor of the Inquisition. If she refuses to answer she will be immunized and asked the questions again. If she refuses she will be held in contempt and sentenced. The sentence for contempt will be in addition to what she is now serving. If she answers that she knows nothing about Whitey’s assets, she will probably be indicted for perjury or obstruction of justice, even if it is the truth. This prosecutor has a bag of tricks to play. Like he’s doing with FBI agent John Connolly, he’s going to try to have Catherine Greig die in prison on the installment plan.
Then he will set his eyes on the Bulgers themselves. All Whitey’s siblings, his nieces and nephews, will be in his sights. Perhaps he will go after Southie.
It’s like what happens in North Korea. This prosecutor rues he doesn’t have the power of Kim Jung-un. There when a man falls out of favor all his relatives have their assets confiscated and are put in prison if they are lucky; if not, as what happened to Kim Jung-un’s uncle and all his blood relatives, they are executed.
Power corrupts. Unrestrained power corrupts absolutely.
I believe that you meant to write about the the American Revolution being the result of the abuses of King George III, not King George II:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_III_of_the_United_Kingdom
Ed: Thanks. My memory was that it was George III – the check my memory I went to the books – having confirmed m memory I went ahead and typed George II. What a dumb mistake. Appreciate you calling it to my attention.
★ Adversary’s
Perhaps Foxy Fred !!! … William, looked at dispassionately one must concede that Wyshak gets the results he seeks, and is ruthless in his pursuit of them. He is guileful, not obtuse in angle on his prosecutorial spread pattern as your blunderbuss metaphor very wittily suggests. His overbearing courtroom demeanor is an abuse of power ; at one and the same time it is the adversaries use of power he knows he can arrogate to himself and use. Never underestimate your enemy.
Matt, John, Patty, Msfreeh, NC especially: Good posts and commentary all around today. The plot thickens as Kevin Cullen, Murphy’s co-author and partner in crime (bad, yellow journalism should be a crime) writes today that “Cathy” Grieg will just keep the grand jury box seat warm while Wyshak et al call in many people named “Bulger”. He writes this with mockery and glee in his voice (glee is the word that occurred to me as I read Cullen today as it apparently occurred to you yesterday as you read Murphy.) So, sadists delight in others’ sufferings and the Federal Courthouse and Boston Globe reporters want to exact more blood from Catherine Grieg and the Bulger family. And it seems they all delight in excoriating, in flaying, in tearing the flesh of their fellow human beings–typical character assassins.
Matt:
Your Grand Jury argument had more than the power of your eloquence in stating it, at a time and season in the Federal Judiciary when Constitutional values were the coin that rang golden when rapped against the counter. That time and season seems well past. That currency has been turned into Federal Spec that the Public gets to spend only at the Company store. We are tenants of the Estate Federale now Matt, no longer are the People the sovereign holders of their Constitutionally landed Estate.
As for the safety deposit boxes stuffed with cash worldwide, this is an enticing prospect ; We entertain it with a jocular sense of its unreality. Some apparently salivate at the possibility. My common sense tells me that a few weatherproofed strongboxes buried in Myles Standish State Park in Plymouth serves the identical purpose, and for one who knew beforehand that his Exile would not be a globetrotting one, Oh that nasty Interpol and such, makes access to one’s STASH OF CASH and withdrawal a much simpler exercise.
John:
Thanks for your comment earlier on this matter. It got me thinking. I did a post on it for tomorrow.
★ With Fred wearing the Grand Inquisitors mitre.
Matt:
The old maxim that ” It is best to let sleeping dogs lie” would suggest itself as the prudent course here. Why raise the hackles of the sturdy mastiff? Can you envision a Grand Jury witch hunt with Fred wearing the Grand Inquisitors and the Senate President adroitly parrying questions and exposing the proceedings for the Kabuki theater that they would be? … All Cathy Greig has to say is … I Dunno’ … ditto for any of the juniors Bulger. William Bulger is not one to cross swords with in any theater. Like giant shadows dancing on the wall as the witch burners caper round the fire will be the forms of all the subterfuges the Government danced into the Circle to keep from paying off Judgments, particularly Patricia Donohues, to the Families. It is a benighted play. It has a desperation about it. Wherein lies this desperation at this late date, Matt? … This is what intrigues !!!
John:
True. If Freddy was looking for assets to reimburse the victims there are many more murderers out there who he could look at, so why is he going back to the well with Greig and I have to assume others. Perhaps we will have to wait for the Globe to tell us. Or, if we learn who the lineup in the grand jury is to be that may give us a clue.
One problem I have is that a grand jury is supposed to be looking at criminal activity; here, it is not being used for that purpose. That is what makes it into the type of inquisition body that existed in the past. I never thought when I used grand juries that I could bring in relatives and friends of a defendant and seek from them information about a defendant’s assets. It seems to me that goes beyond a grand juries function. I thought its function was supposed to be used in connection with determining if a crime had been committed. There does not seem to be a focus on criminal activity here. The federal grand jury handbook says: “As stated above, the federal grand jury’s function is to determine whether a person shall be tried for a serious federal crime alleged to have been committed within the district where it sits.
There is no crime involved in knowing where a person hided his assets. If the purpose of the grand jury is to find out that, then the use of it to do that is a great abuse of power. It is in effect a prosecutor granting himself the right of subpoena by using the grand jury.
Matt:
As Flemmi was once heard musing at the Feast of Saint Anthony
on Hanover street in the North End ” thought is the slave of life,
and life is time’ s fool.
And time that takes survey over all the world,
must have a stop” .
or as we say down here in the whisper stream
” what do you want tears”?
Look these are supposed to be your Golden Years.
You should be taking long walks on Manomet Beach
on Cape Cod looking into the eyes of god as the sun sets
Do you take pleasure in the knowledge you will be remembered
as the Greg Louganis of DOJ Septic Tank Precision Diving?
When voters and taxpayers realize they need to run the
criminal justice system they own you
will see them create a civilian review board with subpoena
powers. This constantly rotating review board will set
and enforce standards for the safety needs of their
community.This will include the hiring and firing of
people who work in this system. Eventually as the word
community evolves you will see this model become
volunteer based. People looking out for each other
without having to get a paycheck.
For more info on how FBI agents destroyed American Unions
for Corporations enlisting the help of the Mafia see
http://www.moldea.com/PartTwo.html
MS:
Can’t say I disagree with what you write. Except perhaps I don’t think I’d ever be compared in any sense to a Greg Louganis. AS for the Goldern Years, I ran into a guy going in the supermarket the other day and I was limping because my sciatic nerve, whatever that is, was acting up and the guy seeing my distress said: “getting old is not for sissies.” So the expression Golden Years must be taken with a little salt. However, my belief is that when you get to that state of life you do what you like to do which you seem to have perfected in your pursuit to make humans into more perfect beings than they will ever be and your dire warnings about our friends in the Government’s police departments. Thanks for the reference to unions, I want to look at it since it is something that I am interested in.
The purpose of Freddy’s new grand jury is awful suspect. He already immunized the entire Winter Hill gang and presumably asked them all extensively about any ‘Whitey money’. Money is the lifeblood of a fugitive. Freddy wanted any money out there and he greedily grabbed everything he could through forfeiture. He used 2 phony CRIs to say the Whitey’s lottery money was illegal. He later admitted it was a legitimate lottery win, but he kept the money from the victims anyway. Freddy already asked Greig’s sister and niece and a raft of non-criminals who knew Whitey. He charged them with perjury and locked them up at the same time he was releasing mass murderers who he knows committed perjury. Fred already subpoenaed and asked all of Whitey’s family about ‘Whitey money’…..he leaked those details to his b Shelley to put in the Globe back on 10/31/00. He locked up Jackie Bulger for lying about a safe deposit box that the Wyshak Team had determined was empty years before. He got Jackies pension forfeited for good measure. Fred knows there is no “Whitey money”. His real strategy, therefore, is something different. Maybe it’s a plan to get the victims off his back. The victims know he lied to them and he is protecting mobsters who killed their family members with Whitey. But these are Fred’s own murderous informants on the street today. How do you deflect attention from your gang of murderous immunized mobsters? First you buy some reporters of low moral character, easy. Then you create a phony target and use your reporter-bitches to focus all public attention on that target. Perfect. Hoover invented this strategy. Wyshak and Margolis perfected it.
-P
Patty:
Good points. I have in my mind to post about some of them. I’m familiar with his past tactics but he seems on a quixotic pursuit at this time which I think is causing grief to those he considers evil. You make a good point that he may be diverting the attention of the victims’ families. But it must be more than that. He needs to feed the reporters material and stay on their good sides as you note but it has to be more. He can’t let go. He isn’t satisfied that Catherine Greig has received an abominable sentence but he wants to punish her further. Just because he had people in to prior grand juries doesn’t mean he won’t drag them in again. There is nothing to stop him. True, Hoover invented the strategy to buy of the media and it is being followed today by Wyshak and Margolis. Time will tell.
He has to keep the Whitey saga going to spook the Florida judges. If the DOJ is strongly interested in this then the Sunshine state officials have to defer to the higher power. The American public is so poorly informed that the Feds can get away with their misbehavior. The Federal judiciary is pathetic. A completely frightened class. If Connolly is freed and his false prosecution is exposed the entire House of Cards may fall. 2. In 1940 Senator George Norris said of the FBI’s Hoover that he was ” the greatest publicity hound on the American continent. Of the FBI ” At it’s head stands the greatest man of all who never made a mistake, never made a blunder. In his hands lie the future and perpetuity of our institutions and government”. Nothing has changed in 75 years. The propaganda persists. 151 for 151 in shooting episodes. Not only does Hoover never make a mistake, everyone who works there is infallible. Dickens correctly assessed it as the Office of Circumlocution. 3. One may applaud government and find no corruption at the Moakley Courthouse but a fair evaluation finds widespread wrongdoing there. Be it Grieg, Swartz, Connolly, Murphy or the Probation people. But what does one expect from the Culture of Death? Endless wars and political persecutions.
NC:
1. I don’t think Greig plays into the spooking of the Florida judges. He will bring that about by commencing the prosecution of Whitey on the murder charges. With Whiey now in the state I believe speedy trial issues must come up so he’ll start pressing for action on that case. The federals control so many things because other law enforcement authorities receive huge grants from them; if not grants, most of the judges are going on paid federal junkets so they don’t want to cross them. Judges are frightened, they sought the security of the job and they don’t want to lose it. It’s best to play a long with DOJ. No one is afraid of Connolly getting out of prison, he has nothing to expose that he has not already tried to do. He’ll be ignored once out. So that’s not the reason they keep him in prison it is merely to punish and to punish, like they are doing with Greig.
2. Norris was right. The FBI had one of four or five divisions called the Public Records Division. It’s only job was publicity. Hoover would threaten people wrote negative things about the FBI or go to their employer and threaten it. It is all propaganda. The FBI is held to a different standard. After the shootings in Ferguson the press was in an uproar over the failure to identify the officer who did the shooting; it was silent about the FBI never identifying the agent who killed Todashev.
3. The thing is no one knows what really goes on in that courthouse because most people have to plead out their cases because going to trial results in such onerous punishment that they have no choice. The other day Justice was driving along Seaport Boulevard and she blushed when she looked over at it.
Matt, NC is right; it’s not that John Connolly, upon his release, will be given a podium and allowed to address the public—the Globe and others will suppress and distort that—-it’s that all the lies from all the Globe Reporters, from Carr, from Dershowitz, from all their books, columns and articles, will be EXPOSED. PLus the Federal prosecutors and judges and the whole DOJ will look as ridiculous as the Mass judges in the Parade Case; and the whole world will know JOhn Connolly was imprisoned for 12 years and the one crime he was convicted of which occurred during his 23 years as an FBI was, according to the perjuer Morris, transferring a case of wine from Whitey to Morris. The whole deck of cards does fall apart. One example: Howie Carr has repeatedly called John Connolly the most corrupt agent in FBI history; Carr must have said this one thousand times. Now he and his cohorts look the fools and prevaricators they are.
★ Pirates bury their treasure don’t they 🙂 … I have never bought the inflated numbers the Bulger Myth Machine in Justice and their Myrmidon Press promoted about drug proceeds in order to serve their Narrative. Money was much more grittily available and meagre in comparison to the Hollywood treatment numbers. Southie was not supporting Billy Shea’s entrepreneurship in Coke dealing to the tune of five million per annum ; this is the number Jay Carney crunched for us when Shea was before him on X examination.
A disappointment to many perhaps who hope for recompense the Justice Department has been most chary with, that discovered Bulger loot will substitute for Justice Department evasions, but the bleak truth may be that the 800K ” Hide” in the wall in Santa Monica was the sum and substance. Why else the penurious economizing of Santa Monica’s most exotic retirees?
The fascinating question is just what is the play here with this empty gesture grandstanding by the wily Wyshak. When will this all be left to rest. When will Fred stop asking questions he really does not want answered.
John:
Good points. I couldn’t figure out how the rent for some bookies only was $1,000 a month which wouldn’t add up to a good living for all the guys who had to split it. You know how you can make up figures for the so-called street value of something. You get a kilo of cocaine and then you assume it is cut to make four kilos and then you find the highest prices for a gram of coke and then use that as the multiplier for the 4 kilos and give it that value which has no relationship to its real value. Billy Shea would have agreed to anything, he just wanted to get back to Florida as quickly as he could. I tend to agree that the 800 was it; his life style didn’t indicate much more was around for him to live off. But I do like the idea there are countless safe deposit boxes hidden around the world that are stuffed full of cash.
My take on the play is his feeling Greig has not been punished enough. He want her to be in prison for life, the same thing for Connolly. Remember doing all this, and I expect he will subpoena in the Bulgers, will take the eyes off the deals he made with all those other criminals. By keeping Whitey up there as some type of monster justifies those other deals; but a close look at them shows how outrageous it is that he has all those murderers free on our streets.
There are people who delight in others’ sufferings and who, as you say, decide for themselves that some people deserve “more punishment.” There are minor sadistic streaks in most of us, but some few are laden and burdened with overdoses of sadism. I see that at work in the Moakley Courthouse. I see the whole thing as an abuse of process and power, and the prosecutors and judges in the Moakley Courthouse bear full responsibility for the abuse.
“Wily Wyshak?” I don’t think he’s that bright. I’d describe him as a power mad blunderbuss. A scatter shot obsessive (Matt repeats Fred the Fed’s diagnosis about where John Connolly went wrong; Fred said “he got too close to the Bulgers and Southie” Bulgers, plural) Why shackle the truth, the facts and constitution, Fred? Why did you unshackle and unleash the known perjurers like Martorano, Salemme and Morris upon us?