(This is being published each Sunday in serial form. For full view of past postings go here. )
Captain Mattioli would get the warrant for Naimovich’s arrest on February 2, 1988. He had scheduled an office meeting of all the troopers under his command for the morning of February 3. Trooper Foley was there along with his partner. So was Naimovich. When everyone was assembled Mattioli placed Naimovich under arrest so that he could humiliate him in front of the rest of the troopers. 23 years on the job and treated worse than some criminal scum. He was then handcuffed and transported to the Boston federal building. Some said Mattioli then told the troopers who had worked with Naimovich they would best seek transfer out of the unit.
It was big news in the media. Naimovich and I would talk over the phone a few times following his arrest. I told him we could not speak about the case because the federals would drag me in as a witness to testify against him if he said anything to me. He indicated that he thought his arrest was all a big mistake since the guy he had been talking to on the phone was his informant. He’d tell me he was mostly hurt by the way some on the state police had treated him. He told me that they gathered up all his personal stuff and just dumped it into a duffel bag and handed it to him.
I had occasion to go to Framingham to teach a class to state troopers on discovery in criminal cases a short time after that. At the end of the class I told those in attendance that they probably heard Naimovich had been arrested but I assured them he did nothing wrong and would be acquitted. I understood this caused an uproar within the state police. I was no longer welcome to teach there.
O’Sullivan would go back to the grand jury again after February 2 to present additional evidence. He would eventually seek a superseding indictment against Naimovich. In the meantime Naimovich went around trying to find good lawyers to represent him. I recommended one but Naimovich decided he did not want to be represented by any lawyer no matter how good he was if he had previously represented organize crime people. So he was not going to use any of the top-level lawyers even though his freedom was at risk because he had been chasing after organized crime people for years. Fortunately, he did come up with two top-notch lawyers who fit within his criteria, Tommy Dreschler and Alex Nappin.
During the time Naimovich is waiting to go to trial, other things were happening outside the criminal litigation. For that I have to return to Tom Foley’s book. By the way, throughout all this remember Foley is a young trooper who is being used by the FBI and his captain. He tells us about Naimovich’s arrest and says. “I get sick thinking about it.”
But Foley starts smelling a rat. He debriefed McIntyre but got little from his to support the idea that launched the investigation that McIntrye passed information from Naimovich to Ferrara about Forte. He says, “I pressed him hard on this, but the FBI agent I was working with, Vince DelaMontagne, didn’t seem to care whether McIntyre had leaked it or not. It was odd, like he was bored with the whole thing.”
Foley’s bothered by this. Out having a couple of pops with some FBI agents he mentions that he doesn’t think Naimovich had anything to do with passing information to Ferrara. They just shrug. Foley said it was like they knew there was nothing to it all along. More and more it bothers him and he went to Captain Mattioli complaining it didn’t seem the evidence was there to hold Naimovich. Mattioli assured him the FBI must have it.
Mattioli arranged for the FBI Supervisor James Ring to visit with them in Framingham the next day. Foley expected he’d hear what the evidence was that the FBI had that he did not know about. Ring went into Mattioli’s office and Foley was left cooling his heels outside for a half an hour.
When he was invited in he noticed Ring seemed uncomfortable. Ring finally laid it out for Foley: “we’ve determined that Trooper Naimovich was not the source of information that was passed to Vinny Ferrara.”
Foley was flabbergasted. Even worse, he found out that they knew that shortly after they sicced him on Naimovich and prior to any charges. Ring said the source of the information was a typist in the FBI stenographer’s pool.
Foley hit the roof and Ring told him to calm down or he “could get Nick in serious trouble.” Nick was the FBI agent who was his partner. Foley fired back, “I’m not going to send a guy to jail just to be nice to somebody else.”
Foley would write that the FBI turned that information over to the defense counsel. That’s questionable. The trial would show the prosecutors presented the case as if Naimovich was the leak.
Foley knows the affidavit for the wiretap contained information indicating Naimovich was the leak to Ferrara even though the FBI knew it was false. Foley said the jurors were baffled because the informant rules were not clear and that’s why they cleared Naimovich. He mistates what happened in the case. The allegation by McIntyre that he paid Naimovich money had nothing to do with informant rules. (I will spell out the evidence that was given at a later date.) It wasn’t confusion over informant rules but a total disbelief in the case against Naimovich on the RICO offenses that caused the jury verdict of not guilty.
The informant issue only arose on the question of whether Naimovich aided McIntyre in running his booking operation by giving him some information. On that one count the jury did not reach a conclusion and a mistrial was declared. The federals threatened to try Naimovich again on that charge unless he resigned from the state police. He did not want to go through the expense and pressure of another trial. He had become bitter with the state police by that point and he refused to take his pension. The abandonment by people he thought were his friends for 23 years who threw him to the FBI wolves made him totally disillusioned.
With him off the force, the FBI succeeded in keeping Whitey and Stevie safe. An investigation which began with a ruse, which was rushed to indictment, and had so many unusual happenings spelled out above could only lead to that conclusion that Naimovich was sacrificed by O’Sullivan to protect those murderous criminals.
But why was O’Sullivan so deeply interested in taking Naimovich down that he took these unusual including lying to me and deceiving the grand jury. Was it because O’Sullivan made a deal with Whitey that he’d protect him if Whitey protected him from the Mafia? Was Whitey truly deprived of a valid defense as he claimed when he called the trial a sham that so many in the media have said is absurd? Does anything else make sense?
Matt, I agree but Martarano was not operating in good faith, he pulled hoax on court, and M & Weeks’ deals hold only if they don’t perjure themselves. DA should pursue this; we know Martorano lied about Veranis; Carney-Brennan tore to shreds many of Wyshak’s witnesses proving them liars-perjurers: that should be pursued. 2. I stick to my belief that for all the tea in China, some people can’t be bought, cannot be purchased at any price, period. 3. Economics is a false science, as is Finance and Banking!!!! Money can’t buy us!!!!
William:
1/ If they were shown to be liars and perjurers then the federals would have to pursue them, not the state authorities. There is a reluctance on the federals part to do so.
2/ I disagree.
3/ Money is buying the United States. We’re a commodity like anything else. Our Senate is made up of almost all multi-multi-millionaires who are interested in preserving and aggrandizing more wealth; our secretary of state is as rich as one can be – he surely can relate to other people. I’d guess a good portion of the House in DC is likewise made up of millionaires. You can’t run for national office unless you sell your soul to special interests. Lobbyists are buying votes with money. In the future you will have billionaires like Sheldon Adelson deciding who gets elected and what the US will do. Money has put us into war which makes the money more money. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
Look at Egypt today – the generals overthrew the government and now are doing the same thing as the leader of Syria has done which is to kill their own people. They are being supported by our money and the Saudi money. How many more terrorists will be created by again destroying the Egyptian democracy. Who is behind its destruction with its money.
Matt,
I have read that there are some in Congress who are trying to change election financing law in order to neutralize the SCOTUS decision in Citizen United v Federal Election Commission. If this were to happen, then perhaps it would be a good first step for the average voter to have a say in elections. But, democracies need educated voters. So, as you have been pointing out, we also need public media whose mandate is to inform, and not delude, or divert, the public…All this takes political will, and therein lies the rub. With that all said, we must keep trying, our own personal integrity depends upon the trying.
“There is a silent voice in the wilderness that we hear when no one else is around”. It’s too bad that recently ‘those not so silent voices’ appear to be of pathological liars. As you have written, it is the Federal Government that has jurisdiction to correct it’s fraud upon the courts, and not the States’ responsibility. Where there is a will, there is a way. Sadly, the ‘will to plead out, and pay up’ does not appear to be in evidence, at this time.
Jean:
Iy will be difficult for Congress to change Citizen’s United because the SCOTUS has said it is a First Amendment right of corporations to have the same rights in speech as people. That decision is very detrimental but couple it with the ability of billionaires to affect our elections and you see where we are heading. A book about DC just came out called Our Town – I heard the author interviewed. He writes about how DC operates and it tells you things are just getting worse.
I will check it out…The first OUR TOWN written by Thornton Wilder was about average citizens in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, which was based upon a small town in NH…from all accounts, we have regressed since 1938…
Keep in mind, folks; that the DOJ’s initial impulse to take down the New England Mafia was a top priority and Bulger-Flemmi were seen as lynchpins in doing that; so protecting them was not ipso facto a bad idea. 2. Secondly, (except for Flemmi’s involvement in bombing Fitzgerald’s auto), Flemmi and Bulger’s roles in murders were not established even by the end of the 1980s. So, O’Sullivan was not protecting, in his mind, “murderous serial-killing scum”, he was protecting useful gangsters of unknown murderous histories or murderous proclivities. 3. Matt, I don’t agree that “there’s truth in the statement everyone has their price”; I know many men and women whose bodies, souls, thoughts, words and actions are not for sale at any price. 4. There’s no question that an honest industrious state prosecutor, DA, could argue Martorano’s immunity deal with Wyshak was void ab initio ( M had not intent to “testify” against 27 people; he never knew anyone on the list Wyshak-Foley presented to him; a DA could also argue that Martorano’s proven perjuries voided any deal (same with Weeks whose not credible on many points); So I agree, if the DA had guts and integrity he’d bring state charges against Martorano, Weeks and Nee and others, like Jimmy Martorano, etc. DA’s don’t forget the Commonwealth is a sovereign equal to the FEDs, except in the narrow areas where the Supremacy Clause gives the FEDs an edge. So, please, local DAs indict the serial killers and their accomplices and their allies, and bankrupt them the same the FEDs bankrupt arguable innocent Mass. residents.
William:
1. True – the great goal was to grind down the Mafia.
2. Maybe – Flemmi was jammed in on the Bennet murder that the FBI fixed to get him out of it. But you are absolutely right since the idea behind committing a crime is to get away with it Bulger and Flemmi were not going around bragging about their murders. No one suggested they were involved in any until 1997 or 1998 when Flemmi started spilling his guts. True – Sullivan was protecting Whitey not known to have killed anyone when he made the deal in the late 1970s.
3. Billy, their price has never been et.
4. No deal can ever be undermined between a prosecutor and defendant dealing at arms length and in good faith no matter how bad it was conceived. Martorano, Flemmi, and Weeks can never be charged because the state DA gave them the state’s promise. Nee and Jimmy Martorano have no deals.
Interesting comments from the MSP people on this blog.
Unfortunately I know first hand what happens when the decision is made to POOF you.
The men and women you worked with run for the hills regardless of whether your guilty or innocent.
The SP is first and foremost about their inamge and even when wrong will not admit it.
If they knew Naimovich was innocent how, in good conscience could they allow the prosecution to go forwward?
The answer is simple; “go along to get along” or you could be next.
The MSP is an outstanding law enforcement agency with a long and proud tradition but there is a hidden underbelly that allows the persecution of Naimovich and other Troopers for strictly political purposes.
Unless thats dealt with the people in the know will always know there’s two MSP’s; the publics perception and the reality.
Notaboyo:
I agree with you that the MSP ia an outstanding agency but in the Naimovich case it dropped the ball. Foley would grow in his job and realize how the FBI was all about the FBI and would use the state police for its own benefits. I don’t know if you recall but back in Naimovich’s time no one would dare cross the FBI and it was able to make and destroy careers based upon reports written in its files that the person written about did not know about and then leaking the report of the news media.
Matt: Still waiting for you to watch the banned documentary
THE GUILTY MEN detailing the evidence for LBJ, Texas Oil and FBI
Director J Edgar Hoover assassinating President Kennedy. see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjaz97tWYzY
This past spring I had a chance to interview attorney Barr McClellan who worked at the Clark Law firm in Austin Texas . The law firm was also LBJ’s law firm. Clark funneled the assassination money to the people who made the hit. Read McClellan’s book BLOOD MONEY. seew
http://www.ctka.net/2012/Evaluating_the_Case_against_Lyndon_Johnson.html
In other news…..
see link for full story
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/16/the-fbi-and-the-myth-of-the-fingerprint/
August 16-18, 2013
The Real Crime is in the Crime Lab
The FBI and the Myth of the Fingerprint
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Few law enforcement institutions have been so thoroughly discredited as the FBI’s forensic lab. In 1997 the Bureau’s inspector general of the time issued a devastating report, stigmatizing one instance after another of mishandled and contaminated evidence, inept technicians, and outright fabrication. The IG concluded that there were “serious and credible allegations of incompetence” and perjured courtroom testimony.
Our view is that taken as a whole, forensic evidence as used by prosecutors is inherently untrustworthy. For example, for years many people went to prison on the basis of the claims of a North Carolina anthropologist, Louise Robbins. She helped send people to prison or to Death Row with her self-proclaimed power to identify criminals through shoe prints. As an excellent recent Chicago Tribune series on forensic humbug recalled, on occasion she even said she could use the method to determine a person’s height, sex and race. Robbins died in 1987, her legacy compromised by the conclusion of many Appeals Courts that her methodology was bosh. There have been similarly hollow claims for lip prints and ear prints, all of them invoked by their supporters as “100 per cent reliable” and believed by juries too easily impressed by passionate invocations to 100 percent reliable scientific data.
Of course the apex forensic hero of prosecutors, long promoted as the bottom line in reliability–at least until the arrival of DNA matching–has been the fingerprint.
Fingerprints entered the arsenal of police and prosecutors in the late nineteenth century, touted as “scientific” in the manner of other fashionable methods of that time in the identification of supposed criminals, such as phrenology. A prime salesman was Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin and a founding huckster for the bogus “science” of eugenics. Actually fingerprints, at least in modern times, found their original use in the efforts of a British colonial administrator to intimidate his Indian laborers (whose faces he could not distinguish) from turning up more than once to get paid. He’d make a great show of scrutinizing the fingerprints he insisted they daub on his ledger book.
Then, as now, the use of the so-called “unique fingerprint” has been histrionic, not exactly scientific. In 1995, so the Chicago Tribune series discovered, “one of the only independent proficiency tests of fingerprint examiners in U.S. crime labs found that nearly a quarter reported false positives, meaning they declared prints identical even though they were not–the sort of mistakes that can lead to wrongful convictions or arrests.”
Decade after decade people have been sent to prison for years or dispatched to the death cell, solely on the basis of a single, even a partial print. So great is the resonance of the phrase “a perfect match” that defense lawyers throw in the towel, as judge and jury listen to the assured conclusions of the FBI’s analysts who virtually monopolize the fingerprint industry in the U.S.A. Overseas, in London’s Scotland Yard for example, the same mesmerizing “certainty” held sway, and still does.
In the U.S.A., part of the mystique stems from the “one discrepancy rule” which has supposedly governed the FBI’s fingerprint analysis. The rule says that identifications are subject to a standard of “100 per cent certainty” where a single difference in appearance is supposed to preclude identification.
The 1997 lab scandals threw a shadow over the FBI’s forensic procedures as a whole and the criminal defense bar began to raise protests against prosecutorial use of latent fingerprint identification evidence, as produced by FBI procedures. In 2002 Judge Louis Pollak, presiding over in a case in Pennsylvania, initially ruled that the FBI’s fingerprint matching criteria fell below new standards of forensic reliability (the Daubert Standards) stipulated by the Supreme Court. Ultimately the judge was persuaded that the FBI’s fingerprint lab had never made a mistake. In 2004, in U.S. v. Mitchell, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld these same questionable procedures.
But in 2006, the FBI’s new inspector general, Glenn Fine, grudgingly administered what should properly be regarded as the deathblow to fingerprint evidence as used by the FBI and indeed by law enforcement generally.
The case reviewed by Inspector General Fine, at the request of U.S. Rep John Conyers and U.S. Senator Russell Feingold, concerns the false arrest by the FBI of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer from Beaverton, Oregon.
On March 11, 2004, several bombs exploded in Madrid’s subway system with 191 killed and 1,460 injured. Shortly thereafter the Spanish police discovered a blue plastic bag filled with detonators in a van parked near the Acala de Heres train station in Madrid, whence all of the trains involved in the bombing had originated on the fatal day.
The Spanish police were able to lift a number of latent prints off the bag. On March 17 they transmitted digital images of these fingerprints to the FBI’s crime lab in Virginia. The lab ran the images through its prized IAFIS, otherwise known as the Integrated, Automated, Fingerprint Identification System, containing a database of some 20 million fingerprints.
The IAFIS computer spat out twenty “candidate prints”, with the warning that these 20 candidates were “close non-match”. Then the FBI examiners went to work with their magnifying glasses, assessing ridges and forks between the sample of 20 and the images from Spain. In a trice, the doubts of the IAFIS computer were thrust aside, and senior fingerprint examiner Terry Green determined that he had found “a 100 per cent match” with one of the Spanish prints of the fourth-ranked print in the IAFIS batch of 20 close non-matches. Green said this fourth ranked print came from the left index finger of Brandon Mayfield. Mayfield’s prints were in the FBI’s master file, not because he had been arrested or charged with any crime, but because he was a former U.S. Army lieutenant.
Green submitted his conclusions to two other FBI examiners who duly confirmed his conclusions. But as the Inspector General later noted, these examiners were not directed to inspect a set of prints without knowing that a match had already asserted by one of their colleagues. They were simply given the pair of supposedly matched prints and asked to confirm the finding. (These two examiners later refused to talk to the FBI’s inspector general.)
The FBI lost no time in alerting the Federal Prosecutor’s office in Portland, which initiated surveillance of Mayfield with a request to the secret FISA court, which issued a warrant for Mayfield’s phone to be tapped on the grounds, laid out in the Patriot Act, that he was a terrorist, and therefore by definition a foreign agent.
Surreptitious tapping and surveillance of Mayfield began. On April 2, 2004, the FBI sent a letter to the Spanish police informing them that they had developed a big break in the case, with a positive identification of a print on the bag of detonators.
Ten days later the forensic science division of the Spanish national police sent the FBI its own analysis. It held that the purported match of Mayfield’s print was “conclusively negative”. (The inspector general refered to this as the “Negativo Report”.)
The next day, April 14, the Federal Prosecutor in Portland became aware of the fact that the Spanish authorities were vigorously disputing the match with Mayfield’s left forefinger. But by now the Prosecutor and his team were scenting blood. Through covert surveillance they had learned that Mayfield was married to an Egyptian woman, had recently converted to Islam, was a regular attendee at the Bailal mosque in Portland, and had as one of his clients in a child custody dispute an American Muslim called Jeffrey Battle. Battle, a black man, had just been convicted of trying to go to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban.
Armed, so they thought, with this arsenal of compromising detail, the Federal Prosecutor and the FBI had no patience with the pettifogging negativism of the Spanish police. So confident were the Americans of the guilt of their prey that they never went back to take another look at the supposedly matching prints. Instead, on April 21, they flew a member of the FBI’s latent print unit to Spain for on-the-spot refutation of the impertinent Madrid constabulary.
The Inspector General’s report makes it clear that the FBI man returned from Spain with a false account of his reception, alleging that the Spanish fingerprint team had bowed to his superior analytic skills. The head of the Spanish team, Pedro Luis Melida-Weda, insists that his team remained entirely unconvinced. “At no time did we give our approval. We refused to validate the FBI’s conclusions. We kept working on the identification.”
By now either the U.S. Attorney’s office or, more likely, the FBI was leaking to the press news of the pursuit of a U.S. suspect in the Madrid bombing. But they knew that the actual evidence they had on Mayfield was virtually non-existent, aside from the fingerprint. On May 6, the Federal Prosecutor in Portland told U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jones that the Spanish police had ultimately accepted the FBI’s match, that Mayfield, alerted by the stories in the press about an unnamed suspect, might start destroying evidence, and that, therefore, they wanted to seize Mayfield, using the now favored charge du jour of the war on terror, claiming him to be a “material witness”. Judge Jones approved an arrest warrant.
Mayfield had no idea that the FBI had been tapping his phones and secretly rummaging through his office. The first time he became aware that he was a citizen under suspicion was on the afternoon of May 6. On that day eight FBI agents showed up at his law office, seized him, cuffed his hands behind his back, ridiculed his protestations. As they approached the door, Mayfield implored them to take the handcuffs off, saying he didn’t want his clients or staff to see him in this condition. The FBI agents said derisively, “Don’t worry about it. The media is right behind us.”
Mayfield ended up with two federal public defenders, Steven Wax and Christopher Schatz. Like many such, these two were dedicated to their interest of their client, tireless and resourceful. Their first concern was to get Mayfield out of the Multnomah Federal Detention Center in downtown Portland. Though jailed under an alias chosen for him by the Federal Prosecutor, the feds had immediately leaked this alias–Randy Barker–to The Oregonian newspaper, and a guard at the jail had promptly roughed up Mayfield.
The two public defenders went before Judge Jones and asked that as a material witness he be kept under house arrest, there being scant apparent evidence against him. Judge Jones finally compelled the U.S. Prosecutor to say what evidence he had against Mayfield. A fingerprint, said the Federal Prosecutor, withholding from the court the fact that this fingerprint was highly controversial and had been explicitly disqualified by the Spanish police.
The federal defenders questioned the imprisonment of their client, faced penalties of the utmost gravity, on the basis of a fingerprint. Judge Jones allowed as how he had sent people to prison for life on the basis of a single fingerprint. Mayfield’s attorneys asked to see a copy of the allegedly matched fingerprints and have them evaluated by their own expert witness. Knowing he was on thin ice the Federal Prosecutor refused, claiming it was an issue of national security. Under pressure from Judge Jones, himself pressured by the assiduous federal defenders, the U.S. Prosecutor finally agreed he would give the prints to an independent evaluator selected by Judge Jones.
The prints were given to Kenneth R. Moses of San Francisco, an SFPD veteran who runs a company called Forensic Identification Services, which, among other things, proclaims its skills in “computer enhancement of fingerprints”. It was “quite difficult”, Moses said, because of “blurring and some blotting out”, but yes, the FBI had it right, and there was “100 per cent certainty” that one of the prints on the blue bag in Madrid derived from the left index finger of Brandon Mayfield.
Moses transmitted this confident opinion by phone to Judge Jones on the morning of May 19. Immediately following Moses’ assertion, the U.S. attorney stepped forward to confide to Judge Jones dismaying news from Madrid from the Spanish police that very morning. The news “cast some doubt on the identification”. This information, he added, “was classified or potentially classified”.
The prosecutors then huddled with the judge in his chambers. After 20 minutes, Judge Jones stormed back out and announced that the prosecutors needed to tell the defense lawyers what they had just told him. The prosecutor duly informed the courtroom that the Spanish police had identified the fingerprint as belonging to the right middle finger of Ouhnane Daoud, an Algerian national living in Spain. Daoud was under arrest as a suspect in the bombing. Judge Jones ordered Mayfield to be freed. The U.S. prosecutor said he should be placed under electronic monitoring, a request which the judge turned down.
Four days later, on May 24, the warrant for his detention was dismissed.
The FBI sent two of their senor fingerprint analysts to Spain on a mission to salvage the Bureau from humiliation. The two analysts did their best, returning with the claim that the fingerprint sent to the FBI by the Spanish police was of “no value for identification purposes”, a claim which the inspector general later shot down by pointing that only a few weeks thereafter the FBI’s latent fingerprint unit concurred with the Spanish national police lab’s determination that the print on the bag matched the right middle finger of Ouhnane Daoud.
The FBI lab fought an increasingly desperate rearguard battle, eventually claiming that it had been the victim of an excessive reliance on technology. The inspector general points out that the only investigator in the FBI’s lab to emerge with any credit is in fact the IAFIS computer that had stated clearly, “close, no match”.
The Inspector General wrote the bottom line on the “science” of fingerprint matching. He got the FBI’s top examiner to admit that if Mayfield had “been like the Maytag repair man” and not a Muslim convert married to an Egyptian, “the laboratory might have revisited the identification with more skepticism.”
And Daoud’s fingerprint match? We don’t know, but if he was convicted on the basis of fingerprints alone, we would say there is grounds for an appeal.
MS:
Things are easing up a bit an I hope to get to those things.
I Knew John Naimovich and I worked with him for a time, we were not friends but I always and still do consider him a trusted co-worker. I was the desk office at SP Framingham on the day he was arrested. There is a great deal of resentment among Troopers as to the way Naimovich was treated on the day of his arrest.
I could write a short story about my dealings with the FBI and the John Naimovich investigation. Let’s just say I read one of the affidavits that the FBI used in the Naimovich investigation and it contained half truths and one outright lie which involved me and McIntyre
I recently wrote An article for the “Trooper”, the official publication, of the State Police Association in which I attempted to make the case that the Massachusetts State Police has a moral obligation to revisit the Naimovich investigation and make an attempt to clear Naimovich’s name. I don’t know if the Trooper newspaper will print the article,but I have already received some positive feedback, prior to any printing of the article.
I’m glad this blog has resurrected the Naimovich investigation. For a number of Troopers the arrest and prosecution of Naimovich is a stain on the state Police investigation of Whitey Bulger. the issue of John Naimovich is not going away until a number of Massachusetts State Police officers give more detail as to their participation in that investigation.
Robert:
Thanks for the comment. Like you I was not a friend of Naimovich, I don’t think he had that many because he did things his own way. I appreciate that you wrote that article. I don’t blame anyone in the state police (except perhaps Mattioli) for what happened to him. I don’t think there was anyway that any one could figure out that Naimovich was being taken out to protect Whitey and Stevie. It took a long time for me to figure that out and the only reason I did was I went to Connolly’s trial and Whitey’s trial. I know some of the guys wanted to back Naimovich but didn’t because of FBI pressure on them which made it look like they too could be charged if they did anything. I met secretly with O’D during that time and he kept me apprised of what was going on as well as he could. Then of course Steve Lowell stood by Naimovich all the way through.
I hope to get to the rest of the case and point out who testified and what the testimony involved. I’d just like to see some recognition that Naimovich was a good state trooper but mostly to insure that an attack by the FBI or some other government agency on a state trooper does not repeat the Naimovich case. Yet, even today with the case of the FBI killing the Chechen in Florida, we see the state police afraid to tell us its version of what happened. Maybe nothing has been learned after all and the FBI still runs the state police hierarchy.
Matt:
I was there in the office when Ivan was arrested. Also there was none other than Jim Ring, and the Commandant of the Academy Tom White who was very close to Dave Mattioli and Ed Sullivan. That is why you were probably invited back. I got upset reading Foley’s book when he commented that they the FBI and Mattioli knew they had nothing on Ivan.
I knew Mattioli for approximately 25 years before and later on the job.
He told me he wanted me out of the Unit, and to write a letter requesting a transfer. I declined because I was on the S/Sgt’s list and no Unit or staion would take me for a matter of months. Approx. 2 weeks
later he and Ed Sullivan both came in to me and again requested me to transfer. I told them no way until everyone that worked for me has left.
A loud argument ensued that was heard throughout the complex with chairs etc. being tossed around. There is no question that happened when they learned from Ring that they had nothing on Ivan. They knew that O’D called me once in a while to keep my head up and don’t let anyone push you around. I remember to this day Alex Nappan coming to visit me and asking questions. At one point he jumped up and started yelling at me to tell him what I know, so they don’t get boxed in at trial. Alex I have told you I have nothing to give the US Attorney’s office that would incriminate Naimovich.
Bob:
Thanks for writing. It is amazing they (Mattioli, Sullivan, Foley) knew the FBI set the state policee up but did nothing about it. No one spoke out about it until Foley wrote his book but all the time they knew they were set off on a fake investigation and something else was going on behind their back. I also know that the DOJ and FBI tried to intimidate you and they tacitly threatened you with prosecution if you continued to stick up for Naimovich. You were thrown into a very difficult sitution because you knew the truth and stuck to it and they wanted you not to do that. I think it might have been hard for Nappin and Dreschler to believe that there was not more there because what they found showed the case never should have been brought. O’D, as I said, operated behind the scene because he saw all around him things were happening that he knew should not have been occurring and because of the command structure could do nothing about it.
N
Ain’t going to happen. If you think it was bad then it is worse now. You can look high and low for stand up people and find few.
MTC
This Naimovich tale turns my stomach. It is no wonder Jeremiah’s heart gave out, like the Jeremiah in the Bible, just that he was imprisoned inside himself.
You seem to have had enough sour experiences to be amongst the most cynical yet you maintain an evenhandedness with the reality of this lousy world of cops and robbers that often seems to have a very thin line between the two.
Naimovich could be a movie with a sad ending.
Hopalong:
I guess what keeps me from being highly cynical is there are mostly good cops out there who want to do the job and do it very well. I had conflicts with a lot of state troopers but they were over different ways of doing things and seeing the job but they were never because they were doing anything out of line. I know the many good cops have to work around some of the obstacles and the brutish few who enter onto the job and have to keep the blue line of silence and sticking up for each other. To date, the good has outweighed the bad. It would be a good movie since it involves high levels of deception and suspense.
That is an excellent question. Did WB have that arrangement with O’Sullivan? If Foley and the State Police knew Naimovich was innocent why the silence? Why no effort to assist? One would think that if they were told he was not the leak but it was a secretary in the FBI office all the brass in the State Police would have testified for Naimovich. Aren’t they just as culpable as the Feds for their acquiescence to this injustice? Doesn’t the duty to disclose exculpatory information to a defendant extend to everyone in law enforcement? Or can they compartmentalize the information and effectively deny the defense it and a fair trial? 2. All the information in the Amy Bishop case should be made public, including the judge’s findings. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and wrong doing by the State or local Police should be exposed as much as wrong doing by the Feds. 3. Using a joint venture or common scheme theory would allow the Suffolk DA to bring murder charges against all the disgusting parties in the WB trial. An old case ( White) permits evidence of any statement made in furtherance of the venture to be admitted. It’s not too late to act. Every killing by Winter Hill or the Mullins gang could be prosecuted.
N:
1. I’m pretty sure Whitey had that relation with O’Sullivan especially after studying how he sprung into action against Naimovich and understanding what Naimovich was doing at the time. Just imagine the chief of the federal strike force coming out on a Saturday to threaten a low level bookie and rushing into a grand jury the Tuesday after a Friday raid and getting an indictment on a state trooper. It is so far out of line with everything I know that only one thing seems to be able to explain it which is he had to protect Whitey at all costs.
2. I agree the information in Amy Bishop case including the grand jury minutes should be made public. You’d see thee was no basis for the murder charge.
3. The Suffolk DA has lots of evidence to indict some of these people. He just has to find the desire to do it.
Matt,
My family’s experiences fit your theory that a deal was made to protect the ‘devils’. Also, Peter Lance’s Book “Deal with the Devil” explains a similar situation with an FBI Agent in NY, Robert Simone. He too was scapegoated in order to protect the TEI, Grag Scarpa. It would appear that Boston was not ground zero, but NY where the five families reside.
Now we have begun to get feed back from the jury, perhaps a more clear picture will present itself as to what can be done to clean up the mess, not just going forward, but to compensate the victims. I really do think that the BP or Exxon metaphors of the big spills, and clean ups should be used as a model. The government – state, local and federal – all put great pressure on BIG OIL to plead out, and pay up. They should now look inward and do the same.
Jean:
It shows you the power of the FBI that it could nab a good trooper and get his job to turn against him. Big Oil is probably more powerful than the FBI.
Matt, in reply to your comments on BIG OIL…
BIG WATER certainly is..Coke, Pepsi, Nestles, etc…and BIG Plastic…that’s a whole category unto itself…but, as they say it’s not in the winning, but in the fight…clearly my family never stood a chance once we were targeted by the BIGs…and BIG muscle that they can hire…no balance of power once they captured BIG GOVERNMENT…
Jean:
There is truth to the saying that everyone has a price – so does a nation. We just don’t know for sure if the price for our country had been paid yet and whether it is in fact owned by others who pretend that we still own it.
Ahmen to that…I guess Mark Twain was right when he said: “Whiskey is for drinking – and water is for fighting over.” The fight has already begun and most Americans don’t even realize it…the power of the press to divert our attention into the mundane…Please keep on keeping us on our toes, Matt.