As you’ll read in my book “Don’t Embarrass The Family” I attended the trial of John Connolly because I never could figure out why the feds indicted John Naimovich the Massachusetts State Trooper. I thought as part of the trial they’d be a discussion of that case. It never happened.
The reason for this is that the trial was strange in one respect, neither side wanted to get into much of what went on in the FBI. It seemed the government strategy was to pretend that only Connolly was to blame for the existence of Whitey and Stevie and limit its case to things surrounding those individuals. In defending himself, Connolly didn’t want to open up the bag of worms by painting the FBI in a bad light fearing that if he made the Bureau look bad he would make himself look bad.
I found the trial interesting for a thousand other reasons but I never got out of it what I was looking for, the reason behind picking out Naimovich to be indicted. I had a sense that he was targeted but as I’ve said I had this gut feeling from working with him, which eventually proved right, that he had done nothing wrong. The more I learned about his case the more I could see that a decision was made to go after Naimovich prior to the time the federal government had any evidence of wrongdoing on his part.
It is something that I’ve found hard to accept that the federal government picked as a target a state trooper who had been on the job for 23 years who did not have a hint of a scandal or any taint of corruption surrounding him and decided they were going to make a case against him. Out of the blue, as if turning a roulette wheel with the names of state police on it, the FBI had it stop on Naimovich and said that’s who we are going to get.
I guess that’s why after all these years it still boggles my mind that such a thing could happen. What’s more astounding is no one else seemed bothered by it. No one! Everyone on Naimovich’s job was content to see him leave the job and just go away. When I’d mention him to other cops or reporters they’d just yawn. It was, as my secretary Sheila Craven who worked typing up all of Naimovich’s lengthy affidavits would say to me whenever I brought it up, “ancient history”.
How could it be? If the FBI can do this to a state trooper how much more easily could it be done to some bloke who happens to incur its displeasure?
I’m sure you’re reading this with a bit of skepticism thinking it just couldn’t have happened. Listen to me out and then make up your mind.
The last few Wednesdays I’ve been posting on Naimovich so to get the background you can go there. Now I want to try to talk about Naimovich being targeted.
(Oh, and while I’m talking about this remember what I wrote previously how the FBI has new rules that allow agents to target people without any evidence they committed a crime. The FBI can just go after you, look at your bank accounts and other personal records, just to see if they can find something on you. And what’s great about it from the FBI agent’s point of view, they don’t even have to open a case file. Yes, you can be investigated without ever knowing about it and some FBI agent can walk around with all your personal information in his pocket even though you’ve been squeaky clean all your life and if you ever wonder about it there will be no record that it happened.)
Keep in mind Naimovich has been involved in organized crime investigations for at least 12 or more years as part of the state police Special Services Unit. Every investigation he’s been in has come out well. He has a stellar record of taking down bookies and is considered the foremost expert in electronic surveillance in the state police. He’s been working with me for over six months in 1987 and we’ve gone right up the ladder to the top of an organized gaming ring that may reach right into the heart of the North End or Whitey’s Winter Hill group.
Prior to that time the FBI and state police were working on two other investigations: one involves Heller’s, a joint in Chelsea where the bookies washed their money, and the other Vanessa’s, a place in the Prudential Center where the new Mafia leaders were gatheringing to make plans. Naimovich is involved in the Heller’s investigation and from that has the ability to know that there is an investigation at Vanessa’s, At Naimovich’s trial the FBI said the Heller’s investigation was not successful because they didn’t get everything they thought they’d get even though they grabbed over on hundred thousand dollars and filled fifteen pages listing items they seized. The results of Vanessa’s showed that the wise guys may have suspected they were being intercepted. I’ll get into those later even though now it is clear the leak came from within the FBI.
Trooper Foley first knows of the FBI interest in investigating Naimovich when FBI Supervisor Ring tells him that secret information he had compiled ended up in the hands of an OC big wig Vinny Ferrara. (It was leaked by a FBI stenographer. The FBI knew this at the time or shortly after it confronted Foley. It never told Foley about it until months later.) Foley is ordered into Ring’s office where he finds Ring and his boss Lieutenant Mattioli. He is questioned by Ring about this information in Ferrara’s hands. He felt he was being accused. Ring let him sweat a bit. He then asked him if he showed the information to anyone. Foley had to tax his memory to remember if he did. He recalled that his boss Mattioli had ordered him to show Naimovich the information. It seems clear that Mattioli and Ring were playing a game with Foley because they already knew he had shown it to Naimovicht. When Foley threw up Naimovich’s name he felt a great relief that he was no longer suspect. He was taken in, hook, line and sinker, ready to do anything to prove his bone fides.
I’d guess Ring and Mattioli conspired to have Foley show that information to Naimovich, scare him, and then forgive him. It’s probably they knew Ferrara had possession of the information before they told Foley to show it to Naimovich. Foley is unclear about the dates.
I say this because the investigation seemed to consist of planting things on Naimovich. They’d then try to show that what Naimovich was told ended up in the wrong hands. Next week I’ll show how desperate they became to show Naimovich was a leak and the preposterous scenario Foley concocted.
Why don’t people care that one guy is wrongly skewered, impaled, punished, ostracized? It’s the pack mentality. Ever see a Wildlife channel, where a wounded animal, gets attacked and mauled by its own? I’ve seen Hyenas and Lions and Chimpanzees do it. It’s the mob mentality. The lynch mob. The scarlet letter. The witch trials. The Soviet trials. Single out one person, and everyone piles on: the press, the bureaucrats, the apparatchiks, the goons, the lawyers, the judges, the mob, the man in the street. It’s Orwell’s Goldstein. One day a hero, the next day a villain. Internationally, one day Serbia’s our friend, the next it’s an evil empire; one day Syria’s our friend, the next their butchering babies and causing genocide and using weapons of mass destruction. How come when we kill civilians, it’s collateral damage and we blame “the rebels” or “the terrorists” for hiding out in villages, using civilians as “living shields” but when Syria bombs rebels hiding out in villages, they are “targeting” civilians. It’s all part and parcel of the same human hubris and frailty; spread the hype and propaganda; invent a villian, and crucify him: That’s what was done to John Connolly and Mr. Naimovitch. The corruption is in the heart of man, and the inner circles he creates, and the finger he points at all the guilty parties outside the inner cirlce,then the propaganda and the hysteria and the mob mentality singles out the scapegoat: “Goldstein” in Orwell’s 1984; Connolly and Naimovitch in Boston, MA circa 1994.
P.S. Do good and fear no man. Don’t fear the Feds, even though they doubt are screwing with us. Remember, just because you’re paranoid, don’t thinks they’re not following you. I can’t see the difference between old KGB tactics and what the DOJ, FBI and CIA are doing today. Widespread snooping and prying and the spread of disinformation are rampant. We, the American people, are becoming less free! Politicians and the press, the media, academia, et al, are outright lying to us. There are some honest individuals in every profession. Evil will triumph, if the honest ones do not continue to raise their voices, despite the costs.
I suggest things are not as bad as you say. People do care but are often fooled in this new political environment of setting groups against each other, the era of single issue politics where you grab on to one issue and disregard all others. My reference to the lack of interest is to the dismal interest of the FBI in a guy it gave commendations to and let retire with high praise.
Now I think some of the things Connolly did were plainly wrong. I know you disagree. However he did them in the context of what he thought his job wanted him to do. The Big Lie in the Connolly case is the white washing of the FBI itself. It is also the failure to address the question of what powers does our government give to FBI agents. The idea of the Top Echelon informant program is a perversion. The FBI told its agents to partner up with and make deals with high level criminals to give it information on other such criminals and in exchange it agreed to protect them from other law enforcement agencies and give them at ticket to commit crimes.(That is also why Whitey is fuming. He thought he had a pass.)
Remember that Connolly had a part in going after Naimovich. I assume he did that thinking it was all right because he was protecting Whitey, Stevie, and Eric (Schneiderhan).
I’m glad you see we are less free after 9/11. I’ve written how the FBI can investigate you now without opening a file on you. It is too inconvenient. When the Patriot Act was first proposed Congressman Delahunt asked me to review it for him. I did. One thing I noticed was that the FBI was seeking changes in the way things were done because one way took a little effort to insure the rights of the people were protected and the other way could be done lickety-split with little concern for the peoples rights. It seemed to me then and even more now that the FBI had become a lazy group unwilling to put much effort into doing things right. I’ve I said the use of an informant is a lazy cop’s tool.
I suggest the easier it is to infringe on our privacy the more it will be done. The FBI is a police outfit. We’re on the way to a police state when the restrictions on the police are continually being eased. As I said, things are not as bad as you portray them but they could quickly get there unless people realize that taking away of rights from any one individual or group becomes precedent for taking them away from all of us.
Here’s a question for you and everyone else. Why is it that no one seems to care? An innocent cop (not the first or the last) is setup by his own people, the very people he trusted with his life, for their own political purposes or worse and everyone acts as if its ok. No demand for an investigation, no call to right the wrong just business as usual, what gives ?
Did you read the book Fence by Lehr? It tells how cops gain up against another cop. Naimovich was done under by state cops working with the FBI. These state cops were still on the job when Naimovich was suspended. They went around to others on the job justifying their actions by saying that Naimovich was bad. Cops don’t like to stand up against their brother cops face to face. Almost no one would defend Naimovich (there were less than five who did that I know of) because they figured “hey, it’s not my fight” and that Naimovich was going to convicted and he’d never come back. Foley even after Naimovich’s acquittal, in fact right up today, insists Naimovich was a bad cop and Foley has his followers who parrot him. It’s the old story that a cop gets labeled as bad once indicted even if he’s acquitted. Guys in higher ranks who should have stood up for him didn’t because they feared the FBI and some were ambitious so they wanted to remain on good terms with the FBI which had a lot of influence in the state police, it still does.
(Maybe I should fear it more. My blog has gone down on three different occasions yesterday and from midnight until about two this morning. Seems strange.)