Boston Area News

by Dan Rea
  COLUMN: By dusk tonight, a serial murderer will live in our midst. John Martorano will have been released after serving but twelve years in prison, although Martorano has admitted to law enforcement that he murdered upwards of twenty people during his criminal career. Martorano's release must be especially painful to the families of his victims.

To understand the rationale for such a deal, one must understand the reign of domestic terror inflicted on our community since the mid-1960's.

Just as the horror of 9/11 changed the way many Americans now look at the world, the escape of James "Whitey" Bulger changed the way many Americans now look at the FBI. For nearly three decades, an alliance amongst some corrupt FBI agents here in Boston and the Bulger-Flemmi crime faction disgraced the reputation of the FBI and permitted the murders and incarcerations of innocent people.

Once Whitey Bulger was allowed to escape prosecution because of his longtime friendship with now disgraced FBI agent John Connolly, the wheels began to come off the sinister conspiracy among some in law enforcement and their criminal clientele. In 1997, Chief United States Federal Judge Mark Wolf convened months of hearings that resulted in major disclosures about the depths of depravity that infected our community because of corruption in the Boston office of the FBI.

Slowly and meticulously, Judge Wolf permitted testimony to be placed on the record that showed the sordid relationship among Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, Whitey Bulger and some in the Boston office of the FBI. The testimony in Judge Wolf's court also proved to several Boston mobsters, John Martorano among them, that Flemmi and Bulger had betrayed them in order to solidify Flemmi's and Bulger's relationships with the FBI.

As a result, John Martorano began to cooperate with law enforcement to help prosecutors solve many heretofore unsolved crimes. The murder of Roger Wheeler in Oklahoma for which former FBI agent H. Paul Rico was charged; the murder of John Callahan in Florida for which former FBI agent John Connolly now stands accused; unsolved murders here in Boston and the unearthing of Bulger-Flemmi victims buried in shallow seaside graves were all the result of information provided by Martorano.

Martorano deserves no sympathy, no thanks for his information. He had access to this critical information because he was a participant in many of the crimes. But his knowledge laid bare a series of crimes even greater than his own. His knowledge placed in clear public view a series of corrupt relationships that began when H. Paul Rico allowed a Mafia hitman, Joe "The Animal" Barboza, to convict four innocent men through Barboza's perjured testimony. John Connolly inherited FBI informants like Bulger and Flemmi from Rico and his partner, former FBI agent Dennis Condon, who later headed public safety here in Massachusetts. Connolly used information from Bulger and Flemmi to advance his corrupt FBI career. And all of this corruption appears to have had the imprimatur of the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. A fish does rot from the head!

John Martorano is and was a serial murderer, but Martorano never disgraced a badge of authority. The greater danger to a free society is not those who murder, but those in authority who conspire with murderers. Federal prosecutors have made a deal with a serial murderer, but hopefully that deal will produce a benefit for society; a lesson to those privileged to wear a badge.

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