The Burglary (66 page)

Given the information the bureau gathered in those operations, says Theoharis, “there was no way it could have been used. It was obtained illegally, and it was worthless information. What was gathered for forty years in the campaign against the Socialist Workers Party is evidence of this.”

In these programs, said Theoharis, “Hoover moved the FBI away from law enforcement.…The person in charge of law enforcement created a culture of lawlessness.”

JOURNALISTS AND SCHOLARS
have found that forcing the FBI to comply with the Freedom of Information Act can take a long time and be very costly.
Their difficulties pale, however, in comparison to those of four Boston men as they spent nearly forty years trying to gain access to the FBI files they needed to exonerate them and free them from death row.

The four men—
Peter Limone,
Joseph Salvati,
Louis Greco, and
Henry Tameleo—were convicted for the 1965 murder of
Edward Deegan. Three of them were sentenced to die in the electric chair. All of them proclaimed their innocence from the time they were arrested. The record shows that the FBI willfully sacrificed these innocent men as part of the bureau's ill-conceived approach to fighting organized crime in New England. For years, Hoover ignored organized crime, even saying it did not exist. When he finally acknowledged its existence, he created a law enforcement approach that failed, as this Boston case tragically illustrates.

When the crimes perpetrated by the FBI in this Boston organized crime–related case in the 1960s became known, it was evident that Hoover could be just as lawless and inhumane in criminal cases as he was in intelligence
matters, perhaps more so. In the intelligence cases, dissent was trampled. In this criminal case, the truth about life-and-death matters was trampled and the FBI knowingly caused innocent people to be falsely convicted and sentenced to die. Unfortunately, in 2002, forty-year-old efforts to gain access to the crucial files that contained exonerating information continued to be rejected—by the FBI, by the Department of Justice, and by President George W. Bush.

The astonishing truth about the case remained secret for four decades: that those four men were framed by the FBI. They were convicted and kept in prison for more than three decades—where two of them died—on the basis of the false testimony of an informer the FBI knew was lying, and who, worse, actually had been coached by the FBI in his lying. FBI agents had precise advance information they had gathered from illegal electronic surveillance about plans for the murder in 1965, but they did nothing to stop it. They knew two of their informers said they would commit the murder but did nothing to stop them. One of the killers later told agents he would falsely accuse the four innocent men. FBI agents helped him carry out that plan.

The FBI presented its perjured informer to a state prosecutor, vouched for his honesty, and urged the prosecutor to try the case. At the trial the bureau in essence set up, one of the agents testified that Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, the witness he had prepared to give false testimony—and who was the only source of evidence against the four men—was an honest person whose testimony could be trusted.

On the day the four men were convicted for this crime the FBI knew they did not commit, agents in the organized crime unit of the Boston FBI office celebrated. Hoover sent commendations and financial awards to the two agents who guided the witness with his perjury. The director apparently did not blink when, a few days later, the agent in charge of the Boston office, in a memorandum to the director, praised the continued development of Barboza as an informer in the bureau's elite Top Echelon group of informers and described him as “a professional assassin responsible for numerous homicides and acknowledged by all professional law enforcement representatives in this area to be the most dangerous individual known.”

Then, for three decades, the FBI compounded the grave injustice perpetrated against the four men by refusing to submit the only evidence that could have exonerated them, the evidence in the FBI's files, as the four men used every legal avenue available to them to gain their freedom and clear their
names—repeated requests for a new trial, efforts to have their sentences commuted, requests for clemency. The injustice was compounded for many years after Hoover had approved it and long after he died.

Hoover was informed of, and approved, each step of the framing of the men, beginning with knowing about the planned murder before it took place and through the steps that sustained the injustice after the men were convicted until he died. The injustice continued to be sustained in 2002, when, at the request of Attorney General John Ashcroft, President Bush issued an executive order requiring the Department of Justice not to turn the requested FBI files over to the four men because the release of the files would “politicize the criminal justice process” and “would be contrary to the national interest.” Astonishingly, Hoover's secret FBI was being protected at the highest levels of the federal government at that late date in a case where the opening of the files was desperately needed to right severe injustices perpetrated by the bureau more than forty years earlier.
Former FBI director Robert Mueller—first as an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston and then as the acting U.S. attorney there—throughout the 1980s,
Boston Globe
journalist
Kevin Cullen reported, wrote letters to the parole and pardons board opposing clemency for the four men framed by the FBI as they repeatedly proclaimed their innocence.

This justice-denying secret role of the FBI in this case finally was broken open by the efforts of Representative
Dan Burton, Republican from Indiana, and
Vincent Garo, a Medford, Massachusetts, attorney who, as the lawyer for one of the four men, worked for more than twenty years to get access to the bureau files that eventually led to the men being exonerated, two of them posthumously, at a federal trial against the government.

The cruel official attitude toward injustice perpetrated against the men by the FBI was on display during 2004 testimony by
Paul Rico, one of the two FBI agents responsible for causing the case to be brought to trial with the perjured informer-witness. When Rico was asked at a hearing of the House Committee on Government Reform, convened by Burton, chair of the committee, if he had any remorse that four innocent men went to prison, he replied, “Would you like tears or something?”

In contrast, at the same hearing, the man who prosecuted the case had much remorse, and also anger at the FBI. “I was outraged—outraged,” said
Jack Zalkind. “I certainly would never have allowed myself to prosecute this case having that knowledge.…This information should have been in my hands. It should have been in the hands of the defense attorneys. It is outrageous, it's terrible, and that trial shouldn't have gone forward.”

In 2007 in the U.S. District Court in Boston, Judge Nancy Gertner ordered the federal government to pay an unprecedented $102 million judgment for the FBI's role in what is known as the Deegan murder case—for “intentional misconduct, subornation of perjury, conspiracy, the framing of innocent men” in the murder of Edward “Teddy” Deegan.

The misconduct in this case ran “all the way up to the FBI director,” Judge Gertner declared in her order that damages be paid to the surviving two falsely charged men and to the families of all four men. This case “was not the work of two renegade agents. It was known to, supported by, encouraged and facilitated by the FBI hierarchy all the way to the FBI director. FBI officials up the line allowed their employees to break laws, violate rules and ruin lives, interrupted only with the occasional burst of applause.”

IN THREE FEDERAL COURTROOMS,
Hoover's secret FBI has been confronted: in Judge
Clarkson Fisher's Camden courtroom in 1973 for essentially entrapping twenty-eight people in the bureau's desperate effort to find the Media burglars; in Judge
Thomas P. Griesa's New York courtroom in the 1980s for violating the constitutional rights of the members of a political party for more than forty years; and in Judge Nancy Gertner's Boston courtroom in 2007 for concocting a murder trial that sent four innocent men to death row for decades on the basis of information in FBI files that would have exonerated the men.

Another federal judge,
Laurence H. Silberman, has called for Hoover's legacy to be confronted. So far that hasn't happened. Judge Silberman's conviction that steps need to be taken to stop the likelihood of FBI officials ever again using the FBI as Hoover used it arose from the revulsion he felt in 1975 when he was forced to read a collection of Hoover's derogatory files about members of Congress and other well-known people. The House Judiciary Committee demanded that Silberman, then deputy attorney general, testify before the committee about Hoover's “secret and confidential” files. It had been assumed those files had been destroyed by Hoover's secretary,
Helen Gandy, immediately after he died. Apparently she missed some. Without FBI director Clarence Kelley realizing it, they were in a file cabinet near his office.

Silberman spent three weekends at FBI headquarters reading those files that were the result, he wrote in a column in 2005 in the
Wall Street Journal,
of Hoover tasking “his agents with reporting privately to him any bits of dirt on figures such as Martin Luther King or their families—information
Hoover sometimes used as blackmail to ensure his and the bureau's power.” It was a sickening experience for Silberman, the worst experience he had, he said, in all his many years in public service. He wrote that he intended “to take to my grave nasty bits of information on various political figures—some still active.” But, “bad as the dirty collection business was, perhaps even worse was the evidence that he allowed—even offered—the bureau to be used by presidents for naked political purposes,” said Silberman, who was appointed to the U.S. Circuit Court in Washington, D.C., in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan.

Silberman has made two recommendations for confronting Hoover's legacy. First, he proposes that all new FBI recruits be required to study “the nature of the secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover.” Only knowledge of what happened in the FBI for forty-eight years under Hoover, he thinks, will assure that the FBI's past will not be repeated.

He also recommended that J. Edgar's name be removed from the FBI's massive national headquarters building in Washington. Representative Burton has joined in this call. The longtime director should not be honored, both firmly believe, especially in such a prominent way. “The country and the bureau” would “be well served” by removing Hoover's name, said Silberman. “It is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr. Liberals and conservatives should unite to support legislation to accomplish this repudiation of a very sad chapter in American history.”

Considered a classic example of brutalist architecture, the mammoth concrete FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House was dedicated by President
Gerald Ford on the day it opened, September 30, 1975. At that time, at $126 million, it was the most expensive federal government building ever built. Hundreds filled the courtyard as the United States Marine Band played, among other selections, the “J. Edgar Hoover March,” a song composed for the occasion by
Al Nencioni, an FBI agent in the Alexandria, Virginia, field office.

Since that sunny dedication day, the J. Edgar Hoover Building has honored Hoover by boldly bearing his name. Conclusions of investigations and court rulings by judges that have declared his actions unconstitutional and shocking to the conscience have revealed the depth of his shame.

20

F
BI HEADQUARTERS FELT
like a war zone in July 1976. The attorney general, Edward Levi, and the
Church Committee were pushing Clarence Kelley to get the domestic intelligence files under control. Levi thought Kelley had made a bad decision when he appointed one of the strongest Hoover defenders as his associate director. Levi eventually ordered Kelley to fire him. Inasmuch as Kelley realized by then that the person he had appointed was sandbagging him in regard to intelligence operations—hiding files, giving him inaccurate information to pass to Levi and the Church Committee, thereby humiliating him—he wasn't unhappy about complying with Levi's demand. The people who saw their main mission as protecting Hoover's files were, of course, very unhappy with the firing.

Then Neil Welch, the special agent in charge in the Philadelphia field office, arrived to conduct a special assignment for Kelley. That upset the old guard even more.

As evidence mounted about the true nature of J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI, Levi demanded that Kelley force the Intelligence Division to review its files and decide whether continuing them could be justified. In response to Kelley's assignment, the intelligence bureaucrats quietly but firmly rebelled. They simply stopped reviewing the files. Kelley analyzed the situation and concluded he would appoint someone from outside headquarters to take control of this problem. It was not the kind of task Kelley liked. He suffered now even more than he had in his first year at the bureau from being pushed and pulled on the one hand by the staunch Hoover loyalists and, on
the other hand, by the reformers, the
Church Committee, and the attorney general. He also suffered from serious back pain and wanted to return to Kansas City, where he had been police chief before he became FBI director, for treatment of his back problem.