Legends of Winter Hill: Cops, Con Men, and Joe McCain, the Last Real Detective

by Jay Atkinson

  They were all known criminals, and nobody on the jury— and certainly no one in law enforcement— shed any tears when Salvati and Limone went to prison. However, the rumor persisted that Salvati wasn't involved in Teddy Deegan's murder, and that the testimony of a confidential informant in a Chelsea Police report contained that fact, although the report never appeared in evidence at the trial. As things turned out, it would take a guy with an expensive haircut and perfect teeth to bring that report to light.

  One of the rising stars in Boston television, the forty-four-year-old newscaster Dan Rea began investigating the Salvati conviction at the suggestion of his friend, Ronald Cass, dean of the Boston University School of Law. Rea was a graduate of the law school, and so was Victor Garo, a chunky, balding Medford lawyer who had represented Salvati pro bono since 1976 and would eventually donate more than ten thousand hours of his time working on various appeals. In one of their early conversations, Garo asked a rhetorical question about Joe Barboza that struck Rea as interesting: “Why would a man try to get a death squad together when he has his own band of cutthroats?”

  Rea, an enterprising reporter and a practicing attorney, agreed to look into the case. One of the first calls he made was to a cop he knew in Chelsea, asking him to look up the file on the Deegan murder. The records on a case that far back were in the attic, and the cop said he'd take a look around and call back in an hour or two. What Rea's contact discovered would surprise the TV reporter and delight Victor Garo. There was a file, all right, and the first document in that worn manila folder was a single-spaced, typed Chelsea Police report from March 12, 1965, that contained a statement from a confidential informant. The informant had called the station on the night Teddy Deegan was killed and described his murder. Roy French, Ronald Cassesso, and a man named Romeo Martin, who was killed before the others went to trial, were the shooters. Joe Barboza and James Flemmi were also present in the alley. There was no mention of Joseph Salvati.

  Dan Rea broke that story during a WBZ-TV newscast on May 17, 1993. A wry-tempered Irishman with a pie face and a mop of coarse, sandy hair, Rea researched and appeared in more than thirty WBZ-TV news spots over the next nine years about who really killed Teddy Deegan. Apparently it hadn't dawned on anyone in law enforcement that you didn't need such a huge conspiracy to kill a drunken brawler like Deegan. Usually it meant a single phone call from Jerry Angiulo to his preferred hitter, Joseph “J. R.” Russo, and the matter was taken care of, quickly and professionally. Not a single witness ever identified Salvati as a member of Barboza's crew, and as Joe McCain would say later, in that line of work, “You never go outside those circles.”

  Years after he and Joe had retired, Leo Papile was watching the evening news on TV when Rea's story on Joe Salvati's role in the Deegan murder appeared. Within minutes, Papile was on the phone with his old partner, rehashing the facts of the case. “Geesh, Leo, we don't want to get involved in that,” said McCain.

  But what had begun as a tiny nub in Joe McCain's conscience had grown into something larger. During the hundreds of hours he and Papile had spent watching the Ebb Tide and the other nightclubs down on the beach, in the thousands of surveillance reports they had written, and in all their profiles of Barboza and his gang of thugs, Joe Salvati's name did not appear once. McCain had also been told by another cop that, during renovations at the Chelsea Police Station, workmen who ripped out the floor in the chief's office discovered a memorandum that listed who had killed Deegan. Joe Salvati's name was not among them. Attempting to explain how the report had ended up beneath the chief's floor, another Chelsea police officer said, “It must've fallen through the cracks.”

  The day after the initial news report, Papile contacted Dan Rea and gave him Joe McCain's phone number, and Rea called McCain. In a meeting at Joe's P.I. office, Rea produced the Chelsea Police report that he had referred to during his broadcast, and McCain examined it. “The only way I'd stick my neck out is if you verify that this is what it appears to be,” said Joe, explaining that the Secret Service had a lab where they could examine the weave of the paper and the typeface and determine whether it was legitimate.

  What McCain didn't say in this initial meeting with Rea was that he'd also heard disturbing things about the FBI's complicity in Barboza's scheme. In those days FBI agents assigned to the Boston office, many of whom were graduates of Boston College or Holy Cross, frequented Ray's Sub Shop on the VFW Parkway, and McCain was familiar with most of them, including H. Paul Rico, a top organized crime investigator who favored the “Hoover look”— expensive three-piece suits, gold jewelry, and shiny black shoes. The word was that Rico had written a report that listed Barboza, Flemmi, Cassesso, Martin, and French as Deegan's killers and turned it in to his supervisor, James Handley. As the agent in charge, Handley sent his own report to J. Edgar Hoover's office in Washington. No one from the District Attorney's Office and certainly none of the defense lawyers at the trial ever saw those reports.

  The reason for such a damaging omission may have been that, just before Teddy Deegan's murder, Paul Rico “turned” Stephen and James Flemmi, signing them up as FBI informants. The plan hatched by Rico and others and later carried to its ugly conclusion by Agent John Connolly was to use the Winter Hill gangsters to get at the Angiulo brothers, who were perceived to be the real strength in the New England Mafia. So when James Flemmi was implicated in Deegan's murder, the FBI agreed not to indict him as a way to curry favor with his brother Stevie— or so the story went. For their part, the Flemmis were delighted. They understood that their status as protected government informants was a license to kill, which they would do on numerous occasions without hint of remorse.

  Dan Rea was able to prove the Chelsea Police report was for real, and Joe McCain and Leo Papile agreed to sign affidavits detailing what and whom they had seen in and around the Ebb Tide on March 12, 1965. In the course of his reporting, Rea had learned that Joseph Salvati had been arrested a few times in the 1950s for receiving stolen goods, larceny, and possession of burglarious tools. While admitting on the air that Salvati “is not Mother Teresa,” Rea continued hammering the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office for their past actions in suppressing the newly discovered police report, which Victor Garo considered exculpatory. Garo believed that the district attorney knew about the report and violated the law and common decency by not exploring the informant's claims or revealing the existence of the report of defense attorneys before the trial.

  In a case tried today, these occurrences would have led to an immediate reversal of the verdict or a mistrial at the very least. Unfortunately for Joe Salvati, he'd been tried in 1965, when the rules of evidence and discovery were pretty much the same but in a legal climate that encouraged attorneys on both sides to bend them every which way.

  Despite Rea's dogged chain of news reports and Garo's passionate advocacy, there were some frustrating setbacks. The Boston Globe and other media outlets accused Rea of “irresponsible advocacy journalism,” and two Massachusetts governors, Michael Dukakis and later, William Weld, denied applications to commute Salvati's sentence, although neither official showed a particular grasp of the facts and both refused to participate in a WBZ-TV news panel.

  In 1993 Joe Salvati, Peter Limone, and Louis Greco filed motions for new trials, which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard and dismissed. The motion judge ruled that the defendants were not entitled to a new trial because the information in the missing report was not provided by a legitimate informant but came via that anonymous call to the Chelsea Police on the night of the Deegan murder. The judge's opinion deemed the source of that phone call a “non-disclosable citizen tipster,” a term and a distinction that Victor Garo claimed had no legal meaning and that he scoffed at during subsequent television appearances.

  Dan Rea wasn't the only one taking heat from his colleagues. As far as most cops were concerned, Salvati and Limone were bad guys and deserved to be in jail, if not for Teddy Deegan's murder for something else. Cert
ainly many cops believed that tainting one's fellow police officers in search of “the truth” was too high a price. By signing an affidavit, testifying at hearings, and appearing on television, Joe McCain and Leo Papile were implying that other law enforcement officials had lied on their reports, conspired against an innocent man, and perjured themselves. But when big Joe heard that FBI Agent Rico might have been tipped by an informant about Deegan's murder before it occurred and yet did nothing to prevent it, he didn't care what his old friends and colleagues said.

  It wasn't the first time McCain had ignored the “blue wall” and done the right thing. As a private investigator, he often found himself working for the defense in criminal cases, a situation that made some of his cop buddies uncomfortable. A retired MDC deputy superintendent with an impeccable reputation, his old friend Al Seghezzi managed the P.I. office for several years and occasionally expressed his dismay at the sorts of clients they were representing. McCain would put his big mitt on Seghezzi's shoulder, look him in the eye, and say, “Al, we're looking for the truth. Same as always.” And regardless of the fact that Joe “the Animal” Barboza had been dead for more than twenty years, Joe McCain was also rankled by the idea that his old nemesis had been allowed to put one over on the judicial system. After Barboza left the witness protection program and was convicted of murder in California, he once boasted to a cellmate that he had subjected Joe Salvati “to the long, dry death.”

  Louis Greco, Ronald Cassesso, and Henry Tameleo died in jail. In 1997, Governor William Weld finally commuted Joseph Salvati's sentence, and he was released from Walpole State Prison. Three years later, Middlesex Superior Court Judge Margaret Hinkle took the additional step of vacating Salvati's conviction. Eventually Paul Rico retired from the FBI and took a job as vice president and director of security with World Jai Alai in Florida, at a far greater salary than he had ever earned in law enforcement. It came as no surprise to Joe McCain that the Winter Hill gang leader, Whitey Bulger, had a controlling interest in the fronton where Rico was employed, a fact that became known after Bulger became a fugitive. In August 2003, Joe Salvati filed a $300 million suit in U.S. District Court, alleging that the FBI helped lay the blame on him for Teddy Deegan's murder and later fought against the effort to have his conviction overturned. Among those named in the suit was former FBI agent H. Paul Rico. (In the fall of 2003, two years after Joe McCain's death, Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi implicated Rico in a 1981 murder case, and the elderly ex-G-man was arrested in Florida and indicted. Rico died in January 2004, shortly before his trial was scheduled to begin.)

  Joe McCain appeared before the Governor's Council at the commutation hearing for Joseph Salvati. Tall and gaunt, the old Met cop wore his gray suit with a red-and-blue tie and a white shirt, the collar loose around his neck and his face and hands covered in age spots. Before him on a raised dais were the eight members of the Governor's Council and the lieutenant governor, who serves ex officio. The council, which meets at noon on Wednesdays in the State House chamber beside the governor's office, acts on issues such as payments from the state treasury, criminal pardons and commutations, and approval of gubernatorial appointments.

  Standing at the podium, McCain testified that over the years several informants had made it common knowledge among police officers that Joe Salvati wasn't present on the night of the murder. McCain went on to say that he believed Salvati was innocent, and that in his forty years as a detective this was the only time he'd ever appeared at a hearing on behalf of a convicted felon.

  It came as a surprise to some people and certainly to members of the Governor's Council that Joe McCain didn't hate Joe Barboza. Rather, the notorious hit man fell into a category, along with Richard “the Pig” DeVincent, James “the Bear” and Stevie “the Rifleman” Flemmi, Nick and Jerry Angiulo, and Whitey Bulger, for whom he had no feeling whatsoever. During McCain's testimony, just prior to an 8 to 0 vote in favor of Salvati's commutation, one of the council members fumbled with her papers and misspoke, asking where Joe Barboza was now.

  Before she could correct herself, Joe McCain looked at the councilor over the top of his spectacles. “In hell, I imagine,” he said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Third Man

  Four months? Baby, four seconds in this whorehouse'll get you greased.

  — MICHAEL HERR

  BEFORE HE BECAME A POLICE OFFICER, Chris Brighton served with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam. Even in December it was eighty degrees and humid enough to swim through the air, a meteorological combination that guys from New England could never quite get used to. A nineteen-year-old corporal with the First Marine Division, Brighton was just three weeks shy of his thirteen-month tour of duty in Quang Nam Province, a few miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, when he was assigned to regimental headquarters. After months in the bush, Brighton acted as squad leader for a mechanized unit that patrolled a section of dirt road connecting HQ to the battalion area.

  Regiment was no safer than the jungle; in fact, a lot of people were killed or wounded on the dusk-to-dawn “rat patrol.” But there were hot meals and cold beer and pickup basketball games at HQ, and Corporal Brighton was able to write his family to say that he'd be home in less than a month.

  The middle of seven children, Christopher Robert Brighton was the son of a salesman and a secretary, and a 1968 graduate of Scituate High, where he played football and golf and ran track. An affable kid with dark hair and a loose grin, Brighton entertained the other jarheads with his deadpan wit, often ending conversations with “Cheer up. Things could get a lot worse.” Mostly, he looked forward to going back to the South Shore and getting a job as a bartender, where he'd turn his charm on the ladies.

  On the night of December 7, 1969, Chris Brighton rode in the first of three jeeps, sitting beside the driver trussed up in a flak jacket with his M-16 and a two-way radio. Four Marines occupied the second vehicle, which had a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on it. The third jeep contained three Marines and a 60 Mike-Mike, a portable cannon the size of a golf bag. The unit provided mine detection and security from the bridge near Hill 55, one and a quarter miles north to checkpoint Alpha, two miles west to battalion HQ, and two miles south to Route 1, the main artery for U.S. military traffic in that part of Vietnam.

  The convoy left battalion shortly after 2:00 A.M., running without lights and keeping a ten-yard interval between the jeeps. Three quarters of a mile from checkpoint Bravo, they reached a tiny, nameless hamlet that occupied both sides of the road. The driver of the first jeep detected movement in the ville, and Corporal Brighton signaled the convoy to a halt. Using a tiny penlight, one of the Marines in the second vehicle identified a small figure dressed in ragged pajamas crouching by the shoulder of the road.

  “I got something,” said the Marine.

  Twisting a knob on the penlight, the Marine widened the beam of light, illuminating the face of a ten-year-old boy who squatted in the weeds.

  “It's all right,” called a Marine in the third jeep. “I know the kid.”

  The Marine spoke to the child in Vietnamese, and he rose out of the tall grass and approached the convoy. When the boy reached the gap between the second and third jeeps, the abrupt noise of an explosion rent the air and Chris Brighton was thrown from the jeep onto the ground.

  Dazed for a moment, Brighton reached up and grabbed the radio handset, calling in their position and asking for immediate air support. He felt something oozing from his head and realized that the back of his helmet was gone. Men were screaming, and the smell of cordite from the spent ordnance and the whoop-whoop of helicopter rotors filled the night sky.

  Brighton looked at his hand; it was covered with blood. Then he passed out.

  Marine investigators would learn that the ten-year-old had two claymore mines strapped to his torso, and when he reached the optimum killing zone, a member of the Vietcong hidden in the jungle detonated the mines, throwing hundreds of steel ball bearings in every direction. Two Marines were killed instant
ly; a third would die of his wounds at the battalion aid station, and all the rest were injured, some quite badly.

  Chris Brighton's flak jacket absorbed most of the blast, saving his life. The child was obliterated.

  Drifting in and out of consciousness, Brighton was patched up in the battalion area, then stabilized and sent on to Japan and later to Walter Reed Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C., and finally, the Chelsea Naval Hospital in Massachusetts. His convalescence lasted over a year. Brighton lost the upper portion of his left lung. His skull was fractured and a small plastic plate was inserted to cover the hole left by the missing bone fragments.

  * * *

  CHRIS BRIGHTON IS TELLING ME this story at the bar in the Fours Grille, a short walk from North Station in downtown Boston. “I still got shrapnel in there,” he says, rotating his arm like a pitcher warming up.

  The Fours is decorated in mahogany wainscoting, with frosted half windows separating the lounge from the dining area. Autographed jerseys from Boston sportsmen adorn the walls: Larry Bird's number 33 in Celtics green; quarterback Tom Brady of the New England Patriots; and, of course, hockey legend Bobby Orr's number 4, adorning the home whites of the Big Bad Bruins. On the menu is a veal cutlet sandwich named for Red Sox slugger Tony Conigliaro, a handsome kid who was born in Revere, got hit in the head with a pitched ball, and ended up dying young. While most people are struggling to get their tax returns done, the patrons at the bar are more concerned about the Sox-Orioles game on TV.