Where the Bodies Were Buried (2 page)

HE STROLLED INTO
the café, an unassuming man with little indication that he had lived a life so far outside the norm as to be extraordinary. At age eighty-one, he still had a full, healthy mane of hair, though it was now completely white. He moved slowly but held his head high, and in the right light his blue eyes shined as bright as they had forty-six years ago when his life was first plunged into darkness. These days, he did not wish to be viewed as an aberration. He was a knockaround guy from the neighborhood, which is all he ever wanted to be. Back in the day, he was a handyman by trade, someone who helped people out for a modest sum. He did what he could to support his wife and four kids, until he got roped into one of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice in the history of the United States.

The man extended his hand. “Hi,” he said. “I'm Joe Salvati.”

We were standing in a café on Hanover Street, the central commercial street in Boston's North End, one of the last authentic Italian American neighborhoods in the country. Joseph Salvati was born here in 1933 and lived in the neighborhood most of his life—except for those years he was locked away deep within the belly of the beast.

I shook the hand of Joe Salvati. “I've been wanting to meet you for a long time,” I said.

Salvati smiled a bit. He realized that he had gained a degree of notoriety in his golden years. It's nice to have a legacy, he figured, though he would rather be known as a good husband and father than as a man who got monumentally screwed by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

We had arrived in Café Pompeii, a venerable grappa and espresso joint on Hanover Street. We were there so that I might interview Joe Salvati about his life. Also, I wanted to ask him some questions about James “Whitey” Bulger.

It was late July 2013. The trial of Whitey Bulger—notorious gangster; longtime fugitive from the law; indicted on thirty-two counts of
racketeering, including nineteen murders—had been ongoing in Boston for several weeks. I had been attending the trial on a daily basis and had not missed a moment of public testimony or in-court legal discussions among the various prosecutors, defense lawyers, and the judge. The trial was a major media event in the city and the nation based on Bulger's infamy as the last of a certain type of old-school gangster, with a criminal lineage that stretched back at least to the 1950s.

After we sat down and ordered some espresso, I said to Salvati, “I've noticed something about the Bulger trial.”

“What's that?” he asked.

“Every time your name comes up, the prosecutors immediately raise an objection.”

Again, Joe smiled—not a smile of mirth; it was a knowing smile, tinged with regret. “That's because when my name comes up, they know they're gonna have to talk about Barboza. And they don't wanna talk about Barboza.”

Joseph “Animal” Barboza, a renowned mob hit man from the 1960s, was the man responsible for Salvati being sent away to prison many decades ago. At a Massachusetts state trial in September 1967, Joe Barboza, testifying on behalf of the U.S. government, fingered Salvati and three other men for a murder they did not commit. He did so with the acquiescence of many people in the criminal justice system, including field agents, prosecutors, and supervisors—all the way up to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who signed off on the framing of Joe Salvati. These men were more concerned with protecting the informant status of Barboza, who was being used as a federal witness against the Mafia in New England, than they were in safeguarding the civil liberties of four “nobodies” whom they knew were being wrongfully convicted.

All these years later, the web of duplicity that led to Joe Salvati serving thirty years in a maximum-security prison for a crime he didn't commit is still difficult to fathom. But it happened. Joe Salvati knows it happened, because he had to live it.

“At the time,” he said, “it was the nightmare that wouldn't end.”

Salvati speaks with a gravelly voice from another era, something out of the 1950s or 1960s, when he went away to prison. In fact, he sounds exactly
like what he is: a street guy who was locked away decades ago and then abruptly released into the modern world with little preparation.

During the early weeks of the Bulger trial, the story of Joe Salvati's ordeal hung over the proceedings like a veil of smoke that lingers long after a conflagration has been brought under control. The grounds upon which the prosecutors objected each time Salvati's name was mentioned usually had something to do with “relevance.” The prosecutors wanted to establish that the story of Salvati being framed by Barboza and many co-conspirators in the criminal justice system had no business being discussed at the trial of Whitey Bulger. It was ancient history, they contended, an admittedly shameful episode in the annals of justice in New England that had been rectified many years ago.

The prosecutors wanted it to appear as if what happened to Joe Salvati had nothing to do with Whitey Bulger.

Salvati had been victimized by Barboza and Barboza's handlers in the U.S. government. Afterward, some of Barboza's handlers in the FBI would go on to become the handlers of Whitey Bulger, who, like the Animal, was protected by the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in New England. As a confidential informant, or CI, Bulger was the government's supposed secret weapon in the war against the Mafia, just as Barboza had been for a previous generation of agents and prosecutors. To allow the story of Joe Salvati to be told in court at the Bulger trial would directly link successive generations of corruption spanning half a century. It would suggest that perhaps the entire criminal justice system was a grand illusion; a shell game presided over by petty bureaucrats more concerned with promoting their careers and protecting their own asses than anything else. It would suggest that maybe the story of Whitey Bulger wasn't really even about Whitey Bulger; maybe it was more about the venal system of justice that had created Whitey, given him his power, and made it possible for Bulger to wreak havoc in Boston for twenty years.

I asked Joe, “How many reporters have come to interview you since Bulger was pinched?”

“Not many,” he answered.

“How many since the trial got under way?”

“None.”

Apparently, the local media didn't want to hear from Joe Salvati, either. Anything that Joe might have to say was a distraction from the main event, which had to do with burning Whitey Bulger at the stake. To ask questions about how Bulger came into being, to explore the historical antecedents that made Bulger possible, was considered to be doing the work of the defense lawyers. To the U.S. government and the media, it was all about Whitey, not about the universe that created Whitey.

At the trial of Whitey Bulger, there was no room for the big picture. There was no room for the story of Joe Salvati and how his ordeal, which began in 1967, had planted the seed for all that came later.

I asked Salvati, “What do you remember about the day you were arrested—anything?”

He said, “I remember everything from the day I was arrested till the day I come home.”

I was skeptical: thirty years is a long time. “Tell me about it,” I said.

It happened a block away from where we were sitting, at the corner of Hanover and Prince streets. “I was waiting for a guy to pick me up,” said Salvati. “He'd bought a saloon on Washington Street; we were gonna go buy some stools for the bar. He was five or ten minutes late, so I told a kid there, ‘If he comes, I'll be over at B.G.'s. I wanna bet a horse.'”

B.G. was a local bookie, and Salvati liked to bet the ponies. In fact, he placed so many bets that some people called him “Joe the Horse.” Most everyone in the North End knew Joe Salvati was a hardworking guy; sometimes he unloaded fish down at the pier, or meat at the meat market. Sometimes he worked late as a doorman. In the North End, people knew who were the wiseguys and who were not; Joe Salvati was not a wiseguy, he was a citizen.

Sipping his afternoon espresso at Café Pompeii, Joe remembered it as if it were yesterday. “So I'm over there at B.G.'s,” he said. “I bet a horse for twenty dollars. I go back to the corner, and I'm trying to get the race on the radio, because it was from a track in New Hampshire. When it started, I called to B.G., ‘Hey, don't take no more bets. The race is off.' I turn around and I seen them coming, the cops. There must have been sixty of them. They were lined up and down the street.

“So I'm listening to the radio, and I win the race. I'm happy about that. Then the sergeant comes up.”

Salvati knew the sergeant—Frank Walsh, head of an organized crime task force.

“He said to me, ‘Joe, can I talk to you?' I said, ‘Yeah, Frank, what's up?' He said, ‘You may want to sit down for this. . . . I got a warrant with your name on it.' I said, ‘A warrant for what?' He said, ‘Murder.'

“Now, I knew Walsh, and he was always fucking with me, telling me who I shouldn't be hanging around with. So I says, ‘Come on. Stop fucking with me. Murder! What murder?' He says the name Teddy Deegan. I says, ‘Who the fuck is Teddy Deegan?'”

Walsh explained a bit about the murder charge. He didn't have to; it was a courtesy to Salvati, two guys chewing the fat. Then he mentioned that the case against Joe was based entirely on one person: Barboza.

“I had to sit down; I could hardly breathe. Walsh says, ‘Go ahead, read the thing [the warrant].' I said, ‘Read it? I can't even see it.' I was gasping. I was in fucking shock. Now, I'm looking at the thing. We're at the front door of B.G.'s. I'm looking out, thinking maybe I'm gonna run. Walsh read my mind, he says, ‘Joe, don't even think about it. Don't try it.'

“I said to myself, Jesus, let me get my composure. I think I had a dollar and twelve cents in my pocket, because I just bet my last twenty dollars on the horse.

“I said to the sergeant, ‘It's all a fuckin' lie. God only knows what they promised that fuckin' Barboza.'

“They locked me up, put me in station one. From there I went to Chelsea. They booked me in Chelsea, because that's where the murder was. From then on, the nightmare started.”

The murder for which Salvati was being charged had occurred two years earlier. Salvati had no alibi because he had no idea where he had been on an anonymous night two years earlier. Probably home with his wife and kids. As the trial date approached, Salvati was certain the case would fall apart. First of all, he was innocent. Second, who would believe Joe Barboza?

Salvati knew all too well who Barboza was; back in 1965, Salvati had borrowed money from a friend named Tash, and this led him into the orbit of the Animal. “Tash was the nicest guy in the world; too nice to be a shylock,” said Salvati. “I borrowed two hundred from him. Then, about a month later, I came back to borrow two hundred more. Tash said, ‘I'll give you the money, but I'm with Barboza now.'”

Barboza was a known hoodlum, a former professional boxer who had become a hit man for the New England Mafia. With his oversize head, dead eyes, and menacing demeanor, his name struck fear in the hearts of many in Boston. But Joe Salvati wasn't scared. He had boxed a little bit himself as a youngster and been around so-called tough guys his entire life. “I said to Tash, ‘Okay, well, give me the money or not. I don't care who you're with.' He said, ‘Yeah, but Barboza has to okay it.'”

Barboza was sitting in a nearby car, dressed in black, wearing dark sunglasses.

“So Tash went over there, spoke to Barboza. ‘Bring him over here, I wanna talk to him,' said Barboza, meaning me. So I went over to the car. Barboza's looking at me, giving me the eye. He said, ‘You want to borrow two hundred more?' I said, ‘Yeah.' He told Tash, ‘Give it to him.' Then he said to me, ‘I hope you don't pay.' I looked at him. I'd fight him in a minute; he didn't scare me. . . . Well, that was it. Bad blood between us. That's how it all started.”

Six months after being arrested by Sergeant Walsh on Hanover Street, Salvati went to trial. He was in a daze. He couldn't believe that he was going on trial, much less that he could be convicted. He was certain the whole case would be exposed as a fraud.

At first, Joe figured it was all being engineered by Barboza. It never crossed his mind that agents or prosecutors could be in on it. And then the trial began. Salvati went on trial for murder, along with five other defendants. Two of the men had been involved in the killing of small-time hood Teddy Deegan, but four of them—including Joe—were completely innocent of the crime. “From the beginning, it didn't look good,” said Salvati. “The prosecutors were too confident, laughing and smiling like they already knew the outcome. And each day the courtroom was loaded with feds, FBI agents, sitting in the gallery. You think a third-base coach has hand signals; you should have seen those agents giving hand signals to Barboza when he was on the witness stand.”

The trial lasted fifty days. All six defendants were found guilty as charged. On the day of sentencing, the judge told the first four defendants, “You are sentenced to die in the electric chair.” The judge taunted the defendants, undulating his hands to illustrate the chair's 2,000-volt current,
adding, “On the designated date, the electricity will run through your body until death.”

Joe Salvati and another defendant came next. They had been found guilty as accessories to the murder of Deegan. Said the judge, “You are sentenced to Walpole prison for the rest of your natural life, without possibility of parole.”
¹

Salvati was thirty-five years old.

“I still thought I was going to get out of there. The case was a joke. Barboza was their only witness. Everybody knew I was innocent.”

His wife and young daughters came to visit him at the state prison in Walpole. “My kids couldn't really grasp what had happened. My daughter said to me, ‘Daddy, what's the electric chair?' I said, ‘What do you mean, what's an electric chair?' She says, ‘The girls at school, the other kids, they say they're going to give you the electric chair.' My heart sank. I said, ‘No, honey. Daddy's not getting the electric chair.'”