10

BOSTON, 1968

By 1968, Joseph Barboza had become the most dangerous individual known to Boston law enforcement. Obviously, he would make a great witness against La Cosa Nostra, and he was encouraged by Paul Rico and Dennis Condon to testify against Patriarca, deemed the “LCN boss and possible Commission member.”

Barboza did in fact testify, resulting in the conviction of Patriarca and his crew in federal court at Boston in 1968. Rico and Condon were crowned golden boys in the Boston office of the FBI, no longer able to do any wrong in spite of the wrongs they’d already done. They had used Barboza to work his black magic in the takedown of the Italian mafia in New England. And Barboza, in turn, had used them to absolve himself of the Teddy Deegan murder and send four innocent men to prison in his stead. Throughout that trial, Rico and Condon continually checked on Barboza’s well-being while he was in protective custody. Actually, the gangster would later claim that the feds were telling him what to say to make sure his story stuck.

Rico and Condon were in court the day the verdicts against the four men were handed down. The Boston Strike Force commented to FBIHQ that “as a result of FBI investigation in state court in Boston, four more [gangsters] are convicted in the 1965 slaying of Teddy Deegan.” Two of these were sentenced to death while Salvati and another defendant identified by Barboza got life sentences. Shortly after the convictions, commendations direct from Hoover himself at FBIHQ kept arriving, praising Rico and Condon’s work on the case. Hoover wrote the agents personally that “The successful prosecution of these subjects was a direct result of your noteworthy development of pertinent witnesses.”

But the seeds of the nefarious doings and ultimate unraveling were firmly in place. In early 1970, Condon reached out to Barboza, now living in San Francisco, to let him know his life might be in danger, something the agent had learned through another informant. The Boston office of the FBI denied that Barboza was still cooperating as an informant and refused to offer him any further help. The temperamental Barboza decided to get even by recanting his testimony that convicted the four innocent men of the murder of Teddy Deegan. He also tried to give evidence that mob boss Patriarca should be exonerated due to additional perjured testimony he provided to FBI agents and the court.

“I got enough that will convince any court that I was lying,” he said at the time, determined to make Rico and Condon pay for abandoning him.

None other than F. Lee Bailey, acting as Barboza’s attorney, reiterated that Deegan’s slayers were convicted on false testimony by Barboza and that they were innocent. By October 1970, FBIHQ was advised that witnesses in affidavits “will allege that Barboza told them he lied about Deegan, about Patriarca and others,” naming the Strike Force and the FBI itself as being responsible for his perjured testimony. F. Lee Bailey went public insisting that Barboza had similarly committed perjury against Patriarca, Angiulo, and the Deegan suspects on the prodding of his corrupt handlers, Rico and Condon. Ultimately, Bailey’s strategy accomplished nothing from a legal standpoint, while casting even more aspersions on the FBI. But Barboza was then paid at least $9,000 by the FBI on the pretext of cosmetic surgery to alter his appearance. He first disavowed his new story, the truth, only to go back to telling it to anyone who’d listen until he was shotgunned to death on a San Franciso street in 1976.

Still, the blowback resulting from their protection of Joseph Barboza as an informant at all costs would haunt both Rico and Condon for years after they retired. During the House Committee on Government Reform’s hearings in 2003, Representative Dan Burton asked Rico about his complicity in sending an innocent man to jail for over thirty years. Rico replied curtly: “What do you want from me? Tears?”

Desperate to redeem himself with the Bureau decades before then, Condon had opened another informant, James “Whitey” Bulger, whom he knew through Whitey’s brother Billy, an aspiring Boston politician. Whitey had been arrested by Condon’s partner Rico on a bank robbery charge, so all the pieces seemed to be in place. Except in his first go-round as an FBI informant, Whitey Bulger proved utterly unproductive and was closed three months later and jailed soon after that.

But Bulger’s relationship with the FBI’s Boston office was far from over. In 1973, just when the careers of Rico and Condon were winding down and they were about to leave Boston, an upstart agent named John Connolly arrived.